Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature

2. How Far Can You Go? to Therapy: Catholicism and Postmodernism in the Novels of David Lodge

32 Chapter 2 How Far Can You Go? to Therapy Catholicism and Postmodernism in the Novels of David Lodge Daniel S. Lenoski In an article written in 1988, Terry Eagleton, the Marxist critic, pointed out that the novelist David Lodge’s Catholicism was ambiguous and “almost wholly unmarked by spiritual passion.”1 Though he continued to go to Mass until 1992, Lodge has confirmed his ambivalence by calling himself an “agnostic Catholic,”2 writing comic novels about Catholicism, and clearly moving in his criticism and fiction toward post-structuralism and postmodernism . On the other hand, as I have shown in a previous article on The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), to say that Lodge’s “Catholicism makes little difference to his conventional liberal wisdom other than providing him with convenient materials for social criticism and comic satire”3 may be going too far in querying the nature of the Catholicism present in Lodge’s writing.4 As Vatican II was “updating” Catholicism to the twentieth century, Lodge was operating in concert and providing a new way of writing a Catholic novel, one not limited by the realism of the previous generation of Catholic writers such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. In this essay I examine the proximity of Lodge’s work to Catholicism and to the major genres of the novel in the twentieth century with reference to, in particular, How Far Can You Go? (1981) and Therapy (1995). Several of Lodge’s novels focus on Catholicism. These are The Picturegoers (1993), set prior to Vatican II, The British Museum Is Falling Down, set during Vatican II and anticipating its outcome, and How Far Can You Go?, 1. Terry Eagleton, “The Silences of David Lodge,” New Left Review 172 (1988): 96. 2. Bernard Bergonzi, David Lodge (Plymouth, Engl.: Northcote House, 1995), 43. 3. Eagleton, “Silences of David Lodge,” 96. 4. Daniel S. Lenoski, “The Catholic Carnival: The Novels of David Lodge,” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 28, no. 4 (2005): 315–29. 33 The Novels of David Lodge set before, during, and after Vatican II. Many others, like Small World (1984) with its mythic and romance antecedents, Nice Work (1988), Paradise News (1993), Therapy, and Author, Author (2004) with its comic focus on the afterlife , may suggest a Catholic undertext “lurking”—to use Andrew Greeley’s word in The Catholic Imagination—beneath the surface of the narrative. The result is that in the few novels, such as Changing Places (1975), where Catholics don’t appear, dedicated Lodge readers tend to wonder which of the characters are closet Catholics. Even Ginger, You’re Barmy (1962), his novel about the absurdities of compulsory British military service during the cold war, includes three characters, Mike, Percy, and the Protestant narrator, who may possess some of the spiritual passion for which Eagleton is apparently nostalgic . Such characters cling to the cliffs of spiritual agony. They live at the “frontiers of the spiritual life,” as Lodge has described characters in the novels of Waugh and Greene.5 Ah yes . . . but that was before Vatican II. Bernard Bergonzi is generally correct when he points out that Vatican II has redefined the subject matter of a Catholic novel and that the genre has subsequently focused more on the day-to-day lives of ordinary Catholics.6 In conversation with Bernard Bergonzi , Lodge himself has commented that “religious language is the symbolic and speculative mode in which we articulate the contradictions and anxieties which are ineradicably part of the human condition.”7 Most of us do not live the desperate and dramatic lives of Catholic characters in so much pre– Vatican II Catholic fiction. Vatican II, particularly that document entitled Gaudium et Spes with its spacious, flexible, inclusive imagery and language, transformed the story of Catholicism to include bedrooms, lavatories, kitchens , factories, television studios, cocktail parties, and universities. Though Eagleton has neglected the influence of Vatican II on Lodge’s Catholic novels , he has recognized that Catholicism is a cultural phenomenon as well as a religion and that a tension exists within Catholicism between its “two major currents”: “a lineage of rigorous doctrinal thought, and a tradition of ethical and social concern.”8 Following David Tracy’s argument in The Analogical Imagination,9 An5 . David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down (London: Penguin, 1983), 64. 6. Bernard Bergonzi, “A Conspicuous Absentee: The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Novel,” Encounter 55, no. 2–3 (1980): 44–57. 7. Bergonzi, “A Religious Romance: David Lodge in Conversation...