Transforming the Realist Narrative Mode in The British Museum is Falling Down: David Lodge’s Literature of Exhaustion

Abstract

David Lodge was one of the many novelists in the 1960’s who felt that the novel form was at a crossroads. Due to the immense pressure on the aesthetic and epistemological premises of literary realism, many novelists considered two routes branching off in opposite directions: one led towards the neodocumentary, fiction as history, or the other way round; the other led towards metafiction. Despite being drawn to metafiction, Lodge retained a modest faith in realism: he was not prepared to accept the assumption that history and reality were so appalling and the human situation so disastrous that realism could no longer be a fitting response to reality. Having produced two realistic novels in the early 1960’s, Lodge responded to the widespread feeling that realism and the novel form were in a crisis, reflected memorably in John Barth’s influential essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, by tackling metafiction on his own terms, moving freely between the realistic and the metafictional mode. What he produced was a narrative about a thoroughly realistic subject, namely, young Catholic parents struggling with the perils of contraception while trying to adhere to the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. The plot, encompassing a single day in the life of its protagonists, unfolds through a series of delightfully witty parodies of the literary styles of a number of major writers, among them James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. The paper will analyse how Lodge’s narrative strategy in his first overtly experimental novel, relying mostly on pastiche, proved that the creative possibilities of literature, despite widespread misgivings, were far from exhausted.