From: Vivian Droptrou
Category: Amis
Date: 7/19/99
Time: 7:52:57 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
STEPHENP SEZ: "Male novelists like following their women into the toilet. Even dear old David Lodge does it."
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FROM *JANE'S WORLD* BY MARTIN AMIS:
In David Lodge's novel *Changing Places*, a tweedy little British academic goes to teach at Euphoric State University, on the West Coast, while a big brash American academic goes to teach at a rain-sodden redbrick called Rummidge. The American, Morris Zapp, wearily begins his seminar:
"What are you bursting to discuss this morning?"
"Jane Austen", mumbled the boy with the beard....
"Oh yeah. What was the topic?"
"I've done it on Jane Austen's moral awareness."
"That doesn't sound like my style."
"I couldn't understand the title you gave me, Professor Zapp."
"Eros and Agape in the later novels, wasn't it? What was the problem?"
The student hung his head.
The immediate joke here is the contrast in critical styles: the British still locked in the ethical battlefields patrolled by F.R. Leavis, the Americans soaring off into the architectonics of myth and structure. But Lodge's deeper point is that Jane Austen is weirdly capable of keeping *everybody* busy. The moralists, the Eros-and-Agape people, the Marxists, the Freudians, the Jungians, the semioticians, the deconstructors---all find an adventure playground in six samey novels about middle-class provincials. And for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself.
[Poster's note: Jane Austen's dowdy crapola effortlessly bores my ass off. I hope you appreciate the effort I took to post this post. Because I almost dropped dead from Profound Cosmic Boredom while I was typing it. If there's anything duller than Jane Austen, it's the Hacks of Academe who pedanticize about Eros & Agape in Jane Austen. I hate Martin Amis for liking Jane Austen. I wish him agony and death.]