translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

the impression that he wished he had written Ulysses himself. But, as he
honestly admits, he knows not how to tell stories.
In 1979, at the 7 th International Joyce Symposium, J. H. Miller said
that the deconstructive reading of Joyce is positioned on both sides of the
border between fiction and criticism, being, at the same time, a secondary
critical act and a creative one. Derrida’s essay is itself a fiction imitating
Joyce’s, and in the act of doing it, the problem of critical reference to a textobject
reproduces the problem of fictional reference to Dublin: it is a fiction
with critical realization. All those aspects of the novel seemingly working
for the creation of referential illusion – lack of plot, absence of the author,
lack of unity of the narrative voice, general multitude of voices, dilution of
the distinction between the exterior and the interior worlds, mimetic
experiences creating the illusion of the lack of any fictional technique,
sensation of direct access to the mind, thoughts and syntax of characters,
unmediated and live presence of Dublin, redundant visual detail – are
interwoven with other layers of techniques meant to destroy the very
illusion of reality. The mission of the reader becomes, under these
circumstances, much more difficult; this change of direction needs an
educated, cultivated, and, why not, patient receiver, willing to give up the
hope to find pleasure in the experience of reading literature, and to
undertake a serious study of fiction, not only the reading of it.
For things to become even more complicated, as if it were not enough
to see critics writing fiction and novelists concentrating on theory, the
university professor enters the landscape, with the mission to keep
everything together, in a confusing puzzle, and instruct already oversolicited
readers:
Some thirty years ago, the relationship between fiction and criticism
was comparatively unproblematical. Criticism was conceived of as a
second-order discourse dependent on the first-order discourse of
fiction. Novelists wrote novels and critics criticised them. (Lodge,
1984: 11)
Literary theory, on the other hand, faced the same abandonment. Is it
more attractive to be a writer than a critic? Barthes, accompanied by so
many others since, seems to have thought so when he gave up scientific
rigour for the ‘erotic pleasures’ of the text and, finally, headed towards
fictional writing.
After sharpening his pen with writing about the distinction between
metaphors and metonymies, David Lodge began to write novels about the
sexual life of academics, spreading, more than anybody else, structuralist
and post-structuralist ideas about fiction. In his academic trilogy (Changing
Places. A Tale of Two Campuses, 1978, Small World, 1984, Nice Work, 1988), the
100