ABSTRACT
David Lodge, as a novelist and professional academic critic who personifies the boundary between fiction and criticism, turns his mind here to the influence of recent criticism on his own and other contemporary British fiction. Lodge is concerned with the way in which recent critical attacks on ideas of the' author' and 'reality' have been reflected in fiction itself, in metafictional anti-realism and the incorporation of a surrogate author into the novel as ways of addressing these issues in the theory of fiction. There is obviously some scepticism on Lodge's part about the idea of critical influence on fiction. Most poststructuralist criticism is, he claims, unintelligible to most novelists; and when it is intelligible (as for himselD it is counter-intuitive in the sense that attacks on the ideas of authorship and the representation of reality rarely accord with the novelist's own conception of fiction. To close the gap between what Lodge calls 'humanist' and 'poststructuralist' accounts of fictional meaning, and therefore the gap between novelists and their academic commentators, he turns to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose idea of the novel as a composite of various discourses allows him to place it somewhere between these polarities. Bakhtin also offers to Lodge an 'ideological' justification of the novel as a form of resistance to repressive, authoritarian and monologic ideologies of the kind that poststructuralism rejects, while maintaining some connection with humanist notions such as the author and the represented external reality.
