My hero's story is very straightforward: he's questing for a girl, and this leads to wordplay on girl and Grail. It's easy enough to generate narrative interest when a man is pursuing a girl who keeps escaping him. The problem was what I should do with the other characters. What would they pursue? So I thought up this idea of a UNESCO Chair, which would be the academic job to end all jobs, and everybody would be trying to get it. That is the Grail the older characters are pursuing (Interview).
So on one hand, Lode is mocking the world of academia, and on the other, he is mocking the naivete of young love. This is a perfect working example of satire; Lodge uses his caustic wit to attack those conventions in society that he finds particularly silly—in his novel.
Satire is a form of comedy—that which is meant to make one laugh. Satire employs wit, which is a specific form of humor—particularly biting or intelligent. All of these devices are used in Lodge’s novel.
We can find specific examples of these within Lode’s text—the whole o0f which of course, is an example of satire. The following passage acts as an example of wit:
“…Scholars these days are like the errant knights of old, wandering the ways of the world in search of adventure and glory.”
“Leaving their wives locked up at home?”
“Well, a lot of the wives are women , these days. There’s positive discrimination at the round table” (Lodge, 63).
The humor of course, is found in the gender bias in the comparison of scholars to knights. Thus, this example also works in the creation of Lodge’s analogy between the two areas of thought.
The irony in the story, the audience sees, lies in the fact that when Persse gets what he wants, it turns out that it is not what he wants at all, as is described later in this paper. These are all specific forms of humor—which is defined as a form of rhetoric designed to induce laughter. In these cases, while Lodge wants to make the audience laugh, he also wants to offer commentary on human nature in these situations.
So here, there are two aspects of the novel which take Arthurian legend into play. Specifically, the quest for love and the quest for success. Our hero Persse, or Percival is looking to achieve the former, while the older characters in the novel are seeking the other. This is where Lodge pulls from another aspect of the legend—In the character of Kingfisher, who quite apparently suggests a reference to the Fisher King. Kingfisher, however, is impotent, and this serves as another point of satire for Lodge.
Perhaps one of the most interesting Jabs that Lodge makes however, is at the town of Birmingham, to which he gives the name Rummidge. This is done further in detail in his previous work, Changing Places, which follows two characters that we know from Small World: Morris Zapp and Phillip Swallow, as they switch places to teach at one another’s university. The novel compares a sad Rummidge to a seemingly ...euphoric Euphoria. Lodge makes light of the University of Bimingham, where he worked as a professor, as well as Berkely, which is characterized in Euphoria.
I thought of using my two characters from Changing Places-- Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp. Originally I thought of just having them, as a little joke, appear at conferences on the periphery of the story, but then I thought, well, they could be actually central. They could even be the characters who introduce the innocent young hero to the world of the global campus
(Interview).
In Small World, It is apparent that Lodge has set out to complete a satire about this notion of the “global campus”. This term becomes perhaps even more important now than it was at the time that Loge wrote Small World. As of now, with the use of technology, the college campus truly is global, and had Persse met Angelica in the past five years, rather than during the seventies, it is highly unlikely that ho would be chasing her around the world. Rather—he would e-mail her, or pick up the phone. Set in the seventies, it seems somehow logical—though humorous--that he should follow Angelica Pabst from conference to conference throughout the world. Lodge, in his own work, however, tends to discredit—albeit with good reason, that literature need have any factual information in it. In this respect, he uses the character Fulvia Morgana to make what Loge believes is a classic mistake that literary types make. It also gives Lodge another opportunity for humor. She talks to Morris Zapp about a book that his wife has published, called Difficult Days.
“Don’t let us talk any more about books,” she said, floating across the dimly lit room with a brandy glass like a huge bubble in her hand. “Or about chairs or conferences.” She stood very close to him and rubbed the back of her free hand over his crotch. “Is it really twenty-five centimetres?” she murmured.
“What gives you that Idea?” he said hoarsely.
“Your wife’s book…”
“You don’t want to read everything you read in books, Fulvia,” said Morris grabbing the glass of cognac and draining it in a single gulp. He coughed and his eyes filled with tears. “A professional critic like you should know better than that. Novelists exaggerate.”
“But ‘ow much do they exaggerate, Morris?” she said. “I would like to see for myself.”
“Like, practical criticism?” he quipped.
Fulvia did not laugh. “Didn’t you make your wife measure it with her tape measure?” she persisted.
“Of course I didn’t! That’s just feminist propaganda. Like the whole book” (134-135).
Lodge ids careful to let the audience know his own view on the matter of literature mirroring art. It is apparent that it doesn’t. In small world, though the events may have happened or could have happened in real life, it is not a necessity that they have.
Fulvia Morgana is making an elementary mistake here about the relationship of fiction to reality. Because the fiction corresponds to historical fact in some respects (for example, the male character’s chest hair), she assumes that it does in every respect. Most novelists are familiar with this reaction from their readers, even quite sophisticated readers, whom they meet face to face. The physical appearance of the writer with his or her personal history available for interrogation, seems to push aside the willing suspension of disbelief, the aesthetic appreciation of the elegant narrative structture, the ludic delight in the proliferation of meaning, in favour of a beady-eyed curiosity about the “true story” (Lodge, “FIN” 23-24).
This is certainly a poststructuralist argument—noting that literature does not mirror reality, but does correspond to it. Though it is technically a satire, it seems that ion Small World, Lodge cannot escape the fact that he is first and fore most a professor and critic. Thus, the novel as a whole seems to make a strong case for this element of poststructuralism.
Perhaps the most amusing aspect of Small World, however, is the fact that once Persse has seemingly reached his Holy Grail—that is, the love of the beautiful Angelica—it turns out that it isn’t her at all. Rather it is her promiscuous twin sister. They finally meet at an MLA conference, where Angelica gives a speech on literary Romance.
“Romance...is not structured in this way. It has not one climax but many, the pleasure of the text comes and comes and comes again. No sooner is one crisis in the fortunes of the hero averted than a new one presents itself; no sooner has one mystery been solved than another is raised; no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and close, open and close, like the contractions of the vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless. The greatest and most characteristic romances are often unfinished—they end only with the author’s exhaustion, as a woman’s capacity for orgasm is limited only by her physical stamina. Romance is a multiple orgasm” (322-323).
Here, through the voice of Angelica, Lodge has described his own work. Angelica, in her research on romance, has described the essential plot of Small World. And—like every good romance, now that Persse has finally caught up with his love, there is still one more mystery that is yet to be solved. Persse finally finds the sexual gratification he has been seeking throughout the course of the novel, butr then he is horribly disappointed.
...Persse felt ten years older, and wiser. He had fed on honey-dew and drunk the milk of paradise. Nothing could be the same again. Was it possible that in due course they could put on their clothes and go out of the room and behave like ordinary people again, after what had passed between them? It must always be so between lovers, he concluded: their knowledge of each other’s nightside was a secret bond between them. “You’ll have to marry me know, Angelica,” he said.
“I’m not Angelica, I’m Lily,” murmured the girl beside him,” (325).
Thus ends the knight’s quest for his love, much in the same manner that Sir Gawain betrays his love Una, in the Spenser classic, Persse believes he has betrayed his love Angelica—albeit humorously.
Lodge must make one more caustic remark at Persse’s notion of love, however, and in the end, leaves the hero chasing after his new love Cheryl, whom he met in the course of seeking Angelica. Thus we assume that his love is fickle, and certainly will move to another object all too soon.
In Small world, the audience sees humour, wit and satire as a criticism of the vices of humanity. Certainly, this seems to be the way in which Lodge intended for one to see the events in the novel.
Works Cited
Lodge, David. Changing Places: A Tale of two Campuses. New
York: Penguin, 1979.
---. “Fact and Fiction in the Novel: An Author’s Note”. The
Practice of Writing. Penguin: New York, 1997. 20-39)
---. Interview with Raymond H Thompson. Birmingham 5 May,
1989. MS Internet Explorer. 27 October 2004.
---. Nice Work. New York: Penguin, 1989
---. Small World: An Academic Romance. New York: Macmillan,
1984.
Mews, Siegfried. “The Professor’s Novel: David Lodge’s
Small World”. MLN 104, 3 German Issue (April, 1989).
713-726.
