A Post-Battle Landscape: Doris Lessings

The Golden Notebook and The Cleft

Katarzyna Wieckowska

Abstract The central theme of Doris Lessings The golden notebook (1962) is
struggle and the heroines attempts to stake out a new territory where she would be
able to re-define herself and gain on a new identity. Similarly, although in a
different manner, this desire to find a space beyond the existing social limits is
repeated in The Cleft (2007) as a dream of an all-female world before the arrival of
sexual difference. Thus repetition can be seen as the regulating principle working
both within the novels and between them, where it takes the form of a certain
mourning, or a process of releasing the desire for a once possessed, but lost unified
self and for an imagined sociality without otherness, a desire underlying also
certain forms of literary and social criticism. In this essay I refer to the work of
Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, and particularly to the psychoanalytic ren-
dering of the concepts of the lost object, the return of the repressed and the woman,
to read The golden notebook and The Cleft as excursions beyond the phallocentric
social and literary orders into a space where the woman might be imagined dif-
ferently than the lacanian symptom of man.

1 Introduction

When Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, she was
addressed by the committee as that epicist of the female experience, who with
scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scru-
tiny (Nobelprize.org). The careful framing of the description of the writer as the

K. Wieckowska (&)
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland
e-mail: klew@umk.pl

J. Fabiszak et al. (eds.), Crossroads in Literature and Culture, Second Language 45

Learning and Teaching, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-21994-8_5,
 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
46 K. Wieckowska

epicist of the female experience emphasizes the centrality of womens issues to

her fiction and also evades the problem of identifying her as a feminist writer, a
label attached to her work since the publication of the notorious The golden
notebook in 1962. The feminist identification, which the novelist strongly and
persistently rejects, is obviously one of the symptoms of the divided civilization
that her fiction both describes and producesa civilization divided not only by
sexual difference but, as Lessings relation with feminism proves, also by the
various political and ideological interests of women as a divided group.
The question whether Lessings work in general, and The golden notebook in
particular, is feminist or not has been the subject of numerous studies and debates,
and continues to be asked, despite the writers repeated objections, such as the one
added by her as early as in the 1971 preface to the novel:
handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about
the sex war, and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis. Yet
the essence of the book, the organization of it, everything in it, says implicitly and
explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalize (Lessing 1989,
p. 10).

As Gayle Greenes discussion of the critical reception of The golden notebook

shows, the debate over the feminism of Lessings novel is itself an interesting
document of the critical approaches dominant at a specific point of literary history
(Greene 1991, p. 109). In contrast to the ideas of New Criticism that were used to
criticize the novel on its publication (interestingly, mostly by male critics), fem-
inist interpretations, including the one by Greene, resort to reader response theory,
where the decision on the meaning of the text is shifted onto the reader, and to the
Barthesian proclamation of the death of the author, which annuls the problem of
authorial intentions.1 The critical debate not only shows the contradictory role of
the author, who is treated as both the support of the meaning of her work and as
simply the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning [.] by which, in
our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses (Foucault 1994, p. 209), but also
unmasks the critic as author and ideologically motivated master of interpretation.
Considering its critical fortunes, The golden notebook can be seen as a document
in cultural, literary and social history, illustrating not only the changing critical
approaches, including feminism, but a more general and slow coming to terms
with the collapse of the notion of personal identity as stable and knowable. The
dissolution of identity is closely related to one of the major problems of con-
temporary feminism and feminist literary criticism, i.e. the loss of the stable
female subject at the time she has finally regained her self, and might be one of the
reasons which make it difficult to interpret Lessings work along feminist lines. In
accordance with Lessings wish to pay attention to the structure of the book and
her authorial intentions, I read the novel as an account of breakdown, which is also

1
It is interesting to note that Roland Barthes seminal essay was published in 1967 and can
therefore be seen as coming out of the same critical upheavals from which Lessings novel
originates.
A Post-Battle Landscape: Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook and The Cleft 47

a way of self-healing (Lessing 1989, p. 8), staged along a number of textual

erasures and absences which hamper the formulation of a finite interpretation. The
erasures are, as I argue, repeated and apparently compensated for in The Cleft
(2007), a novel which can be read as a continuation and complementation of the
thematic concerns and problems of The golden notebook. The key word in ana-
lyzing the novels is repetition, both within and between the books, which is
approached here from the psychoanalytic perspective, thus binding the texts to the
process of mourning after an object which, although lost, continues to be secretly
desired and possessed (Freud 1995a, p. 586). The question of the supposed fem-
inism of Lessings work is left openmostly because, as Ros Coward(1992)
writes, it is just not possible to say that women-centred writings have any nec-
essary relationship to feminism (1992, p. 378; my emphasis)but the reading of
the novels is motivated by a kind of feminist practice which Rosi Braidotti
describes as a strategy of working through the historical notion of Woman
which aims at unveiling and consuming the different layers of representation of
Woman (1994, p. 168).

2 An Absent Centre

The golden notebook is a novel about Anna Wulf, a writer suffering from a block,
and her friend, Molly Jacobs, an actress, and it documents Annas crisis of identity.
Although the crisis spreads over all areas of Annas lifeher disillusionment with
the Marxist party, her problems with writing the second novel, and the end of her
love affair with Michael, who returns to his wifeits ultimate cause is the fact that
Anna is a woman, or, to be more specific, that she represents a new type of a free
woman: as Molly states at the beginning of the novel, Free. Do you know I
was thinking about us, and Ive decided that were a completely new type of
women. We must be, surely? (Lessing 1989, p. 26). A single woman with a child,
an artist and a political activist, Anna certainly does not fit any of the models of
womanhood offered by the English society of the 1950s, represented in the novel
as itself a fragmented and divided society in transit. Interestingly, the fragmen-
tation of the society is reflected in its literature, particularly the novel, which, as
Anna writes, has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented
consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divi-
ded, and more subdivided in themselves; they are beings for whom reading has
become a blind grasping out for their own wholeness (Lessing 1989, p. 75). This
binding of the recovery of stable identity to writing and reading is reflected by
Annas almost compulsive need to write, to compartmentalize her life into separate
spheres so as to finally discern there a recurring pattern:
I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red
notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my
experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary (Lessing 1989, p. 418).
48 K. Wieckowska

Annas writerly gesture inside the book mirrors the structure of the whole novel
which Lessing describes in the introduction in the following way:
There is a skeleton, or frame, called Free Women, which is a conventional short novel,
about 60,000 words long, and which could stand by itself. But it is divided into five
sections and separated by stages of the four Notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue. The
Notebooks are kept by Anna Wulf, a central character of Free Women. She keeps four, and
not one because, as she recognizes, she has to separate things off from each other, out of
fear of chaos, of formlessness of breakdown. Pressures, inner and outer, end the
Notebooks: a heavy black line is drawn across the page of one after another. But now that
they are finished, from their fragments can come something new, The golden notebook
(Lessing 1989, p. 7).

Anna the writer, like Lessing the novelist,2 are thus engaged in recording,
documenting, repeating in order to restore the dissolving identity and to reach the
lost and absent centre, to encounter what Jacques Lacan calls the Real (Grosz
1995, p. 34).
As Gayle Greene notices, The golden notebook is marked by repetition: the
same characters appear under different names in the various notebooks, the same
situations are re-staged in different contexts, the reactions of male characters
within the novel are repeated by the male critics of Lessings book (Greene 1991,
p. 114). The ultimate repetition is the very act of writing, with the notebooks,
initially imagined as a writing cure, turning into a frightening and poisonous
testimony to ones disappearance:
It occurs to me that what is happening is a breakdown of me, Anna, and this is how I am
becoming aware of it. For words are form, and if I am at a pitch where shape, form,
expression are nothing, then I am nothing, for it has become clear to me, reading the
notebooks, that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence. This intelligence
is dissolving and I am very frightened (Lessing 1989, p. 419).

But frightened of what?

The golden notebook opens with a scene of a meeting between Anna and Molly
in the summer of 1957 after a separation. Not having seen each other for some
time, the women try to pick up their friendship where they left it and to restore the
old feelings of intimacy and confidence. But their conversation is strained, the
familiarity and frankness gone, and therefore Annas opening comment that as
far as I can see, everythings cracking up (Lessing 1989, p. 25) can be understood
as referring not only to their colleagues and the Party, but also to their friendship
and to Anna herself, who is cracking up under the burden of the secret of her
changed relationship with Richard, Mollys ex-husband. In the relation between
the women, where balance had been struck early on (Lessing 1989, p. 26),
Molly was the confidante, to whom Richard entrusted the problems with his
second marriage, and Anna was the enemy, the free woman he always disagreed

2
It is indeed hard not to draw analogies between Doris Lessing and Anna Wulf: they are both
writers who have successfully published their first books, they are both members of the
Communist Party and they are both free women.
A Post-Battle Landscape: Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook and The Cleft 49

with. In Mollys absence, Anna takes over her role and becomes not only the
mans support, but also the object of his sexual desire. That this is a disturbing
change which, in fact, damages the balance between the women is visible in this
scene in the way their conversation circles around the event, in the various detours
they take to talk about Richard through references to his wife and their marital
problems without addressing the role he plays in the relationship between Molly
and Anna. The strategy of dismissing Richards presence mirrors the representa-
tion of men in general in the novel in which failed encounters with men play so
important a role that the text can be described as having men at its hidden centre:
they are the common secret, the regulating principle that nobody speaks about.
It is therefore the man (and men in general) who disturbs the womens rela-
tionship, who becomes Annas guilty secret and the seemingly absent centre of
their relation. If we see the man as occupying the central position in the triangle,
then Annas comment, dropped just before she makes her confession about
Richard to Molly, gains new significance: when Anna states with anger that,
although they call themselves free women, [t]hey still define us in terms of
relationships with men, even the best of them (Lessing 1989, p. 26), she passes a
judgment on the structure of society as a whole and recognizes the impossibility of
escaping the social reality of sexual difference. A free woman is, therefore, an
ironic label and a state impossible to achieve in a society where identity is
intersubjectively constituted and where, as psychoanalysis would have it, it is the
encounter with the (historically contingent) hierarchy of sexual difference that
enables the entry into the social space.
It is not accidental then that Anna resorts to men as the way out of emotional
and psychic collapse; towards the end of the novel, Anna decided the remedy for
her condition was a man. She prescribed this for herself like a medicine (Lessing
1989, p. 562). In a text dramatically documenting the lack of place for women in
social, political and critical life, the medical choice of a man, though it may seem
surprising, is also, I think, the only choice possible: the man is both dangerous and
necessary, at one and the same time a poison and a cure whose presence, although
unmasking the constructed nature of the socio-sexual hierarchy, reinforces its
validity. The encounter with Milt that takes place just before the novels closure
marks Annas return to normal lifewhich begins with her daughters return from
the cinema and with the prospects of Mollys future marriage. But Annas coming
out of the crisis is also her agreeing to the existing divisions of genders based on
the womans submission to the role of the one who supports the system, serving for
the men as the other who guarantees social cohesion. As Lacan emphatically
claims, [a] woman is a symptom of man (1985, p. 168); she is the place where
[male] lack is projected and through which it is simultaneously disavowed (Rose
1985, p. 48); without her acquiescence to play her role in the social fiction, that
fiction would collapse. The plea uttered by Milt, an impotent and therefore
powerless and emasculated American, discloses the protagonists awareness of the
social mechanism and the necessity for women to continue its game:
50 K. Wieckowska

Youve got to take us on, youve got to, dont you know that? Dont you see its all much
worse for us than it is for you? I know you are bitter for yourselves and youre right, but if
you cant take us on now, and see us through it [] Youre tougher, youre kinder,
youre in a position to take it (Lessing 1989, p. 574).

That Anna agrees to take him on, to comfort him by reflecting him back to
himself as complete, testifies to her readiness to join the social masquerade and to
perform the supportive role the society ascribes to women in the process of social
identification.
In The golden notebook psychoanalysis is presented not as a possibility of
escaping the social fiction of gender, but as a chance of having it explained and
thus making it easier to accept, although not to fight. An explanation of why Anna
continues to attend the ineffective sessions with her Jungian psychoanalyst, whom
she ironically and tellingly calls Mother Sugar, can be found in Elizabeth
Groszs statement that:
Psychoanalysis exerts an appeal for women which can also be seen as a lure or trap, espe-
cially for those who want to challenge the social functions and values attributed to women
and femininity in our culture (actively affirmed in psychoanalytic theory) (1995, p. 6).

Like the world in which Anna lives, psychoanalysis proves to be a phallocentric

trap (Grosz 1995, p. 3); therefore, the only function it can perform for the woman
is that of returning her to her place in the social fiction, of sweetly mothering her
back into the dominant order and to thus rewarding her with a stable identity.
The veiled acquiescence to the inevitability of phallocentrism is repeated in
Doris Lessings preface to the novel where she identifies herself as a writer by the
masculine pronoun he. This may have been a defensive gesture to counter the
insistence on her womanly status in the hostile reviews of male critics where she
was usually addressed as Mrs. Lessing, as evidenced by the more sympathetic
review of her work by Michael Thorpe who defends The golden notebook by
writing that Mrs. Lessings aim was to produce
a comprehensive work describing the intellectual and moral climate of her time, not to
produce [] a feminist broadside. [] She aspired instead to meet the need for the more
varied view of the human condition such as a Tolstoy or a Stendhal could provide (1973,
p. 25).

By comparing the female writer to a Tolstoy or a Stendhal rather than to an

Eliot or a Woolf, the critic repeats Lessings and her novels gesture, seemingly
disregarding sexual difference, but only through identifying writing and the human
condition with the male subject.

3 A Return of the Repressed

In The Ego and The Id Sigmund Freud describes the mechanism of loss as
resulting in an alteration of the ego which can only be described as a setting up of
the [lost] object inside the ego, as it occurs in melancholia (Freud 1995b, p. 638).
A Post-Battle Landscape: Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook and The Cleft 51

The ego is re-defined here as a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes where

the lost objects survive, conserved through prior identifications (Freud 1995b,
p. 638). The process of introjecting the lost object is posited as a universal road to
sublimation so that all sublimation take[s] place through the mediation of the
ego, which begins by changing sexual object-libido into a narcissistic libido and
then, perhaps, goes on to give it another aim (Freud 1995b, p. 639). A work of art,
as an effect of sublimation and mediation of the ego, contains the traces of all that
has been lost or repressed; hence the possibility of another relation of sexual
difference, of a female identification that has been lost in The golden notebook
returns conserved as a trace in The Cleft.
As Doris Lessing writes in the Preface to the book, The Cleft (2007) originated
from a remark she encountered in a scientific article which speculated that the
basic and primal human stock was probably female, and that males came along
later, as a kind of cosmic afterthought (Lessing 2008). Consequently, the creation
myth the novel presents begins with an idyllic state disturbed by the appearance of
an other, in this case men, and situates the origins of civilization in a war between
the sexes. Clefts, an all female race living close to the sea, impregnated with water
or the Moon, lead uneventful and happy lives, lacking nothing and wanting
nothing, with no sense of time or place, until one day, for reasons never explained,
one of them gives birth to a baby boy and thus begins the race of what to the
women appear as [m]onsters. The deformed ones, the freaks, the cripples
(Lessing 2008, p. 8). The first boys are treated as a curious though threatening
natural perversion: like toys, they are mercilessly played with, experimented on,
mutilated, left to die on the rocks or killed by being thrown into the Cleft. As more
of them are born, some are saved by the eagles who transport them to a nearby
valley where the boys, suckled by a doe, set up a rival community. Slowly but
inevitably, the two communities begin to establish contacts, particularly when
Clefts realize that they have lost their ability to self-impregnate and that they need
men to have children. It is at this point when the need for mutual dependency
becomes obvious to both groups that the sexual relations as we know them begin to
be established, leading to the hierarchy prescribed by the novels epigraph
according to which Man does, woman is (Robert Graves in Lessing 2008).
The novel represents the appearance of men in the womens world as the
beginning of our civilization: the men radically change the womens lives,
destroying their communality and the old way of thinking and giving them in
exchange the inventions of language, individuality, time and space. It is also the
mens presence that forces the women to record their past, although this has to be
done in the new language of the colonizers, with the use of concepts alien to the
women; as one of the Memories, the women keeping record of the oral history of
Clefts, states:
Even words I use are new, I dont know where they came from, sometimes it seems that
most of the words in our mouths are this new talk. I say I, and again I, I do this and I think
that, but then we wouldnt say I, it was we. We thought we (Lessing 2008, p. 7).
52 K. Wieckowska

With the introduction of the new language, there comes the need for history and
for a new way of thinking: I said think but did we think? Perhaps a new kind of
thinking began like everything else when the Monsters started being born
(Lessing 2008, p. 8). Above all, the men bring social organization, the division into
separate communities, both between men and women, and among the women
themselves, who are divided over the question of how to treat the new race.
Importantly, what underlies the Clefts decision to establish relations with Squirts
is shame and the feeling of guilt for having killed the first boys.
In his account of the origins of civilization, Freud identifies the beginning of
social organization with patricide and with the sons guilt for having killed the all-
powerful patriarch:
Society was now based on complicity in the common crime; religion was based on the
sense of guilt and the remorse attaching to it; while morality was based partly on the
exigencies of this society and partly on the penance demanded by the sense of guilt (Freud
1995c, p. 503).

The original patricide and the ensuing guilt are presented also as the reasons for
the unequal distribution of power within patriarchy as
atonement with the father was all the more complete since the sacrifice was accompanied
by a total renunciation of the women on whose account the rebellion against the father was
started (Freud 1995c, p. 508).

In Lessings novel, the original crime from which society springs is ironically
presented as committed by women driven not by their will to power, but by
curiosity and disgust with the boys (bodily) otherness. But, although the story of
female supremacy is abrasive and may upset certain people (Lessing 2008,
p. 7), its patriarchal effects are the same, even if this time it is the womens choice,
dictated by what one might call, again ironically, the feminine ethics of care,
wisdom or simple desire to survive the actions of men who, as Clefts are fond of
repeating, act, but do not think or care.
The Cleft emphasizes the accidental and subjective nature of official history, as
well as the fact that it is being issued by a man. The story of Clefts is a mass of
material accumulated over ages, originating as oral history, some of it the same but
written down later, a cumbersome, unwieldy mass (Lessing 2008, p. 6).
Moreover, more than one hopeful historian had been defeated by it, and not only
because of its difficulty, but because of its nature (Lessing 2008, p. 6) which
might explain why the material had at various times been regarded as so
inflammatory it had been put with other Strictly Secret documents (Lessing
2008, p. 7). The Clefts tale is finally put together by a Roman historian, an elderly
man hopelessly in love with his much younger wife, who retreats from the dangers
of Neros burning Rome to immerse himself in writing and in fatherly duties. A
lover of peace and family, the historian is contrasted with his wife, an adventurous
and clever woman who safely manages her complicated public affairs, leaving to
him the care over their private life. In this marriage, it is the woman who acts and
the man who is, which contradicts not only the epigraph to the novel, but also the
A Post-Battle Landscape: Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook and The Cleft 53

existing hierarchy of sexual difference, origin myths, or historical accounts. As for

the latter, their nature is made sufficiently clear by the historians frequent remarks
on the gradual changes introduced to the history of Squirts which finally presents
them as the first men who were not mothered by Clefts, but fathered by the Eagle.
The Cleft begins with the historian observing the arrival of Marcus, a slave, and
his encounter with Lolla, the beloved who has been waiting for his return.
Impatient to spend the night in the company of his male friends, Marcus leaves the
girl, who starts crying; still, for the man watching the pair it is obvious the boy will
return to spend the night with Lolla. Yet another contradictory comment on the
binding of women with being and men with acting, for the historian the little
scene seems [] to sum up a truth in the relations between men and women
(Lessing 2008, p. 6). The truth, if there is one, might relate to the correspondence
between the official account and the lived experience, between what is prescribed
and what is practiced, to the variety of relations acted out daily, and to the fact that
we are not Oneone Race, one Species, or one People (Lessing 2008, p. 23),
but always already divided.

4 A Lost Object

The work of mourning, as Freud tells us, proceeds through incorporating the lost
object into ones ego and working through the relation, gradually de-cathecting it,
until it can be substituted for by something new (Grosz 1995, p. 30). The desire for
a stable identity, for a complete self before the arrival of any differenceand
perhaps particularly the sexual differenceis what The golden notebook depicts,
while simultaneously, from the start, disbelieving its possibility. There is nothing
in the unconscious that accords with the body (Lacan 1985, p. 165) or, to put it
differently, there is no body as a biological fact, but instead there are the lin-
guistically coded body parts of Clefts and Squirts for whom sexual difference is an
invention, a necessary invention of the other (Derrida 1991). To identify oneself
beyond social divisions and not to divide things off, not to compartmentalize, as
Lessing would like us to live (Lessing 1989, p. 10) is, as Lacan would say,
impossible: there is no one without an other, and no two without the Other of the
social (Lacan 1985). If the lost object of The golden notebook and The Cleft is the
woman as Onebeyond or before sexual differencethen it is an object which
must be substituted by something new, possibly by writing.3 That this writing as a
whole has been described as subject[ing] a divided civilization to scrutiny
proves that the object of the lost unity must be abandonedin anything but fiction.

3
To refer to Lacan again, when he identifies the woman as the symptom of man, he also writes
that the symptom is what never ceases to be written and that writing is a means of situating the
repetition of the symptom (Lacan 1985, p. 166).
54 K. Wieckowska

The desire for One returns, like the repressed, in the critical wish to have a
clearly identified writer of a fragmented novel, to arrive at or to secure the one
interpretation, to come up with one definition of what it means to be a feminist, a
feminist writer or a woman, particularly the woman as other than man. That this
desire is recognized as one that cannot be fulfilled is visible in Lessings preface to
The golden notebook when she writes about the impossibility and dangers
underlying the authorial wish to control her text:
it is not only childish of a writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the
shape and aim of a novel as he sees it his wanting this means that he has not understood a
most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able
to promote thought and discussion only when its plane and shape and intention are not
understood, because the moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the
moment when there is not anything more to be got out of it (Lessing 1989, p. 21).

If, as The Cleft illustrates, our stories are incessantly re-constructed and through
them, so are we, perhaps it is time to see that [t]he myth of Woman as other is
now a vacant lot where different women can play with their subjective becoming
and that the question for the feminist subject [the critic or the reader] is how to
intervene upon Woman in this historical context, so as to create new conditions for
the becoming-subject of women here and now (Braidotti 1994, p. 168). After all,
as one of the male characters of The golden notebook claims, the real revolution
is, women against men (Lessing 1989, p. 198), a revolution which, as The Cleft
ironically shows, started a long, long time agoand doubtless will continue.

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