Intertextuality and Arthurian Women in David Lodge’s Small World (1984)

The present article analyses intertextual references in David Lodge’s Small World. An Academic Romance (1984), focusing on allusions to the corpus of medieval and twentieth-century Arthuriana in the representation of women characters. An analysis of Arthurian allusions in the portrayal of women characters shows that Lodge introduces Arthurian women to his academic ‘Camelot’ in response to medieval and post-medieval literature about King Arthur and the Grail quest. In this respect, his representation of academic women in Small World is different from the way they are described in Lodge’s other academic novels, Changing Places and Nice Work. Lodge rarely recasts Arthurian women characters as his heroines with the exception of Prof Fulvia Morgana, who is modelled on the Arthurian sorceress Morgane/Morgause. Nevertheless, in Small World, women appear in the traditional roles of being the object of a ‘knight’s’ quest, such as Persse’s beloved Angelica and Swallow’s lover Joy, and wise advisors (Miss Maiden). Alternatively, women are portrayed as antagonistic or negative characters, the so-called ‘whores’ or ‘demonic temptresses’: such are Angelica’s twin sister Lily and the lusty Fulvia Morgana.

Wagner's Parsifal as ritual theater: approaching the numinous unknown

Richard Wagner spent 37 years developing and refining his final work,Parsifal, which he would not call an opera but, rather, a ‘Festival Play for the Consecration of the Stage’. Critical response toParsifalhas historically taken up the work's ambiguous nature as a puzzle to be analyzed and solved, yet treating the opera as a Grail quest for some ultimate meaning reveals more about the seeker than the work and simultaneously errs by distancing the audience from participation in the ritual Wagner orchestrated.Parsifalis deeply psychological in the most radical sense of the word. A depth psychological approach finds the essential value of the work through a direct encounter with the dynamic symbols of the archetypal unconscious, which emerge through Wagner's images and music. Then, the light of understanding emanates from within the drama, from within the music, and from within the landscape and its characters as complex and dynamic autonomous beings – so that it becomes, in Nietzsche's description ofParsifal, ‘an event of the soul’.