David Lodge, January 28th 1935 – January 1st 2025
Recently deceased, David Lodge is a zeitgeist sort of figure. Novelist and critic, he formed a sort of late duumvirate with Malcolm Bradbury. They were both red brick university Eng. Lit. chaps: and they wrote novels on the side. They even worked together. They wrote novels; they wrote criticism: Bradbury wrote books on modernism, for instance, and wrote one classic novel, The History Man, which is a genuine achievement, showing how awful universities became after the sexual and political revolutions of the 1960s. Lodge wrote a Campus Trilogy and works of criticism. I think the best thing Lodge did was to draw attention to something about literary style that is still not known very well, and should be known a lot better than it is. This is what I want to celebrate, and also to celebrate his part in laying emphasis on it. I have found mention of it in books by John Mullan (How Novels Work)and James Wood (How Fiction Works), but it should be taught to everyone of a certain academic level. Lodge tried to theorise it in his book Consciousness and the Novel of 2002.It is like Mandeville’s paradox or Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage or Newton’s infinitesimals or Bach’s well-tempered clavier, and just as good. Like them, it is a bit of a cheat: but it is also brilliant, and it helps unleash a modernity.
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