translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

professor-character is thus constructed as to become a vehicle for ideas,
principles and concepts, and pinpoint ‘literature-about-literature’ and
‘language-about-language’ in the text of the novel. The consequences of
such strategic manipulation seem to be at least two: the reading process is
more difficult and many of the meanings are often ignored, added,
mistaken, the signifiers sending to multiple signifieds that differ from one
reader/reading to another. Given the writer’s talent, the hard and barely
digestible theoretical core is, nevertheless, clothed in a comic that, through
parody and self-parody, fully rewards the reader, as the writer himself
shows understanding and compassion for the difficulties he is confronted
with. The criticism of criticism and of the critic is the main purpose of a
metatext ‘virused’ by regurgitations of critical discourse by some characters
who seem to have lost their humane features and replaced them with labels
and concepts. Fulvia Morgana – the marxist, Sigfried von Turpitz – the
German expert in the theory of reception, Michel Tardieu – the
narratologist and Arthur Kingfisher – their mentor and superior, all
characters in Small World are good cases in point.
Open to (re)interpretation, Lodge’s academic novels play with the
reader’s horizon of expectation, distracting and challenging it, while
revealing the most hidden corners of the exterior or interior life of the text.
When Julia Kristeva wrote in 1990 her first novel, The Samurai, in
which she proposed a bet with fiction, politics and the intellectual credo of
an age, she asked herself the same question as Proust: whether to treat a
problem that preoccupied her in a theoretical or a fictional manner. One of
the answers she gave reflects the frustrating suppression of passion in the
intellectuals’ life:
The imagination could be considered as the deep structure of concepts
and their systems. It may be that the crucible of the symbolic is the
drive-related basis of the signifier, in other words, sensations,
perceptions, and emotions; and to translate them is to leave the realm
of ideas for that of fiction: hence, I have related the passion-filled life
of intellectuals. (Kristeva, 1993: 78)
Another explanation might be that “everybody understands literature.”
(Kristeva, 1993: 22)
Giving up theory for fiction and ‘taming’ it inevitably result in
narrative self-contemplation. Barthes defined theoretical discourse as selfreflexive
discourse, export of critical expertise into the novel, and a means
not only to disseminate theory, but also to attribute a critical function to the
novel, to lend it an ability to explore the logic and philosophy of narration
without resorting to metalanguage. In Mark Currie’s opinion, theoretical
fiction is rather performative than constatative narratology, because it does
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