Abstract
If it is dangerous to assess the work of a living author, it is especially so with Doris Lessing, who is twenty steps ahead of us whenever we try to place her in a critical framework or predict the direction of her work. Her own attitude towards her critics is highly ironic and she has questioned students about wasting their time dissecting only one book or even the works of a single author.1 As a critic then, I must face the fact that my current attempts to interpret Lessing may later appear foolish, but I also know that this body of work of hers is worth being foolish over. It intrigues me, worries me, infuriates me. How I hope her vision of the future will not come true! The clarity of her depiction of the dissolution of society, with its prediction of world-wide destruction and catastrophe makes many of her readers long to reject her prophesies, her rejection of the way most people live their lives.
If genius is the power of anticipation, the passionate portrayal of things to come, then your work carries the mark of genius and over and above its artistic ventures it is a moral phenomenon.
(Thomas Mann to his brother Heinrich, 1941)
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Notes
D. Lessing, ‘On the Golden Notebook’, Partisan Review, XL (Spring, 1973) 14–30; The Golden Notebook, (London: Michael Joseph, 1962).
D. Lessing, The Four-Gated City, vol. five of Children of Violence (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969).
S. J. Kaplan, ‘The Limits of Consciousness in the Novels of Doris Lessing’, Contemporary Literature, XIV (Autumn, 1973) 536; Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel (London: University of Illinois Press, 1975) pp. 136–72.
D. Lessing, Briefing For a Descent Into Hell (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971).
D. Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (London: Octagon, 1974).
J. Mellors, ‘Island Styles’, The Listener, XCIII (23 January 1975) 126.
For discussions of Lessing’s interest in Sufism, see: R. Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing (London: University of Illinois Press, 1979);
N. Hardin, ‘Doris Lessing and the Sufi Way’, Contemporary Literature, XIV (Autumn, 1973) 565–81;
and D. Seligman, ‘The Sufi Quest’, World Literature Written in English, XII (1973) 190–206.
J. White (ed.), The Highest State of Consciousness (New York: Anchor Books, 1972) p. vii .
D. Lessing, The Summer Before the Dark (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973).
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1973) p. 184.
D. Lessing, ‘An Ancient Way to New Freedom’, Vogue, CLVIII (July 1971) 98.
D. Lessing, ‘In the World, Not of It: On Sufism’, Encounter, XXXIX (August 1972) 62.
J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962) p. 268.
C. G. Jung, ‘The Stages of Life’, in J. Campbell (ed.), The Portable Jung (New York: Viking, 1971) pp. 3–22.
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© 1982 Thomas F. Staley
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Kaplan, S.J. (1982). Passionate Portrayal of Things to Come: Doris Lessing’s recent fiction. In: Staley, T.F. (eds) Twentieth-Century Women Novelists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05215-8_1
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