The British Museum is Falling Down

A Novel by David Lodge

The British Museum is Falling Down was written by David Lodge in 1965 and it's considered by the author himself the first novel whose aim was to treat some of the most important subjects for Roman Catholic married people about the birth control in a sort of comic way [1]. The novel underlines the moral and ethical questions most Catholic married people had in mind in the early 1960's, when in one hand they would have lived according to catholic principles concerning the birth control, known as Rhythm or the Safe Method, and in the other hand they looked with admiration – and a sort of envy – at the new scientific progress in the field of contraception: the progesterone pill.
The novel is considered the first experimental novel of Lodge, above all for its narrative form: it's a mixture of literary genres and styles which becomes the most salient feature of Lodge's creative writing [2]. This experimental novel combines realism, fabulation and non-fiction narratives: Lodge uses parody, poliphony, comic interludes, allusions, interior monologues, free indirect speech, stream of consciousness and so on, connecting his critical and academic role to his creative one. Particularly his double role allows him to enter on metafictional novels' way of writing, according to Lodge's own words, which makes “the problem of writing a novel the subject of the novel"[3].
Even if the author, in his Afterword to The British Museum is Falling Down, denies his identification with the novel's protagonist, Adam Appleby, there are some similarities between them: they are both related to the academic world[4] and also to the Roman Catholic world. Moreover the fact that Adam is a research student in Modern English Literature helps the author in his mixing of the real life of his protagonist with literature (there are in fact a lot of allusions and pastiches which remind us of English Modern authors like James Joyce, Henry James, Joseph Conrad etc...).
The novel describes a day of Adam Appleby, a Catholic research student, married with Barbara and father of three children (and supposed to expect another): the first chapter starts at Appleby's home, where we understand that probably Barbara is pregnant again. Most part of the following chapters is set in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where Adam works at his thesis, whose subject is not yet defined. The reader follows Adam vicissitudes, the meeting with his friend Camel, the false fire-alarm in the British Library (which is one of the funniest events of all the novel), lots of encounters with a fat American man, the Dollinger meeting, the visit at Mrs Rottingdean's house where he's tempted by the sensual teenager Virginia and so on, until his going back home when, during the epilogue, thanks to Barbara's interior monologue, we understand that she's not pregnant.

Main Themes
The British Museum is Falling Down treats two important themes: the first is a religious question, which is about birth control according to the Roman Catholic Church: married people had to control their sexual life using the Safe Method (complete abstinence from sexual relationships for a certain period established by "yes" corresponds here to Barbara's “perhaps”: this probably underlines the differences between the certainties of Joyce's measuring woman's body temperature every day to be sure that the following period is safe), which was the only “contraceptive” method allowed by the Church. At the same time people hoped that the Roman Catholic Church would approve Pope John XXIII's proposals5 of a change about birth control, and they thought that the pill would be a great solution to the question. Adam is married with Barbara, they have three children and probably Barbara is pregnant again; this makes Adam very sad because he doesn't know how to feed another baby or where to place him. The day described by the novel is characterized by Adam's changes of thoughts and feelings about this possible new birth (when he has almost found a job he's very happy of Barbara's pregnancy, but when he phones her she announces to him she was wrong. But when he "loses" the job possibility he receives a phone call announcing she's sure she's pregnant [6]). During the day Adam frequently speaks about the
possibilities of contraception Catholic couples don't have, above all with Father Finbar and with the Dollinger Society members, showing his moral indecision between being a perfect Catholic who respects the Church's precepts or being an innovator but a misbeliever by using the contraceptive pill.
The second theme is Modern Literature; Adam Appleby is a research student and he often confounds real life with his study subject:

For what was that house in Bayswater, dismal of aspect and shrouded in fog, with its mad, key-rattling old queen, raven-haired, honey-tongued daughter, and murderous minions insecurely pent in the dungeon below, but a Castle Perilous from which, mounted on his trusty scooter, he, intrepid Sir Adam, sought to snacht the unholy grail of Egbert Merrymarsh's scrofulous novel? [7]

This vision of the world seen by Adam, who is constantly day-dreaming or having a sort of hallucinations, allows the author to mix, all along the text, the facts of the novel with literary elements, which can remain hidden, or just mentioned, or clearly quoted, giving to the novel a great component of innovation. The most important allusion to a literary work is undoubtfully the epilogue of the novel: it's an interior monologue with a lot of components of Joyce's typical stream of consciousness, especially for what concerns the last part of it. The fundamental features of this monologue are the complete absence of punctuation-marks and the presence of a lot of
sentences which describe thoughts as they come into one's mind without any connection; but the most important fact is that the narrator has now moved into the character's mind which is talking with himself:

[...] that American girl Jean something was her name Jean Kaufman said once a boy took her to the Rhode Island Rhythm Centre thinking it was a jazz club and taking your temperature every morning that's a bore Mary said she's tried everything including temperature charts she's one of the unlucky ones it won't work for so what is she supposed to I'd like to know O the church will have to change its attitude there's no doubt about that [...] [8]

This monologue imitates Molly Bloom's one, but if in her interior monologue Molly's more recurrent word is "yes", the word heroine and Barbara's perplexities [9], giving exaltation to the differences between modernism and post-modernism typical characters: this makes this part of the novel implicitly metafictional.
Another important theme of the novel, which can be linked to the religious one, is woman's body and how it is perceived by men: all along the novel there's a kind of hidden journey which leads the reader into the human body (especially the feminine one). The Reading Room of the British Museum is described as a huge womb protecting its foetus-like scholars:

He passed through the narrow vaginal passage, and entered the huge womb of the Reading Room. Across the floor, dispersed along the radiating desks, scholars curled, foetus-like, over their books, little buds of intelectual life thrown off by some gigantic act of generation performed upon that nest of knowledge, those inexhaustible ovaries of learning, the concentric inner rings of the catalogue shelves. [10]

At the beginning of the fifth chapter the Museum's entrance is described as a big maw swallowing visitors and readers like food (so in this case the Reading Room is probably identified with a human stomach); later Adam – escaping and hiding himself on the uppermost of the book-lined galleries beneath the Dome – looks down at the Reading Room thinking at the
precise simmetry of its design and he compares it to a human brain:

It was like a diagram of something – a brain or a nervous system, and the foreshortened people moving about in irregular clusters were like blood corpuscles or molecules.[11]

In the following passage Lodge makes a reflection about the relationship between men and women and between both men and women with intellectual life:

But the women who waited outside felt differently. [...] they looked out through the windows at the life of the world, at the motor-cars and the advertisements and the clothes in the shops, and they found them good. And they resented the warm womb of the Museum which made them poor and lonely, which swallowed up their men every day and sapped them of their vital spirits and made them silent and abstracted mates even when they were at home. [...] and vowed that these (their) children would never be scholars. [12]

The virtual journey ends in Barbara's mind [13] where the reader finds a reconciliation between men and women, between literature and real life thanks to the repetition of the word "perhaps", which is the sign of Barbara's identity, who is ready to follow her husband in his enthusiastic view of life, even if she is closer to reality than him. Barbara has been a marginal character all along the novel (even if she's always present in the air, like a ghost, because of Adam's hallucinations, thoughts or phone calls, and her possible pregnancy has influenced all the events), but in the Epilogue his marginality becomes central and allows the reader to focus her as the "guiding principle" and most important point of all the story [14].

Structure and Style
The British Museum is Falling Down is considered by the author himself, as I said above, his first experimental novel especially for what concerns its style, which mixes different genres: parody, pastiche, multivocality, metafictional elements and different kinds of écriture such as private diary writing, phone calls, daily papers articles, encyclopaedia's definitions, epistolary form, dialogues, free indirect speech and interior monologue.
At the beginning of the novel there are two important quotations; the one from Oscar Wilde says “Life imitates art.”: it's a clear reference to Adam's behaviour towards his life because he often confounds real life with literary works, but it also seems to anticipate Lodge's parodic style, which will be a leading element all along the novel, because it focuses on the relationship between fiction and reality and between fiction and fiction15. The second one is from Dr. Johnson: “I would be a Papist if I could. I have fear enough, but an obstinate rationality prevents me”, as to say that Catholic people must have faith without being very rational; in fact this element of contrast between faith and rationality is frequently discussed during the all text.
The novel is divided into ten chapters with the addition of the Epilogue; every chapter tells an episode and starts with a quotation which gives us some information about what we're going to read. For example the sixth chapter starts with a quotation from Arundell Esdaile, former secretary to the British Museum:

Free or open access can hardly be practised in so large a library as this. As it was once put, the danger would be not merely of losing the books, but also of losing the readers. [16]

What happens in this episode is actually that Adam loses himself among the book shelves of the library, feeling a great sense of enstrangement. Before the beginning of the seventh chapter Lodge reproduces a quotation from a Guide to the Use of the Reading Room of 1924: "During the autumn and winter the delivery of a book is not infrequently hindered by darkness or fog"; the episode which follows this quotation is, in fact, marked by the initial description of this foggy day, and of the sensations it gives to Adam and people in general [17].
The narrator is omniscient and the narration is in the third person singular but it's also characterized by a great poliphony, in fact, not only, does Lodge frequently make characters talk to themselves thanks to free direct speech, but we also know the character in his interior mind and feelings thanks to free indirect speech, which makes us very much closer to the character's thoughts. Moreover the author doesn't make a description of his protagonists, he lets us know their attitudes or behaviours just describing their actions [18].
Lodge uses a lot of different kinds of writing, as in the first chapter,
16 D.Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, cit., p. 87 17 Ibid, p. 98 18 This component of Lodge's style can be considered a parody of Hemingway's one.
where Adam mentally composes "a short article, 'Catholicism, Roman, for a Martian encyclopaedia compiled after life on earth had been destroyed by atomic warfare" [19]; during one of his day-dreams, Adam imagines a private diary page of a Franciscan Friar, Francesco Francescini, who comments the ascent of the new Pope (supposed to be Adam Appleby) and his proposals about birth control. [20]
The novel is characterized, above all, by parodic allusions to English literary authors: in the second chapter, for example, Adam's sensations when "his cautiously-extended foot encountered a soft, yielding, object" can be compared with the feelings of fear of the protagonist of one of William Golding's novels [21]; at the end of this chapter, when he's in the traffic jam (caused by the Beatles' passage) he sees a woman who he “identifies” with Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist of Virginia Woolf's novel22. The most obvious parody is the Epilogue, as Lodge says in the Italian foreward to his novel: Barbara's interior monologue is a clear allusion to James Joyce's Ulysses, for what concerns its style (chiefly composed of stream of consciousness) and its function: Molly Bloom, just like Barbara, remains a marginal character all along the novel (they're both present just in the husbands' thoughts) but at the end she becomes the protagonist, giving her point of view about the husband and their relationship.

Note to the text
1D.Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, London, Penguin Books, 1983, “An Afterword”, p.163 2 D.Lodge,
2 The Practice of Writing, Harmodsworth, Penguin, 1997, p. 9 3
3D.Lodge, The Practice of Writing, cit., p.6
In fact, thanks to the voice of his characters, all along the novel, Lodge makes a lot of reflections about narrative genres, or about mixing reality with fiction and fiction with fiction (which is also one of his pricipal characteristic of écriture: we can think at all the dialogic and narrative forms used in The British Museum is Falling Down, such as in most of his next novels, or at the large quantity of simulations of older texts in his works).
4 Adam Appleby is, in fact, a postgraduate student working on his scholarship thesis and Lodge was a Professor of Modern English Literature until 1987.
5 In 1958 Pope John XXIII called for a second Vatican Council to re-interpret the Catholic Faith to the Modern World and he set up a Pontifical Commission to study problems connected with the Family, Population and Birth Control. But in 1968 Pope Paul VI, in his encyclical Humanae Vitae, endorsed the traditional Catholic prohibition of artificial birth control. (Cfr. D.Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, cit., p. 163)
6 This example shows the way in which the novel is considered a comic novel; when Adam desires Barbara is pregnant he's announced she's not, and when he's desperate about their economic situation he thinks her pregnancy true. Another element is the way Adam's thoughts change: when he's happy he thinks Barbara is not pregnant, when he's sad or unlucky during the day he thinks Barbara is certainly pregnant.
7 D.Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, cit., p. 129 That passage is a clear allusion to The Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599).
8 D.Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, cit., p.158
9 Cfr. R.Mullini, “Testualità parodica e liminalità della donna in “The British Museum is Falling Down”, Linguae &, 2004, 1, www.ledonline.it/linguae, p. 43-56
10 D.Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, cit., p. 44
11 Ibid, p. 92
12 Ibid, cit., p. 45
13 Ibid, see Epilogue
14 Cfr. R.Mullini, cit., p.43-56
15 R.Mullini, Il Demone della Forma, Editrice La Mandragora, 2001, p.76
16 D.Lodge, The British Museum is Falling Down, cit., p. 87
17 Ibid, p. 98
18 This component of Lodge's style can be considered a parody of Hemingway's one.
19 Ibid, p. 12
20 Ibid, p. 71-73
21 He's in a Gestapo jail and he thinks he's touching with his feet a piece of human flesh, which simply is a wet cloth.
22 Ibid, cit., p. 32-33

Bibliography
Primary texts:
Lodge, D., The British Museum is Falling Down, London, Penguin Books, 1983

Secondary texts:
Lodge, D., "The novelist today: still at the Crossroads?" in The Practice of Writing, Harmodsworth, Penguin, 1997, pp. 4-19
R.Mullini, "Testualità parodica e liminalità della donna in The British Museum is Falling Down”, Linguae &, 2004, 1, pp. 43-56, www.ledonline.it/linguae
R.Mullini, Il Demone della Forma, Editrice La Mandragora, 2001

Other texts:
Lodge, D., "The Novel as Communication" in The Practice of Writing, Harmodsworth, Penguin, 1997

di Elena Cancellieri [Visita la sua tesi »]