Vol. 14 No. 18 · 24 September 1992
pages 18-20 | 4614 words
On the Salieri Express
John Sutherland
- Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury
Secker, 343 pp, £14.99, September 1992, ISBN 0 436 20115 1
- The Promise of Light by Paul Watkins
Faber, 217 pp, £14.99, September 1992, ISBN 0 571 16715 2
- The Absolution Game by Paul Sayer
Constable, 204 pp, £13.99, June 1992, ISBN 0 09 471460 6
- The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis de Bernières
Secker, 388 pp, £14.99, August 1992, ISBN 0 436 20114 3
- Written on the body by Jeanette Winterson
Cape, 190 pp, £13.99, September 1992, ISBN 0 224 02358 6
Britain’s two leading campus novelists have long broken out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically. The narrative opens in London, flies to Vienna, boards the Salieri Express for Budapest, then chuffs on to Milan, from where it cruises to a luxurious island on Lake Como, then to Lausanne. A brief interlude on Lake Geneva is followed by a long jaunt to Buenos Aires. A climax is reached in Brussels, ‘the heart of our brave new Europe’. An epilogue follows in ‘Schlossburg’, Southern Germany, site of one of the four conferences that feature in the novel. At Schlossburg, Henri Mensonge, scheduled to speak on the totally deconstructed self, fails to arrive: Bradbury loves a donnish joke. It all winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that Bradbury lives in Norwich and ‘travels a good deal.’
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 20 · 22 October 1992
From Ashley Tauchert
Somewhere between the ages of eleven and thirteen I sat quietly through a biology lesson on the facts of reproduction. An elegant woman informed the uncomfortable class of something called a clitoris, about the existence of which the medical profession had not yet reached a consensus. This odd piece of information rested dormant in my unconscious for a decade or so, until I sat down last Wednesday evening with a cup of tea and the latest edition of the LRB (24 September). I turned first to Hugo Williams’s poem, ‘Sex’, which also left me a little uncomfortable. I found that my discomfort, heightened by the last third of John Sutherland’s piece, had provoked this long-stored memory into consciousness. I am not entirely certain of the logic governing the connection between Williams’s poem, Sutherland’s review of Jeanette Winterson’s novel, and being informed of the uncertain existence of the clitoris. But a connection there certainly is. Neither am I certain of the logic governing Sutherland’s assertion that adultery ‘is tied into strict definitions of penile penetration. No penis, no adultery.’ My experience of adultery is at odds with Sutherland’s definition. Adultery is defined according to anxieties about inheritance and paternal identity; penile penetration is only involved if conception is a possible concomitant. Hence penile penetration of another man is also excluded from the legal definition. It can, however, be used as evidence of ‘unreasonable behaviour’.
I was intrigued by Sutherland’s comment on the probable effect of putting Winterson’s passage describing aggression towards her lover’s husband on a practical criticism paper. Surely the projected inability of students to read gender into this piece of text says a lot more about the structure of assumptions governing any practical criticism exercise (relying as it does on crude assessments of genre) than about Winterson’s passage. And that word leads me back to Williams’s poem. There is (at least I hope so) an ironic drive to the lines: ‘ “Sex” seems to be a word that most people understand,/so there is a fair chance that the woman will understand/what the man is getting at when he mentions the subject.’ Williams’s tone is a relief in comparison with Sutherland’s assumption of a readership nodding in assent to his situating of Winterson’s novel as a narrative centred on an idea he ‘still finds odd’. I found equally odd the reviewer’s implication that the idea behind the narrative could cause a ‘snigger’. This sense of oddness became severe irritation when he detailed a list of sexual acts in which the characters in Winterson’s novel might have indulged the reader. I can only assume that Williams’s poem and Sutherland’s review should be read after taking note of Barbara Duden’s remark (in Anne Summers’s article in the same issue): ‘The imagination and perceptions of a given period have the power to generate reality.’ I am as relieved not to inhabit the realities of Williams and Sutherland as I was to discover the fallibility of biology-class ‘facts’.
Ashley Tauchert
University College London
Vol. 14 No. 22 · 19 November 1992
From L.G. Walker
‘If you have to ask you’ll never know,’ quoted by John Sutherland in your 24 September issue, should be attributed to Louis Armstrong rather than Fats Waller.
L.G. Walker
Charlotte. North Carolina
