Volume 34, November—December 2007

Sue King-Smith

"I AM ANNA WULF":

THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK REVISITED

When Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October this year, the
Swedish Academy described her as "that epicist of the female experience, who
with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization
to scrutiny." 1 Certainly, this prodigious eighty-eight-year-old British author
has always been known for her unique style and her steadfast commitment to
challenging social mores. She has published over fifty works, including novels,
collections of short stories, operas, numerous non-fiction books and the two
volumes of her autobiography. And her literary career is still going strong after
fifty-seven years, with her latest novel, The Cleft, coming out earlier this year.

Lessing has never been one for conforming to literary conventions. Throughout
her career, she has consistently challenged conventional notions of form and
theme, making it difficult for critics to categorise her as any particular kind
of writer. Lessing has written speculative fiction, such as the Canopus in Argos:
Archives series (vol.1-5, 1979-1984) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971).
However, she never allowed herself to become trapped in a particular literary
box. Memoirs of a Survivor (1975), for example, was seminal in exploring the
fiction/non-fiction divide (Lessing has said that this futuristic dystopia was "an
attempt at an autobiography" 2) whilst The Fifth Child (1988) could be read as
a kind of postmodern parable. Novels like The Good Terrorist (1985) and Love,
Again (1996) are relatively realist in their structure (although thematically they
deal with material that was somewhat revolutionary at the time they were
published - the depiction of a terrorist cell and the romantic life of an older
woman, respectively).

In many ways, Doris Lessing is one of the few writers to have consistently
interrogated the socio-cultural and technological changes of the last sixty years.
From her first novel, The Grass is Singing, first published in 1950, Lessing has
probed the hegemonies of her age. The Grass is Singing depicts the life of Mary
Turner, a young white women living on a farm in Rhodesia and an African
farmhand, Moses, who is accused of Mary's murder. Lessing, who herself grew
up on a veld in what was then Southern Rhodesia, wrote this text when she was
in her mid-twenties. In the 1950s, when colonialism (and apartheid) remained
largely unchallenged, this text was dangerous for a young, white, South African
woman to write, but it certainly set the tone for Lessing's career. (In fact, as a
result of this book, she was prohibited from entering South Africa from 1956-
95.) Lessing was to go on to write about Communism (she was a member of the

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Communist Party in both South Africa and Britain), feminism, anti-psychiatry,

terrorism, ageism and growing pressures on the environment. One of her more
recent books, for example, the dystopian Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999)
depicts the futuristic "Ifrik," a land devastated by drought and environmental
degradation, failed technology (presumably of our age) and genetic experiments
gone wrong. Having said this, Lessing's work is rarely didactic. Through
her characters, she explores the complexity implicit in these themes, often
interrogating her own closely held beliefs in the process

But it is not just her themes that can be confronting to readers. Stylistically,
Lessing has always broken the rules. Realist modes of representation often
give way to layered texts, where narratives overlap and frames of reference are
broken. The seeming logic of the "real" world is replaced with worlds within
worlds, non-linear temporal settings and various versions of "reality" that
unproblematically co-exist. Often the very capacity of language to convey
meaning comes under scrutiny, sometimes becoming the "subject" of her writing
rather than the tool by which her stories are told. The breaking of conventions
in Lessing's work, is, however, never done gratuitously. Language, story and
unconventional literary techniques are always in the service of uncovering the
hidden machinations of society and the human psyche.

One of Lessing's best known works, first published in 1962, is The Golden
Notebook. As is true of many of her other books (including the Children of
Violence Series vol. 1-5, 1964-69), The Golden Notebook was ahead of its time, on a
number of levels, but particularly in terms of its narrative structure and themes,
and its exploration of the female subject. In many ways, The Golden Notebook
exemplifies the uniqueness of Lessing's work as a whole. It is stylistically
innovative, thematically confronting and utilises many literary techniques that
are characteristic of later postmodernist writings.

Written at a time when Second Wave feminism was just beginning to challenge
patriarchal control over the material conditions of women's lives, The Golden
Notebook delves into the complex inner lives of women. But Lessing's challenge
to simplistic notions of what it meant to be a woman didn't stop at thematic
exploration. As is characteristic of much of Lessing's work, The Golden Notebook
also took apart the linguistic frameworks by which women had previously
been contained (by predominantly male authors). Lessing deconstructs
phallogocentric language in much the same way later French theorists like Luce
Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous were to do in the 1970s, when Third
Wave feminism began to focus on women's identity/subjectivity. Indeed, many
of the literary techniques suggested by postmodern feminists such as Cixous,
Kristeva and Irigaray, regarding representational practices that undermine
the Symbolic Order, can be found in Lessing's early work, particularly The

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Golden Notebook. 3 Despite the fact that Lessing has always been wary of "isms"
including feminism, the Swedish Academy (responsible for awarding the Nobel
Prize) acknowledged the feminist movement's indebtedness to Lessing and
The Golden Notebook, stating, "The burgeoning feminist movement saw it [The
Golden Notebook] as a pioneering work, and it belongs to the handful of books
that informed the 201hcentury view of the male-female relationship." 4

The issues raised by this book are no less relevant today than they were then.
In fact, in this book Lessing has foreshadowed many contemporary debates
regarding the nature of subjectivity. For this reason, and because it was such
a radical departure from previous books written by women about women
(thus making it a classic), it is worth revisiting The Golden Notebook in order to
understand what, exactly, made this such a controversial book at the time it
was published.

The Golden Notebook is often considered one of Lessing's greatest works because
of the, "... immensity of its conception, its formal intricacy, the inclusivity of its
concerns, its historical accuracy, the intellectual capacity of its protagonist, and
above all the fact that the entire book asserts that the 'filter which is a woman's
way of looking at the world has the some validity as the filter which is a man's
way'." 5 On its publication in 1962, The Golden Notebook received much critical
attention, not all of it good. Many critics didn't understand the unconventional
form of the book, its strange and often contradictory messages regarding society
and the nature of subjectivity, and its fragmented and apparently chaotic style.
Many women, however, saw it as one of the first books to genuinely articulate
the female experience.

Although The Golden Notebook can, and has been, interpreted from various
perspectives - feminist, socialist, psychoanalytic, amongst others - it is also
a great example of postmodern writing, both thematically and in terms of
the literary techniques it employs. The structure of the novel itself challenges
many of the conventions of the realist novel. It is framed by a novella, written
primarily about its main protagonist, Anna Wulf, and her friend Molly. There
are five instalments of this novella, titled "Free Women," throughout the novel,
interspersed by a series of notebooks written by Anna. The Black Notebook is
a record of various aspects of Anna's bestselling first novel, Frontiers Of War
- the raw material, financial transactions and critical commentaries. The Red
Notebook documents Anna's involvement with the British Communist party and
her various political activities. The Yellow Notebook is a "romantic novel" called
The Shadow Of The Third, written by Anna, in which the life of the protagonist,
Ella, very much mirrors aspects of Anna's own life. The Blue Notebook, a journal
and Anna's attempt at a "factual," "objective," account of her life, explores

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her ideas regarding art and writing, and their relationship to concepts such
as "truth" and "reality." All of these notebooks represent different aspects of
Anna's life which she separates out in an attempt to understand herself and
the apparent chaos of her life, and more practically, to overcome writer's block.
As Lessing notes in the book's preface, Anna keeps four notebooks, "and not
one because, as she recognises, she has to separate things off from each other,
out of fear of chaos, of formlessness - of breakdown. 116 Martens suggests
that the split diary works on four different levels: 1) it "mirrors Anna's split
personality"; 2) it reveals the "universal condition of partial perception"; 3) it
"shows the failure of language by example"; and 4) the Inner Golden Notebook
"establishes the theme of unity, effaces point of view ... and achieves the ideal
of transubjectivity." 7 Eventually the various notebooks collapse into each other
and into the Inner Golden Notebook, where Anna merges with another writer
and her lover, Saul. Here, everything fragments and breaks, down into chaos.
Anna eventually emerges from this in the final instalment, in "Free Women,"
both more integrated and more accepting of the incongruities and fractured
nature of existence.

The structure of The Golden Notebook challenges traditional understandings of

narrative progression and form. Lessing suggests that the structure should be
read as an integral part of the text, saying she hoped that, "... if the book were
shaped in the right way it would make its own comment about the conventional
novel ..." and that the form of the novel was "... another way of describing
the dissatisfaction of the 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?" 8

The notebooks draw on materials and writings from various genres and literary
forms including newspaper clippings, Communist Party propaganda, short
stories, literary criticism, reviews and journalistic pieces, making it at times
a kind of literary collage. It is a multi-layered and complex text, with several
levels of narrative co-existing within the same novelistic space. Often the reader
finds him/herself reading a story within a story within the primary text itself. 9
As Lightfoot describes:

In The Golden Notebook we see the novelist writing a novel (Doris Lessing on Anna
Wulf) about a novelist writing two novels (Anna on Ella and "Free Women"). These
two novels respectively are about a novelist writing a novel and about a novelist not
writing a novel. 10

Another writing technique that is commonly used by Lessing to undermine

linearity and narrative progression is erasure. Erasure, where a fictional world,

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scene, object, concept, word or person is constructed, then deconstructed or

erased,' 1 occurs several times in The Golden Notebook. An example of this can be
found in the Yellow Notebook. Anna describes a story that is "inside Ella" but
follows it with the comment, "Ella does not write this story. She is afraid that
writing it might make it come true." 2 In this instance, Anna is asking readers
to erase from their memory what they have just read and to accept a new
version of the event. Obviously it is impossible to forget what we have just read,
thus the technique has the simultaneous effect of excluding and including the
erased text. McHale describes this "bifurcation" as "... violating sequentiality
by realizing two mutually exclusive lines of narrative development at the some
time. 1113 He suggests that the "ontological peculiarity" of a world in which events
both do and don't happen displaces the "truth/falsity" dichotomy resulting in a
kind of "ontological flickering" between the various realities. 14

Erasure also acts to foreground the relationship between author, reader and
narrator. The narrator momentarily draws the reader into the text by giving
direct instructions as to how they should respond to a particular passage. This
happens repeatedly in The Golden Notebook where an omniscient narrator, on
a narrative level higher than Anna (who is the primary narrator of the text)
intrudes into the text. For example, in the Yellow Notebook, Ella, (the narrator
of this novel/notebook) a creation of Anna, writes a set of stories that prefigure
Anna's break-up with Saul, making us wonder, as Greene suggests, "... if Ella
is 'writing' Anna, is she 'authoring' her author?" 5 In The Golden Notebook, the
levels of reality are deliberately confused, the reader is invited to enter the text
(as if she/he were a character), as is the author. Likewise, the narrator moves
in and out of narrative levels. As Barthes suggests, this kind of literary structure
acknowledges the problems with (and challenges) traditional understandings of
a text's origin and reception. 16

Literary techniques such as the layering of narrative fragments, using various

genres and erasure, result in a text that is multilayered and cyclical 17 rather
than linear and progressive. This results in what McHale describes as a
"hesitant" text, a text that is unwilling to reach conclusions or offer a fixed
version of "reality." Whilst we are very familiar with many of these techniques
today, at the time The Golden Notebook was written, it challenged traditional
novelistic conventions and made readers, and theorists, think differently about
the novel generally.

Thematically the novel works on many levels. As Greene suggests, the central
question posed by The Golden Notebook is, "... how [do we] oppose a system
by means of linguistic and literary conventions that have been forged by that
system 1118 It asks the questions "... how can literature be truthful; how can
writing accommodate experience; how can language still communicate when

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the world is turned upside down "19 Lessing was writing post World War II,
post-Hiroshima and in the wake of Stalin. In many ways, The Golden Notebook
maps the way in which language is highly contingent and easily co-opted into
the service of oppressive regimes.

One of the most striking elements of The Golden Notebook is the fragmentation
of Anna's character. The four notebooks can be understood as different aspects
of her split personality and often depict contradictory versions of her character
and the characters of others. Anna talks about her various "Selves" or the
different Annas and often describes herself in the third person. At one point
while talking to Molly, Anna thinks, "I wonder what I'm going to say? And who
the person is who will say it? How odd, to sit here, waiting to hear what one
will say."2° This is a kind of "ontological" questioning of subjectivity. Instead of
asking, "Who am I?" a question which may belong to a modernist interrogation
of the Subject, Anna asks, "Which Self is this?" implying multiple versions of
the Self, none of which is necessarily a "true" Self. Later in the text, Anna tries
to "... summon up younger stronger Annas, the schoolgirl in London and the
daughter of my father, but I could only see these Annas as apart from me." 21
This sense of dislocation from the Self, of schizophrenic alienation, is typical of a
postmodernist understanding of the Subject.

Saul, Anna's lover in the Inner Golden Notebook, is actually schizophrenic.

His sense of time is completely distorted, 22 his loss of an integrated identity is
reflected in his speech, which Anna describes as, "... jumbling phrases, jargon,
disconnected remarks" 23 and his constant "I 11 I" 24 diatribes in which he enters
into a state of self-obsessed individualism. In the Inner Golden Notebook, the
distinction between Self and Other is completely dissolved as Anna and Saul
merge into one another. Anna is living "inside [her and Saul's combined]
madness." As Lessing comments in the preface to The Golden Notebook, Anna
and Saul:

'break down' into each other, into other people, break through the false patterns
they have made of their pasts, the patterns and formulas they have made to shore
themselves and each other, dissolve. They hear each other's thoughts, recognise each
other in themselves. 25

Anna says, "I wondered when we began to talk, which two people would be
talking." 26 By this stage in the text both exist in a state where their multiple
Selves have merged and are indistinguishable from one another. The conclusion
Anna seems to reach is that the Self is a multidimensional, chaotic and
constantly changing entity, which is, as Danziger suggests, 27 how Anna likes
it. As Anna states near the end, "I am a person who continually destroys the
possibilities of a future because of the number of alternate viewpoints I can
focus on the present." 28

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The Golden Notebook not only questions the belief in an integrated, fixed Self but
also challenges all truth claims, questioning the idea that "grand narratives"
such as Communism and Science, have a unique claim on truth. The text
particularly undermines the notion that concepts such as "truth," "memory"
and "history" can be viewed as being in any way objective. Of course, this is
standard fare in contemporary literary theory, but it was revolutionary at the
time it was written. An example of this questioning can be found in the Blue
Notebook, when Anna decides that the only way she can really capture the
"truth" of her life is by describing a single day in detail as a list of objectively
recorded events. After this experiment she notes that:

The Blue Notebook, which I had expected to be the most truthful of the notebooks,
is worse than any of them. I expected a terse record of facts to present some sort of a
pattern when I read over it, but this sort of record is as false as the account of what
happened on 15 th September, 1954, which I read now embarrassed because of its
emotionalism ... this would be more real if I wrote what I thought. 29

She quickly realises that "her desire for truth is frustrated by the unreliability
of memory and language." 30 Earlier, Anna comments while looking back
on her time in Africa in her early twenties (the subject matter for her novel,
Frontiers Of War) that she is, "... appalled at how much I didn't notice, living
inside the subjective highly-coloured mist. How do I know what I 'remember'
was important? What I remember was chosen by Anna of twenty years ago. I
don't know what this Anna of now would choose." 31 One of her earlier lovers,
Michael, says that, "... this is a time when it is impossible to know the truth
about anything." 32 When describing her history Anna says, "... the material of
[my] past has been ordered by me to fit what .1 know, and that was why it was
false . . . " 33

Many contemporary theorists contend that "grand narratives" of any variety

are totalising and lead to the oppression and marginalisation of the "Other,"
or groups outside dominant hegemonies or cultural elites. The four notebooks
critique and undermine various "grand narratives." As Danziger notes:

One by one she [Anna] divests herself of the patterns that had allowed her to make
sense of the world: the romantic idealism of her African experiences, her Marxist
politics, psychoanalysis, her sexual needs, and her presuppositions about the value of
traditional realistic fiction. 34

The Black Notebook documents the many contradictions and problems within
the Communist Party in Britain, of which Anna has been a member for some
time. It is also critical of its utopian vision for the future. Psychoanalysis is also
undermined as, "... traditional, rooted, conservative, in spite of its scandalous
familiarity with everything amoral." 35 For some time Anna sees a psychoanalyst

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- Mrs. Marks, or Mother Sugar, as Anna and Molly call her. Mother Sugar sums
up the psychoanalytic view of art as being purely about form:

People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art that says murder is good,
cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped
up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love
is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told that it all doesn't matter, they can't
stand formlessness. 36

For Anna, her life is about giving in to chaos and formlessness. The concept of
a whole integrated Self is undesirable and limiting, 37 as is the concept of art/
writing as permanent and lasting.

The Golden Notebook also challenges the notion that language has the capacity
to contain "reality." As Anna's personality starts to fragment, so too does her
belief in language's ability to convey meaning. 38 She says:

I am in a mood that gets more and more familiar: words lose their meaning suddenly.
I find myself listening to a sentence, a phrase, a group of words, as if they were a
foreign language - the gap between what they are supposed to mean, and what in
fact they say seems unbridgeable. 39

This echoes Derrida's theory that there is a "meaning-creative" gap between

words (as signifiers) and the reality/objects they are trying to depict. Later
Anna comments on a story by a "comrade." At first she believes it to be written
ironically, then she thinks it is parodic, but eventually realises that it is in fact
serious. She comments that, "It seems to me this fact is another expression of
the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that
is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language
against the density of our experience." 40 Not only is she commenting here
on the fact that language no longer seems to have the capacity to reflect or
capture "reality" but it is also a comment on the way "grand narratives,"
such as Communism, lose meaning when the language they employ becomes
jargonised. This also results in language becoming a kind of "surface without
depth." Anna eventually concludes that her writer's block is a direct result of this
loss of meaning. She says:

• .1 am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. They have

become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of
meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience ...the words
dissolve, and my mind starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the
words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an
enormous sea of images. So I can't write any longer. 41

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Cheng links Anna's description of language to a generalised postmodern mood,

suggesting that, "AS the change of the world is paradigmatic, so the traditional
dualistic, hierarchical basis of representation must be subverted. Consequently,
language becomes misleading, doomed to confusion or self-contradiction.
Language turns schizophrenic, self-alienating." 42

The "mood" of the age is a strong theme in The Golden Notebook. Draine
describes this "mood" as "... a paralysing fear of the formlessness of the present,
a despairing sense of emptiness and futility ... The postmodern sensibility is that
of Anna Wulf." 43 In the final pages, Milt (a version of Saul) characterises the age
by saying, "... the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time
one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream." 44
Anna describes how the age she lives in differs from what has gone before,
saying, "They didn't feel as I do. How could they? I don't want to be told when
I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb
exploding, that people felt that way about the crossbow. It isn't true. There is
something new in the world." 45 She says that, "the truth of our time was war, the
immanence of war 1146 Although Anna has visions of "... a life that isn't full of
hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and the
day ... 1147 her perception of the age as one of unabating violence, fragmentation
and anxiety also carries "... at times the implication that mental breakdown
may be the only appropriate response to the condition of living in the twentieth
century." 48 If anything, these insights have more resonance now than they had
in the 1960s.

Despite the sense of fragmentation and chaos that dominates this text, The
Golden Notebook has an underlying desire for unity and connectedness. As
Lessing says in the preface:

The way you deal with the problem of subjectivity, that shocking business of being
preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an
explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in
this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general,
as indeed life always does, transforming a personal experience ... into something
much larger; growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and
incredible experience is what everyone shares. 49

Anna's breakdown is described as a necessary precursor to her becoming "whole"

again. The descriptions of her merging with Saul are a kind of recognition
that her identity is not separate and distinct from those around her, but that
other people feed into her identity and she into theirs. Throughout The Golden
Notebook various characters, especially Anna, talk about unity and wholeness as
desirable outcomes, with the suggestion being that chaos and the disintegration

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of the Self will ultimately result in a resurrection of sorts, of a relational Self

that exists in a much more harmonious and connected state. Anna describes a
dream that illustrates this:

I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was
incredibly beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were
illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the
myths themselves, so that the soft fabric was glittering and alive ... Then I look and
it is like a vision - time has gone and the whole history of man ... is present in
what I see now, and it is a great soaring hymn of joy and triumph in which pain is
a small and lively counterpoint. And I look and see ... the bright different colours of
the other parts of the world .. .This was a moment of almost unbearable happiness,
the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes - I was
suddenly standing in peace, in silence. Beneath me was silence. 5°

When she wakes up she says, "... so much of my life has been twisted and
painful that now when happiness floods right through me ... I can't believe
it. I say to myself: I am Anna Wulf, this is me, Anna, and I'm happy." 51 Her
experience in the dream connects her to the whole of humanity across all time.
It is this sense of connection that allows her to feel genuine joy. This conception
of the world contradicts the postmoderriist belief that there is no unified Subject
and no intrinsic "meaning" or "truth." It does concur, however, with postmodern
feminist notions of the Self. They understand subjectivity as being multifaceted,
fluid and relational. 52 It is also very much in line with Sufi understandings of
the world. 53

Post Anna Wulf, many women have come to the conclusion that "womankind"
is not a singular, homogenous group, easily contained by any universal
definition. Anna's identity is interrelational, layered and in a constant state of
flux. Lessing seems to conclude that worhen are multifaceted and complex.

The preoccupations of The Golden Notebook are as relevant today as they were in
the 1960s. The novel questions the notions of "reality," "truth" and "memory."
It challenges the capacity of language to contain meaning. It interrogates the
nature of subjectivity. But perhaps most importantly of all, it asks us as readers
to unflinchingly dissect the dominant political and social narratives of the age.

Endnotes
1 As quoted by Motoko Rich and Sarah Lyall at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/
world/i icnd-nobel.html

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2
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, 1919-1948 (London:
Flamingo, 1995) 28.
For Kristeva, the semiotic is similar to the feminine in as much as it is repressed
and marginalised. As a result it is implicitly "Other" and therefore potentially subversive
as it "deconstructs the binary oppositions that are fundamental to the structures of
symbolic language." Julia Kristeva, "Oscillation between Power and Denial" New French
Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle De Courtivron (Great Britain:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1981) 165-67. See also Rosemary Tong, Feminist Thought:
A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992) 219-23. Cixous says: "Women
must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will
wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut
through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the
very idea of pronouncing the word 'silence." Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh Of The Medusa,"
in Signs, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Vol.1, no.4 (1976) 229.
As quoted by Motoko Rich and Sarah Lyall at http://www.nytimes.com/
2007/10/11/world/i lcnd-nobel.html
Jean Pickering, Understanding Doris Lessing (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1990) 3.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 7.
Martens as quoted in Yuan-Jung Cheng, Heralds Of The Postmodem: Madness and
Fiction in Conrad, Woolf and Lessing (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) 92.
8
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 14.
McHale defines the term as follows: "A true mise-en-abyme is determined by three
criteria: first, it is a nested or embedded representation, occupying a narrative level inferior
to that of the primary, diegetic narrative world; secondly, this nested representation
resembles ... something at the level of the primary, diegetic world; and thirdly, this
'something' that it resembles must constitute some salient and continuous aspect of
the primary world, salient and continuous enough that we are willing to say the nested
representation reproduces or duplicates the primary representation as a whole ... Mise-en-
abyme is one of the most potent devices in the postmodernist repertoire for foregrounding
the ontological dimension of recursive structures." (his italics). Brian McHale, Postmodemist
Fiction (Great Britain: Routledge, 1991) 124.
10
Lightfoot as quoted in Shadia Fahim, Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium ( New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1994) 80.
11
Jacques Derrida as quoted in Brian McHale, Postmodemist Fiction (Great Britain:
Routledge, 1991) 100.
12
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 448.
13
Brian McHale, Postmodemist Fiction (Great Britain: Routledge, 1991) 108.
14
Brian McHale, 106.
15
Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn eds., Making A Difference: Feminist Literary
Criticism (London: Routledge 1990) 113.
16
As is well known, Barthes suggests that the relationship between the author,
reader and narrator is primary, stating that, "... a text's unity lies not in its origin but in

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its destination" Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" in Image, Music, Text, ed. S.
Heath. (London: Fontana, 1977) 148. This idea is echoed in Lessing's preface where she
comments on, "how odd it is to have, as author, such a clear picture of a book, that is seen
so differently by its readers." She acknowledges that the importance of the reader's input
and interpretation is vital to ensure that a book is "alive and potent and fructifying." Doris
Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 22.
17 The Golden Notebook is a self-begetting novel. The final lines of the text are also the

opening lines. At the end of the novel, Saul "gives" Anna what become the first lines of
The Golden Notebook.
18 Gayle Greene, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change (University of Michigan Press,
1997) 106.
19 Yuan-Jung Cheng, Heralds Of The Postmodem: Madness and Fiction in Conrad, Woolf

and Lessing (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) 80. Danziger also suggests that, "[The Golden
Notebook's] explicit subject is the play of overlapping paradigms: both its form and content
are resolute attempts to come to terms with multiplicity and fragmentation" (Danziger
1996) 46.
20 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 497 and 345.
21 Lessing, 571-2. As Michael notes, "There is no essential Anna in The Golden

Notebook; instead the novel offers many versions of Anna on several narrative levels ..."
(Magali Cornier Michael, "Woolf's Between the Acts and Lessing's The Golden Notebook:
From Modern to Postmodern Subjectivity" in Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin eds., Woolf and
Lessing: Breaking the Mold (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) 47.
22 Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 554.

23 Lessing, 570.
24 Lessing, 560 and 568.

25 Lessing, 7.

26 Lessing, 600.
27 Marie Danziger, Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris

Lessing, and Philip Roth ( New York: Peter Lang, 1996) 47.
28 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 623.

29 Lessing, 455.

30 Betsy Draine, Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the

Novels of Doris Lessing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) 73.

31 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook ( Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 148.
32 Lessing, 301.
33 Lessing, 620.
' Marie Danziger, Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris
Lessing, and Philip Roth ( New York: Peter Lang, 1996) 63.
35 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 26.
36 Lessing, 461.
37 Lessing, 456.
38 This theme recurs repeatedly in The Golden Notebook. As Green notes, "When Anna

can accept that there is no reality apart from the mind that perceives it and the words that
shape it, she can accept that none of the versions [of herself as found in the notebooks]

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 Volume 34, November-December 2007

is true - or all are true, or truth itself is a fiction, invented rather than discovered. It is
this that gives her the power of renaming. New possibilities incur ontological instability,
and as Anna's role becomes more creative, we cannot always tell what is real and what
is created." (Gayle Greene, Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change (Ann Arbor, Michigan:
University of Michigan Press, 1997) 113.
39 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 299.
40
Lessing, 301.
41
Lessing, 462-63.
42
Yuan-Jung Cheng, Heralds Of The Postmodem: Madness and Fiction in Conrad, Woolf
and Lessing (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) 85.
43
Betsy Draine, Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the
Novels of Doris Lessing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983) 87.
" Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 636.
45
Lessing, 459.
46
Lessing, 571.
47
Lessing, 459.
48
Marguerite Alexander, Flights From Realism: Themes and Strategies in Postinodernist
British and American Fiction (Great Britain: Edward Arnold,1990) 85.
49 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (Great Britain: Panther Books, 1985) 13-14.
50
Lessing, 297-98.
51
Lessing, 298.
52
See Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodem (London: Routledge,
1989) 197-98.
53
According to Fahim, this dream image, and the themes in The Golden Notebook
generally, resonate with a distinctly Sufi understanding of the world. Sufism, a spiritual
and philosophic belief system that has clearly influenced Lessing, suggests that it is
necessary to look beyond the personal and material in order to become "complete." As
the Sufi, Idries Shah says, "the complete Man., is both a real individuality and also a part
of the essential unity" (Shah as quoted in Fahim 1994) 15. Fahim also comments that
in order to understand The Golden Notebook, "the reader should ... suspend the rational
mode in order to perceive the underlying balance within the emerging mystical dimension
which does not pertain to the laws of time and space. The ultimate effect does not aim at
an experience of absolute aesthetic freedom from tangible reality [rather, the aim is] the
transcendence of the one dimensional mode of experiencing reality." Shadia Fahim, Doris
Lessing and Suui Equilibrium (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994) 84.

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