Restoration of Wasteland:

The Mythological Archetype In David Lodge’s Small World

David Lodge (1935-) is an illustrious British novelist-critic, whose works in

fiction as well as in literary criticism earn him recognition and reputation around the
world. Academic life and Catholicism are two main spheres Lodge’s novels touch
upon. Working as a professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham
until 1987, he is familiar with university life and the world of academe. Brought up as
a Catholic, he is good at infusing reflection of religion into his literary creations.
David Lodge’s campus novels are best exemplified in Small World: An Academic
Romance, which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize and enjoys a large audience in
China, where Small World is often compared to Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu.
Small World depicts the globe-trotting scholars attending multifarious
conferences, looking for fame, sensual pleasure, or love. It contains two story-lines.
One is the young, Irish academic Persse’s pursuit of Angelica, a charming yet
enigmatic girl; another is the peripatetic scholars’ pursuit of romantic trysts and fame,
especially of the UNESCO chair.
Archetypal criticism is “the investigation and analysis of archetypal and mythical
narrative patterns, character types, themes and motifs and their recurrence in
literature”. For Frye, archetypes are “narrative designs, patterns of action, character
types, themes, and images which recur in a wide variety of works of literature, as well
as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals” (Abrams: 32). The narrative structure of
the novel is constructed on a mythological archetype, that is, the Holy Grail legend
which is a recurring story pattern in Romance. Small World resembles the story
pattern of the Holy Grail legend in many aspects including the situation of ceaseless
pursuit and the death-and-rebirth motif, as well as the archetypal characters. In the
Arthurian legend, knights pursue the Holy Grail in order to heal the wounded Fisher
King so that the barren wasteland of the kingdom, as the result of King’s impotency,
will be restored. Lodge alludes to the quest of knights for the Holy Grail at the
beginning when Persse and Miss Maiden is talking about The Waste Land and its
allusion to the Grail legend. Persse claims that everyone is in pursuit of his own Grail.
Zapp also compares the global-trotting scholars as knights, who are bent on the quest
for adventure and glory. In Grail romance, knights travel from many lands, searching
for the Holy Grail to heal the wounded and impotent Fisher King, whose land is also
rendered infertile, but only the purest one among King Arthur’s Knights of the Round
Table can raise the question which helps Fisher King restore his virility and bring his
wasteland back to life (cot. in Li and Sun: 116). This story pattern is repeated in Small
World. Global-trotting scholars resemble the knights. The “Grail” they are in pursuit
of is fame or carnal pleasure. Arthur Kingfisher, “a king among literary theorists”
(Lodge: 113), loses his ability both in sex and in intellectual creativity. He is an
archetypal character who parallels the Fisher King both in name and in experience.
Persse, with his sincere hope of realizing self-improvement in conferences and his
earnest quest for love, makes himself an exception among the scholars who attend
conferences to search for professional opportunities and carnal satisfaction, and
resembles the purest knight “Percival”. Finally it is Persse’s question during the MLA
Conference that restores Kingfisher’s potency and literary creativity so that he decides
to take over the UNSECO chair of literary criticism, and the wasteland of literature is
brought back to vitality. As Northrop Frye defines, romance is an endless form in
which the center character takes on one adventure after another (qtd. in Wang: 48).
Analogous to this feature of romance, Small World ends up with Persse’s new round
of quest for another girl. Small World builds its story upon the frame of chivalric
romance, which makes sure that various characters can be connected by a dense
matrix of links, and that complex plots can intersect with each other. And the motif of
pursuit expressed through the appropriation of the Grail legend reflects the real life of
the academics during the 1960s and exposes the corrupts of the academic world at that
time.
Small World has its temporal setting in 1979, when great achievements in
technology at that time have made it possible to have a bird’s eye view of the whole
world as an academe, just as Zapp claims that jet travel, direct-dialling telephones and
the photocopier “have revolutionized academic life ” (Lodge: 42). The age of the
single campus has passed, and the whole world forms “the only university that really
matters—the global campus” (Lodge: 42). It is the international conference that
distinguishes the modern academic world. In Small World, modern conference is
compared to the pilgrimage of medieval christians, which involves scholars in the
excitement and pleasure of travel. During ceaseless travelling, their paths converge,
intersect and pass, occasioning coincidental reunions and separations. It is the
conference that introduces Persse, an innocent Irish lecturer, into the global campus,
and brings him together with Angelica, an enigmatic woman with whom Persse falls
in love at the conference held in Rummidge. The quest for Angelica leads Persse to
one conference after another, during which he meets the global-trotting scholars who
give him clues. Various characters, minor or major, near or far, are connected by
international conferences and jet travels, which constitute a panorama of the western
contemporary academe. Technological revolution benefits the contemporary academe
greatly. Information becomes more portable than ever before, and scholars are no
longer confined in an individual campus. Instead, they can communicate by attending
international conferences. However, contemporary scholars in Small World seize upon
such opportunities to indulge themselves in material and sensual comforts rather than
spread ideas or improve themselves. What attracts them to various conferences is not
the lectures delivered, but the living accommodations and the chances to make the
acquaintance with authorities and have romantic trysts. Their ceaseless pursuit
resembles the pursuit of the knights, but what differs them from the real knights in
Holy Grail legend is that the end they pursuit is not holy at all. Most academics in
trilogy are hypocritical and rakish. They indulge themselves in the material comforts
and take literary research just as a means to achieve their utilitarian and hedonistic
ends. Through the ironic appropriation of the grail-searching archetype, Lodge
weaves his satire toward the western contemporary academe, and implies the crisis of
literature and literary study as well as his veiled confidence in the future of them by
alluding to the “restoration of wasteland” in Holy Grail legend.

Works Cited:
[1]Abrams, M. H. and Harpham, G. G., 2013. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Beijing: Peking
University Press.
[2]Lodge, David, 1985. Small World: An Academic Romance. London: Secker.
[3]李梅英, 孙明丽, 2008. 物欲横流的学者世界——戴维·洛奇《小世界》的互文性解
读.名作欣赏, (2):115-118.
[4]王菊丽, 2005. 结构与解构的悖论性对话——戴维·洛奇校园小说的建构模式研究.河
南: 河南大学.