Abstract
Doris Lessing’s science fiction series constitutes her most mature vision of the theme of equilibrium. While The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook dramatize the need for personal equilibrium and The Memoirs of a Survivor enlarges on the theme of personal and collective equilibrium, Canopus in Argos: Archives, comprehends and complements the earlier works. In it Lessing goes one step further in her continuing exploration of self and cosmos by positing a cosmic “‘Order”’ that if properly observed leads to individual, cultural and ultimately cosmic growth. Here the balance between the levels of perception becomes the ‘“Necessity”’ that has to be observed to ‘understand’ and maintain the ‘“Order”’ 1 of the universe. In that context, the new ‘order of world’ referred to in the last pages of The Memoirs of a Survivor — an ‘order’ which essentially incorporates the inner realm of reality — becomes the basis for Lessing’s cosmology in The Canopus in Argos: Archives.
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Notes
Doris Lessing, Re: Colonised Planet 5 Shikasta (1979), rpt., 1981. All subsequent references will be to this edition.
Lessing, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980), rpt., 1981. All subsequent references will be to this edition.
Lessing, The Sirian Experiments (1981), rpt., 1982. All subsequent references will be to this edition.
Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), rpt., 1983. All subsequent references will be to this edition.
Lessing, Documents Relating to The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, 1983. All subsequent references will be to this edition.
Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, Marx/Engels: Collected Works, Vol. 25, 1987, p. 327.
Robert Reilly (ed.), The Transcendent Adventure: Studies of Religion in Science Fiction/Fantasy, 1985, p. 3. In his introduction to the book, Reilly argues that ‘One can… see that physical science can be included within the scope of [the] definition of religion. It uses rational means to explain order in the universe and provides a relationship (the experimental method) to the source of order. The scientists themselves are a sort of priesthood’ (p. 3). Doris Lessing expresses a similar point of view. In an interview published in 1980, she postulates: The best scientists, those on the highest levels, always come closer and closer to the mystical. Much of what Einstein said could have been said by a Christian mystic, St. Augustine, for example. Science, which is the religion for today, looks for the metaphysical… Hence the boom in science fiction, which reflects this preoccupation and which moves in the world of the non-rational.
N. Torrents, ‘Testimony to Mysticism’, Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter 1980) p. 12)
C. J. Driver, ‘Profile 8: Doris Lessing’, The New Review, Vol. 1, No. 8 (November 1974), p. 23.
Patrick Parrinder, Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching, 1980, p. 58.
Betsy Draine, ‘Competing Codes in Shikasta’ in Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger (eds), 1986, p. 154.
Robert Galbreath, ‘Ambiguous Apocalypse: Transcendental Versions of The End’, in The End of the World, Eric S. Rabkin et al. (eds), 1983, pp. 45–5.
Lois and Stephen Rose, The Shattered Ring: Science Fiction and the Quest for Meaning, 1970, p. 112.
Quoted in William Irwin Thompson’s Passages About the Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture, 1973, p. 138.
Lorna Sage, Doris Lessing, 1983, p. 78.
Lesley Hazleton, ‘Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and Space Fiction’, New York Times Magazine 131 (5 July 1982), pp. 20, 28.
Doris Lessing, ‘Spies I Have Known’, Partisan Review, Vol. 38, No. 1, 1971, p. 55.
Susan Starnberg, ‘An Interview with Doris Lessing’, Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 2 ((Fall 1984), p. 3.
Report by Ruth Saxton on ‘Lessing’s visit to California’ on April 5, 1984 in Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall 1984), p. 7.
N. Torrents, ‘Testimony to Mysticism’, Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter 1980 ), p. 1.
Shah, The Sufis, p. 350. Doris Lessing expresses her interest in that effect of Sufi literature by referring to Mulla Nasrudin’s fables in Doris Lessing, ‘What Looks Like an Egg and Is an Egg’, New York Times Book Review (7 May 1972), p. 42.
Nancy Hardin, ‘The Sufi Teaching Story and Doris Lessing’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 23, No. 3 (October 1977), p. 316.
Idries Shah, ‘The Teaching Story: Observations on the Folklore of Our “Modern” Thought,’ in The Nature of Human Consciousness, Robert Ornstein (ed.), 1974, p. 291.
Sharon Spencer, Space, Time and Structure in the Modern Novel, 1971, pp. 3, pp. xx.
Doris Lessing, ‘An Elephant in the Dark’, Spectator, Vol. 213 (18 September 1964), p. 373.
Steven E. Colburn, ‘Reading Shikasta: A Reading Comprehension Quiz on “The History of Shikasta”’, Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 1982 ), 15.
The concept of ‘death and Rebirth’ is recurrent in Sufi literature. See William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love, 1983, pp. 183, 101–7.
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© 1994 Shadia S. Fahim
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Fahim, S.S. (1994). The Science Fiction Series. In: Doris Lessing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230375222_5
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