David Lodge and the Art-and-Reality Novel

Book excerpt: Two distinctive views emerge concerning the presumed battle between Lodge's creative and critical work. One holds that Lodge’s fiction is antimodernist and therefore lags behind his criticism, which displays a theoretical interest in the modernist and – though to a lesser extent – in the postmodernist text. According to the opposite view, time and again there have been strong elements of modernism and postmodernism in Lodge’s novels. In order to bring together the two lines of Lodge’s work, this study shall focus on some aspects in his fiction that are also discussed in his criticism. Given this interdependence, his declared interest in what he calls the ‘art-and-reality novel’ can be regarded as a major starting-point. The emphasis falls on various forms of interplay in the fields of literature, criticism and reality. Accordingly, it should be possible to apply Lodge the theorist to Lodge the novelist and thus bridge or at least explain the alleged division in his work.