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Literary Review
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Belatedly enNobeled
ZERIN ANKLESARIA
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Lessing, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a writer who portrays contemporary reality with an unparalleled honesty.
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Photo: AFP
Delayed recognition: Doris Lessing.
“I was not entirely surprised, because this has been going on for something like 40 years,” said Doris Lessing, when she heard from a reporter that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. “You can’t go on getting excited every year about this”. The statement typifies her blunt, straight-talking manner. She is, in a sense, an old-fashioned writer belonging to the pre-Joycean tradition. Her style is direct, and she does not exploit the resources of paradox and ambiguity. Symbols, if used, are subsumed into the narrative structure.
The plainness for which she has been criticised is a strength rather than a weakness, for, Lessing is primarily a novelist of causes who uses words for other ends. In a career spanning almost half a century, she has been involved in issues ranging from racial oppression in the South Africa of her childhood, to the recurrent threat of nuclear war, to Feminism with which she has been chiefly identified. Unabashedly committed, she says of her vocation: “One is a writer because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible”. The writer’s relation to the collective life is a buried theme in her fiction.
Wide-ranging concerns
Lessing’s oeuvre is mind-bogglingly various, consisting of at least 25 novels (one has lost count); volumes of short stories and sketches; a play and a collection of 14 poems; and six works of non-fiction. As early as 1949, she shows her over-riding concern for human dignity. The Grass is Singing is a powerful study in moral degeneration, both of the oppressor and the oppressed. A city girl marries a farmer and is transported to a closed world where she has total control over black people. Accountable to nobody, she slides from petty tyranny to sadism, and is eventually murdered.
The same theme preoccupies the writer in The Children of Violence, an ambitious series of five novels whose heroine, Martha Quest, is an allegorical parallel of the author herself. She grows up in a milieu where Englishmen and Afrikaans distrust each other, and both despise the Jews and blacks. However, this lengthy bildungsroman is not as compelling as the earlier novel. Lessing’s skills are psychological, and she excels in portraying the nebulous undercurrents in human relationships which surface in sudden and unexpected ways. When Martha joins the Communist party, the reader begins to tire, as, one suspects, does Lessing herself since her skills as a writer are not political. C.P. Snow felt in this huge, amorphous work “the dynamo-like throb of a formidable talent”. This reviewer did not.
Seminal work
After two failed marriages, Lessing moved to London where other forms of oppression engaged her art. The Golden Notebook, her best-known work, brought her instant fame and a cult following as the high priestess of Feminism. It was also a daring experiment in technique. Anna, whose domestic life is in crisis, sees herself as a failed writer. To objectify her problems she sets them down in four “notebooks”, viewing her predicament as fiction, parody, political documentation and a recording of quotidian events. In this ingenious manner the author explores the dilemmas of the independent, activist woman with a truthfulness that is as remarkable as it is clear-sighted. However, it ends tamely when Anna, like Martha, joins a political party, not Communist this time but Labour! Such a bald summary does little justice to a seminal novel, one of the most influential of the 20th century.
A less promising period followed, in which Lessing, inspired by Sufi mysticism and the radical psychology of R.D. Laing, focused on themes of mental and social breakdown. The results were not an unqualified success. In a five-novel sequence titled Canopus in Argos Archives she turned to science fiction. From the vantage point of space she sees the earth, the stars, humankind and its manifold problems, and tries to discover the significance of life. Covering eons of time she depicts various societies at different stages of evolution. Pleasingly fanciful and exuberant, this series shows her versatility as a writer but little else.
Worse still is Memoirs of a Survivor, a futuristic fable about the regression to barbarism and savagery in a society in which norms of behaviour have collapsed. City children flee their homes in search of a better life and form street gangs which move around committing arson and murder at will, finally turning on each other and descending to cannibalism. Since their motivation to evil is not clear, the book lacks a strong thematic foundation and disintegrates into a series of phantasmagoric images, more like a horror story than serious social comment. The faith in humanity which redeems Lessing’s tragic vision is nowhere to be found in this grim and depressing novel.
With her intuitive understanding of human nature, it was inevitable that Lessing would revert to realistic fiction, and what a relief it is for her admirers. In two novels and a short story seen in conjunction, she projects the idea that each individual, even if old and supposedly useless, has a right to social space, but adds an important caveat — that the rights of others should not be infringed.
In The Diaries of Jane Somers, the author is deeply compassionate without sinking into sentimentality. The titular heroine is rich, successful, ultra-smart and utterly self-absorbed. When she is in her 40s, after her husband and mother are dead, she begins to question her value systems. In this new mood of introspection she starts a diary which she enters intermittently, a clever device of Lessing’s to avoid repetition and redundant detail.
One day Jane has a chance meeting with nonagenarian Maudie. Frail, heroic-wilful, she refuses, against all the norms of common sense, to move out of her squalid, filthy surroundings into a “Home”. Lessing makes us feel the blaze of vitality, an uncanny something, in this peevish and obdurate old woman that compels Jane to bond with her emotionally. In so doing, she discovers within herself the capacity for love and commitment. Though she is the protagonist, it is Maudie who is unforgettable.
Conversely, in The Fifth Child, the eponymous Ben is autistic and absorbs all his mother’s attention, to the exclusion of his siblings. As he grows older and more criminalised, he becomes a canker eating away the lives of his gregarious and affectionate family, and though he is briefly institutionalised, his mother, nurturing a deep sense of guilt, brings him home. Unsparing in her realism, Lessing shows how the family inexorably falls apart. In contrast, Ben’s cousin is mongoloid but utterly lovable.
The scrutiny of a novelist
In The Child in Question, the same theme is reworked. A 10-year-old girl in a large Muslim family living in London is learning impaired, a fact her mother simply refuses to acknowledge. A social worker comes visiting to insist that the child attend a special school, but is ultimately convinced that little Shireen, “swaddled in tenderness”, should stay where she is.
The Nobel citation praises Lessing as the “epicist of female experience who, with scepticism, fire and visionary power, has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. It could also have commended her hatred of cant and hypocrisy, and her astonishing range. There is no genre that she has not attempted, and no theme of any significance that she has not touched with her powerful imagination. Nothing escapes her keenly observant eye, and she portrays contemporary reality with unparalleled honesty and percipience. The Award, not Lessing, is diminished by coming to her so late.
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