David Lodge. A novelist and a teacher

Por Juan Carlos Andrés

Despite the fact that since the time of my being an undergraduate I usually have followed the piece of advice I was given about refraining from reading novels published less than twenty years before, I must confess that there are some exceptions that are worth to observe.

This is the case of David Lodge’s novels. Just nowadays I am reading his latest work, A Man of Parts, released last September through Viking-Penguin and, believe me, I am lingering in its pages and chapters because of the intellectual pleasure it endlessly gives.

Its very title deserves to be explained, as it is in the preliminary quotations. There you can find the definition that reads as follows: Parts PLURAL NOUN 1. Personal abilities or talents: a man of parts. 2. short for private parts. (Collins English Dictionary)

Taken into account that the plot consists on H. G. Wells’ life, the English writer whose The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible man or The War of the Worlds, among many others, are well known all over the world, you can deduce what this story is about: sex and literature. Better said, a biography interspersed with metafiction, in which sex plays a key role from the beginning.

In this point, allow me to warn you about what has been said: sex never in a pornographic way. This would be not possible in David Lodge’s writings. May be some hints of eroticism, but never filthy stuff.

David Lodge is an English writer, in addition to former teacher of Literature at Birmingham University, a specialist on Victorian fiction. He retired from teaching twenty years ago, although happily he hasn’t given up writing both fiction and criticism.

He defines himself as ‘one of the few Catholic English novelists’, which implies that he openly tries to keeping step on the novelistic path trodden before by K.G. Chesterton, Graham Greene or Anthony Burgess, the undisputable leaders of 20^th century fiction in England.

So far David Lodge’s all fictional contents have been introduced: university, religion, the art of writing  – as frame topics; on the other hand, you always can find poignant lives of individuals thoroughly trespassed by the former, so that their souls (sometimes their bodies) get portrayed in the nude.

From his first novel –The Picturegoers (1960)- to the latest, you can enjoy plenty of funny stories that even will make you cry-laugh; besides, others (to quite a lesser extent, by the way) will make you feel a pang in your heart: as for instance  Author, Author (2004), that keeps many similarities with A Man of Parts: both treat of Victorian English writers (in Author, Author he tells the adventures and misadventures of the playwright Henry James) and both show mercilessly real characters of the decadent English society of late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Are you interested in how university life has been changing from the sixties up to now? Don’t miss the reading of The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) [by the way, this was the first David Lodge’s work I happened to come across unexpectedly -oh my God- in 1994], the hilarious trilogy Changing Places, a Tale of Campuses (1975), Small World, an Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988); and Paradise News (1991), Thinks … (2001) or Deaf Sentence (2008).

The latter in my view his best novel, full with tender, ridiculous, preposterous anecdotes suffered by his main character, Desmond Bates, a retired linguistics professor who had been getting deaf; so, standing up against the threatening monotony of his new impaired life and dealing with wordplays –as in the title-, he gets involved in some unforeseen affairs that lead to summarize the whole plot by the sentence the main character writes on his journal:  ‘Deafness is comic, blindness is tragic’.

And just in case you are interested in social changes, the meaning of liturgy, the fear of sin (with sex not far away), the lure of temptation or the force of tradition, please do not miss How Far Can You Go? (1980), published in the United States as Souls and Bodies.

I encourage you to read David Lodge writings, above all if you are a teacher and your subject is close to languages, literature or the like.