Charles University, Prague
Faculty of Education
Department of English Language and Literature
THE THEME OF CATHOLICISM IN DAVID LODGE’S
NOVELS
Author: Anna Piskačová, Aj-Čj
Supervisor: PhDr. Petr Chalupský, Ph.D.
Prague 2010
Abstract:
This thesis attempts to describe and interpret the theme of Catholicism in three of
David Lodge‟s novels. These are: The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), How Far Can
You Go? (1980) and Paradise News (1991). It focuses on the depiction of Catholics in his
novels as a source of comedy and tries to explain Lodge‟s treatment of these people. It also
illustrates the development of Lodge‟s conception of this theme and points out some turningpoints that happened in the Catholic Church in the second half of the twentieth century and
which are reflected in the selected Lodge‟s novels.
Abstrakt:
Předmětem této bakalářské práce je popsat a vyložit téma katolictví ve třech románech
Davida Lodge. Jde o romány: Den zkázy v britském muzeu (1965), Kam až se může? (1980) a
Zprávy z ráje (1991). Práce se zaměřuje na zobrazení katolíků v těchto románech, kteří jsou
zde zdrojem komiky, a zároveň popisuje způsob, jakým Lodge o těchto lidech píše. Současně
tato práce objasňuje vývoj pojetí katolictví, kterým Lodge prošel, a zdůrazňuje několik
mezníků ve vývoji katolické církve v druhé polovině dvacátého století, na které Lodge
reaguje.
Čestné prohlášení:
Prohlašuji, že jsem diplomovou práci zpracovala samostatně, za přispění vedoucího
diplomové práce a že jsem uvedla veškerou použitou literaturu i ostatní zdroje.
V Praze, dne
Anna Piskačová
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank my supervisor PhDr. Petr Chalupský, Ph.D. for all his advice, support,
patience and helpfulness throughout the preparation of this thesis.
Abbreviations used in the text:
BMFD
The British Museum is Falling Down
HFCYG
How Far Can You Go?
PN
Paradise News
Motto:
Autor knihy je katolík. Nemíní sice touto knihou provozovati propagandy pro svoji víru, ale jeho
věrou je dáno v mnohých otázkách jeho stanovisko. Bez stanoviska a bez lásky nelze dost dobře
poznávat nic na světě. Doufám, že moje stanovisko nebylo nikde formulováno tak, aby nebylo
spravedlivé k názorům cizím.
Alfréd Fuchs, Novější papežská politika, Praha 1930.
Contents:
Introduction
1
David Lodge
3
The British Museum is Falling Down
6
How Far Can You Go?
16
Paradise News
25
Conclusion
31
Bibliography
33
Introduction
Religion and Catholicism in particular, has always been a favourite topic for writers.
The main reason is that the Catholic Church has fundamentally contributed to the
development of the Western world and has been influencing people‟s lives more and more as
it was gaining power. From the earliest times it was connected with education, art and
philosophy. It has evolved as a social institution and together with school, army and factory
helped the state to control its people. Writers of all kinds treated the theme of Catholicism
according to their intentions. Some liked to emphasize their personal attachment to the Roman
Catholic Church and dwelled on the theme to encourage ordinary people in their devotion to
God; others took pleasure and self-fulfilment in satirizing religion and mocking its practices
and doctrinal definitions.
Bernard Bergonzi points out:
There is a distinguished roll-call of English writers who have been Roman Catholics:
Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Waugh, Greene, David Jones, Muriel Spark. But nearly all of
them were converts to Catholicism. This fact separates them from the majority of their coreligionists, the „cradle-Catholics‟ whose religion was passed on from their families, and, who,
apart from a small number of upper-class „Old Catholics‟, were working class or lower middle
class, with a strong admixture of Irish immigrants
i
He goes on explaining, that their educational attainments and ambitions tended to be limited
and often not of an exceptional literary quality. It frequently happened that young people from
such a background who received a good quality education and became socially mobile
abandoned Catholicism in the process. This tendency is to be seen among Irish writers, most
famously Joyce, though his work remained marked by the religion which he had given up. “A
number of recent English writers have been lapsed Catholics, who look back on Catholicism
with affection or hostility, or elements of both. Examples include John Braine and Antony
Burgess, both of Northern English Catholic origin, and a succession of women authors
seeking revenge for their convent education.”ii Every writer has dealt with the theme in a
i
ii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Plymouth, Northcote House, 1995, p. 29.
Ibis, p. 29
1
slightly different manner, put emphasis on slightly different aspects. This dissimilarity in the
way they treated the topic makes their work specific and distinctive.
Who exactly is a Catholic writer? Does he/she have to be of Catholic upbringing?
Does he/she have to be a „good‟ Catholic to be included in the pantheon of Catholic writers?
And can writers such as the English novelist Graham Greene or the American poet Robert
Lowell be included even though they struggled with or even rejected their faith? Are earlier
writings of convert writers like Coventry Palmore to be considered Catholic? What about the
many converts to Catholicism like Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh or Muriel Spark whose
writings are not always Catholic in theme and point of view? Are the writings of people like
J.R.R. Tolkien, Antony Burgess and David Lodge Catholic simply because they are baptised,
sometimes practising, sometimes not, Catholics? Such and other questions are raised by
David Birch, a Professor of Communication at Deakin University, Melbourne, in his article
„Catholic literature‟: what does this mean?iii He, however, does not give a straight-forward
answer because clearly there is not any. He contrasts two points of view: Evelyn Waugh‟s
who once described the Catholic novel as „one that deals with the problem of faith‟ and
Flannery O‟Connor‟s who went far beyond and described it ‟as a Catholic mind looking into
anything.‟iv The Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, one of the Second Vatican Council‟s
documents, stresses the importance of literature and art in general in human life, saying:”They
seek to probe the true nature of man, his problems and experiences, as he strives to know and
perfect himself and the world, to discover his place in history and the universe, to portray his
miseries and joys, his needs and strengths, with a view to a better future.”v Literature is food
for thought; it expands on our knowledge and helps us understand the world around us.
The main aim of this thesis is to concentrate on David Lodge‟s Catholic novels and to
analyze his depiction of Catholics, especially the troubles and struggles with their everyday
lives. It will primarily deal with three of David Lodge‟s novels where his concept of
Catholicism is best exposed and where the theme plays an essential role. These novels are The
British Museum is Falling Down (1965), How Far Can You Go? (1980) and Paradise News
(1991).
iii
Birch, D.: ’Catholic literature’: what does this mean? December 2008 – January 2009,
http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/2008/decjan2008p12_2949.html
iv
Ibid
v
Gaudium et Spes, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html
2
David Lodge
David Lodge, born in London in 1935, is a graduate and Honorary Fellow of
University College London. He taught at the University of Birmingham from 1960 to 1987
when he retired to become a full-time writer. His is the author of not only fiction but also of
numerous works of literary criticism and literary theory.
He was brought up in a Catholic family and this experience as well as the austere
conditions of the postwar England where he grew up is reflected in his early fiction. His first
novels include The Picturegoers (1960), Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962) which was inspired by
his own experience in national service, and The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965)
which will be analyzed in more detail in the following chapters. Out of the Shelter (1970)
deals again with the war, where and during which a young boy has to undergo an uneasy
journey from childhood to adulthood. His career as a university professor gave rise to his
trilogy of campus novels comprising Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice
Work (1988). The two latter were shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction. How Far Can
You Go? (1980) and Paradise News (1991) both deal with the doctrinal changes in the
Catholic Church and moral uncertainty of its members and will be discussed later. Therapy
(1995) continues similar themes. Thinks … (2001), Consciousness and the Novel (2002) and
Author, Author: A Novel (2004) are among his most recent novels. His latest novel, Death
Sentence (2008), is based on his own experience of deafness.
Lodge is also a successful playwright and screenwriter and has adapted not only his
own work but also other writers‟ novels for television. His first stage play, The Writing Game,
was produced in 1990 and four years later was adapted for Chanel 4 television. His most
recent play, Home Truths, performed in 1998, was subsequently re-written as a novella and
published in 1999.vi
David Lodge began his career of a novelist in the 1960s, an age when radical events
happened and new tendencies appeared. Individual freedom was the highest norm and it was
sought at the expense of the society as a whole.
Each nation suffered a crisis of identity, each sought to confront its past, make atonement and
rediscover a positive idealism. … Inherent in this literature is a sense of national shame, a
vi
Smith, J.: David Lodge – Autobiography, 2009. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth62
3
feeling that „things fall apart‟, a horror at the nightmarish events themselves and the media‟s
cynical neglect or bland misinterpretations and an awareness of the need for liberal and
democratic values which is simultaneously undermined by doubts about the efficacy and
substantiality of those values when confronted by turmoil of elemental proportionsvii
David Lodge reflects on this period in his works and what he focuses on is the depiction of
ordinary people – mainly but not exclusively Roman Catholics‟ lives. He pays little attention
to the political or economic development unless it concerns the Church.
Catholic upbringing
Bernard Bergonzi in his monographic booklet David Lodge (1995) describes the
circumstances that influenced Lodge to become a Catholic writer. He says: “David Lodge is
unusual in being a cradle-Catholic from a lower-middle-class family in South London who is
a successful writer and who continues to regard himself as a Catholic, though his ideas about
religion have changed greatly over the years.”(Bergonzi, 29) He describes his family
background further on saying that his origins were not altogether typical of cradle-Catholic
culture because he was an only child and his father was not a Catholic. Although his mother
was a devoted believer, the atmosphere of the home was not distinctively Catholic. They
rarely talked about religion and there was little social interaction with the parish clergy and
laity that was so typical of a large religious Catholic family. As a child Lodge felt a lot as an
outsider in the Church. He had no siblings and there was not one friend in their street who
would happen to be Catholic. The feeling of being in the church and an outsider at the same
time was reflected in his novels. He presents a detailed description of the Church and yet he
does it objectively, with a specific kind of detachment. At school he was taught the
theological foundation of the Catholic belief. He found it very interesting and via reading
modern authors (James Joyce, Graham Greene, Francois Mauriac and others) enlarged his
knowledge. What he liked about their works was that “they drew the sinner as a representative
Christian in a way that was exciting to an adolescent with literary ambitions.”viii David
Lodge‟s first four novels all contain Catholic characters. The main focus is put on their
vii
Pearce, S., Piper, D.: Literature of Europe and America in the 1960s, Manchester United Press, Manchester,
1989, p. 2
viii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 30
4
interaction with the rest of society. The theme of struggling with faith would come up in his
later novels.ix
ix
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 29-30
5
The British Museum Is Falling Down
The earliest worth-noticing novel concerning Lodge‟s portrayal of Catholics is The
British Museum is Falling Down, first published in 1965. It is a comic novel which is to some
extend autobiographic. The main protagonist, Adam Appleby, a 25-year-old postgraduate
student of English literature, struggles to write his diploma thesis (on the topic of The
Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern English Novels) and, at the same time, faces
the responsibility of taking care, mostly existential, of his rather large family.
The entire novel comprises the events and mental processes of only one day of
Adam‟s life. The reader follows him from the moment he opens his eyes in the morning up to
the point he reaches his bed again late in the evening. It is a series of humorous incidents and
Lodge‟s exquisite manner of creating comedy gives it a nonchalant airing.
As Adam wakes up on one autumn morning a series of unfavourable thoughts spring
to his mind concerning his studies, job and family but his major anxiety is the fact that his
wife Barbara‟s period is overdue. Adam Appleby is a Roman Catholic following the Church‟s
teaching on the birth control. The story takes place sometime during the Second Vatican
Council because Adam impatiently awaits the Vatican‟s verdict on the legality of using
contraceptives for Catholics. Until then, the only possible way of regulating birth was the
rhythm method (a regulation that remained unchanged) which followed the female cycle and,
more importantly, the natural law. Adam and his wife were not very successful with its
effectiveness and another pregnancy seems to be on the way.
The Second Vatican Council formally opened on October 11, 1962 and was presided
over by Pope John XXIII and, after his death in June 1963, by Pope Paul VI. The council
ended on December 8, 1965. Unlike the previous councils it was not held to combat
contemporary heresies or deal with awkward disciplinary questions but as Pope John himself
declared, to renew “ourselves and the flocks committed to us, so that there may radiate before
all men the lovable features of Jesus Christ, who shines in our hearts that God‟s splendour
may be revealed.”x The council consisted of Roman Catholic bishops who had full voting
rights. Non-Catholic Christian churches and lay organizations were invited as observers but
had neither voice nor vote in the council deliberations. They produced sixteen documents on
subjects such as divine revelation, the sacred liturgy and the role of the church in the modern
6
world. The reaction to the council was generally favourable: an essential achievement was the
development of closer relations among the Christian churches. However, some conservative
Roman Catholics feared that the reforms became too radical.xi
Adam‟s wish, however, is not to be answered by the Vatican Council because the topic
was not discussed there. As Bergonzi points out:”The subject was removed from its
deliberations by the pope and entrusted to a special commission made up of theologians,
scientists and other experts.”xii A large majority of the people voted for a change in the
Church‟s teaching and it was expected that the pope would satisfy the public. Nevertheless, in
1968 pope Paul VI published his encyclical Humanae Vitae in which he confirmed the
previous teaching and prohibited any kind of contraception. This act raised a general
disapproval and people were protesting against this decision. “Married Catholics, at least in
the western world, decided that if there was not to be a change in the law about contraception
then they would ignore it. Humanae Vitae provoked a crisis not only about sexuality but about
authority in the Church.”xiii The British Museum is Falling Down was published three years
before the verdict in Humanae Vitae and therefore Adam Appleby lives in a period full of
hope for the change. However, something in the text suggests that things will not be as
straightforward as the young Catholics would wish them to be and the pope‟s opinion (as well
as the church‟s teaching) will not be easily altered. This theme will be to more extent and
more seriously discussed in Lodge‟s later novel How Far Can You Go? (1980).
Adam Appleby personifies the hopes of young married Catholics in 1962 when the
only possible way of controlling birth, approved of by the Church, was the rhythm method.
He has, from his own experience, little belief in the efficiency of the birth control, having
managed, unintentionally, to conceive three children without much of his desire being
gratified. Feeling the absurdity of the method and the Church‟s teaching on it he imagines
what his and other Catholics‟ situation would look like to Martians:
Martian archaeologist have to learned to identify the domiciles of Roman Catholics by the
presence of large numbers of complicated graphs, calendars, small booklets full of figures, and
quantities of broken thermometers, evidence of the great importance attached to this code.
Some scholars have argued that it was merely a method of limiting the number of offspring;
x
The start of Vatican II, http://catholicphilosophy.com/sys-tmpl/startofvaticanii21/
Mcbrien, R. P.: Second Vatican Council, http://mb-soft.com/believe/txs/secondvc.htm
xii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 33
xiii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 34
xi
7
but as it has been conclusively proved that the Roman Catholics produced more children on
average than any other section of the community, this seems untenable. (BMFD, 12)
Adam is very good at making up imagery and this ability of his gets repeatedly displayed
throughout the novel. It suggests not only Adam‟s exuberant imagination but also the
influence of literature he studies.
On his way to the British Museum where Adam daily works on his thesis he offers a
lift to a local priest Father Finbar. Adam has not ceased to worry that his wife might be
pregnant and therefore asks Father Finbar whether the Council is likely to change the
Church‟s attitude to Birth Control. He nevertheless receives a negative answer only
underlined by the fact that Father Finbar‟s ideas are strongly rooted in the persuasion the
Church held long before The Second Vatican Council. For Father Finbar, the true function of
marriage is to “procreate children and to bring them up in fear and love of God.” (BMFD, 31)
His advice to practise self-restraint offers no satisfactory solution to Adam and he finds
himself caught up in rules that feel like chains, a feeling only increased by the traffic jam in
which they got stuck. Father Finbar, who evidently did not take pleasure in talking on such a
topic, finally decides to reach his distance on foot and when he leaves Adam the traffic moves
forward and Adam can continue not only in his worrying but also in his journey to the British
Museum. The traffic jam emphasized here is of a symbolic value and will be discussed later in
this thesis.
At the museum he meets his friend Camel, who also comes here to work on his thesis
(entitled Sanitation in Victorian Fiction) and later they are accompanied by Pond, a full-time
teacher who likes to talk to them. Adam is depressed by his state of affairs and the two, both
non-Catholics, try to help him. They provide him with pieces of advice such as the one that he
should leave the church and come back later:
‟Death-bed repentance, you mean? ‟
‟Well, more of a menopause repentance. It‟s not such a risk is it? You and Barbara have a
good expectation of living past forty or so. ‟
‟It‟s no good talking to him like that, Camel, ‟said Pond. There‟s always the bus. ‟
‟Yes, there‟s always the bus,‟ Adam agreed.
‟Bus? What bus? ‟ asked Camel in bewilderment.
‟The bus that runs you down. The death that comes unexpectedly, ‟explained Pond. ‟Catholics
are brought up to expect sudden extinction round every corner and to keep their souls highly
polished at all times. ‟ (BMFD, 57-58)
8
Pond decides that he will convince him intellectually that the Catholic religion is false. He
starts with the Trinity, implying that the common sense cannot consent to it. Adam picks up a
jar of mustard, spoons it on his plate and sprinkles it with salt and pepper showing him that it
is possible sometimes. Pond realises that he cannot conquer Adam in this respect and
therefore he raises his dread that England will be a predominantly Catholic country in three or
four generations if Catholic families will continue to produce children in the same number.
Adam sets him right by saying that this will never happen because of the lapsation rate, the
amount of people abandoning the Church.”‟Not because of the doctrine of the Trinity,‟ said
Adam. ‟Because of birth control is my guess.‟“ (BMFD, 59) It is amazing to see that Adam
stretches his problem on the whole Church, not allowing that people could abandon the
Church because of other, more serious, reasons than not being able to use contraceptives. It is
a sign of the fact that he is so absorbed in his issue that he has no space for any other
explanation.
From the British Museum Adam rushes to the Dollinger Society which is a group of
lay Catholics set up to liberalize the Church‟s attitude to some subjects such as “religious
liberty in Spain, nuclear war and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum” (BMFD, 60). He arrives
and starts a discussion on the topic of birth control (even though the session opened on a
different theme). Adam says: “‟The trouble with using contraceptives, from the point of view
of practical moral theology…is that it‟s necessarily a premeditated sin.‟” (BMFD, 63) He
goes on speculating that if you seduce someone‟s wife at a party and later confess to it saying
that you were overcome by your passions and feel really sorry and promise not to do it again,
than you could do the same thing next week without being a hypocrite. With the
contraceptives it is “something you commit, in the first place, in cold blood in a chemist‟s
shop; and once you start you have to go on steadily, or there is no point.” (BMFD, 63)
Lodge‟s argumentation is quite radical here and a non-believer might perceive this teaching as
illogical if not paradoxical, but the basic idea is that what the Catholic God evaluates is the
effort one puts into the struggle, not the outcome. Adam suggests that the solution to their
situation would be if using contraceptives was classified as a venial sin.”‟Then we could all
feel slightly guilty about it, like cheating on the buses, without forfeiting the sacraments.‟”
(BMFD, 63) Father Wildfire, a priest that is a part of the group, explains to him that:
„All sins are mortal sins. Or, to put it another way, all sins are venial sins. What matters is
love. The more love, the less sin. I was preaching at a men‟s retreat the other day, and I told
9
them, better sleep with a prostitute with some kind of love than with your wife out of habit.
Seems some of them took me at my word, and the bishop is rather cross.‟
Father Wildfire is a Dominican and the Dominicans are generally known to have mild
regulations, of which he is a good example. Compared to Father Finbar to whom Adam gave
a lift earlier in the novel, Father Wildfire looks very liberal and we get two very different
attitudes towards the church‟s teaching. Bergonzi comments on this passage: “Father Fibar
and Father Wildfire, contrasting caricatures as they are, reflect the divisions that were
appearing in English Catholicism and which would deepen over the years.”xiv Adam wants to
ask Father Wildfire if it is better to make love to one‟s wife using contraceptives or not to
make love to her at all but then decides against it. Father Wildfire has a good job dealing with
criminals, prostitutes and murderers and therefore his plight compared to Adam‟s, as he
himself perceives it, is of a more considerable weight.
No matter how trivial Adam‟s dilemma might seem to a priest or anyone else, to him it
is a matter of life and death. The thought of his wife‟s another pregnancy nearly drives him
insane. He starts to act and think irrationally and his paranoid behaviour reaches its limits
when he sees Camel talking to an assistant and assuming that he is reporting him as the
hoaxer who called the Fire Brigade into the British Museum. In his mind he travels illogically
from one subject to another and has bizarre imaginations, such as that he himself has become
a priest after his wife died during the labour of their fourth child and he was subsequently
elected the Pope, at which point he cancels the practice of the birth control and recommends
using contraceptives of all kinds. This whirlwind change from a level-headed person to almost
an emotional wreck had been caused only by Barbara‟s period being delayed. He had “only a
few days ago, been a reasonably contented man, but who now, haunted with the fear of an
unwanted addition to his family, divided and distracted about his academic work, and guilty
of a hoax he had had no intention of committing, wandered like an outcast through the foggy
streets of Bloomsbury.” (BMFD, 95) Adam‟s disposition simply does not come up to that of a
mature man. Compared to his wife Barbara, Adam acts like a teenager as he is not being able
to hold his mind steadily, let alone to deal with his worries in a down-to-earth, pragmatic
manner. He is under extreme stress because his thesis needs completing, his family needs
material support and on top of all there seems to be another baby on the way. He is
approaching a nervous breakdown. After he falls off a chair at the British Museum he
speculates:”Perhaps they would make a petition to the Pope and get him and Barbara a special
xiv
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 32
10
dispensation to practice artificial contraception. Or perhaps he would die, his tragic case be
brought to the attention of the Vatican Council, and the doctrine of Natural Law revised as a
result. A fat lot of good that would do him.” (BMFD, 47) He is filled with self-pity which
makes him go to such extremes as supposing that his current situation will end up by his
decease or making up the image of his wife‟s death during the fourth childbirth.
In the morning Adam receives a letter from Mrs. Rottingdean in which she offers him
to come and have a look at some scripts by Egbert Merrymarsh, a contemporary of Chesterton
and Belloc. Adam is eager to get hold of some unpublished works because it would partly
solve his current situation. He would not need to complete his thesis because publishing
Merrymarsh would do the job. Mrs. Rottingdean is a devout Catholic and Adam can see the
signs of it soon after he enters her flat. There are pictures of martyrs as well as religious
paintings on the walls, the shelves are ranged with reliquaries, statuettes and vials of Lourdes
water. Adam is startled at the sight of a human finger-bone in a glass case with a legend
„Blessed Oliver Plunkett, Pray for us.„ He is offered some holy water from a stoup fixed to the
wall. Adam quickly learns that he is to deal with a very strict elderly lady who locks up her
sixteen-year-old daughter in her room to prevent her from exposing to public. She locks
Adam in her flat too in order to prevent him from escaping with the manuscript of
Merrymarsh„s Lay Sermons and Private Prayers while he is studying it. He is supposed to
decide whether he wants to purchase it from Mrs. Rottingdean but both the price and the
moralistic content of the book put him off the idea. While he waits for Mrs. Rottingdean to
come back he is shocked by her daughter Virginia who comes determined to seduce him.
Through her narration he gets a completely different account of Egbert Merrymarsh and Mrs.
Rottingdean. Earlier he was told by Mrs. Rottingdean that they were an uncle and a niece
which turns out to be false since Virginia gives him a proof of their being lovers. She shows
him a romance by Merrymarsh which is an account of his love affair with Mrs. Rottingdean.
This romance, entitled Robert and Rachel, is not a particularly great piece of art but it
sincerely narrates the story of a middle-aged man‟s first love affair. Adam is keen to get the
manuscript. “He would get his hands on Merrymarsh‟s scandalous confessions, and with them
he would deal a swinging blow at the literary establishment, at academe, at Catholicism, at
fate. He would publish his findings to the world, and leap to fame and perdition in a blaze of
notoriety.” (BMFD, 129) The trouble is that Virginia would not give it for less than a sexual
intercourse with him. She attempts to seduce him several times which Adam manages to
resist. It is ironic that he is able to withstand the temptation not because it would surely cause
11
pain to his wife if detected, or because of his Catholic upbringing and education, but because
of the dread of another possible pregnancy.
The events that occur at Mrs. Rottingdean‟s flat seem to be far-fetched, hardly
believable but it is a feature a comic novel can afford. The portrayal of the characters is very
specific here. The heart of the depiction lies in the contradiction between what the characters
want to look like for the outer world and what they really are. Merrymarsh is a perfect
example of a person preaching water and drinking wine and, in the case of Mrs. Rottingdean,
all her sacramentals that surround her would not stop her from being a hypocrite, on the
contrary, they would multiply the fact. This is undeniably Lodge‟s observation of the outer
world that gets reflected here.
The manuscript of Robert and Rachel is eventually given to Adam at the spur of a
moment but never reaches the publishing house because Adam‟s scooter on which he is
proudly driving his prey home unexpectedly sets on fire. “A jet of flame shot up … too late!
Egbert Merrymarsh‟s lost masterpiece had perished in its second ordeal by fire.” (BMFD,
149) This fate of the book has undoubtedly a symbolic meaning. One of the possible
explanations would be that Adam‟s God would not allow him to build his career on
disrespecting and blackening the Church. The ending is, however, a happy one. Adam is
offered a job by a rich American businessman who intended to buy the British Museum and
transport it stone by stone to his hometown Colorado and who occurs a few times earlier in
the novel; and Barbara turns up not to be pregnant.
The novel is divided into numbered chapters and as David Lodge himself points out:
”Each chapter is headed by a (hopefully) amusing quotation from some printed source about
the British Museum Reading Room, both imitating and mocking the procedures of literary
scholarship”.xv The final chapter is written not from Adam‟s perspective but from his wife
Barbara‟s. It is a beautiful account of her thoughts presented in a stream of consciousness.
Lodge in his afterword to The British Museum is Falling Down explains:”Molly Bloom‟s
famous, unpunctuated interior monologue lent itself to my purposes with uncanny
appropriateness: my novel could end, like Joyce‟s, with the hero returned to his home,
reunited with his spouse, asleep in the marital bed, while the more wakeful wife drowsily
pondered the foibles of men, the paradoxes of sexuality and the history of their courtship and
marriage.” (BMFD, 172) While Molly Bloom‟s keyword was ‟yes‟, Barbara‟s ‟perhaps‟ is
xv
Lodge, D.: The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books, London, 1992, p. 167
12
more tender and more appropriate to her character. Compared to Adam, Barbara has a
detached point of view and sees things as not being only black and white. While throughout
the novel Adam envies his non-Catholic friend Pond‟s enjoying of his frequent marital
intercourse, Barbara perceives that there is no such thing as a normal sexual relationship. She
reveals her friend Saly‟s (Pond‟s wife) difficulty to make love to her husband unless she has a
couple of drinks beforehand, caused by an incident when she was a young girl. This is a
depressing piece of knowledge because the reader watches her husband boast to Adam of
their exceptional sexual experiences. Having learnt this fact the reader must consider Adam‟s
moaning a mere trifle.
The British Museum is Falling Down is to some extend symbolic. The characters as
well as the setting and circumstances stand for more than is suggested by their denotative
meanings. For example, the name Adam reminds of the first man made up by God when
creating the World. God formed him, on the sixth day, took out one of his ribs and by use of it
produced him a female companion. Then he commanded them “Go forth and multiply and fill
the Earth.” Against this fundamental task Adam is fighting throughout the novel. As Lodge
himself points out in his The Art of Fiction: “In a novel names are never neutral. They always
signify, if it is only ordinariness. Comic, satiric or didactic writers can afford to be
exuberantly inventive, or obviously allegorical, in their meaning…the naming of characters is
always an important part of creating them, involving many considerations, and hesitations,
which I can most conveniently illustrate from my own experience.”xvi Other names also
suggest the personalities of their bearers. The name of Mrs. Rottingdean implies a rotten,
decayed person, a proposal not far from Mr. Merrymarsh where the word marsh denotes a
stinking individual, only contrasted by merry entailing the exact opposite. The combination of
these two words that exemplify dissonance of meaning form a perfect hypocritical scheme.
Young Virginia symbolizes an inexperienced teenager who pretends to be someone else only
to be accepted into the world of grown-ups. She pretends not to be a virgin which a reader
could possibly believe according to her frivolous behavior had not David Lodge revealed the
truth in her name. Last but not least it must be noticed that the names of Adam and Barbara‟s
children are Clare, Dominic and Edward. “When the principle behind the nomenclature
dawned on their friends they were likely to ask humorously whether Adam and Barbara
intended working through the whole alphabet, a joke that seemed less and less funny to Adam
and Barbara as time went on.” (BMFD, 20) It is worth noticing that Lodge plays with creating
xvi
Ibid, 37
13
his characters‟ names, hinting by them the true nature of his characters, as well as making
them a source of fun.
Lodge uses symbolism also in situations that the characters find themselves in. When
Adam speaks with Father Finbar about the possibility whether the Vatican is likely to change
the teaching on birth control, he is stuck in a traffic jam. However good his reasoning for
using contraception might be, however many Catholics there may be calling for a change, it is
not going to be altered. The atmosphere of the traffic jam gives the discussion an
extraordinary power. The cars are fuming to move on and there is no way to progress because
the authority, a policeman, is in hold of it and would not let them go, a parallel of the Pope
seizing the verdict ready to impose it on the laity. The mood in a traffic jam is tense, filled
with stress, impatience and selfishness and so were the feelings before the hopes of many
Catholics were ruined by Humanae Vitae.
Weather and, more importantly, the symbolism of it plays an essential part in this
narrative. The motif of fog appears frequently throughout the novel which would not be too
surprising provided the story is set in London but the author puts a special emphasis on it.
Within a single page we read:”...through the foggy streets of Bloomsbury...shrouded in
fog...was it fog or self-pity that made his eyes smart.” (BMFD, 95) And further on in a
chapter introduced by a quotation:”During the autumn and winter the delivery of a book is not
infrequently hindered by darkness or fog” the reader within two paragraphs receives: ”It was
foggy in London that afternoon and the dark came very early...you couldn‟t see much because
of the fog…It was foggy in London that afternoon and the dark came very early…you
couldn‟t see the children swinging because of the trees and the fog.” (BMFD, 98) Fog
accompanies Adam, signals his uncertainty about his wife‟s pregnancy, about the future of his
thesis, about their provision. At the end of the day when he is offered a job and things appear
not to be as bad as they seemed throughout the day Adam observes: “The fog was clearing
then … it was absurd to let this pregnancy thing get on top of you. If she was, they might as
well make the best of it, and if she wasn‟t – “ (BMFD, 152) Adam is relieved at the end of the
day even though he does not know whether they are to expect an addition to their family or
not. Having been offered a job he is convinced they would manage.
The novel has a happy ending since Barbara finds out that she is not pregnant, but this
seems only a provisional and short-term relief because it offers no solution for the future. The
long-term result would lie in a change of the Vatican teaching on the birth control. Because
the final import of the novel is conventional, the possibility of going against the Church‟s
14
decision is not raised here. Barbara and Adam only speculate what it would be like if the
contraception was allowed but never consent to using it. This alternative will be to a greater
extent dealt with in Lodge‟s How Far Can You Go? where it will raise a huge disturbance.
The British Museum is Falling Down is a very comical novel and even though it
mainly deals with problems of Catholics it is not written strictly for this reading public. Since
Lodge gives an explanation of the facts that a non-Catholic reader might not know, it makes it
easy to understand as any other fiction. In this novel Lodge presents two sayings that are both
very amusing and also very true. One of them is Adam‟s observation that literature is mostly
about having sex and not much about having children whereas life is the other way round. The
other feels more like a proverb: Show me a happy scholar and I will show you the bliss of
ignorance. (This could be seen as a parallel for a saying from the Bible: “Show me your faith
without deeds and I will show you my faith by what I do”, James 2:18) Both of these
observations derive from Adam being absorbed by books. Barbara beautifully comments on
this by saying: “what was it he said, a novel where life kept taking the shape of literature, did
you ever hear anything so cracked, life is life and books are books and if he was a woman he
wouldn‟t need to be told that.” (BMFD, 157) In comparison to him she is a lot more practical
whereas he is a dreamer.
The British Museum is Falling Down is full of allusions to classics, such as: Virginia
Woolf‟s Mrs. Dalloway, James Joyce‟s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence‟s Lady Chatterley‟s Lover
and others but not all of them are clear to pick. Lodge in his afterword explains:
I was well aware that the extensive use of parody and pastiche was a risky device. There was,
in particular, the danger of puzzling and alienating the reader who wouldn‟t recognize the
allusions. My aim was to make the narrative and its frequent shifts of style fully intelligible
and satisfying to such a reader, while offering the more literary reader the extra entertainment
of spotting the parodies. (BMFD, 170)
Lodge managed what he intended to do. Recognizing the allusions makes the reader proud of
himself/herself and not recognizing does not spoil the enjoyment of the story because it is not
crucial for understanding it.
15
How Far Can You Go?
David Lodge‟s second novel focusing on Catholics, How Far Can You Go?, is a lot
more serious than The British Museum is Falling Down. Even though it has its amusing
moments, they are not as frequent as in the previous novel. The question in the title relates
primarily to the young Catholics asking about the boundary in pre-marital relationship, in
other words, how far you are allowed to go with the opposite sex considering intimacies. The
answer of one of the priests is: “Not further than you wouldn‟t be ashamed to tell your
mother” and “as far as you would let another boy go with your sister”. (HFCYG, 4) The
second implication of the title refers to the Catholic Church and mainly to the development of
the changes that happened after the Second Vatican Council. These changes were, for
example, the mass being held in English and other languages (instead of the Latin), it was a
dialogue mass and the people were joining in responses, the priest was facing the
congregation instead of carrying the mass with his back towards them; and some people
thought that the church went too far, that it was over-liberalized only in order to be popular
with the laity. These are the two basic allusions contained in the title but more, subtle ones,
follow. For example, how loose your faith and your behaviour within the Church can be for
you to consider yourself a believer, or how strictly you have to follow the Church‟s rules to be
viewed as its rightful member. These questions are raised but are rarely, almost never,
answered and it is Lodge‟s favourite devise to make the reader uneasy by introducing him to
demanding issues and letting him decide for himself/herself. His novels are, especially with
the Catholic readers, very popular because they deal with problems which many of them face
daily. Lodge presents a series of difficulties and many of them are, understandingly, very
unsettling for the reader.
The story begins on St Valentine‟s Day in 1952 in the Church of Our Lady and St Jude
where a couple of students are hearing a mass. It is a week day and therefore these young
Catholics are there from their own will, it is not their duty to attend a mass unless it is a
Sunday or a feast day. Some of these young people came there in pursuit of blessings, the rest
came for other than spiritual reasons. In the novel the reader follows the fates of these
students up to late 1970s. Bernard Bergonzi gives a short account of the characters present
during the Mass:
16
There is Angela, pretty, blond, and very devout, reading French. Dennis is a burly youth,
reading chemistry, and not very devout; indeed, he is only at the Mass because he is in love
with Angela. (They will marry, after a protracted, notionally chaste engagement lasting several
years.) Polly is a dark, pretty girl, something of a rebel and destined to loose her virginity and
her faith before long. She is reading English, and so is Michael, who is clever, sex-obsessed,
and still a virgin, as are all of them at this point…Michael will marry Miriam, a convert to
Catholicism, and have a happy marriage…Edward, a somewhat lugubrious medical student
who is acting as Mass server when we first see him, and Tessa, a nurse whom he marries after
he qualifies as a doctor, and who willingly becomes a Catholic. There is Adrian, a student of
economics, who never really comes alive; theologically he is a dogmatic conservative at the
beginning of the book and a dogmatic liberal at the end of it. Ruth is a plain girl with a strong
personality, reading botany; she is to become a nun and have an unexpectedly interesting life
in the wake of the changes brought by Vatican II. Miles, a recent convert, ... struggles with his
homosexuality. Violet, reading classics, is a pretty but neurotic girl, who is to be seduced by a
young lecturer and then marry him; her spiritual path takes her from Catholicism, first to
Jehovah‟s Witnesses, and then to Sufism. The person who travels the furthest is the young
priest saying Mass. …Father Austin Brierley…becomes more and more radical and by the end
of the novel he has left the priesthood and married, though still considering himself ´a kind of
Catholic´.xvii
How Far Can You Go? presents a number of characters, which is one of the main
differences from the British Museum is Falling Down where there was only one main
protagonist. On the one hand, this choice enables Lodge to introduce as many themes as there
are characters but, on the other hand, it makes the novel more attention-demanding, and it is
likely that the characters would be confused and mixed up with one another to some degree.
In order to minimalize this confusion Lodge helps the reader to remember the characters by
providing the reader with a set of distinguishing features which personify them. Sometimes he
makes it clear that his characters symbolize a certain problem and were created purposefully
for the occasion. After the introduction of the characters he goes over them again and in brief
comments on them: “Adrian, bespectacled (=limited vision), in belted gabardine raincoat
(=instinctual repression, authoritarian determination), not to be confused with Ruth‟s glasses
and frumpish schoolgirl‟s raincoat, signifying unawakened sexuality and indifference to selfdisplay.” (HFCYG, 14) Lodge puts the same emphasis on choosing the names for his
characters, which explicitly reveal part of their function. In this novel, where the narrator is
telling rather than showing, Lodge does not veil the process of crafting them: “Angela‟s very
xvii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 35-36
17
name connotes angel … and her blonde hair archetypecasts her as the fair virtuous woman,
spouse-sister-mother figure, whereas Polly is a Dark Lady, sexy seductress, though not really
sinister because of her healthy cheeks and jolly curls.” (HFCYG, 14) Once in a while we also
get the mental dilemmas that the author himself, or his embodiment in the novel, has to
solve:”
Let her be called Violet, no, Veronica, no Violet, improbable a name as that is for Catholic
girls of Irish extraction, customarily named after saints and figures of Celtic legend, for I like
the connotation of Violet – shrinking, penitential, melancholy – a diminutive, dark-haired girl,
a pale, pretty face ravaged by eczema, fingernails bitten down to the quick and stained by
nicotine … a girl, you might guess from all this evidence, with problems, guilts, hang-ups.
(HFCYG, 15)
This hesitation is, however, pretended. Its purpose is to have the vivid vision of Violet settled
and ready to retrieve from the reader‟s mind.
How Far Can You Go? is more academically and artistically demanding than its
predecessor. Lodge illustrates there the basic concept of the Catholic faith in an approach that
is both entertaining and sufficient in information. He points out the essential features of the
Catholic faith and the dogmas and stresses out that most of them are hardly believable or
illogical facts. What is exceptional about his description of these uninteresting essentials is
that they are never boring to read about. He presents them in a playful manner, for example:
Up there was Heaven; down there was Hell. The name of the game was Salvation, the object
to get to Heaven and avoid Hell. It was like Snakes and Ladders: sin sent you plummeting
down towards the Pit; the sacraments, good deeds, acts of self-mortification, enabled you to
climb back towards the light. Everything you did or thought was subject to spiritual
accounting. It was either good, bad or indifferent. Those who succeeded in the game
eliminated the bad and converted as much of the indifferent as possible into the good. For
instance, a banal bus journey (indifferent) could be turned to good account by silently reciting
the Rosary, unobtrusively fingering the beads in your pocket as you trundled along. To say the
Rosary openly and aloud in such a situation was more problematical. If it witnessed to the
faith, even if it exited the derision of non-believers (providing this were borne with patience
and forgiveness) it was, of course, Good – indeed heroically virtuous; but if done to impress
others, to call attention to your virtue, it was worse than indifferent, it was Bad – spiritual
pride, a very slippery snake. Progress to Heaven was full of such pitfalls. On the whole, a safe
rule of thumb was that anything you liked doing enormously was probably Bad, or potentially
bad – an “occasion of sin”. (HFCYG, 6-7)
18
The essential of the Catholic teaching is explained here as a game, moreover, a very insidious
one. Lodge does so in order to easily interpret the Church‟s teaching for every reader to
understand, and to ironically hint to the illogicality of something very serious. When reading
his descriptions the reader feels as if the author was asking in between the lines: Why? Why
have people been practising it for centuries, why do they submit their lives to something so
self-evidently absurd and silly? Lodge as well as his characters answer these questions for
themselves in the text and find their own explanations of why religion is an important part of
their life.
Bergonzi quotes David Lodge‟s explanation why he has chosen this theme:
It was a subject nobody else seemed to have dealt with, what had happened to the Catholic
Church over the last twenty-five years. Even the people in the Church haven‟t realized how
it‟s changed out of all recognition, because it was a gradual change, and I needed a large
number of characters in order to illustrate all the varieties of change – priests dropping out, for
example, and nuns having to throw off their habits and adjust to the modern world; sexual
problems in marriage, mixed marriages, changes in the liturgy – I would immediately think of
a whole set of incidents and situations that I wanted to incorporate. It would have been a huge
saga novel if I had treated it in a realistic mode. I also knew I had to find some way of
comunicating to a non-Catholic audience a lot of theological and ecclesiastical information. So
thinking in terms of a short novel with a rather rapid pace, with a lot of characters and a lot of
information to communicate, I was led inexorably to use a dominant, intrusive authorial voice
which would communicate that information in a way I hoped was itself amusing. It meant
cutting down the characterization to a fairly summary form, and having many characters of
more or less equal importance.xviii
The fact that David Lodge has worked as a University lecturer is evident from his writing. He
manages to put across the tedious facts with a great amout of wit. He often uses examples,
drawing a line between an unknown fact and comparing it to its notorious counterpart, for
example, he compares praying for souls in Purgatory to sending food parcels to refugees.
Elsewhere he goes even further sayng: ”The afterlife figures in their thoughts rather like
retirement: something to insure against, but not to brood on at the very outset of your career.
Religion is their insurance.” (HFCYG, 16) Finally, in describing the principal idea of the Holy
Communion he speaks about the host as a wheaten vehicle from which Christ jumps into the
soul. Not only the reader learns some knowledge but does so in an easy way, possibly with a
smile on the face.
xviii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 34
19
All the young characters fight with their sexuality from the very beginning of the
novel. It is the sixth comandment that makes their behaviour different from their peers‟ and is
indeed the source of their misery. Initially it is the struggle to enter their marriges as chastily
as possible, which varies from couple to couple, and later to ensure that the size of their
families will be manageable. All the Catholic spouses follow the Church‟s teaching and
control the number of their offspring by the Safe Method. This, however, turns out to be an
unsatisfactory technique because it does not allow them to consumate their marriages
whenever they would wish to. Humanae Vitae plays an importat role in this novel. While in
The British Museum is Falling Down the characters were only awaiting the Pope‟s
pronouncement, hoping that the Church would update and somehow relax the teaching among
other practises, in this novel, when the Pope finally promulgates his opinion, the laity strongly
disagree with his attitude. After a lot of brooding, all of them choose to make up their own
minds about it and choose the Pill instead. The reason they were able to make this step was
the disappearance of Hell somewhere in the nineteen-sixties. It was connected with the
general relaxation of morals in the secular world. This tendency got reflected among the
religious people too. The concept of Catholic religion changed, the black and white idea of
heaven and hell disappeared and the emphasis was put on the conscience of an individual
rather than on the strict rules. As a result all the characters choose the longed-for freedom and
abandon the Pope‟s authoritative doctrine. Their sexual need is at last satisfied. On the other
hand “their sex lives were less dramatic, more habitual, and most of them, especially the men,
worried about this occasionally.” (HFCYG, 151) By solving one problem another occurs and
it is again the question of How Far Can You Go?. Polly, who abandons her religion very early
in the novel and marries a film producer, strives to set some boundaries in their marriage.
After a row they have she asks:”After group sex and orgies, what then? Rubber fetishism?
Fladge? Child porn? Snuff movies? Where does it end?” (HFCYG, 157) What Lodge suggests
here is that one has to know his or her limits. There are boundaries that are not to be
trespassed. One concession in morals leads to another one and therefore setting rules should
be essential and vital in any society.
David Lodge also tackles the topic of homosexuality. For this reason he creates the
character of Miles, a convert to Catholicism who sincerely tries to overcome his handicap (in
this novel it is treated so) and make as much of his career as he can, but who suffers from the
lack of human love and recognition which obstructs his professional development. It is a
vicious spiral because Catholicism does not permit homosexuals to have a normal
20
relationship, if that is what it is according to the liberal world. The reason why the church
would not permit it is because they do not consider it normal. Roman Koch explains that the
fact that homosexuals are attracted to the same sex does not make their relationship any more
normal than would be a person attracted to a child, an animal or an object. Normal is how it
should be in a natural system, that is, a woman should be attracted to a man and vice versa.
Anything else is a deflection from the norm.xix Thus the Catholic attitude. After consulting a
Catholic psychiatrist Michael is told:”I can do nothing for you. Speaking as a doctor, my
advice would be: find yourself a partner. Speaking as a Catholic, I can only say: carry your
cross...with many clients there comes a point when one has to say your problem is what you
are.” (HFCYG, 138) The person who gives him hope in his situation is Bernard. He is a monk
and when Miles seeks his advice he tells him that as long as there is genuine love the act
cannot be really evil. Eventually Bernard leaves his friary and moves in with Miles.
Apart from the theme of sexuality there are some more serious topics elaborated on,
namely the issue of death. There is quite a number of people that die in the novel. Some of the
deaths are expected, prepared for, if one can ever do that, but other deaths leave people
uncomprehending. This is, for example, the case of Anne, Angela and Denis‟s little daughter
who is knocked down by a van. The narrator says:”Of course, Dennis and Angela and Anne
are fictional characters, they cannot bleed or weep, but they stand here for all the real people
to whom such disasters happen with no apparent reason or justice.” (HFCYG, 125) We like to
see some order in life, we want to understand what is going on around us and why. The loss of
a small child can hardly ever be understood, let alone overcome, and one is always likely to
speculate whether it is a punishment for some crime one has committed. Denis abandons his
faith in consequence of the accident because he simply cannot believe in God who takes
pleasure in torturing people. The writer also retells the disaster in Aberfan where a school
with one hundred and fifty children with their teachers was buried under a huge mass of mud
and snow caused by a heavy rain. Lodge writes:”had the landslide occurred a few hours later,
and destroyed an empty building, it would have been called a miracle in the popular press; but
as it did not, it was called a tragedy, the part, if any, played in it by God being passed over in
tactful silence.” (HFCYG, 106) Usually the Christians, trying to make out why tragedies
happen, attribute them to man‟s sinfulness or interpret them as God„s will. None of these
explanations is, however, plausible because they do not explain why the innocent ones be
punished, and what the point of killing so many people is. We sometimes think that the fact
xix
Koch, R.: Homosexuální útok proti svobodě slova a myšlení, Immaculata, Brno, 2004, p. 14-15
21
that one believes in God should provide him or her with special protection but, rather
ironically, it is not so in real life. Sufferings visit upon all people without exception and there
is no possible way to avoid them. On the other hand, the fact that someone believes in God
should make a difference in the way one accepts a suffering. Catholics believe that by bearing
one‟s cross one participates in the sufferings Jesus Christ underwent, which was an act of
deep love that has made salvation attainable.
Many allusions to classics are made throughout the novel. Most often it is the English
novelist Graham Greene and his works that are mentioned or cited, predominantly by Michael
who is writing a thesis on him and sees him as his religious role model. Michael‟s attitude
towards his faith and the Church develops in the same way as Greene‟s attitude on the same
themes. When we meet Michael for the first time his favourite book is The Heart of the
Matter followed by The Quiet American and the narrator says:”Michael‟s interest was more
than academic: in some oblique way the credibility of the Catholic faith was underwritten for
him by the existence of distinguished literary converts like Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh,
so any sign of their having Doubts was unsettling.” (HFCYG, 41) He is so fond of him that
when he feels frustrated on his wedding night after an unsuccessful attempt to make love to
his new wife he recalls a passage by Greene: “the loyalty we all feel to unhappiness, the sense
that this is where we really belong.” (HFCYG, 63) As time goes on, Michael seems to adopt a
more relaxed conception of his religion. Graham Greene‟s novel A Burnt-out Case, reflecting
on a book that was suppressed by Rome as heretical, presents a counterpart to Michael‟s
change. In the final quote of Greene we read:”When I was a boy I had faith in the Christian
God. Life under his shadow was a very serious affair....Now that I approached the end of life
it was only my sense of humour that enabled me sometimes to believe in Him.” (HFCYG,
102) David Lodge gives credit to Graham Greene to a great extent in this novel, making it
clear that it is not only Michael who gets impressed by his works but also Lodge himself.
Towards the end of the novel most of the characters join the Catholics for an Open
Church, a group set up in order to fight Humanae Vitae. It is a sort of counter-demonstration
to Archbishop Lefebre‟s movement who thought that “the Vatican Council had betrayed the
Catholic faith to modernism“ (HFCYG, 209) and wanted to bring back the Latin mass. The
last chapter of the novel is a transcript of the Catholics for an Open Church Pascal Festival. Its
aim is to show the pluralist, progressive, postconciliar version of the Church. The members,
calling themselves “the New Catholics”, express in it their attitudes on crucial topics
concerning the Catholic Church. These utterances are a mixture of statements that are again
the issue of How Far Can You Go? Austin challenges the Pope‟s infallibility and among other
22
things points out that we cannot be sure that the Resurrection actually happened. Further on,
he defies the legitimacy of the New Testament saying that it may not be literally true. Miriam,
on the other hand, admits that there are cases in which she would consider to have an
abortion. Fiona proposes to teach young people about contraception and allow them to have
sex before marriage. Miles wants to have homosexuality legalized within the Church. Polly
raises the question when it makes any difference whether one is a Catholic. “Most of the
people at this affair don‟t seem to think that they‟re in any way superior to Protestants or
Jews, Hindus or Muslims, or for that matter, atheists and agnostics. Which is very decent and
humble of them, but it does raise the question, why be a Catholic at all, rather than something
else, or just nothing?” (HFCYG, 235) Michael pushes the boundary even further comparing
the Holy Communion to primitive rituals saying it is like:”when a tribe would kill their king
and eat his flesh and drink his blood to inherit his strength. Then you got a lot of vegetation
gods who were identified with the crops and the vine, bread and wine. I don‟t think it‟s
surprising that Jesus adopted this archetypal symbolism.” (HFCYG, 238) At this point the
characters seem to doubt and misinterpret everything the Catholic religion stands for. They
are almost forming a church within a church, attempting schism. The cause of this
development is the influence of the 1960 when the sexual revolution came up with new
alternative-values such as free love. It is by this time the nineteen-seventies “but this group of
people were having their sixties a little late” (HFCYG, 143) the narrator notes ironically.
One of the problems that the Church faced in the second half of the twentieth century
was the problem of priests leaving their vocation. This subject is elaborated in this novel to
some extent and even further in Paradise News. The cause of this massive tendency was the
publication of Humanae Vitae which came with a new interpretation of marital sex. Up to this
point the true purpose of sexual act were procreation and the reciprocal giving and receiving
of sensual pleasure. These two were not to be separated. Humanae Vitae, however, came with
a new explanation, saying that marital intercourse can be confined to the female‟s infertile
period because the reciprocal giving and receiving of sensual pleasure was a good thing in
itself. With this interpretation priests found it often difficult to understand why they gave up
something good in itself.
As long as sexual pleasure had been viewed with suspicion by Christian divines, as something
hostile to spirituality, lawful only as part of man‟s procreative function in God‟s scheme, the
vow of celibacy had obvious point. Unmarried and chaste, the priest was materially free to
serve his flock, and spiritually free from the distractions of fleshy indulgence. But when the
new theology of marriage began to emerge, in which sexual love was redeemed from the
23
repression and reticence of the past, and celebrated… as “self-liberating, other-enriching,
honest, faithful, socially responsible, life-giving and joyous,” the value of celibacy no longer
seemed self-evident, and a progressive priest might find himself in the paradoxical position of
defending the right of the laity to enjoy pleasures he himself had renounced long ago, on
grounds he no longer believed in. (HFCYG, 119-120)
Quite a number of priests leave their vocation in course of the novel, many of them motivated
by the wish to marry, but some even driven by intellectual doubts about the truthfulness of the
Catholic faith.
24
Paradise News
Paradise News was written in 1991, so there was 11 years during which David Lodge
left the themes of Catholicism at rest. It differs from the previous novels slightly in treating
the theme as well as in the story it narrates “it is milder and gentler, without the inventiveness
and displays of wit readers had come to expect.”xx
The central character, Bernard Walsh, is a theologian, a former priest, who in course
of his serving as a pastor abandons his vocation as well as his faith. He comes from a family
of Irish immigrants and from an early childhood has been brought up with the idea that he
would become a priest one day. The choice of the profession was, therefore, not his own, but
imposed on him by his parents. Bernard, first as a student and then as a teacher in the
seminary, slowly loses his faith altogether and one day he realised that:”All the radical
demythologizing theology that I had spent most of my life resisting suddenly seemed selfevidently true.” (PN, 191) At this point in his life he is drawn into a relationship with Daphne,
a middle-aged nurse whom he instructs in the Catholic faith. Their short relationship,
however, is a fiasco which leaves both of them disillusioned and disappointed. Bernard is
laicized and takes up a part-time job as a theologian in a college. This is, understandably, a
great disappointment for his parents and from this moment on Bernard becomes the black
sheep of the family. Most of these pieces of information are provided to the reader
retrospectively from Bernard himself for part of the book is written in a form of confessional
diary.
The major part of the novel takes place in Hawaii where Bernard‟s aunt Ursula lives.
She is dying of an inoperable form of cancer and phones Bernard one day to persuade her
brother, Bernard‟s father, to come to visit her. Ursula has not been on good terms with her
family for many decades and wants to gain reconciliation from the living members before she
dies. After some difficulty and amusing incidents Bernard achieves to get his old father, Mr
Walsh, to Hawaii but before he gets him to see his sister, Mr Walsh is knocked down by a car
and sent to a hospital with a broken hip. (Being from England Mr. Walsh did not expect the
car to come from the other side). The reconciliation of the siblings, therefore, has to be put off
for about two weeks because both patients are unable to leave their beds. Meanwhile Bernard
gets to know Yolande who, ironically, is the driver of the car that nearly kills his father. They
soon become very friendly and intimate. Their relationship, at least at Yolande‟s part, is based
xx
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 39
25
on compassion rather than passion but evolves into a tender love affair. Bernard almost
instantaneously asks Yolande to marry him which she has to decline because she is still
married, although her husband ran off with one of his students. She promises to come and
visit him in Rummage where he teaches, playing with the idea that she might marry him after
all and move out from Hawaii where she hates it anyway.
When the two old siblings finally meet and put to rights all the long-suppressed
wounds Bernard feels very much satisfied and relived for making at last something
praiseworthy. Ursula awards him with a considerable amount of money in her will. He learns
this piece of knowledge from a letter from Yolande who attends to Ursula until her death
when Bernard is already busy teaching back at home. Among other things she informs him to
expect her to come at Christmas and although no promise is made it looks rather hopeful that
she might marry him eventually.
The romantic element plays a crucial part here because Bernard‟s life from the very
beginning seems desperate but Yolande‟s love gives it some meaning and, more importantly,
some hope. Bergonzi says:”Bernard‟s experiences in Hawaii may not have restored his faith,
but they have given him hope, which is a theological virtue as well as human quality.“xxi In
other words, Bernard‟s faith has not been restored in Hawaii but a lot of talking on this
subject goes on, mainly with dying Ursula, which is very natural because she is curious and a
little wary of where her soul will end up. It might seem bizarre, almost irrational, to seek the
answer to this subject matter from someone who does not personally believe in anything
particular after death (Bernard is an agnostic) but this is not really the case. They both take the
theme rather lightly, warm-heartedly, they even joke about it. Bernard is very helpful when
answering Ursula‟s questions that are of theoretical rather than practical nature. When
Yolande inquires about the topics they discuss she is quite amused:
“What do you two talk about?”
“Today we were talking about heaven.”
“But you don‟t believe in heaven!”
“No, but I know a lot about it.”
Yolande laughed. “There speaks the true academic.” (PN, 276)
Several times it looks as if Ursula was slightly trying to make Bernard believe again,
whether for his own good or to make stronger ground for her own faith. Bernard, however,
remains quite firm in his agnostic position, although he amuses himself (or David Lodge the
reader) from time to time by creating little contradictions. For example, after he had a very
26
pleasant evening with Yolande and was walking her to her car he is thinking:”Please don‟t let
her throw herself at me, I prayed inwardly – (to whom?) – please not that“ (PN, 172) or when
his father is knocked down and the driver suggests a couple of hospitals where he can take
them he contemplates:
“... Or there‟s St. Joseph‟s, the Catholic hospital.” (Said the driver)
“Yes,” said Mr. Walsh in an inaudible whisper.
“Take him to St. Joseph‟s,” said Bernard. “We‟re Catholics.” He used the plural pronoun
instinctively: it was no time to go into the niceties of religious belief and affiliation. If it would
make his father feel any better to be treated in a Catholic hospital, he was ready to recite the
Creed in public if necessary. (PN, 104)
The process of Ursula‟s death is not narrated directly in the story but is reported by Yolande
in a letter to Bernard and therefore it feels like a second-hand experience, something that
happened far away, something that is not actually real. Lodge chose the treatment of the cause
of things in this manner in order not to upset the reader. Death is something one can hardly
imagine and barely comprehend. Yolande was quite stunned by it and was herself wondering
where Ursula‟s soul went:”it seemed hard to believe that Ursula was totally extinct, gone for
ever.” (PN, 363) Everybody seems to be aware that death does not concern only Ursula but
every one of them. Bernard pushes the topic even further making it explicit:”They say,” said
Bernard, “that when your second parent dies, you finally accept your own mortality. I wonder
if it‟s true. To accept death, to be ready for death whenever it happens, without letting that
acceptance spoil your appetite for life – that seems to me the hardest thing of all.” (PN, 316)
Although this topic is not a favourite one in a modern society and causes various amounts of
stress with different people, here it is not presented as something terrible or frightening, but
quite the opposite. Because Ursula knows she is dying and because she is old, her death gives
the impression that it is something necessary, even proper. Being reconciled with her relatives
and being given The Sacrament of the Sick she could not be better prepared (at least from the
Catholic point of view) for meeting her creator.
The title of this novel comes from a publication, bearing the same heading, which
Bernard picked up at the arrival in Hawaii. He soon discovers that many shops, services and
other everyday insignificant things bear this attribute, for instance:”Paradise Florist, Paradise
Gold, Paradise Custom Parking, Paradise Liquor, Paradise Roofing, Paradise Used Furniture,
Paradise Termite and Rat Control…” (PN, 163) The adjective stretches on even more
objects:”Paradise Bakery, Paradise Dental, Paradise Jet Ski, Paradise Redicap…” (PN, 240)
xxi
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 43
27
and further on even more bizarre items:”Paradise Gems, Paradise Home Builders, Paradise
Upholstery, Paradise Puzzle Company…” (PN, 254) It is clear that the use of the word is
highly commercialized, trying to produce an appealing vision to attract customers and
visitors. Bergonzi explains another interpretation:”The insistent and ultimately meaningless
repetition of the word is counter-pointed with Bernard‟s mingled doubts and hopes about the
spiritual paradise of Christian tradition.”xxii In creating these slogans there are two things
drawn together, the secular entity and the transcendental entity. There is a theory by Roger
Sheldrake, one of the many minor characters that happen to travel on the same plane as
Bernard and his father. Sheldrake is not on a holiday in Hawaii but doing research for his
thesis, and having overheard that Bernard is a fellow-lecturer he comes over and explains his
work:”The thesis of my book is that sightseeing is a substitute for religious ritual …
accumulation of grace by visiting the shrines of high culture. Souvenirs as relics. Guidebooks
as devotional aids. You get the picture.” (PN, 75) Sheldrake suggests that what all the most
important religions have in common is that they believe in the importance of seeing the
Pantheon, the Sistine Chapel or the Eifel Tower.
I‟m doing to tourism what Marx did to Capitalism, what Freud did to family life.
Deconstructing it. You see, I don‟t think people really want to go on holiday, any more than
they really want to go to church. They‟ve been brainwashed into thinking it will do them good,
or make them happy. In fact surveys show that holidays cause incredible amount of stress.
(PN, 76)
When Bernard tries to argue that these people seem to enjoy themselves, Sheldrake replies
that it is a mask they put on, “artificial cheerfulness” that comes from the fact that people
know how they should behave on holidays. There is something accurate to this idea, even if it
might seem far-fetched. What is a bit extreme in his theory, however, is to compare
swimming to baptism, which is a culmination of Sheldrake‟s hypothesis.
Yolande also presents her view of Hawaii, for her it is a “Paradise stolen. Paradise
raped. Paradise infected. Paradise owned, developed, packaged, Paradise sold.” (PN, 177) She
has moved there with her husband a couple of years before and has hated it ever since. In
order to escape this pseudo-paradise she is willing to embark on a relationship with Bernard.
The novel can also be read as a parable on the modern world. The characters in the
novel go on vacations to find paradise but the whole business seems to be a caricature of
happily spent free time. The travel brochure offers things that it cannot provide and no one
xxii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 42
28
seems to mind this lie, except for the Best family who are ready to complaint about anything
just for the sake of it. All the rest of the people accept this lie as something entirely normal.
David Lodge has moved a long way from his early Catholic opinions to those that are
presented in this novel. He relaxed many of his former attitudes towards the doctrinal truths
and pushed the boundary of his faith. His current ideas are likely to shock the more
conservative readers who must be wondering whether he is a Catholic writer after all.
However liberal some of David Lodge‟s stances are, on some topics his mindset remains
unchanged. One of these is the idea of the indissolubility of marriage. Bergonzi quotes Peter
Winddowson:
Lodge‟s Catholicism – explored historically in How Far Can You Go? – underpins his
acceptance of bourgeois marriage as the domain in which people, whatever their frustrations
and aspirations need finally to secure themselves: the family is the still point in a world
turning even faster, and the wife (usually) the one woman who has to stand in for ... all the
other women theoretically available in the world of sexual permissiveness. In Lodge‟s novels,
there is always a crucial return (or nostos) for the main characters from the wide-open spaces,
the fleshpots, the global campus, to a marriage which has to be remade.xxiii
In How Far Can You Go? Dennis has a brief affair with his young secretary Lynn who is a
single mother and who seeks more support than romance in their relationship. Dennis is at
first flattered by her admiration and although being a very sensible and responsible husband,
he leaves his family and moves in with Lynn. After several weeks filled with remorse he puts
an end to the relationship and returns to his family:”He was exhausted from nightly sex,
depressed by the meanness of his surroundings, acutely embarrassed by the gossip at work,
and hag-ridden with guilt on account of Angela and the children, especially Nicole.”
(HFCYG, 226) Nicole is their handicapped child and Angela gives her more care, love and
attention at the expense of Denis. Because of Angela‟s neglect of her husband it is made clear
that the infidelity is not entirely Dennis‟s fault. A similar pattern of marital unfaithfulness
occurs in Paradise News concerning Bernard‟s sister Tess who unexpectedly flies to Hawaii
under the false pretence to meet her father. It comes out that her husband Frank has found
himself a mistress. Although the relationship is utterly platonic it hurts Tess, who has spent
many years by looking after their brain-damaged child. Their relationship resumes when
Frank breaks up the affair with the girl and Tess comes back to her family. In the case of this
couple the blame is also to be divided between both of them. Yolande reflects on it:”Perhaps
xxiii
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 44
29
Tess hasn‟t given him enough. She‟s obsessed with that kid. She‟d take on the whole world,
to protect his interests. She‟ll trample all over you, if you give her the chance.” (PN, 312) The
interesting piece of knowledge that draws a closer line between these two couples is the fact
that both wives found out about their spouse‟s affairs by discovering a love letter (in Angela‟s
case, ironically, when looking for money for mass.) Bergonzi offers a final comment on the
topic:”The underlying assumption seems to be, adapting a remark by Samuel Johnson, that
though marriage has many pains, infidelity brings no pleasure.”xxiv Marriage represents order
in Lodge‟s novels and seems to withstand almost impossible trials.
xxiv
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995, p. 45
30
Conclusion
David Lodge‟s novels do not concentrate on the dogmatic side of Catholicism but
focus on the practical side of it. Difficulties that arise from Catholicism form the centre of his
novels and are a source of comedy. The characters often make mistakes and it is probably
why they need the vision of a loving and forgiving God who would make their lives
meaningful. Lodge often builds his novels on binary oppositions but it would be useless to
look for the right option between these two because he does not prefer one character over the
other, he presents them as they are and leaves it to the reader to decide for himself/herself
which is the one more admirable, maybe even worthy of being identified with. He usually
presents a number of characters who individually deal with their problems according to their
dispositions. The majority of the troubles are of sexual nature. The reader might be depressed
to see how miserable the situations of these young people are. Lodge knows it and in an
attempt to avert the reader‟s pessimism says:
Let copulation thrive, by all means; but the man cannot live by orgasms alone, and he
certainly cannot die by them, except, very occasionally, in the clinical sense. The good news
about sexual satisfaction has little to offer those who are crippled, chronically sick, mad, ugly,
impotent – or old, which all of us will be in due course, unless we are dead already. Death,
after all, is the overwhelming question to which sex provides no answer, only an occasional
brief respite from thinking about it. (HFCYG, 121)
Whether the reader is satisfied being given this revelation is a different matter but what this
extract shows is a gradual development in the choice of themes.
The first novel that I analysed, The British Museum is Falling Down, concentrates on a
young man who after many failings finds most of the things he strived for. His hardship is
caused by sexual deprivation which results from the Church‟s pressure. The whole novel as
well as the final message is very conservative because the protagonists follow the Church‟s
policy rather than their own consciences. Even though the characters manage to abide by the
rules, they are not so sure that they will not change their minds in the future. In the next
novel, How Far Can You Go?, which covers a longer period and therefore the development of
the characters can be more subtly portrayed, the reader sees them slowly alter their opinions
about the crucial themes concerning their faith. It is difficult to tell, at least for me, whether
Lodge is convinced by and pleased with the stance his characters take in the final scene of the
novel or whether the way he ended the narrative is a sort of a warning for society. Lodge is
not an author with didactic tendencies and for that reason his novels do not provide the in-the-
31
face sort of message and the reader has to give the reading a closer look to find a moral. In
How Far Can You Go? Lodge presents a set of explanations about the Catholic religion.
These enable the reader who is not familiar with Catholicism to fully comprehend the
narrative. In this novel sexuality is also one of the main themes. A more serious subject which
is mentioned here and further explored in Lodge‟s later novel, Paradise News, is death. The
main protagonist, a former priest, who has abandoned his faith and in the course of the novel
finds himself a girlfriend tends to his dying aunt and tries to answer her existential questions.
When comparing Lodge‟s first and the so far last Catholic novels we can notice the change in
both the depiction of Catholics as well as in the nature of their problems. From my point of
view, we can trace a gradual shift from an author under the influence of the church to an
author searching for his own religious self-fulfilment.
This thesis has tried to analyse David Lodge‟s Catholic novels and present a
description of his style. What is most appealing in his novels from my perspective is the
treatment of the subject that could be characterized by Bernard‟s adaption of a famous line by
a nineteen century poet: “„There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the
creeds.” Tennyson. In Memoriam.‟” (PN, 232)
I would like to finish my thesis by saying that David Lodge‟s novels are among my
favourite readings because they are an exquisite source of humour, wit and knowledge. Being
a great social observer and a master of literary theory Lodge produces fabulous plots and
dialogues that never bore its readers.
32
Bibliography
Primary sources
Lodge, D.: The British Museum is Falling Down, Penguin Books, London, 1983.
Lodge, D.: How Far Can You Go?, Penguin Books, London, 1980.
Lodge, D.: Paradise News, Penguin Books, London, 1992.
Secondary Sources
Bergonzi, B.: David Lodge, Northcote House, Plymouth, 1995.
Pearce, S., Piper, D.: Literature of Europe and America in the 1960s, Manchester United
Press, Manchester, 1989.
Lodge, D.: The Art of Fiction, Penguin Books, London, 1992.
Koch, R.: Homosexuální útok proti svobodě slova a myšlení, Immaculata, Brno, 2004.
Putna, M. C.: Česká katolická literatura 1918-1945, Torst, Praha, 2010.
Bible, Česká katolická charita, Praha, 1985.
McGrath A. E.: Christian Literature: An Anthology, Blackwell, Oxford, 2001.
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Birch, D.: ’Catholic literature’: what does this mean? December 2008 – January 2009,
http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/2008/decjan2008p12_2949.html
Gaudium et Spes,
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html
Smith, J.: David Lodge – Autobiography, 2009.
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth62
The start of Vatican II, http://catholicphilosophy.com/sys-tmpl/startofvaticanii21/
Mcbrien, R. P.: Second Vatican Council,
http://mb-soft.com/believe/txs/secondvc.htm
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