Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing

            Biography

She war born in Persia in 1919 of British parents.

Her father was a banker, becoming disillusioned, he had the family to move to a farm in Rhodesia, in Africa, which is today’s Zimbabwe.

The father changes from a banker to a farmer, which turned out to be a very bad move for the family, but a very good move for Doris Lessing.

She attended school in Africa, and she did not like the school very much.

She was a rather introverted, imaginative and neurotic child, according to her own account. She left school at 14 and became a nurse maid.That was a brief episode and she soon decided to return to the farm with the family.

Generally speaking, Doris Lessing was formed by Africa. She was also a passionate reader. While on the farm, she wrote two novels, but thinking they were bad, she destroyed them.

After this brief period on the farm, she returned back to Salisbury and worked there for a while as a telephone operator. During that period she socialised a lot and made a lot of friends. That way of life is described in one of her early novels, in which Martha Quest portrays Doris Lessing.

She marries for the first time to a civil servant and gives birth to a son and a daughter. Soon the marriage breaks up and she leaves the children behind.

She marries for the second time to a German officer named Lessing, who was a communist activist in Africa. In the second marriage, she gives birth to a son. This second marriage also fails very soon and she decides to leave Africa and go to England with the son from the second marriage.

She tries to establish herself in London in the post-war years and it was the first time she lived in Europe. By then, she had already destroyed six novels. So she was a prolific writer but had no confidence. She did bring along one of her novels and dared to publish it in 1950 under the title “The Grass is Singing”. It was received well by the critics.

Some of her other works during the 50s included a trilogy under the title:

The Children of Violence. Part one appeared under the title Martha Quest in 1951,

                                           Part two under the title A Proper Marriage in 1954

                                           Part three under the title A Ripple from the Storm.

That is the same period in which she joined the Communist Party and she had already been involved in the leftist policy while being in Rhodesia. She became disillusioned with the Communist Party and its ideology, so she left the Party in 1956.

In the next decade, the Golden Notebook, which was regarded as one of her most ambitious works, came out in 1962. It was a highly profound novel, which was not instantly recognised by the literary critics.

They claimed that literature could not be brought in connection with history, linguistics, journalism, etc. and that the context in which the work of art was created should be disregarded. For that reasons, the critics of the time failed to recognise its greatness. This is the novel that already announces post-modernism.

This was a new type of the novel, in many ways ahead of its time.

Doris Lessing was disappointed by the failure of critics.

Wherein lies the value of the book? The novel deals with a number of mutually related issues. There are three or four interconnected major themes.

One of the major ideas of the novel in general is that everything is interconnected and that we should strive to have a complete picture.

A number of closely related themes of the novel are:

the problems of writing (which is what makes this novel a post-modernist novel, the fact that the author problematic  the phenomenon of art making, the position of artist, the relationship between art and life, the search for an adequate form of expression);

political issues, or maybe political and social context, where society and politics are seen quite contrary to Golding, as something that hinders the development of the individual, emotional and artistic development of the individual in both socialist or communist and capitalist systems

theme of madness or insanity, namely the experience of fragmentation of personality and the idea that such condition might be creative, and finally,

the theme of feminism, the gender issue, the study of a woman who is trying to live in a way women never lived before, namely, as a single mother striving for artistic career, working for living, and problems that arise from such a lifestyle, not only the problems imposed by the society, but also inner problems resulting from individual’s upbringing.

So, the value of the novel is in showing how complex life is. One is always reflection of the other. That is what the novel is about, that is what the title of the novel is trying to suggest, namely that it is impossible to neatly separate all of these separate aspects, because life in the 20^th century has simply become too complex.

The troubles Anna Wulf is facing as a writer or as an artist trying to write cannot be separated from her identity as a woman and from her psychological problems. Those are tree inseparable aspects of one problem, which again cannot be separated from her political activism and her political views. So all of these aspects are intertwined, but we will try to deal with them separately.

            Structure

Doris Lessing liked to emphasise that the novel could not be taken merely as a personal confession, as critics declared, because it is a highly structured and carefully constructed novel.

 Even from the point of view ofkjj technical skill of writing, Doris Lessing invested a special effort into structuring the novel properly, and the structure of the novel, again reflects these interconnected themes. So, the structure itself adds to the themes, or illustrates, or underlines them, namely that things cannot be separated. She deliberately broke the novel into fragments and these fragments make implicit statements about all of these main themes, such as alienation, fragmentation of the individual, etc. The novel is an attempt to break the literary form, which is similar to the effort of the modernists, just as much as it is an attempt to break social norms. Both the form and the content are original and unusual. For that reason the book was confusing to the critics of the 60s.

The central character is Anna Wulf, the writer who has not published for many years and who is suffering from the so-called writers’ block, who is in an artistic crisis.

Anna has already become famous in the novel, she is already somewhat an established writer, and the book that established her in the literary world is her novel “Frontiers of the War”, so we have a novel within a novel, which is a reflection of postmodernism already.

This novel that has made her known deals with the problem of racial issue in Africa during the WWII. So that is the theme that Anna writes in the Golden Notebook. As a protagonist, Anna Wulf feels that life has become too complex.

Much in a similar way in which Virginia Woolf had said in her essay the Narrow Bridge of Art in the early 20^th century that life has become too complex and that this complexity had to be reflected in the new type of literature and that the new type of literature should be the modernist novel.

The problem Anna experiences in the novel is that life has become so complex that it has become impossible to record it in a single book, so she tries to break these aspects of her experience into several books. She keeps four different books, at almost the same time, and each book deals with a different aspect of her life.

The four notebooks are all written in the first person and then make up the greater portion of the novel. They deal with Anna’s life during the period between 1950 and 1957. In addition to these four notebooks, there is a fifth one, in the second part of the novel, and that is the Golden Notebook, and it is no coincidence that it is the golden one, meant to suggest how precious it is. It was written by Anna in 1957, as a kind of conclusion, it is only related to events that took place in that year.

Besides these notebooks, there are also various sections of novel within the novel, which is a typical postmodernist element.

The Golden Notebook begins with the novel within the novel, not with her reality, just like in Hamlet, where we have a play within a play. In it, in this novel within a novel, Anna is having a conversation with her friends Molly, Tommy and Richard, who are her friends in her real life.

Then the notebooks follow, with excerpts from the four notebooks, always in the same order, first we have excerpts from the black notebook, followed by the red one, followed by the yellow one, and finally followed by the blue one (there is also a colour symbolism) after that, there is another section of free women following, and then come the four notebooks again. That is the general structure of the novel.

Altogether, we have four sections of the Free Women, always followed by the sections from the notebooks, always in the same order. After the last of the four repetitions, comes the section called the Golden Notebook. After that, we have the final, fifth section of the Fee Women, ending the novel.

So the novel begins and ends with the novel within the novel.

The reader finds it very difficult to distinguish reality from fiction, which is a technique typical for postmodernism.

The relationship between the sections of Fee Women, her novel and the notebooks which portray her reality is of central importance because it determines both the structure and the form, and the structure and the form reflect the main themes

Postmodernists write in a very playful, seemingly superficial way, their tone is disrespectful, they challenge all notions inherited from modernism and preceding literary schools, they doubt in the very existence of personality or absolute truth, objective truth. They say it always depends on the point of view, so there is no universal truth, but there are truths and realities.

            Theme of Insanity

Lessing coins in her novel the liberating experience of madness.

Anna journeys deep into her consciousness, she has to cast off her ego completely, and through that, she gains a more complex vision.

So madness can potentially be the source of great knowledge of oneself and one’s environment.

The theme of madness recurs in her novels. She goes to the edge and back. She is then rewarded with integration, which she achieves after having surmounted fragmentation. While she experiences disintegration and while suffering from the artistic block, she goes to psychiatric sessions, which are unsuccessful, which is a criticism of organised therapy. It is unsuccessful because her therapist believes she needs to neutralise her painful experiences.

Anna disagrees with it, and she believes that all of her feelings may be a sign of courage, sensitivity, superiority and that they might be constructive rather then destructive, because it is these feelings that make us look beyond the surface. She manages to achieve this new kind of unity taking enormous effort. She must resolve several dualities, paradoxes; she needs to learn to cling to her emotions, despite the difficulty of enduring the pain, rather then burying them.

            Theme of Politics

Political system and society hinder creative development of personality in both communism and capitalism. She shows that everything is a construct and everything is ideology. That is the realisation that Anna comes to.

Doris Lessing was influenced by Marxist philosophy and communism, just as is her protagonist Anna, who shares the political view of her maker and her later disappointment.

Doris Lessing goes a step further and suggests that there is no essential difference between the communist systems and modern democracies.

The literature of the west which presents itself as free, is just as false. Western literary practices are just as much connected with ideology and the rhetoric of freedom as the Russian soc-realistic art.

The central question for her is how to oppose the system, not communist system, but she, implanted in the western system, tries to oppose it by using the language and literary conventions and practices forged and shaped by the system, so for her, the central question is how to use the system against itself.There is a blacklisted American writer named Nelson, who appears in the Golden Notebook, who speaks in the novel about the American kind of oppression, for which he claims is efficient because it works in a subtle way. They, meaning the state apparatus, do not need prison and firing squads to beat people and force them into obedience. They work in the subtle way, they use the rhetoric of freedom, but in reality, they have very subtle mechanisms of preventing people from succeeding.

Both systems use sate and unreal jargon to keep people obedient.

            Theme of Gender or Feminism

Gender roles are a construct, like everything else.

The gender roles (not sex roles, as sex is a biological category) are something completely different, although they are presented as something completely natural, so we see ideology at work again. So gender roles are artificial constructs created for real men and real women. But in order to be efficient, they are presented as natural, unfortunately they are successfully sold to people as natural. Anna realises her becoming conscious citizen in this sense. Male critics have tried to discredit Doris Lessing and condemn the Golden Notebook as too narrow in scope. It is all but narrow. They tried to claim that the book is too concerned with feminism, probably because they were provoked by a rather unflattering picture of men. The truth is that feminism is only one of several issues and unfavourable review of the book by male critics claimed that all of her uncertainties she experiences in the novel, namely her artistic and intellectual crisis, her uncertainty about her political beliefs, her unhappiness with her love life, were all the result of her sexual frustration, deliberately trying to reduce it to all that. With time, this view changed. Even those who admitted that the book was interesting for her reflection on feminine experience, denied its artistic quality. Women greeted the book, calling it the first “Tampax” in world literature, because never were the menstruation and tampons mentioned in literature.

The feminist issue here is reflected in the woman’s position in the 20^th century. Anna changes as an individual, as an artist, as a political thinker, but also as a woman.

In her novel, all of her female and male characters act as cripples, because they act in accordance with the prescribed gender roles,

The major idea is that gender roles are limiting and they had to be redefined, along with the entire relationship between men and women.

Doris Lessing repeatedly refused to be classified as the feminist writer, she was never involved in organised feminism. Still, the book is feminist because it focuses on female fears, the fears that Anna has and how necessary it is to be reborn, how necessary it is to oppose the traditional models, which starts with fighting oneself first, which is what Anna comes to realise.

Another thing that she needs to overcome is this typical female fear of being alone and finally, she needs to overcome her emotional dependence on men. She believes she needs to be dependent on a man to love some man, as if to justify her own existence. So now, she needs to view herself not through her attachment with some man, but through her attachment to herself. That does not mean that the relationships should stop. Only through confrontation with these fears, she arrives at the new position, so her vision which is partly hinted at, at the end of the novel is a transformation of gender roles. But the woman needs to work on herself, not just blame it all on others, and with transformation of women, what comes as the next necessary rtthing is the transformation of men as well and the society as a whole. She examines these western values of competition, materialism, individualism, which are seen as very negative things at times, and never focuses exclusively on women.