In the second book of the trilogy, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, an astute theorist lecturing at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the nudist go-go bars of Berkeley, California, as a metaphor of what continental theory has discovered about language:
“This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease, it is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of recoverable meaning, according to which if we remove the covering of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts that it is. trying to communicate.”
It is the beginning of a long and hilarious comic monologue on poststructuralist theory, all the more effective because, like the previous one, it is actually analysable. It is also obscene, so much so that during its performance “a young man in the audience fainted and was carried away”.
The character of Zapp was inspired by the American literary theorist Stanley Fish, who liked the homage so much that he replaced the name on the door of his office at Duke University with that of Zapp. (The third novel in the trilogy is “Nice Work,” published in 1988.)
Graham Greene was an early admirer of Lodge’s fiction, going so far as to send Lodge’s third novel, “The British Museum Is Falling Down” (1965), which concerns the Roman Catholic Church’s antipathy toward contraception, to Cardinal John Heenan. , then the highest-ranking church official in England.
Anthony Burgess called Lodge “one of the best novelists of his generation,” and John Banville, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1995, described Lodge’s work as “wonderfully funny, in that rueful, lugubrious way that is characteristic of forerunners like Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green.