31 Allegory
Erewhon by Samuel Butler 1872
Lodge tells us that this is "a specialised form of symbolic narrative". It "insists on being decoded in terms of another meaning". I don't quite know why I haven't given up.
32 Epiphany
Rabbit, run by John Updike 1960
"Literally, a showing", by which a commonplace event or thought is transformed into a thing of timeless beauty". The extract we read is about a novice golfer on the tee, being ridiculed by his playing partners, but a swing of the club sends the ball soaring far down the fairway. I get that.
33 Coincidence
The Ambassadors by Henry James 1903
"All too obviously a structural device in fiction". We get lots of examples including the extract that, as the author puts it, "a chance in a million". Lodge goes on t say "there is always a trade off in the writing of fiction between the achievement of structure, pattern and closure on the one hand, and the imitation of life's randomness, inconsequentiality and openness on the other". That is OK until Lodge pushes his own novels to demonstrate.
34 The Unreliable Narrator
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro 1989
The book and the film (starring Anthony Hopkins) are so familiar. The book is narrated by the butler Stevens in a "stiffly formal style" and "with no literary merit " if viewed objectively. But Stevens in deluded and unreliable in his grovelling support of his discredited employer "appeasing Hitler and giving support to fascism and anti-Semitism." Similarly, his lack of recognising the love of Miss Kenton, and his own inadequacies leave him isolated. Only at the end does he come to understand the realities of his own life.
35 The Exotic
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene 1948
In the extract included by Lodge "he was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to FAIR long after it's companion had moved to STORMY". But the book itself "manipulates, juxtaposes and counterpoints which are signifiers of home and abroad". So on the one hand we think we are in London as the hero looks down from his balcony "Bond Street, Bedford Hotel, the Cathedral", but then the schoolgirls he sees are young negresses, he has bare knees, his companion on the balcony is black and he has "his face turned to the sea". So not London at all.
36 Chapters etc
CHAPTER TWO
The Adventures of Roderick Random 1748
CHAPTER X
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent 1759-67
CHAPTER V111
The Heart of Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott 1818
CHAPTER 1
Middlemarch by George Eliot 1871-2
Eveline by James Joyce 1914
Lodge tells us that chapters are there for "breaking up a long text into smaller units ..... gives the narrative, and the reader, time to take breath". And lots of other reasons. Unlike, for instance, those of Daniel Defoe with his "uninterrupted streams of discourse". We are told about various methods of dividing a book.
37 The Telephone
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh 1934
The extract is a terrific conversation over the phone. "An instrument full of narrative potential". "The words here express contempt, callousness and complete lack of compunction". A good section.
38 Surrealism
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonara Carrington 1976
Not the same as magic realism (see before) but where "metaphors became real". Alice in Wonderland for example. The extract we read is similar in it's "jumbling together of the cruel and grotesque with the domestic and the droll".
39 Irony
The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett 1908
"Irony consists of saying the opposite of what you mean". So when Sophia, in the extract above, says to Gerald "I've got no-one but you now" it's only for affectation: "She fancied it would please him".
40 Motivation
Middlemarch (oh not again!) by George Eliot 1871-2
Did I actually own a copy of this book at one time? I think it went off to the charity shop, virtually unread. Lodge starts by telling us that novels "can offer more or less convincing models of how and why people act as they do". OK, but the very next sentence starts "Postmodernism and poststructuralism". (Is that a word?) Here the hero's motivation is just to see the young woman with whom he has fallen in love". That is all.