culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

LIDIA MIHAELA NECULA
writing English prose. He is loud, he is boorish, he is really rather a creep; in
short, the stereotypical American (as Britons regard them).
“(Maude) Why are you abusing and humiliating women in your fiction.
‘Ramming into them. Making them squeal’. (…) I thought everything one wrote
came out of oneself, ultimately.
(Leo) I admit that I’m fascinated by sex as a power struggle, a struggle for
dominance, with violence at the heart of it, violence and tenderness strangely
entwined. Maybe that’s a source of energy for me, like the core of a nuclear
reactor, white hot, deadly in itself, but a source of terrific energy if controlled,
cooled. That’s what style is to me. A coolant. That’s why I write and rewrite and
rewrite.” (Lodge 1991: 57)
Maude Lockett is the perfect foil for Leo Rafkin. While Rafkin can be
read like a book, Lockett takes some reading between the lines. Gracious on the
exterior, she is instilled with a perfect talent for the best-mannered English
hypocrisy. So, of course, Rafkin wastes no time demanding sex. And, of course,
Lockett at first appears shocked and, after revealing she has been married for 20
years, viciously lets Rafkin know she doesn’t find him ‘irresistibly attractive’.
Well, not until he finds her soaped up in the shower, at any rate. Maude Lockett
brought out all the insecurity and self-doubt, the sleaziness, the bestiality of
Rafkin. Does Maude really not know that Simon St. Clair is gay before she
discovers his brief bedtime ‘performance’ indicates his lack of interest in
women? Or does she allow him to take her merely to torture the unsatiated
Rafkin in the room below?
Simon St. Clair is at war with the world, hateful to everyone, indicative of
how much he hates himself. His self-loathing and barely suppressed, closeted
homosexuality creates constant tension.
All three write trash, of course, and the reader is entertained by some of
the worst of it, at ‘readings’ for the students on the course. The students walk
out on Rafkin’s crude obscenities, adding another chip to the mountain of
insecurities not very far beneath the character’s extrovert exterior.
Jeremy Deane is just the sort of person Rafkin is set to hate. In a matterof-fact,
English way Deane takes for granted the clogged-up sink and kettle that
has to be hit to spring to life and the other disamenities of this antithesis of
Holiday Inn.
“(Leo) I don’t know anything about poetry. I don’t really understand why
people go on writing the stuff. Nobody reads it anymore, except other poets.
(Jeremy) Oh, point taken! The audience is miniscule. But I suppose one
goes because one is obsessed with the music of language.” (Lodge 1991: 3)
“(Jeremy) I think we call it a plumber’s mate. There’s one over in the
farmhouse. (Pokes sink outlet) Ugh. I suppose one could call this a particularly
unpleasant form of writer’s block.” (Lodge 1991: 5)
There is an obvious contrast between the beginning of the play when the
sink is clogged up thus pointing to the writer’s block experienced, in one way or
32