The Practice of Writing
This is another excellent book of literary criticism by David Lodge, with essays on Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, Harold Pinter, and others. His analysis of Pinter’s Last To Go struck me as particularly insightful. There he makes a very good case that in his minimalist dialogues Pinter makes the same sorts of observations made by linguistic theorists, perhaps without even being entirely aware of all the implications of his own dark humor.
In a chapter entitled ‘The Novel As Communication’, David Lodge communicates a kind of felicitatem that comes from being the author of a work under equally perceptive criticism.
“It is fairly easy to demonstrate that the meaning of a text cannot be constrained by reference to a writer’s intentions. Let me give a trivial but I hope interesting example from my own experience. In Small World the middle-aged English academic Philip Swallow has a wife called Hilary and has a passionate affair with a younger woman called Joy, who reminds him of his wife when she was younger and prettier – when he first meets her, Joy is even wearing a dressing gown like one Hilary used to wear. Reviewing the novel in the London Times, A. S. Byatt noted approvingly that this theme of identity and difference was neatly encapsulated in the names of the two women, Hilary being derived from the Latin hilaritas, or joy. Now I can be quite sure I had not intended this pleasing symmetry. I called Philip’s wife Hilary in a previous novel, Changing Places, because it is an androgynous name and at that stage of their marriage she was the dominant partner in the marriage, or, as the saying is, wore the trousers. I called Joy Joy because when Philip falls in love with her he is in pursuit of what he calls “intensity of experience” an essentially Romantic quest with a capital R, and joy is a key word in Romanticism. At the moment of consummation, Philip shouts aloud the word “Joy”, which is both exclamation and apostrophe. I had no conscious awareness of the Latin root of the name Hilary until Antonia Byatt pointed it out to me. Nonetheless the play on words is there in the text, and is appropriate. It seems a good case of what Barthes calls the text working.” (195)
In a chapter entitled ‘The Novel As Communication’, David Lodge communicates a kind of felicitatem that comes from being the author of a work under equally perceptive criticism.
“It is fairly easy to demonstrate that the meaning of a text cannot be constrained by reference to a writer’s intentions. Let me give a trivial but I hope interesting example from my own experience. In Small World the middle-aged English academic Philip Swallow has a wife called Hilary and has a passionate affair with a younger woman called Joy, who reminds him of his wife when she was younger and prettier – when he first meets her, Joy is even wearing a dressing gown like one Hilary used to wear. Reviewing the novel in the London Times, A. S. Byatt noted approvingly that this theme of identity and difference was neatly encapsulated in the names of the two women, Hilary being derived from the Latin hilaritas, or joy. Now I can be quite sure I had not intended this pleasing symmetry. I called Philip’s wife Hilary in a previous novel, Changing Places, because it is an androgynous name and at that stage of their marriage she was the dominant partner in the marriage, or, as the saying is, wore the trousers. I called Joy Joy because when Philip falls in love with her he is in pursuit of what he calls “intensity of experience” an essentially Romantic quest with a capital R, and joy is a key word in Romanticism. At the moment of consummation, Philip shouts aloud the word “Joy”, which is both exclamation and apostrophe. I had no conscious awareness of the Latin root of the name Hilary until Antonia Byatt pointed it out to me. Nonetheless the play on words is there in the text, and is appropriate. It seems a good case of what Barthes calls the text working.” (195)
posted by Quin Finnegan at 6:23 PM
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