Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the most distinguished contemporary authors. He was born in Nagasaki in 1954, the year when the Lord of the Flies came out. The family moved to England, he received a typical English education, in a school in which he was the only non-English student. Back then, England was very class conscious and his presence invoked curiosity. He had the bi-cultural upbringing. That account for his sense of uprootedness. He thought of himself as of homeless writer. He travelled to the United States and Canada in 1974, he wrote a journal and he even tried to launch a musical career, not successfully. He studied English and philosophy at Kent University. He graduated with BA in 1978, he attended the course in creative writing with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. He earned his MA degree in 1980 at the University of East Anglia. He worked as a social worker and community worker. He was very socially conscious. Writing came somewhat later. He helped the homeless in London and in Scotland. His literary career begins in the 80s. He had written some short stories before, but in 1981, he has one of his short stories published in a volume introducing contemporary writers, it was an anthology. At that point, Faber and Faber, the famous publishing house committed him to write a novel. From that point on, his literary career begins to flourish, from 1982 with the Pale View of Hills, his first novel about the Japanese born woman protagonist. She moves to English countryside, remembers the past involving the nuclear devastation of Nagasaki. The relationship with her two daughters is also one of the themes of the Novel. In 1986, An Artist of the Floating World comes out, again it is about the Japanese painter obsessed with the past. The protagonist is plagued by the guilt caused by his war time experiences. Both novels received prestigious literary awards. Ishiguro attributes his success with good timing. So, he demystifies himself as an artist. He was labelled an Anglo-Japanese writer which was lucrative at the time. The Remains of the Day came out in 1989 and was something completely different from his previous two novels. Not only did it take place on the English soil but it also had an English protagonist. Just like his preceding and succeeding novels, it deals with personal history with emphasis on moulding one’s history in order to meet the psychological needs of the character.

            The Remains of the Day

The protagonist of the Novel tries to grow as a character throughout the novel, but he fails in his attempt. Stevens, the protagonist of the novel, is the head butler of the respectable old English house and estate called Darlington Hall. His master was Lord Darlington. He remembers the past, before the WWII and after it. At the beginning of the novel he makes a trip for a first time after a long period of time of self imposed confinement on the estate. The motive of the trip is a meeting with a woman who he had been in love with, which is something he never admitted to himself. Miss Campton, is the former co worker. The journey is not only physical, but also a mental journey, in which he has a chance to come to terms with the past, in which he fails. During the trip, he clearly sees the failure that his life was for the first time, but he hides it behind the mask, the illusion of that he puts up in order to be able to carry on with his life. Many critics agree that this novel was a perfection of Ishiguro’s narrative techniques and a brilliant psychological portrait. He is not a typical postmodernist writer, we do not have framing, but again, there are elements of meta-fiction, combined with the interest in the past. Ishiguro admitted that his literary model were 19^th century English and Russian realist writers. He looks back to realism in much the similar way Fowles does. Among the modernists, the one who exerted influence on Ishiguro was E. M. Forster because of his exploration of Englishness. There was also Henry James, because of his psychological approach. He also discusses this idea of Englishness in The Remains of the Day.

What all of Ishiguro’s novels have in common is the first person narrator. These narrators are protagonists at the same time, so we have internal viewpoint. The protagonists usually hide something from themselves; they are people who do not have courage to be true to themselves. They are usually very ordinary people, they are not artists or hyper sensitive characters, they are well adjusted, down to earth conformists, of whom Stevens is a perfect example. They have simple and limited perspective. They usually do not see much beyond their own world, they do not dare to cross over to the big world. They remain caught in their own microcosm. All characters, including Stevens, try to reconstruct the past, usually their own past, not to make it right, but to make it look better. Nostalgia is the feeling of regret for the past that has never been. The moment of remembrance is the very moment of modification when truth is left behind. At the moment of remembrance, we are instantly altering the past, so remembrance, again cannot be taken as reliable. What Stevens does is he beautifies his own past. He rationalises his own mistakes providing comforting explanations in order to avoid the unpleasant truth. The truth is that he has lead the meaningless of life, pretending that his life had a meaning. He strived to be an excellent butler, like his father was. He does this, constructs this lie, to give his life a sense of purpose. Then also, he explores the psychological mechanisms of repression, which is reflected in the use of language not to create meaning, but to hide the real meaning, or to suppress the unpleasant truth. The language serves the purpose of creating and maintaining illusion. So we delude ourselves through language. That is what Stevens does. That is the source or irony and sarcasm. We are at the same time irritated by him and we feel sorry for him. Steven claims to invoke in his memory the truth about the past, while it becomes very clear to the reader early on that he is trying to conceal from himself and from the reader the truth, because the truth is shameful, painful, threatening for his personal integrity and his sense of dignity. The narrator reveals the truth to the reader unintentionally, unconsciously. We recognise as readers that he is beating around the bush all the time. He is more interested in the inner then the outer. History and politics are very much present, but these are not his primary concerns, which means that he is only interested in history and politics only as a reflection of his own mind. Here they are a testing ground for the character’s response. Ishiguro’s main concern is psychology, inner mechanism of suppression of emotions, the idealisation of oneself, self-deception, the way in which people protect themselves from the truth about themselves, mostly through language.

Ishiguro is not postmodernist overtly, as much as the form is concerned, but his concern for the use of language for the purpose of constructing one’s life, makes him a postmodernist writer. Ishiguro shows how language is used by the character to fictionalise his own past, which is exactly what Stevens does. He is rewriting his own past, recreating himself in a more favourable light. We all do that, suggests Ishiguro. Again we have the distinction between art and life blurred in a new way. We are all artists. Language is not used to construct reality. He points to that. It is not there as a meaningful tool of creating reality or truth, it is only there to create somebody’s version of reality. Unlike other postmodernists, Ishiguro does not experiment with form, his novels do not contain inter-textuality, framing, etc. they are not meta fictions, they do not discuss the nature of fiction, they are not concerned with the art of writing of fiction. On the contrary, he tries to hide the elements that could be experimental. Formally, he is quite unlike postmodernists, but his themes are postmodernist. Ishiguro did not believe that the nature of fiction was one of the burning issues of the late 20^th century. In this sense, he is not postmodernist, which makes him totally opposite from Barnes. However, his novels are experimental, in this quiet way.

The central theme deals with psychological methods of suppression of feelings. Stevens suppresses his feelings and uses psychological mechanisms of defence to keep unpleasant memories at bay, to keep unacceptable desires at bay. That is the goal that is why people repress contents they do not want to face. Stevens represses knowledge about the past to protect himself from the painful memory of political flirtation of Lord Darlington with fascism and Nazism and the fact that he, Stevens accepted it passively. Silence is acceptance. He was a collaborator of Nazis indirectly. He never condemn Lord Darlington’s behaviour. The fact that he does not defend Lord Darlington shows that he knows very well right from wrong. He poses here very unpleasant question of personal responsibility. Throughout history, many people resorted to this type of repression. He is very well aware of how wrong it was what Lord Darlington did. Stevens is coward. This aspect dealt with political repression.

Second thing he repn ressed was his sexual desire. Just as he is unable to admit to himself that he was in a way collaborating with the Nazis, another thing that he was in love with Miss Kenton and that he wanted to sleep with her. He cannot admit this, because he thinks sex was something dirty. He was brought up to think this way. What he keeps at distance are his sexual attraction with Miss Kenton, his disappointment with her engagement. He pretends to miss her only for professional reasons. He masks his romantic and sexual interest in her as professional interest. Even when he makes his trip, he does not admit his true motive. The reason is completely different, but he persists in lying to himself. His view of right or wrong political affiliation makes Stevens completely identify with his master. As if he does not have to think with his brain, and whatever Lord Darlington is doing, with whom he identified himself, is right. The incident occurs on the estate and Lord Darlington want two of his Jewish servants dismissed. This causes serous confrontation between Stevens and Miss Kenton. She is a person who is politically conscious, whereas Stevens is a coward, like unfortunately millions of people. Majority of people would act in the way in which Stevens acted, rather then in a way in which Miss Kenton acted. It is easier for him to identify with Lord Darlington.

There is also a trauma over his father’s death, but despite being devastated, he keeps on working and he pretends to be OK. He wanted to ‘live up with the ideals of his profession’. He is not indifferent, but with tremendous effort of will, he convinces himself he should be indifferent, so he carries on with his work. There is also this element of competition between father and son, another Freudian theme. On very rare occasions, Stevens does tell the truth. That is a minor illustration of his ability to tell the truth. When his car stops out of gas, he refuses to look at his shoes, which serves as a symbol of his entire behaviour. He always chooses to look aside, rather then confronting with the issues he has. Likewise, he is unable to comfort Miss Kenton when her aunt dies. He does not know how to do it. He cannot face sadness and grief, he is person who has never grown up entirely. Indirectly, if he managed to comfort Miss Kenton after her loss, he would then also have to acknowledge his own loss, which he is not prepared to do.

He also has problem coming to terms with his own sexuality. He is embarrassed with Faraday’s joke about his lady friend. He permanently describes his relationship with Miss Kenton, whom he always addresses with her family name, as strictly professional. He hates flowers, which are a symbol of nature, that is a symbolical way of suggesting how he resents any natural impulse. He is embarrassed in each of his encounters with attractive women, so he is completely repressed in every way. The culmination is when he rejects Miss Kenton’s open sexual invitation in the pantry. She plays the reversed gender role, playing the role of seducer, to try to get somewhere with him. When she finds him reading the love story, which he explains by his ambition to learn better English. Stevens convinces himself that he is not interested, because it is easier for him. He is afraid and that is a typical reaction for someone who is afraid. He resents adventure and risk. There is also a scene with the couple who eloped and resigned only to get married, which he resented explaining that it was irresponsible act.

There is the character called Reginald Cardinal who tries to talk to Stevens and to explain that Lord Darlington was used by the Nazis as a pawn. Stevens does not want to hear that and acknowledge this truth. He simply rejects to see anything that is going on. He is furious with Reginald for his attempt to confront him with the truth about Lord Darlington. Ishiguro shows parallels between English and Japanese cultures, both of which are very repressive, very authoritarian, very prone to be manipulated. He even claimed they were easy targets of skilful political manipulators. Authoritarian education creates obedient citizens, which can make them very vulnerable to manipulation of totalitarian rules, who then become father substitutes. It worked on the Balkans with Milosevic Tudjman and Izetbegović, all three of whom were fathers of the nation. Reflections of all of these ideas are found here, for Stevens, Lord Darlington is this father substitute. Stevens also totally identifies with his upper class father substitute and symbolically and even physically abandons his own father. He comes to indirectly support Nazism, because he is completely naïve person and a coward. He fakes responsibility to avoid thinking with his own head. He wants to become a gentleman like Lord Darlington, he dresses above his class, which makes him a tragicomic character.

Stevens masks his repression as professionalism, which is his excuse for everything. He is obsessed with professional dignity, with being a perfect butler, is an excuse for himself for being politically and sexually disengaged. He avoids every kind of responsibility. He is furious about the decision of the housekeeper and the under butler to get married and leave profession. The reason he is upset is that they dared to do what he does not. He masks his disappointment with Miss Kenton’s seeing someone as a purely professional disappointment. He says her marriage would be a professional loss. When she surprises him in the pantry, revealing her interest in him, he tries to reassert their ‘professional relation in a more proper manner’. So the language he uses, very formal, stiff and artificial, is a reflection of himself.

He exempts him from political responsibility claiming that as a butler, it was not his job to think. He believed he needed to agree with views of his master. There are very disturbing conclusions here that make us seriously question democracy. In the early 30s Stevens has to fire two Jewish maids, under the excuse of just following orders. There is even a suggestion of homo erotic connection between Brehman, German aristocrat and Lord Darlington.

This is Ishiguro’s very subtle criticism of stiffness and conventionality of British and also of Japanese societies. As a result, these societies produced characters much like Stevens is, cowards who are easy targets of authoritarian manipulators.

Unintentionally and ironically, his words reveal just the things he is trying to hide. He only accomplishes to speak of himself through what he says of others. He says Lord Darlington’s life was a ‘sad waste’ and that the life of Miss Kenton was pervaded by the ‘sense of waste’, which suggests it is Stevens’s life that was wasted. This is the strategy most of us resort to. When he speaks of Miss Kenton’s nostalgia about the past, it is his nostalgia. He also suggests that Miss Kenton regrets the decision she made in the past, and it turns out he regrets his own decision.

His obsession with the clothes, suggest he wants to hide his true self. He has later inherited Lord Darlington’s clothes. So symbolically, he becomes Lord Darlington. He also was to be mistaken for a gentleman, but in the moment of crisis, he does not deny his own identity.

            The significance of the Journey

Journey is his first attempt ever to break out from the prison house in which he voluntarily confined himself. The journey is both physical and psychological. In the struggle between his desire to cast off this mask and his desire to keep it as something familiar, he succumbs to the latter. So, he does not really change. The chance is only offered for a brief moment of time and he is to frightened of the new to embrace it. He fails in breaking free emotionally and physically. The political activist he meets during the journey makes no impact on Stevens. He also fails to overcome his sexual repression, when he finally meets Miss Kenton. This final encounter turns out to be a disappointment, while Stevens is even strongly as before, trying to keep up this pretence. In the end he sits on a bench next to a retired butler. He concludes that he has given everything to Darlington, then he masks his tears as fatigue, so he is back to the old pattern of behaviour. He finally ironically tries to learn to banter, which is not part of his personality, which means he never truly changes. That does not mark any kind of transformation, he does so just because his new employer would like him to. There is no development. It could not be taken as a sing of true, profound change. This might be a criticism of the entire culture of suppression.

            The concept of Englishness

Ishiguro claims that this novel reworks certain stereotypes and myths about England. He uses a lot of clichés that people usually have about the English. Whether he reinforces or subverts them is difficult to decide. Stevens’ politeness is only politeness on the surface and it masks destructive political passivity. The myth of merry old England is harmless nostalgia for the times that have never been, so Ishiguro subverts them.

Historical personages appear in the novel, who are at the same level with Stevens and other character, so again there is a postmodernist element in the novel which is not exactly true postmodernist work.

             

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes belongs to the generation of British postmodernist writers, and postmodernism is not exclusively literary phenomenon.

 Generally, postmodernism is a very paradoxical phenomenon. It is never either/or, it is always both/and at the same time. The contradiction would be the very second name of postmodernism.

            Reflections on Postmodernism

Postmodernists rejected the view which culminated with realism, that literature was a reliable source of universal truths, though such view was never before questioned. In the tradition of postmodernism this assumption is questioned. There are no universal truths, according to postmodernism, there is no one constant, measurable reality, there are only realities. The very assumption that art imitates life is questionable; it could be that art imitates life. There is a lot of scepticism, as a typical element of the postmodernist world view. Postmodernists are also very sceptical about the modernist view that reality is to be found in its inner rather then outer manifestation. So, there are no clear definitions, there are no clear solutions. There is no realm that contains objective reality and objective truth, according to postmodernist, and in this context we speak of relativism, which is another typical postmodernist trait. Modernists also believed in the cult of the genius, which they inherited from the Romantics, according to which artists were the elite, hypersensitive persons who can grasp the ultimate truth, which was another idea of modernists that postmodernists rejected. Modernists still pretended that their novels were not constructs but that they somehow revealed the truth, which again the postmodernist challenged. Even the notion of consciousness, personality, mind, were rejected by the postmodernists, who claimed that consciousness was rooted in language which describes nothing but itself according to them. Postmodernist literature is not only literature; they integrate philosophical, linguistic, anthropological theories of the 20^th century, theories of human sexuality, which reflects the eclectic nature of the postmodernist literature. To postmodernists, language is another construct, a toy invented by human beings, not necessary for the purpose of describing the outside phenomena, but it is a play, signifier does not refer to the signified, but what we have is the constant play of signifiers. Language refers back to itself, especially in literature. Per convention, when 10 people use the word ‘tree’ all ten of them may have a different image on their mind, which is the reason there can never be true communication. According to postmodernists, one needs to be very careful using the language. Human mind, according to postmodernists, is not a constant, it remains in the state of constant flux, which proves their notion that there is no such thing as personality, because it is not a stabile phenomenon, just a set of moods, which is never the same, even in the single day. They say it is a very delicate, phantom like phenomenon called consciousness. Even our thinking is rooted in language, according to postmodernists, which means it is unreliable, because language itself is unreliable and provisory. We have the Post-Freudian approach according to which, the unconscious is also rooted in language, which makes it highly elusive, just as the reality is illusive. Our view of reality, regardless of whether it is external or internal reality, is always subjective. Postmodernism is on the other hand it is very liberating and creative, because if there are just realities or truths all of them subjective, there are no borders or rules as to how to create or write. Freedom involves great possibilities, but also great pitfalls. Literature in postmodernism can by no means claim to represent the truth, it can only present one or two or three versions of the same story, which means that the author can deliberately play with the idea and offer several solutions, or endings. Even the interpretation of the work of art by the reader greatly depends on reader’s point of view, education, social standing, making it again, highly subjective.

            Flaubert’s Parrot

Flaubert’s Parrot is almost a textbook example of a postmodernist novel, of the second half of the 20^th century, one of the major messages of Flaubert’s parrot is that literature or art in general, cannot fully represent life. They constantly draw attention to the limitations of art and literature, reminding the reader that what he is reading is fiction, which is in a very intricate way connected with the reality.

In Flaubert’s Parrot, in Chapter 2 entitled Chronology, Barnes offers us three different versions of Flaubert’s biography. There is no text in the traditional sense. Text is anything that someone writes, says, etc. So, even the past is always highly subjective, and context is very important. For that reason, neither literature, not history can claim to represent the truth. Postmodernists completely abolish the old fashioned distinction to fiction and non fiction, to them any discourse is equally reliable and equally unreliable as the rest of them. There is also inter-textuality, that is another characteristic of postmodernist novels, present in Flaubert’s Parrot. It is not only open to the literary discourse, with the plot, the characters, the story, the style, etc, it makes only part of postmodernist novels. Alongside with the literary discourse, there is also a scientific discourse, present in Flaubert’s Parrot in the lectures on Gustave Flaubert given by literary critics some of whom existed, while others are invented, there is also a biography, which is a third kind of discourse, there is also exam, letters, etc. People not accustomed to postmodernism are confused by this. They want to abolish distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Sometimes we do not even know if these inserted texts really existed, or if perhaps they were invented by the author. So, just as they mix real personages with fictional characters, there is also a mixture of real, authentic texts and texts invented by the author. The point of that is to make the reader realise that it is impossible to make the distinction between what is real and what is fictitious.

As we said, postmodernist literature did not even attempt to assert itself as the source of reliable truth, they instead keep reminding the reader constantly reminded of this unreliability. That is the game that they play with the reader and themselves. They play with this chaos very creatively, they draw attention to the disorder, unreliability, relativity and to the absence of reliable answers. Just like modernists before them, they keep betraying expectations of the reader. They combine many things, and take a lot from modernists. Postmodernist novels, just like modernist novels before them, get the readers confused, irritated and provoked. That is a deliberate plan on the part of the postmodernist writer, because they believe that when the reader is provoked or irritated, maybe he or she will start thinking.

Barnes makes it clear that his narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite does not know everything. Barnes ridicules his own narrator, by showing that he knows very little, let alone the truth. His narrator’s perspective is limited and subjective, which makes all answers illusive, temporary, provisory and unreliable. Living means living with uncertainty, which we have to come to terms with. That is one of the provocative messages of the postmodernist literature, which could also lead to a creative, liberating experience.

            Themes

This issue of elusiveness of the truth is one of the major themes of this novel. It is thematised through the very figure of the narrator, who is widowed physician who is obsessed with Flaubert’s fiction and his life. Geoffrey Braithwaite he believes in the humanist illusions that the postmodernism rejects. He is taken by the author as the example of the old way of thinking. This humanist view of the narrator is reflected in his notion that education matters very much, that one can accomplish anything if she or he desires it very much, that there are certain universal truths applicable to all human beings, that history progresses, that each historical period is more advanced then the previous. When Barnes makes such a narrator, the reason he makes it that was is to ironise him. He makes him question his own notions. One of the illusions in which the narrator believes and which Barnes ridicules, is that if you want to learn something about your favourite author, you can understand it better if you learn as much as you can about his life. In order to ridicule this view, Barnes offers us in Chapter two three different versions of Flaubert’s life. The author make it deliberately obvious that such notion is ridiculous by giving two completely opposed versions of the biography with the third one being somewhere in between. Indirectly, the author wants to suggest that it is foolish to believe you could get much better insight into the work of art by close study of artist’s life, just as it is ridiculous to believe that one’s path to the truth has anything to do with minor facts or details that make no difference at all, such as the fact of which of the stuffed parrots was the one that Flaubert used briefly, as he was writing one of his short stories. So Flaubert’s parrot becomes the symbol of the desire for the objective truth, which Braithwaite pursues, but which keeps escaping. So Braithwaite concentrates on one of Flaubert’s short stories “The Sacred Heart”, not even “Madame Bovary”, his major work. He makes a journey to Rouanne and hears that there are two stuffed parrots, and he tries to decide which one of the two was the one Flaubert used and kept on his desk as he was writing his short story. So Barnes ridicules this enterprise, making it apparent how impossible this task of finding the real parrot really is, and the pursuit of the parrot really serves as a symbol of Braithwaite’s humanist desire to grasp the objective truth and to establish the exact amount of relation between reality and fiction. The novel ends in Rouanne in France, just where it begun, with Braithwaite being unable to identify the right parrot, finding that there could even be the third parrot, indicating that his pursuit was impossible and even unnecessary. Barnes ironises these humanist notions of the narrator, suggesting how pointless it is to keep trying to find out anything about the parrot, or the life of the author, suggesting the absence of reliable answers as the only reality. He suggests this at the very end of the novel. The parrot is then the symbol of illusiveness of the truth.

Another important aspect is meta-fictionality. All postmodernist novels have the element of meta fiction. They are not only fiction, they are fiction about writing fiction. That is one of the recurrent themes. They remind us of how difficult it has become to write books, so they write books about impossibility of writing books. Sometimes it is called self-referentiality. All of the postmodernist works are self-referential, they all refer back to themselves, just as the language does. Postmodernist novels draw attention back to themselves. Postmodernist writers draw attention to the reader that what he or she is reading is a construct, a work of fiction, they keep reminding the reader of fictionality of fiction, again connected with the view that art cannot imitate reality, which undermines the Aristotelian notion of art as mimesis, so their works are anti-mimetic, anti-illusionist, they make it impossible for the reader to identify with characters. They are doing it to show that every creative act is a play. When it is a play, it is both fictional and real. When they seem most playful on the surface, they turn out to be very serious. That is the approach of postmodernist artists.

In chapter 7 titled Cross Channel, there is section about the omniscient narrator and the unreliable partial narrator in the postmodernist fiction. Barnes talks about this convention of the narrator, ridiculing and ironising it. Barnes explains how it was merely a formal device that even the artists of the old times did not believe in. He also comments on the partial narrator of the postmodernist fiction. He claims it was a “form of cubism”, the artifice is not reflection of reality. To draw attention of postmodernist novels being very playful, Barnes draw attention to the so-called authorial intrusion. Other devices include framing and inter-textuality. Barnes keeps a dialogue, a sort of debate on the literary issues, mentioning the novel with two endings to suggest that even that is an illusion, because there is always the author who is behind. The true postmodernist novel will have to have a blank page at the end, to let the reader decide what the ending would be. That would be the true postmodernist novel, that would be the true freedom. That is postmodernisms taken to the extreme. It demystifies literature as serious, elevated business, reinforcing at the same time its importance.

Authorial intrusion: Throughout Flaubert’s Parrot, the story is broken off, or delayed by the intrusion of either the narrator or the author. In the realist tradition, authorial intrusion also existed, reflected through the omniscient narrator, but now it happens for the different purpose. When the realists did it, the purpose was to uphold the illusion, not to dismantle it, as postmodernists do. These various insertions about the search for the real parrot are interconnected with the story of narrator’s life. Again the distinction here is abolished and very vague. His search for the real parrot is inseparable from his life. Geoffrey Braithwaite is obsessed with Flaubert and Madame Bovary, his major work. Barnes indicates indirectly why this story of Madame Bovary is so interesting and fascinating to Geoffrey Braithwaite, and as it turns out, there are parallels between the story of Madame Bovary and his life, in which he also had an adulteress wife who also committed suicide. He thinks that he might be responsible for the suicide of his wife. His profession was also the same as the profession of Madame Bovary’s husband, namely, he was a physician and Madame Bovary’s husband was apothecary. Not only that he identifies himself with the novel, but he also has a feeling that his life and his marriage are almost a replica of Madame Bovary. Life here imitates art, which is

a complete postmodernist inversion.

The private life of Geoffrey Braithwaite is a copy of the book. Additional irony is when we look at different frames. By studying Gustave Flaubert, Geoffrey Braithwaite hopes to be able to understand his marriage better, which is another humanist illusion, because art can never be pursued in therapeutic purposes. He thinks that if he somehow grasps better Madame Bovary, he would find a key to his own life and find out why his wife committed suicide, which is not something he is aware of, he masks it as his own intellectual pursuit. It enforces the belief that art does mingle with reality. It should not be taken as a reality, but it does contain elements of reality, and it remains very indefinite. There is another ironic juxtaposition, namely, the juxtaposition between the life of Emma Bovary and the life of Madame Bovary’s English translator whose name is Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, in examination paper in Chapter 14. This woman who translates Madame Bovary into English feels the connection between herself and Emma Bovary. In the same Chapter, the first exam question is the relationship between art and life, so in a way, Barnes puts the reader in the role of a student, not a student of literature, but the student of life. In introduction to the exam questions, it is said: “It has become clear to the examiners in recent years that candidates are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between art and life. Everyone claims to understand the difference, but perceptions vary greatly. For some, life is rich and creamy, made according to old peasant recipe, from nothing but natural products, while art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings.” That is the traditional view. “For others, art is the truer thing, full, bustly and emotionally satisfying, while life is worse then the poorest novel, devoid of narrative, peopled by whores and rogues, short on wit, long on unpleasant incidents and leading to a painfully predictable ending. Adherence of the latter view tends to cite Logan Smith “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” Candidates are advised not to use this quotation. Consider the relationship between art and life suggested by any two of the following statements or situations.” The text is the discourse of exam.

We are invited to think about this, which is a major goal here. Another typical postmodernist technique applied here, which we have also seen at work in the Golden Notebook, is framing, which sums up to existence of several layers of the narrator. This again reinforces the view that there is no clear distinction between art and life.

The first narrative level is the story of the physician Geoffrey Braithwaite, on that very level, already complications begin, because various real personages make appearance, like Jean Paul Sartre who is there, in addition to Enid Starky, one of the real, existing scholars specialising in French literature, thee is also Christopher Rigs, a truly existing person. This is a post modernism because it relativises Geoffrey Braithwaite as a fictional character, because he appears together with real persons who are frequently inserted.

The third level is that Geoffrey Braithwaite, the fictional character is interested in Gustave Flaubert, dead, but real writer of the 19^th century.

 So, the third level is the life of Gustave Flaubert, his relationship with Louise Colette. There are other long dead persons who come to voice, there is Flaubert himself speaking n the third version of his biography, and his long dead lover, who was also a real person. Occasionally they completely supplant the first level, the level of Geoffrey Braithwaite, challenging what he knows about Flaubert’s life. We wonder who to believe, which again means that we should not be too hasty that Flaubert or Colette can offer the more reliable story. The final level is the level of fictitious characters in Flaubert’s works, namely the world of Emma Bovary, Felicity, and others, all of whom seem to Geoffrey Braithwaite as real as he is himself. So much so, that he suspects and fears that his life and his marriage had been anticipated in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which is particularly ironic, because we know that both Braithwaite and Emma Bovary are fiction. Furthermore, the novel Flaubert’s Parrot is the quest for the real parrot on which the fiction was based and Geoffrey Braithwaite tries to establish the exact nature of this connection. The answer is always complicated, Barnes deliberately confuses the reader to show how difficult it is to distinguish between life and fiction. 

Next issue is the inter-textuality. Barnes inserts the array of different texts, which are not not necessarily traditionally associated with literature, we have texts, excerpts from students’ guides, essays, letters, portions of literary criticism, allusions to other works of art (modernist technique taken to the extreme). Other literary works alluded to here include Madame Bovary, French Lieutenant’s Woman and Lord of the Flies. So, this is no longer a novel in a traditional sense, it includes different discourses in text. It includes not only the main story, the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, which is by no means the most prominent one in the novel, but also the author’s numerous theoretical discussions about the nature of literature, his dislike for the coincidences. According to Aristotle, accidents in the work of art are an indication of the incompetence of the artist.

There is also a passage in which the narrator expresses his hatred to critics. He is very disrespectful and provocative. It is to be found in Chapter 4 – Emma Bovary’s eyes. In this Chapter, an excerpt is given from Enid Starky’s critical overview of Flaubert’s work. Barnes ridicules this as rubbish, because this kind of information is not needed by anyone. Barnes also mocks the halo of seriousness which surrounds literary critics. He speaks of Enid Starky’s lecture and mocks her manner of speech with French accent, he says this through the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite. He is not irritated only with Enid Starky, he was first irritated with Flaubert, because such literary genius failed to be consistent in describing the exact colour of his most famous character’s eyes, but his anger soon shifted to Ms. Starky. He relativises the distinction between the ordinary reader and the professional critic. This passage, like many like it, has nothing to do with the action. Everything is equally worthy to be present in the novel, both the main action and the digression. In this particular Chapter he attack the attitude of literary critics, whose approach to the books is obsolete.

Another thing he deliberately abandons in the novel is chronology. There is no chronological sequence. The author himself is no longer a presiding authority. Here, Barnes abandons the norms of narrative, like chronology structure, the beginning, the middle and the end. The author can no longer expect that his moral vision of the world is binding by the reader, so he also gives up the didactic function of literature. The moral relativism concerning all kinds of moral issues makes it increasingly difficult to get anything of a message or a solution or a instruction from the novel, they merely make moral inquiries, without preaching or advocating a certain moral view. If they do preach, they preach in a way that ironises preaching. The narrator, fails not only in finding the truth, but also in trying to understand himself, both the truth and he himself, remain mysteries. Geoffrey Braithwaite has lived through a traumatic experience, he is yet to cope first with the infidelity of his wife and then with her suicide (which could have also been a murder), because he does not find a straightforward way to tell the story of his life.

Another typical postmodernist theme is the view of history or the official historiography and its relation to literature. Official history is no longer seen as the source of objective truth, because it is rooted in language, just like any other discourse. Biography is also a form of historiography. What we get to read in history books, including biographies, are only somebody else’s versions, which are inevitably subjective, and as such, they are unreliable as evidence of what has really happened. We can never know exactly what the past was like. There is always the aspect of personal perspective. He subverts the notion of scientific objectivity, because any kind of intellectual work, reflect the attitudes, the views and the values of its author. Literature, more then about anything else, speaks about its author, just as the language speaks most of itself. This means that social, moral and political prejudices, wherever they are, be it a work of literature of a history, are unreliable. Context is everything in postmodernism. Text is always embedded in some context. Historiographer in writing history, just like the novelist in writing novels, presents only one of the possible stories, based on what he or she has heard or read, often relying on equally unreliable sources. He creates out of a chaotic mess of material, which he has been able to gather about a certain historical period, to make it a meaningful piece. So historiography is fictionalised and fiction is historicised, both equally reliable and both equally unreliable. A lot of postmodernist novels deal with history.

In the end of the novel, the narrator finds himself unable to reveal the exact truth of Flaubert’s life. Illusiveness of the knowledge of the past is emphasised here.

Biographies in the Novel

The first biography emphasises the facts from Flaubert’s life. It focuses on Flaubert’s artistic, intellectual and romantic strengths and his triumphs in professional and private life.

Biography No.2, focuses on Gustave’s poor health, intellectual underdevelopment, his pitiful achievement as lover. It focuses on his downfalls and his weaknesses. It notes problems with alcoholism, problems in writing, romantic problems, etc. It even mentions how he contracted syphilis.

Flaubert’s autobiography is a compilation of Flaubert’s own thoughts on his experiences.

The narrator highlights our inability to know the truth exactly. History is just another literary genre, in the view of the narrator. History is something highly subjective presented to be objective. Cross Channel – “The past is a distant receding coastline and we are all in the same boat, along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes, each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use, it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activities, scanning from one telescope to another. Seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another, and when the blur does clear, we imagine that we did it all by ourselves.

The Chapter “The Case Against” enumerates a number of views contrasted again against the postmodernist view, namely the view of constant progression of human race, the view of historical progression, etc. “What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest, or is it simply that our desire to know the worst is love’s favourite perversion?” This is very philosophical. “For some this curiosity operates as baleful fantasy. .. I loved Ellen and I wanted to know the worst. I never provoked her, I was cautious and defensive, as is my habit. I didn’t even ask questions, but I wanted to know the worst. Ellen never returned this caress. She was fond of me, she would automatically agree as if the matter wasn’t worth discussing that she loved me. But she unquestioningly believed the best about me, that was the difference. She never searched for that sliding panel that opens the secret chamber of the heart, the chamber where memory and corpses are kept. Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open. Sometimes it opens but your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton, but at least you looked. That’s the real distinction between people. Not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love.” Geoffrey Braithwaite has a very postmodernist definition of love; he makes clear distinction of people who live in illusion and those who do not. The Chapter continues with enumeration of various accusations made against Gustave Flaubert, namely that he hated democracy and humankind and that he did not believe in progress. On this third accusation, Braithwaite says: “I cite the 20^th century in his defence”. Later he says that literature is affected by politics (context), not vice versa. He discusses all sorts of issues in small segments.

John Fowles

John Fowles

            Biography

Born in 1926 in the middle class family in a place called Leigh at Sea.

He was living in a province which suffocated him. He then explained that his background might explained why he became something of a misanthrope early on.

Unlike modernists, who were always depressed by the modern civilisation,

postmodernists are depressed with civilisation in general.

During the WWII, he was evacuated to Devon. He was educated at Bedford school; he served in the army as the lieutenant in the royal marines, after the war,

in 1950, he graduated from Oxford,

in 1956 he married.

From 1954 to 1963 he taught at the university of Poitiers in France and in schools in Greece and England, becoming the Head of the English department at the London College in Hampstead.

He as a scholarly career, which was his official profession for quite a long time, with writing being his part time activity for quite a while.

The situation abruptly changed in 1963 because the first novel came out under the title The Collector. It was well received and he then turned to full time writing.

In 1965 another novel becomes a success; it is published under the title Magus.

In 1965 Fowles retires in a small town in Dorset, which is the setting of the French Lieutenant’s woman, so in line with his dislike with mankind, he turns to solitude and nature. He believes that the novelist has to live in a self-imposed exile. He is also an active ecologist.

In 1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman comes out, again it is filmed in 1981. The screenplay for the film version was written by Harold Pinter. It is one of very few examples of successful film adaptation of a novel. He published a collection of stories under the title The Ebony Tower in 1974 and in 1977 Daniel Martin, in 1985 A Maggot.

The Collector  1963

Magus  1965

 The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1969

            The French Lieutenant’s Woman

The French Lieutenant’s Woman was highly acclaimed and even considered as one of the best books that came from England since the war.

It is a mixture of  Victorian and postmodernist novel.

What makes it a Victorian novel is the setting. It also offers a brilliant picture of Victorian England, which is where the game begins.

He presents a panorama of various social classes, typical of 19^th century England. Characters are also typical of the Victorian novel. He perfectly recreates the style of writing of the time. Again, it is not a historical novel, despite all that.

It in not postmodernist novel when it comes to the form. He imitates the form of Victorian novels and recreates their style, but he does it ironically, so the novel is an ironic commentary of what he decided to put in his novel.

The novel presupposes that the reader should be well informed of the Victorian literature, values, gender roles and manners.

 He wrote an essay about how he wrote this novel, under the title “Notes on writing a novel”, which was based on a journal he was keeping at the time. The initial idea came to him in a waking dream of a woman standing alone on a deserted harbour wall gazing seaward, with her back turned to the village.

This vision came to him in the fall of 1966. He began working on a story about the woman from his vision, and he knew at the beginning that the woman from the vision was associated with a long gone age.

He reduced the illusion breaking comments by the narrator.

He also switched the order of the endings, so that the conventional happy ending would not come last.

.Postmodernist method in French Lieutenant's Woman

The postmodernist aspect of the novel is primarily reflected in the role of the narrator. What is the role of the narrator?

On the one had, the narrator is the omniscient narrator, in line with the tradition of the literary realism (he stops the action, discusses certain things, he was the construct, invention of the author, just like the rest of them, he is outside the world of action, not outside the novel, he also refers to the characters in the third person, he takes the reader by the hand, he sums up for the reader, he forms the opinion of the reader, leads him almost physically and mentally. The viewpoint of the narrator is external because the narrator looks at what happens to the characters and reports it, it is external, Olympian viewpoint.

He serves the function of the mediator between the protagonist and the reader. He may be similar to the author, but it is not necessary.).

On the other hand, Fowles uses this tradition of the all knowing narrator, and plays with it in a typical post modernist way, to suggest that such type of narrator was a convention as everything else, that he was made up by the author just like the characters. As readers, we can never tell if he is ridiculing or reinforces this tradition of the omniscient narrator. It turns out he is doing both at the same time. Since these narrators are all knowing, they intervene, they control the moves of their characters. But the twist that Fowles deliberately does here, he makes his narrator the all-knowing, but also makes him not intervene, not use his power. That is how Fowles plays with the tradition of the omniscient narrator.

Fowles also applies the theory of evolution to the social context. Sara would be a prototype of a free woman, she anticipates new times. Applying Darwin’s theory of evolution, she makes Sarah the species who will successfully adapt to the coming times. Charles is yet to become an emancipated men. On the other hand, Ernestina and most of the other characters are doomed to extinction, they fail to adapt and adopt the new norms.

Postmodernism is a very playful phenomenon. On one occasion, Charles needs to make up his mind about whether he would meet Sarah in Exiter or not. That is one of the moments where the narrator intrudes on the action and addresses the reader. He says: look at him now. So he stops the action and addresses the reader. The narrator suggest that he could make Charles do what he wanted him to do, such as, go to his fiancée and forget all about Sarah. Probably, he should go to his fiancée, the narrator says, which is a reflection of Fowles’ irony, here we have through the narrator Fowles speaking and ironising the right and wrong of the time, suggesting that there is no right and wrong, but simply right and wrong from the perspective of the particular set of norms and conventions.

According to Victorian norms, what would be right for Charles to do would be to go to his fiancée and forget about the mysterious woman. He should decide not to have an affair with her, because it is right from the Victorian perspective. “That is what he should do, but he won’t, what can I do?”, says the narrator, “I could intervene, but I won’t, I am just here, I want to make my characters free (another paradox, how can we make someone free, we can only grant freedom, which only means that they are not free).”

There is also an ending. At the end of the novel, Charles enters the house, sees Sarah and they have a typical Victorian happy ending. Another indication that Sarah has completely changed and accepted the new times is reflected in the fact that Charles finds her living in the house of the artists, Pre-Raphaelites (another postmodernist element), who rejected Victorian morality, which reinforces the theory of evolution applied on the social context. Fowles deliberately associates her, the invented character of his fiction, to the Pre-Raphaelite artists who truly existed, which is another postmodernist mix. There are fictitious characters, functioning on the same level with true personages who truly existed in history.

As a result, we are confused and the borderline between fiction and reality is very thin. In the traditional happy ending, he is happy to have found her, they decide happily ever after as husband and wife and miraculously, they even have a daughter, who is the child of love, born from one sexual encounter they had.

All of the sudden, the narrator reappears, takes his watch, winds the hands of the watch backwards 15 minutes, which suggests narrator’s unlimited control and power. We then see Charles re-entering the house and we see the whole episode rerun, but with a different outcome. It is very 20^th century like ending, more in tune with the expectations of the 20^th century reader, who feels the first type of ending to be sweet, but unrealistic.

She decides to let him go, they realise that their differences are too great to be bridged, she is not very happy about the idea of marriage.

She has simply found some model, some way of life that appeals to her. She also decides not to tell him of the child. This is much more realistic, much more down to earth ending.

On his way out, Charles sees the child, and it never occurs to him it could be his child. That is another example of intervention in the name of non-intervention.

Charles is the character that develops throughout the novel, he dares not to marry Ernestina, proving, in line with the Darwin’s theory, that he will adapt to survive.

Sarah does not grow, we already find her different at the beginning of the novel. Even her first appearance in the novel establishes her as a rebel, with her back turned to the village. Only her circumstances change, and she finds her place, she finds her true, natural environment, and she no longer seems to be an outcast.

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.