REPRESENTATIVE NAMES AND TITLES

Capitolul 2 – Representative Names and Titles

2.1. Lawrence Durrell

 born in India, in 1912

 educated in Britain, lived mostly in France
 novel sequences: The Alexandria Quartet [Justine (1957), Balthazar
(1958), Mountolive (1958) and Clea (1960)], The Revolt of Aphrodite
[Tunc (1968) and Nunquam (1970)], The Avignon Quincunx [Monsieur; or,
The Prince of Darkness (1974), Livia; or, Buried Alive (1978), Constance;
or, Solitary Practices (1982), Sebastian; or, Ruling Passions (1983) and
Quinx; or, The Ripper’s Tale (1985)]
 volumes of travel writing: Prospero’s Cell (1945), Reflections on a
Marine Venus (1953), Bitter Lemons (1957), The Greek Islands (1978)
 collections of short stories: Sauve Qui Peut (1966), The Best of Antrobus
(1974), Antrobus Complete (1985)
 plays: Sappho (1959), Acto (1961), An Irish Faustus (1963)
 volumes of poetry: Collected Poems (1960 and 1968), Collected Poems
1931-74 (1980)
 died in 1990

Interested less in social or psychological aspects, Lawrence Durrell

prefers dwelling on the image of reality and the individual’s ability/possibility
to grasp its inner meaning. An adept of Einstein’s theory of relativity and
interdeterminancy, he associates the observing of nature with the latter’s
being disturbed by the interference. As a result, he places the emphasis on
the role of imagination, by means of which one reflects on things untouched
by the presence of the observer. With him, knowledge is thus reached
through subjective perspective rather than through objective analysis.
Applying these beliefs in the practice of writing fiction, Durrell
formulates a critique of the impositions at work within Western society and
gives liberating alternatives under the form of Eastern patterns of thought and
behaviour. Combining mythical elements with philosophical speculations, he
focuses on the global cultural phenomenon and the human beings caught in
its web.As an experimental novelist, Lawrence Durrell’s principal aim seems
to be that of building a totally detached and impartial fictional text, one that
does away with author and authority, inviting personal interpretations on the
part of the reader. The latter is empowered with the interpretational task, is
given letters, journals, quotations from characters within the story or from
famous names in the English literature outside the text as such. Fiction
expands therefore and contaminates the real, just as the latter is already
known to invade (to have invaded once and for all) the novel. The universe(s)
he rounds up resemble unsolved puzzles, endless combinations of their
disparate parts being possible as one reader is exchanged with another or
one and the same person goes through the reading task more than once and,
as experiences vary, moods shift, expectations are transformed, awareness
of fictionality differs.

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Multiplying perspectives to infinity, Durrell’s writings may suggest,
(besides the obviously intended diversity of the world and interplay of
subjective positions regarding it) hesitancy or even carelessness, but the
unitary, palpable, real settings that hold the pieces together imply the idea
that the ultimate purpose of he texts is that of pinpointing the only actual
similarity there is between the fictional and the real: their constitution out of
fragments and the necessary understanding of its being ordered by the-less-
than-apparent thread of life – chaotic, yet pulsating with inner energy. Depth
of analysis and complexity of indirect comment on the state of the (literary)
world are achieved by means of:
 the relativity of truth
 the trespassing of textual boundaries
 symbolic modes of writing
 the comic of language and situation
 mythic suggestiveness
 inter-human relationships governed by love and/or passion
Sudden interferences of an authorial and authoritative kind are present
in his text to awaken readers from comfortably plunging into the fiction of
fiction and, therefore, to undercut expectations of separation from the real
world (of novels and novel writing). The reality Durrell constantly sends to is
one of unity in diversity, singularity in multiplicity, harmony in polyphony. His
richly populated fictional universe, his numerous narrators and standpoints
define the way of the world, governed as it is by the story-telling process
going on around us and taking us across the frontiers of our own stories into
everybody else’s. A huge novel, our lives are inscribed in the collective
memory, whose traces remain discernible for future inscriptions to start from
or move around.

The Alexandria Quartet

The four novels that are part of the ‘quartet’ are: Justine, Balthazar,
Mountolive and Clea, all named after characters involved in the plurifaceted
story of the sequence. Its central character, however, remains Alexandria,
the setting whose spirit Durrell means to bring to attention. Prefacing Justine
is the following disclaimer: The characters in this novel, the first of a series,
are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no
resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real. (1982) It serves a double
purpose: that of warning against the sin of taking fiction for reality, and that of
emphasizing the feeling of place, exotic and different, under whose spell all
the characters are to discover unexpected angles of themselves.
The plot and the characters remain essentially the same throughout
the four novels, narrative technique being the only variable. As narrators
change and different viewpoints are presented, the reader is taken on an
open ended journey along the fictional(ising) path. Expanding the story
beyond the limits of one book, Durrell suggests that the result of the
extension might still be part of a continuum. The addressee of this message
is the reader – invited to play the narrating game and tell his/her own version
of the ones already caught on paper.
Justine is narrated from Darley’s point of view. He, a novelist in love
with Justine, offers to tell her story and, no matter how hard he might try to
keep it objective, he remains unreliable because of his very awareness of the
possibility of being influenced by his love for this narrated woman. Like
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Pygmalion, he grows obsessed with his creation and tends to construct his
whole narrative around her.
A rich, young and beautiful Egyptian Jewess now at her second
marriage (to Nessim Hosnani), Justine attracts the attention of men, who
gravitate around her in trajectories mirrored at the level of the text’s inner
structure. Part of a world of the drifters, the uprooted, the ‘lost’, Justine’s
main preoccupation is with herself, her well-being. Selfish and narcissistic,
she is the perfect choice for a metafictional text whose norms are scrutinised,
exposed and turned into the focal point of reference.
Balthazar adds information meant to correct/contradict Darley’s
assumptions in Justine. Balthazar is a physician; his narrative is
automatically considered to be nearer to objectivity and reliability.
Nevertheless, he remains partly unreliable due to his being involved in the
story that he tells.
Balthazar discloses the fact that Justine had only used Darley as a
screen for her true love for Pursewarden, the latter’s close friend. He also
alludes to Justine’s infidelity to her lover(s) in her alliance with Nessim in
setting up an anti-British plot to smuggle weapons to Palestine, a partnership
stronger than any kind of love.
Mountolive, narrated by the homonymous character – British
ambassador to Egypt – brings an omniscient, therefore objective and reliable
narration, whose ‘politics’ is to shed light on that which people commonly
choose to keep silent about: from political plots to private lives and skeletons
in dark closets.
Clea is the novel which centers round a breakthrough from the
bondage of time and space. It presents Darley’s escape from Alexandria’s
contaminating influence and his freedom to enjoy true love with Clea, the
artist/painter.
The link between the four narratives is provided by the progression
envisaged, one that alludes to the constant metamorphoses of the self in and
of fiction. A state of permanent suspense is thus maintained, the reader
being supposed to expect and accept any sudden mutation in the
interpretation of relationships and personal motives on the one hand, and of
narrative practices and techniques on the other.
Initially intended to investigate modern love, perpetually changing in a
kaleidoscopic fashion, The Alexandria Quartet is sooner about the violation
of current tastes and the norms of social realism. Taboos are tackled directly,
to shock and prevent from complacently accepting impositions. Absolute truth
is questioned and replaced with personal truths, stories and experiences,
stories of experiences. Its circularity (in time, plot, setting, characters) confers
it the quality of a whole, a series of cycles similar to that of life itself.

2.2. John Fowles

 born in Essex, in 1926

 educated at Oxford University
 novels: The Collector (1963), The Magus (1965 and 1977), The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Daniel Martin (1977), Mantissa (1982), A
Maggot (1985)
 short stories: The Ebony Tower (1974)

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 nonfiction: Islands (1978), The Tree (1979), The Enigma of Stonehenge
(1980), Land (1985)

Writing under the influence of existentialism and the practices of the

nouveau roman, John Fowles experiments with fiction and focuses on its
very nature. Considering how fiction interacts with reality and history, and the
boundary separating them, he covertly discusses issues like: the power of
repressive convention, the negative force of social (and literary) conformity,
the enigmatic nature of sexual relations, individual freedom and the desire to
manipulate and control.
In the preface added to the second edition of The Magus, and as a
result of the numerous criticisms his book had received, Fowles explains his
intentions, points to his indebtedness to literary tradition and personal life and
defines his text as an exploration into the antipathy between God and
freedom.
If there was some central scheme beneath the […] stew of intuitions
about the nature of human existence – and of fiction – it lies perhaps in the
alternative title, whose rejection I still sometimes regret: „The Godgame‟. I did
intend Conchis to exhibit a series of masks representing human notions of
God, from the supernatural to the jargon-ridden scientific; that is, a series of
human illusions about something that does not exist in fact, absolute
knowledge and absolute power. […] I do not defend Conchis‟s decision at the
execution, but I defend the reality of the dilemma. God and freedom are
antipathetic concepts; and men believe in their imaginary gods most often
because they are afraid to believe in the other thing. (1983: 10)
This metafictional aside may be read as two things at once (in keeping
with the kind of reader one is); on the one hand, it might be taken for a
neutral ground where the freedom of choice is still very much possible, since
it lies in the future; on the other hand, it might imply that, despite its
preaching in favour of total freedom, it remains an intrusive exercise which,
by telling the reader what not to expect from the text, is actually telling
him/her what to read into it. In other words, the preface is illustrative of
Fowles’s fiction, one which demolishes pretensions of divine powers, both on
the part of the writer (as author) and on the part of the reader. Targeted by
his bitter irony and obvious parody are the omniscient authors of the English
literary past and the passive, submissive readers of the present, too narrow
minded or too blind to see the text as constantly in the making.
The non-diegetic historical information Fowles makes use of serves to
authenticate the fiction it encloses; to both offer a pleasing surface for the
reader who is eager to establish links between the real and the fictional, and
give the text the depth expected by the active, inquisitive reader who seeks
to reach the ‘true’ message underneath the dialogism of the text. Added is
either a fantastic dimension or a fictionally-real one. The former is suggestive
of the movement away from the object reality, the latter gives access to the
reality of fiction, inside the metafiction thus constructed. Or, from a different
perspective: committed to democratic socialism in their urging emancipation
from oppressive social structures and sympathising with a whole tradition of
religious dissent, the novels of John Fowles are also utopian texts firmly
opposed to reaction.

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The Magus

A strikingly new kind of novel which, although intends to establish an

absolute level of reality, paradoxically relativizes reality (Brian McHale,
Postmodernist Fiction, 1987: 114), The Magus foregrounds a godgame
whose central protagonist is Nicholas Urfe, the puppet whose strings are held
by Conchis – God/the puppeteer.
Arriving on the Greek island of Phraxos, the young Nicholas Urfe
(supposed to teach English in a local boys’ boarding school) meets and
befriends Conchis, an elderly Greek millionaire residing at Bourani. Nicholas
accepts to be experimented on by Conchis, who stages a succession of
theatrical situations, for his younger friend to experiment with confrontations
with the ‘real’. What actually happens is that Nicholas is made to accept
responsibility for his ‘true’ self by plunging at the heart of fiction(s) and
returning, each time, to reconsider reality in terms of the fictional underlying it
(as illustrated by his bringing along vivid memories of worlds which only
seem real but are obviously artificially created).
All of Nicholas’s journeys into the possible are paralleled by a journey
inwards, to his own consciousness, which may be inferred by considering
Conchis’s name, symbolically pronounced to suggest ‘the conscious one’
(Nicholas’s rational alter ego, but also the embodiment of narrative
omniscience):
„How do you know who I am, Mr Conchis?‟
„Anglicize my name. I prefer the “ch” soft.‟ He sipped his tea. „If you
question Hermes, Zeus will know.‟ (The Magus, 1983: 80)
Indeed, apparently it is Nicholas Urfe who functions as narrator, but it
is really Conchis who manipulates him into telling his stories the way
authority imposes it on him. They are both, in turns, authors and narrators,
narrators and narrated, sharing the statute of magus, imposing perspectives
and trapping the reader into the labyrinth of their story-telling.
Pathologically driven towards the games Conchis keeps making him a
pawn of, Nicholas loses contact with reality. His own personal life is
backgrounded in favour of the enticing experiences he is the subject of. His
teaching career, his love for Alison, the death of his parents no longer count,
no longer manage to interfere with his new reality or unreality.
In its constant building and breaking of frames and settings, the novel
is resonant of metatheatre and metafiction: Nicholas’s role-playing in
Conchis’s theatre is similar to the reader’s experience with this novel which
offers multiple illusions of reality as food for thought. It seems that this was
the perfect choice for Fowles to pinpoint the features of the new, liberated
literature of the later half of the twentieth century, one of illusory textual
representation and of interactive activities meant to both educate the reader
and allow him/her a personal interpretation.
The last pages of the book, presenting Nicholas reunited with Alison
back in London, once again formulate the central ideas of The Magus:
The final truth came to me, as we stood there, trembling, searching,
between our past and all our future; at a moment when the difference
between fission and fusion lay in a nothing, a tiniest movement, betrayal,
further misunderstanding.

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There were no watching eyes. The windows were as blank as they
looked. The theatre was empty. It was not a theatre. […] I looked away from
Alison and at those distant windows, the façade, the pompous white
pedimental figures that crowned it. It was logical, the perfect climax to the
godgame. They had absconded, we were alone. I was sure, and yet … after
so much, how could I be perfectly sure? How could they be so cold, so
inhuman – so incurious? So load the dice and yet leave the game? (654-655)
Nicholas Urfe’s incursions at the heart of fictionality and his analyses
of the way in which it is constructed and perceived make the novel a
document of postmodernism, with its obvious questioning of realist
conventions and simultaneous parodic acknowledging that, unfortunately,
realism still has control over the way in which literature is read, taught and
evaluated.
A novel about worlds in collision, The Magus is as near fabulation as
it is realism. The two are blended in a way that makes its reading at once
challenging and rewarding.

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Unlike The Magus, too theoretical for the common reader, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman is a deliberately readable piece of fiction
which clearly brings out the artistic preoccupations of two generations of
novelists and which offers keys for its author’s intellectualising inclination in
novel writing.
It adopts an old fashioned Victorian narrative pattern, which it both
praises and parodies. Its setting is Victorian, its plot is Victorian, its
characters are Victorian too. Nevertheless, besides the Victorian narrated
time, there is the twentieth century narrating one that the author – a character
in his own story – belongs to. The latter addresses a contemporary reader, in
a way which facilitates the discussions on the absurdities related to the
previous century’s mentality, behaviour, habit, narrative practices.
In his Notes on an Unfinished Novel, Fowles wrote:
I write memoranda to myself about the book I‟m on. On this one: You
are not trying to write something one of the Victorian novelists forgot to write;
but perhaps something one of them failed to write. And: Remember the
etymology of the word. A novel is something new. It must have relevance to
the writer‟s now – so don‟t ever pretend you live in 1867; or make sure the
reader knows it' (in Malcolm Bradbury, The Novel Today. Contemporary
Writers on Modern Fiction, 1977: 138)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman is set in the Lyme Regis and the
London of the late 1860s. It tells the story of Sarah Woodruff and Charles
Smithson. The latter comes to Lyme on the occasion of his engagement to
Ernestina, but falls prey to Sarah’s manipulative story-telling. She, by now
known as ‘the French lieutenant’s whore’ due to her own fabrication of a story
of unrequited love and sexual misfortune, seems aware of the fact that a
Victorian man like Charles will sooner be attracted by a past such as her
invented one than by an impression of propriety and innocence. She plays
her role to perfection, turning into the character she had imagined. Lured by
the mystery surrounding her, Charles indulges in a relationship with her, only
to discover the total lie underneath Sarah’s tale.
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What follows is a temporary separation and numerous special and
temporal journeys back and forth, as Charles begins looking for the woman
he had abandoned, and as their paths fail to cross. This is also the point at
which the authorial voice (making the savour of Chapter Thirteen) turns into
an authorial presence and the smooth flow of the Victorian narrative is
interrupted by the intervention.
The parallel plots of Sam and Mary, of Mrs. Poultney and of Dr.
Grogan add to the complexity of the novel’s construction and formulate
judgements on strict social hierarchies, narrow-minded mentalities and
progressive scientific research respectively, as embodied by the above
mentioned characters.
In point of structure, the novel’s chapters are all preceded by asides
under the form of famous Victorian texts; excerpts from Thackeray, Hardy,
Dickens, Browning, Darwin, Marx, Arnold, Ruskin and others, together with
quotes from late nineteenth century journals, magazines, legal and political
writings are all used to provide each fictional section with an appropriate
introduction, further developed to later connote in the exact opposite direction.
The ending is open in its double-natured form, therefore overtly anti-
Victorian as the whole novel. It once again returns to the formula of
existentialist philosophy in its forwarding more than one choice for the reader
to experience freedom of interpretation (a necessary condition of the human
condition) and to the theory of the nouveau roman that Fowles owes to Alain
Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Michel Butor and that he abides by,
favouring the movement of the writing, the novel’s own language and
technique.
All in all, it is now accepted (see Neil McEwan, The Survival of the
Novel. British Fiction in the Later Twentieth Century, 1981) that The
French Lieutenant’s Woman serves as a revealing introduction to the work
of other modern novelists, who are as conscious as Fowles is (although less
explicitly) of the need to be wary about the nature of fiction. It is a brilliant, but
also a conscientious work which explores the incongruities of fiction today.

2.3. David Lodge

 born in London, in 1935

 educated at London University
 Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Birmingham
(since 1976)
 novels: The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), The
British Museum is Falling Down (1965), Out of the Shelter (1970),
Changing Places (1975), How Far Can You Go? (1980), Small World
(1984), Nice Work (1988), Paradise News, Therapy (1995), Home Truths
(1999), Thinks (2001), Author, Author: A Novel (2004)
 works of criticism: Language of Fiction (1966), The Novelist at the
Crossroads (1971), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), Working with
Structuralism (1981), Consciousness and the Novel (2002)

An attempt at sugaring the metalanguage pill has been that of

transforming literary theory and criticism into theoretical fiction or narratology
as narrative. Nevertheless, the abrupt shift asks for an educated, highly

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cultivated and, why not, patient reader, for a reading elite who might consent
to abandoning hope of ever deriving any pleasure out of experiencing
literature and to plunging into a thorough study of fiction while apparently
reading fiction. And, some would say, as if it weren’t bad enough for critics to
write fiction and novelists to concentrate on theory, the university professor is
added at times as a special ingredient meant to hold everything else together
in a puzzling puzzle, with a view to instructing (!?) an already overburdened
readership.
Some thirty years ago, the relationship between fiction and criticism
was comparatively unproblematical. Criticism was conceived of as a second-
order discourse dependent on the first-order discourse of fiction. Novelists
wrote novels and critics criticised them. (David Lodge, The Novelist at the
Crossroads, 1984: 11)
Nowadays, the literary phenomenon has offered itself to being
moulded and controlled by academics who, on the one hand, have operated
selections and exclusions within the canon (simply because literature cannot
be taught or learnt without there being a common body of texts to refer to and
compare) and, on the other hand, have attempted to write texts about the
canon, themselves becoming canon-ised, within a relatively short period of
time. Additionally, mention must be made of the fact that inside and outside
the educational system there is a growing variety of conflicting views on the
subject of literary value and on the difference between literary and non-
literary texts (Ann Jefferson and David Robey [eds], Modern Literary
Theory, 1988:10), which has led to relative hierarchies being drawn up.
A case in point is the simultaneous manipulation of the critical,
theoretical novel and of the fictionalised critique (whose skilful handling of the
terminological instrumentarium perhaps performs investigation enterprises on
the literary corpse if not surgical interventions to resuscitate it back on track)
with David Lodge. The following excerpts from his (non)fiction will hopefully
support the thesis:
1. To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every
decoding is another encoding. (Small World, 1984: 25)
2. Any text inevitably undermines its own claims to have a determinate
meaning, and licences the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by
an activity of semantic freeplay. (Modern Criticism and Theory, 1988: 108)
3. Aporia. In classical rhetoric it means real or pretended uncertainty about
the subject under discussion. Deconstructionists today use it to refer to more
radical kinds of contradiction or subversion of logic or defeat of a reader‟s
expectation in a text. (Nice Work, 1988: 338)
4. The „meaning‟ of a literary text is objectively knowable, and
distinguishable from the „significance‟ attributed to that meaning by particular
readers. (Modern Criticism and Theory, 1988: 253)
5. The paradigms of fiction are essentially the same whatever the medium.
Words or images, it makes no difference at the structural level. (Changing
Places, 1978: 251)
In Lodge’s academic trilogy, the professor-character is carefully
manipulated so as to forward ideas, principles, concepts and to have
literature-about-literature and language-about-language embedded within the
text. The reading process is rendered difficult and, most often than not,
meanings are either overlooked, added, misinterpreted, or misattributed. In
other words, signifiers send to signifieds that are multiple or simply different
with each reader/reading. The comedy embedded is, nevertheless, the

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ingredient which allows parody and self-parody, avenging the reader’s
difficulties in digesting the hard core of the texts.

Changing Places. A Tale of Two Campuses

This novel is structured around the idea of an academic exchange

scheme, further developed in Small World and Nice Work. In Changing
Places, the American professor Morris Zapp, from Euphoria State University
exchanges places for a year with the English professor Philip Swallow, from
Rummidge University. As the two men are confronted with different
universes, the cultural clash is brought to the fore; the American finds the
English educational system rural, quite absurd and out-of-date, while the
Englishman is shocked to discover an emancipated, highly progressive urban
environment. They are both misfits trying hard to survive and to cope with
everything: from accommodation facilities to teaching activity and social life.
A study of the cross-Atlantic, invisible but powerful cultural battle, the
book ridicules the inertia both sides manifest in accepting the other. Although
it analyses all this on the small scale of the university situation, it is allusive of
similar practices in other domains as well. The academic campus is nothing
but the world in a nutshell and the academic an embodiment of Man at his
most ridiculous, despite the novel’s disclaimer:
Although some of the locations and public events portrayed in this
novel bear a certain resemblance to actual locations and events, the
characters, considered either as individuals or as members of institutions, are
entirely imaginary. Rummidge and Euphoria are places on the map of a
comic world which resembles the one we are standing on without
corresponding to it, and which is peopled by figments of the
imagination.(Changing Places, 1978)
David Lodge manages to create a feeling of verisimilitude by recurrent
references to the state of affairs in the wide world outside the university and
in the claustrophobic academic one, and to types of discourse that
distinguish one from the other. Furthermore, the use of numerous letters in
the epistolary section of the novel (exchanged between Philip and Morris and
their wives, Hilary and Désirée), the British English and the American English
alive in their texts, together with the numerous and humorous incursions into
the frontier reality/fiction (e.g. Morris is a specialist in Jane Austen, and his
twin children are called Elizabeth and Darcy) mirror a mock-refined cultural
situation one can easily recognise.
The ending takes one back to the novel’s opening paragraphs, with
the two professors (this time each accompanied by the other’s wife) on
planes moving in opposite directions than they were when their story began,
and which are about to collide – avoided accident that has the four reunited
and planning on future exchanges, all suggestively illustrated by the scene’s
being presented as a script whose stage directions both manipulate the
actors-characters and introduce an authorial presence who ultimately proves
to be inefficient, so the play-novel remains open.

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Small World. An Academic Romance

This second novel in the series is set against an international

academic background. The numerous academics populating the novel’s
universe are presented as migrating from one place to another, to take part in
conferences (but also to seek the company of others like them, who might
understand their worries, appreciate their efforts and plug in to their creative
energy). The conferences are nothing but alibis, the real reason for their
being constantly on the move being the socialising involved:
But, on the whole, academic subject groups are self-defining,
exclusive entities. Each has its own jargon, pecking order, newsletter,
professional association. The members probably meet only once a year – at
a conference. Then what a lot of hallos, howareyous and
whatareyouworkingons over the drinks, over the meals, between lectures.
(1984: 233)
The romance mode, the mythical pattern and the metafictional design
of Small World are brought together by Lodge’s skill with constructing
memorable stories which speak of/to the contemporary mind. The main
character, Persse McGarrigle, a young university lecturer is, like Percival, in
search of a Grail: Angelica Pabst, a fellow academic. Naïve and romantic,
Persse keeps answering calls for papers and putting his name down for all
possible future conferences in the hope of meeting Angelica once again. His
(mis)adventures seem never-ending, like the metafictional discussions on
texts and textuality, literature and literary theory – that most of the characters
spend their lives delivering. Among those who forward the metafictional
debate in the novel is Morris Zapp – the deconstructionist. Philip Swallow is
also present but, unlike his peers, he has adopted no critical orientation and
seems to be the only one still enjoying literature for what it is rather than
massacring it for the sake of theory.
Criticising criticism and the critic is the dominant goal of the metatext,
infested by regurgitations of critical discourse from people who seem to have
lost their human features and replaced them with labels and concepts: Fulvia
Morgana – a Marxist, Sigfried von Turpitz – a Teutonic Response Theory
expert, Michel Tardieu – a narratologist and, last but not least, Arthur
Kingfisher – their mentor and superior, embodiment of both the King Arthur
and the Fisher King figures.
The academic romance announced in the title is followed through to
the very end, when Persse discovers true love outside the suffocating world
of sterile words the academia is (in the person of Cheryl Summerbee, a non-
academic, working for British Airways). His quest continues, however, as he
is incapable of tracing her down. Open ended, therefore also open to
interpretation and reinterpretation, Small World, plays with expectations and
amuses while uncovering the darkest of corners in the life outside and inside
the text.

Nice Work

The last novel of the trilogy returns to the exchange scheme in

Changing Places. This time it involves an academic and a businessman, a

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woman and a man, other oppositions being considered, without the university
milieu’s being left out.
Robyn Penrose, a lecturer specialising in the nineteenth century novel
and women’s studies, is asked by her faculty board (that Philip Swallow is a
part of) to spend some time becoming acquainted with the industrial world
and to accept that an engineer, Vic Wilcox, managing director of a steelworks,
attend her classes in return, everything being part of a project initiated by the
government on Industry Year. Totally displeased at the thought of the drab
involved in all this, she shows up in Vic’s office, only to discover that he is
just as angry about the scheme as she. The difficulties they initially encounter
in understanding the world of each other (and which are comically rendered
by Lodge) gradually become easier to accept, as the two get to know each
other better.
Lodge’s craft of rendering the atmosphere of the two universes that
are part of the broader one but that do not cross paths too often is related to
his portrayal of their discourses and the essential misunderstandings they
cause as a result of the war of mentalities thus formulated.
„My field is […] women‟s studies.‟
„Women Studies?‟ Wilcox echoed with a frown. „What are they?‟
„Oh, women‟s writing. The representation of women in literature.
Feminist critical theory.‟
Wilcox sniffed. „You give degrees for that?‟ […] „Still, I suppose it‟s all
right for the girls.‟
„Boys take it too,‟ said Robyn. „and the reading load is very heavy, as a
matter of fact.‟
[…] „Why aren‟t they studying something useful, then?‟
„Like mechanical engineering?‟
„You said it.‟ (1989: 114)
The language Vic speaks is that of a middle-aged married man with a
wife he no longer loves and children whom he cannot get to grips with; the
language of an engineer who, after having graduated, does nothing to
broaden his cultural horizon; the language of the well-off, who pay for their
pleasures without giving real quality a second thought, driven as they are by
the dictates of fashion and by the need to impress neighbours and friends.
Robyn’s language is that of a young and beautiful woman who is still
single because of the time and effort she puts into her long-term education;
the language of the open-minded academic who freely discusses all subjects,
including those which are disturbing for most people; the language of the
literate, the scholar, the researcher.
Communication between them is obviously impossible at first. Only as
human beings can they finally find common ground, and even then not
wholly: when Vic develops a crush for her, Robyn is bewildered by the old
fashioned, syrupy approach he adopts (candle light, roses, romantic
declarations and adolescent love-making); she seems more accustomed to
frank statements and safe sex.
The last paragraphs of the novel bring an image that sums up the
whole content and message: looking out of her office window that gives on to
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the campus lawn, Robyn can see a gardener pushing his motor mower up
and down. The students make way for him to pass, without uttering a word,
without communicating in any way, although he is roughly of the same age
as they. No arrogance is obvious on the students’ part, no resentment on the
gardener’s, just an avoidance of contact. Physically contiguous, they inhabit
separate worlds. (384) Food for thought on the reader’s table.

2.4. Doris Lessing

 born in Persia (Iran), in 1919 and brought up in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)

 educated in Salisbury, at a Roman Catholic convent, but left school at the
age of fourteen
 settled in London in 1949
 novel series: Children of Violence [Martha Quest (1952), A Proper
Marriage (1954), A Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), The
Four Gated City (1969)] and Canopus in Argus: Archives [Shikasta
(1979), The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), The
Sirian Experiments (1981), The Making of the Representative for Planet
8 (1982), The Sentimental Agents (1983)]
 novels: The Grass Is Singing (1950), The Golden Notebook (1962),
Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Summer Before Dark (1972),
Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984), The
Good Terrorist (1985), The Fifth Child (1988), The Old Age of El
Magnificato (2000), The Sweetest Dream (2001), The Grandmothers
(2003) and others
 collections of stories: This Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951), Five:
Short Novels (1953), The Habit of Loving (1957), A Man and Two Women
(1963), African Stories (1964), Winter in July (1966), The Black Madonna
(1966), The Story of a non-Marrying Man (1972) and many more
 other: Going Home (1957), In Pursuit of the English (1960), A Small
Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (1974)

Doris Lessing’s literary works are closely associated with feminism,

social criticism and autobiography, their central themes being in connection
with the world’s being shaken into new patterns by the current cataclysms
and with individuals in search of wholeness, both illustrated at the level of
content and form (the latter being used to support the former). Her writing
covers a wide range of genres, settings and narrative techniques, but are
held together by a number of main concerns. Worth mentioning are the
following: the analysis of the contemporary cultural scene; the awareness of
the perpetual social change; the association of the catastrophic nature of
twentieth century history with personal dissatisfaction and unhappiness; the
emphasis on higher states of consciousness as a possible retreat in the face
of alienation; intense anger at social injustice; interest in radical revisions of
the self; concentration on the nature of inter-human relationships.
A novelist at odds with old-fashioned ways of shaping novel discourse,
Lessing remains nonetheless indebted to traditional modes of writing which
she uses to express the manners, aspirations, anxieties and particular
problems of the times she lives in. Authorial omniscience is not abandoned
wholly, the moralising tone is partly preserved, the anchoring in historical,

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social, political and cultural realities is still obvious, despite the numerous,
more experimentalist, narrative practices and techniques adopted.
The tradition she works in stems from the great European realists of
the nineteenth century, with their special preoccupation with liberation
movements and profound judgement of the quality of a whole way of life in
terms of the qualities of people. (see Lorna Sage, Women in the House of
Fiction, 1992). What she resents is the world’s inability to allow women to
stand for universality, and she builds her texts so as to highlight the
recognition of difference and the authority of otherness.
Whether her novels are autobiographical, science fiction or
metafictional, they adopt realism as a backdrop, but do not round up
imaginative worlds one can live inside. Uncomfortable, threatening, terrifying,
her universes demand fighting for survival. The reader’s task seems to be
that of finding his/her way through the entanglement of plots celebrating
heterogeneity and of ‘listening’ to the silence undermining rhetoric.
In the Preface to The Golden Notebook (in Malcolm Bradbury, The
Novel Today. Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, 1977), Lessing
formulates a complete literary credo, by exposing the inner workings of her
fiction:
 mild feminism, the unsilencing of women: This novel was not a trumpet
for Women‟s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression,
hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women
were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. (171)
 the theme of the breakdown: Sometimes when people „crack up‟ it is a
way of self-healing, of the inner self‟s dismissing false dichotomies and
divisions. (170)
 other thoughts and themes:
- the impossibility of finding a novel to describe the intellectual and moral
climate of a hundred years ago, in the middle of the last century, in Britain, in
the way Tolstoy did it for Russia, Stendhal for France (173)
- the main character – an artist with a ‘block’, so as to tolerate no longer
this monstrously isolated, monstrously narcissistic, pedestalled paragon(174)
- a different kind of subjectivity: The way to deal with the problem of
„subjectivity‟ is to see [the individual] as a microcosm and in this way to break
through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed
life always does (176)
- allowing the book to make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk
through the way it was shaped (176)
- criticising the critic/reader: the book is alive and potent and fructifying and
able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and
intention are not understood (185)
Like Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing orients her texts towards
transcending difference and exploring a shared crisis of consciousness. She
expands the discussion so that it might also cover the area of novel writing,
but, most often than not, she prefers to look into real women, with real
worries in real-life situations. Starting from individual cases and then
broadening the scope to catch womanhood between parallel mirrors, she
manages to disturb and please at the same time, opening doors behind
which unspoken selves have long been hidden.
The attempted dialogue with the rest of the world is more valuable in
its preliminary, anticipative stage than in its actual manifestation. The feeling
of entrapment and the loud noise of silence remain overwhelming and

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contaminate the reading process also, leaving behind painful traces of
sudden realisations.

The Diaries of Jane Somers

The book appeared initially as two separate volumes, entitled The

Diary of a Good Neighbour and If the Old Could. In its present day form,
these are the two parts of the novel.
Central is Janna, an intelligent, attractive magazine editor from whose
perspective the story is told. Before her illumination on the true value of
existence, her life had meant money, comfort, success and glamour. With the
death of her husband, and that of her mother, Janna begins to understand
her inadequacy and to question the way of the world.
The shiny cover of her life, like that of a women’s magazine, hides the
real bitterness, the dim corners underneath. Her emotional sterility, her
vulnerability and her inefficiency in really communicating with others drives
her to writing a diary and to becoming committed to the old and the deprived,
in an attempt at analysing her true nature and making up for the lost time.
Accidentally meeting Maudie Fowler (old, wicked, poor), Janna
becomes obsessed with the woman and joins ‘The Good Neighbour’ social
aid programme, volunteering to help look after the needy. Leaving behind her
wonderful career, expensive clothes, educated friends, travels abroad, she
embarks on a journey of self-knowledge that is painful in that it discloses
aspects she had previously been blind to, living, as she had done, among the
priviledged. Her downfall (in the eyes of her acquaintances) runs parallel with
incursions into her soul, which she turns upside down and inside out,
especially in the pages of the diary she keeps.
Maudie is the secondary character who, in Part I, supports the
introspection by providing the necessary ‘other’ against which Janna may
define herself. In Part II, the role is played by Richard Curtis, the man with
whom Janna falls in love.
Richard is a married man, which adds to the responsibilities both are
weighed down with. Their relationship is clearly an impossible one, and
Janna can decide to bring it to an end only when she eventually
acknowledges the fact that, in wanting him around she is desperately trying
to deny Freddie’s death. She pretends to be in love with Richard, but all she
does is relive her past with Freddie, her then empty marriage, now
fictionalised and improved due to her having become older, more mature,
therefore more alert to the small things in life which make it worth living.
All this richness and intensity of feeling and thought is shared with the
reader in a way that reminds of everyone’s personal unhappiness wrapped
up in the self-satisfaction on display with most. Following Janna’a text,
pretext and context, the reader discovers aspects of the self previously
buried and is lead to looking with fresh eyes at the impositions of society, at
the norms it seems to force people to accept and thus remain caught on the
surface of things, behind the artificial mask of convention.
The Diaries of Jane Somers is a novel which involves the self-
conscious and deliberate textualisation of one’s self. It posits fiction alongside
truth, blurring the boundary between them and suggesting that the
fictionalising of fact is closer to truth than reality/history.

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Aware of the unreliability and unpredictability of memory, Lessing
demolishes the myth of the past as real and as contained in the present. In
so doing, she gives her writing a feminine and feminist touch: the fertility of
imagination is not devoid of messages about women and womanhood,
especially since the mother-daughter and the woman-lover relationships are
focused upon and amplified until distorted, made to go beyond the commonly
accepted prejudices.
Trapped inside the identity of someone she barely recognises, Janna
decides it is time for her to become involved in establishing connections, no
matter how extra-ordinary they may be. It is not surprising maybe that she
holds on to her friendship with Maudie and gives up the one with Richard.
The symbiosis of the former is far more valuable than the attraction of
opposites with the latter. Man-the-centre becomes man-the-outsider,
gravitating around the main character’s presence, yet incapable or forbidden
to trespass its inner circle. Like Doris Lessing, Jane Somers goes through the
therapy of writing and of living anew, accessing the truths of a younger and
fictive self from the different perspectives of her split older ones.

2.5. Fay Weldon

 born in Worcestershire, England, in 1931

 educated at University of St. Andrews, Scotland (studied economics and
philosophy)
 lives in Dorset, England
 novels: The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967), Down Among the Women (1971),
Female Friends (1975), Remember Me (1976), Words of Advice (1977),
Praxis (1978), Little Sisters (1978), Puffball (1980), The President’s Child
(1982), The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983), The Shrapnel Academy
(1986), The Rules of Life (1987), The Heart of the Country (1987), Leader
of the Band (1988), The Cloning of Joanna May (1990), Darcy’s Utopia
(1991), Growing Rich (1992), Life Force (1992), Affliction (1993), Splitting
(1995), Worst Fears (1996), Big Women (1997), Nobody Likes Me (1997),
The Bulgari Connection (2001), Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide
(2002), Mantrapped (2004)
 children’s books: Wolf the Mechanical Dog, Party Puddle
 collections of short stories: Watching Me, Watching You (1981), Polaris
(1985), Moon Over Minneapolis (1991), Wicked Women (1997), A Hard
Time to Be a Father (1998) and others
 non-fiction: Letters to Alice, Rebecca West, Sacred Cows etc.

The feminism of Fay Weldon’s writing is concentrated on the idea of

women exploited by men in domestic circumstances. She shifts the emphasis
from the broader social context to the narrower one of the home where,
behind doors and shutters, the real unhappiness unfolds. Aware of the fact
that women allow themselves to be subjected by men and by their natures
alike, she uses satire to formulate judgements on a world that seems to have
been arranged so that it suits men. The novelist bridges the gap between the
popular and the serious, presenting the simple, small things in life as we
know it in a way which invites at the thorough consideration of the
complicated pattern underneath. She finds the best wording for everything
that has remained unsaid, avenging all the silent splinters of a woman’s life.
Her readers are pleased to discover only too familiar representations which,
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through exaggeration and caricature, are rendered ridiculous and
preposterous, yet remain sufficiently connected with what goes on in the real
world to result in an analysis of actual problems.
Adopting a direct, straightforward attitude and point of view, Fay
Weldon expresses a sense of paradoxical sisterhood and exposes the
various aspects of patriarchal ideology. She seems to point to the fact that
any stereotype is self-destructive, easily transformed into its own unstable
contradiction and thereby demonstrates that such stereotypes only exist as
verbal constructs in the service of that ruling ideology or to that, as Germaine
Greer argues (see The Female Eunuch, 1993) whatever the kind of feminine
stereotype to which women are supposed to conform to, it is necessarily a
construction of patriarchal capitalism: The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine.
[…] She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because
virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity. (in Keith Green and
Jill LeBihan [eds], Critical Theory and Practice, 1996: 234)
The woman as mother, lover, wife, housewife, friend, career woman
etc are roles her characters play, usually in separation one from the other, to
gratify preconceived ideas that are further developed, pushed out of shape,
until they become monstrously deformed, defamiliarised so as to contain the
criticism intended. Ordinary and middle-class, her characters are mostly
described in terms of the relationships they establish with others. The men
and women around them are just as bad, just as disappointing, and it is
Weldon’s frequently expressed intention of exposing weaknesses with
women, of not discriminating against men, of unfavourably treating both, that
gets forwarded. Her politics appears to be related to the notion that women
themselves are to blame for the status they have been imposed and have
accepted. The victims are more numerous than the warriors, and their inertia
is contagious, passed on from generation to generation. Furthermore, when
not silenced altogether, most women play their roles conscientiously, under
the yoke of male power and control, although capable of seeing through the
consensus.
Narrating with a view to disclosing multiple perspectives, Weldon’s
women adopt dialogism to juxtapose the surface level of things with the
subtle pondering on its depths. They wear the mask, but rebel behind it; in
observing their situation, they pronounce aphoristic truths that give flavour to
the writing: Men are irrelevant. Women are happy or unhappy, fulfilled or
unfulfilled, and it has nothing to do with men (Down Among the Women,
1971: 187); Men do get very odd when their wives are pregnant (Affliction,
1993: 96); If the wife leaves an empty bed, a husband‟s first impulse is to fill it
(Worst Fears, 1996: 57) Embodying abstract notions of womanhood,
characters switch from the third person to the first person, both imitating male
voices and guiding the responses to the inner femininity/feminism of the text.
Thus two types of audiences are addressed efficiently and the message
carried through.
The plots are also selected to illustrate the argument about women
today and always. From childhood to maturity and old age, women are
portrayed as suffering from gender inequalities directly related to economic,
monetary conditions. The additional subplots foreground hypostases of
institutions like marriage, career, love affairs, education, the succession of
which (never presupposing the same order) creates the impression of life, of
a dynamism to be associated with change or progress rather than with
prosaic circularity or cyclicity leading nowhere in the end.

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Down Among the Women

The novel’s theme is stated by its very title: women’s oppression and
the low status they have always been associated with. Used as a refrain, to
start most chapters, it emphasizes a dangerous streak in the collective
unconscious, and ridicules the current drive to subdue the already subdued.
It depicts the complexity of women’s experience and glimpses into the
unreasonable expectations society enacts upon them. The characters and
the plot serve to transmit the idea that patriarchy must be fought back and
freedom of action and thought allowed to dictate the evolution of women in
society. Built around six characters, whose lives are interwoven to compare
and contrast, to oppose and analyse, the novel also presupposes two levels
– one on which the diachronic debate is developed and one on which the
synchronic aspect is considered:
 on the one hand, three generations of women are presented, each
embodied by a particular character: Wanda – the grandmother, Scarlet – the
mother, Byzantia – the daughter
 on the other hand, a group of friends (not really all that friendly towards
one another) is discussed: Scarlet, Jocelyn, Audrey, Helen, Sylvia and Susan
The link remains Scarlet, a partly autobiographical character, an
independent single mother, a woman with a will and a way, the most
intelligent and emancipated of all. Through Scarlet, whose name adds a
critical and intertextual component, Weldon empowers women with the force
to appreciate their value and refuse submission to absurd requirements.
Jocelyn turns from a bright, open-minded intellectual into a bored and
boring housewife. She stands for the ‘happily married’ woman, trapped in an
impossible situation, with a husband who cheats on her and with no other
satisfaction to ever look forward to. Eventually, she breaks free, as she
leaves Philip for Ben, with whom she begins a new life.
Audrey is the one who moves in the opposite direction: from a quiet,
submissive wife and mother to a woman of the world, as she manages to
shake off the ties imposed on her, abandons husband and children and lives
with a married man. She awakens from the woman’s nightmare and lives life
to the full, with no remorse or sense of guilt whatsoever.
Helen is the prototype of the victim; she is beautiful, sensitive and
loving, therefore a misfit. After numerous disappointing relationships, she
understands that men only feel comfortable with women who are their
inferiors, but continues to make compromises and lower herself in
degradation. Her suicide, and her decision to take her daughter’s life also, is
symbolical for Weldon’s feminist message of anger at such philosophies of
life.
Sylvia is another victim. Unlike Audrey, who has gone through all the
stages of social womanhood and come out a fresher, better person, she sees
all her attempts at happiness destroyed, all her hopes shattered in the
unfortunate relationships she establishes. Punished for having punished in
her turn, Sylvia has to accept her fate and simply carry on with her life.
Susan, who becomes Scarlet’s stepmother, is the ‘nicest’ from a
patriarchal point of view. She transforms her status of wife and mother into a
religion, dedicating all her time and effort to making her marriage to an
elderly man work, despite being aware of the bitterness underneath the
polished surface of her life.
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Wanda, the only feminist proper, opens the novel, and Byzantia, her
follower, ends it. The former introduces the discussion on the necessity of
educating women to think independently and fight for the right of making
personal choices, while the latter detaches herself and her generation from
‘the last of the women’ (as patriarchy has constructed and as focused upon in
the book), announcing the emergence of a new, emancipated woman with
the strength to operate major changes and to provide all women with an
improved, culturally and socially determined, status.
The narration is achieved by the handling of both a third-person,
omniscient narrator and a first-person subjective one, underlining the shift
from the historical perspective to the individual, particular viewpoint.
Jocelyn’s narratorial task is interrupted every now and then by authorial,
intrusive passages (very patriarchal in essence) within which generalisations
are made and a twenty-year span is covered, all in relation with the evolution
(or involution) in feminist positions. Immortalised in fiction, the female,
feminine and feminist voices inside Weldon’s novel leave deep traces in the
reader and therefore attain their goals.

2.6. Salman Rushdie

 Indian novelist, born in Bombay, in June 1947

 educated at Cambridge University
 has recently moved from London to New York
 novels: Grimus (1975), Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The
Satanic Verses (1988), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), The Moor’s
Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001)
 short stories: East, West (1994)
 a book of reportage: The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987)
 critical essays: Imaginary Homelands (1991)
 film criticism: ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1992)
 non-fiction: Step Across This Line (2003)

Defined as a postcolonial, experimentalist, metafictional, magic realist

writer, Salman Rushdie’s fame rests upon the uniqueness of the imaginative
space he foregrounds, where representations of alterity meet and fill the void
of denied realities. Rushdie is an enthusiastic proponent of new forms, able to
match the new sensibilities, the twentieth century location of culture: film,
radio, television, video – all present as narrative material, structural device
and metaphor in his fiction. (see Damian Grant, Salman Rushdie, 1999) The
emphasis on the media helps him open a whole discussion on the
fundamentally new relationship between public and private life, language and
silence, the centre and its fringes. Inside today’s global culture, Rushdie’s
intention, as formulated in Imaginary Homelands, is that of writing books
that draw better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can
understand the world.
Drawing on a vast range of Hindu, Islamic and Western, classical and
modern, academic and popular traditions, he produces a highly original
collage which speaks equally to the East and to the West, about the past and
about the present, in elaborate or in simplistic ways. A self-conscious and
versatile writer, Rushdie discusses diversity and uses multiplicity as forms of
resistance to the unitary nature of imperialist ideology, of political and
religious control, of canonical artistic impositions. The magic realism of his
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fiction allows the combination of the realistic portrayal of poverty and suffering
with magic, fantasy, farce, symbolism and allegory. In other words, the
objective meets the subjective, the masculine the feminine, tradition
innovation, authority the subdued.
Assuming migrancy (and therefore discontinuity) at the personal,
national and artistic levels, Rushdie seems to find a liberating mode of
defining the self taken up by fiction, using in his defence the very weapons
that have been directed against him by fate. A ‘translated’ man, he now
translates his translation, distancing himself from the original, while creating a
better one to replace it. An easterner whose western definition is found
unsatisfactory, he adopts the opposite position to do justice to his own.
Placed within the British tradition (of Forster’s A Passage to India),
and benefiting from a deeper knowledge of ‘the other’ to which he has always
belonged, but is now distant from (therefore less biased about), Rushdie sets
out to juxtapose layers of cultural patterns that run parallel to successive
strata of story-telling – all shown to be on the fiction - reality borderline.
Narratologic and historiographic self-consciousness is subtly
incorporated by his symbolical, obliquely theoretical fiction preoccupied with
the subjectivity of historical narrative, which places its endings and
beginnings at the centre to avoid any obtrusive moral conclusion. Social
boundaries are crossed, cultural frontiers trespassed and distinctions blurred
in this insane game of having the misplaced other intrude upon worlds he/she
does not belong to. Resulting is an impression of reality melting into a fiction
that implies an overpowering authority gaining in altitude and becoming
increasingly frightening, especially when identified with the realist’s urge to
have complex reality represented, encapsulated by strict formulations within
or without the fictional text.
Salman Rushdie’s rewriting of the past has helped define not only
time, but history also, as relative. Much of the knowledge about the past, he
believes, is of a narrated nature since all past events are potential historical
facts, actual facts remaining those which have been chosen to be narrated.
He therefore separates personal history from the collective, acknowledged
version of history and, by doing so, rediscovers himself, man and artist.
The autobiographical vein remains a unifying feature of Rushdie’s
writing, despite his transgression of genre categories and its challenges upon
the reader. From the mention of one’s arrival on a strange island (in Grimus),
to one’s birth into a new world (in Midnight’s Children), nationality versus
religious (dis)orientation (in Shame and The Satanic Verses), to language
and culture in conflict (in Fury), his texts cover painful ground, engage in
ideological discourses, experiment with the limits of imagination, test the
coherence of life, explore the nature of Man and Art –obvious metaphors of
Rushdie’s own life experiences. Inside his texts, autobiographical characters,
like everyone else, live history forward and ‘write’ it in retrospect (see The
Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey, 1987), feeling free to commit
mistakes, knowing that the draft of their lives will be corrected in the future
narrative about it.

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Midnight’s Children

The Three Books that make up the novel cover sixty-odd years (from
1915 to 1977) and four generations. However, there are numerous incursions
into the distant, mythical past of India and the world. As to the future, it is only
suggested, or left untouched for the moment when, years from now, it will
already have become someone else’s past.
Saleem Sinai, the main character, is writing an autobiographical novel,
but starts the story of his life much earlier than usual (as in Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy), by the presentation of his grandparents’ meeting and
falling in love. Their story is symbolical for the metatext of Midnight’s
Children. Saleem’s grandmother pretends to be ill, just to have the new
doctor in town consult her. Custom had it, in those days of India’s past, for
young, virgin women not to expose their bodies to anyone, not even a doctor;
she is therefore consulted from behind a sheet, perforated to allow the
doctor’s hand to touch her belly. What follows is love and marriage, years
spent together in getting to know each other. As time passes, the perforated
sheet acquires new holes, it becomes more and more transparent. And so
does the narrative: if initially obscure, allowing brief glimpses into the
narrated universe, it then opens new doors, as new perspectives are added
and the mysteries begin to clear.
Saleem-the-narrator discusses Saleem-the-character with Padma-the-
narratee. The former adopts the stance and voice of the author, while the
latter stands for an inquisitive, constantly dissatisfied reader, who keeps
complaining about the meaninglessness of the narrative that is presented to
her every time she comes in the room where Saleem sits at his writing desk.
It is Padma who avenges the problems the reader has with the exotic and
sophisticated mixture of autobiography, history, magic realism and
metafiction in Midnight’s Children.
Saleem writes of his birth, simultaneous with that of one thousand
more children across the country, and with that of the new, liberated India (at
midnight, on 15th August 1947) – hence the title of the novel. The births bring
about a generation of witnesses/artists, with their own, intruded-upon,
stories/tales, as 1001 Sheherezades under the threat of telling what they are
told, or as obedient practitioners of religion, whose personal interventions in
THE text are looked upon as a deadly sin (with One Thousand and One
Nights and The Quran as obvious intertexts).
He then goes through pains to rebuild the past out of disparate
fragments with the aid of memory and ends up disintegrating, he himself, as
Padma has foreseen: You better get a move on or you‟ll die before you get
yourself born (in fiction) (1982: 38). The ending he provides marks an abrupt
shift from the metonymical ‘I’ standing for the group, to the ‘I’ becoming the
group and, incapable of holding it together, splitting into a multitude of virtual
‘I’s about to rewrite their own versions of a story that has engulfed them and
their wor(l)d .
Although silenced in the end, his individuality pulverized (the clock
having made time become a bomb), HISstory fights back time and disrupts
accepted patterns: I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory,
as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks (38). His view
on history/the past is that of a succession of jars containing pickles to be

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swallowed as one swallows words which contain worlds, although one’s
perceptions get to be distorted and hideously altered by/in time.
The future, however, is much more difficult to encapsulate; on the
other hand, it will, for sure, presuppose yet another possible interpretation of
things past and digested by a former present having become a recent past by
then; in other words, what lies ahead is only for others to actually experience
and deposit under the form of dried-out memories. One last empty jar seems
to await a Proustian reader who, by tasting the past (historical and literary),
might begin to write the future.
The principles at work in the novel are those of decentring, plurality
and double-selves, all related to India’s cultural, religious, linguistic
heterogeneity, her ‘double parentage’ – native and colonial – and her ‘double
emergence’ – birth and death/rebirth. (Benjamin Graves, Born Again –
Double Parentage in Midnight’s Children, 1998, The Internet) Throughout
the intricate scaffolding of the plot, the irony of the mistaken identity is built
on double-faceted cultural archetypes (Shiva, in the divine division of labour,
is sometimes the destroyer, sometimes the creator) and apparent truths:
Saleem should be Shiva and Shiva – Saleem; Ahmed is really Shiva’s father
(not Saleem’s) and Wee Willie Winkie – Saleem’s (not Shiva’s); the son
Saleem finally adopts when marrying Parvati the Witch is really Shiva’s etc.
The multiplicity beyond appearances rooted in unilateral misjudgement
painfully becomes the object of satire, even towards the end, where three
options are presented and none chosen: to provide the book with a happy
ending, to raise unanswerable questions or to give dreams the concluding
statement. Instead, the complex film of future plural lives/narratives is
projected on the paper screen.

2.7. Kazuo Ishiguro

 Japanese novelist, born in Nagasaki, in 1954

 came to Britain in 1960
 educated at the University of Kent, Canterbury and the University of East
Anglia
 now lives in London
 novels: A Pale View of the Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World
(1986), The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled (1995), When
We Were Orphans (2000)
 screenplays – A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (1984), The Gourmet (1986)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels are mainly historical ones. They are

developed on moments, events and ideologies that have shaped the
contemporary situation. The global and individual histories his writings
present resemble Rushdie’s, in the sense that they constantly haunt
characters, to the extent to which they become incapable of distinguishing
between what really is/has been, what is/has been fictionally constructed.
With Ishiguro, however, the emphasis is on the twentieth century rather than
on ancient, mythical times, and the magic is replaced by the illusory, although
the allusive and symbolical is preserved.
With the two World Wars in the background, Ishiguro’s novels acquire
a dangerous, threatening nuance, employed to the full in the portrayal of life
on the edge of reason and meaning. Violence seems to be the key-word in
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defining the human condition, in the essence of existence. People are
violently manipulated and respond with violence, irrespective of the level on
which this ‘battle’ takes place (global, national or individual).
Most often than not, the public and the private selves are described as
at war with each other, their struggle resembling the conflict between nations,
the combat between armies. If nations have history, individuals have memory,
and it is this double slippery ground that Ishiguro’s writings cover. Like
Rushdie, Ishiguro invites at considering both as fluid or in-the-making, and
therefore rewriteable. He consequently inscribes both with traces that give
substance to the commentary on the way we are.
Re-membering, putting together the dismembered past to make sense
of the trauma of the present (see Leela Ghandi, Postcolonial Theory, 1998),
Ishiguro carries out a therapeutic project, postcolonial in essence, bridging
the gap that keeps worlds apart.
Historically-accurate descriptions accompany the otherwise extremely
subjective, character-based narration, which leads to the mixed chronology of
the plot and the double-layered narrative structure. Usually involved in the
thorough consideration of their own movements forward in space and
backwards in time, Ishiguro’s character-narrators subvert accepted notions of
truth and deconstruct patterns of authority in and outside fiction. Stereotypes
are judged as forming the buffer zone between cultures, advertised by
greedy vendors who offer them as tax-free merchandise, without the
awareness of the disastrous impact their actions might have on a wider scale
in the foreseeable future. Behind them, cultures flourish independently, few
managing to preserve their genuineness from the onslaught of the invading
‘other’, while most facilitate the conquest and accept the yoke.
Besides the historical contexts, the settings chosen also disclose their
author’s philosophical perspectives: Ishiguro's first two novels are set in
Japan, the third in England, the fourth somewhere in an unidentified
European country, and the most recent in London and Shanghai. The two
worlds they stand for are considered from the opposite direction without the
break being too obvious since the only alienating factor at work here is
hybridity, as embodied by the writer himself.
Populating his novels are characters which filter the world from
different standpoints: that of a woman (in A Pale View of the Hills), of a
painter (in An Artist of the Floating World), of a butler (in The Remains of
the Day), of a pianist (in The Unconsoled), of an orphan (in When We Were
Orphans). All the roles are assumed by Ishiguro, as all are margins, now
central to the discussion on the cultural politics of otherness.
The quiet surface of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction hides deep water
underneath. Submerged are the subjugating forces of the literary craft,
human psyche, logocentric discourse. Working his way around Conrad,
Forster, Joyce, Freud (among others), the novelist speaks to and from the
canon about what has been de-canonised but matches the canonical.
Plunging into the depths of consciousness, reaching the unconscious and
experimenting with language and technique so as to illustrate their inner
workings (already associated with the great twentieth century Western
masters) are mirrored by, or simply versions of the analysis of the exiled,
misfit, outcast, exotic, different (now coming from Japan and flooding the
Western stage).
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Challenging boundaries of all sorts, Ishiguro addresses readers world-
wide, developing themes and strategies of universal appeal in an
international language that allows the voicing of local concerns, the sharing
of personal preoccupations.

The Remains of the Day

The novel focuses on the absolutely desolate life of an English butler
with no family (besides a butler-father – now dead), no name (he seems to
have been christened Stevens, as he even thinks of himself in terms of his
surname), no home (he has always found accommodation with his
employers), no past (his life has only presupposed butlering), no future (his
friends are inexistent; as to love, it has generally been out of the question).
Mr. Stevens is the last of a long line of butlers. With him, tradition ends
and nothing replaces it. His Englishness (as constructed from the outside, as
seen through foreign eyes) is old fashioned and sterile, doomed to disappear.
Its absurd inappropriateness in a changing world is exacerbated by the
seriousness with which Stevens reflects on issues like friendship, affection,
happiness, which people set as ultimate goals for themselves, but which are
incomprehensible to him. Spontaneity, humour, enthusiasm, open-
heartedness are as alien to him as reserve, dignity, sobriety, propriety are
natural, inbuilt.
Reluctant to change, he does not accept difference, diversity, simply
because he does not know they exist. In his enclosure, isolated from the rest
of the world and caught in time, Stevens lives to serve and serves to live, in a
mechanical and surveyable way. The book however breathes freedom from
constraint and escapes the bonds of time, moving backwards and forwards,
from the present to the past and back, involving circularity and repetition.
In 1956, after a very long and for the first time, Mr. Stevens takes a
break from the routine of his daily life and is made to go on holiday by the
present owner of Darlington Hall – the American Mr. Farraday, who finds it
absurd to expect someone to dedicate his whole time to one’s career and,
anyway, is incapable of seeing what to do with the inherited butler.
Leaving the residence (which had been his foster home for countless
years while in the service of Lord Darlington) is a difficult experience for
Stevens. He has nowhere to go, no one to visit. Eventually, he remembers
Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn) – former housekeeper, workmate and secret
love, the woman who had brought the freshness of living intensely, of actually
being alive to Darlington Hall and in Mr. Stevens’ path. He pretends (to
himself) to be going on a ‘business’ trip to provide Darlington Hall with a
suitable housekeeper, when what he really wants is to see her again.
His six day motoring trip through the south of England takes him down
memory lane and he revisits his life/butlership. The focal point is March 1923,
when two crucial events took place, without his then being aware of their
significance: the death of his father and the conference organised at
Darlington Hall. Seeing to the Lord’s French, German and American guests
(gathered to discuss politics and to aid Germany after the war), Mr. Stevens
cannot be with his father on his death bed; his place is taken by Miss Kenton
and a special bond develops between the two. Blinded by this ray of light in
the blandness of his life, he is incapable of grasping the importance of the

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history written in his presence, one that will bring about the downfall of his
master and the end of the old ways. The two events remain the link in Mr.
Stevens’ digressive meandering through his past, which now seems so
distant, so unreal, so belittled by the current sensation of being alive and part
of a greater scheme.
The cinematic enchaining of scene after scene, reflected on the
automobile windows, builds the film of Stevens’ life in retrospect. Gone wrong,
it now comes in the way of perceiving the normal evolution of things. In its
portrayal of the emblematic figure of the butler stubbornly and ridiculously
opposing the challenges of the Times, at odds with History and picking up the
remains of a Day, dreams of comfortable inertia and of predictability are
shattered and rebuilt by Ishiguro in this book about the contamination of
Englishness by the long-dreaded other, Americanness in particular being
hinted at: I do not mean to imply anything derogatory about Mr. Farraday; he
is, after all, an American gentleman and his ways are often very different
(The Remains of the Day, 1990: 15) The novel’s depersonalised style, its
artificial morality and its sense of superior detachment in capturing the still-
life posture of Englishness speak of Ishiguro’s knowledge of the people and
the culture he embodies only to offer new insight to from the heritage of his
Japanese sensitivity to detail and nuance.

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