From Professor to Critic to Novelist:

Crimson: You began your career as a professor. Are you still teaching?

Lodge: I took what's called early retirement in England in 1987, though I still retain the little of Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham.

Q: What was your field?

A: Teachers specialize less in England, but I taught 19th and 20th century literature with an emphasis on the novel and critical theory.

Q: What effect do the two roles of critic and author have no each other for you?

A: In my case I think it's been a cross-fertilization, a symbiotic relationship. I'm often asked this question, for obvious reasons, and I think that many writers who started out as academics gave up academics as soon as they could because they felt it was some sort of inhibition or contradiction, but I never felt that. I've almost consciously alternated a critical book and a novel all through my career. I've found that I like something different to do. If I'd written a novel, I wasn't ready to do another straightway ...

Q: The other role you played was a teacher: Do you think of yourself as a teacher who is writing? A writer who was teaching?

A: I suppose when I started off, from a practical point of view I thought of myself as a teacher who was writing in his spare time inasmuch as I depended on my teaching for my income and supporting a young family, and I never really dreamed that I'd be able to be a freelance writer--that didn't seem like an attainable ambition in those days. As time went on I began to feel that the novels were more important, more rewarding, because they were more difficult, and I switched from a teacher who wrote in his spare time to a part-time critic.

Q: Many of your novels seem to include a type of structural leitmotif or metaphor. What I mean, for example, is that in Nice Work, the character Robyn explains to us what the 19th century Industrial Novel was, and your actual novel fits that description. How does this happen in Paradise News? Are you using genre as mechanism?

A: Well yes, it's what critics call inter-textuality, isn't it? using allusion deliberately to some other text or body of texts. In this one, I think it's more subdued than in the others. In some ways I rather regret not exploiting it more. Basically I saw it generically as a tragicomedy, in the sense in which one applies that term to Shakespeare's later plays, among which I was thinking particularly of The tempest. I saw it as a sort of island story, like The Tempest.

Q: It has been suggested that Morris Zapp, of Small World, was modeled on Stanley Fish. Do you model characters on acquaintances?

A: Morris Zapp is the only one--Stanley is very old friend of mine, and I did borrow some things from Stanley, who was notorious for writing his books on Milton while watching American football or baseball. But Morris Zapp is a kind of typical; figure, who has been "identified" with other academics--Leslie Fiedler or Harold Bloom or whatever. And it pleases me, because he is a representative type--and Stanley has rather encouraged the likeness, I think. On the whole, I'm very careful not to portray people--I don't write romans a clef, though Small World is often read as one. It's not.

Q: In your criticism, a fundamental distinction you seem to be very interested in is that between metaphor and metonymy, and you characterize classical literature as essentially metonymic, and modernist literature as metaphoric. Could you fit your own work into this paradigm?

A: Well, that's a very interesting question, one of which I've thought a bit about. I think, if I were challenged to fit them into this typology, they're novels which are metaphorical in structure and metonymic in texture, by which I mean on the surface. The movement of the story through space and time tends to conform to the metonymic type. I aim for a kind of plausibility of smooth continuity, but the underlying idea which unites the narrative, or encapsulates the thematic core of the book, is metaphorical.