Abstract
The study of The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook has so far revealed that the basic dynamic of the action was the search for an equilibrium between rational, psychological and spiritual modes of consciousness in perceiving reality. In the early novel, Lessing focused on the ways in which the individual’s perception of reality is determined by the intellectual, social and material conditions of the time. Increasingly since The Golden Notebook she has elaborated on the necessity for retrieving the balance by developing an inward movement — a descent into the unconscious and a complementary ascent to spiritual dimensions of reality which can only be attained if one has learned to attend to all the faculties.
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Notes
Quoted by Doris Lessing in The Four-Gated City (1969), rpt., 1972, p. 461 from Shah’s The Sufis, p. 54.
Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), rpt., 1976. All subsequent quotations will refer to this edition.
J. Mellons praises Lessing for her accurate depiction of reality, and takes the outer action of Memoirs as a literal parallel ‘to the conditions we have had a taste of in the last few years’ (J. Mellons, ’Island Styles’, The Listener, Vol. 93 (23 January 1975 ), p. 126 ).
On the other hand Lorelei Cederston, interprets it in terms of the inner action as ‘the interior symbolic landscape, peopled by mythological figures and the personification of different aspects of the collective and personal unconscious of the protagonist’ (Loreli Cederstrom, ’Inner Space Landscape: Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor’, Mosaic, Vol. 13, parts III-IV, 1975, p. 116).
Further still, Michael L. Magie faults Lessing for deserting rationalism and realism and retreating in an ivory tower of hermetic art, conjuring up ‘a private religion of her own’ (Magie, ’Doris Lessing and Romanticism’, College English, Vol. 38 (Feb. 1977), p. 531). See also Melvin Maddocks, termed this book ‘a ghost story of the future’ in ’Ghosts and Portents’, Time (16 June 1975), 16. Jenny Taylor terms it ’ Doris Lessing’s fantasy’ in ’Memoirs was made of this’ in Notebooks/Memoirs/ Archives, p. 227, and Martin Green concludes that Memoirs ’employs the techniques of fantasy and rejects those of realism’, in ’The Doom of Empire: Memoirs of a Survivor’, Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 1982 ), p. 6.
Betsy Draine, in her study of Memoirs, bases her argument on the 1902 theory of William James that each world ‘whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion, only the reality lapses with the attention’. This creates a rather limited response to the novel since it stops at the point where the novel starts - that is she appreciates the novel’s distinction and clear definition of each realm and rejects the increasing interaction between them which is the novel’s raison d’être. Moreover she overlooks the many modern theorists for whom the interaction between two modes within the parameters of two genres is not only valid, but also of great aesthetic value. See in that context Gregory L. Lucente, The Narrative of Realism and Myth, 1979
R. Scholes, The Fabultors, 1975
and Maurice Z. Schroder, ‘The Novel as Genre’, Masachusetts Review, Vol. 4 (1963), pp. 291–308.
See Victoria Glendinning, ’The Memoirs of a Survivor’, The Times Literary Supplement (13 December 1974), p. 1405.
Malcolm Cowley, ‘Future Notebook’, Saturday Review (28 June 1975), 23–24.
Alvin Sullivan, ’The Memoirs of a Survivor: Lessing’s Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 1980), p. 160.
Term used by Todorov as a strategy to negotiate between text and reader. See Todorov, ‘Origins of Genres’, New Literary History, Vol. 8 (1976), p. 167.
Wolfgang Iser’s comment on that issue of the relationship between text and reader in the modern novel may be helpful here: What is normally meant by ‘identification’ is the establishment of affinities between oneself and someone outside oneself - a familiar ground in which we are able to experience the unfamiliar. The author’s aim, though, is to convey the experience, and above all, an attitude towards that experience. Consequently, ‘identification’ is not an end in itself but a stratagem by means of which the author stimulates attitudes in the reader. (Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, 1974, p. 291 )
In an interview discussing Memoirs Doris Lessing refers to that issue in her novels: I don’t think literature is there for people to identify closely with some character. I think the right way to read a book is to try and get some kind of objective view of the situation. If you’re going to identify with some character in a book — like a woman’s magazine way — it’s a form of self-indulgence. It’s certainly not what the writer had in mind. (Susan Starnberg, ‘An Interview with Doris Lessing’, Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall 1984), p. 3)
In her Defense of Fantasy, Ann Swinfen explains that ‘the essential ingredient of all fantasy is “the marvellous ”, which will be regarded as anything outside the normal space-time continuum of the everyday world… [and in which] the writer as sub-creator creates a complete and self-consistent “secondary world”’ (Ann Swinfen, In Defense of Fantasy, 1984, p. 50).
In that context any form of analogy with reality cancels the grip of the marvellous. This marks the crucial difference between Memoirs and the genre of fantasy for as Tolkien explains, fantasy must present a consistent alternative world — ‘a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it while you are, as it were, inside’. Tolkien further postulates in that context that since fantasy ’deals with “marvels ”, it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting the whole story in which they occur is a figment or illusion’ (Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 1964, pp. 36, 14 ).
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 1979, pp. 20–1.
Critics have frequently referred to the similarity between the apocalyptic world of Memoirs and their present culture. To quote but two, see Sydney Kaplan, ‘Passionate Portrayal of Things to Come’, Twentieth Century Women Novelists, Thomas F. Staley (ed.), 1982, pp. 1–15
and J. Mellons, ‘Island Styles’, The Listener, Vol. 93 (23 January 1975 ), p. 126.
Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, Jane E. Lewin (trans.), 1980, pp. 44–85.
Ferdinand de Saussure ‘s distinction between the signifier- the linguistic unit or word sign, and its signified- all the possible referents for the signifier - is important in relation to how ’it’ is used in this context. By laying bare the multivalence of this semiotic sign, the narrator calls into question the perception of language and the process of reading. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (trans.), W. Baskin, 1974.
Lessing, ‘An Elephant in the Dark’, Spectator, 213 (18 September 1964), p. 373.
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© 1994 Shadia S. Fahim
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Fahim, S.S. (1994). The Memoirs of a Survivor. In: Doris Lessing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375222_4
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