Chapter3
Metamorphosis and Coherency
−on The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook
Ⅰ
As I discussed in Chapter 1, in Mrs. Dalloway Woolf foregrounds – through her
tunnelling process – the intertwinement of a person’s life and his/her memory; if the
individual is part of a collective whole, a discursive continuum, this individual memory
can extend also into a collective human history, which man attempts to reconstruct and
reinterpret. In Between the Acts Woolf attempts to shed light on the historical inscription
on human life, not by way of the tunnelling process in this instance, but rather by
focusing on the surface, visible, and audible world constituted by landscape, pictorial
representation, people’s dialogue, and the pageant itself.
Doris Lessing pursues the same interweave of human’s everyday life and his/her
history as Woolf does, deploying totally different narrative strategies from those of
Woolf, or rather, transgressing every boundary of categorisation, though. In the world of
Lessing’s novel appears the interwoven relationship, as Woolf shows, in which the
individual is always re-creating, and is re-created by, the collective, and so, the
individual life is always entangled with a sense of recursive history. Lessing depicts this
intertwinement in the even more complicated and even harder time than the time Woolf
lived in. Above all Golden Notebook, Lessing’s well known masterpiece, is marked by
her awareness of the time with this repeatedly resurrected historical inscription, and by
paradoxically highly patterned fragments. It is by exploring how and why Lessing
choose this narrative strategy that one can penetrate her serious and straightforward
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attempt at representing the time she lives in.
Before discussing The Golden Notebook, however, I want to examine her first
novel – The Grass Is Singing – because a comparison of the two books will demonstrate
the coherency of Lessing’s attitude towards writing, in spite of her ostensibly diverse
narrative strategies. Since The Grass Is Singing was published in 1950, Doris Lessing
has presented a number of novels covering a wide variety of forms: realism, science
fiction, fantasy, and gothic, to enumerate but a few. The trajectory of her changing
forms is scarcely regular, consistent, nor linear. After writing realist novels – with the
exception of The Golden Notebook – she suddenly seemed to diverge, in 1979, in an
unexpected direction with the “Canopus in Argos: Archives” series of science fiction;
then, just when she appeared to forget realism entirely, she abruptly came back to it –
publishing The Diary of Jane Sommers in 1984. Nevertheless, I agree with her own
definition of herself in 1980 that “I am the same person who wrote about the same
themes” (Conversations 64).
In this chapter I want to argue first, in the first section, about The Grass Is Singing,
a purportedly typical realist novel, and then about The Golden Notebook, her 1962 novel
with a highly complicated structure – focusing on the difference and consistency
between them. It is, it would seem, by comparing The Grass Is Singing to The Golden
Notebook that one can best recognise how drastically Lessing shifts her mode of novel
and why this shift takes place; she had, from the beginning of her career, continued to
write nothing but realist novels for twelve years, until The Golden Notebook broke up
the realist mode with a non-chronological yet highly patterned conglomeration of
fragmented writings. By exploring this metamorphosis of Lessing’s one can detect the
underlying coherency beneath her formal metamorphosis.
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As is often the case with a writer’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing encapsulates
several embryonic themes which are recurrently explored and developed in books
throughout her career, including The Golden Notebook. What I want to emphasise in my
discussion of The Grass Is Singing is, however, not that it contains some themes –
friction of the individual with the collective, a female position in the society, insanity in
the modern world – which persist in The Golden Notebook, but that some of its
narrative modes already diverge from what is usually attributed to realism. Lessing
already destabilises in her first novel the framework of the realist mode which most
critics insist The Grass Is Singing has.
Then, in the second section, in my analysis of The Golden Notebook – a novel
filled with a lot of pastiche, fragments, scripts, and signs – I want to accentuate that it is
one of the results of her struggle with the time she lives in, in this case the post-war
world and Britain in the fifties, when the Suez Crisis upset the government and the
declaration of the Twentieth Committee agitated moral support of the communists. If
“[t]his late age of world’s experience [the First World War] had bred in them all, all men
and women, a well of tears” (MD 8), the trauma of the Second World War – including
the development of nuclear weapons and the tragedy of Auschwitz – dug this “well of
tears” even more profoundly and tenaciously. Therefore, while the struggle of a writer in
post-war society relates back to that of modernists after the Great War, and particularly
Virginia Woolf, the task they face might be more difficult still.
I described in Chapter 1 Woolf’s attempt to intersect the spirit of the time and the
aesthetic after the Great War, and I will maintain in the third section that Lessing
attempts a similar thing in The Golden Notebook. Furthermore, Lessing grapples with
the same problem as Woolf does: both explore how a writer should proceed after such
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an unprecedented catastrophe. In confronting their struggle with the time – despite the
totally different narrative styles in Mrs. Dalloway, Between the Acts, and The Golden
Notebook as well – the two writers develop a huge discursive continuum, where
individuals are not fixed and established beings but always in flux, interacting with each
other and the persistent return of memory; as a result history, their collective memory, is
always re-emerging in this discursive continuity. This viewpoint – that a human
individual is always intertwined with other individuals, and further, with history – is an
undercurrent that functions like a palimpsest in both their writings.
The Grass Is Singing – based apparently on Lessing’s African experience – was a
great success, as I have stated in the Introduction. Its colonial subject matter was
generally welcomed by critics in post-war British society. The 1950s cultural and
political new wave required new talent, and people wanted to know what was actually
going on in the colonies in the face of increasing immigration from ex-colonies into
Britain. Since then the novel has attracted a lot of critical attention; though it is
examined as social realism – because of its detailed description of the situation on a
farm in a then British colony – it also inspires criticism from the perspective of
psychoanalysis. Notably, in her 1979 monograph The Novelistic Vision of Doris
Lessing: Breaking the Form of Consciousness, Roberta Rubenstein explicates the
psychological relationship between Mary, the protagonist, and the murderer Moses,
drawing on Jungian theory. My purpose in arguing about The Grass Is Singing here is,
however, less the connection between the characters – or between the characters and
social mores – than the way in which its narrative structure provokes the reader to
imagine something that is actually going on, something that is absent in the text, thereby
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inspiring the reader’s epistemophilia.
I think it necessary, before discussing The Grass Is Singing, to delineate the
economic and social conditions of Southern Rhodesia at that time, which is the
background not only of the novel but also of Lessing’s own life. Rhodesia was named
after Cecil Rhodes, a British man, and then Prime Minister, who piled up immense
wealth by the exploitation of diamond near Cape Town. He established Southern
Rhodesia – incorporating Mashonaland and Matabeleland – in 1895, seizing it with his
British South Africa Company. In 1913 a Land Act came into force which substantially
cancelled the land ownership of all Africans, who occupied more than 90 per cent of the
population in South Africa, and became an effective tool for segregation and apartheid.
As for Southern Rhodesia, Basil Davidson describes the similar situation as follows:
The same system of proletarianizing self-sufficient peasants, and of driving
them into a labour market where they could have no bargaining power, was
used elsewhere with local variants. In Southern Rhodesia . . . Crown
Colony government was established in 1923 . . . . They [Colony
government] at once set about installing South African pattern of
segregation, whether as to land or as to labour. After much tergiversation a
‘final allotment’ was made in 1936: this awarded nearly half the total area
to white settlement (even if there were nothing like enough whites to settle
it), and ‘reserved’ about a quarter for African ownership. Not surprisingly,
the whites got the best areas. (117)
This meant that as a consequence of the rule of a private company most of the best land
was passed legitimately to white Europeans; while 30,000,000 acres of prime land were
allotted to Europeans, only 10,000,000 acres were “reserved” for the native
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population.１
The economy of Southern Rhodesia suffered serious damage in the Great
Depression of 1929, which dealt a further blow to already debilitated agricultural
conditions. Despite slightly increased productivity in the cotton, flour and tobacco
industries, the whole economic situation had been but under pressure partly because of
high wage paid to white people. In order to overcome this stagnation, the government
put into practice Land Apportionment Act in 1930 and Industry Mediation Act in 1934,
both of which are notorious for their institutionalisation of racial discrimination; the
Land Apportionment Act designated and enclosed the settlements of African natives
according to the reserve system, thus authorising both the prejudice of the Europeans
and the cheap labour of the native. The Industry Mediation Act was formulated to
support this policy, constraining the labour conditions of the native population.
Therefore, along with the introduction of a cash economy and taxation, native settlers
were forced to work under severe working conditions to pay their tax in cash.
It is in a farm confronting this economic and social environment in Southern
Rhodesia that the story unfolds in The Grass Is Singing. Dick Turner – the husband of
its protagonist, Mary Turner – is a typical British immigrant who, abandoning and
leaving Britain because of the Great Depression, comes to Africa only to fail to find
hope in the agricultural activity of the colonial society. What awaits them is another
version of depression. Lessing refers – in her first autobiography, Under My Skin – to
this figure of the forlorn farmer who reminds one of her own father, Alfred Cook Taylor:
The central character was idealistic young Englishman of the kind who so
often arrived in the Colony, only to be appalled at what he found. Since
most were escaping the Slump and extreme poverty in Britain, to leave
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again was impossible, and they adapted themselves to the local mores.
(325)
The immigrant farmer, no longer able to go back to their homeland and having no
choice but to obey local mores, cannot escape the unfamiliar new territory of the
colonial society. In a society based, legally or illegally, on explicit racial discrimination
he finds himself in an unprecedented position where he – in spite of his one-sided
privilege – can never manage his farming without the labour of African native.２
The background of The Grass Is Singing is, as stated above, set in the farm in the
Southern Rhodesia where Lessing grew up and also in the period when Lessing – at
around twenty years old – lived a city life in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia.
The story traces in detail the life of Mary, a white woman who leaves the city to marry a
poor farmer, Dick Turner; it discloses the psychological aspect of their married life, in
parallel with its social dimension, ending with a murder case in which Mary is killed by
a black house boy – Moses – having suffered a nervous breakdown. The main plot
follows the trajectory of Mary’s nervous breakdown. What is emphasised throughout the
story is that, in spite of her talent for business and her outgoing character, Mary does not
know nor want to know her own “volition” (195); this disposition of hers proves to be
one of the critical reasons why she succumbs to her collapse, which leads ineluctably to
the murder. Mary’s father is on the staff of the railway company, always drunk and often
quarreling over money with his wife – Mary’s mother. Fed up with her parents’ strife,
Mary is happy to depart for the city where she is independent of her family and an
excellent secretary; she lets loose her practical abilities and enjoys her “freedom” to do
anything she likes in her rich and carefree unmarried life.
Nevertheless, she never ceases to be a passive woman, being unaware or
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unmindful of her own intentions and always “taken out” by someone who needs at their
disposal a convenient girl “adapting herself sensibly and quietly to any occasion” (38).
However, even if she seems to have an active social life with a lot of friends around her,
the possibility remains that it is superficial. She has a subtle but profound fear of contact
with people, which urges her to make her life busy in order to conceal and forget her
own inner fears. Supposedly because she senses, consciously or unconsciously, her own
difficulties regarding personal relationships, she favours “the friendly impersonality of
[her work]” (35) as well as “impersonal casual friendship” (45). Only at the end of her
life does she give insight for the first time into this ontological anxiety of her own:
But what had she done? And What was it? What had she done? Nothing of
her own volition. Step by step, she had come to this, a woman without will.
(195)
She cannot have any motivation within her daily activities, but simply does what other
people want her to do; what she wants is no more than to adjust to the world
surrounding her.３ Her mind is fragile and insecure enough to be agitated by a slightly
sarcastic remark from her friend: “She isn’t just like that” (40). Being no longer
satisfied with her city life, she begins to count on Dick – whom she happens to meet in a
cinema and who offers her a way out of the city’s already uncomfortable life. This is
also the case with Dick; he loves his farm and the work there, but he has also been tired
with his lonely and poor life, and has been pursuing a woman to live with him and
provide a way out of his miserable existence. Thus, neither Dick nor Mary tries to
overcome the struggles of their own lives, and their marriage functions as a device for
escaping the hopelessness of each.
How could this marriage give comfort and satisfaction to each of them when they
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marry only to flee from their former life? Married life on Dick’s farm falls utterly short
of Mary’s expectations. In addition to their poverty and the unforgiving nature that
surrounds them, the distance in their attitudes towards farm life arouses Mary’s
suspicions about the happy life their marriage is supposed to provide. Moreover, she
also begins to doubt Dick’s ability to manage a farm and her hatred of the native settlers
– which her parents have taken every opportunity to drum into her head ever since her
childhood – intensifies further. Caught up in hatred, despair and disillusionment, she
gradually loses her balance of mind and allows herself to be “poised, as it were, waiting
for something to propel her one way or the other” (141).
It is when Mary is under this condition that Moses, a black African, who
eventually murders her, is hired as a house boy by the Turners. In addition to the fact
that she prefers an “impersonal” relationship with other people, Moses represents the
last sort of person she wants to contact with – the epitome of the alien black collective
whom she has been conditioned to detest. She knows quite well that she, a white woman,
can never be excused for having a personal relationship with a black native. This social
taboo suppresses the natural expression of her emotion and worsens her already
vulnerable status, making the communication with an African house boy awkward and
embarrassing. What is worse, Mary senses something sexually attractive in Moses,
which agitates her as a woman. Oscillating between fear against and fascination with the
new addition to their household, she experiences a nervous breakdown – leaving herself
completely in the hands of Moses, which triggers the crime that finishes their lives. She
has never been aware of her own self-trapped being until the last day of her life when
she meditates:
She would walk out her road alone, she thought. That was her lesson she
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had to learn. If she had learned it, long ago, she would not be standing here
now, having been betrayed for the second time by her weak reliance on a
human being who should not be expected to take the responsibility.
(200-01)
Obviously, The Grass Is Singing can be called a realist novel; indeed, many critics have
considered it as not only belonging to but definitive of the genre. The narrator carefully
traces both Mary’s external social surroundings and her psychological progress from her
self-satisfied city life to the tragedy at the end of her miserable marriage. With the
almost chronological narration focusing mostly on Mary, the reader can understand
more or less her external and internal condition; the motivation to decide to marry Dick,
her disappointment with his poor farm life, her doubt about his ability to manage the
farm, her fear of the black native, or her panic when facing Moses’ existence. Andrzej
Gąsiorek, whom I will discuss again in detail later, defines Lessing’s novels after The
Golden Notebook as experimental realism, but admits that the ones before it are
“conventionally realist, exhibiting omniscient narration, linear chronology, unaffected
language, naturalistic characters, and detailed social observation” (92). Certainly,
without any metafictional device or fabular form and with a verisimilitude concerning
social and moral crises, this text could be categorised as a realist one.
Admitting that the novel can be pigeonholed into the domain of realism, however,
I do not want to overlook two points which emerge from the ostensibly ordered mode
and the structure of the text, and want to suggest that it foreshadows Lessing’s later
metamorphosis. For one thing, the novel lacks the clear description of causality which
constitutes a necessary condition of realism. The first chapter delineates the aftermath of
the murder, the denouement that happens at the end of the plot. This reversal of the
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chronological order often appears in some kinds of novel – for example, Wuthering
Heights or Manon Lescaut – in which the narrator recollects his or her story after the
things are over, and so he or she becomes the omniscient narrator; the beginning of the
novel or the day the narrator begins to tell the story is, then, long or shortly after the end
of the plot. What makes the beginning of The Grass Is Singing different from those of
the novels of the kind is that there is no recollection of the narrator; the narration
originates in Tony Marston, who has just arrived in Southern Rhodesia from England
and lives with the Turners for just a week or so and therefore knows almost nothing
about their situation. He can no more make sense of the reason for Moses’ murder than
of the behaviour of Charlie Slatter – the Turners’ neighbour – and Denham, a
policeman.
What he barely understands is that “[t]he most interesting thing about the whole
affair was this silent, unconscious agreement” (10) which leads to “that esprit de corps
which is the first rule of South African society, but which the Turners themselves
ignored” (11). In Tony’s eyes, Charlie and Denham seem to make frantic efforts to
finish the affair by concluding that “a silly woman got herself murdered by a native for
reasons people might think about, but never, never mentioned” (11). Thus the reader
also knows in the first chapter nothing but the very ambiguous idea of the cause of the
murder and expects to find by the end of the novel its answer, which is never made
explicit; the reader can only conjecture what the silent, unconscious agreement is, the
specific nature of the esprit de corps, and why Charlie wants to smother the affair. This
is the aspect that makes the text dissimilar to other realist novels, where what is
questioned or covered earlier is necessarily answered or uncovered by its end –
satisfying the reader’s epistemophilia.
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In addition to this, the narrator does not keep an omnipotent viewpoint throughout
the text, as realist novels are supposed to do. Though the narrator focuses mainly on
Mary, he/she dodges away from her both in the first chapter and in the penultimate one,
centred on Charlie’s visit to the Turners and his growing awareness of Mary’s weird and
disgusting behaviour towards Moses. Then, like a pendulum-swing, the viewpoint
comes back to Mary in the last chapter more closely than ever before – to the extent that
something like a monologue emerges from her, in the style of free indirect discourse. In
addition to this abrupt shift of perspective, the blank period during which Mary falls
into a serious nervous breakdown precipitates the reader’s anxiety that he might not be
guided by the sort of omnipotent narrator one encounters in realist novels. Even the
detailed description of her psychological state in the last chapter scarcely gives the
entire picture of the murder or her relationship with Moses; on the contrary, it leaves
some mysteries behind. Strangely enough, her collapsing but mysteriously detached
mind grants her a perspicacious insight into her whole life on its final day:
What was it all about? she wondered dully . . . . I don’t understand, she said.
I don’t understand . . . . The idea of herself, standing above the house,
somewhere on an invisible mountain peak, looking down like a judge on
his court . . . . That was how they would see her, when it was all over, as
she saw herself now: an angular, ugly, pitiful woman, with nothing left of
the life she had been given to use . . . and while she saw Mary Turner
rocking in the corner of the sofa, moaning, her fists in her eyes, she saw,
too, Mary Turner as she had been, that foolish girl traveling unknowingly to
this end. I don’t understand, she said again. I understand nothing. (194-95)
When she wakes up in the dawn that day she imagines herself looking down on the
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entire house from some higher point like a god. Here the sensation returns, but this time
Mary Turner herself comes into view; she can see herself in the present and herself in
the past though she cannot make sense of how this forlorn life of hers has come about.
Moreover, she has a mysterious presentiment that she will be killed that night:
For the evil was a thing she could feel: had she not lived with it for many
years? How many? Long before she had ever come to the farm! Even that
girl had known it. But what had she done? And what was it? What had she
done? Nothing of her own volition. Step by step, she had come to this, a
woman without will, sitting on an old ruined sofa that smelled of dirt,
waiting for the night to come that would finish her. And justly – she knew
that. But why? Against what she sinned? The conflict between her
judgment on herself, and her feeling of innocence, of having been propelled
by something she did not understand, cracked the wholeness of her vision.
(195: original italics)
Remembering that she has never tried to find what she wants and that “the evil” has
always haunted, she knows her own death to be the consequence. The narrator does not
make any explanation regarding this sudden revelation and Mary’s prophetic insight,
leaving the reader wondering why and how she has come to this conclusion. In this
respect the narrator in The Grass Is Singing is very different from the omnipotent
narrator in the realist novel, discussed by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis:
. . . the speakers no longer seem to be human beings at all but spirits
between heaven and earth, nameless spirits capable of penetrating the
depths of the human soul . . . but not of attaining clarity as to what is in
process there, with the result that what they report has a doubtful ring . . .
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(532)
Demonstrating that the speakers in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are totally
different from those in realism – the focus of much of his study – Auerbach calls them
“nameless spirits” by way of which the author shows not a fixed objective portrait of
Mrs. Ramsay but renders her a “mere supposition, glances cast by one person upon
another whose enigma he [the author] cannot solve” (532). If the person speaking in To
the Lighthouse never attempts to delineate any complete and objective presentation of
the protagonist, the narrator in The Grass Is Singing – at least in the last chapter – can
be classed in the same category. Obviously the narrator in the last chapter does not care
about a consistent and understandable portrait of Mary, preferring to follow her internal
flow from morning till night in her last day. As a consequence, what causes the murder
remains ambiguous as well at the end of the novel.
Certainly one can say that the reason why Mary has to be killed is suggested
everywhere in the novel: her fear of human relationships – despite her apparently
outgoing character – especially with the black native; her hopeless marriage that is only
an escape from her city life or even herself; her suppressed and distorted sexual desire.
All of these personal elements conspire to produce the warped and perverted
relationship between a white woman and a black native which finally brings ruin to all.
One can also say that these personal factors are inescapably and complicatedly
intertwined with her external social surroundings. Most of all, the colour divide – one of
the most emblematic traits of colonial society – constrains Mary from releasing and
expressing naturally her own desire.
However, all of this causality is only inferable between the lines; it is not
articulated from the authoritative standpoint of a bird’s-eye view. Therefore, we cannot
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infer the causes of the murder without the sort of contrapuntal reading that Edward W.
Said suggests. Arguing about the imperialism that lurks in British and French novels,
Said proposes in Culture and Imperialism the need for a way of reading that is
contrapuntal reading, where one can deduce some further context behind the visible
text:
The point is that contrapuntal reading must take account of both processes,
that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which can be by extending
our reading of the texts to include what was once forcibly excluded – in
L’Étranger, for example, the whole previous history of France’s
colonialism and its destruction of the Algerian state, and the later
emergence of an independent Algeria (which Camus opposed) . . . . In
reading a text, one must open it out both to what went into it and to what its
author excluded. Each cultural work is a vision of a moment, and we must
juxtapose that vision with the various revisions it later provoked . . .
(66-67)
While in The Grass Is Singing, published just after the Second World War, there would
perhaps be no “forcibly excluded” text, we could not know its main plot without
opening the text out “to what its author excluded.” Of course, Said applies the
contrapuntal reading to a reading of realist novels as well – for instance, David
Copperfield or Jane Eyre – and yet what emerges from the contrapuntal reading of these
realist novels is something not necessarily involved in the main plot of each text. By
contrast a contrapuntal reading is, in my view, indispensable in the case of The Grass Is
Singing; although the mystery surrounding the murder – the ending of the plot – is
presented at the beginning of the text, and hints at its cause are scattered throughout, its
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answer is never clearly articulated. We are obliged to “extend our reading” to include
what is excluded or what is absent in the text.
Once we realise the necessity of the contrapuntal reading, however, it makes
feasible the penetration of this latent content – for example, the trace inscribed in
Mary’s unconscious by the imperial system – in the text through recognition of what is
included and present; that is, Mary Turner’s detailed psychological movement. The
narrator follows and adheres to her emotional flow almost from the beginning to the end,
except in the first chapter and the penultimate one. What is interesting here is that the
deeper the narrator goes into her mind, the more visible the social constraint
surrounding and suppressing her becomes. The invisible social mores, esprit de corps of
the colonial society and the tacit understanding of white privilege – all of which
externally and internally precipitate her falling into collapse – emerge by way of this
non-political, non-ambitious local woman’s road to breakdown. Thus, personal issues
become a microcosm of the collective; or rather, as I will mention again in my argument
regarding The Golden Notebook, the individual can be considered a metonym of the
collective. Hence the exploration of the individual mind translates unavoidably to the
collective situation; a conjunction that is examined in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the
Acts as well.
It would not be too audacious to say that the text of The Grass Is Singing is not
typical nineteenth century realism, but contains elements of divergence from it; it is,
subtly but critically, heterogeneous. This divergence leads, I want to argue, to the germ
of a thorough breaking up of the realist mode in The Golden Notebook, a more
miscellaneous novel published twelve years later. I will show in the next section how
and why Lessing effects the drastic metamorphosis in narrative structure in The Golden
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Notebook.
Ⅱ
After publishing some non-fiction and three volumes – Martha Quest, A Proper
Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm – of the five books compiled under the name of the
“Children of Violence” series, Lessing published in 1962 The Golden Notebook – one of
her most controversial novels of hers with a more complicated structure than any other
novels written in a career spanning more than half a century. The novel was accepted at
first predominantly as one about the sex war – as I have indicated – and as Lessing
herself mentions this fact with some irritation in her preface to the second edition,
published nine years later.４ It was at the same time reviewed as an autobiographical
novel, as she laments in her second autobiography, Walking in the Shade.５ Since then a
number of critics have discussed it from diverse points of view: as well as contemporary
gender relations, they deal with the socio-political background of the fifties in Britain,
the psychoanalytic process of Anna’s mental breakdown – a writer’s block evoked by
her skepticism towards nostalgia allegedly undermining her first novel, Frontiers of War
– and the enduring conflict in the signification of language. Recently critics have begun
to focus on the novel’s position in the post-9/11 world of the twenty-first century.
In this section I want to draw at first a rough picture of its structure, showing how
drastically Lessing departs from the mode and formation of her realist novels. She
juxtaposes one conventional novel, “Free Women,” with four notebooks belonging to
the protagonist. Within this seemingly fragmented structure lurks a schema in which
form and formlessness are counterposed; that is, a finished conventional novel and its
raw materials. ６ This dual deployment foregrounds Anna’s struggle against the
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presiding dilemma for the writer: why and how a writer should shape a story from
amorphous reality, especially after such an indescribable experience as the Second
World War? Paradoxically enough, however, Lessing foregrounds the human longing
for form through this deconstruction of form. I will also make a point of indicating that
this struggle is closely connected to the time – the fifties in Britain – and yet might also
be regarded as a repetition of the modernist struggle after the Great War, typified by
Virginia Woolf. In any case, Lessing’s conflict with language and the time remains
throughout her half a century career.
The Golden Notebook has quite a complicated structure, containing one realist
novel titled “Free Women,” four notebooks – whose colours are black, red, yellow and
blue respectively – and an inner golden notebook. “Free Women” is divided into five
sections and the four notebooks four sections respectively. The text begins with the first
section of “Free Women” followed by the first sections of each of the four notebooks,
and this sequence repeats itself four times. Then after the fourth repetition – including
the fourth section of “Free Women” and the four notebooks – appears an inner golden
notebook, followed by the fifth section of “Free Women” with which the entire novel
ends. Anna Wulf, a protagonist of “Free Women” proves to be the writer of the four
notebooks, and also of “Free Women”; it is made clear in the penultimate section, the
inner golden notebook, that “Free Women” is a complete fiction produced by Anna after
her writing up all the four notebooks. “Free Women” is actually an embedded text rather
than the encompassing one it seems at first sight. Finally, what appear at first to be the
notebooks that Anna in “Free Women” writes, are found to be outside the text of “Free
Women”; that is, its raw material in the reality of the novel. Consequently, this
subversion of reality’s position functions in the same way as the pageant in Between the
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Acts does; the strategic deployment of the fractured writings in The Golden Notebook or
the pageant in Between the Acts marks a narrative device which obscures the boundary
between fictionality and reality – or rather, subverts that categorisation.
Each of the four differently coloured autobiographical notebooks contains a
different aspect of Anna’s whole life. In the black notebook appears her experience in
the Central Africa during the World WarⅡand the events around her successful first
novel, Frontiers of War. The red one details Anna’s afflictions in her political life,
especially her conflict with the British Communist Party which she is going to leave.
She attempts to make a draft in the yellow notebook for a novel titled “The Shadow of
the Third” in which Ella, an alter-ego of Anna, features. The blue notebook is provided
for the purpose of simply writing daily happenings. All of these notebooks include
elements that defy categorisation, be they fiction or nonfiction: scraps of the newspapers,
a sequence of extremely short stories like short–short, puns, and even signs or double
lines, which make the notebooks over all look like rough materials in comparison with
the neatly-ordered “Free Women.”
The readers possess no prior knowledge of any of these frameworks; they are
forced to go on reading confusedly without knowing why the notebooks are divided in
this manner or how the realist novel and the four notebooks could be lined up
chronologically – just guessing that possibly the Anna in “Free Women” is the same
woman as the Anna in the notebooks. Only when the reader comes to the scene in the
inner golden notebook in which Saul Green gives Anna the first phrase of “Free
Women,” does he/she realise that Anna Wulf – the author of the notebooks – writes the
fictional “Free Women” after she finishes the notebooks. Before examining why
Lessing adopts this complicated, fastidious and labyrinth-like formation – which seems
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calculated to embarrass and confuse the readers – I will proceed to describe the content
of the four notebooks a little more minutely.
In the black notebook are delineated mainly Anna’s dilemma as a writer, the
events surrounding her first novel – Frontiers of War – and her recollection of African
days that form the basis for the novel. Frontiers of War contains the story of a young
man in the RAF who is dispatched to the Central Africa, where he falls in love with a
wife of an African activist from whom he has at last to part. The novel is a great success
and receives a lot of offers to be made into a film or a TV drama. Anna sets the
background of the novel in Central Africa, where she has once lived, and portrays the
characters and the events based on her actual experience there; she has spent the days
with her communist comrades, sometimes lingering whimsically around a hotel at
weekends. An already renowned writer, she herself can no longer be proud of her own
novel – disgusted with “a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for the freedom, for the
jungle, for the formlessness” (77) in the novel. She considers that the lying nostalgia
there might eventually induce nihilism in the reader and offer nothing of value,
continuing to speculate that:
. . . . Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to
throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of
dissolution. This emotion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue.
And the people who read Frontiers of War will have had fed in them this
emotion, even though they were not conscious of it. That is why I am
ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime. (78)
Anna hardly believes that her novel is selling because of its high quality as a novel; she
has made a reputation for herself, she thinks, by catching public fancy at the time –
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responding to the interest of readers in1940s and 1950s Britain in works from and about
the colonies. In the meantime, the way to understand human nature or perception
changes so radically that she is no longer satisfied with her own activity of writing as
she used to be:
It is the malady of some of the best people of this time; some can stand the
pressure of it; others crack under it; it is a new sensibility, a half-conscious
attempt toward a new imaginative comprehension. (76)
Threatened by the urgent demand of the new age for a new perception and a new
epistemology, Anna nevertheless does not know what form they will take and how to
acquire them. She is only aware that they can not be expressed in the conventional form
of the novel, and that even the novel nowadays – when the individual is alienated and
cracked – becomes a mere medium of information (75). Thomas Mann’s type of novel
is no longer suitable. Then what kind of novel has she to write now? What on earth does
the activity of writing a novel mean? Suffocated by these questions, Anna is at a
dead-end, unable to write any longer.
In the red notebook is shown her days as a member of the British Communist
Party, to which she has adhered from 1950 until her departure in 1954. She never has
great aspirations for the Party, as she has already been disenchanted by her experience
in the communist group in Africa. Still, she has stuck to the party even after arriving in
London since it is the only place – she mentions – to talk about the social and political
matters to which she feels a close connection; she also states that “the only discussion I
have about politics where I say what I think are with people who have been in the Party
and have now left” (153). The additional condition, “people who . . . have now left [the
Party],” is significant. It suggests people who join the Party finding themselves
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ineluctably connected to society and politics, and yet remain critical of the way in which
the Party rules them; they never give top priority to fidelity to the cause, refusing to
instill theocracy into politics. Anna has joined it as a result of her own indignation that,
as everyone tries to overlook deceptive and hypocritical reality, it is “[b]etter to be a
communist, and at almost any cost, better to be in touch than to be so cut from any
reality that one can make a remark as stupid as that” (267). She finds, however, that the
Party maintains its social organisation much more than it observes its belief and policy,
and is desperate to conceal any misconduct it commits.
Not only the British Communist Party but communism throughout the world had
plunged into the difficult phase in the 1950s. The USSR, the first communist state in the
world and the centre of all the Communist Party, had gradually exposed the inherent
contradiction between communist dogma and its actual practice – even before the death
of Stalin in 1953. The subsequent critique of Stalin by Khrushchev in 1956 gave a
telling blow to communists all over the world. What was disclosed was that Stalin’s
terrifying dictatorship had usurped the ideal of an impartial society where all the
working-class people could be well off. On the other hand, there spread in the United
States in the fifties a frenzy of communist-hunting – or “Red-hunting” – under the
banner of McCarthyism, whose impact is exemplified in Mrs. Wright’s fright at finding
out Anna is a communist, and in the story Saul Green tells Anna. The Party at the time is
shaken both by the outer socio-political situation and from within, which accelerates
Anna’s anxiety:
. . . somewhere at the back of my mind when I joined the Party was a need
for wholeness, for an end to the split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all
live. Yet joining the Party intensified the split . . . (157)
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Thus at the end of the red notebook Anna could no longer find what to write, only
putting on the wall the newspaper scraps that read about violence and crimes throughout
the world.
In the yellow notebook is described a kind of draft of the novel Anna is writing,
called “The Shadow of the Third.” The protagonist named Ella – an alter-ego of Anna –
is the editor of a magazine for working-class women. Ella mentions her relationship
with her lover, Paul Tanner, a counterpart of Anna’s lover Michael; Ella also mentions
her life with Paul, her psychological state as a woman, her sex life as well as her deep
concern for her daughter, Jeannette. Ella might be what Anna wishes to be or what she
believes she should be. Whichever it may be, however, this self-portrait is entangled
with “the third”; despite the fact that “the third” is originally designated to be Paul’s
wife, Ella – or Anna – finds herself imagining this woman as a decent, non-jealous, and
undemanding person who has nothing to do with Paul’s wife:
It occurs to Ella (but much later, about three years on) that this is a
remarkable image to have developed, since it does not correspond to
anything at all Paul says about his wife. So where does the picture come
from? Slowly Ella understands that this is what she would like to be herself,
this imagined woman is her own shadow, everything she is not. (193)
Seeing herself try unwittingly to project her wish onto another woman to cover her own
lack, Anna/Ella comes to lose confidence as a writer in portraying people – and further,
in keeping her way of life as a woman. A “free woman,” an economically and socially
independent woman as Anna may be, she suspects that such words as “free” or
“independent” could not be appropriate for her:
. . . I am unhappy because I have lost some kind of independence, some
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freedom; but my being ‘free’ . . . has to do with my attitude towards a man,
and that has been proved dishonest, because I am in pieces. (283)
Disturbed by the ambiguity of what the words signify, Anna’s writing falls into a slump;
she abruptly stops writing “The Shadow of the Third” and starts her notes for the short,
random pieces of fiction. In the third section of the yellow notebook Ella, with her
frustration worsening, falls back increasingly on the happy and healthy figure of a
woman – a product of her wish – who preserves her integrity. At last she abandons her
attempt to produce a novel, just scribbling extremely short stories and regretting that she
should have written them in the blue notebook.
The blue notebook begins with Anna’s elucidating why she decides to write a
diary. She is surprised at her own behaviour: having seen the quarrel between Molly and
Tommy, she goes up to her room and starts to write, as if in opposition to the act of
writing a fiction that she tries in the yellow notebook. Anna begins to write down only
her daily events, keeping a diary in order to avoid the artificiality she detects in “turning
everything into fiction.” This attempt to “write down simply what happens” (77), which
seems to be much closer to the truth than fiction does, does not go well either.
The diary in the blue notebook, dating from 1950 to 1954, naturally contains the
descriptions of daily events: uneasiness about the Party; skepticism in her life as a
woman and as a mother; her relationship with men; the meaning of writing a novel.
Anna states her sentiments on them precariously and without any order. There also
appear her conversations with Mrs. Marks – a psychiatrist, whom Anna calls Mother
Sugar – whose analysis of her dreams Anna gets irritated with.
In the second section of the blue notebooks, Anna describes in detail the events
that happen on 17th September in 1954. On the morning that day she oscillates between
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the role of mother – to her daughter, Jeanette – and that of lover to Michael, who has
stayed overnight in her house. Having bought food for Michael’s dinner – and wearing
his favourite clothes – Anna goes to work in the office of the Party where she, already
made uncomfortable by menstruation, is further depressed by futile dialogues with her
close friend and comrade, Jack. When coming home and preparing a gorgeous dish for
Michael, she nevertheless senses with terrible exhaustion that he is not coming; she
feels that “an awful black whirling chaos is just outside me, waiting to move into me”
(326).
In the third section she overtly admits the limit of a diary, marking with a big
cross page by page. Now she no longer dates the notebook, just scribbling what comes
into her mind with a feeling of frustration. Unable to understand what is wrong with the
diary, Anna gets even more embarrassed and distressed to the extent that she falls into
madness with Saul Green in the fourth section; madness characterised by confusion and
disorder, in which real life and dream, human kindness and cruelty, dialogue, sex, and
daily chores coexist. From this entire chaos, however, drops a hint of what seems like
something new which is to be embodied by the inner golden notebook.
The juxtaposition of the conventional novel, “Free Women,” and the notebooks
makes it clear that – in contrast to its finished form – the raw material of the text is
extremely formless. Anna is haunted by this unbridgeable gap between a formed story
and formlessness of reality that should produce it. Why, then, does she write a fiction?
Could a novel convey reality? Overwhelmed by this aporia Anna is distressed by two
dilemmas as a writer. She is embarrassed with the aforesaid degeneration of the function
of recent novels. Although the only kind of novel which interests her is “a book
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powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a
new way of looking at life” (75-76), the current novel falls into “an outpost of
journalism” – becoming “a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented
consciousness.” This is, she complains, because “[h]uman beings are so divided, are
becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the
world” (75).７ In addition to this, she can not wipe out her sense of disappointment at
her first novel, Frontiers of War. Despite its great success she labels the novel a failure;
as I mentioned earlier, she is dismayed at its “lying nostalgia” (77) that will have fed in
the reader “nihilism, and angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness,
a longing to become part of dissolution” which is “one of the strongest reasons why
wars continue” (78).
Confused and disillusioned – both by recent fiction in general and her own novel
in particular – she asks herself, “why did I not write an account of what had happened,
instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. . . . .
Why not, simply, the truth?” (77). In fact – as I earlier mentioned – when Anna sees the
quarrel between Molly and her son Tommy, she immediately goes upstairs to her room
and begins writing a story about the quarrel she has just seen, and is ashamed of her
own behaviour:
It struck me that my doing this – turning everything into fiction – must be
an evasion. Why not write down, simply, what happened between Molly
and her son today? Why do I never write down, simply, what happens?
Why don’t I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction
is simply a means of concealing something from myself. (211)
Perhaps Anna cannot accept artificiality of fiction; while she recognises that her
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experience is elusive and amorphous and no beginning and no ending, she writes from
that experience a fiction which demands just such a rigid framework. She senses falsity
in “changing everything into fiction” in the first section of the blue notebook, and so
begins to write simply “what happens” without imposing upon it a pattern. After her
long description of “what happens” with exact dates in the first and second section,
however, she fails to find satisfaction in it at last. What she finds there is not experience
or reality, but just its emotionalism and its dubious assumption:
So all that is a failure too. The blue notebook, which I had expected to be
the most truthful of the notebook, is worse than any of them. I expected a
terse record of facts to present some sort of a pattern when I read it over,
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
emotionalism and because of its assumption that if I wrote ‘at nine-thirty I
went to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated’, this
would be more real than if I simply wrote what I thought. And yet I still
don’t understand why. (412)
In order to avoid “changing everything into fiction” Anna tries to write simply “what
happens.” This effort of hers stands on the assumption that “a terse record of facts”
would be “more real” than the writing of what she thinks, and yet she realises that this
assumption makes her diary far from real experience. She no longer hold onto her
former presupposition that fiction is unreal, and nonfiction real: she fails in defining the
relationship between fiction and nonfiction as a falsity-reality dyad. The question here
moves on to the signification of language itself, of which both fiction and nonfiction
consist: could language correctly represent reality, experience, or truth whether in
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fiction or in nonfiction?
This scepticism about language is omnipresent throughout the novel, either in
“Free Women,” or in the notebooks, permeating into spoken words as well as written
ones. When Anna discusses with her comrades in the Party on Linguistics by Stalin, she
is suddenly possessed by a sense of vacancy in signification of language:
. . . words lose their meaning suddenly. I find myself listening to a
sentence, a phrase, a group of words, as if they are in a foreign language –
the gap between what they are supposed to mean, and what in fact they say
seems unbridgeable. I have been thinking of the novels about the
breakdown of language, like Finnegans Wake. (272)
When Anna thinks that “what they [languages] are supposed to mean” is not equal to
“what in fact they say,” she also detects that this insurmountable gap is caused by “the
thinning of language against the density of our experience” (273). While the gap
between the word and real experience prevails in male-female conversation and the
discourse of the Communist Party, Anna is – as a writer – mainly concerned about the
gap in the written words. She loses confidence in the mimetic power of language, or the
novel that contains it. Language, for her, no longer has a valid meaning but completely
drops the signifié.
It was then I decided to use the blue notebook, this one, as nothing but a
record of facts . . . . I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words
mean nothing. 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 experience . . . and
immediately the words dissolve, and my minds starts spawning images
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which have nothing to do with the words . . . . So I can’t write any
longer . . . . For words are form, and if I am at pitch where shape, form,
expression are nothing, then I am nothing . . . (418-19: original italics)
Anna begins to write in her blue notebook just “what happens,” because by writing
“what happens” and not making up fiction words appear to get closer to the “real”; in
other words, they appear to have always a proper meaning. Yet if the words even in her
blue notebook “mean nothing,” and if words could not be “the form into which
experience is shaped,” how could she convey or represent the “real”? How could she
manage, as a writer, words that are “a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk”?
Haunted by this signifiant without signifié, she can not wipe out her ontological anxiety
as a writer, and even as a human being.
Anna has also taken another method for getting closer to her experience; the
reason why she has four notebooks is that she tries to compartmentalise her own daily
life, dividing neatly her experience into four aspects before making it whole. The black
notebook is “to do with Anna Wulf the writer”; the red notebook is to be “concerned
with politics”; the yellow notebook is where she “make[s] a story out of [her]
experience; the blue notebook is “to be a diary” (418).
However, her attempt is criticised by Tommy, who asks her, “Why the four
notebooks? What would happen if you had one big book without all those divisions and
brackets and special writing?” After Anna replies, “I’ve told you, chaos,” he further
questions, “Are you afraid of being chaotic?” and blames her for being irresponsible
(247). He continues to dispute:
“ . . . And you aren’t even honest enough to let yourself be what you are –
everything’s divided off and split up. . . you take care to divide yourself up
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into compartments. If things are a chaos, then that’s what they are. I don’t
think there’s a pattern anywhere – you are just making patterns, out of
cowardice.” (247)
While Anna tries to put her daily life in order by dividing it into the four notebooks,
Tommy indicates the falsity of her attempt; in doing so Anna only tries, according to
him, to evade conveying the true “chaos” of things – she is “just making patterns, out of
cowardice” by writing out in the four notebooks whether fiction or nonfiction. Although
Anna keeps writing in the notebooks in spite of Tommy’s impeachment, her attempt at
division turns out to be a failure. For as the writing in the four notebooks goes on, the
boundaries of the books she sets up come to blur; the content of each notebook begins
to transgress into the others so that each form of writing can not play its role any more.
Thus Anna completely fails either to establish the division of her life or to avoid chaos.
She has to face the fact that what is called reality can not be divided and contained in a
pattern: it always produces excess or divergence from any framework – and so the
“real” can never be encapsulated in form-giving words. This is exactly what Lessing
writes in her essay “Writing Autobiography,” which I have quoted in the Introduction.
For Lessing and Virginia Woolf – and clearly for Anna as well – real experience is
“fluid, fleeting, evanescent” and “memory isn’t fixed.” Therefore, when it is written
down – that is, contained in form of language – it becomes ineluctably “fixed,”
“lifeless,” “without movement.” Real experience “inside a moving, flickering, luminous
envelope” could never be correctly represented in “solid fixed” words. It seems
unavoidable, therefore, that Anna should fail both to describe her life truthfully in her
diary – the blue notebook – and to pigeonhole her life in each of the four notebooks.
Moreover, if memory is not static but “slips and slides about,” history as an
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accumulation of memory cannot be fixed either.
The inability of language to approach the “real” never ceases to depress Anna; at
last, as stated above, she falls into madness with her American lover Saul Green, as a
consequence of continuous depression and embarrassment. Paradoxically enough,
however, in this total confusion she can at last let go of her obsession with dividing and
putting in order her life – the obsession which Tommy had severely criticised. She stops
compartmentalising the description of her life into the four notebooks and begins to
write in just one golden notebook as if challenging Tommy’s accusation, which she
explains thus to Saul:
‘Why do you have four notebooks?’ I [Anna] said; ‘Obviously, because it’s
been necessary to split myself up, but from now on I shall be using one
only.’ I was interested to hear myself say this, because until then I hadn’t
known it. (521)
I’ll pack away the blue notebook with others. I’ll pack away the four
notebooks. I’ll start a new notebook, all of myself in one book. (528)
Here it is not so much the intention of using only one notebook as the fact that she is
“interested to hear [her]self say this” that impresses itself upon her. She has not
“known” it, but something lets her know. After undergoing multifarious shapes of
madness, Anna attains some kind of inspiration:
Knowing was an ‘illumination’. During the last weeks of craziness and
timelessness I’ve had these moments of ‘knowing’ one after another, yet
there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. . . . what I
have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die. Words. Words.
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I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance
combination, will say what I want. . . . . The fact is, the real experience
can’t be described . . . . Anything at all, but not words . . . . But once having
been there, there’s a terrible irony . . . and it’s not a question of fighting it,
or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always.
It’s a question of bowing to it, so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an
ancient enemy: All right, I know you are there, but we have to preserve the
forms, don’t we? And perhaps the condition of your existence at all is
precisely that we preserve the forms, create the patterns – have you thought
of that? (549)
Anna thinks she knows something, though she can not put it into words; going through
an agonising struggle against language, she compromises with it and admit “the real
experience can’t be described.” But the acknowledgement of the impossibility of
describing experience does not mean to give up hope. She cannot put the real
experience into words, yet she holds on to the hope that “some combination [of words],
even a chance combination, will say what [she] want[s].” It is, she realises, important
not to evade chaos but to face it and struggle with it so as to grasp something closer to
the real experience, something new. This dialectic-like process is already predicted in
the third section: in the third section of the yellow notebook Ella is thinking of
male-female relations as the one between the two “at the end of the tether,” but also
senses that when both are “cracking up because of a deliberate attempt to transcend their
own limits,” “a new kind of strength” is born “out of the chaos” (411); in the third
section of the blue notebook, meanwhile, Anna – from the perspective of the flow of
history – tells Mother Sugar:
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“I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring
history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be
new . . . there’s a crack in that man’s personality like a gap in a dam, and
through that gap the future might pour in a different shape – terrible
perhaps, or marvelous, but something new . . . ” (416)
In refusing the universalisation of everything by Mother Sugar – a female psychiatrist –
Anna makes a point of the need to admit the historical process by which something
proper to the time is spawned out of chaos. Since I will discuss later this dialectical
process entangled with history, I will now focus on that aspect of Anna’s struggle.
The dialectical process of her agony related to language is embodied in the figure
of the “boulder-pusher” in Anna’s dream, described in the inner golden notebook. This
figure is a person that combines Ella’s lover Paul, a doctor with working-class
background, and Anna’s lover Michael, a refugee from Europe. This man tells Anna:
“But my dear Anna, we are not the failures we think we are. We spend our
lives fighting to get people very slightly less stupid than we are to accept
truths that the great men have always known . . . . Meanwhile, human
beings are ten thousand years behind them, imprisoned in fear. The great
men can’t be bothered. And they are right. Because they know we are here,
the boulder-pushers. They know we will go on pushing the boulder up the
lower slopes of an immensely high mountain . . . . All our lives, you and I,
we will use all our energies, all our talents, into pushing that boulder
another inch up the mountain . . . and that is why we are not useless after
all.” (537)
Paul has already referred to this “boulder-pusher” in the first section of the yellow
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notebook. There his career is mentioned; he fails to become a discoverer. In spite of
becoming the forger of a new path he becomes “a person who fights a middle-class
reactionary medical superintendent” (195). He insists:
“You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get
people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the
great men have always known. They have known thousands of years that to
lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have
known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his
landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But
do the great enlightened mass of the Britain people know it? No. It is our
task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them . . . . You and I are the
boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our
talents, into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth
that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of
mankind. We push the boulder. (195-96)
What is interesting and indicative in comparing these two remarks is the two very slight
differences: for one thing both Paul and Paul/Michael admit that he and Ella/Anna are
the same “boulder-pusher” who put “all [their] energies, all [their] talents, into pushing
a great boulder up a mountain,” but whereas Paul defines himself and Ella as the
failures, Paul/Michael declares “we are not the failures we think we are”; additionally,
while Paul mentions that they “spend [their] lives fighting to get people very slightly
more stupid than [themselves] to accept truths,” Paul/Michael says they get people
“very slightly less stupid” than themselves.
These two changes in referring to the boulder-pusher trace Anna’s struggle.
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Presumably for Anna, still entangled in her own perplexity, the act of repeated
boulder-pushing is nothing more than the symbol of futility. As a bright and privileged
person she has to work and work again in vain to save less enlightened people. This
ineffectiveness makes Paul say “we are the failures.” In the gulf of her agony, however,
she finds the boulder-pushing no longer a waste of time; on the contrary it is
indescribably valuable, even without any immediate result, because the process of
recurrence itself gives human life meaning. When she reaches this understanding, she
has no sense of privilege any longer, admitting herself being “more stupid” than other
people. She might not able to put her real experience into words, but her effort to do so
or her hope for a “chance combination” of words itself is indispensable for human life.
So she finds out in her “illumination”; she has to keep trying to integrate and express
what she wants even though entangled in and confused by the chain of signifiant.
The boulder-pusher appears originally in Greek myth, and yet what is delineated
here is very close to the boulder-pusher in “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. A
lot of legends on Sisyphus have been told, the narrator tells, and according to Homer he
is “the wisest and most prudent of mortals.” Because of his attitude to the gods, or
because of a breach of their laws, he is forced to roll a huge stone up a slope; as soon as
the stone reaches the peak, it rushes down “toward that lower world whence he will
have to push it up again toward the summit.” This process is repeated endlessly. The
narrator gets interested in what occurs in Sisyphus’ mind when he goes back to the plain
to push the stone again:
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me . . . that is the
hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the
heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to
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his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious . . . it is
what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his
torture at the same time crowns his victory. (Camus 108-09)
Although his consciousness makes his story tragic, it also grants him victory. In other
words, “knowing something” translates to both his torture and his victory, as is the case
with Anna. She is depressed since she is keenly conscious of the schism between words
and human reality, but she recovers when she discerns that “knowing was an
‘illumination’.” Hence the narrator elucidates that “[h]appiness and the absurd are two
sons of the same earth” and concludes that Sisyphus – the boulder-pusher – is happy:
One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher
fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is
well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile
nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled
mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is
enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (111)
One cannot escape from suffering repeatedly throughout his life because of his
cognisance. But if this cognisance – or knowing – also brings happiness, and if “the
struggle itself” confers meaning on his life, the world he lives in is “neither sterile nor
futile.” That “[t]he struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” is
the insight Anna acquires in her “illumination,” after her long conflict in the morass of
her difficulties. To borrow Camus’ words, even if human is torn between “two
certainties” – that is, the appetite for the absolute or for unity and the impossibility of
reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle” (51) – “the wild longing for
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clarity” continues to “echo in the human heart” (26). I will come back to this point at the
end of this chapter.
Ⅲ
It is often suggested that Anna’s conflict could not be rendered only in something
universal; it is, however, closely connected to the condition of the modern age –
especially just after the Second World War. She senses that “the real thing that has been
happening” is “death and destruction” (216), and “war, murder, chaos, misery” are “the
truth about the last few years” (228). She continues to be terrorised by the world filled
with terror, war, and violence even in the last section of the blue notebook:
But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it,
that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society
dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every
emotion are property, money, power. (478)
I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this
knowing . . . that great armouries of the world have their inner force, and
that my terror, the real nerve-terror of the nightmare, was part of the force. I
felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. (513: original italics)
I had known, finally, that the truth for our time was war, the immanence of
war. (516)
People are absorbed in “property, money, power” in “a society dead or dying,”
inhibiting their natural emotion. In such a society “the truth of our time” is inescapably
“the immanence of war,”８ which she feels in “a new kind of knowing” but “the word,
written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing.”
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Also, it is, it seems to her, “just a matter of luck” that she hasn’t been “tortured,
murdered, starved to death or died in a prison.” As a result “whenever anything happens
anywhere that is terrible,” she dreams on it “as if [she] were involved in it personally”
(228). Her sense of involvement with violence everywhere in the world suggests,
together with her sense of the contingency of her own identity, the way in which the
individual exists not as a fixed and static being but as an elusive and sometimes
interchangeable one; it is just such a being that is delineated in Mrs. Dalloway and
Between the Acts.９ The interchangeability of the individual is reinforced by Anna’s
dreams in which she can be an Algerian soldier or a Chinese farmer’s wife, and by the
appearance of the various presentations of Anna throughout the notebooks. She is not a
solitary being but just one among many. This sense of herself as a metonym of the
collective frequently makes her feel threatened and haunted by the violence scattered
throughout the world at the time she lives in.１０ This recognition of herself as a part of
a haunted worldwide collective attests to “the immanence of war” that Anna is
possessed by.
Her obsession about “a society dead or dying” is exemplified at first by her
enumerating the fragmented articles of the newspapers in the first section of the blue
notebook (219-27). Anna admits that the last section of the red notebook is saturated
with the articles of the newspapers relating to violence throughout the world (462).
Then it is stated, in the last section of the blue notebook and the inner golden notebook,
that she puts on the wall and on the ceiling of her room a number of the scraps of the
newspapers which tell of the battles or slaughters. She is literally taken over by “the
immanence of war” until Saul – or Milt in “Free Women” – finally removes them.
Anna – as a writer – is keenly aware of the destructiveness of the time and
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sceptical of the ability of language to convey this new reality, and also of the relevance
of her profession. This scepticism lies at the very root of her problem. It precipitates her
dilemma that – if a writer is “the conscience of the world” (385), as she believes they
should be – she could not avoid the question what and how she could do as a writer in
this dying world. If what is called realism presupposes the trust in the novel’s mimetic
power, this presupposition does not work any more in post-war society. It might,
therefore, be the collapse of this presupposition that causes and aggravates the dilemma
of Anna, who encounters it after writing her first realist novel, Frontiers of War.
Anna’s struggle with writing her novel and especially with language, then,
parallels Lessing’s own; after writing her first realist novel – The Grass Is Singing –
Lessing kept writing both long and short realist novels in the fifties, till she wrote The
Golden Notebook early in the sixties. Hence this struggle is epitomised not only in
Anna’s anxiety about the discrepancy between words and the real experience they are
supposed to capture, but also in that of Lessing who was similarly troubled by doubts
regarding the capacity of language in the post-war world. Lessing refers to the twisted
relationship between realism and language in her oft-quoted essay, “The Small Personal
Voice” published in 1957:
If there is one thing which distinguishes our literature, it is a confusion of
values. It would be hard, now, for a writer to use Balzacian phrases like
‘sublime virtue’ or ‘monster of wickedness’ without self-consciousness.
Words, it seems, can no longer be used simply and naturally . . . . Yet I
re-read Tolstoy, Stendhal, Balzac . . . . I was not looking for a firm
re-affirmation of old ethical values . . . . I was looking for the warmth, the
compassion, the humanity, the love of people . . . (“The Small Personal
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Voice” 14-15)
Even if the fluid and evanescent reality can never be perfectly contained in the fixed
format of written words, realists of the nineteenth century – such as Tolstoy, Stendhal,
and Balzac – must have used words, at least it seems to Lessing, much more
straightforwardly than the novelists in post-war world could use them. What makes it
more difficult for the post-war novelists to use words in such a manner in their novels is
“a confusion of values” induced specifically by the unprecedented experience of the
Second World War and the ongoing smaller wars in the world, and more generally by
the wars accumulated historically: most decisive was the appearance of the nuclear
bomb, a weapon that could destroy all human beings on the earth in one fell swoop.
Lessing makes explicit the stigma of the time she lives in, which she maintains causes
“a confusion of values”:
We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive and
precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people left alive
to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of
us; and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman
does not destroy us all, our children may be born deformed or mad. We are
living at one of the great turning-points of history. (16)
“[L]iving at one of the great turning-points of history” where none of us might survive,
where human beings might annihilate themselves completely, she asks herself what she
should – or could – do as a writer. For Lessing a writer is “an architect of the soul”
whose act of “getting story or a novel published is an act of communication, an attempt
to impose one’s personality and beliefs on other people” (16); she argues also that “one
is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly
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fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is
responsible” (27), and so, “this is no time to turn our backs on our chosen
responsibilities” (16).１１ It is this sense of responsibility as a writer, being part of the
“numbers of people” that overwhelm Lessing and Anna as well; how could a writer
living in a time of unprecedented human crisis that threatens the signification of
language articulate the new and horrible reality?
One of the responses Lessing has formulated to this question is The Golden
Notebook itself, which traces not only the struggle of Lessing/Anna as a writer in the
post-war world but also a possible strategy to overcome it. Perhaps Lessing’s main
concern is how the signification of language could function after experiencing such
massive and mechanical slaughter and in the midst of such and monstrous and
widespread violence.
The agonising consciousness of the unprecedented violence in the modern age
could be already found a few decades earlier after the Great War. Criticising Virginia
Woolf’s Night and Day (1919) as “a lie in the soul,” because “The war has never been,
that is what its message is,” Katherine Mansfield appeals in her letter to her husband,
John Middleton Murry:
. . . but the novel cant [sic] just leave the war out. It is really fearful to me
the ‘settling down’ of human beings. I feel in the profoundest sense that
nothing can ever be the same [,] that as artists we are traitors if we feel
otherwise: we have to take it into account and find new expressions [,] new
moulds for our thoughts & feelings. (Katherine Mansfield’s letter quoted in
MacKay 7: original italics)
Mansfield cannot countenance the “settling down” of human beings – especially of
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artists – after experiencing the Great War. When she labels as “traitors” the artists who
allow things to be the same after the war, she thinks she bears the same kind of
responsibility of an artist as Lessing/Anna does. This sense of responsibility makes
Mansfield insist that artists have to “find new expressions [,] new moulds for [their]
thought & feelings.” Though Woolf transmits a strong message about the Great War
after Night and Day, it is not just a coincidence that this utterance of Mansfield’s
strangely resembles Anna’s sense of crisis as an artist: she deplores in the first section of
the black notebook that “I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which
interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to
create order, to create a new way of looking at life” (76). Therefore, when MacKay
mentions that “[m]any experimental treatments of the Great War share Mansfield’s
sense that modernist form was something close to a historical obligation imposed by
unprecedented recent violence,” the same could apply to Anna – with the Second World
War substituted for the Great War. Resisting Mother Sugar’s universalisation of
everything, Anna refutes that “[t]here is something new in the world” (415) and that she
wants to separate “what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the myth, from what is
new, what [she] feel[s] or think[s] that might be new” (416). Here Anna refuses Mother
Sugar’s ahistorical assumption, and yet – paradoxically – Anna’s wish to produce
something “new” is old at the same time. Since Anna’s conflict is at least in some
aspects prefigured by modernists a few decades earlier, it is itself not perfectly “new” in
the strict sense of the word; in history, as Anna considers of Finnegans Wake when she
deplores peeling off of meaning from words, there is neither any historical event that is
perfectly the same as what happened in the past, nor one that stands solitary and
independent.１２Hence, with an always already imposed historical burden, we have to
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confront a new situation; here we need the aforesaid dialectical process to integrate
somehow the two dimensions, or, to push the boulder up another inch.
Of course the case of the Great War is not the same as that of the Second World
War. MacKay wants to “connect the Great War’s causes and effects to the emergence of
new textual forms” (8), and yet she does not forget to accentuate the difference of the
experiences of the two wars. Discussing war poets who appeared in the Great War but
seemingly disappeared in World War II, she states that rather than disappear they simply
submerged and changed their conditions; it is, she says, on account of the fact that
“[t]he criteria for what constituted proper war literature had already been established by
the Great War, without regard to the sheer secondness of the Second World War and
without acknowledgement of what had happened in between” (5). She goes on:
The literature of the Second World War was always going to be different:
that it does not take as its raison d’être the position that war is stupid,
wasteful and ugly is certainly not because writers mistake state-sanctioned
violence on the grand scale for anything other than what it is, but exactly
because, after the Great War, they took this as given. (5)
Although the Second World War’s causes and effects demanded the emergence of new
textual forms – just as the Great War had done a few decades earlier – and even if Anna
ruminates on the cyclical nature of history (399), it is evident that Lessing’s vicarious
trauma of the Great War that I have referred to in the Introduction belongs not merely to
her but to many others. They had already experienced the modern technological war
when the Second World War broke out. Whereas the writers who lived during and after
the Great War were overwhelmed by the futility and ugliness of war, those who lived
during and after the Second one had to face – in addition to war’s absurdity – the
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possibility of the total annihilation of the human race.
Moreover, the way that war was conducted had radically changed: as MacKay
highlights, “What makes the cultural context of the second war so radically different
from that of the first was the new primacy of the civilian experience” (6). Although the
number of civilian deaths was finally less than that of military death in Britain and
Germany, these were the only two countries where this was the case. Frequent air-raids
throughout Europe drastically changed the conception of war in any country in Europe,
with Britain being no exception. MacKay presents a picture of the effects of “the new
primacy of the civilian experience” in British literature:
As a conflict in which the civilian experience was paramount, its literature
urges a reshaping of what counts as the literature of war in order to include
authors who were not combatants and texts that are not ‘about’ war in any
straightforwardly mimetic way. It demands, in other words, the modes of
reading that the non-combatant modernisms of the Great War made
possible. (6)
Lessing/Anna lived at a time when writers “who [are] not combatants” were needed and
– as writers well aware of “the immanence of war” – were compelled to produce texts as
the literature of war “that are not ‘about’ war in any straightforwardly mimetic way.”
Whereas as, for the modes of reading it needs, MacKay enumerates Ford Madox Ford
and Joseph Conrad as examples of “the non-combatant modernisms of the Great War,”
it is inviting to add to this list the name of Virginia Woolf. For, as I suggested in Chapter
1, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway can be called one of the typical novels of war “that are not
‘about’ war in any straightforwardly mimetic way,” written from “the non-combatant
modernisms of the Great War.” Anna possibly tries in her conflict to write a novel which
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requires the sort of mode of reading made possible by Mrs. Dalloway. In this respect,
Anna Wulf’s attitude towards writing leads back to Virginia Woolf’s approach –
especially in Mrs. Dalloway – in spite, and at the same time because, of the difference
between the two World Wars. Both Woolf and Lessing/Anna examine the stigma of war
not apparent in the battlefield but immanent in private everyday life.１３
That the catastrophe of the Second World War haunted the British literary scene
was a common recognition of contemporary critics; at the end of the forties V. S.
Pritchett regarded contemporary literature as being “overshadowed by the events of the
last ten years,” and Rose Macaulay defined contemporary life as being disintegrated,
broken into odd, unshapely bits” (qtd. in Gąsiorek 2). Utilising these quotations,
Gąsiorek states that “the novel was under pressure from the events of recent history,
which seemed not only to be unrepresentable but also to have shattered pre-war
illusions,” and “the horrors of the war seemed to outstrip the literary imagination” (2-3).
Under this confusing circumstance, he goes on to suggest, there appeared debates about
the direction that present and future novels would take – experimentalism associated
with decadence, politically reactionary or elitist on the one hand, and realism associated
with good old English tradition and empiricism on the other. Although Gąsiorek is right
when he warns against contingency and arbitrariness of such conjunctions, the binary
opposition of experimentalism and realism is itself – in my view – ambiguous and
ineffective, especially in relation to Lessing; as I have discussed in the first section, a
purportedly realist novel of Lessing’s – The Grass Is Singing – is tinged already with
ambivalent factors which adumbrate the more experimental aspects of The Golden
Notebook.
In addition to – and precipitated by – the apocalyptic aftermath of the War, the
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accompanying transformation of Britain and the British Empire cannot be overlooked.
Losing its colonies one after another around the War, “by 1962, there was virtually no
empire left” (Stevenson 2). According to Stevenson, “mid-century renunciation of
empire” and “the loosening of class hierarchies and social exclusions in the years that
followed” measured “the last of a certain kind of England.”; as this England debilitated
there emerged “another England” which was “less enthralled by tradition, freer and
more open, as a result, in outlook, lifestyle, and culture” (4).
As I have showed in the Introduction, Jed Esty names the phase of this
transformation of Britain or England “an anthropological turn” – that is, “the discursive
process by which English intellectuals translated the end of empire into a resurgent
concept of national culture” (Esty 2). Analysing particularly Woolf’s and Eliot’s texts in
the thirties – Between the Acts and Four Quartets respectively – he declares that their
“layered construction inscribes all complexity of a massive historical transition in which
metropolitan modernism gives way to the petits recits of national culture”; in other
words, the literary forms of their texts reveal the transition in which “the fading
significance of English universalism” is replaced with “the emergent significance of
English particularism” (5). This debilitating English universalism, Esty emphasises
repeatedly, is located in London as the capital of the British Empire – its metropolitan
centre.
Esty pays little attention to Lessing – whom he labels “a colonial and left
intellectual writer” – and yet he offers an insight into what Lessing does in her
autobiographical novel, In Pursuit of English (1960): Lessing, he mentions,
“anthropologized England” in the novel which, as it were, “seek[s] to lay bare the
workings of class society” (211). Perhaps for Lessing, who had spent most of her
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childhood and her twentieth in the ex-colony and came to London only in 1949 – four
years after the Second World war was over – England is less her own homeland than the
interesting object of her observation as the homeland both of her melancholic father and
her compelling mother.
In spite of – or alongside – her English heritage, the African impact on her
experience is undeniable, as I have explained in the Introduction. When the Empire still
enjoyed its prosperity in the early twentieth century, she could obtain the perspective of
a colonial periphery, away from the metropolitan centre, in a double sense – in both a
geopolitical sense and in a pure political sense: first of all, since she lived in Southern
Rhodesia – a British dominion from the twenties to the forties – she could see the
Empire and the catastrophe of the war from the margins without being sucked into the
whirlpool of the metropolitan centre; secondly, being in an outpost of the British Empire,
she continued to defy white society, the establishment that upheld the Empire. Moreover,
her experience of living in and enjoying the African bush leaves an ineffaceable trace in
her thought. Being the daughter of an English couple and being brought up by a
Victorian-minded mother, combined with this African experience, Lessing seems to
develop a peculiar way to write novels that it might be hard to categorise into any genre
or group of novel.１４ Perhaps it is not important for Lessing whether she writes realist
or experimental novels; what is the imminent question for her is what she could do as a
writer in post-war society, and The Golden Notebook is one of her most elaborate
answers.
The Golden Notebook – consistent with the tendencies of the sort of experimental
novels that were current in the early sixties – also contains some of Lessing’s
philosophy, nurtured in part by Africa’s wild nature. While the image of the
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boulder-pusher seems to derive, as I have mentioned above, from “The Myth of
Sisyphus,” it also bears a striking resemblance to the African dung beetles depicted in
one of her short novels set in Africa – “The Sun Between Their Feet” – which I have
referred to in the Introduction. In the story the anonymous narrator, who reminds us of
Lessing herself in her childhood, keeps watching the action of the dung beetles named
officially Scarabaeus, or Aleuchus. Shaping a ball of dung for their eggs, they roll it up
and down a hill. Being impatient with their seemingly laborious, ineffective and slow
movement, the narrator scoops the beetles together with their balls and puts them on a
smaller hill. As if defying her support, however, they go back to their steeper choice. As
the narrator whispers, “it is not for us to criticise the processes of nature” (184).
If a sense that human beings have no right or ability to interfere with the process
of nature permeates, especially among her African novels, and if the behaviour of the
boulder-pusher has a keen affinity with the movement of the dung beetle – which
symbolises “the process of nature” – the figure of the boulder-pusher in The Golden
Notebook might connote incongruous and insurmountable human reality; human reality
that Lessing thinks can never be, and should not be, controlled for the purposes of
human interest. At the same time – just as Paul/Michael persuades Anna that “we are
not useless after all” – the boulder-pusher is not simply the embodiment of the futility of
human life; it embodies also the ceaselessly repeated efforts of human beings that are
far from useless, since it is in the very process itself to reach the peak of the mountain
that the significance of human life lies.
With regard to this point Soo Kim declares that The Golden Notebook is “a
modernist novel in the fullest sense of the word” – and further, it can be called “a
Hegelian modernist novel” (15). Unfolding some of the preceding arguments, which she
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decides have no clear conclusion as to whether The Golden Notebook is a modernist or a
postmodernist novel, she accentuates that the novel is about a “compromised
breakdown within the form,” and “this type of return to forms is repeated in the novel,”
which renders it as belonging to “a modernist rather than a postmodernist tradition” (15).
She further develops her argument referring to Jean-François Lyotard in her footnote:
According to Jean-François Lyotard: “[S]o this is the differend: the modern
aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime. But it is nostalgic; it allows the
unpresentable to be invoked only as absent content, while form, thanks to
its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or spectator
material for consolation and pleasure . . . The postmodern would be that
which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of
taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and
inquires into new presentations – not to take pleasure in them, but to better
produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable” (14-15). The
Golden Notebook is often assessed to share affinities with the above
description of the postmodern, such as Anna’s damnation of a totalizing
grand narrative and her preoccupation with new presentations. Yet,
Lessing’s novel should be distinguished from the Lyotardian sense of the
word postmodern. Anna’s exploration of the identity of the self and the
novel, despite her acknowledgement of the implausibility of such a project,
still searches for “[t]he pleasure of recognition” that Anna translates to a
“rescuing [of] the formless into form” (450). (Kim 18)
Lyotard defines modern aesthetic as “an aesthetic of the sublime” and form “continues
to offer . . . material for consolation and pleasure” that the postmodern refuses. Indeed,
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Anna continues to deny throughout the novel Mrs. Marks’ shaping up a pattern from
everything she tells her; furthermore, it is precisely Anna’s sense of impossibility of
making form out of human reality – the impossibility of putting human experience into
the form of words – that continues to haunt and threaten her. Yet when she pursues “new
presentations,” she does not do so in order to “better produce the feeling that there is
something unpresentable.” She does so because she hopes “that some combination, even
a chance combination, will say what [she] want[s].” Anna “still searches for ‘the
pleasure of recognition’ that Anna translates to a ‘rescuing [of] the formless into form.’”
In spite of her postmodernist acknowledgement that “the real experience can’t be
described” Anna does not relinquish “the pleasure of recognition” through “a rescuing
of the formless into form” (414).１５ It is in the incompetent and responsible human act
itself to try to present the unpresentable that the pleasure of recognition lies; in a
ceaseless and apparently futile human process like the act of the boulder-pusher.
Thus, where Woolf deploys as her narrative device the tunnelling process in Mrs.
Dalloway and the pageant in Between the Acts, Lessing juxtaposes fragmented and
miscellaneous writings so as to accentuate that writing – whether fiction, nonfiction or
otherwise – cannot contain amorphous reality perfectly, calling into question the static
conception of the individual as Woolf does. Through paradoxically highly patterned
fragmentations Lessing at the same time effects the emergence of “the pleasure of
recognition” in the act of “a rescuing of the formless into form,” which Woolf also
expresses in a remark in her essay, “A Sketch of the Past”; after admitting that reality
can be made whole “only by putting it into words,” Woolf declares that wholeness
offers her “a great delight to put the severed parts together,” and that is “the strongest
pleasure known to me” (72). Of course, Woolf knows that this wholeness is evanescent,
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and her desire for it – especially undercurrent in Between the Acts – has entirely
different qualities to those found in fascism, as I have discussed in Chapter 2. Static and
hierarchal wholeness in fascism is established a priori with an “anti-eros” orientation
that Woolf denounces throughout her career.
By contrast, both Woolf and Lessing pursue pleasure in the process towards
wholeness in which the individuals play a part – interacting not only with each other but
also with their memory, and so always intertwined with a history both personal and
collective. In this respect Lessing resuscitates Woolf’s “pleasure of recognition” a few
decades after Woolf’s death, suggesting the inscription of a discursive continuum in The
Golden Notebook in the same way that Woolf does in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the
Acts; a continuum in which the boundaries not only between individuals, but also
between reality and fiction, are destabilised to the extent that the reader is invited to
re-consider and re-construct their own extra-textual reality. Moreover, in this continuum
– where the boundaries between past and present are also destabilised – humans
reinterpret and reconstruct repeatedly their personal or collective memories, being
constantly affected by and reshaping it; as a result humans are always in flux,
interpenetrated by their recursive histories – a process which conveys reality for Woolf
and Lessing.
Notes
１
According to Davidson, for example, about a million African peasants had title in 71million acres,
while a few hundreds white farmers had nine million in then Northern Rhodesia by 1936 (118).
２
In The Grass Is Singing this image of the immigrant farmer is embodied not only by Dick Turner
but also by Tony Marston, who has just come with hope from England but cannot find the exact
cause of the murder of Mary. Obviously Tony is another Dick, many years before the murder; in this
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respect the appearance of Tony in the first chapter is suggestive of cyclical nature of the situation.
３
This unconscious adaptation to the surrounding society resembles strikingly the state of mind of
Susan Rowlings in “To Room Nineteen,” as I will assess in Chapter 4.
４
Lessing complains in the preface that, although the theme of the book is “breakdown,” such a
theme is not noticed; the book is regarded rather as being about the “sex war,” or “a useful weapon
in the sex war” for women. (Preface: 8)
５
Lessing complains about people’s wish to “make characters in a novel into autobiography,” and
she thinks it derives from “a reluctance of the imagination.” (Walking in the Shade 336) Also, Paul
Schlueter indicates “the tendency of reviewers and critics to confuse the fictional protagonist and the
author herself,” and introduces Lessing’s indignant remarks with the comment that it is at the level
of a “gossip-column.” (Shlueter. The Novel of Doris Lessing 80.)
６
Lessing herself declares the book is about “rawer materials.” (Preface 8)
７
The idea of human being as a reflection of the world suggests Anna’s conception of the individual
as a metonym of the collective, as I will mention later.
８
The word, “immanence of war,” suggests the profound relationship between the human mind and
collective history.
９
As I have quoted in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, Clarissa “[feels] herself everywhere,” and senses
“[o]dd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to” (129), and Mrs. Swithin murmurs “we
live in others . . . we live in things” (64).
１０
Lessing herself explicates this idea: “Throughout the Notebooks people have discussed,
theorized, dogmatized . . . sometimes in voices so general and representative of the time that they are
anonymous . . .they have also reflected each other, been aspects of each other, form wholes.”
(Preface 7) This relationship between the individuals, and between the individual and the collective
is very close to that depicted in Mrs. Dalloway and Between the Acts.
１１
These phrases are resonant with Anna’s aforesaid remarks that a writer is “the conscience of the
world.”
１２
This is the case with the Wars as well. Marlene A. Briggs points out Lessing’s idea of the
profound continuity between the World Wars as follows: “[I]n The Four-Gated City, Lessing
represents the technological destruction of nuclear apocalypse as a culmination of trench warfare:
‘What will happen is a development of what is already happening and what has been accelerating,
out of control, since 1914 and the green light for mass extermination” (577). (“’Born in the Year
1919’: Doris Lessing, the First World war, and the Children of Violence.” Doris Lessing Studies
2008 (27-1,2), 8: original italics) In this sense Anna’s agony is in one aspect proper to the time she
lives in, and at the same time repetitious in history in another aspect.
１３
Lessing’s notion that the collective thought is found in the individual everyday life is coherent.
As I have referred to in the first section, the exploration of Mary’s mind in The Grass Is Singing
discloses the trace inscribed by the collective society; the trace implanted especially by the racial
colonial society in this case.
１４
Dorothy Brewster quotes in her 1965 monograph, Doris Lessing, as I have mentioned in
Introduction, Lessing’s remarks in the interview published in The Queen in 1962 that “the best thing
that ever happened to me was that I was brought up out of England. I took for granted kinds of
experience that would be impossible to a middle-class girl here.” Lessing also recalls, according to
Brewster, “the contrast Virginia Woolf had pointed out in A Room of One’s Own between the
restrictions that hemmed in Charlotte Brontë, the English governess, and the freedom to explore all
possibilities that was open to Tolstoy, the Russian aritstocrat, during the same period.” Brewster goes
on to say that “Mrs. Lessing feels that Virginia Woolf’s experience must have been too limited,
‘because there’s always a point in her novels when I think, “Fine, but look at what you’ve left
out.”’ . . . growing up in Southern Rhodesia was very different from growing up at Hyde Park Gate.”
(158)
１５
Anna’s/Lessing’s desire for pleasure resonates with the author’s aforesaid remarks in “The Small
Personal Voice” that “I was looking for the warmth, the compassion, the humanity, the love of
people . . .” (15)
162