Changing Places by David Lodge

First published: 1975

Type of work: Satire/comedy of manners

Time of work: 1969

Locale: The fictional cities of Esseph, Euphoria, especially the campus of the State University of Euphoria (often referred to as Euphoric State), and Rummidge, England, especially the campus of the University of Rummidge

Principal Characters:

• Philip Swallow, a lecturer in English at the University of Rummidge
• Morris Zapp, a professor of English at the State University of Euphoria and a leading authority on Jane Austen
• Desiree Zapp, Morris Zapp’s second wife and Philip Swallow’s first extramarital lover
• Hilary Swallow, Philip Swallow’s wife and Morris Zapp’s lover

The Novel

In a very real sense, Changing Places is a situation comedy chronicling the clash of several different cultures, clashes which are set in motion by the faculty exchange program between the University of Rummidge and the State University of Euphoria. Set in fictional equivalents of San Francisco, California, and Birmingham, England, the story revolves around several prominent cultural oppositions involving British and American culture, the generation gap, men and women, and, ultimately, the age of the book and the age of film. Set in 1969, the novel embraces the height of the student protest movement in the United States and the beginning of a similar movement in Great Britain, the early days of the women’s liberation movement, and the end of the so-called golden age of academe, before the glut of Ph.D.’s changed the dynamics of being a university professor. In this highly charged atmosphere, the faculty exchange of Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow sets off a chain of complications that address most of the practical dilemmas of modern existence.

For Philip, the exchange means a spring semester in Plotinus, the university town across the bay from idyllic Esseph. The situation that greets him at Euphoric State, however, is in stark contrast to the image he had had of the easygoing city on the bay. Competitiveness seems to dominate every facet of life. From the social snobbery of cocktail parties, to the mysterious machinations of tenure committees, to the conflict between students and the authorities, to the bedroom, the urge to exceed dominates every aspect of American culture. This orientation toward conspicuous achievement is in direct contrast to the comfortable, stodgy dignity of Rummidge, and Philip is at first repelled but then attracted to this wide-open, fast-paced style of living. He has a one-night stand with Melanie Byrd, who turns out be Morris Zapp’s daughter by a previous marriage; he becomes involved in the student protest movements, and his arrest, by mistake, for stealing bricks for the “People’s Garden” elevates him to the status of folk hero; he eventually moves in and has an extended affair with Desiree Zapp, who is planning to divorce Morris. In short, Philip is swept along on a tide of excitement far surpassing anything conceivable at Rummidge, and while the semester at Euphoric State is unsettling, it is also invigorating, so much so that when the time to return to Great Britain rolls around, Philip thinks seriously of staying with Desiree.

Meanwhile, Morris Zapp, accustomed to the hustle and competition of American academic life, undergoes an awakening of his own at Rummidge. Morris finds himself in an alien world, a cold, damp place full of people whose seemingly impenetrable reserve promises to make his stay lonely indeed. Yet his paternal involvement with Mary Makepeace, an American who had come to Great Britain to have an abortion but changed her mind and decided to stay and have the baby, and his experience in dealing with student protests combine to break the accustomed English reserve and establish him in Philip Swallow’s household and in the English department at Rummidge. Morris arranges for Mary, who had been performing in a London striptease club, to act as a kind of live-in maid and baby-sitter for Hilary Swallow, a humanitarian act that surprises even Morris, for he is not known for kindness or selflessness. Thus, when the dozen refuse accidentally dumped from the toilet of a passing jetliner crashes through the roof of Morris’ flat, rendering it uninhabitable, Hilary is moved to reward his kindness by letting him move into her house until his flat is repaired. This move, then, sets the scene for an affair between Morris and Hilary.

In the meantime, at the university, the student revolt has erupted, and the somewhat balmy chairman of the English department, Gordon Masters, has gone completely berserk. He is carried off to an asylum, and Morris Zapp, the only member of the faculty with any experience in student protest, takes on the role of chief negotiator for the university. He is so successful in his role that the vice chancellor offers him the post of chairman on a permanent basis, and his installation as a fixture in the English department completes the parallels between Morris’ situation and Philip’s. The men have changed more than simply their places; they have exchanged lives. Morris, filling Philip’s place in the university, is ensconced in Philip’s house with Philip’s wife, while Philip has become Desiree’s lover and a surrogate parent for Morris and Desiree’s twin children. By the end of the semester’s exchange, neither man is at all certain that he wishes to return to his own home or job, and each wife is at least wondering if she is not better off with her new man. At the end of the novel, the two couples meet in New York in order to decide what to do.

The Characters

Morris Zapp, like all the rest of David Lodge’s characters in this novel, is a type. He is the quintessential American academic hotshot, who doubles as a typical male chauvinist. At work, Morris is a terror. The preeminent Jane Austen scholar, Morris’ one ambition is to write a series of commentaries on Jane Austen that will make all other efforts in the field useless. After Morris, no one will write any more books or articles about Austen, since Morris will have anticipated every possible contribution. Morris also wants to employ teams of graduate assistants to do a series of commentaries on every other author, until he has finally put a stop to literary criticism. This kind of grandiose ambition is typical of Morris, not only at the office but also in the bedroom, where his vigor and his desire to be the dominant male cause Desiree to complain that she “always felt like an engine on a test bed. Being, what do they call it, tested to destruction?”

Yet Morris is beset by his own success. Professionally, at age forty he has tasted all the meaningful accomplishments. On one level, he is justifiably satisfied with himself: “His needs were simple: a temperate climate, a good library, plenty of inviting ass around the place and enough money to keep him in cigars and liquor and to run a comfortable modern house and two cars.” His security begins to crumble, however, when he realizes that at forty he has gone about as far as he can expect to go, and when Desiree tires of her husband’s domineering personality and asks for a divorce, she adds a personal dimension to his nagging professional doubts. Lodge uses Morris to examine what happens to a man who has achieved a modern version of the American Dream.

Similarly, Philip Swallow is a type of the tweedy, pipe-smoking English lecturer. Slender, somewhat timid, and far from ambitious, Philip is Morris Zapp’s opposite, yet he is as much a product of the English academic system as Morris is of the American. Under the English system, he who performs well on four examinations—“at eleven-plus, sixteen-plus, eighteen-plus, and twenty-plus”—can secure an academic position in a system in which tenure is virtually automatic and in which publication and professional growth are not spurred on by any system of merit pay increases. Philip, as a result, has not completed a project since his master’s thesis (on Jane Austen, another parallel between him and Morris), and his greatest talent is as a composer of examination questions. Thus, the Englishman with all the questions is placed in opposition with the American who thinks that he has all the answers.

The same sort of opposition occurs in the female characters. Hilary Swallow is in the process of being totally swallowed up by her children and her husband. A graduate student in literature in her own right, she gave up her career when she became pregnant with her first child. Two children later, her only real ambition is to have central heating installed in her large, drafty Victorian house. Through simple neglect, she is overweight, plain, and almost depressingly moral. Desiree Zapp, in contrast, is attractive, sexy, quite intelligent, and extremely outspoken. Desiree is a natural for the emerging women’s liberation movement. Undomestic in the extreme, she is an effective opposite number for Hilary Swallow and an exciting sparring partner for Morris.

Taken together, these four character types carry the burden of Lodge’s comedy of manners. Desiree’s sexual openness, her American middle-class values, and her active intellect stimulate Philip. He becomes more confident and less tweedy, even giving up his pipe and putting on weight. He, in turn, softens her bitterness over her marriage to Morris, showing her that a man can be both masculine and gentle. Across the ocean, Morris’ acerbic bluntness meets Hilary’s reserved sense of propriety, and while Morris becomes kinder and less assertive, Hilary gains a renewed sense of her possibilities. Lodge uses these oppositions to build toward an affirmation of the golden mean; neither the British nor the American culture is totally right. Each has positive aspects that act to improve the other.

Critical Context

Winner of the Hawthornden and the Yorkshire Post Fiction prizes, Changing Places establishes David Lodge as both a comic satirist and a positivist social critic. The novel acts at once as a send-up of academic life in the United States and Great Britain and as a serious look at the texture and character of modern life.

Besides the aspects of comedy of manners noted above, Lodge exploits the generic possibilities of the novel to make an implicit statement about the evolution of English-speaking cultures from a book-centered culture to a film-centered culture. Lodge employs a range of genres, from straight narrative to epistolary novel to a montage of newspaper articles, but all leave something to be desired and all are discarded, ultimately, in favor of the screenplay, which Lodge uses to relate the details of the main characters’ summit conference in New York. Incorporating many of the aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s work on the visual media, Lodge exhibits the materially different ways in which different generations receive and process information and shows how those methods of perception work to produce materially different cultures.

Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow reappear in a sequel to Changing Places, Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), although not as the central characters. Set in 1979, a decade after its predecessor, Small World satirically sketches a much-changed academic scene (student protest has given way to semiotics) via the international literary conference circuit.

Bibliography

Feinstein, Elaine. “Getting Through,” in New Statesman. February 14, 1975, p. 216.

Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview, 1985.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. February 14, 1975, p. 157.