On The Religious Consciousness Of David Lodge's Catholic Novels

As a distinguished contemporary British Catholic novelist, David Lodge displays rich religious consciousness in his novel creation and in academic critical domain.His literary studies on British Catholic novels reflects the systimatical exploration in Bri-tish critical circle and his literary creation represents the distinctive religious view of a conscious Catholic novelist. The study on his works will definitely promote our study of post-war British Catholic novels.David Lodge has been widely known as a college novelist in Chinese academic circles for one-sidedly introduction and artistry research of Campus novels such as Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, though half of his novels are Catholic novels and most studies focusing on aesthetic and literary-theoretical issues such as novels' polyphony, parody, carnival and intertextuality. This dissertation tries to broaden and deepen literary studies on heterogenous culture by exploring the religious consciousness in Lodge's Catholic novels through analyzing their religious facts, archetypes and the whole aesthetic individuality in fictional subjects.This dissertation is a study of David Lodge's six catholic novels. By employing archetypal criticism, science of religion, narratology, postmodernism criticism and social-historical criticism and through detailed analysis of The Picturegoers, The British Museum is Falling Down, Out of the shelter, How Far Can You Go, Paradise News, Therapy, this dissertation tries to analyse religious facts as well as religious archetypes and their literary use in these novels, and reveals their social significance.This dissertation consists of 6 parts which includes introduction, main body and conclusion.The introduction gives a brief review of David Lodge's literary creation, and makes a comprehensive summary of the studies of his writings at home and abroad. This part attempts to make a systematical and comprehensive survey of Lodge's studies in China and points out the flaws from the aspects of translation, introduction and research of his works, including summarization and monograph. At last we show the intention, basic structure and main critical methods of this dissertation.The first chapter mainly studies the religious facts in David Lodge's Catholic novels. This part takes the religious phenomenology and novel aesthetic analysis as research techniques on Lodge's Catholic novels' plots, characters, inner linguistic environments and explores the aesthitic significance as well as the function in Christian development and Christian culture of religious doctrines and regulations.In this chapter, the dissertation points out that David Lodge mainly focuses on displaying Catholics'troubled life under the oppression of religious doctrines and regulations and regarding the conflict of human body and soul as the narrative core of novels. Lodge's Catholic novels portray a series of characters including priests and followers and judge their wisdom and personality by displaying their different religious manner. This part analyzes the religious linguistic environment including natural environment, social environment, which are the direct-viewing linguistic environment, as well as the religious system, which is the metaphysics linguistic environment, and elaborates all these kinds of linguistic environments reflecting Lodge's critical and questioning attitude to Catholic doctrines and regulations.The second chapter is an analysis of religious archetypes in David Lodge's Catholic novels. This chapter discusses a series of religious archetypes in David Lodge's Catholic novels through analyzing the archetypes with archetypal criticism, religion study and narratology, and explores the influence, significance of christian culture in the novels. This chapter consists of 3 parts---the archetype of image, the archetype of concept, and the archetype of structure. The first part focuses on analyzing character archetypes and environment archetypes such as Adam, Eve, the Christ, Garden and Water. The second part focuses on analyzing heaven and pilgrimage, which are typical concepts in Christian culture. The last part stresses two typical structure in the Holy Bible, the U-structure and dualistic structure, which widely exist in Lodge's Catholic novels.This dissertation points out that David Lodge' borrowing of religious arthetypes bases on his Catholicism, his thoroughly understanding of Christian culture and the rational consideration of religion's function in modern world. The existence of series of religious archetypes in Lodge's Catholic novels mades strongly religious atmosphere and communicates the secular life with the religious world and the real people with the Christian archetype. Meanwhile, Lodge's Catholic novels reflect the author's transformation of religious archetypes and religion itself by the method of using archetypes. In his Catholic novels, Lodge focuses on the common life of common people in the post-industrial age and he maintains the eternal dream of happy life by borrowing ancient prototypes. On the other hand, Lodge does not regard the religious characters as the Christ, which can solve social questions, and draws religion close to the real life by discarding the abstract metaphysics of religion.In the third chapter, attention is given to the writer's religious consciousness and its development in David Lodge's Catholic novels, which are revealed through the religious facts, archetypes, plots, characterization and many details with the historical situation in which such novels are written.The dissertation divides Lodge's religious consciousness into two periods-the earlier period and the later period according to his Catholic novels, which the earlier period novels consist of The Picturegoers, The British Museum is Falling Down, Out of the Shelter and How Far Ccan You Go, and Paradise News, Therapy belong to the later period novels. The preliminary novels focus on demonstrating the oppressed people and their troubled life, and display the author's critical and questioning thoughts on religion. In the later novels such as Paradise News, Therapy, David Lodge changes his religious view. In general, This chapter points out that earthly happiness is emphasized in Lodge's early novel and the religious faith is stressed in Lodge's later novels and analyzes how it is expressed.The first part of this chapter gives attention to how the external context influence Lodge's religious view by analyzing the social and mental reason of Lodge's religious consciousness in his Catholic novels through the creative writing's subject-object theory.The second part of this chapter analyzes Lodge's attention to the belief crisis in society and to a sistymatical survey of religious doctrines and regulations in his later novels, which reflects his sincere moral anxiety. This dissertation points out Lodge's development bases on religious spiritual function and transforms to religious realistic replacement and the religious faith is transmitted in Lodge's later novels, which bases on the religion's supplement and consummation of the human nature.This dissertation believes that Lodge's individual thoughts on religion in his two period novels reflects his religious division, which divides religion into beliefs and churches, religion and concrete rules. Lodge realizes the importance of the belief and religious rule's damage to human's secular happiness.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the distinctive artistic features of David Lodge's Catholic novels influenced by his religious consciousness throuth comparing Lodge's Catholic novels with other senior Catholic novelists' such as Graham Greene's novels and Evelyn Waugh's novels to display Lodge's distinctive religious view and his artistic features.The first part is the comparison between David Lodge's novels and Graham Greene's novels. This part points out that Lodge reveals why and how the faith, doctrine and church of the religion affect human-beings especially Catholics instead of such christian metaphysics as original sin, heaven and hell compared with Greene and analyses how Lodge improves novels' readability in comparison with Greene. David Lodge approves Greene to the readability value of novels, pays great attention to many technegues to improve the novel readability, especially reader's appreciation and the literary market demand, thus further strengthens the literaray attention to the realistic social life.In comparing David Lodge's novels with Evelyn Waugh's novels, this dissertation points out that Lodge absorbs norishment from Waugh's comic irony and symbolism and carries a new Catholic ideal to substitute for Waugh's tragic absurdity.This dissertation shows that Lodge's practice on novel's form innovation has ac-complished one kind of narrative miracle, both retained the traditional realism territ-ory under the modern narrative linguistic environment, and created a kind of conve-rsational novel, a novel pattern of multi-dimension. The massive applications of mo-dern and post-modern writing techniques also causes the complamation of character, weak emotions, insufficient thoughts and so on, which reflect Lodge's transcending traditional realism.The last part of this dissertation is a conclusion, which briefly sums up Lodge's religious consciousness in his six Catholic novels. The conclusion points out that in his novels Lodge pays great attention to a new Catholicism ideal whose essence is Christian humannism. This new ideal advocates satisfying human desire moderately, also advocates using the rational restriction. Regarding the belief, it bases on the in-dividual rationality and the social morality, discarding the abatract, mystical system of the religion theology, emphasizes the earthly help, mercy and love. This dissertation shows that Lodge has been aware of religious oppression as well as losing of faith in modern world with the rise of hedonism. Therefore he focuses on harmonizing the earthly happiness with religious faith. The study on Lodge's works will grasp the inner salvation from social evils in spite of the ironical style and understand Lodge's moral anxiety.