David Lodge: "Deaf Sentence"

"Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic. Take Oedipus, for instance: suppose, instead of putting out his eyes, he had punctured his eardrums. It would have been more logical actually, since it was through his ears that he learned the dreadful truth about his past, but it wouldn't have the same cathartic effect. It might arouse pity, perhaps, but not terror. Or Milton's Samson: O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, without all hope of day. What a heartbreaking cry of despair! O deaf, deaf, deaf, ... doesn't have the same pathos somehow. How would it go on? O deaf, deaf, deaf, amid the noise of noon, / Irrecoverably deaf, without all hope of sound. No."   

This is the David Lodge I admire: scrutinizing, analyzing, still biting, and - contrary to what the blurb says - displaying huge appetite for research. Although much less hilarious than my favourite Small World or Changing Places, Deaf Sentence is funny and demonstrates that despite his loss of hearing, the author hasn't lost the ability of turning embarrassing experiences (the book is said to be highly autobiographical) into comic situations. After all, the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow, as Mark Twain once remarked. 

The title plays on the phonetic similarity of the words "deaf" and "death" and the novel also treats about death - the protagonist's father dies at the end. Two simultaneous processes are then observable: the protagonist's isolation from life imposed by his growing deafness and his father's isolation from life brought about by senility leading to dementia and finally to death.

  Death seems to actually dominate the novel: the protagonist visits Auschwitz, he gets fleetingly involved in carrying out research connected with stylistic analysis of suicide notes, he remembers his first wife's death of cancer (mercy killing, to be precise).  I somehow cannot get rid of the impression that "Deaf Sentence" by a wicked twist does become "Death Sentence" in this novel and the book is a sort of "suicide note" from David Lodge, who has decided to retire from writing fiction.  SAD. 

 

On the other hand, however, the parallelism of  "deaf" and "death" allows the author to end on an optimistic note for readers: ... now it seems more meaningful to say that deafness is comic and death is tragic, because final, inevitable, and inscrutable.  I will be waiting then.