Wednesday, October 10, 2007

notes on THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK Doris Lessing. (1962)

Division, fragmentation and how they are overcome – this is the major theme of Doris Lessing’s novel, The Golden Notebook. The novel gives us an idea of the intellectual and moral climate of Britain in the mid twentieth century. Critics suggest that it was ‘written before its time’ – that is, it anticipated cultural trends such as feminism and attitudes towards madness which were not generally accepted until some years later. Politics, madness and the roles of women – these are the familiar Lessing themes.

Form and theme reflect each other in this novel. Form echoes the content in its fragmentation. Doris Lessing takes the novel form apart to see how far, if at all, fiction is capable of truth-telling.

One problem considered here is the writer’s block, the cessation of artistic creativity. Both the psychological and technical features of this condition are considered here. Can the form of the conventional novel act as a block to the writer who wishes to express the irrational and unconventional? Doris Lessing sets out to free Anna’s creativity through her exploration of the novel form.

Dissatisfied with the techniques of realism (that is, a rational and causal delineation of experience), she was searching for a variety of methods to convey the many layers of consciousness of her characters and their states of breakdown and madness. She began to question the veracity of the novel – whether the novel can say something true.

In the Preface, Doris Lessing explains the function of ‘Free Women’ in ‘The Golden Note Book’: “To put the short novel ‘Free Women’ as a summary and condensation of all the mass of material, was to say something about the conventional novel, another way of describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: ‘How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped’”.

Anna writes part of her diary as factually as possible in order to see if the plain facts are nearer to the truth than the carefully shaped material that goes into a novel. By examining the novel form so thoroughly, Doris Lessing made an important contribution to the post-modernist debate about the nature of fiction. Many post-modern novels are reflexive, their content being their own methodology. Doris Lessing’s novels are never purely formal. ‘The Golden Note Book’ combines both: the realist story and the examination of realism.

Form.

The form of this novel is complicated and very carefully worked out. It contains a short realistic novel called ‘Free Women’ divided into five parts. Interspersed between the sections of this novel are four extracts from four different coloured notebooks, kept by Anna, the heroine of ‘Free Women’: -- a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red one concerned with politics, a yellow one in which she makes stories out of her experiences; and a blue one which tries to be a diary. The four notebooks emphasize the divisions in Anna’s personality, as if she were four people. By using the device of the notebooks, she is able to convey the variety of moods, memories, thoughts, motives and habits that make her the individual Anna Wulf. Time, place, memory intercept so that the reader sees not a coherent past that fully explains the present Anna. Finally there is also a Golden coloured notebook, in which Anna and her lover give each other sentences to begin a new novel. Anna’s is the first sentence of ‘Free Women’, thus linking the end of the notebooks to the beginning of the novel ‘The Golden Note Book.’ The fragmentary structure of the novel is thereby unified, and turned into a circular, coherent whole.

By showing us various aspects of Anna, her past in Africa, her political involvements, her writers’ block, her psychotherapy, it makes us realize the inadequacy of traditional realism. In addition, through Anna’s attempts to organize such disparate material into her fiction (the novel she is writing in the yellow note book), we are shown the steps involved in such a process: selection, omission, shaping and falsifying.

For example, one of the central episodes in ‘The Golden Note Book’, a woman being rejected by a man after a long relationship, is treated in several different ways.

In ‘Free Women’ we learn of the event after it has happened, and that three years later Anna has not really recovered from it. In the blue note book, (Anna’s diary) she writes in great detail of the day in 1954 when Michael leaves her. Dissatisfied with that account, she rewrites in laconic and factual sentences, so that all the pain is reduced to: “I realized that Michael had finally decided to break it off. I must pull myself together.” In the yellow note book (her novel) the episode is rewritten in fictional form, so that Anna becomes Ella, and Michael becomes Paul. There are also synopses of short stories, reworking the same thing. These different perspectives on the same event allow the reader to see the many ways the raw material can be represented.

Doris Lessing reveals to us both the events of Anna’s life and the various ways of recording them, all of which are shown to be only partially true, even the most factual and unvarnished. But all these attempts bring us up against a central artistic problem: the inability of realism to convey reality. There is always a gap between experience and its representation.

Free Women – is an account of two women friends living in London in the 1950s. Anna is divorced and has a small daughter, Janet. She has also been rejected by her lover after a five-year relationship. Molly is divorced and has a son of twenty called Tommy. Both women have been members of the communist party, and both have had psychotherapy from the same analyst. Anna keeps four note books of different colours to record different aspects of her experience. One day, Tommy reads these note books, and accuses Anna of dishonesty, of pretending things are not chaotic when in reality they are. Tommy tries to commit suicide and succeeds in blinding himself instead. Anna quarrels with a homosexual couple living in a part of her flat, and asks them to leave. Her daughter, at her own request, goes to a girls’ boarding school. Left alone, Anna begins to have a break down. She has an affair with an American, recovers, and begins to do welfare work and marriage guidance. Molly remarries. It is only at the end of The Golden Note Book that we learn that Anna has written ‘Free Women’ out of the raw material of her life, collected in her diary.

‘Free Women’ is written in the third person; the tone is objective. The emotional and non-rational elements associated with the events are separated from them, and are written about in the blue note book, leaving ‘Free Women’ as an ironic version of the truth. ‘Free Women’ is, to some extent, a parody of the conventional realist novel. Its flatness shows how the chaos and vitality of the note books has been structured, but in the process, diminished.

The Notebooks (except the golden coloured one) each finish in various kinds of frustration, whereas ‘Free Women’ achieves an ending. But by its sensible, chronological narrative, and its refusal to incorporate frustration, it is finally dissatisfying. Without the juxtaposition of the note books to flesh it out, ‘Free Women’ would be dry and skeletal. Yet it plays an integral part as a whole, elaborately echoing and prefiguring essential themes.

During the reading of ‘The Golden Note Book’, we involuntarily supplement the text of ‘Free Women’ with our knowledge of events and moods from the note books, so that as readers we rebuild the process of fictionalization that Doris Lessing painstakingly breaks down.

The black note book is originally divided into two columns, headed ‘Source’ and ‘Money’. In it, Anna deals with the material she used to write a best-selling novel, ‘Frontiers of War’, and with her consequent literary success. We see the insistent world of agents, television adaptation and film rights, and several funny parodies. As Anna loses her ability to write, the black note book becomes a cuttings file for new items about violence in Africa.

The red note book is about Anna’s experiences with the British Communist Party from 1950 to 1957, her growing unease with it, and her final extrication from it. This too becomes full of newspaper cuttings, again about violence.

The yellow note book begins with a novel Anna is writing, called ‘The Shadow of the Third’, and her comments on the process of writing it. This is a fictionalized version of her own life and the juxtaposition of it with ‘Free Women’ enables the reader to see how Anna selects and shapes and reconstructs the material for the purposes of fiction. Ella, the heroine of Anna’s novel, is herself writing a novel about suicide, thus adding to the reflexiveness of the novel. There are ideas for short stories, parodies and pastiche, the last being symptomatic of Anna’s writers’ block.

The blue note book functions as Anna’s diary, a deliberate attempt not to turn everything into fiction, but to try to keep a factual account of what happens in her life. She records her writers’ block, her sessions with her psychotherapist, the ending of her love affair with Michael, her work for the Party, her relationship with Molly and with her daughter. It describes in detail her break-down, and also her affair with an American, Saul Green.

‘Free Women’ and ‘The Shadow of the Third’ are fictionalized version of Anna’s life, and the blue note book, with its status of diary, gives it a veracity the other versions lack.

Finally, in the golden-coloured note book, Anna synthesizes the various experiences kept separate in the other books, so that they approximate to a kind of wholeness of vision. And attaining this integration enables her to begin to write again.

By separating the various aspects of her life, Anna hopes to impose a pattern on chaos. In all the note books, at some time, she is unable to continue writing. They become a record of her blocked creativity. It is impossible to keep events coherent and separate. When she is able to abandon her separate notebooks, the golden notebook becomes all that is needed to record her perceptions. Because she has allowed herself to break down and allow the chaos in, she is able to achieve a final integration.

As a feminist text: In 1962 it was an important statement about women’s roles. Far from being a celebration of women’s independence from men, the novel explores relations between men and women, and the seemingly inescapable female need for the opposite sex.

The relationships described are usually troubled but running throughout the novel as a kind of unmentioned subtext is the idea of a woman, living happily with her husband, sexually and emotionally fulfilled by him, cooking for him and bearing his children. Anna and Ella often express very unfeminist needs. What they want is not to be liberated from marriage, but to enhance the quality of marriage.

The Golden Notebook broke new ground in its open discussion of female sexuality from the point of view of a woman writer. Ella compares the vaginal and clitoral orgasms. There is a great deal about men’s sexual inadequacies in this book, from technically efficient but emotionally detached lovers to those who are simply inept.

Along with women’s dependence on men in this novel is shown the devastating effect of being rejected by them. Fear of breakdown is always very close to Anna or Ella. The Golden Notebook is not a treatise advocating autonomy for women; rather, it is a lament for its seeming impossibility.

Splitting and fragmentation are recurring themes. Anna joins the Communist Party because of a need for wholeness, for an end to the split. But the split is only intensified, since the theory and objectives of the party are so at odds with the real world. She leaves the Party at the same time as Michael leaves her.

Anna’s devices to protect herself against breaking down are her notebooks, her roles as a conscientious party worker, a good mother, a compliant mistress. In the blue book, she writes a very detailed account of a day in her life, 15 September 1954. She does this to counter Michael’s criticism that because she is a writer she does not know what is true and what is fiction. We see Anna giving attention to her child and to her lover, planning and preparing meals, coping with menstruation, having long discussions at the office. Anna Wulf is swamped by the roles of mistress, mother, colleague and friend. She herself ceases to exist.

During the account of 15 September we realise that the juggling act involved in keeping everyone happy cannot continue indefinitely. Anna resigns from her job, her lover leaves, and her daughter goes to boarding school. Her roles suddenly disappear and she is left to be Anna Wulf. She lets a room in her flat to an American, Saul Green, who is unbalanced, and she falls in love with him. Influenced by him, she allows herself to break down. They break down into each other, into other people, break through the false patterns they have made of the pasts.

The golden notebook acts as a symbol of Anna’s psychic integration, just as the four books symbolised her feelings of disunity. They give each other sentences for a new novel.

The last section of Free Women is deliberately banal. Anna tells Saul, they are ‘boulder-pushers’, Sisyphus like. This image of perpetual effort with the prospect of very little achievement replaces Anna’s idealistic communist dreams. Towards the end, great theories are abandoned, and small hopeful images remain.

4 comments:

കെ.പി said...

Hi,
Your blog is an interesting read.Could you please see if anything can be done to the formatting?
(Try using a different template?)

Or better still, create a blog at wordpress.com, it gives better features than Blogger and you have an option to port your exist blogger blog onto wordpress.

Keep writing, I have been regularly reading stuff written out here.

thanks
Rajesh

Unknown said...

It was very useful as there are only limited sources for this text in internet. Thank u. Great job

Unknown said...

Hi can teach me this novel

prof prem raj pushpakaran said...

Professor Prem raj Pushpakaran ♡ പ്രൊഫസ്സർ പ്രേം രാജ്‌ പുഷ്പാകരന്‍ ♡ writes -- 2019 marks the birth centenary year of Doris Lessing!!