In the second book of the trilogy, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zepp, a brilliant theorist, lectures at a conference, using the striptease style supposedly popular in all the nude go-bars of Berkeley, California. is A metaphor for what continental theory has revealed about language:
“It’s not striptease, it’s all strip and no flirting. It amounts to the hermeneutic fallacy of a reproducible meaning, which claims that if we strip a literary text of its rhetorical garb. So we’re trying to communicate the bare facts.”
This is the beginning of a long and hilarious monologue on poststructuralist theory, which is all the more effective because, as above, it is actually analyzable. It’s also obscene, so much so that during its delivery “a young man in the audience fainted and was kicked out.”
Zapp’s character was inspired by the American literary theorist Stanley Fish, who enjoyed the tribute so much that he replaced the name with Zapp’s on his office door at Duke University. (Turkey’s third novel is “Nice Work”, published in 1988.)
Graham Greene was an early admirer of Mr. Lodge’s fiction, sending Mr. Lodge’s third novel, “The British Museum is Falling Down” (1965), to Cardinal John Heenan, about the Roman Catholic Church’s hostility to contraception. . , then the highest church official in England.
Anthony Burgess Called Mr. Lodge “One of the best novelists of his generation,” and John Banwell wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1995, describing Mr. Lodge’s work as “wonderfully funny, in that sad, funny way that Evelyn As characterized by Waugh and Henry Greene.”