The Art of Fiction by David Lodge - Parts 21 to 30

 

21 Intertextuality

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad 1917

The heading is another word you don't normally hear. What it means is borrowing from other texts. "There are many ways by which one text can refer to another: Parody, echo, illusion, direct quotation, structural parallelism" (whatever that is). The extract here "recalls a passage from.... The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

22 The Experimental Novel

Living by Henry Green 1929

Lodge tries to explain that an experimental novel "ostentationally   deviates from the received ways of representing reality". Sorry teacher, I don't understand. Alternatively "the abrupt shifting of the discourse from narrative to dialogue and back again without smooth transitions or explanatory links". 

23 The Comic Novel

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis 1954

I thought that Lodge could have selected a funnier extract. This one wasn't. We hear about a lot of other comic novels (perhaps those by the author are the funniest?) But he's right when he says that "humour is notoriously subjective".

My review of the 21st February 2017 said  "Lucky Jim is not as funny or laugh out loud as most of the reviews made out, I only smiled a coupe of times".

24 Magic Realism

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera 1978

So many writers of whom I had never heard.

"When marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be realistic narrative". Such as an extract that includes "a floating ring of dancers". A type of fiction that I now avoid. There are references to other such books like Angela Carters Nights at the Circus.

In my review of the 26th November 2019, I said "I made it past the first hundred pages, to the end of the section in London. But that was enough. It was weird and fantastical, not my usual kind of book. But I did want to try an Angela Carter novel, having seen her "Wise Children" adapted for the stage. There were parts that were atmospheric and original, but the writing seemed deliberately awkward".

25 Staying on the Surface

The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury 1975

This type of fiction consists only of description and dialogue ("flatly, objectively"). So there is "no access to Howard's private thoughts". All written in the present tense.

26 Showing and Telling

Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding 1742

Showing being "the words spoken by the characters" and telling is "authorial summary". What, is that all?

27 Telling in different voices

Female Friends by Fay Weldon 1995

So what is the "summary narrative method"? Lodge tells us it "suits our modern taste for irony, pace and pithiness". Fay Weldon avoids it's pitfalls with a "hectic narrative tempo" and "stylistic vivacity". For the last two pages about literary theory we are advised to "skip the remainder". I did.

28 A sense of the Past

The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles 1969

A modern novelist writing about nineteenth century men and women cannot compete with writers of the time. Lodge gives examples of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. But what if he could bring a modern perspective to that era. "Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the Victorians".

29 Imagining the Future

Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell 1949

The extract includes a bit about a telescreen you cannot turn off. Most novels about the future are naturally told in the past tense. The first line in the book: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen". The book itself, being published in 1949, drew on many features of austerity Britain. 

30 Symbolism

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence 1921

"Anything that stands for something else is a symbol". The extract from the book includes a colliery train (symbolising the mining industry) and the horse that nearly causes an accident (symbolising the countryside). That's almost OK, but not what follows. "The nature/culture symbolism is modelled on the rhetorical figures of speech known as metonymy and synecdoche". I give up. 

P.S.

I just have to say that I am glad I escaped from doing English at University. There are, apparently, fifteen different types of Literary Theory. I don't want to know what they are.