Changing Places

David Lodge

4 ideas

1. Two professors swap jobs and lives

   In 1969, timid Philip Swallow of the provincial English university of Rummidge and brash Jane Austen specialist Morris Zapp of Euphoric State, a Californian university, exchange posts for six months. Swallow blossoms amid Californian student protest and sexual freedom and has an affair with Zapp's wife Désirée, while Zapp becomes an effective operator in Rummidge's sleepy politics and gets involved with Swallow's wife Hilary. The book ends with all four meeting in New York, undecided about which marriage and which country to choose.

2. The Humiliation game rewards shameful confession

   In the game, players score by naming classic books they have not read, earning a point for each other player who has read it, so admitting ignorance becomes the way to win. A competitive American English professor, desperate to win, confesses he has never read Hamlet. He wins the round but is denied tenure shortly afterwards, which shows how a status contest can push someone to trade real standing for a local victory.

3. Temperament as a product of institutions

   Traits that look like fixed personality are partly produced by the institutional system a person works in. Swallow's diffidence and reluctance to specialise suit the British generalist, exam-driven system, and Zapp's aggression suits American publish-or-perish careerism. Once each is transplanted, the new environment rewards different behaviour and each man becomes noticeably someone else.

4. Exhaustive criticism would end criticism itself

   Zapp's ambition is to write commentaries on Jane Austen that cover every possible angle, historical, formal, psychological and mythic, so that nothing further could be said about her. The novel treats this as a revealing absurdity: the goal of total interpretation is really a goal of shutting down other interpreters. It exposes how careerist scholarship can aim at monopoly rather than understanding.

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