Lessing’s Interruptions

This chapter offers the first substantial exploration of Doris Lessing’s typescripts, showing how they complicate commonly-held views that she wrote too quickly and edited too little. It reads several sections that Lessing inserted or substantially re-wrote in the typescripts for two of her novels, The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980). The chapter argues that such interruptions are critical for a reading of Lessing’s creative process, but also in understanding how individuals in her work witness - and narrate - historical change.

Lessing and Time Travel

This chapter focuses on Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), with the science-fiction novels Shikasta (1979) and The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), in order to assess her involvement with the future, which underlies all her work. Lessing is constantly involved with thinking the future – with, we might say, how the future presents itself, how it irrupts into the present, destabilising our assumptions, always making the present different from how we might expect it to be. We see something of this in Lessing’s remarks on science fiction, or ‘space fiction’ as she also terms it, exploiting a productive ambiguity in the word ‘space’ – as she considers not only the ‘outer’ space of both realism and conventional science-fiction, but what might happen to our understanding of space, spatiality, as we extend ourselves into the imagined, predicted, unpredictable, preordained future. What shall we remember? Or, what shall we ‘re-member’, in the sense of putting back together the shards and fragments of history? The chapter concludes by questioning whether this notion of accommodating the future, which we might refer to as a variant of time travel, has to do with telepathy, a concept to which Lessing was greatly attracted.

Lessing and the Scale of Environmental Crisis

This chapter explores how Doris Lessing’s fiction might provide an unusually strong vehicle for thinking through some of the questions of scale which have become important to theoretical responses to environmental crisis. It traces how a split response to the problem of scale - for instance, how to bridge the gap between individual and larger community - becomes evident in The Four-Gated City (1969), and shapes how Lessing’s fiction develops from this point. The chapter argues that the turn to a concept of storytelling late in Lessing’s career, in novels such as Mara and Dann: an adventure (1999), is a result of her grappling with scalar difference, and a symptom of her ultimate pessimism about the chances of humanity adequately meeting the challenges it poses.

From The Grass is Singing to The Golden Notebook: Film, Literature and Psychoanalysis

This chapter discusses the place of cinema in Lessing’s early work, focusing in particular on The Golden Notebook (1962). Cinema first appears in Lessing’s work as a gendered site of communal spectatorship and distraction in The Grass is Singing (1950), in common with the work of other mid-century women writers such as Jean Rhys. But in The Golden Notebook, cinema and filmic consciousness increasingly acts as a privileged metaphor for the description of dreams and visions, influencing the novel’s striking descriptions of dreams and dreaming – a formal achievement of Lessing’s work often over-looked. This chapter suggests that this conflation of dreaming and cinematographic consciousness bears comparison with the work of psychoanalytic theorists such as Ella Freeman Sharpe, Bertram Lewin, and Didier Anzieu, and their concepts such as the ‘dream screen’ and ‘projection,’ and with the work of psychoanalytically-inflected feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey. Additionally, it explores the resonances of the descriptions of some of The Golden Notebooks imagined films with the techniques of postwar nouvelle vague directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Readers of Fiction and Readers in Fiction: Readership and The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is peopled by fictional readers who interpret and challenge the texts of others within a layered and ontologically unstable narrative frame. While the novel’s innovative portrayal of authorship and its implications for authority have long been a rich source of critical debate, the equally intriguing if less studied correlative of this portrayal is the particular pressures Lessing’s depictions of readership place on her readers. The Golden Notebook not only includes multiple types of readers but also invites, anticipates and critiques conflicting responses. The cumulative effect of the many acts of readership which take place within the novel is to challenge its readers to question the presuppositions upon which their own reading practice rests; the modes of reading they employ; and the ways in which these modes of reading are implicated in particular beliefs about the function of literature. This chapter examines how readership is depicted in The Golden Notebook to ask the question: what kinds of readers does Lessing want us to be?

‘I’m an adolescent. And that’s how I’m going to stay’: Lessing and Youth Culture 1956–1962

The mid-to-late 1950s saw an explosion of youth subcultures in Britain – teenagers, Teddy Boys, jazz fans, hipsters, beatniks, mods and rockers. This range generated a series of moral panics and media fascination. The New Left in particularly were split on whether to see these new youth groups as indicative of a consumer-led Americanization of traditional working-class British culture or as potential sites for cultural (and political) rebellion. Lessing’s representation of youth is particularly interesting in this context, and it is a recurring theme in a number of works from this period including her plays Each to His Own Wilderness and Play With a Tiger, her documentary novel In Pursuit of the English, and her novels A Ripple From the Storm and The Golden Notebook. This chapter traces Lessing’s engagement with youth culture and argues that she articulates concerns within the New Left and British culture more broadly. Her work is read against contemporary cultural commentary from the New Left, especially in a series of articles in the Universities and Left Review, and against other fiction and commentary from the period, including works by Lynne Reid Banks, Anthony Burgess, Shelagh Delaney, Richard Hoggart, Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe, and Muriel Spark.

Introduction

‘It’s a question of form’ (1993: 418). So declares frustrated writer Anna Wulf, in what remains Lessing’s most celebrated novel, The Golden Notebook. As this volume shows, the attempt to find forms which might record, model and engage historical change and all that it entails is one that persists throughout the six decades spanned by Lessing’s writing. The chapters that follow attend to the full weight of Anna’s statement: when Lessing’s writing turns towards history it is not simply a question of finding the literary form that might best represent it; rather it involves questioning the very relationship between form and history, as they are brought together afresh in each new work. These questions might be common to literary criticism, but the chronological breadth of Lessing’s career, and its sheer variety and productivity, makes them both particularly pressing and particularly enlightening in her work. As she moves from colonial Rhodesia to post-war Britain, and from war-torn Afghanistan to our posthuman future, her work employs the full panoply of techniques, modes, genres and effects that we refer to as forms: short stories, realism, serial fiction, documentary, drama, jokes, Sufi tales, reportage – and more....

The Politics of Form: The Golden Notebook and Women’s Radical Literary Tradition

In A Proper Marriage (1954), Martha Quest wants to ‘break the nightmare of repetition’ that has shaped the twentieth century — the seemly unending cycle of patriarchy, nationalism, war, colonialism, and rigid political ideologies. In The Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing enacts this disruption through an experimental crossing of genres, documenting, as if fulfilling Virginia Woolf’s wish in Professions for Women (1931), the ‘sexual lives of women’ in the context of collective histories. Through her combination of fiction, documentary material, political theory, and memoir, Lessing offers a nuanced reading of the connections between state violence, sexual hierarchies, and political crises. Using textual hybridity to resist closed formal and political structures that reinscribe authority, Lessing writes women as central narrators and subjects of twentieth-century politics and history, subverting the boundaries of gender and genre. However, Lessing’s radical textual and political project is not a singular one. This chapter considers new ways of reading Lessing’s text alongside works by Virginia Woolf, Muriel Rukeyser, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Arundhati Roy, and Claudia Rankine, arguing that the The Golden Notebook is not only better understood within these networks, but is pivotal for understanding the formal and political possibilities of hybridity in the hands of women writers.

A Catastrophic Universe: Lessing, Posthumanism and Deep History

This chapter explores the shift in Lessing’s work from social realism to an experimental approach to genre and argues that it is inseparable from the expansion of the scope of her later fiction, from the specifics of contemporary history to a concern with evolutionary and planetary time. A recurring tension in her writing is identified, between a trans-humanist ethos (expressed through the protagonists’ engagement with the prospect of ‘enhancing’ humanity) and post-humanist perspectives that offer a radical challenge to human exceptionalism. Taking the figure of the evolutionary ‘throwback’ in The Fifth Child (1988) as a starting point, the chapter argues that the novel opens up a landscape in which ‘the human’ in its current incarnation is no longer the structuring norm. It goes on to consider the relationship between humans and other animals in Lessing’s work, charting an emerging critique of anthropocentric ideology and an innovative mapping of inter-species subjectivities. Drawing on the neo-vitalist philosophy of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, it argues that a post-humanist perspective is articulated in Lessing’s fiction, but that it is complicated by a transhumanism which is in part impelled by her continued commitment to Sufism. The chapter concludes by locating Lessing’s space fiction and late fables such as Mara and Dann (1999) in the context of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘deep history’, an approach that he argues is mandatory at a time of planetary crisis.

Lessing’s Witness Literature

This chapter takes as its starting point World War One, its traumatic effect on Lessing’s parents, and the ongoing effect of their traumas on Lessing herself; and goes on to explore how these issues are channeled into literary form in The Wind Blows Away our Words (1987), Mara and Dann (1999), The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) and Alfred and Emily (2008). In exploring the effects of trauma on survivors and their children, it refers to the theories of a psychologist specialising in war trauma, Robert Jay Lifton; to Holocaust scholars such as Michael Levine; and to the philosopher Susan Brison. The chapter demonstrates how Lessing’s early experiences influenced her contribution to what is termed ‘witness literature’, developing techniques in her work that encourage readers to engage with the most challenging issues of her time, and to expose the ways in which language can be manipulated. Lessing’s thinking is contextualised with reference to other writers such as Herta Müller, Nadine Gordimer, Storm Jameson, Attia Hosein and Kamala Markhandaya, whose work is haunted by the effects of war and violence, and who all insist that personal experience cannot be divorced from the Zeitgeist.