Abstract
I first read Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest (1952) while studying a third-year option on “The Art of the Novel”, taught by Simon Dentith, as part of my degree course at the University of Liverpool in 1988. The oddly intense moment Martha experiences early in the novel while walking across the African bush made a big impression on me at the age of 20. I soon learned to call such experiences moments of epiphany (I had come across something similar before in Wordsworth’s “spots of time” but at that point had not read Joyce). However, unlike in a conventional realist bildungsroman, in Martha Quest this is not a positive, enriching moment of revelation that confirms Martha’s place in the world. Instead, the moment reveals to her “her smallness, the unimportance of humanity”. As Lessing puts it: “there should be a new word for illumination” (Lessing, 1952; 1990: 75).
As I began my doctorate and realised that I wanted to work on the idea of epiphany and its relationship to feminine subjectivity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, Lessing was one of the authors I stuck with. Having followed Martha’s story through the rest of the Children of Violence sequence (1952-1969) I was stunned by how The Four-Gated City, the fifth novel in the quintet, ended: with a catastrophe in the late 1960s that destroys the western world. Martha, along with a small group of survivors, starts to develop extra-sensory abilities that are explicitly rooted in that first epiphany in Martha Quest. The move in the sequence away from realism and towards science fiction / fantasy (within one novel, in fact) was something that intrigued and astonished me.
Here I think we can find something of what makes Lessing such an important writer. Her challenge to generic conventions and boundaries (what I have elsewhere referred to as “border crossings” (Ridout and Watkins 2009)) is apparent in the range of her work. This includes realist novels (although I have always found Andrzej Gasiorek’s idea of her work as experimental realism useful), science fiction / fantasy, gothic novels, comic books, libretti for operas, etc. etc. She found categories confining (see her essay, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside) and the world of the literati and the publishing industry constituted for her, its own kind of “group mind” (Lessing, 1986: 49). Her hoax on the literary establishment, when she published two novels under a pseudonym in order to see how she would be reviewed as an unknown, became one of the most well-known instances of literary imposture. In my 2010 book on Lessing, I argued that her refusal of generic conventions and boundaries was intimately linked to her discomfort with ideologies: she worked through the politics of form.
If we consider some of the issues she grappled with over a lifetime of politically engaged writing, her importance as a writer who was witness to the grandest narratives and political movements of the twentieth century becomes clear. The impact of her parents’ experiences in WW1 made her aware that the war had “squatted all over my childhood” (Lessing, 2008: viii). She became involved with Communism in the 1940s in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, because the Communists “were the only people I had ever met who fought the colour bar in their lives” (Lessing 1957; 1996: 248), and she was the only woman writer included in the 1957 volume Declaration, which subsequently became known as the manifesto of the “angry young men”. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing, published in 1950, tackles the then somewhat tricky subject (to put it mildly) of a white southern African farmer’s wife’s personal relationship with her black African houseboy. In the context of discontent with British colonial rule and emerging nationalist narratives (although these were still embryonic in Southern Rhodesia at the time, if not in other parts of the (former) British Empire) this was a brave book to write, particularly because of its examination of a woman’s experience of what Robert Young has termed “colonial desire” and its involvement in the colonial encounter.
Lessing is remembered by many as the author of The Golden Notebook (1962), famously described as “the first tampax in world literature” (DuPlessis, 1986: 279-80) for its open treatment of the female body and sexuality. Lessing herself wanted the book to “talk through the way it was shaped” (Lessing 1962; 1993: 13) and again, the formal innovation of the novel’s structure is, for me, intimately connected with its dissection of women’s lives, Cold War paranoia and colonial nostalgia.
In subsequent work Lessing examines the horror of “family values” in the gothic fairy-tale The Fifth Child (1988), and gets inside the mind of the terrorist in The Good Terrorist (1985). Lessing’s narrative voice in both these novels is worthy of comment. Rarely, if ever, writing in the first person, but very fond of the liberties provided by free indirect speech, many critics and readers have been discomfited by some of the “views” apparently “espoused” by Lessing in some of her work. If the unpleasant opinions of a first-person narrator are easy to dismiss as those of a particular character, then we are, strangely, more implicated in the voice of a clever third-person narrator, and are forced to examine how we can gently be led by an accomplished writer to understand decisions such as Alice’s – the “good” terrorist of the book – who bombs a central London hotel.
In two of her latest works, Lessing imagines a world affected by climate change where a second ice-age has redrawn the world map. It is tempting to see her as some kind of seer, predicting cultural and other changes before they happen, but more important to acknowledge her work’s imaginative effort and artistic engagement with the twentieth century’s key political and cultural movements. I’m glad that the Journal of Commonwealth Literature has provided space to discuss her work before (see Chambers and Watkins, 2008) and as co-editor, particularly happy to have the opportunity to mark that artistic engagement and imaginative effort here.