Read Online David Lodge - Small World by Author's Note - Free Book Online Page B

the turn of the century, under the spell of Freud and Frazer. You know Freud’s idea of primitive society as a tribe in which the sons kill the father when he gets old and impotent, and take away his women? In modern academic society they take away your research grants. And your women, too, of course.”
    “That’s very interesting,” said Persse. “It reminds me of Jessie Weston’s Ritual and Romance .”
    “Yep, it’s the same basic idea. Except that in the Grail legend the hero cures the king’s sterility. In the Freudian version the old guy gets wasted by his kids. Which seems to me more true to life.”
    “So that’s why you keep jogging?”
    “That’s why I keep jogging. To show I’m not on the heap yet. Anyway, my ambitions are not yet satisfied. Before I retire, I want to be the highest paid Professor of English in the world.”
    “How high is that?”
    “I don’t know, that’s what keeps me on my toes. The top people in this profession are pretty tightlipped about their salaries. Maybe I already am the highest paid professor of English in the world, without knowing it. Every time I threaten to leave Euphoric State, they jack up my salary by five thousand dollars.”
    “Do you want to move, then, Professor Zapp?”
    “Not at all, I just have to stop them from taking me for granted. There’s no point in moving from one university to another these days. There was a time when that was how you got on. There was a very obvious pecking order among the various schools and you measured your success by your position on that ladder. The assumption was that all the most interesting people were concentrated into a few institutions, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and suchlike, and in order to get into the action you had to be at one of those places yourself. That isn’t true any more.”
    “It isn’t?”
    “No. The day of the individual campus has passed. It belongs to an obsolete technology—railways and the printing press. I mean, just look at this campus—it epitomizes the whole thing: the heavy industry of the mind.”
    They had reached a summit which offered a panoramic view of Rummidge University, dominated by its campanile (a blown-up replica in red brick of the Leaning Tower of Pisa), flanked on one side by the tree-filled residential streets that Persse had walked through the previous evening, and on the other by factories and cramped, grey terraced houses. A railway and a canal bisected the site, which was covered by an assemblage of large buildings of heterogeneous design in brick and concrete. Morris Zapp seemed glad of an excuse to stop for a moment while they viewed the scene. “See what I mean?” he panted, with an all-embracing, yet dismissive sweep of his arm. “It’s huge, heavy, monolithic. It weighs about a billion tons. You can feel the weight of those buildings, pressing down the earth. Look at the Library—built like a huge warehouse. The whole place says, ‘We have learning stored here; if you want it, you’ve got to come inside and get it.’ Well, that doesn’t apply any more.”
    “Why not?” Persse set off again at a gentle trot.
    “Because,” said Morris Zapp, reluctantly following, “information is much more portable in the modern world than it used to be. So are people. Ergo , it’s no longer necessary to hoard your information in one building, or keep your top scholars corralled in one campus. There are three things which have revolutionized academic life in the last twenty years, though very few people have woken up to the fact: jet travel, direct-dialling telephones and the Xerox machine. Scholars don’t have to work in the same institution to interact, nowadays: they call each other up, or they meet at international conferences. And they don’t have to grub about in library stacks for data: any book or article that sounds interesting they have Xeroxed and read it at home. Or on the plane going to the next conference. I work mostly at home or on planes