Doris Lessing and Postmodernism

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism
By Dr. Sue King-Smith

An earlier version of this series of essays was submitted as a thesis at La Trobe University in 2003. A version of Chapter 2 on The Golden Notebook entitled I am Anna Wulf: The Golden Notebook Revisited, Vol 34 LiNQ, November-December 2007. This version copyright Sue King-Smith 2003-2013. Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. Image: Doris Lessing at lit.cologne in 2006. Original by Elke Wetzig (square version above by Juan Pablo Arancibia Medina). Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
INTRODUCTION
Doris Lessing is one of the most significant writers of the last century. She has managed to articulate the social, cultural and political mood, particularly of the last fifty years, with a level of insight that is both confronting and refreshing. Her writing has always challenged conventional notions of form, narrative and theme, making it difficult for critics to categorise her as any particular kind of writer. It would undermine the complexity and breadth of her work to suggest that it is only postmodernist - or feminist, Marxist, Sufi, psychoanalytic or existentialist for that matter - although it can certainly be read from all of these perspectives. I would suggest that her most challenging and important texts are her non-realist texts, which share many concerns and stylistic elements with other texts that are considered to be postmodernist1. In order to demonstrate this, I will analyse three of her texts in detail in Chapter Two, The Golden Notebook (1985); in Chapter Three, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1972) and in Chapter Four, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1976). I have chosen to concentrate on these three novels as they are often cited as typical examples of Lessings non-realist period. All three undermine traditional notions of the novel. Each of these texts articulates in various ways, the concerns and central tenets of postmodern theorising by employing distinctly postmodernist literary structures and linguistic techniques. They are also postmodernist in terms of their themes and ideological/political concerns. The term postmodernist has many connotations and meanings so it is important before analysing these texts to distinguish between postmodernity as a historical period, postmodern theory and postmodernist representational practices. These distinctions and definitions will be explored in depth in Chapter One. A brief definition of postmodernist writing is, however, usefully introduced here. For the purposes of this thesis I will take postmodernist writer to mean someone who deliberately undermines narrative integrity, using various stylistic techniques, in order to disorient and challenge the reader. She is someone who foregrounds the fiction-making process and who includes both herself (as author) and the reader, as characters or players in the text. She raises questions about the nature of reality and challenges concepts such as truth, history and memory.
1
See also Appendix 1 for a summary of Lessings wider body of fiction in context
Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003
She focuses her attention on ontological questions rather than the epistemological questions typically asked by the Modernists2. Her texts are uncertain, self-reflexive and fragmented. The Golden Notebook, Briefing and Memoirs could all, under this definition, be described as postmodernist texts. In The Golden Notebook the relationship between the writer, narrator, characters and reader is constantly shifting. The text is made up of a series of related (but distinct) narratives or fragments layered one on top of another with no clear primary narrative. The identity of the main character, Anna, is shown to be, not fixed and unchanging but in a constant state of flux. Identity, and the concept of Self generally, are shown to be relational and relative rather than fixed. Annas primary task as both a writer and a person seems to be to deconstruct all universalistic truth claims or belief systems, revealing them to be contingent. Briefing is quite different to The Golden Notebook and employs quite distinct stylistic and thematic elements. Whilst the central issue of identity is similar to The Golden Notebook, Briefing uses layers of myth, allegory and metaphor to make its point. It questions the nature of reality by viewing it through the eyes of a man in a mental institution. It asks the questions: whose versions of reality are real?; what kind of language should be used to describe this reality?; and it challenges the distinction made between fiction and the real. Memoirs contains other quite different postmodernist elements. It is not as fragmented or chaotic as the other two texts and is of added interest because Lessing describes it as an autobiography. In Memoirs, Lessing deliberately challenges the delineation between fiction and history (as fact). It is a history that is set in th e future. It reads like a novel and contains various sequences that might be described as dreams, visions or hallucinations. However, these sequences are given the same claim on reality as the realist elements of the text. Lessing also imbues the world of Memoirs with a mood that is distinctly postmodern, depicting a society ravaged by hyper-capitalism, environmental degradation and socio-cultural collapse. Lessing has more often been analysed from Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, Sufi and Existentialist perspectives than from a postmodern perspective. Certainly the
2
McHale 1991: p.9-10
three texts being analysed in this thesis could easily be interpreted from non-postmodern perspectives3. The Golden Notebook, for example, is in part a study of the collapse of the communist party in Britain. Certainly a number of theorists have given powerful readings of her fiction as a critique of communist party politics. This novel also depicts the fragmentation of the female subject. By the end of the novel, Anna transcends patriarchal social structures and expectations of what it is to be a free woman in order to redefine her femaleness and freedom in her own terms. Indeed many feminist theorists see this book as heralding a new age for women. Some see it as one of the first novels to accurately depict the situation of women in the Western world. Lessing herself argues that at the time The Golden Notebook was written women were second-class citizens4. The novel is also about Annas descent into madness and her attempts to work through psychological barriers and blocks to her creativity, clearly inviting a psychoanalytic reading. From an Existentialist perspective the novel is also about Annas search for her true Self. To Lessing, Annas process of cracking up [is] a way of self -healing, of the inner selfs dismissing false dichotomies and divisions5. I believe that while these approaches are all useful, they are limited and do not offer adequate insight into the cultural significance of Lessings work. A postmodern reading of Lessings work enables us to delve more deeply into the complexities and intricacies of her unique perspective. Lessing herself suggests that none of the traditional readings of her books can adequately summarise the mood she is trying to capture, that they are all limited by their desire to fit the book into whatever ideology or critical model is of interest to them6. She says, for example, that the Womens Liberation Movement cannot accurately summarise or solve the problems of the age, not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through7. In fact, a central theme in Lessings work is her disillusionment with all-encompassing redemptive ideologies and their incapacity to elicit meaningful change. Paradoxically, Lessing is a politically committed writer highly suspicious of the inherent rightness of any political system. The three texts discussed in
3 4
See Appendix 1 for further discussion of this. Lessing 1985b: p. 8 5 Lessing 1985b: p.8 6 Lessing 1985b:p.21-2 7 Lessing 1985b: pg.8
this thesis meditate on the problem of how to continue to fight injustice without becoming implicated in a political model or movement that has the potential to be oppressive, and even violent, in pursuing its goals.8 Postmodern critical models open up a space for this kind of exploration, allowing multiple interpretations of texts to co-exist. Whilst a number of Lessings novels, as I will argue, articulate many of the central concerns of postmodernism, it is my contention that her version or view of postmodern culture and theory, is not celebratory but is, rather, diagnostic. Lessing describes a culture that is diseased and in the late stages of decay. Although she does celebrate the breakdown of some traditional social structures that have been oppressive to various groups in the global community, such as women, the working classes, ethnic and other colonised or marginalised groups, she does not celebrate the kind of indiscriminate relativism and perspectivism often associated with postmodernism. For Lessing, this relativism has resulted in an advanced form of capitalism being able to infiltrate all areas of social, cultural and political life. It has also lead to a disintegration of communitarian connection between people and a generalised feeling of apathy and powerlessness. This is the postmodernism or postmodern mood described in her texts. Lessing is interested in using postmodernist writing techniques to challenge conventional understandings of language, art and the novel form, and not simply as an exercise in aesthetic experimentation, but rather to depict the fragmentation and alienation she sees all around her. After an exhaustive exploration of many of the theoretical and ideological movements of the age, she abandons the solutions posed by materialists as incapable of providing an adequate reading of the age. Lessing does not celebrate the breakdown of society and the fracturing of subjectivity, but instead puts forward a model of a healthy society which is more about connection, unity, wholeness, community and living in harmony with nature. She looks, in part, to metaphysical solutions such as those offered by Sufism. Her response is also, according to theorists
Lessings experiences with the British Communist Party and their support for Stalin is certainly a factor in her wariness of such movements.
such as Patricia Waugh, a distinctly female response to postmodernism and a solution that has been postulated by many female postmodern writers of fiction9. Lessing can only be described as a postmodernist writer in as much as she describes the postmodern age. Ultimately, however, she condemns postmodern solutions to the problems of the age as being symptomatic rather than curative.
Waugh 1989: p. 206
CHAPTER 1 Postmodernism and Postmodernist Fiction

Before engaging directly with the texts, it is necessary to outline what is meant by the term postmodern and more importantly, how postmodernism manifests in its fictional form. Clearly a detailed analysis of postmodernism is beyond the scope of this thesis but I think it is necessary, especially in the case of Lessing, who engages with the tenets of postmodernism on various levels (cultural, political and the mood of the age), to at least outline the basic concerns of postmodernist theorists and thinkers. To define postmodernism is, however, highly problematic and any definition of postmodernism can only ever be thought of as provisional. As Doherty suggests, it is a futile and pointless exercise to offer any simple definition of the term itself; indeed much of the argument arises over the question of how the postmodern should be defined 10. Postmodernity as a historical period or mood is difficult to pin to a certain date. Many theoreticians link the onset of the postmodern age to Communist led demonstrations in France in 1968, which tried (and failed) to unite workers and intellectuals across Europe. This failure forced many members of the communist party to reassess their commitment to the tenets of Marxism11 and resulted in a fracturing of the Left in Europe. The culmination of many years of disillusionment after the horrors of Stalinist Russia, accompanied by the many betrayals of comrades who were leaving the communist party in their droves, and a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the proletariat to embrace the theories of Marxism, also contributed to the split within the Communist party. This crisis of faith led to a generalised wariness of all-encompassing redemptive theories and a proliferation of new Leftist ideologies. Lessing, as a long standing member of the Communist party, has clearly been heavily influenced by these events and theories and, most notably in The Golden Notebook, is trying to articulate a new understanding of the world given the perspectives offered by Western Marxists, Feminists and the emerging Environmentalist movements. Some commentators suggest that the shift from a modernist to postmodernist consciousness came earlier and that 1968 was simply a culmination of many events over several decades. Historical events falling between what is typically described as the
10 11
Doherty 1993: p. 1 Doherty 1993: p.4
modernist and postmodernist periods, such as World War II and Nazi Germany, the dropping of the Atom Bomb and the revelations regarding Stalin, had a huge impact on Western intellectuals. Milner talks about the militarisation of culture at this time, saying, Postmodernity has been underwritten throughout by the arms economy[It is] a militarism which knows no rational bounds, a militarism not directed towards victory but towards racial extinction.The postmodern effacement of history powerfully bespeaks the apocalyptic element in the post-war culture of the West12. Clearly the view of the West as civilised had been shattered. Socio-cultural trends such as the growth of consumer capitalism and the increased power of the mass media led to what Anthony Giddens describes as the commodification of all areas of life13. Post WWII also saw the shift into a post-industrial period where the economy was no longer reliant on industry and agriculture, but was based instead on the exchange of information and technology. This resulted in a kind of abstractification of work and generally increased levels of technocratic bureaucratisation. Together, these changes led to a re-evaluation of Western culture for many writers and theorists. Postmodernist writers, like Lessing, attempt to explore the ramifications, nuances and consequences of these events and trends in their writing. Many commentators saw the shift from modernity (as a historical period) into postmodernity as a positive one, as it enabled many previously marginalised groups to find a voice. As Fredric Jameson describes, it was a period when Third World People or the natives became human beings, and this internally as well as externally: those inner colonized of the First World minorities, marginals and women fully as much as its external subjects and official natives14. Others saw it as a decline. Toynbee, in his book A Study of History written in 1939, predicts what Patricia Waugh later describes as the onset of the postmodern age: [an age] dominated by anxiety, irrationalism and helplessness. In such a world, consciousness is adrift, unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason on which the ideals of modernity had been founded in the past. Consciousness itself is thus decentred; no longer
12 13
Milner 1991: p.109 Giddens 1992: p.11-12 14 Jameson 1992: p.128
an agent of action in the world, but a function through which impersonal forces pass and intersect.15 Toynbee predicts not only the theoretical manifestations of postmodernism, as will be discussed later, but also the psychologically destabilising effect such a decentring could potentially have on society generally. In fact, many commentators suggest that contemporary life is now characterised by a mood of alienation, fragmentation and schizophrenic dislocation16. Jeff Nuttall, in Bomb Culture, describes the mood of young people during this period as, troubled by anxiety over indefinable guilt,17 suggesting they were disillusioned by a society, that had lost its appetite for life and looked forward to the death it had contrived18. The nihilistic mood of this period has had a significant impact on both cultural theory and literature and it is a constant undercurrent in Lessings novels. The 1960s and 70s saw the emergence of a number of new theoretical systems that were, in part, born out of the uncertainty and chaos that ensued from the fracturing of the Left. Thomas Docherty suggests that during this period, the universalistic foundations of philosophy, and therefore theory, were under attack: Theory by which I here mean any critical practice which makes a philosophically foundational claim now enters into crisis itself. Not only has knowledge become uncertain, but more importantly the whole question of how to legitimise certain forms of knowledge and certain contents of knowledge is firmly on the agenda: no single satisfactory mode of epistemological legitimation is available.19 The grand narratives of history were now viewed as potentially oppressive. Waugh notes, Postmodernism tends to claim an abandonment of all metanarratives which could legitimate foundations for truth. And more than this, it claims that we neither need them, nor are they any longer desirable. We have witnessed the terror produced through instrumental modes of universal reason, the generalizing violence of the concept,
15 16
Waugh 1992: p.4 See Baudrillard and Jameson in Foster 1990: p.119 17 Nuttall 1970: p.11 18 Nuttall 1970: p.105-6 19 Doherty 1993: p.4-5
and that we no longer want truth and we do not even require the truth-effect.20 Contemporary theorists such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Richard Rorty, challenge the idea that ideals such as reality, truth and objectivity can be unequivocally and universally grounded, postulating instead that these concepts are highly contingent and contextualised. As a result, religious, philosophical and ideological grand narratives, including Science and Marxism, and their respective claims on reality and truth, come under fire as being essentialist and exclusionary. The world becomes a place of multiple perspectives, where (ideally) the voice of the marginalised, the excluded, the Other is allowed to speak, where one viewpoint isnt privileged over another and where multiple views of reality are allowed to co-exist. As Hal Foster summarises, postmodernism offers: a critique of Western representation(s) and modern supreme fictions; a desire to think in terms sensitive to difference (of others without opposition, of heterogeneity without hierarchy); a scepticism regarding autonomous spheres of culture or separate fields of experts; an imperative to go beyond formal filiations (of text to text) to trace social affiliations (the institutional density of the text in the world); in short, a will to grasp the present nexus of culture and politics and to affirm a practice resistant both to academic modernisms and political reaction.21 With this comes a kind of democratisation of culture, where high culture is no longer privileged over mass culture and where expert opinions are considered to be of equal value to the opinions of the average person. Postmodernist theorists also challenge the modernist conception of Selfhood, especially the belief that there can be such a thing as a unified autonomous Subject. Language and other sign systems, as mediators of reality, are also deconstructed and revealed to be shifting and unstable. The particular theory that helped demolish the idea that cultural signification unproblematically reflected reality, was Deconstruction. As Tong summarises: The deconstructionist approach takes a critical attitude to everything, including particular ideas or social injustices as well as the structures upon
20 21
Waugh 1992: p.4 Foster 1990: pg xiii
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which they are based, the language in which they are thought, and the systems in which they are safeguardedSo total is the anti-essentialism of the deconstructionist, that he or she questions two of the assumptions that almost everyone holds: that there is an essential unity of self through time and space termed self identity and that there is an essential relationship between language and reality termed truththe notion of truth is challenged by reference to the idea that language and reality are variable and shiftingWords do not stand for things, for pieces of reality. Reality, rather, eludes language, and language refuses to be pinned down or limited by reality.22 Derrida, a leading philosopher of Deconstruction, attacks the assumptions made by Saussure and the Structuralists who proposed a science of signs in which the meanings of words were believed to be relatively stable and able to be systematically categorised. He suggested instead that there is a meaning-creative gap between words and the reality/object/world they are attempting to depict, saying,the signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would only refer to itself 23. It is this gap between the signifier and the signified, and the constantly shifting relationship between language and reality that many post-modern writers, including Lessing, explore in their writing. Contemporary political debates and movements have significantly influenced postmodern theorising. As Docherty suggests: the salient fact is that aesthetic postmodernism is alwa ys intimately imbricated with the issue of political postmodernityAs a result of this legacy inherited from Frankfurt, the issue of the postmodern is also tangentially at least an issue of Marxism.24 Postmodern theory is in dialogue with the theories of Western Marxists - primarily the Frankfurt School - especially theorists such as Adorno, Gramsci, Habermas, Horkheimer, Lukacs and Marcuse.25 The debates of traditional Marxists and Western Marxists provide
22 23
Tong 1992: p. 219-20 Derrida 1991: p.63 24 Docherty 1993: p.3 25 Even amongst postmodern theorists there is much debate and many theoretical conclusions. Some Western Marxists such as Jurgen Habermas, for example, are concerned that the kind of relativism and perspectivism championed by postmodern theorists ultimately undermines liberating, non-oppressive truth claims.
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a powerful thematic undercurrent in Lessings writing. As she notes in the introduction to The Golden Notebook, in order to: give the ideological feel of our mid-century, it would have to be set among socialists and Marxists, because it has been inside the various chapters of socialism that the great debates of our time have gone on; the movements, the wars, the revolutions, have been seen by their participants as movements of various kinds of socialism, or Marxism, in advance, containment, or retreat26. Many of the ideas postulated by postmodern feminists such as Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray regarding ecriture feminine or womens writing and representational practices have contributed greatly to postmodern cultural theory and can certainly be applied to Lessings work. Whilst postmodern feminists are strongly influenced by theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, they have modified the ideas postulated by these theorists to articulate the situation of women.27 Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray are both particularly interested in Derri das notion of difference, described by Tong as the inevitable, meaning-creative gap between the object of perception and our perception of it28. For them, the feminine is to be found in this gap between language and reality. Postmodern feminists try to reconceive a feminine voice but suggest that this is difficult given that the only tools available are part of the Symbolic realm - language and logical thought - and thus intrinsically phallocentric29. Lessing is also faced with this challenge and explores it in depth in The Golden Notebook and at the end of The Memoirs of a Survivor
Postmodern writing is certainly influenced by the mood and historical events described above. Marguerite Alexander suggests that a definition of postmodernist literature could
26 27
Lessing 1985b: p.11 Julia Kristeva adopts the Lacanian model using Lacans framework for describing the pre -oedipal developmental stage which she renames the semiotic. For Kristeva, the semiotic is similar to the feminine in as much as it is repressed and marginalised. As a result it is implicitly Other and therefore potentially subversive as it deconstructs the binary oppositions that are fundamental to the struc tures of symbolic language. Unlike Lacan, Kristeva does not believe that the semiotic is completely repressed, but occasionally ruptures the Symbolic order (the realm of language and rationality), creating temporary chaos, which subverts the Symbolic order. (Kristeva 1980b: p.167 & Tong 1992: p.219-223) 28 Tong 1992: p.223 29 Cixous 1980: p.92-3 & Irigaray 1980: p.104
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be that it combine[s] formal experimentation with a radical political position30 and goes on to comment that consideration[s] of form in postmodernist fiction can never be separated from those of theme or subject matter31. Thus the mood of the age, historical events and the theoretical discourses associated with postmodernist theorising form the thematic material for postmodernist writing. Aesthetically, postmodernist representational forms cannot be separated from these themes. These descriptions of postmodernist themes and aesthetic practices are evident in much postmodernist literature including classic postmodernist texts such as William Burroughs The Naked Lunch (1959), Vladamir Nabakovs Naked Fire (1962), Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow (1973) and Angela Carters The Passion of a New Eve (1977). Postmodernist writers borrowed from and expanded on early twentieth century Avant Garde artistic traditions, which were based on an explicit denunciation of arts claim to autonomy or social transcendence32. Avant Garde artists and writers (such as the Surrealists), like postmodernist writers, viewed art as a means to rupture, undermine and deconstruct realist modes of representation, which they viewed as oppressive, limiting and essentialist. This manifests in the form of anti-mimetic writing techniques and methods of representation, where the writer deliberately disrupts and parodies standard realist narrative structures. As Danziger summarises, postmodernist literature is characterised by: Fragmentation, duplication, startling juxtapositions, alternate versions of characters and events, deviations from established norms - and ultimately, violent confrontation [which] can all be interpreted as the natural consequences of decreased confidence in the ability of storytelling to convey meaning.33 Postmodernist representational practices foreground the unstable relationship between the reader, writer and characters, and highlight the blurred boundaries betwe en fictional and real worlds. Waugh suggests that postmodernist writers, [refuse] to
30 31
Alexander 1990: p.9 Alexander 1990: p.17 32 Baker 2000: p.47 33 Danziger 1996: p.1
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separate, absolutely, a domain of the real from a domain of the represented34. Brian McHale, one of the leading commentators on postmodernist literature, notes that postmodernist writing is simultaneously anti-mimetic and mimetic. He suggests that postmodernist fiction is anti-mimetic in that it doesnt depict the world in realist terms as logical, rational and progressive - but that it is mimetic in the sense that contemporary society is characterised by pluralism, discontinuity, alienation and fragmentation. He says: postmodernist fiction turns out to be mimetic after all, but this imitation of reality is accomplished not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of formwhat postmodernist fiction imitates, the object of its mimesis, is the pluralistic and anarchistic ontological landscape of advanced industrial culturesone of the features of this ontological landscape is its permeation by secondary realities, especially mass-media fictions, and one of the most typical experiences of members of this culture is that of the transition from one of these fictional worlds to the paramount reality of everyday life, or from paramount reality to fiction.35 A feature of postmodernist writing is that it often depicts multiple versions of the same reality or many layers of reality. Secondary realities, such as films, television, music, fictional stories within the primary narrative, also proliferate in these texts and act to either undermine or mirror the primary narrative. Lessing uses these techniques repeatedly in her work, especially in The Golden Notebook and The Memoirs of a Survivor. There are some crossovers between modernist and postmodernist literature. Texts such as Franz Kafkas Metamorphosis (1916) and In the Penal Settlement (1919), James Joyces Ulysses (1922) and Samuel Becketts Malloy (1950), are all examples of fiction that are usually seen as modernist but could just as easily be interpreted as precursors to postmodernist literature. Whilst acknowledging these exceptions, there is a general consensus that there has been a change of consciousness, theme and style from modernist to postmodernist literature. One of the most persuasive descriptions of the shift between modernist and postmodernist representational practices comes from Doherty and McHale.
34 35
Waugh 1989: p.3 McHale 1991: p.38
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Doherty usefully summarises this shift in focus as being a shift from the epistemological to the ontological: The shock of the new shocks its audience or spectator out of the forms of Identity and into the anxieties of alterity and heterogeneity, into the perception of a world and subject of consciousness which is always radically Other. The rationale behind the project of the avant-garde, therefore is the refusal of gnosis and its replacement with praxis a shift from epistemology to ontology.36 McHale states that modernist fiction highlights questions such as, What is there to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it and with what degree of certainty?; How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower?; What are the limits of knowledge? And so on.37 He goes on to argue that postmodernist writing is primarily ontological: the dominant in postmodernist fiction is ontological. That is, postmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions likeWhich world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?Other typical postmodernist questions bear either on the ontology of the literary text itself or on the ontology of the world which it projects, for instance: What is a world?; What kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ?; What happens when different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?; What is the mode of existence in a text, and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?; How is a projected world structured? And so on.38 This is not to assume that all aspects of postmodernist writing are ontological. Ontological concerns, however, predominate in postmodernist texts and are foregrounded more strongly than epistemological concerns. Certainly in the analysis of Lessings texts, it is clear that they raise both ontological and epistemological questions, but I would argue that the emphasis is on the former rather than the latter. When reading texts that have been classified as postmodernist, one thing that is almost immediately noticeable is the experimentation with narrative structure.
36 37
Doherty 1993: p.16 McHale 1991: p.9 38 McHale 1991: p.10
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Postmodernist texts tend to be bi-directional and reversible rather than linear and unidirectional,39 polyphonic and stratified rather than monolithic, ambiguous rather than certain. Postmodernist literature plays with narrative structure to create modes of representation that defy realist forms of categorisation. This is done in various ways but with the same result the reader is left feeling disoriented and unsure about the reality they are engaging with in the text. Postmodernism, as it is inflected through feminist consciousness, also questions traditional paradigms regarding literature, adding the issue of gender to the larger ontological questions. Postmodern feminists suggest that womens writing and language are distinct and must somehow articulate the female body. As Cixous describes: Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reservediscourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word silence40 Cixous uses the term ecriture feminine to describe her ideal of womens writing41. Irigaray suggests that feminine forms of representation are like reality as reflected in a curved mirror, which distorts and disrupts phallologocentric versions/reflections of reality42. For her, womens language should emphasise fluidity, plurality and multiplicity and she suggests that the female writers language goes off in all directions in which he is unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Contradictory words seem a little crazy to the logic of reason, and inaudible for him who listens with ready made grids, a code prepared in advance43. These feminists all have different ideas about womens writing but there seems to be some consensus between them that womens writing potentially ruptures male representational forms in a number of ways, including an emphasis on: the sensorial 39 40
McHale 1991: p.11 Cixous 1976: p.229 41 Whilst Cixous says that it is impossible to define a feminine practice of writingfor this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded (Cixous in Morris p.119) Cixous own writing might give us some understanding regarding what she means by this. She usually writes in the first person, present tense to create a sense of immediacy and embodied-ness. She plays with meaning, syntax and sound, using highly metaphoric and joyous language (Morris 1988: p.121). 42 Irigaray 1980: 104-5 43 Irigaray in Greene 1985: p.84
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sound, colour, rhythm; on the abject (or marginalised) themes of madness, the maternal and female sexuality, and; the breakdown of syntactical and grammatical conventions. Womens writing also attempts to articulate a sense of time that is cyclic (repetitive) and monumental (eternal) and which mimics the temporal rhythms of the womb (or the semiotic)44. Much of Lessings work employs the kinds of literary techniques described by these postmodern feminist theorists. Postmodern and postmodern feminist reading of Lessings work are both relevant and reveal powerful undercurrents in her texts that are often overlooked. Her texts are multi-layered and fragmented and challenge conventional narrative forms in a number of distinctly postmodern ways.
44
Tong 1992: p.231
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CHAPTER 2 The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook is a powerful and challenging novel that employs many of the postmodernist literary techniques discussed in the previous chapter. It is also a very political novel demanding that the reader confronts a number of the ideological and sociological debates of the 1950s, many of which have profound resonances within postmodern cultural debates. It is often considered one of her greatest works because of the, immensity of its conception, its formal intricacy, the inclusivity of its concerns, its historical accuracy, the intellectual capacity of its protagonist, and above all the fact that the entire book asserts that the filter which is a womans way of looking at the world has the same validity as the filter which is a mans way45. On its publication in 1960, The Golden Notebook received much critical attention, not all of it good. Many critics didnt understand the unconventional form of the book, its strange and often contradictory messages regarding society and the nature of subjectivity, and its fragmented and apparently chaotic style. Women, however, saw it as one of the first books to genuinely articulate the female experience. Although The Golden Notebook can, and has been, interpreted from various perspectives feminist, socialist, psychoanalytic, amongst others it is a great example of postmodern writing, both thematically and in terms of the literary techniques it employs. The structure of the novel itself challenges many of the conventions of the realist novel. It is framed by a novella, written primarily about its main protagonist, Anna Wulf, and her friend Molly. There are five instalments of this novella, titled Free Women, throughout the novel, interspersed by a series of notebooks written by Anna. The Black Notebook is a record of various aspects of Annas bestselling first novel, Frontiers Of War - the raw material, financial transactions and critical commentaries. The Red Notebook documents Annas involvement with the British Communist party and her various political activities. The Yellow Notebook is a romantic novel called The Shadow Of The Third, written by Anna in which the life of the protagonist, Ella, very much mirrors aspects of Annas own life. The Blue Notebook, a journal and Annas attempt at a factual, objective account of her life, explores her ideas regarding art and
45
Pickering 1990: p.3
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writing, and their relationship to concepts such as truth and reality. All of these notebooks represent different aspects of Annas life which she separates out in an attempt to understand herself and the apparent chaos of her life, and more practically, to overcome writers block. As Lessing notes in the books preface, Anna keeps four notebooks, and not one because, as she recognises, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness of breakdown46. Martens suggests that the split diary works on four different levels: 1) it mirrors Annas split personality; 2) it reveals the universal condition of partial perception; 3) it shows the failure of language by example; and 4) the Inner Golden Notebook establishes the theme of unity, effaces point of viewand achieves the ideal of transubjectivity 47. Eventually the various notebooks collapse into each other and into the Inner Golden Notebook, where Anna merges with another writer and her lover, Saul. Here, everything fragments and breaks down into chaos. Anna eventually emerges from this in the final instalment, in Free Women, both more integrated and more accepting of the incongruities and fractured nature of existence. The Golden Notebook can be read as postmodernist in various ways. For the purposes of clarity I have chosen to first analyse the structure and literary techniques of the text, and secondly analyse the themes, although it will become clear that there is much overlap between structure and theme.
The structure of The Golden Notebook challenges traditional understandings of narrative progression and form. Lessing suggests that the structure of The Golden Notebook should be read as an integral part of the text, saying she hoped that, if the book were shaped in the right way it would make its own comment about the conventional novel and that the form of the novel was another way of describing the dissatisfaction of the writer when something is finished: How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped 48.
46 47
Lessing 1985b: pg.7 Martens as quoted in Cheng 1999: pg. 92 48 Lessing 1985b: p.14
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The notebooks draw on materials and writings from various genres and literary forms including newspaper clippings, communist party propaganda, short stories, literary criticism, reviews and journalistic pieces, making it at times a kind of literary collage. As Sprague notes, Hybrid is the perfect word for The Golden Notebook, a novel which speaks satirically, nostalgically, angrily, self-pityingly, self mockingly in multiple genres49 It is a multi-layered and complex text, with several levels of narrative coexisting within the same novelistic space. Often the reader finds him/herself reading a story within a story within the primary text itself50. As Lightfoot describes: In The Golden Notebook we see the novelist writing a novel (Doris Lessing on Anna Wulf) about a novelist writing two novels (Anna on Ella and Free Women). These two novels respectivel y are about a novelist writing a novel and about a novelist not writing a novel.51 McHale suggests that it is quite common within postmodernist novels to have several layers of narrative co-habiting within the text. Often the primary and secondary (or other) layers of narrative become entangled or cross established boundaries. This technique acts to deliberately undermine the structural integrity of the text and disorient the reader.52 This happens repeatedly in The Golden Notebook. In the first instalment of the Yellow Notebook, we are privy to forty pages of Annas novel, The Shadow Of The Third, and quickly establish a strong empathy with the characters, until Anna (as both the writer of The Shadow Of The Third and narrator of The Golden Notebook) enters the text to give a critical analysis of The Shadow Of The Third. At first this is an academic, psychoanalytic reading of the text but soon Anna reveals that the many parallels between her life and Ellas (which in reading The Shadow Of The Third are disconcerting enough)
49 50
Sprague 1994: p.10 McHale uses the term mise-en-abyme which he borrows from Andre Gide, to describe this literary technique. He says, A true mise-en-abyme is determined by three criteria: first, it is a nested or embedded representation, occupying a narrative level inferior to that of the primary, diegetic narrative world; secondly, this nested representation resemblessomething at the level of the primary, diegetic world; and thirdly, this something that it resembles must constitute some salient and continuous aspect of the prim ary world, salient and continuous enough that we are willing to say the nested representation reproduces or duplicates the primary representation as a whole Mise-en-abyme is one of the most potent devices in the postmodernist repertoire for foregrounding t he ontological dimension of recursive structures. (his italics) McHale 1991: p.124 51 Lightfoot as quoted in Fahim 1994: p.80 52 McHale 1991: p.115
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are not merely coincidental but that Ella is actually her, Anna, and that she is actually attempting to analyse herself as if she were an objective bystander to her life53. The boundaries between the two narrative levels are thus breached (and are repeatedly breached throughout the text) making it difficult for the reader to distinguish levels of reality. This is further reinforced by Anna acknowledging that she is always turning everything into fiction54 which undercuts our ability to trust in the reality described in the text and forces the reader to question whether anything we read is the truth. Alexander summarises this, saying: The Golden Notebook may be described as postmodernist in terms of the kind of relationship it establishes with the reader, requiring constant adjustments in the way it must be read. Meanings are displaced as the narrative voice moves from one mode to another (in addition to Free Women, there are other fictions and purportedly factual accounts which are organized like fiction, within the Notebooks), sometimes without a firm line being drawn between the fiction and, within the terms of the novel, the real. Moreover the many distortions of experiencemay be taken as a criticism of realism, in line with orthodox post-modernist thinking on the subject.55 Another writing technique that is commonly used by postmodern writers to undermine linearity and narrative progression, is erasure. Erasure, or sous rature as it is termed by Derrida56, is where a fictional world, scene, object, concept, word or person is constructed, then deconstructed or erased. Several times in The Golden Notebook text is written then erased by Anna. This happens in the Blue Notebook when Anna decides to describe a day in her life as objectively as possible. Thirty three pages and a day later, an omniscient narrator (presumably Anna) notes in the journal, The whole of the above was scored through cancelled out and scribbled underneath: No it didnt come off. A failure as usual57. This is followed by a small paragraph that summarises these thirty-three pages in a businesslike journal entry tone. She does this again later in the Yellow
53 54
Lessing 1985b: p.212-216 Lessing 1985b: p. 232 55 Alexander 1990: p.93 56 Derrida as quoted in McHale 1991: p.100. McHale summarises Derrida suggesting that Derrida uses erasure in order to, remind us that that certain key concepts in western metaphysics such asexistence and objecthood continue to be indispensable to philosophic discourse even though that same discourse demonstrates their illegitimacy. They both cannot be admitted, yet cannot be excluded. 57 Lessing 1985b: p.360
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Notebook. Anna describes a story that is inside Ella but follows it with the comment, Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that writing it might make it come true. 58 In both of these instances Anna is asking the reader to erase from their memory what they have just read and to accept a new version of events. Obviously it is impossible to forget what we have just read, thus the technique has the simultaneous effect of excluding and including the erased text. McHale describes this bifurcation as violating sequentiality by realizing two mutually exclusive lines of narrative development at the same time59 He suggests that the ontological peculiarity of a world in which events both do and dont happen displaces the truth/falsity dichotomy resulting in a kind of ontological flickering between the various realities60. Erasure also acts to foreground the relationship between author, reader and narrator. The narrator momentarily draws the reader into the text by giving direct instructions as to how they should respond to a particular passage. This happens repeatedly in The Golden Notebook where an omniscient narrator, on a narrative level higher than Anna (who is the primary narrator of the text) intrudes into the text and tells us that, for example, [At this point Anna had drawn a heavy black line across the page.]61. This omniscient narrator also makes various other comments on the text, leading us to wonder, is this the voice of the author? Is she intruding into the text? If not, then who is it? This is quite disconcerting. The same technique is repeated later in the Yellow Notebook when Ella, (the narrator of this novel/notebook) a creation of Anna, writes a set of stories that prefigure Annas break-up with Saul, making us wonder, as Greene suggests, if Ella is writing Anna, is she authoring her author?62. This technique undermines conventional notions of the novel, whereby the reader reads what the author has written and the author writes through either the voice of a single or various clearly labelled and defined narrators/protagonists. In a traditional novel the expectation is that all of the players (the writer, reader and characters) maintain this relationship. In The Golden Notebook, the levels of reality are deliberately confused, readers enter the text (as if they are characters), as does the author. Likewise, the narrator moves in and out
58 59
Lessing 1985b: p.448 McHale 1991: p.108 60 McHale 1991: p.106 61 Lessing 1985b: p.465 62 Greene 1990: p.113
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of narrative levels. As Barthes suggests, this kind of postmodern literary structure acknowledges the problems with (and challenges) traditional understandings of a texts origin and reception63. Literary techniques such as the layering of narrative fragments, using various genres and erasure, result in a text that is multilayered and cyclical 64 rather than linear and progressive. The time periods depicted in the book are constantly shifting, a technique that is very disorienting. The various notebooks offer different, often contradictory, perspectives on the characters in the book. All of this results in what McHale describes as a hesitant text, a text which is unwilling to reach conclusions or offer a fixed version of reality. It also undermines the readers ability and desire to interpret the text in a traditional way.
Thematically the novel works on many levels. As Greene suggests, the central question posed by The Golden Notebook is, how [do we] oppose a system by means of linguistic and literary conventions that have been forged by that system65. It asks the questions how can literature be truthful; how can writing accommodate experience; how can language still communicate when the world is turned upside down66. One of the most striking elements of The Golden Notebook is the fragmentation of Annas character. The four notebooks can be understood as different aspects of her split personality and often depict contradictory versions of her character and the characters of others. Anna talks about her various Selves or the different Annas and often describes herself in the third person. At one point while talking to Molly, Anna thinks, I wonder what Im going to say? And who the person is who will say it? How odd, to sit here,
63
Barthes suggests that the relationship between the author, reader and narrator is primary, stating that, a texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination (Barthes 1977: p. 148) an idea which is echoed in Lessings preface where she comments on, how odd it is to have, as author, such a clear picture of a book, that is seen so differently by its readers. She acknowledges that the importance of the readers input and interpretation is vital to ensure that a book is alive and potent and fructifying (Lessing 1 985b: p.22) 64 The Golden Notebook is a self-begetting novel. The final lines of the text are also the openning lines. At the end of the novel, Saul gives Anna what become the first lines of The Golden Notebook. 65 Greene 1997: p.106 66 Cheng 1999: p.80. Danziger also suggests that, [The Golden Notebooks] explicit subject is the play of overlapping paradigms: both its form and content are resolute attempts to come to terms with multiplicity and fragmentation (Danziger 1996: p.46)
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waiting to hear what one will say67. This is a kind of ontological questioning of subjectivity. Instead of asking, Who am I? a question which may belong to a modernist interrogation of the Subject, Anna asks, Which Self is this? implying multiple versions of the Self, none of which is necessarily a true Self. Michael notes that, In contrast [to modernism] Postmodernism posits a centerless, dispersed subject who is literally a composite of various socially and culturally constructed roles or positions - not perspectives that can be reconciled68. Later Anna tries to summon up younger stronger Annas, the schoolgirl in London and the daughter of my father, but I could only see these Annas as apart from me69
70
. This sense of dislocation from the Self, of
schizophrenic alienation, is typical of a postmodernist understanding of the Subject. Saul, Annas lover in the Inner Golden Notebook, is actually schizophrenic. His sense of time is completely distorted71, his loss of an integrated identity is reflected in his speech, which Anna describes as, jumbling phrases, jargon, disconnected remarks72and his constant I I I I73 diatribes in which he enters into a state of selfobsessed individualism. In the Inner Golden Notebook, the distinction between Self and Other is completely dissolved as Anna and Saul merge into one another. Anna is living inside [her and Sauls combined] madness. As Lessing comments in the preface to The Golden Notebook Anna and Saul: break down into each other, into other people, break through the false patterns they have made of their pasts, the patterns and formulas they have made to shore themselves and each other, dissolve. They hear each others thoughts, recognise each other in themselves.74 Anna says, I wondered when we began to talk, which two people would be talking75. By this stage in the text both exist in a state where their multiple Selves have merged and are indistinguishable from one another. The conclusion Anna seems to reach is that the
67 68
Lessing 1985b: p.497 see also p. 345 Michael 1994: p.40 69 Lessing 1985b: p.571-2 70 As Michael notes, There is no essential Anna in The Golden Notebook; instead the novel offers many versions of Anna on several narrative levels( Michael 1994: p. 47) 71 Lessing 1985b: p.554 72 Lessing 1985b: p. 570 73 Lessing 1985b: p. 560 & 568 74 Lessing 1985b: p. 7 75 Lessing 1985b: p.600
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Self is a multidimensional, chaotic and constantly changing entity, which is, as Danziger suggests, how Anna likes it: Although she [Anna] proceeds to examine her life in contrasting genres and from separate perspectives or paradigms, there is no overview to fit the pieces into some workable metasystem. The point is that Anna likes it this way. Wholeness is foreign to her experience and she has no intention of imposing a phoney, complacent coherence upon her separate personal texts.76 Towards the end Anna concludes that, I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the number of alternate viewpoints I can focus on the present77. The Golden Notebook not only questions the belief in an integrated, fixed Self but also challenges all truth claims, questioning the idea that grand narratives such as Communism and Science, have a unique claim on truth. The text particularly undermines the notion that concepts such as truth, memory and history can be viewed as being in any way objective. At a certain point in the Blue Notebook Anna decides that the only way she can really capture the truth of her life is by describing a single day in detail as a list of objectively recorded events. After this experiment she notes that: The Blue Notebook, which I had expected to be the most truthful of the notebooks, is worse than any of them. I expected a terse record of facts to present some sort of a pattern when I read over it, but this sort of record is as false as the account of what happened on 15th September, 1954, which I read now embarrassed because of its emotionalismthis would be more real if I wrote what I thought78. She quickly realises that her desire for truth is frustrated by the unreliability of memory and language79. Earlier, Anna comments while looking back on her time in Africa in her early twenties (the subject matter for her novel, Frontiers Of War) that she is, appalled at how much I didnt notice, living inside the subjective highly-coloured mist. How do I know what I remember was important? What I remember was chosen by
76 77
Danziger 1996: p.47 Lessing 1985b: p.623 78 Lessing 1985b: p.455 79 Draine 1983: p.73
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Anna of twenty years ago. I dont know what this Anna of now would choose80. One of her earlier lovers, Michael, says that, this is a time when it is impossible to know the truth about anything81. When describing her history Anna says, the material of [my] past has been ordered by me to fit what I know, and that was why it was false82 The postmodernist contention is that grand narratives of any variety are totalising and lead to the oppression and marginalisation of the other, or groups outside dominant hegemonies or cultural elites. As a consequence of the disasters of Nazism, Communism, colonialism and their respective claims to righteousness, postmodernists are highly suspicious of totalising truths and the claims of any ideological group or individual regarding the superiority of certain traits, values or belief systems. They also apply this critique to modernist conceptions of art, as does Lessing. The four notebooks critique and undermine various grand narratives. As Danziger notes: One by one she [Anna] divests herself of the patterns that had allowed her to make sense of the world: the romantic idealism of her African experiences, her Marxist politics, psychoanalysis, her sexual needs, and her presuppositions about the value of traditional realistic fiction.83 The Black Notebook documents the many contradictions and problems within the Communist Party in Britain, of which Anna has been a member for some time. It is also critical of its utopian vision for the future. This is particularly powerfully portrayed when party members begin to understand the horrors being perpetrated in Russia under Stalin in the name of communism. After many years of seeing Russia as an example of an ideal in practice, the reality is both shocking and results in a generalised suspicion of grand redemptive ideals of any kind. The ideal of love is also constantly evaluated in The Golden Notebook. At the end of her five year relationship with Michael, Anna asks, But at least it has been a great love affair? He then: Ah, Anna, you make up stories about life and tell them to yourself, and you dont know what is true and what isnt. And so we havent had a great
80 81
Lessing 1985b: p.148 Lessing 1985b: p.301 82 Lessing 1985b: p.620 83 Danziger 1996: p.63
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love affair?84. Psychoanalysis is also undermined as, traditional, rooted, conservative, in spite of its scandalous familiarity with everything amoral85. For some time Anna sees a psychoanalyst - Mrs. Marks, or Mother Sugar, as Anna and Molly call her. Mother Sugar sums up the psychoanalytic view of art as being purely about form: People dont mind immoral messages. They dont mind art that says murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sexs sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love. What they cant stand is to be told that it all doesnt matter, they cant stand formlessness.86 For Anna, her life is about giving in to chaos and formlessness and the concept of a whole integrated Self is undesirable and limiting87 as is the concept of art/writing as permanent and lasting. When Mother Sugar says that, the artist has a sacred trust Anna laughs and says, Doesnt it strike you as funny art is sacred, majestic chord in C Major?88 Here she undermines the concept of universal value and meaning through the use of parody89. The Golden Notebook also challenges the notion that language has the capacity to contain reality. As Annas personality starts to fragment, so too does her belief in languages ability to convey meaning.90 She says: I am in a mood that gets more and more familiar: words lose their meaning suddenly. I find myself listening to a sentence, a phrase, a group of words, as if they were a foreign language - the gap between what they are supposed to mean, and what in fact they say seems unbridgeable.91
84 85
Lessing 1985b: p.327 Lessing 1985b: p.26 86 Lessing 1985b: p.461 87 Lessing 1985b: p.456 88 Lessing 1985b: p.456 89 McHale suggests that postmodernist writers often use parody as a means of undermining serious truth claims. (McHale 1991: p.145) 90 This theme recurs repeatedly in The Golden Notebook. As Green notes, When Anna can accept that there is no reality apart from the mind that perceives it and the words that shape it, she can accept that none of the versions [of herself as found in the notebooks] is true or all are true, or truth itself is a fiction, invented rather than discovered. It is this that gives her the power of renaming. New possibilities incur ontological instability, and as Annas role becomes more creative, we cannot always tell what is real and what is created. (Greene 1997: p.113) 91 Lessing 1985b: p.299
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This is an idea that echoes Derridas arguments that there is a meaning-creative gap between words (as signifiers) and the reality/objects they are trying to depict. Later Anna comments on a story by a comrade. At first she believes it to be written ironically, then she thinks it is parodic, but eventually realises that it is in fact serious. She comments that, It seems to me this fact is another expression of the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience92. Not only is she commenting here on the fact that language no longer seems to have the capacity to reflect or capture reality but it is also a comment on the way grand narratives, such as Communism, lose meaning when the language they employ becomes jargonised. This also results in language becoming a kind of surface without depth. Anna eventually concludes that her writers block is a direct result of this loss of meaning. She says: I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experiencethe words dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I cant write any longer.93 Cheng links Annas description of language to a generalised postmodern mood, suggesting that, As the change of the world is paradigmatic, so the traditional dualistic, hierarchical basis of representation must be subverted. Consequently, language becomes misleading, doomed to confusion or self-contradiction. Language turns schizophrenic, self-alienating94. The mood of the age is a strong theme in The Golden Notebook. Draine describes this mood as a paralysing fear of the formlessness of the present, a despairing sense of emptiness and futilityThe postmodern sensibility is that of Anna Wulf95. In the final pages, Milt (a version of Saul) characterises the age by saying, the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is
92 93
Lessing 1985b: p.301 Lessing 1985b: p.462-3 94 Cheng 1999: p.85 95 Draine 1983: p.87
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greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream96. This is the kind of anxiety and nihilism that is often present in postmodern writing and is prominent throughout The Golden Notebook. Anna describes how the age she lives in differs from what has gone before, saying, They didnt feel as I do. How could they? I dont want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the crossbow. It isnt true. There is something new in the world97. She says that, the truth of our time was war, the immanence of war98. Although she has visions of, a life that isnt full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the day99, Annas perception of the age as one of unabating violence, fragmentation and anxiety also carries at times the implication that mental breakdown may be the only appropriate response to the condition of living in the twentieth century100. Despite the sense of fragmentation and chaos that dominates this text, The Golden Notebook has an underlying desire for unity and connectedness. As Lessing says in the preface: The way you deal with the problem of subjectivity, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a personal experienceinto something much larger; growing up is after all only the understanding that ones unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.101 Annas breakdown is described as a necessary precursor to her becoming whole again. The descriptions of her merging with Saul are a kind of recognition that her identity is not separate and distinct from those around her, but that other people feed into her identity and she into theirs. Throughout The Golden Notebook various characters, especially Anna, talk about unity and wholeness as desirable outcomes, with the suggestion being
96 97
Lessing 1985b: p.636 Lessing 1985b: p.459 98 Lessing 1985b: p.571 99 Lessing 1985b: p. 459 100 Alexander 1990: p.85 101 Lessing 1985b: p.13-4
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that chaos and the disintegration of the Self will ultimately result in a resurrection of sorts, of a relational Self that exists in a much more harmonious and connected state. Anna describes a dream that illustrates this: I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was incredibly beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the myths themselves, so that the soft fabric was glittering and aliveThen I look and it is like a vision time has gone and the whole history of manis present in what I see now, and it is a great soaring hymn of joy and triumph in which pain is a small and lively counterpoint. And I look and seethe bright different colours of the other parts of the worldThis was a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes I was suddenly standing in peace, in silence. Beneath me was silence.102 When she wakes up she says, so much of my life has been twisted and painful that now when happiness flood right through meI cant believe it. I say to myself: I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and Im happy103. Her experience in the dream connects her to the whole of humanity across all time. It is this sense of connection that allows her to feel genuine joy. This conception of the world contradicts the postmodernist belief that there is no unified Subject and no intrinsic meaning or truth. It does concur, however, with postmodern feminist notions of the Self. They understand subjectivity as being multifaceted, fluid and relational104. It is also very much in line with Sufi understandings of the world105.
102 103
Lessing 1985b: p.297-8. Lessing 1985b: p.298 104 See Waugh 1989: p.197-8 105 According to Fahim (1994), this dream image and the themes in The Golden Notebook generally, resonate with a distinctly Sufi understanding of the world. Sufism, a spiritual and philosophic belief system that has clearly influenced Lessing, suggests that it is necessary to look beyond the personal and material in order to become complete. As the Sufi prophet Idries Shah says, the complete Manis both a real individuality and also a part of the essential unity (Shah as quoted in Fahim 1994: p.15). Fahim also comments that in order to understand The Golden Notebook, the reader shouldsuspend the rational mode in order to perceive the underlying balance within the emerging mystical dimension which does not pertain to the laws of time and space. The ultimate effect does not aim at an experience of absolute aesthetic freedom from tangible reality [rather, the aim is] the transcendence of the one dimensional mode of experiencing reality (Fahim p.84)
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CHAPTER 3- Briefing For A Descent Into Hell

Briefing For A Descent Into Hell has often been overlooked by critics and tends to be seen as one of Lessings less important novels. It has been criticised as being inaccessible, alienating to readers and structurally flawed106. Alternatively it has been read simply as a fictional rendering of R.D. Laings theories, which viewed mental illness as a valid, even healthy, response to contemporary Western culture 107. Each of these interpretations of the text overlooks its complex and powerful critiques of the Western world. This book resonates on a number of different levels long after it has been set aside. It is important both as part of Lessings wider body of work and as an example of the ways in which she engages with postmodernism thematically and structurally. Briefing For A Descent Into Hell is similarities to The Golden Notebook in many ways. The central characters in both texts, Anna and Charles, experience a mental breakdown, the description of which is the focus of the respective narratives. In both, Lessing suggests that mental illness has the capacity to be redemptive and that madness is a normal response to contemporary life. Both employ literary structures that challenge the conventional linear structure of traditional novels. They use assorted narratives told through multiple documents108 that undermine the structural integrity of the text and confuse the reader as to which is the primary and which the secondary reality. As Pickering notes, in both Briefing and The Golden Notebook, this multi-layered structure parallels the meaning of the texts109. Subjectivity is also a major theme in both texts. Having noted the similarities, it is important to recognise that these two texts are significantly different in the ways they approach their fictional worlds. Whilst the many narrative layers in The Golden Notebook are fractured and act to dislocate the reader, they are still primarily realist in that they are grounded in the real world. Briefing For A Descent Into Hell, however, draws on the realm of myth, legend and other worldly perspectives, crossing into science/speculative fiction. In doing this, Briefing also foregrounds ontological issues such as which world is this? and what is a world?110
106 107
Leonard 1986: p.204 & Draine 1983: p.89 Tiger 1986: p.88 108 Pickering 1990: p.125 109 Pickering 1990: p.127 110 McHale1991: p.10
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Both Pickering and Draine suggest that the concept of madness is dealt with differently in the two texts. Pickering suggests that, unlike Anna, Charles madness is less of a retreat than a quest111 whilst Draine notes that The Golden Notebook is still about individual personal consciousness in relation to the collective, but that in Briefing: Lessing materially alters her technique and fundamentally shifts the situation of her theme. In Briefing, the theme of the woeful limitations of human consciousness is no longer a question of individual character or even social consciousness; it is instead a metaphysical question a matter of the relation of humanity to laws of the universe that simply (and radically) transcend individual personal existence.112 Briefing can be described as a postmodern text in that it employs narrative structures and raises questions central to postmodernism, even though some of the conclusions reached within the text contradict those reached by postmodernist theorists. Before developing these ideas and themes further, it is important to explore the ways in which Briefing makes use of a postmodern poetics. Briefing For A Descent Into Hell tells the story of the mental breakdown, or journey towards awakening or remembering, of Charles Watkins, a classics professor. It opens at the Central Intake Hospital, where Charles has just been admitted, his identity as yet unknown. By the second page the narrative has switched to what we presume to be Charles internal reality where he is a sailor, Charlie, drifting on the sea on a small craft, obviously having been adrift for a long period of time. For the next forty pages the text swaps between the notes of Dr. X and Dr. Y at the hospital and Charles mythic journey on the ocean as a kind of archetypal sailor Odysseus, Jason, Sinbad, Jonah, The Ancient Mariner are all either directly referred or alluded to113 - who has lost his sailing companions. He then lands in a kind of Eden114, an untouched, pure place where he discovers the ruins of an old city and waits for the Disk to come (a kind of alien entity from which he has access to a higher reality). Eventually the city is overrun by ratdogs
111 112
Pickering 1990: p.126 Draine 1983: p.108 - If this observation is correct, then it would seem to be in conflict with the belief of many postmodernist theorists that there is no higher or universal reality. This will be discussed further later in the chapter. 113 See Lessing 1972: p.14, 20, 29. 114 Lessing 1972: p.40-1
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and apes who war with each other in a kind of replication of the Fall 115. The contrast between the two narratives in this first section is startling. Charles inner world is mythical and alive compared to the realm of the hospital, which is stark, anonymous, rational and monochromatic (signified by the generic names of the hospital and doctors). At first we assume that the hospital narrative is primary and replicates the real world whilst Charles inner world is secondary and hallucinatory. At a certain point, however, Charles narrative seems to usurp the hospital narrative as Charles draws us into his world, and this secondary narrative becomes primary. This change, prompt[s] the reader to reverse his [her] previous account of the relation of the narrative levels as the reader forms an attachment to the realm of the city, subverting the realistic framework of the hospital116. Lessing uses this technique throughout the text117. Every time she introduces a new narrative sequence, she undermines the truth value of the sequence. This undermines the readers faith in the text and stops them from establishing any handle on the reality of this fictional world. Soon after the ratdogs and apes pillage the city, Charlie enters the Disk, which takes him out into a kind of alien realm peopled by Greek Gods who are looking down on contemporary earth118. He is an operative, briefed on his mission to go down onto earth (presumably earth is the hell from the title) in order to awaken people to the fact that they are destroying the world. This passage is both a powerful Gods Eye View critique of the horrors of contemporary Western life - war, environmental degradation, poverty, suffering - and a parody. These Greek Gods with names like Minna Erve and Merc Ury are a kind of alien bureaucratic governing body, (like something out of Star Trek) and cannot be seen as anything less than farcical. At the same time the observations of these Gods are cutting and insightful 119. Here, Lessing
115
In a horrific description a mother ratdog is torn to pieces as she is giving birth and is trying to protect her young. In her madness she lashes out and kills some of her young. As the male ratdogs attack her they tear at her breasts so that blood and milk pour out together and one of them attempted to mate with her as she died. After this Charlie states Now I believed that everything was ended, and there was no hope anywhere for man or for the animals of the earth (Lessin g 1972: p.85) 116 Draine 1983: p.90-1 117 Draine states that, At some time during the course of the novel, each level of narration has been undermined in some way by conflict with other levels or by stylistic oddities that tend to alienate the reader. (1983: p.92) 118 Lessing 1972: p.106 119 See Lessing 1972: p.120-124
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introduces a validating device an appeal to an ancient mythic tradition to support her theme, but then undercuts the authority of the validating device by mocking it tonally120. This happens again later in the text when Charles gives a (twenty page) realistic, detailed and coherent account of his time as a freedom fighter in Yugoslavia121. A page later it is revealed by Charles friend Miles Bovary that Charles was never in Yugoslavia, again undermining the readers faith in the text. As Pickering notes, Briefing is not intended to describe the organization of the universe but to defamiliarize the world so that readers will look at it with new eyes and open minds122. King also acknowledges this, suggesting that the real world depicted in Briefing For A Descent Into Hell is not in any way privileged as more truthful than any of the mythical worlds: this reality in no way dominates over other versions of reality presented in the novel: the effect is to draw the readers attention to the means by which this particular view of reality is embodied in the discourse of Realismand privileged by our culture.123 As in The Golden Notebook, madness is clearly a strong theme in Briefing and is a theme explored extensively in postmodern literature
124
. This is not to say that it hasnt
also been a theme in other literary movements clearly it has. However, the ways in which madness is depicted in postmodern literature is distinct from other literary movements in that it is depicted as a function of an insane society. Michel Foucault, considered to be one of the forefathers of postmodern theorising, describes the connection between madness and art in the contemporary world: Nietzsches madness that is, the dissolution of his thought is that by which his thought opens out onto the modern worldThis does not mean that madness is the only language common to the work of art and the modern worldbut it means that, through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the worlds time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to
120 121
Draine 1983: p.104 Lessing 1972: p.203-223 122 Pickering 1990: p.130 123 King 1989: p.65 124 Cheng 1999: p.1
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question itselfHenceforth, and throughout the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes culpable (for the first time in the Western world) in relation to the work of art; it is now arraigned by the work of art, obliged to order itself by its language, compelled by it to a task of recognition125 This, I would suggest, is exactly the task of Briefing. At one point Charles describes how in mental hospitals, the millions who have cracked are, making cracks where the light could shine through at last126. Lessing doesnt pass judgement or lead the reader to a particular conclusion about Charles madness. In fact, as has been previously discussed, quite the opposite is true; every narrative sequence and every version of Charles is undermined.127. Lessing doesnt allow the reader to form comfortable conclusions at any point in the text. And yet, out of this disparity and confusion, at the end of the text when Charles agrees to and receives the ECT or shock treatment which returns him to his previously sane self, instead of feeling relieved, the reader is left with the feeling that Charles was more sane and had a deeper understanding of himself, and society, in his fragmented and insane state128. In this sense, although Briefing For A Descent Into Hell might appear to depict reality as chaotic and mad, as Foucault suggests, [to] drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone actually functions to open a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself As readers we are forced to ask questions about contemporary Western culture and its effect on us as individuals. As King notes, our initial assumption that the Hell of the title is Charles descent into the hellish state of insanity is undermined when Hell turns out to be the hell of living a conventional unquestioning life in the modern world. Also, Charles amnesia can be interpreted as a remembering129, as a recognition of how life should be lived.
125 126
Foucault 1988: p.288 Lessing 1972: p.130 127 As King notes, neither the real world nor Charles dream world is given the authority of the authentic. The text is simply a series of 1st person narrative perspectives which break down any sense of a pre-existent, unified subject, so that there can be no coherent, identifiable originator o f meaning (King 1989: p.67) 128 Draine 1983: p.66 129 King 1989: p.65
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As with The Golden Notebook, the issue of language is foregrounded in Briefing For A Descent Into Hell. But unlike The Golden Notebook, where language is foregrounded and discussed as an inadequate tool for depicting reality, in Briefing, language is used as a tool to demonstrate how rational, logical language structures are privileged in Western culture as having a greater capacity to depict reality than mythical, poetic language structures. In effect, Briefing shows what The Golden Notebook tells. In many parts of Briefing, the language breaks down into a kind of free association or unrestricted flow of thoughts and ideas, often using unconventional punctuation and grammatical structures. Charles plays with language, connecting thoughts through sounds rather than progressing through a logical sequence of ideas. When Charles is drifting on the raft early on in the text, there are several pages where his thoughts also drift. At one point he describes: On my face, thick crusts of salt. I can taste it. Tears, seawater. I can taste the salt from the sea. From the desert. The deserted sea. Sea horses. Dunes. The wind flicks sand from the crest of the dunes, spins off the curls of waves. Sand moves and sways and masses itself into waves, but slower. Slow. The eye that would measure the pace of sand horses, as I watch the rolling gallop of sea horses would be an eye indeed. Aye. Aye. I. I could catch a horse, perhaps and ride it, but for me a sea horse, no horse of sand, since my time is man-time and it is God for deserts. Some ride dolphins. Plenty have testified.130 Later when talking to the doctors in the hospital Charles talks about words and sounds: Fuddled. Fuddddlled. Fudddled. Fuddthat word sounds like what it says. Thats strange. Wordssounds. A dull heavy sound. Fudd. Thud. Thud thud, thud thud, thud thud. Fudd, fudd, fudd, fudd. Its colour is. What? I knew. But not now. Sound thats importantyes131 This use of language associational, lyrical, poetic, sound based also approximates the semiotic (as described by Kristeva) and can be interpreted as a semiotic rupturing of the Symbolic order. It is fluid, multi-directional and disrupts the linear and rational language structures associated with logical thought. This form of language is repressed in our
130 131
Lessing 1972: p.12 Lessing 1972: p.139
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culture. It is viewed as subjective and as having little or no capacity to capture or contain reality. Indeed, this theme is developed further in the text when Charles is talking to the doctors in the hospital and they are trying to get some sense out of him. In this passage, there is a clashing of linguistic discourses; the scientific, medical discourse of the doctors and Charles free-flowing, poetic discourse. The doctors make no attempt to recognise or interpret Charles discourse, which is rich with literary and cultural allusions (that could potentially provide clues to his mental state) but instead dismiss what he says as the ramblings of an insane man. At one point Charles tells the doctor this, saying, What you say is only what you know. You tell me it is so. But if I tell you what I know, you disagree. When the doctor asks Charles to tell him what Charles knows, Charles replies, Doctor, I cant talk to you. Do you understand that? All these words you say, they fall into a gulf, theyre not me or you. Not you at all. I can see you. You are a small light. But a good oneYou arent these words132. To Charles it is as if they are speaking different languages and as King notes, in Briefing: when one single mode of representation is privileged above all othersit becomes a dominant ideology, used as a form of social control. It becomes a means of internalizing the ethical system deemed to reinforce most effectively the existing power structure. Instead, the novel suggests, we need to understand many discourses, other perceptions of what might indeed be shared experience133. It is clear that Charles, and Lessing, are challenging the belief that the Realist language structures and representational practices that are dominant in contemporary Western culture, have the capacity to objectively represent reality. This is also one of the central aims of the postmodern project generally, which, politically and culturally, has made a space for the voices or languages of women, the working classes, and people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Likewise it has made space for alternative readings of history, making way for more inclusive, polyvocal, historical/cultural (amongst other) discourses.
132 133
Lessing 1972: p.141 King 1989: p.64
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It is clear that both Briefing For A Descent Into Hell and The Golden Notebook employ a number of postmodern literary techniques and engage with many themes that could be said to come under the postmodern banner. Briefing, however, despite its fragmentary structure, strikes me as having an underlying message that could be described as existentialist or perhaps influenced by the philosophical or spiritual teachings of Sufism (a tradition that has clearly influenced some of Lessings other works134). The teaching of this text is not that we should embrace the fragmentation and perspectivism of postmodern society, but that instead, humanity needs a re-emphasis on community and needs to acknowledge our collective human consciousness. When Charles enters the crystal which takes him out into space, he gains a unique perspective on humanity and its interrelationships with all things. He describes seeing the mind of humanity which was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere. Nor was it a question of higher or lowerbecause all sympathetic knowledge must be that, in this spin of fusion like a web whose every strand is linked and vibrates with every other135. Whilst briefing Charles for his descent to earth Merk Ury reiterates this point, citing the inability to understand this interconnection as the main failing of humanity. He says: Each individual of this species is locked up inside his own skull, his own experience and while a great part of their ethical systems, religious systems, etc., state the Unity of Life, even the most recent religion, which, being the most recent, is the most powerful, called Science, has only very fitful and inadequate gleams of insight into the fact that life is One. In fact, the distinguishing feature of this new religion, is its insistence on dividing off, compartmenting, pigeon-holing, and one of the most lamentable of these symptoms is its suspicion of and clumsiness with words.136 Draine suggests that Lessing has drawn heavily on Sufi wisdom in her message and method in Briefing. She notes that Sufi stories have many layers of meaning and can be interpreted in various ways and that often readers balk when presented with a fiction that has multilayered plots as well as multiple interpretations of each plot137. Draine suggests that although Briefing is, Discordant on the surface, the text nonetheless
134 135
See Shadia Fahims book, Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium. Lessing 1972: p.92 136 Lessing 1972: p.120-1 137 Draine 1983: p.93
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discloses a whole series of corresponding elements that together form a microcosm of the universal harmonyno one interpretation is reliable or significant unless it is viewed as part of the total truth138. If indeed Lessing is engaging with the metaphysical belief systems of Sufism and is using literary techniques designed to encourage multiple interpretations of the text in order to, as Draine suggests, give readers a path to understanding a greater truth, this raises the question, is she really a postmodernist writer?139 Postmodernists are highly suspicious of any totalising grand narratives that hold any one truth higher than another. I believe that Lessings writing leads the reader to reach the conclusion that part of the problem with Western civilisation is its lack of a life-affirming organising principle. Although she does not state explicitly, in Briefing For A Descent Into Hell or in The Golden Notebook, that she believes this organising principle should be non-secular, she is clearly disenchanted with secular solutions such as those offered by Communism, consumer capitalism and scientific rationalism. She doesnt give details of how this world or system would function, however her solution to the woes of the Western world seems to point toward a system based on harmony, community and connectedness. Briefing For A Descent Into Hell can clearly be described as postmodern in various ways. Its fragmented narrative structures, use of non-rational language, its constant undermining of textual integrity and its perspectivism all create a sense of dislocation designed to challenge the reader in a manner that could be considered distinctly postmodern. Thematically, it is also very postmodern in the philosophical questions that it raises, particularly the way it questions universalistic belief systems, and in terms of its explicit critiques of contemporary Western culture. However, because of her depiction of postmodern culture as alienating and nihilistic, I believe her postmodernism is diagnostic rather than celebratory.
138 139
Draine 1983: p.95 Fahim suggests that there is some crossover between the theories of postmodernist theorists such as Barthes and Sufism. Both suggest that literature that has multiple layers offers the possibility of multiple interpretations, which they both see as positive. Fahim notes, however, that there is a fundamental difference between postmodernist and Sufi conceptions of literature. She says, Barthes concept of the plural novel may serve as a point of reference here. Although in both, the novel operates on multiple levels, to Barthes the novel is polyphonic, whereas to Lessing, as to the Sufis, the novel is monologic, where the truth is perceived on deeper levels (Fahim 1994: p.134). In other words for Barthes t here are multiple truths whereas for the Sufis, there are several levels of the one truth.
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CHAPTER 4 - The Memoirs Of A Survivor

The Memoirs Of A Survivor is a very different text to both The Golden Notebook and Briefing For A Decent Into Hell. Although many of Lessings concerns - subjectivity, the limitations of the traditional novel form, language and society - are shared by all three novels, they are approached from very distinct angles and utilise different literary techniques. The Memoirs Of A Survivor engages with postmodernism in a number of ways that are different to the previous texts and it is these differences that I will primarily concentrate on in this chapter. Firstly, I will give a brief summary of this text and the concerns it shares with The Golden Notebook and Briefing For A Descent Into Hell. The Memoirs of a Survivor is set some time in the future in an unnamed city and is narrated by an unnamed narrator. It is a description of the breakdown of society, the endtime, from the perspective of the middle-aged female narrator who observes this breakdown from the window of her ground floor flat. It is also the story of Emily Cartwright, a twelve-year-old girl who is left on the narrators doorstep early in the story and who is the narrators link to the outside world. The disintegration of society in the real world is paralleled by another world, existing behind a Wall in the narrators flat. This world is shifting and dreamlike, filled with ever-changing rooms and personal scenes from Emilys childhood, where the narrator is forever in a state of on the edge of realizing140 how everything fitted together, how everything was interconnected. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, the boundaries between the primary real world and the secondary world of behind the Wall are threatened on several occasions141 and eventually the real world ceases to exist when, at the end of the novel, several of the main characters pass through the Wall permanently. The structure of The Memoirs of a Survivor, which divides the readers attention between two main spaces, one outside the window and one behind the Wall, is integral to the novels ability to challenge the dominance and plausibility of Western rationalism.
140 141
Lessing 1976b: p.10 Lessing 1976b: p.38 & 78-9
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Both of these spaces are depicted as being equally real. This technique, also used in slightly different ways in Briefing For A Descent Into Hell and The Golden Notebook, results in what Borges describes as vertigo142, where the reader is left feeling disoriented and uncertain. As Fishburn notes, by sufficiently defamiliarizing reality, Lessing helps us to see it in many ways we probably never had before 143 and Lessing is not asking us literally to break though wallsbut she is asking us to break though the walls of our conventional thinking to dismiss our preconceived ideas about reality144. Like Briefing For A Descent Into Hell, this novel forces us to ask the questions, what world is this? and what reality is this145. These questions remain unanswerable because what is happening is impossible according to Western notions of time, space and possibility, thus they disrupt the readers usual relationship with reality by creating ontological uncertainty. As Greene notes, To insist on realistic explanations is to be bound to an outmoded epistemology, to notions of possibility and probability that derive from the scientific methodand which Lessing shows here have run its course146. Another postmodern technique used in all three texts is the use of a self-conscious narrator, a narrator who is aware that s/he has an audience and is writing explicitly for that audience. Anna, Charles and the narrator in Memoirs,147 all speak directly to their readers, and in doing so acknowledge the importance of the reader as the point of reception and interpretation, and as an integral part of the writing process itself148.
One of the more interesting and distinctive aspects of The Memoirs of a Survivor (in a postmodern context) is that Lessing has described it as an autobiography. If Memoirs is an autobiography, this begs the question, what kind of autobiography is this?149 There are clear correlations between Lessings life, as described in her more conventional
142 143
Draine 1983: p.140 Fishburn: p.49 144 Fishburn: p.51 145 See note # 38 146 Greene 1997: p.142 147 Lessing 1976b: p. 19 & 107 148 See note #62 149 Interestingly The Memoirs Of A Survivor is written once removed, through the eyes of the narrator. This is also unconventional in the autobiographical tradition and seems to support the contention that Lessing feels that memory is manipulatable over time, is not fixed and unchanging, and in recording memories it often feels as if they were being written by an outsider.
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autobiography written in 1995, and the life and memories of the narrator as described in Memoirs.150 However the structure of Memoirs forces the reader to question what exactly Lessing is saying about the nature of memory. In fact she describes this process in her later autobiography: And then and perhaps this is the worst deceiver of all we make up our own pasts. You can actually watch your mind doing it, taking a little fragment of fact and then spinning a tale out of it. No. I do not think this is only the fault of storytellers. A parent says, We took you to the seaside, and you built a sandcastle, dont you remember? look, here is the photo.151 In her later autobiography, she also suggests that in Western culture many people cannot conceive of an autobiography that is not chronological and realist in its structure. She says: When I wrote Memoirs of a Survivor I called it, An Attempt at an Autobiography, but no one was interestedPeople seemed embarrassed. They did not understand it, they said. For thousands upon thousands of years, we humankind have told ourselves tales and stories, and these were always analogies and metaphors, parables and allegories; they were elusive and equivocal; they hinted and alluded, they shadowed forth in a glass darkly. But after three centuries of the Realist Novel, in many people this part of the brain has atrophied.152 By describing this text as an autobiography, Lessing raises many questions about the nature of memory and history. By merging the genres of literary fiction, science fiction, futuristic fantasy and autobiography, Lessing deliberately deconstructs the neat delineation between fact and fiction, recognising the necessity of discursive exchange between the two. She also emphasises the mutability and relativity of concepts such as memory, history, knowledge and reality. She says of writing autobiography:
150
An example of this is the tickling scene behind the wall, where the young Emily describes being tickled by her father as a kind of torture (pg.79), is described in detail by Lessing in her later autobiography (pg.31). Also, in her 1995 autobiography Lessing described how her mother, talks all the time about what a burden her children are to her, how they take it out of her, how much she is unfulfilled and unappreciated, how no one but a mother knows how much she has to give of herself to ungrateful children who soak up her precious talents and juices like so many avid sponges.pg. 29. In The Memoirs Of A Survivor the narrator gives several examples of exactly this attitude of the mother, almost word for word see specifically pg. 62-5. (Lessing 1976b) 151 Lessing 1995: p.13-14 152 Lessing 1995: p.28
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As you start to write at once the questions start to insist: Why do you remember this and not that? Why do you remember in every detail a whole week, month, more, of a long year, but then complete dark, a blank? How do you know that what you remember is more important than what you dont? (her italics)153 When talking about history she describes how, always and at all times the past gets tidied up and made safer154. In Memoirs, the narrator prefaces her memoirs by noting that, it wouldnt be out of place here to comment on the way we - everyone will look back over a period in life, over a sequence of events, and find much more there than they did at the time. The narrator also wonders about the nature of memory and what people hope to find looking back: People will compare notes, as if wishing or hoping for conformation of something the events themselves had not licensed far from it, something they had seemed to exclude altogetherA meaning, then; a purpose? At any rate, the past, looked back on in this frame of mind, seemed steeped in a substance foreign to it. Is it possible that this is the stuff of real memory? Nostalgia, no; Im not talking of that, the craving, the regret not that poisoned itch. Nor is it a question of importance each one of us tries to add to our not very significant pasts: I was there, you know. I saw that.155 Even though the narrator later suggests that she is trying to write a historyand I hope a truthful one156 she acknowledges that memory, which is the material of history, is highly contingent and contextualised. In response, Lessing writes an autobiography in which the structure of the text is layered with various aspects of memory. Behind the Wall seems to represent childhood. It is a combination of dream and childhood memories which are told from the perspective of a child157. It is a kind of Jungian landscape of rooms that need to be cleaned out and various other symbols typically found in what the psychoanalysts might refer to as the subconscious158. This space is described in a language that is not rational and realist but uses allegory, metaphor, is poetic and fluid, multidirectional and sensorial. It is a space that exists outside of conventional time and is
153 154
Lessing 1995: p.12 Lessing 1995: p.12 155 Lessing 1976b: p.7 156 Lessing 1976b: p.99 157 Lessing 1976b: see, for examples p. 62-5, 78-84, 123-5 158 Draine 1983: p.136-7
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feminine, domestic and personal. This is an autobiography that is both postmodern, in the ways it challenges fixed definitions of universals such as truth, memory and history but it is also distinctly female in its approach to postmodernism159. Lessings response to these fixed concepts, concepts that postmodern feminists would suggest emanate directly from patriarchal cultural and religious understandings of the world, is not to deconstruct them using the tools of rationality and logic, but to rupture the structures of the Symbolic realm altogether by using a language and form that denies the reader any sense of logical closure. At the end of The Memoirs of a Survivor, the narrator, Emily, Gerard, Hugo and Denis (one of the street children), leave the city and step behind the Wall. As they do, the world they leave behind collapses. Simultaneously the world behind the Wall also disintegrates presenting itself in a thousand little flashes, a jumble of little scenes, facets of another picture, all impermanent folding up as we stepped into it160. Lessing erases the real world, a world that has collapsed in on itself as a result of consumer capitalism, materialism and rationalism, replacing it with a world that is fluid and supernatural, timeless and cyclic. It is a world that cannot be contained by language. The only thing that the narrator seems able to tell us about it is that it is imbued with a sacred (feminine) organising principle described simply as, the One 161. As Waugh notes: Lessings abandonment of realismis linked to the expansion in her fiction of a utopian vision of a collective mode of existence which, it seems to me, projects the possibility of a community founded on the sort of relational identity which has been associated with women and devalued by the present society.162 Again, the issue of subjectivity is central to this novel. Throughout Memoirs the reader is told that the memories the narrator is encountering behind the Wall are Emilys memories from childhood. If this is indeed an autobiography, then the reader has to ask
159
Waugh describes postmodern female writing as being distinctly different to postmodern male writing in that it is characterised by, fluidity, loss of boundaries, connection, rather than the free play of the signifier (1989: p.212) 160 Lessing 1976b: p.189 161 The narrator says No, I am not able to say clearly what she was like. She was beautiful: it is a word that will do. I only saw her for a moment, in a time like the fading of a spark on dark air a glimpse: she turned her face just once to me, and all I can say isnothing at all. (Lessing 1976b: p.190) 162 Waugh 1989: p.197
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how the narrator has access to Emilys memories, given that she has only known her for a short amount of time. Are these memories the memories of the narrator herself? There is some evidence in the text to suggest this is the case. At one point the narrator describes how, her [Emilys] condition, [was] as close to me as my own memories 163 and when describing Emily and her mother in a scene behind the wall, the narrator slips from third person into first person164. If Emilys memories are actually the narrators memories, then what is the relationship between Emily and the narrator are they simply aspects of the same person? As an autobiography, this would be an innovative way to depict various eras in the narrator/authors past with the behind the wall scenes being memories from childhood, Emily the teenager being the narrator as a teenager, and the narrator being the author looking back on her life165. (It is not a coincidence, surely, that Lessings mother and grandmother were both called Emily166.) As Greene notes, Memoirs is also meant to be a collective story about all women: Our attempts to make temporal connections, to make sense of the chronology, are thwarted, though also weirdly satisfied, when we realize that all are one: Emily, the narrator, Lessing, ourselves; that we are reliving a personal past that is also a generalized past, the experience of a woman of our time.167 This is supported by the description of Emily as the eternal woman168. Her grief and mourning for the disintegration of society and for herself personally, is described as an embodiment of the grief experienced by everyone169. This description of Emily is also an acknowledgement of the kind of relational identity described by Waugh and other postmodern feminists, where women define themselves, not as individuated separate entities but instead by their relationship to others and to society generally. Lessing suggests in this novel, as she did in The Golden Notebook, that women are constructed,
163 164
Lessing 1976b: p.45 Lessing 1976b: p.42 165 This conclusion is also reached by many other commentators such as Pickering 1990: p.138, 140; Waugh 1989: p.207; and Greene 1990: p.149. 166 Greene 1990: p.149 167 Greene 1990: p.149 168 Lessing 1976b: p.151 169 Lessing 1976b: p.151
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not by their individual will or in isolation, but in relation to their past, their relationships to family, friends and society. Here, identity is fluid, relational and shifting.
Thematically, The Memoirs of a Survivor is interesting on a number of levels. The comments it makes regarding Western society are, however, particularly powerful. As Lessing has said, We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is a question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them170. Social comment is a significant component in all of Lessings work, but the comment made in Memoirs is of particular interest when read in a postmodern context. It both predicts the logical conclusion of the sort of political and economic structures that dominate Western culture today and it captures the mood of political postmodernity. Many critics have talked about the end time described in Memoirs as if it was the result of some kind of violent, definitive catastrophe171, perhaps a nuclear conflagration172. The immensity of the collapse could certainly lead the reader to such an assumption, but in fact, the power of this text resides in its description of an End Time not unlike T.S.Eliots description in The Hollow Men (1925), of the world ending, Not with a bang, but a whimper173. It is a gradual decline, propelled by unnamed forces It, They, Them - that have gradually undermined social structures. Lessing describes a strange malaise or apathy that is difficult to combat. The idea that there is no one force or group of people to blame, no oppressor or dictator, reflects a uniquely postmodern understanding of oppression and societal breakdown. Indeed, the theme of the End Of History recurs in much postmodern literature. The narrator herself acknowledges that everyone is implicated, that it is in everyone and that they/we are all complicit in some way in what is happening174. There are hints that the narrator sees the collapse, in part at least, from a Marxist perspective. She describes the end of the Age of Affluence, where the authoritative middle-classes still have access to vital commodities and still use objects, such as clothes,
170 171
Lessing, as quoted in Murray Walker: p.93 Draine 1983: p.135 172 Waugh 1989: p.203 173 Eliot 1990: p.86 174 See Lessing 1976b: p.21, the game we were all agreeing to play & p. 96.
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as symbols of wealth, even though society is collapsing around them 175. The decadence and short-sightedness of Western society, in economic terms, is certainly implicated in the collapse. One of the most interesting observations made by the narrator regarding the decline of Western society is in her description of the ordinariness of the extraordinary176. She notes how people will accommodate to almost anything to keep things normal. Throughout the text, citizens groups are being formed to instigate vitami n programs for children in schools177 and to talk about the decay of family values, the media is encouraging people to buy and consume products as they have always done178, while simultaneously, basic services and commodities such as electricity, water and food are becoming rare and difficult to obtain. Parents are encouraged to send their children to school179 at a time when the air is becoming unbreathable. People are reverting to living in primitive nomadic tribes where orphaned children as young as four are living in gangs of 30-40 children living in the underground, having lost the capacity for language and basic human morality. The narrator describes how: on the newscasts and in the papers they would pursue for days the story of a single kidnapped child taken from its pram perhaps by some poor unhappy woman. The police would be combing the suburbs and the countryside in hundreds, looking for the child, and for the woman, to punish her. But the next news flash would be about the mass death of hundreds, thousands, or even millionsThis is the sort of thing we accepted as normal.180 It is this aspect of the text that is so disturbing and that resonates with contemporary readers, portraying a heightened (perhaps? or maybe not) version of what we now accept as ordinary and normal. In his essay Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction Irving Howe outlines characteristics of postmodern society (as described in postmodern literature). He suggests
175 176
Lessing 1976b: p.20 & 96 Lessing 1976b: p.19 177 Lessing 1976b: p.20 178 Lessing 1976b: p.49 179 The narrator also describes how school was basically an extension of the army and a means of population control (Lessing 1976b: p.32) 180 Lessing 1976b: p.20-1
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that while social classes still exist, they are more fluid than before and that traditional units of authority such as the family have lost some of their power. He also believes that: Passivity becomes a widespread social attitude: the feeling that life is a drift over which one has little control and that even when men do have shared autonomous opinions they cannot act them out in commonAs perhaps never before, opinion is manufactured systematically and scientificallyOpinion tends to flow unilaterally, from the top down, in measured quantities: it becomes a market commodityDisagreement, controversy, polemic are felt to be in bad tastereflection on the nature of society is replaced by observations of its mechanicsThe era of causes, good or bad, comes to an end: strong beliefs seem anachronistic; and as a result, agnostics have even been known to feel a certain nostalgia for the rigors of beliefDirect and first hand experience seems to evade human beings, though the quantity of busy-ness keeps increasing and the number of events multiplies with bewildering speedThe pressure of material need visibly decreases, yet there follows neither a sense of social release nor a feeling of personal joy; instead, people become increasingly aware of their social dependence and powerlessness.181 This description by Howe very much summarises the central concerns and mood of The Memoirs of a Survivor. The narrator talks about being in a constant state of passive waiting for information182. Mass society, as described in Memoirs, seems to have little or no capacity to make a stand against what is happening. People suffer from generalised, undiagnosable illnesses that leave them listless and will-less.183 The narrator describes this as simply, It: It, in short, is the word for helpless ignorance, or of helpless awareness. It is a word for mans inadequacyWorse still when the stage is reached of Have you heard anything new, when it has absorbed everything into itself, and nothing else can be meant when people ask what is moving in our world, what moves our world. It. Only it, a much worse word than they; for they at least are humanity too, can be moved, are helpless, like ourselves. It, perhaps on this occasion in history was above all a consciousness of something ending.184 The narrator also describes the way in which the media is simply a tool of the authorities, not used to inform but instead to pass on manufactured information to pacify people
181 182
Howe 1992: p.25 Lessing 1976b: p.46 & 73 183 Lessing 1976b: p.138 184 Lessing 1976b: p.136
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against the realities of what is happening185. Consumer objects take on different value to what they had previously, proving their value in the Age Of Affluence was not innate but constructed. Objects are valued for their practical usefulness rather than their aesthetic or status value, turning the hierarchies of consumerism upside down and revealing them to be somewhat absurd186. The narrator also comments: As for our thoughts, our intellectual apparatus, our rationalisms and our logics and our deductions, and so on, it can be said with absolute certainty that dogs and cats and monkeys cannot make a rocket or fly to the moon or weave artificial dress materials out of the by-products of petroleum, but as we sit in the ruins of this variety of intelligence, it is hard to give it much value: I suppose we are undervaluing it now as we overvalued it then. It will have to find its place: I believe a pretty low place, at that.187 Here the narrator makes it clear that she believes over-rational, bureaucratic ways of thinking have been major contributing factors in the collapse.
The Memoirs of a Survivor, more than Briefing For A Descent Into Hell and The Golden Notebook, starts to outline, however sketchily, a vision for a different kind of future. The narrator in Memoirs seems to suggest that the kind of collective psychic imbalance outlined in the novel needs to be addressed if Western society is to achieve any kind of equilibrium. Whilst the final image of the text is of a sacred world that cannot be contained by language and therefore defies description, two images are particularly striking and perhaps suggest the kind of possible solutions Lessing is advocating. Just before the end of the novel the narrator describes the space behind the Wall as a place that is safe for usthe worlds people. Gardens beneath gardens, gardens above gardens: the food-giving surfaces of the earth doubled, trebled, endless the plenty of it, the richness, the generosity188. In this world, Nature and the earth are depicted as the source of all life-giving energy. The other image, again from behind the Wall, which is referred to again at the very end of the novel, is of a group of people creating a quilt, each
185 186
Lessing 1976b: p.12 Lessing 1976b: p.9 & p.46-8 187 Lessing 1976b: p.74 188 Lessing 1976b: p.142
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lovingly contributing fragments of fabric in a process that is continuous, collective and ongoing. The narrator describes this process: At first it seemed that they [the quilters] were doing nothing at all; they looked idle and undecided. Then one of them detached a piece of material from the jumble on the trestles, and bent down to match it with the carpet behold, the pattern answered that part of the carpet. This piece was laid exactly on the design, and brought it to life. It was like a childs game; only it was not a game, it was serious, important not only to the people actually engaged in this work, but to everyoneI realized that everywhere around, in all the other rooms [behind the Wall] were people who would in their turn drift in here, see this central activity, find their matching piece would lay it down, and drift off again to other tasksA recognition, the quick move, a smile of pleasure or of relief, a congratulatory glance from one of the othersthere was no competition here, only the soberest and most loving cooperation. 189. This can certainly be read as a symbol of the kind of collective co-operation, unity and connectedness Lessing seems to be advocating190, not just in Memoirs, but in all three texts I have discussed.
189 190
Lessing 1976b: p.72-3 and again on p.189. Fahim also comments on The Memoirs of a Survivor as an example of Sufi equilibrium, suggesting that it is, in part, preparing us for another, more unified, underst anding of the world. She says, Like the intricate patterns of Eastern works of art designed for meditation, the novel functions both as a model for meditation, and a strategy designed to prepare the one-dimensional mind for such activity (Fahim 1994: p.135)
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Conclusion
Contemporary life in the Western world is often experienced as fast-paced, chaotic and psycho-spiritually dissatisfying. We are in a time of massive and constant change and have been, I would suggest, since the 1950s. The 1950s saw a radical shift in consciousness in the West that continues to influence us today. This shift was the result of a number of factors. World War II, Stalinist Russia and the dropping of the atom bomb saw us enter a new phase of warfare, where the horrors human beings were willing to commit against themselves suddenly escalated. This fed into the collective psyche in the form of fear and mistrust and left people in a constant state of waiting, like the narrator in The Memoirs of a Survivor, for the annihilation they had conceived. At the same time, the post-war period saw increased economic prosperity. Television beamed into homes everywhere selling images of perfection- perfect homes, perfect families, perfect lifestyles. The split between the alienation people were feeling and the images of life presented to them through the mass media, led to a kind of collective schizophrenic dislocation characterised by the frenzied (often meaningless) busyness and insatiable pursuit of consumer objects that is the driving force behind so many peoples lives today. In the past fifty years we have had incredible technological and medical advances but instead of using this newly developed knowledge to reduce workloads or cure illnesses, we are attempting to replicate ourselves through robotic impersonations of people (complete with computer generated emotions) or through the perversely narcissistic practice of cloning. Our standard of living and general economic wellbeing is higher than ever before, but instead of aiming for a world community where the benefits of this gain are shared equitably, we drain poorer countries of their natural resources, force them into massive debt and condemn their people to lives of poverty. We live in an age when we are supposedly more free, liberated from many of the moral and social restrictions associated with the past and yet our lives are characterised by skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety disorders, along with a generalised breakdown of community. Lessing is one of the few writers who is capable of dealing with the complexity and strangeness of the last fifty years. She captures both the mood and the social
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realities of this period with a lucidity and clarity of vision that is both frightening and liberating. And it is in the texts discussed in this thesis that I feel she has captured this mood and the effects of these events most powerfully. For these reasons I also regard these texts as her most important. Lessing makes an invaluable contribution to twentieth century literature with these novels by capturing the subtle and disturbing pathos of the age. The Golden Notebook, Briefing For A Decent Into Hell and Memoirs Of A Survivor, form part of a period where Lessing was interested in challenging traditional understandings of language, art and the novel form, not simply as an exercise in aesthetic experimentation, but in order to find a method of expression that could most clearly articulate what she was seeing around her. She portrays many aspects of contemporary life. In describing the gradual meltdown of Western civilisation she reveals a kind of underlying collective death instinct. She also depicts the increasing invasion of private and cultural life from the media (as a mechanism of consumer capitalism) and a generalised sense of alienation and fragmentation. She chooses modes of representation that reflected this fragmentation and meltdown, undermining traditional narrative structures and leaving the reader with a distinct sense of unease about society. Her conclusion seems to be, not that we have grown or progressed as a people, but that we are actually in a more degraded and self-destructive state than ever before.
I have argued that Lessing engaged with postmodernism both stylistically and thematically in books like The Golden Notebook, Briefing For A Descent Into Hell and The Memoirs of a Survivor191. Stylistically, she challenges conventional understandings of the novel and realist modes of representation by employing novelistic structures that are unconventional, multidirectional, multi-layered and that challenge the ordered relationship between the reader, author and characters. She makes the process of writing, and language generally, part of her subject matter, foregrounding the problematic process of trying to convey meaning when contemporary Western society no longer has a universal symbology or ordering principle. In fact, much of her work is committed to
191
See Appendix 1 for other examples of Lessings work that can be read as containing postmodernist elements.
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challenging universalistic notions of the Subject and concepts such as truth, knowledge, objectivity, sanity and memory. She illustrates the shifting and unreliable nature of such concepts, suggesting instead that they are changeable and relative. The exploration of these ideas is something she shares with many postmodern writers. Lessing also uses various literary techniques that have been identified by theoreticians and analysts as being typical of postmodern writing. The use of techniques such as erasure and bi-furcation where whole sections of texts are erased or split into two mutually exclusive versions of events that exist simultaneously, are examples of this. She often also sets up texts with primary and secondary versions of reality that are reversed during the course of the text (sometimes more than once) and uses what Brian McHale calls mise-en-abyme, where the primary narrative world is reflected in secondary worlds or levels of reality. All of these techniques are unnerving and dislocating for the reader as, I suspect, is her intention. Thematically, Lessing captures with disturbing accuracy the mood of postmodernity. Her texts are consistently confrontational, dealing with issues of race, gender, class and mental illness. Instead of adopting a simple good/evil analysis of these issues, where the oppressor is demonised and the oppressed idealised, Lessing challenges this dualistic model. She instead offers a much more complex and inter-relational reading of the oppressor/oppressed relationship, more in line with postmodern theorists such as Foucault. Lessing also foregrounds the psycho-social instability of the contemporary Western world. In all her texts, Western ways of living are portrayed as the source of great suffering and mental anguish. Her characters are plagued with mental illness and alienation. Society generally, is depicted as cold, unjust and anti-life, riddled with a form of consumer capitalism that encourages profit at all cost, even if that cost is our health and happiness. This mood has often been described as being distinctly postmodern. Having summarised the ways in which Lessings writing has engaged with postmodernism, it is also important to recognise the ways in which she is not postmodernist. In fact, she is more often described as a realist or science fiction writer,
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than a postmodern writer. Much of her work could be said to be an engagement with the tenets of modernism and could clearly be interpreted from various more traditional perspectives - from psychoanalytic, Marxist/socialist, existential or feminist viewpoints. To call her exclusively a postmodern writer would be to disallow these other interpretations of her work, interpretations that are, I think, both valid and important. Lessings solutions to the problems of the age also contrast with the solutions offered by many postmodern theorists. For many postmodern theorists, the death of the subject might be viewed as a liberation from the limitations placed on individuals in the past, as it undermines fixed notions of identity. These theorists generally embrace perspectivism and relativistic theoretical systems, believing they enable a dynamic dialectic to be established between various power structures and individuals. This in turn allows oppressive social and political systems to be challenged. The idea that language has no innate meaning is also viewed by many postmodern theorists as liberatory, as it allows for various interpretations and meanings to proliferate in a given discourse or text. Many of these issues are central to the texts I have discussed and are powerful themes within Lessings work. However, she does not necessarily share these postmodern conclusions. Lessing uses postmodern writing techniques and engages with themes/concepts central to postmodern theorising, at the same time as she undermines the validity of this way of knowing. The question arises, Is Lessing a postmodern writer at all? I would suggest that Lessings postmodernism is diagnostic rather than celebratory, in that she depicts postmodernity as a period of crisis. Many postmodern theorists see the breakdown of grand narratives, of concepts such as truth and reality, as liberatory from oppressive traditional understandings of the world. Lessings involvement with the communist party, her sympathies for certain strains of feminism and her involvement with movements in South Africa designed to end apartheid and racial discrimination, suggest that she agrees with these conclusions to some degree. She certainly recognises the need to overthrow oppressive and hierarchical understandings of what it is to be human, which privileged the discourses of a few at the expense of many. Although she values this aspect of political postmodernity, her texts are clearly critical of contemporary life in a postmodern society. They certainly do not depict a world
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characterised by freedom and liberation from oppressive modes of thought. Postmodernity, for Lessing, is not about individual freedom but the breakdown of a collective sense of community. It is a period that doesnt encourage individuals to construct themselves as they choose (as many postmodern theorists might suggest), but rather, according to Lessing, it encourages the fragmentation of the Self, which results in a loss of identity. Rather than encouraging the unrestrained individualism currently in vogue in the Western world, Lessing suggests that a balance is required between the needs of individuals and the psycho-social health of society192. She seems to advocate a reemphasis on community, harmony and connectedness, rather than individualism, capitalism and secularism. She suggests that the only way to remedy the ills of the age is with a reversion to or re-emphasis on some kind of metaphysical (or at least nonmaterialist) understanding of life. As Charles comes to understand in Briefing For A Descent Into Hell, humanity is not: a question of individual entities, as those entities saw themselves, but a question of Wholes, large and small, for groups and packs and troops and crowds made entities, made Wholes, functioning as WholesAnd this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together.193 Lessings invocation of concepts such as truth and Wholes suggests that while she questions our current paradigms regarding concepts such as reality and truth, she believes that there exists other versions of the truth that are potentially more lifeaffirming. Perhaps Lessing shares Annas hope (The Golden Notebook) that her novels will be statements of hope and moral commitment, strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life194. Despite the fact that Lessing reaches conclusions that differ from those of many postmodern theorists, her depiction of life in a postmodern society is sharp, highly
192
This, again, is very much in line with Sufi understanding of reality, which suggest that in order to achieve equilibrium, a balance is needed between rational and non-rational modes of consciousness, and between detachment and identification with life(Shah in Fahim 1994: p.15) 193 Lessing 1972: p.94-96. This quote from Briefing For A Descent Into Hell is very similar to Annas dream in The Golden Notebook (p.297-8) as quoted on p.30 of this thesis. 194 Lessing 1972: p.80
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perceptive and distinctly postmodernist. Her attempts to deconstruct reality very powerfully upset the dominance of Realist and rationalistic ways of knowing. These techniques and aims, and the three texts discussed in this thesis are, I believe, clearly postmodernist in many ways.
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APPENDIX 1 LESSING IN CONTEXT

It is important to paint a brief portrait of Lessings novels in context. The three texts that are at the centre of the thesis, The Golden Notebook, Briefing For A Descent Into Hell and The Memoirs of a Survivor, were written in a period when Lessing was experimenting with the novel form. Prior to this, with novels such as The Habit of Loving and the Martha Quest series, Lessing was better known as a realist writer. Later, novels such as the Canopus in Argos: Archives series and Mara and Dann: An Adventure were more in the field of speculative fiction. She also wrote many more realist texts including The Good Terrorist, and Love, Again . Draine notes that, Lessing employs various styles and narrative techniques, including tragedy, social realism,
Bildungsroman, modernist perspectivism, parody, allegory, quest romance, parable, legend and science fiction saga,195 in her works. Thematically, she also covers a vast number of topics and issues. The Good Terrorist, for example, offers a critique of the communist party in Britain, of which she was an active member for many years. She depicts the party in microcosm in the form of a share house peopled with comrades, whose lives are characterised by petty bickering and an over-inflated sense of self-importance. They are basically a group of disaffected middleclass kids playing at politics. Eventually their overzealous commitment to the party results in a car bomb that kills a number of people. The Martha Quest series is an exploration of the female psyche as it changes and develops over a lifetime. It is also about the powerful influence of childhood on adult consciousness. Love, Again, written when Lessing was in her seventies, is about finding a meaningful love relationship as an artist and an older woman. For me the texts that I have identified as postmodern are her most powerful and interesting both stylistically and in terms of the comments they make about society. A number of her other novels could also be read as postmodernist texts. In these works, the postmodern elements are not foregrounded as strongly as they are in The Golden Notebook, Briefing and Memoirs, but they are still important stylistic and thematic
195
Draine 1983: p.xi
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elements. The following section gives a brief summary of some of her other texts that could be interpreted from a postmodern perspective.
THE GRASS IS SINGING Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, first published in 1950, is clearly an example of what we might now describe as post-colonial literature. It depicts the life of Mary Turner, a young white women living on a farm in Rhodesia. The novel begins with an account of her murder at the hands of one of the native farmhands, Moses. The narrative then moves back in time to describe Marys early life and the period leading up to the murder. Lessing, who herself grew up on a veld in what was then Southern Rhodesia, wrote this text when she was in her mid-twenties. It depicts the complex and fraught relationship between poor whites settlers and the colonised native population. The text does not idealise or patronise either. Instead it attempts to show the inherent inequities in the relationship between black and white; between the traditional owners of the land and the intruders and the impact such a close and strained relationship can have on both parties Mary eventually goes insane and Moses is accused of murder. The Grass Is Singing undermines the dominant colonialist narrative, still relatively intact in the 1950s, which depicted natives as lesser human beings in need of a firm white hand of control196. It challenges the stereotypes generally associated with blacks and depicts them as complex people, suffering great indignities at the hands of a colonial regime. It also challenges the belief that white Western ways of living are superior to other more primitive ways of living. In this sense, although The Grass Is Singing is quite realist, its critical attention to exposing the effects of the colonialist narrative of white superiority makes it a pre-cursor of the postmodern pre-occupation with deconstructing authoritative discourses. SPECULATIVE FICTION The CANOPUS IN ARGOS SERIES and MARA AND DANN: AN ADVENTURE The Canopus in Argos: Archives series (first published between 1979-83) has been dismissed by many critiques as part of Lessings sci-fi phase and therefore not
196
Lessing 1989: p.18
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worthy of critical analysis and attention. However, I feel this series is very interesting from a postmodern perspective because in it, Lessing deliberately undermines the traditional boundaries between genre fiction and literary fiction. These texts are highly literary, ask deep and probing questions about Western civilisation, and offer a unique Gods Eye View of contemporary life that is often scathing and disturbing. McHale describes how postmodern writers borrow quite liberally from science fiction, choosing a temporal displacement rather than spatial displacement, usually the future. He suggests that they are not as concerned generally with gadgetry as traditional science fiction writers, but are more concerned with the social and institutional consequences of technological innovation, the social arrangements these advances give rise to, rather than the innovations themselves. He also suggests that postmodern science fiction is preoccupied with the cartelization of the future, the growth of international conglomerates that threaten to displace national governments and engulf the entire world197. Certainly, many of these elements are present in Briefing and Memoirs, which, in part, cross into the science fiction genre. Texts like the Canopus In Argos series and Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) also contain many of the elements that McHale describes. Like the futuristic fantasy Mara and Dann, they are far from being light entertainment and challenge the reader to redefine their relationship to the contemporary world. In the tradition of Aldous Huxleys Brave New World and George Orwells 1984 these texts reflect the real in all its distopian glory. Mara and Dann is set in what we suspect to be the future, in Ifrik, where drought resulting from years of environmental degradation and misuse of technology198 have destroyed (what we must assume is) our current society, leaving only strange useless remnants such as unusable solar devices and strange metallic fabrics199. Themes such as cloning and genetic engineering and their consequences are also explored200, depicted as the result of scientific rationalism meddling in nature, with dire consequences. Money,
197 198
McHale 1991: p.65-67 Lessing 1999: See pgs. 132, 168, 159, 248 199 Lessing 1999: See pgs. 228, 347, 352, 354. 200 Lessing 1999: See pgs. 62, 258.
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greed and consumer capitalism are also depicted as central causes of the collapse of society201. It is, like Memoirs, an example of an End of History narrative.
THE FIFTH CHILD The Fifth Child (first published in 1988) could easily be read as a postmodern parable. The story centres on two very normal people, Harriet and David, describing their meeting, falling in love, buying a rambling house just outside London which they intend to fill with children and happiness202. The story is a kind of modern day fairy tale, until their fifth child, Ben comes along. He is violent, has superhuman strength and is described as a kind of goblin or throwback to a past form of human203. As a toddler he kills the family dog204 and terrifies his younger brother, Paul, who is sure Ben is trying to kill him. In a powerful scene, Ben is institutionalised in a hospital for uncontrollable or defective children. When Harriet succumbs to her guilt and goes to pick him up the attendants are shocked as no one ever reclaims these children: She [Harriet] was at the end of a long ward, which had any number of cots and beds along the wall. In the cots were monsters. While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every cot held an infant or small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a bodythen something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbsa small girl all blurred, her flesh guttering and melting.A child at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her. Rows of freaks, nearly all asleep, and all silent. They were literally drugged out of their minds I told you not to come! shouted the young man [attendant]. He took Bens shoulders and the girl Bens feet. From the way they touched the child, Harriet saw they were not brutal; that was not the point at all.205 Eventually Ben leads to the collapse of the family and the ideal. The Fifth Child is a strange and disturbing story. The message is difficult to discern. Perhaps it is the way
201 202
Lessing 1999: pgs. 177-8, 319 Lessing 1989a: p.8-16, 26-8 203 Lessing 1989a: p.60-1, 155-6, 159-60. 204 Lessing 1989a: p.74 205 Lessing 1989: p.98-9
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society actively subverts difference. Alternatively, it may be about the collapse of expectations of normality in an age like ours. It takes a form described by McHale as distinctly postmodernist where traditional allegorical forms of literature, such as myths and fairy tales are contemporised and overlayed with current themes. He suggests that in postmodernist writing everything is potentially allegorical but nothing actually is an allegory and that this kind of writing has too many interpretations, more than can possibly be integrated into a univocal reading. He suggests that this results in ontological oscillation206. Unlike traditional stories, in postmodern myths, the endings of these narratives dont bring closure or a fixed moral message but are open ended and make themselves available to various interpretations.
206
McHale 1991: p.141-2
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REFERENCES
PRIMARY SOURCES
LESSING Doris, Mara And Dann: An Adventure, Flamingo, London, 1999. LESSING Doris, Walking In The Shade: Volume Two of my Autobiography, 1949-1962, Flamingo, London, 1998. LESSING Doris, Love, Again, Flamingo, London, 1996. LESSING Doris, Under My Skin: Volume One Of My Autobiography, 1919-1948, Flamingo, London, 1995. LESSING Doris, Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, Flamingo, London, 1994. LESSING Doris, Martha Quest, HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 1993 (a). LESSING Doris, The Four-Gated City, HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 1993 (b). LESSING Doris, Canopus In Argos: Archives Shikasta, Grafton Books, London, 1990. LESSING Doris, The Fifth Child, Paladin, London, 1989 (a). LESSING Doris, The Grass Is Singing, Paladin, London, 1989 (b). LESSING Doris, The Diaries Of Jane Somers, Penguin Books, Great Britain, 1985 (a). LESSING Doris, The Golden Notebook, Panther Books, Great Britain, 1985 (b). LESSING Doris, The Good Terrorist, Jonathan Cape Ltd., Great Britain, 1985 (c). LESSING Doris, Canopus In Argos: Archives - The Making Of Representative For Planet 8, Jonathan Cape Ltd, Great Britain, 1982 (a). LESSING Doris, Canopus In Argos: Archives The Syrian Experiments, Granada Publishing Ltd., Great Britain, 1982 (b). LESSING Doris, Canopus In Argos: Archives The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four And Five, Grafton Books, London, 1981. LESSING Doris, Landlocked, Panther Books, Great Britain, 1976 (a). LESSING Doris, The Memoirs Of A Survivor, Picador, London, 1976 (b). LESSING Doris, A Proper Marriage, Panther Books, Great Britain, 1975. Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003 62
LESSING Doris, The Habit Of Loving, Panther Books, Great Britain, 1974. LESSING Doris, Briefing For A Descent Into Hell, Panther Books, London, 1972.
SECONDARY SOURCES
ALEXANDER Marguerite, Flights From Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postmodernist British and American Fiction, Edward Arnold, Great Britain, 1990. APPIGNANESI Lisa (ED.), Postmodernism: ICA Documents, Free Association Books, London, 1989. BAKER Stephen, The Fiction of Postmodernity, Edinborough University Press, Edinborough, 2000. BARTHES Roland, The Death of the Author in Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath; Fontana, London, 1977. BARTLETT Alison, Jamming The Machinery: Contemporary Australian Womens Writing, ASAL, Queensland, 1998. BELL Daniel, The Dimensions of Post-Industrial Society, The Coming of PostIndustrial Society, 1973. BEILHARZ Peter, Postmodern Socialism: Romanticism, city and state, Melbourne University Press, Australia, 1994. BEILHARTZ Peter (Ed.), Social Theory: A Guide to Central Thinkers, Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1991. BOYERS Robert & ORRILL Robert (ED.), Laing and Anti-Psychiatry, Penguin Education, England, 1975. BROOKS Ann, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms, Routledge, London, 1997. CHENG Yuan-Jung, Heralds Of The Postmodern: Madness and Fiction in Conrad, Woolf and Lessing, Peter Lang, New York, 1999. CIXOUS Helene, Sorties in MARKS Elaine and DE COURTIVRON Isabelle (Ed.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology, University Of Massachusetts Press, Great Britain, 1981: p.90-98.
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CIXOUS Helene, The Laugh Of The Medusa translation by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, Vol.1, no.4, 1976. DANZIGER Marie A., Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, and Philip Roth, Peter Lang, New York, 1996. DERRIDA Jacques, Ed. KAMUF Peggy, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991. DERRIDA Jacques, Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, U.S.A.,1978 DEWS Peter (Ed.), Habermas: A Critical Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1999. DOCHERTY Thomas (Ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Harvester/Wheatsheaf, Great Britain, 1993. DRAINE Betsy, Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 1983. ELIOT T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays, Faber & Faber, London, 1990. FISHBURN Katherine, The Unexpected Universe Of Doris Lessing: A Study In Narrative Technique, Greenwood Press, London. FOUCAULT Michael, Madness and Civilization: A History Of Insanity In The Age Of Reason, Vintage Books, New York, 1988. FAHIM Shadia S., Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium, St. Martins Press, New York, 1994. FOSTER Hal (Ed.), Postmodern Culture, Pluto Press, Britain, 1990. GIDDENS Anthony, From Modernism and Postmodernism in WAUGH Patricia (Ed.) Postmodernism: A Reader, Edward Arnold, Great Britain, 1992: p.11-13. GREENE Gayle, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change, University of Michigan Press, U.S.A., 1997. GREENE Gayle and KAHN Coppelia (Ed.), Making A Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, Routledge, London, 1990. HOWE Irving, Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction in WAUGH Patricia (Ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Edward Arnold, Great Britain, 1992: p.25-31. HUTCHEON Linda, The Politics Of Postmodernism, Routledge, London, 1991.
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HUTCHEON Linda, A Poetics Of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, London, 1989. HUYSSEN Andreas, After The Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1986. IRIGARAY Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One, in MARKS Elaine and DE COURTIVRON Isabelle (Ed.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology, University Of Massachusetts Press, Great Britain, 1981: p.99-106 JAMESON Fredric, Periodising the Sixties in WAUGH Patricia (Ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Edward Arnold, Great Britain, 1992: p.125-152. KRISTEVA Julia, Woman Can Never Be Defined in MARKS Elaine and DE COURTIVRON Isabelle (Ed.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology, University Of Massachusetts Press, Great Britain, 1981: p.137-141 (a) KRISTEVA Julia, Oscillation between Power and Denial in MARKS Elaine and DE COURTIVRON Isabelle (Ed.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology, University Of Massachusetts Press, Great Britain, 1981: p.165-167 (b). KAPLAN E. Ann (ED.), Postmodernism and its Discontents: Theories, Practices, Verso, London, 1989. KING Jeannette, Doris Lessing, Edward Arnold, Great Britain, 1989. LAING R.D. & ESTERTON A., Sanity, Madness and the Family, Penguin Books, 1972. LAING R.D., The Divided Self, Penguin Books, Great Britain, 1974. LASH Scott, Sociology of Postmodernism, Routledge, New York, 1996. LEONARD John, The Spacing Out of Doris Lessing in SPRAGUE Claire and TIGER Virginia (ED.), Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1986. LOOMBA Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Routledge, London, 1998. LYON David, Postmodernity, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1999. MARKS Elaine and DE COURTIVRON Isabelle (Ed.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology, University Of Massachusetts Press, Great Britain, 1981. MASLEN Elizabeth, Doris Lessing, Northcote House, U.K., 1994. McHALE Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, Great Britain, 1991.
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MEANEY Geraldine, Unlike Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, London, 1993. MICHAEL Magali Cornier, Woolfs Between the Acts and Lessings The Golden Notebook: From Modern to Postmodern Subjectivity in SAXTON Ruth and TOBIN Jean (ED.), Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, St. Martins Press, New York, 1994: p.3956. MILNER Andrew, Contemporary Cultural Theory, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991. MOAN ROWE Margaret, Doris Lessing, St. Martins Press, New York, 1994. MORRIS Meaghan, The Pirates Fiance: Feminism, Reading Postmodernism, Verso, London, 1988. MORRIS Pam, Literature and Feminism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. MURRAY WALKER Jeanne, Memory And Culture Within The Individual: The Breakdown Of Exchange In Memoirs Of A Survivor in KAPLAN Carey & CRONAN ROSE Ellen (Ed.), Doris Lessing: The Alchemy Of Survival, Ohio University Press, Ohio, 1988. NAREMORE J. & BRANTLINGER P. (Ed.), Modernity and Mass Culture, Indiana University Press, U.S.A, 1991. NICHOLSON Linda J. (Ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge, U.S.A, 1990. NUTTALL Jeff, Bomb Culture, Paladin, London, 1970. PICKERING Jean, Understanding Doris Lessing, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1990. RUBENSTEIN Roberta, The Novelistic Vision Of Doris Lessing: Breaking The Forms Of Consciousness, University Of Illinois Press, U.S.A., 1979. SAXTON Ruth and TOBIN Jean (ED.), Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, St. Martins Press, New York, 1994. SMART Barry, Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies, Routledge, London, 1982. SPRAGUE Claire, Multipersonal and Dialogic Modes in Mrs.Dalloway and The Golden Notebook in SAXTON Ruth and TOBIN Jean (ED.), Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold, St. Martins Press, New York, 1994: p.3-14.
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SPRAGUE Claire and TIGER Virginia (ED.), Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1986. SZASZ Thomas S., The Myth Of Mental Illness, Paladin, London, 1972. TAYLOR Jenny (ED.), Notebooks/Memoirs/Archive: Reading And Rereading Doris Lessing, Routledge & Kegan Paul, U.S.A, 1982. TIGER Virginia, Woman Of Many Summers: The Summer Before The Dark in SPRAGUE Claire and TIGER Virginia (ED.), Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, G.K. Hall & Co., Boston, 1986. TONG Rosemary, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction, Routledge, London, 1992. WAUGH Patricia, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern, Routledge, London, 1989. WAUGH Patricia (Ed.), Postmodernism: A Reader, Edward Arnold, Great Britain, 1992. WOOD David (Ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader, Blackwell Publishers, Great Britain, 1992.
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Doris Lessing and Postmodernism

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Doris Lessing and Postmodernism

By Dr. Sue King-Smith

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

McHale 1991: p.9-10

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Waugh 1989: p. 206

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

CHAPTER 1 Postmodernism and Postmodernist Fiction

Doherty 1993: p. 1 Doherty 1993: p.4

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Milner 1991: p.109 Giddens 1992: p.11-12 14 Jameson 1992: p.128

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Waugh 1992: p.4 Foster 1990: pg xiii

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Waugh 1989: p.3 McHale 1991: p.38

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doherty 1993: p.16 McHale 1991: p.9 38 McHale 1991: p.10

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Tong 1992: p.231

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

CHAPTER 2 The Golden Notebook

Pickering 1990: p.3

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

. This sense of dislocation from the Self, of

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

CHAPTER 3- Briefing For A Descent Into Hell

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

. This is not to say that it hasnt

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Lessing 1972: p.12 Lessing 1972: p.139

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Lessing 1972: p.141 King 1989: p.64

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

CHAPTER 4 - The Memoirs Of A Survivor

Lessing 1976b: p.10 Lessing 1976b: p.38 & 78-9

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003

Doris Lessing and Postmodernism, copyright Sue King-Smith, 2003