ABSTRACT
Matrix IN THIS CASE IS FIGURATIVELY CORRECT—MORE SO THAN I realised when giving an exploratory version of the piece as a conference paper for the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA), meeting in Atlanta. Through such academic satires as the novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, the non-academic reading public has endowed these professional conferences with the attributes of a bedroom-hopping French farce. I regret to report that nothing even remotely like the erotic intertextualities described in Changing Places, Small World, or Doctor Criminale has ever happened to me (though some of my colleagues, particularly the Victorians who regularly attend the annual Dickensfest at Santa Cruz, tell a different tale; perhaps it's the Californian remnants of Sixties loveins, or perhaps, as my mother once told me with her female insights into such things, Fm just not well attuned to picking up the signals from the opposite sex). SAMLA was to be different, though I should caution any devotees of eroticism that my tale is more like a medieval allegory of unfulfilled romantic desire (say, The Romance of the Rose without the final “plucking” of the rose) than Fanny Hill or the classics of the Olympia Press.
