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The Brynmill Press Ltd was started in 1970
by Ian Robinson and David Sims.
For nearly forty years we have been publishing criticism of literature and
language,
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including poetry and fiction.
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Brynmill also publishes some of the central English books including the Homilies
and is the leading contemporary publisher
of works by the third great English fabulist,
T. F. Powys.
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in preparation
D. H. Lawrence: Selected Criticism
edited by Brian Crick and Michael DiSanto
and uniform with the already published selections from Arnold and Carlyle
also a new edition of
Studies in Classic American Literature
* * *
There is More
Poems
by
Frances Blodwell
* * *
Stalking the A4
Poems
by
Christopher Morgan
copyright © 2009 The Brynmill Press Ltd
a postscript to Untied Kingdom (where some novels of the age are discussed)
Earlier, Robyn has (quite improperly) intervened in the running of the factory to try to safeguard the job of a worker of immigrant origin, Danny Ram.
“Vic,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “How many times do I have to tell you: I don’t believe in that individualistic sort of love.”
“So you say,” he said.
She bridled a little at that. “Are you suggesting that I don’t mean it?”
“I thought it was impossible to mean what we say or say what we mean,” he said. “I thought there was always a slippage between the I that speaks and the I that is spoken of.”
“Oh, ho!” said Robyn, planting her hands on her hips. “We are learning fast, aren’t we?”
“The point is,” he said. “If you don’t believe in love, why do you take such care over your students? Why do you care about Danny Ram?”
Robyn blushed. “That’s quite different.”
“No, it’s not. You care about them because they’re individuals.”
Game set and match to Victor, and I conjecture that Lodge can write Victor because he is or was a Roman Catholic. Wilcox not only has a better understanding of love, he exposes Robyn Penrose’s intellectual incoherence. The passage continues,
“I care about them because I care about knowledge and freedom.”
“Words. Knowledge and freedom are just words.”
“That’s all there is in the last analysis. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”
“What?”
“There’s nothing outside the text.”
“I don’t accept that,” he said, lifting his chin and locking his gaze on hers. “It would mean we have no free will.”
“Not necessarily,” said Robyn. “Once you realize there is nothing outside the text, you can begin to write it yourself.”[1]
If there is nothing outside the text, knowledge and freedom as are as arbitrary as love, and there can be no such thing as “the last analysis”.
But in the novel Robyn Penrose is taken for the best “teacher” in the department, complimented by Vic Wilcox himself on being “really good at it” and “a natural teacher”,[2] and she has the happy ending of being allowed to stay there, God help her.
Never trust the artist, trust the tale: if the tale shows the mindless shallowness of one bit of England, whether it is against the will of the novelist doesn’t matter? It would say something about his judgement of his own work though. But how do we know he shares the general opinion of Robyn as thinker? In this case there is evidence of a kind that is irrefutable unless one is to accuse David Lodge of deliberately misleading his public or publishing a work of fiction as an academic monograph, for he himself cites Robyn Penrose as an authority in The Art of Fiction[3] as part of a very unconvincing argument that in that wonderful moment of Women in Love with Gerald Crich on the mare at the crossing “the train ‘symbolises’ the mining industry, which is a product of culture in the anthropological sense, and that the horse, a creature of Nature, symbolises the countryside.” Robyn comes in as authority for the view that “Metonymy substitutes cause for effect or vice versa (the locomotive stands for Industry because it is an effect of the Industrial Revolution) and synechdoche substitutes part for whole or vice versa (the horse stands for Nature because it is part of Nature).”[4] Vic Wilcox would have been too mannerly to say “Bollocks!” But no, the steam engine and coal-trucks, the horse, the man, don’t stand for anything. They don’t symbolise, they (actually in a condition-of-England kind of way) exemplify. Reading the account of the horse’s terror and submission one does not think Nature is being terrorised into submission by Capitalism: it’s this horse and Gerald Crich. This fact is known to the common reader but not to the literary theorist.
Perhaps if Lodge had been a clearer-minded critic he would have written a better novel. As it is, Nice Work demands criticism. This is not faint praise. Ian Robinson
2 p. 355
3 1992; quoted Critical Anthology AQA GCSE Advanced Level for use in 2010, 2011, 2012, pp. 15–16, citing Nice Work, pp. 222–3
4 Wilcox chooses Robyn’s doctrine of metaphor and metonymy in support of his admiration of her teaching; Nice Work, p. 355.
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