Deaf Sentence by David Lodge Read Free Book Online Page A

understand culture and society you have to be able to analyse their discourses.’ (Thus Professor Bates, giving his introductory pep talk to the first year, throwing in a reference to sex to capture the attention of even the most bored and sceptical student, the one with indifferent A-level grades who had really wanted to do Media Studies, which was oversubscribed, so had switched to Linguistics at the clearing stage of admissions.)
    He had not lost faith in the value of discourse analysis, and he still had original ideas for doing it from time to time, but the thought of putting them into a form acceptable to the academic profession, of obtaining data, or setting up an experiment, and reading all the relevant literature, and writing an article with footnotes and references acknowledging the work of other scholars in the same field, and then sending it off to the editors of journals, and waiting weeks for them to have it refereed, and then emending it in the light of the referees’ comments, and then sending it back and correcting the proofs and waiting months for it to appear in the journal - just thinking of all the effort that would be required to complete such a project generated a kind of proleptic mental fatigue so overwhelming that he invariably abandoned it before he had properly begun. An article of this kind would probably be read by only a few hundred people, if you were lucky, which was incentive enough if you cared what they thought of it, if it enhanced your standing in your peer group and contributed usefully to your Department’s RAE rating (as Head of Linguistics he had felt obliged to give a lead in this respect); but once you retired, the professional incentive melted away. Needless to say there was no economic incentive: academic journals did not pay their contributors, and even if you were fortunate enough to have the article reprinted in a book the permission fees were modest.There had been a time when he made a little extra money as a consultant, acting as an expert witness in cases that involved linguistic evidence - interpreting covertly recorded conversations, determining the authorship or authenticity of documents, and suchlike - and he had enjoyed this work as well as profited from it. But since a humiliating experience in court in the first year of his retirement, when he had difficulty hearing the questions put to him by his own side’s barrister in a thick Scottish accent, and the opposing QC seized the opportunity to question his competence to give an opinion on a recorded telephone conversation which was at the heart of the case - since that occasion, which still made him twitch and grimace when he recalled it, he had received very few offers of such work, and those he had declined for fear of repeating the experience. Apart from his pension, the only income he received was from the steadily declining royalties of a textbook, which he privately referred to as Discourse Analysis for Dummies , first published some twenty-five years ago.
    It was fortunate therefore that Winifred’s business began to be profitable at just about the time that he retired. A tax-free bond linked to the FTSE-100 index which her first husband had purchased in her name in some fit of generosity or remorse, or perhaps as a tax reduction device, matured and yielded a large lump sum which she used to start up an interior design and soft furnishings business with her Health Club friend Jakki, who had a diploma in textiles from Manchester Polytechnic, and some experience of spreadsheets and computerised accounting from working in the office of her husband’s Japanese car franchise before she divorced him (obtaining a generous settlement which provided her stake in the business). Winifred’s qualifications for the enterprise were more nebulous: one half of a Combined Honours degree in Art History, and an amateur enthusiasm for decorating and furnishing her own home, but in due course she showed an aptitude for retail