Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P608-610
And there, for the time being, let us leave Vic Wilcox, while we travel back an hour or two in time, a few miles in space, to meet a very different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn't herself believe in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own), Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that ‘character’ is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism. As evidence for this assertion she will point to the fact that the rise of the novel (the literary genre of ‘character’ par excellence) in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of capitalism; that the triumph of the novel over all other literary genres in the nineteenth century coincided with the triumph of capitalism; and that the modernist and postmodernist deconstruction of the classic novel in the twentieth century has coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism.
Why the classic novel should have collaborated with the spirit of capitalism is perfectly obvious to Robyn, Both are expressions of a secularized Protestant ethic, both dependent on the idea of an autonomous individual self who is responsible for and in control of his/her destiny, seeking happiness and fortune in competition with other autonomous selves. This is true of the novel considered both as commodity and as mode of representation. (Thus Robyn in full seminar spate.) That is to say, it applies to novels themselves as well as to their heroes and heroines. The novelist is a capitalist of the imagination. He or she invents a product which consumers didn't know they wanted until it is made available, manufactures it with the assistance of purveyors of risk capital known as publishers, and sells it in competition with makers of marginally differentiated products of the same kind. The first English novelist, Daniel Defoe, was a merchant. The second, Samuel Richardson, was a printer. The novel was first mass-produced cultural artefact. (At this point Robyn, with elbows tucked into her side, would spread her hands outwards from the wrist, as if to imply that there is no need to say more. But of course she always has much more to say.)
According to Robyn (or. more precisely, according to the writers who have influenced her thinking on this matter), there is no such thing as the ‘self’ on which capitalism and the classic novel are founded - that is to say, a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person's identity; there is only a subject position in an infinite web of discourses - the discourses of power, sex, family, science, religion, poetry, etc. And by the same token, there is no such thing as an author, that is to say, one who originates a work of fiction ab nihilo. Every text is a product of intertextuality, a tissue of allusions and citations of other texts; and, in the famous words of Jacques Derrida (famous to people like Robyn, anyway), ‘il n 'y a pas de hors-texte’, there is nothing outside the text. There are no origins, there is only production, and we produce our ‘selves’ in language. Not ‘you are what you eat’ but ‘you are what you speak’ or, rather ‘you are what speaks you’ is the axiomatic basis of Robyn's philosophy, which she would call, if required to give it a name, ‘semiotic materialism’. It might seem a bit bleak, a bit inhuman (‘antihumanist, yes; inhuman, no,’ she would interject), somewhat deterministic (‘not at all; the truly determined subject is he who is not aware of the discursive formations that determine him. Or her,’ she would add scrupulously, being among other things a feminist), but in practice this doesn't seem to affect her behaviour very noticeably - she seems to have ordinary human feelings, ambitions, desires, to suffer anxieties, frustrations, fears, like anyone else in this imperfect world, and to have a natural inclination to try to and make it a better place. I shall therefore take the liberty of treating her as a character, not utterly different in kind, though of course belonging to a very different social species,
from Vic Wilcox.
Robyn rises somewhat later than Vic this dark January Monday. Her alarm clock, a replica of an old-fashioned instrument purchased from Habitat, with an analogue dial and a little brass bell on the top, rouses her from a deep sleep at 7.30. Unlike Vic, Robyn invariably sleeps until woken. Then worries rush into her consciousness, as into his, like clamorous patients who have been waiting all night for the doctor's surgery to open; but she deals with them in a rational, orderly manner. This morning she gives priority to the fact that it is the first day of the winter term, and that she has a lecture to deliver and two two tutorials to conduct. Although she has been teaching now for some eight years, on and off, although she enjoys it, feels she is good at it, and would like to go on doing it for the rest of life if possible, she always feels a twinge of anxiety at the beginning of a new term. This does not disturb her self-confidence, a good teacher, like a good actress, should not be immune from stage fright. She sits up in bed for a moment, doing some complicated breathing and flexing of the abdominal muscles, learned in yoga classes, to calm herself. This exercise is rendered easier to perform by the fact that Charles is not lying beside her to observe and ask ironic questions about it. He left the previous evening to drive to Ipswich, where his own term is due to begin today at the University of Suffolk.
And who is Charles? While Robyn is getting up, and getting ready for the day, thinking mostly about the nineteenth-century industrial novels on which she has to lecture this morning, I will tell you about Charles, and other salient facts of her biography.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P610-612
She was born, and christened Roberta Anne Penrose, in Melbourne, Australia, nearly thirty-three years ago, but left that country at the age of five to accompany her parents to England. Her father, then a young academic historian, had a scholarship to pursue post-doctoral research into nineteenth-century European diplomacy at Oxford. Instead of returning to Australia, he took a post at a university on the south coast of England, where he has been ever since, now occupying a personal Chair. Robyn has only the dimmest memories of the country of her birth, and has never had the opportunity to refresh or renew them, Professor
Penrose's characteristic response to any suggestion that the family should revisit Australia being a shudder.
Robyn had a comfortable childhood, growing up in a pleasant, unostentatious house with a view of the sea. She attended an excellent direct-granted grammar school (which has since gone independent, much to Robyn's disgust) where she was Head Girl and Captain of Games and which she left with four A grades at A-Level. Though urged by the school to apply for a place at Oxbridge, she chose instead to go to Sussex University, as bright young people often did in the 1970s, because the new universities were considered exciting and innovatory places to study at. Under the umbrella of a degree course in English Literature, Robyn read Freud and Marx, Kafka and Kierkegaard, which she certainly couldn't have done at Oxbridge. She also set about losing her virginity, and accomplished this feat without difficulty, but without much pleasure, in her first term. In her second, she was recklessly promiscuous, in her third she met Charles.
(Robyn kicks off the duvet and gets out of bed. She stands upright in her long white cotton nightgown from Laura Ashley, scratches her bottom through the cambric, and yawns. She goes to the window, treating the rugs spread out on the sanded and waxed pine floorboards as stepping stones, pulls back the curtain, and peers out. She looks up at the grey clouds scudding across the sky, down at a vista of narrow back gardens, some neat and trim with goldfish ponds and brightly painted play equipment, others tatty and neglected, cluttered with broken appliances and discarded furniture. It is an upwardly mobile street of nineteenth-century terraced cottages, where houseproud middle-class owners rub shoulders with less tidy and less affluent working-class occupiers. A gust wind rattles the sash window and the draught makes Robyn shiver. She has not double-glazed the house in order to preserve its architectural integrity. Clutching herself, she skips to the door from rug to rug, like a Scottish country dancer, across the landing and into the bathroom, which has smaller windows and is warmer.)
The Sussex campus, with its tastefully harmonized buildings in the modernist-Palladian style, arranged in elegant perspective at the foot of the South Downs a few miles outside Brighton, was much admired by architects, but had a somewhat disorienting effect on the young people who came to study there. Toiling up the slope from Falmer railway station, you had the Kafkaesque sensation of walking into an endlessly deep stage set where apparently three-dimensional objects turned out to be painted flat, and reality receded as fast as you pursued it. Cut off from normal social intercourse with the adult world, relieved of inhibition by ethos of Permissive Society, the students were apt to run wild, indulging melancholy mad. Robyn's generation, coming up to university in the early 1970s, immediately after the heroic period of student politics, were oppressed by a sense of belatedness. There were no significant rights left to demand, no taboos left to break. Student demonstrations developed an ugly edge of gratuitous violence. So did student parties. In this climate, shrewd and sensitive individuals with an instinct for self-preservation looked around for a partner and pair-bonded. By living in what their parents called sin, they nailed their colours to the mast of youth revolt, while enjoying the security and mutual support of ole-fashioned matrimony. Sussex, some long-haired, denim-clad veteran of the sixties complained, was looking more and more like a housing estate for first-time buyers. It was full of couples holding hands and plastic carrier bags that were as likely to contain laundry and groceries as books and revolutionary pamphlets. One of these couples consisted of Robyn and Charles. She had looked around, and chosen him. He was clever, personable, and, she thought, probably loyal (she had not been proved wrong). It was true that he had been educated at a public school, but he managed to disguise this handicap very well.
(Robyn, her white nightdress billowing round her hips, sits on the loo and pees, mentally rehearing the plot of Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848). Rising from the toilet, she pulls the nightdress over head and steps into the bath, not first pulling the chain of the toilet because that would affect the temperature of the water coming through the showerhead on the end of its flexible tube, with which she now hoses herself down. She palpates her breasts as she washes, checking for lumps. She steps from the bath, stretching for a towel in one of those ungainly, intimate postures so beloved of Impressionist painters and deplored by the feminists art historians Robyn admires. She is tall and womanly in shape, slender of waist, with smallish round breasts, heavier about the hips and buttocks.)
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P612-615
In their second year, Robyn and Charles moved off campus and set up house in a small flat in Brighton, commuting to the University by local train. Robyn took an active part in student politics, She ran successfully for the Vice-Presidentship of the Student Union. She organized an all-night telephone counseling service for students in despair about their grades or love-lives. She spoke frequently in the Debating Society in favour of progressive causes such as abortion. animal rights, state education and nuclear disarmament. Charles led a more subdued and private life. He kept the flat tidy while Robyn was out doing good works, and always had a cup of cocoa or a bowl of soup ready for her when she returned home, tired but invariably triumphant. At the end of the first term of her third year, Robyn resigned from all her commitments in order to prepare for Finals. She and Charles worked hard and, despite the fact that they were pursuing the same course, without rivalry. In their Final Examinations, Robyn obtained a First - her marks, she was unofficially informed, were the highest ever achieved by a student in the School of European Studies in its short history - and Charles an extremely high Upper Second. Charles was not jealous. He was used to living in the shadow of Robyn's achievements. And in any case his degree was good enough to earn him, as Robyn's did for her, a Major State Studentship to do postgraduate research. The idea of doing research and pursuing an academic career was common ground to both of them; indeed they had never considered any alternative.
They had got used to living in Brighton, and saw no reason to uproot themselves, but one of their tutors took them aside and said, ‘Look, this place hasn't got a proper research library, and it's not going to get one, Go to Oxbridge.’ He had seen the writing on the wall: after the oil crisis of 1973 there wasn't going to be enough money to keep all the universities enthusiastically created or expanded in the booming sixties in the style to which they had become accustomed. Not many people perceived this quite so soon.
(Robyn, a dressing-gown over her underclothes and slippers on her feet, descends the short dark staircase to the ground floor and goes into her narrow and extremely untidy kitchen. She lights the gas stove, and makes herself a breakfast of muesli, whole meal toast and decaffeinated coffee. She thinks about the structure of Disraeli's Sybil: or, the Two Nations (1845), until the sound of the Guardian dropping on to the doormat sends her to scurrying to the front door.)
So Robyn and Charles went to Cambridge to do their PhDs. Intellectually it was an exciting time to be a research student in the English Faculty. New Ideas imported from Paris by the more adventurous young teachers glittered like dustmote in the Fenland air: structuralism and poststructuralism, semiotics and deconstruction, new mutations and grafting of psychoanalysis and Marxism, linguistic and literary criticism. The more conservative dons viewed these ideas and their proponents with alarm, seeing in them a threat to traditional values and methods of literary scholarship. Battle was joined, in seminars, lectures, committee meetings and the view pages of scholarly journals. It was revolution. It was civil war. Robyn threw herself enthusiastically into the struggle, on the radical side naturally. It was like the sixties all over again, in a new, more austerely intellectual key.
She subscribed to the journals Poetique and Tel Quel so that she could be the first person on the Trumpington Road to know the latest thoughts of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva. She forced her mind through the labyrinthine sentences of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida until her eyes were bloodshot and her head ached. She sat in lecture theatres and nodded eager agreement as Young Turks of the Faculty demolished the idea of the author, the idea of the self, the idea of establishing a single, univocal meaning for literary text. All this of course took up a great deal of time and delayed the completion of Robyn's thesis on the nineteenth-century industrial novel, which had to be constantly revised to take the new theories into account.
Charles was not quite so committed to the new wave. He supported it, naturally - otherwise he and Robyn could hardly have continued to co-habit - but in more detached spirit. He chose a subject for his PhD - the idea of the Sublime in Romantic poetics - which sounded reassuringly serious to the traditionalists and off-puttingly dry to the Young Turks, but which neither party knew much about, so Charles was not drawn into the front-line controversy in his own research. He delivered his dissertation on time, was awarded his doctorate, and was lucky enough to obtain a lecturership in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Suffolk, ‘the last new job in Romanticism this century’, as he was wont to describe it, with justifiable hyperbole.
(Robyn scans the front page headline of the Guardian, ‘LAWSON DRAWN INTO FRAY OVER WESTLAND’, but does not linger over the text beneath. It was enough for her to know that things are going badly for Mrs Thatcher and the Tory party; the details of the Westland affair do not engage her interest. She turns at once to the Women's page, where there is a Posy Simmonds strip cartoon adroitly satirizing middle-aged, middle-class liberals, an article on the iniquities of the Unborn Children (Protection) Bill, and a report on the struggle for women's liberation in Portugal. These she reads with the kind of pure, trance-like attention that she used to give, as a child, to the stories of Enid Blyton. A column entitled ‘Bulletin’ informs her that Marilyn French will be discussing her new book, Beyond Power: Women, Men and Morals, at a public meeting to be held later in the week in London, and it crosses Robyn's mind, not for first time, that it is a pity she lives so far from the metropolis where such exciting events are always happening. This thought reminds her of why she is living in Rummidge. She puts her soiled breakfast things in the sink, already crammed with the relics of last night's supper, and hurries upstairs.)
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P615-617
Charles's success in landing a job provoked in Robyn the first twinge of jealousy, the first spasm of pique, to mar their relationship. She had grown used to being the dominant partner, the teacher's favourite, the victrix Iudorum. Her grant had expired, and she still some way off completing her PhD dissertation. However, she had her sights fixed on higher things than the University of Suffolk, a new ‘plateglass’ university with a reputation for student vandalism. Her supervisor and other friends in the Faculty encouraged her to think that she would get an appointment at Cambridge eventually if she could hang on. She hung on for two years, existing on fees for supervising undergraduates and allowance from her father. She finished, at last, her thesis, and was awarded PhD. She competed successfully for a post-doctoral research fellowship at one of the less fashionable women's colleges. It was for three years only, but it was a promising stepping-stone to a proper appointment, She got a contract to turn her thesis on the Industrial Novel into a book, and settled enthusiastically to the task. Her personal life did not change much. Charles continued to live with her in Cambridge, commuting by car to Ipswich to teach his classes, and staying there for a night or two each week.
Then, in 1981, all hell broke loose in the Cambridge English Faculty. An extremely public row about the denial of tenure to a young lecturer associated with the progressive party opened old wounds and inflicted new ones on this always thin-skinned community. Long-standing friendships were broken, new enmities established. Insults and libel suits were exchanged. Robyn was almost ill with excitement and outrage. For a few weeks the controversy featured in the national and even international press, up-market newspapers carrying spicy stories about the leading protagonists and confused attempts to explain the difference between structuralism and poststructualism to the man on the Clapham omnibus. To Robyn it seemed that critical theory had at last moved to its rightful place, centre-stage, in the theatre of history, and she was ready to play her part in the drama. She put her name down to speak in the great debate about the state of the English Faculty that was held in the University Senate; and in the Cambridge University Reporter for the 18th February, 1981, occupying a column and a half small print, sandwiched between contributions from two of the university's most distinguished professors, you may find Robyn's impassioned plea for a radical theorization of the syllabus.
(Robyn straightens the sheet on the bed, shakes and spreads the duvet. She sits at her dressing-table and vigorously brushed her hair, a mop of copper-coloured curls, natural curls, as tight and springy as coiled steel. Some would say her hair is her finest feature, though Robyn herself sectretly hankers after something more muted and malleable, hair that could be groomed and styled according to mood - drawn back in a severe bun like Simone de Beauvoir's, or allowed to fall to the shoulders in a Pre-Raphaelite cloud. As it is, there is not much she can do with her curls except, every now and again, crop them brutally short just to demonstrate how inadequately they represent her character. Her face is comely enough to take short hair, though perfectionists might say that the grey-green eyes are a little closer-set, and the nose and chin are a centimetre longer than Robyn herself would have wished. Now she rubs moisturizer into her facial skin as protection against the raw wintry air outside, coats her lips with lip-salve, and brushes some green eyeshadow on her eyelids, pondering shifts of point of view in Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854). Her simple cosmetic operations completed, she dresses herself in opaque green tights, a wide brown tweed skirt and a thick sweater loosely knitted to muted shade of orange, green and brown. Robyn generally favours loose dark clothes, made of natural fibres, that do not make her body into an object of sexual attention. The way they are cut also disguises her smallish breasts and widish hips while making the most of her height: thus are ideology and vanity equally satisfied. She contemplates her image in the long looking-glass by the window, and decides that the effect is a little too sombre. She rummages in her jewellery box where brooches, necklaces and earrings are jumbled together with enamel lapel badges expressing support for various radical causes - Support the Miners, Crusade for Jobs, Legalize Pot, A Woman's Right to Choose - and selects a silver brooch in which the CND symbol and the Yin sign are artfully entwined. She pins it to her bosom. She takes from the bottom of her wardrobe a pair of calf-length fashion boots in dark brown leather and sits on the edge of the bed to pull them on.)
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P617-618
When the dust settled in Cambridge, however, it seemed that the party of reaction had triumphed. A University committee charged to investigate the case of the young lecturer determined that there had been no administrative malpractice. The man himself departed to take up more remunerative and prestigious post elsewhere, and his friends and supporters fell silent, or retired, or resigned and took jobs in America. One of the latter group, somewhat the worse for drink at his farewell party, advised Robyn to get out of Cambridge too. ‘This place is finished,’ he said, meaning that Cambridge would be a less interesting place for his own absence from it. ‘Anyway, you'll never get a job here, Robyn. You're a marked woman.’
Robyn decided she would not put this gloomy prediction to further test. Her research fellowship was coming to an end, and she could not bear the prospect of ‘hanging on’ for another year as a freelance supervisor of undergraduates, sponging on her parents. She began to look for a university job outside Cambridge.
But there were no jobs. While Robyn had been preoccupied with the issues of contemporary literary theory and its repercussions on the Cambridge English Faculty, the Conservative Government of Mrs Thatcher, elected in 1979 with a mandate to cut public spending, had set about decimating the national system of higher education. Universities everywhere were in disarray, faced with swingeing cuts in their funding. Required to reduce their academic staff by anything up to twenty per cent, they responded by persuading as many people as possible to take early retirement and freezing all vacancies. Robyn considered herself lucky to get a job for one term at one of the London colleges, deputizing for a woman lecturer on maternity leave. There followed an awful period of nearly a year when she was unemployed, searching the back pages of the Times Higher Education Supplement in vein every week for lecturerships in nineteenth-century English Literature.
The previously unthinkable prospect of a non-academic career now began to be thought - with fear, dismay and bewilderment on Robyn's part. Of course she was aware, cognitively, that there was a life outside universities, but she knew nothing about it, nor did Charles, or her parents. Her youngster brother, Basil, in his final year of Modern Great at Oxford, spoke of going into the City when he graduated, but Robyn considered this was just talk, designed to ward off hubris about his forthcoming examination, or an Oedipal teasing of his academic father. When she tried to imagine herself working in an office or a bank, her mind soon went blank, like a cinema screen when the projector breaks or the film snaps. There was always schoolteaching, of course, but that would entail the tiresome business of acquiring a Postgraduate Certificate of Education, or else working in the independent sector, to which she had ideological objections. In any case, teaching English Literature to schoolchildren would only remind her daily of the superior satisfactions of teaching it to young adults. Then, in 1984, just when Robyn was beginning to despair, the job at Rummidge came up. Professor Philip Swallow, Head of the English Department at Rummidge University, had been elected Dean of the Art Faculty for a three-year term; and since the duties of this office, added to his Departmental responsibilities, drastically reduced his contribution to undergraduate teaching, he was by tradition allowed to appoint a temporary lecturer, at the lower end of the salary scale, as what was quaintly termed ‘Dean's Relief’. Robyn applied, was interviewed along with four other equally desperate and highly qualified candidates, and was appointed.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P618-620
Glory! Jubilation! Huge sighs of relief. Charles met Robyn off the train from Rummidge with a bottle of champagne in his hand. The three years stretching ahead seemed like a long time, then, worth buying a little house in Rummidge for (Robyn's father lent her the money for the deposit) rather than paying rent. Besides, Robyn had faith that, somehow or other, she would be kept on when her temporary appointment came to an end. She was confident that she could make her mark on the Rummidge Department in three years. She knew she was good, and it wasn't long before she privately concluded that she was better than most of her colleagues - more enthusiastic, more energetic, more productive. When she arrived she had already published several articles and reviews in academic journals, and shortly afterwards her much-revised thesis appeared under the imprint of Lecky, Windrush and Bernstein. Entitled The Industrious Muse: Narrativity and Contradiction in the Industrial Novel (the title was foisted on her by the publishers, the subtitle was her own) it received enthusiastic if sparse reviews, and the publishers commissioned another book provisionally entitled Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females: Woman as Sign and Commodity in Victorian Fiction. She was a popular and conscientious teacher, whose optional courses on women's writing were oversubscribed. She performed her share of administrative duties efficiently. Surely they couldn't just let her go at the end of the three years?
(Robyn goes into her long narrow living-room, formed by knocking down the dividing wall between the front and back parlours of the little house, which also serves as her study. There are books and periodicals everywhere - on shelves, on tables, on the floor - posters and reproductions of modern paintings on the walls, parched-looking potted plants in the fireplace, a BBC micro and monitor on the desk, and beside it sheaves of dot-matrix typescript of early chapters of Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females in various drafts. Robyn picks her way across the floor, putting her shapely boots down carefully in the spaces between books, back numbers of Critical Inquiry and Women's Review, LP albums by Bach, Philip Glass and Phil Collins (her musical tastes are eclectic) and the occasional wineglass or coffee cup, to the desk. She lifts from the floor a leather Gladstone bag, and begins to load it with the things she will need for the day: well-thumbed, much underlined and annotated copies of Shirley, Mary Barton, North and South, Sybil, Alton Locke, Felix Holt, Hard Times; her lecture notes - a palimpsest of holograph revisions in different-coloured inks, beneath which the original typescript is scarcely legible; and a thick sheaf of student essays marked over the Christmas vacation.
Returning to the kitchen, Robyn turns down the thermostat of the central heating and checks that the back door of the house is locked and bolted. In the hall she wraps a long scarf round her neck and puts on a cream-coloured quilted cotton jacket, with wide shoulders and inset sleeves, and lets herself out by the front door. Outside, in the street, her car is parked, a red six-year-old Renault Five with a yellow sticker in its rear window, ‘BRITAIN NEEDS ITS UNIVERSITIES.’ It was formerly her parents' second car, sold to Robyn at a bargain price when her mother replaced. It runs well, though the battery is getting feeble. Robyn turns the ignition key, holding her breath as she listens to the starter's bronchial wheeze, then exhales with relief as the engine fires.)
Three years didn't seem such a long time when one of them had elapsed, and although Robyn was satisfied that she was highly valued by her colleagues, the talk at the University these days was all of further cuts, of tightening belts, deteriorating staff-student ratios. Still, she was optimistic, Robyn was naturally optimistic, She had faith in her star. Nevertheless, the future of her career was a constant background worry as the days and weeks of her appointment at Rummidge ticked away like a taxi meter. Another was her relationship with Charles.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P620-622
What was it, exactly, this relationship? Hard to describe. Not a marriage, and yet more like marriage than many marriages:domesticated, familiar, faithful. There was a time, early in their days at Cambridge, when a brilliant and handsome research student from Yale made a determined pitch for Robyn, and she had been rather dazzled and excited by the experience (he wooed her with a heady mixture of the latest postFreudian theoretical jargon and devastatingly frank sexual propositions, so she was never quite sure whether it was Lacan's symbolic phallus he was referring to or his own real one). But in the end she pulled back from the brink, conscious of Charles's silent but reproachful figure hovering on the edge of her vision. She was too honest to deceive him and too prudent to exchange him for a lover whose interest would probably not last very long.
When Charles obtained his post at Suffolk, there had been a certain amount of pressure from both sets of parents for them to get married. Charles was willing. Robyn indignantly rejected the suggestion. ‘What are you implying?’ she demanded from her mother. ‘That I should go and keep house for Charles in Ipswich? Give up my PhD and live off Charles and have babies?’ ‘Of course not, dear,’ said her mother. ‘There's no reason why you shouldn't still have your own career. If that's what you want.’ She managed to imbue this last phrase with a certain pitying incomprehension. She herself had never aspired to a career, finding complete satisfaction in acting as her husband's typist and research assistant in the time she had left over from gardening and housekeeping. ‘Certainly it's what I want,’ said Robyn, so fiercely that her mother let the subject drop. Robyn had a reputation in the family for being strong-willed, or, as her brother Basil less flatteringly put it, ‘bossy’. There was a much-told tale of her Australian infancy that was held to be prophetic in this respect - about how at the age of three she had, by the sheer force of her will, compelled her uncle Walter (who was taking her for a walk tn local shops at the time) to put all the money he had on his person into a charity collecting-box in the shape of a plaster-of-Paris boy cripple; as a result of which the uncle, too embarrassed to admit to this folly and borrow from his relatives, had run out of petrol on the way back to his sheep station. Robyn herself, needless to say, interpreted this anecdote in a light more favourable to herself, as anticipating her later commitment to progressive causes.
Charles found a pied-a-terre in Ipswich and continued to keep his books and most of his other possessions in the flat at Cambridge. Naturally they saw less of each other, and Robyn was aware that this did not cause her to repine as much as perhaps it should have done. She began to wonder if the relationship was not, very, very slowly, dying a natural death, and whether it would not be sensible to terminate it quickly. She put this calmly and rationally to Charles one day, and calmly and rationally he accepted it. He said that although he was personally quite happy with things as they were, he understood her doubts and perhaps a trial separation would resolve them one way or the other.
(Robyn drives her red Renault zigzag across the south-west suburbs of Rummidge, sometimes with the flow of rush-hour traffic, sometimes against - though the rush hour is almost over. It is 9.20 a.m. as Robyn reaches the broad tree-laned streets that border the University. She takes a short cut down Avondale Road, and passes the five-bedroom detached house of Vic Wilcox without a glance, for she does not know him from Adam, and the house is outwardly no different from any of the other modern executive dwelling in this exclusive residential district; red brick and white paint, ‘Georgian’ windows, a tarmac drive and double garage, a burglar alarm prominently displayed on the front elevation.)
So Charles moved his books and other possessions to Ipswich, which Robyn found rather inconvenient, since she was in the habit of borrowing his books, and occasionally his sweaters. They remained good friends, of course, and called each other up frequently on the telephone, Sometimes they met for lunch or a theatre in London, on neutral ground, and both looked forward to these meeting as if they were occasions of almost illicit pleasure. Neither was short of opportunities to form new relationships, but somehow neither of them could be bothered to do so. They were both busy people, preoccupied with their work - Robyn with her supervisions and the completion of her PhD, Charles with the demands of his new job - and the thought of having to adjust to another partner, to study their interests and minister to their needs, wearied them in anticipation. There were so many books and periodicals to be read, so many abstruse thoughts to be thought.
There was sex, of course, but although both of them were extremely interested in sex, and enjoyed nothing better than discussing it, neither of them, if the truth be told, was quite so interested in actually having it, or at any rate in having it very frequently. They seemed to have burned up all their lust rather rapidly in their undergraduate years. What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. He had meant the phrase pejoratively, of course, but to Robyn and Charles D.H.Lawrence was a quaint, rather absurd figure, and his fierce polemic did not disturb them. Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite deferment and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signified temporarily interrupted. Charles himself was not an imperious lover. Calm and svelte, stealthy as a cat in his movements, he seemed to approach sew as a form of research, favouring techniques of foreplay so subtle and prolonged that Robyn occasionally dozed off in the middle of them, and would wake with a guilty start to find him still crouched studiously over her body, fingering it like a box of index cards.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P622-624
During their trial separation, Robyn became deeply involved in a Women's Group at Cambridge who met regularly but informally to discuss women's writing and feminist literary theory. It was an article of faith with this circle that women must be free themselves from the erotic patronage of men. That is to say, it was not true, as every novel, film and TV commercial implied, that a woman was incomplete without a man. Women could love other women, and themselves. Several members of the group were lesbians, or tried to be. Robyn was quite sure she was not; but she enjoyed the warmth and companionship of the group, the hugging and kissing that accompanied their meetings and partings. And if her body occasionally crave a keener sensation, she was able to provide it herself, without shame or guilt, theoretically justified by the writings of radical French feminists like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who were very eloquent on the joys of female auto-eroticism.
Robyn had two casual heterosexual encounters at this time, both one-night stands after rather drunken parties, both unsatisfactory. She took no live-in lover, and as far as she was aware, neither did Charles. So then it became a question, what was the point of separation? It was just costing them a lot of money in phone calls and train tickets to London. Charles moved his books and sweaters back to Cambridge and life went on much as before. Robyn continued to give much of her time and emotional energy to the Women's Group, but Charles did not object; after all, he considered himself a feminist too.
But when, two years later, Robyn was appointed to Rummidge, they had to split up again. It was impossible to commute from Rummidge to Ipswich or vice versa. The journey, by road or rail, was one of the most tedious and inconvenient it was possible to contrive in the British Isles. To Robyn, it seemed a providential opportunity to make another - this time decisive - break with Charles. Much as she liked him, much as she would miss his companionship, it seemed to her that the relationship had reached a dead end. There was nothing new in it to be discovered, and it was preventing them from making new discoveries elsewhere. It had been a mistake to get together again - a symptom of their immaturity, their enslavement to Cambridge. Yes (she swelled with the certainty of this insight), it had been Cambridge, not desire, that had reunited them. They were both so obsessed with the place, its gossip and rumours and intrigues, that they wanted to spend every possible moment together there, comparing notes, exchanging opinions: who was in, who out, what X said about Y's review of P's book about Q. Well, she was sick and tired of the place, tired of its beautiful architecture housing vanity and paranoia, glad to exchange its hothouse atmosphere for the real if smoke air of Rummidge. And to make the break with Cambridge somehow entailed breaking finally with Charles. She informed him of this decision, and with his usual calm he accepted it. Later she wondered if he was counting on her not sticking to her resolution.
Rummidge was a new leaf, a blank page, in Robyn's life. She had at the back of her mind the thought that some new male companion might figure in it. But no such person manifested himself. All the men in the University seemed to be married or gay or scientists, and Robyn had no time or energy to look further afield. She was fully stretched preparing her classes, on a whole new range of subjects, marking her essays, researching Domestic Angles and Unfortunate Females, and making herself generally indispensable to the Department. She was fulfilled and happy, but, occasionally, a little lonely. Then sometimes she would pick up the telephone and natter to Charles. One day she rashly invited him to stay for a weekend. She had in mind a purely platonic visit - there was a guestroom in the little house; but in the event, perhaps inevitably, they ended up in bed together. And it was nice to have someone else caress your body, and release the springs of pleasure hidden within it, instead of having to do the job yourself. She had forgotten how nice it was, after so long an interval. It seemed, after all, that they were indispensable to each other; or, if that was putting it too strongly, they fulfilled a mutual need.
They did not go back to ‘living together’ even in the purely conceptual sense of many academic couples they knew, separated by their jobs. When Charles came to visit, he did so as a guest, and when he departed he left no possessions behind him. However, on those occasions they invariably slept together. An odd relationship, undoubtedly. Not a marriage, not a living together, not an affair. More like a divorce in which the two parties occasionally meet for companionship and sexual pleasure without strings. Robyn is not sure whether this is wonderfully modern and liberated of them, or rather depraved.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P624-626
So these are the things that are worrying Robyn Penrose as she drives through the gates of the University, with a nod and a smile to security man in his little glass sentry box: her lecture on the Industrial Novel, her job future, and her relationship with Charles - in that order of conspicuousness rather than importance. Indeed, her uneasiness about Charles scarcely counts as a conscious worry at all; while the worry about the lecture is, she is well aware, a trivial and mechanical one. It was not that she does not know what to say, it is that there is not enough time to say all she knows. After all, she worked on the nineteenth-century industrial novel for something like ten years, and even after publishing her book she went on accumulating ideas and insights about the subject. She has boxes full of notes and file cards on it. She probably knows more about the nineteenth-century industrial novel than anyone else in the entire world. How can all that knowledge be condensed into a fifty-minute lecture to students who know almost nothing about it? The interest of scholarship and pedagogy are at odds here. What Robyn likes to do is to deconstruct the texts, to probe the gaps and absence in them, to uncover what they are not saying, to expose their ideological bad faith, to cut a cross-section through the twisted strands of their semiotic codes and literary conventions. What the students want her to do is to give them some basic facts that
will enable them to read the novels as simple straightforward reflections of ‘reality’, and to write simple, straightforward, exam-passing essays about them.
Robyn parks her car in one of the University's landscaped car parks, lugs her Gladstone bag from the front passenger seat, and makes her way to the English Department. Her gait is deliberate and stately. She holds her head erect, her red-gold curls like a torch burning in the grey. misty atmosphere. You would not think her unduly burdened with worries, if you watched her crossing the campus, smiling at people she knows, her eyes bright, her brow unfurrowed. And indeed, she carries them lightly, her worries. She has youth, she has confidence, she regrets nothing.
She passes into the foyer of the Arts Block. Its stairs and passages are crowded with students; the air is loud with their shouts and laughter as they greet each other on the first day of the new term. Outside the Department Office she meets Bob Busby, the Department's representative on the local committee of the Association of University Teachers, pinning a sheet of paper to the AUT noticeboard. The notice is headed ‘ONE DAY STRIKE - WED. JANUARY 15TH’. Unbuttoning her coat, and unwinding her scarf, she reads over his shoulder: ‘Day of Act ...protest against cuts ... erosion of salaries ... pickets will be mounted at every entrance to the University ... volunteers should give their names to Departmental representatives ... other members are asked to stay away from the campus on the Day of Action.’
‘Put me down for picketing, Bob,’ says Robyn.
Bob Busby, who is having trouble digging a drawing-pin out of the noticeboard, swivels his black beard towards her. ‘Really? That's jolly decent of you.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you know, a young temporary lecturer ... ’ Bob Busby looks slightly embarrassed. ‘No one would blame you if you wanted to keep a low profile.’
Robyn snorts indignantly. ‘It's a matter of principle!’
‘Right then. I'll put you down.’ He resumes work on the drawing pin.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P626-628
‘Good morning, Bob. Good morning, Robyn.’
They turn to face Philip Swallow, who has evidently just arrived, since he is wearing his rather grubby anorak and carrying a battered briefcase. He is a tall, thin stooped man, with silvery grey hair, deeply receding at the temples, curling over his collar at the back. Robyn has been told that he once had a beard, and he is forever fingering his chin as if he missed it.
‘Oh, hello, Philip,’ says Bob Busby. Robyn merely says, ‘Hello.’ She is always uncertain how to address her Head of Department. ‘Philip’ seems too familiar, ‘Professor Swallow’ too formal. ‘Sir’ impossibly servile.
‘Had a good vac, both of you? All set to return to the fray? Jolly good.’ Philip Swallow utters these platitude without waiting for, or appearing to expect. a reply. ‘What are you up to, Bob?’ His face falls as he reads the heading of the notice. ‘Do you really think a strike is going to do any good?’
‘It will if everyone rallies around,’ says Bob Busby. ‘Including those who voted “Against” in the ballot.’
‘I was one of them, I don't mind admitting,’ says Philip Swallow.
‘Why?’ Robyn boldly interjects. ‘We must do something about the cuts. Not just accept them as if they're inevitable. We must protest.’
‘Agreed,’ says Philip Swallow. I just doubt the effectiveness of a strike. Who will notice? It's not as if we're like bus drivers or air traffic controllers. I fear the general public will find they can get along quite well without universities for a day.’
‘They'll notice the pickets,’ says Bob Busby.
‘A very sticky wicket,’ says Philip Swallow.
‘Pickets. I said, they'll notice the pickets,’ say Bob Busby, raising his voice against the surrounding hubbub.
‘Hmm, mounting pickets, are we? Going the whole hog.’ Philip Swallow shakes his head, looking rather miserable. Then, with a slightly furtive glance at Robyn, ‘Have you got a moment?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She follows him into his office. ‘Have a good vac?’ he says again, divesting himself of his coat.
‘Yes, thanks.’
‘Do sit down. Go anywhere interesting? North Africa? Winter sports?’ He grins encouragingly, as if to intimate that a positive reply would cheer him up.
‘Good Lord, no.’
‘I hear they have very cheap packages to the Gambia in January.’
‘I couldn't afford the time, even if I had the money,’ says Robyn. ‘I had a lot of marking to catch up on. Then I was interviewing all last week.’
‘Yes. of course.’
‘What about you?’
‘Oh, well, I, er, don't do admissions any more. Used to, of course - ’
‘No,’ says Robyn, smiling. ‘I mean, did you go anywhere interesting?’
‘Ah. I had an invitation to a conference in Florida,’ says Philip Swallow wistfully. ‘But I couldn't get a travel grant.’
‘Oh dear, what a shame,’ says Robyn, without being able to work up much genuine compassion of this misfortune.
According to Rupert Sutcliffe, the most senior member of the Department, and its most pertinacious gossip, there was a time not so long ago when Philip Swallow was for every swanning around the globe on some conference jaunt or other. Now it seems that the cuts have clipped his wings. ‘And quite right, too,’ Rupert Sutcliffe declared. ‘A waste of time and money, in my opinion, those conferences. I've never attended an international conference in my life.’ Robyn nodded polite approval of this abstention, while privately guessing that Rupert Sutcliffe had not been embarrassed by a large number of invitations. ‘Mind you,’ Sutcliffe added, ‘I don't think it's just lack of funds that has kept him at home lately, I have a hunch that Hilary read him the riot act.’
‘Mrs Swallow?’
‘Yes. He used to get up to all kind of high jinks on those trips, by all accounts. I suppose I ought to tell you: Swallow has a bit of a weakness where women are concerned. Forewarned is forearmed.’ Sutcliffe tapped the side of his long nose with his index finger as he uttered these words, dislodging his spectacles and causing them to crash into his tea-cup - for this conversation took place in the Senior Common Room, not long after Robyn's arrival at Rummidge. Looking at Philip Swallow now, as he seats himself in a low, upholstered chair facing her, Robyn has difficulty in recognizing the jet-set philanderer of Rupert Sutcliffe's description Swallow looks tired and careworn and slightly seedy. She wonders why he has invited her into his office. He smiles nervously at her and combs a phantom beard with his fingers. Suddenly a portentous atmosphere has been established.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P628-630
‘I just wanted to say, Robyn ... As you know, your present appointment is a temporary one.’
Robyn's heart leaps with hope. ‘Yes,’ she says, interlocking her hands to stop them from trembling.
‘For three years only. You're a third of the way into your second year, with another full year still to run from next September.’ He states these facts slowly and carefully, as if they might somehow have slipped her mind.
‘Yes.’
‘I just wanted to say that, we would of course be very sorry to lose you, you've been a tremendous asset to the Department, even in the short time you've been here. I really mean that.’
‘Thank you,’ says Robyn dully, untwining her fingers. ‘But?’
‘But?’
‘I think you were going to say something beginning with But.’
‘Oh. Ah. Yes. But I just wanted to say that I, we, shouldn't at all blame you if you were to start applying for jobs elsewhere now.’
‘There aren't any other jobs.’
‘Well, not at this moment in time, perhaps. But you never know, something may turn up later in the year. If so, perhaps you should go in for it. I mean, you shouldn't feel under any obligation to complete the three years of your contract here. Much as we should regret losing you,’ he says again.
‘What you mean is: there's no chance of my being kept on after the three years are up.’
Philip Swallow spreads his hands and shrugs. ‘No chance at all, as far as I can see. The University is desperate to save on salaries. They're talking about another round of early retirements. Even if someone were to leave the Department, or drop dead - even if you were to, what's the expression, take out a contract on one of us’ - he laughs to show that this is a joke, displaying a number of chipped and discoloured teeth, set in his gums at odd angles, like tombstones in a neglected churchyard - ‘even then, I very much doubt whether we should get a replacement. Being Dean, you see, I'm very aware of the financial constraints on the University. Every day I have to tell them that only way we can meet our targets is an absolute freeze. It's very hard for young people in your position. Believe me, I do sympathize.’
He reaches out and puts a hand comfortingly on Robyn's pair. She looks at the three hands with detachment, as if they are a still life. Is this the long delayed, much-heralded pass? Is there a promotion-and-appointments couch somewhere in the room? It seems not, for Philip Swallow immediately removes his hand, stands up and moves to the window. ‘It's no fun being Dean, these days, I can tell you. All you do is give people bad news. And, as Shakespeare observed, the nature of bad news infect the teller.’
‘When it concerns the fool or coward.’ Robyn recklessly recites the next line from Antony and Cleopatra, but fortunately Philip Swallow appears not to have heard. He is staring down gloomily into the central quadrangle of the campus.
‘I feel as if, by the time I retire, I shall have lived through the entire life-cycle of post-war higher education. When I was a student myself, provincial universities like Rummidge were a very small show. Then in the sixties, it was all expansion, growth, new building. Would you believe our biggest grouse in the sixties was about the noise of construction work? Now it's all gone quiet. Won't be long before they're sending in the demolition crews, noise no doubt.’
‘I'm surprised you don't support the strike then,’ says Robyn tartly. But Philip Swallow evidently thinks she said something entirely different.
‘Exactly. It's like the Big Bang theory of the universe. They say that at a certain point it will stop expanding and start contracting again, back into the original primal seed. The Robbins Report was our Big Bang. Now we've gone into reverse.’
Robyn glances surreptitiously at her watch.
‘Or perhaps we've strayed into a black hole,’ Philip Swallow continues, evidently enchanted with his flight of astronomical fantasy.
‘If you'll excuse me,’ says Robyn, getting to her feet. ‘I have to get ready for a lecture.’
‘Yes. yes, of course. I'm sorry.’
‘It's all right, only I - ’
‘Yes, yes, my
fault entirely. Don't forget your bag.’ With smiles, with nods, with evident relief that am awkward interview is over, Philip Swallow ushers her out of his office.
Nice Work (2) - David Lodge P630-632
Bob Busby is still busy at his bulletin board, rearranging old notices around the new one, like a fussy gardener tidying a flower bed. He cocks an inquisitive eyebrow at Robyn as she passes.
‘Is it your impression that Philip Swallow is a bit hard of hearing?’ she asks him.
‘Oh, yes, it's been getting worse lately,’ says Bob Busby. ‘It's high-frequency deafness, you know. He can hear vowels but no consonants. He tries to guess what you say to him from the vowels. Usually he guesses what he happens to be thinking about himself, at the time.’
‘It makes conversation rather a hit-or-miss affair,’ says Robyn.
‘Anything important, was it?’
‘Oh no,’ says Robyn, disinclined to share her disappointment with Bob Busby. She smiles serenely and moves on.
There are several students slouching against the wall, or sitting on the floor, outside her room. Robyn gives them a way look as she approaches, having a pretty good idea of what they want.
‘Hello,’ she says, by way of a general greeting as she fishes for her door key in her coat pocket. ‘Who's first?’
‘Me,’ says a pretty, dark-haired girl wearing an outsize man's shirt like an artist's smock over her jeans and sweater. She follows Robyn into her room. This has the same view as Philip Swallow's but is smaller - indeed, rather too small for all the furniture it contains: a desk, bookcase s, filing cabinets, a table and a dozen or so unstacked stacking chairs. The walls are covered with posters illustrative of various radical causes - nuclear disarmament, women's liberation, the protection of whales - and a large reproduction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting, ‘The Lady of Shalott’, which might seem incongruous unless you have heard Robyn expound its iconic significance as a matrix of male stereotypes of the feminine.
The girl, whose name is Marion Russell, comes straight to the point. ‘I need an extension for my assessed essay.’
Robyn sighs. ‘I thought you might.’ Marion is a persistent defaulter in this respect, though not without reason.
‘I did two jobs in the vac, you see. The Post Office, as well as the pub in the evenings.’
Marion does not qualify for a maintenance grant because her parents are well off, but they are also estranged, from each other and from her, so she is obliged to support herself at University with a variety of part-time jobs.
‘You know we're only supposed to give extensions on medical grounds.’
‘Well, I did get a terrible cold after Christmas.’
‘I don't suppose you got a medical certificate?’
‘No.’
Robyn sighs again. ‘How long do you want?’
‘Ten days.’
‘I'll give you a week.’ Robyn opens a drawer in her desk and takes out the appropriate chit.
‘Thanks. Things will be better this term. I've got a better job.’
‘Oh?’
‘Fewer hours, but better pay.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, it's a sort of ... modelling.’
Robyn stops writing and looks sharply at Marion. ‘I hope you know what you're doing.’
Marion Russell giggles. ‘Oh, it's nothing like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘You know. Porn. Vice.’
‘Well, that's a relief. What is it you model, then?’
Marion Russell drops her eyes and blushes slightly. ‘Well, it's sort of underwear.’
Robyn has a vivid mental image of the girl before her, now so pleasantly and comfortably dressed, sheathed in latex and nylon, the full fetishistic ensemble of brassiere, knickers, suspender belt and stockings with which the lingerie industry seeks to truss the female body, and having to parade at some fashion show in front of leering men and hardfaced women from department stores. Waves of compassion and outrage fuse with delayed feelings of self-pity for her own plight, and society seems for a huge conspiracy to exploit and oppress young women. She feels a choking sensation in her chest, and a dangerous pressure in her tear-ducts. She rises and clasps the astonished Marion Russell in her arms.
‘You can have two weeks,’ she says at length, sitting down and blowing her nose.
‘Oh, thanks, Robyn. That's super.’
Robyn is rather less generous with the next supplicant, a young man who broke his ankle falling off his motorbike on Nex Year's Eve, but even the least deserving candidate gets a few days' respite, for Robyn tends to identify with the students against the system that assesses them, even though she is herself part of the system. Eventually they are all dealt with, and Robyn is free to prepare for her lecture at eleven. She opens her Gladstone bag, pulls out the folder containing her notes, and settles to work.
