Doris Lessing, one of the most important post-war writers in English, was born in Persia (present-day Iran) in 1919. In her writing, she explores a wide range of issues concerning race, politics, gender and the role of individual in society. With the publication of her novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing became firmly identified with women’s position in the 20 th C.
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Anna Wulf, the main character of the novel, faces a personal and artistic crisis, seeing her life shattered and divided into various roles. That is, she is separately a woman, a lover, a writer, and a political activist. Anna eventually suffers a mental breakdown and it is only through this disintegration that she is able to discover a new ‘wholeness’ which she writes about in the final notebook.
The writerly dimension of Lessing’s fiction puts her in a complex relation to Realism, for she is simultaneously one of the great realist writers of the 20 th C and a writer who chafes against the assumptions of Realism. Yet, The Golden Notebook unmasks the conventions of Realism, challenging the assumption that literary and linguistic forms are “innocent” reflections of reality and this tension between the form and its deconstruction is part of the novel’s fascination.
Realism is a literary movement that began in France in the 19 th C. During the last part of the century, Realism was a definite trend in European literature. Fundamentally, in literature, Realism is the representation of life with fidelity. On the whole, one tends to think of realism in terms of the everyday life, the normal and the pragmatic. It is, thus, not concerned with idealization, the supranormal and the transcendental. It is in strong opposition to unrealistic, fantastic and improbable works. In addition, Realism rejects Classicism and Romanticism since a realist artist is concerned with the “here and now”, with everyday events and with his own environment including the movements of his time such as political, social, etc.
Naturalism, in literature, is an approach that copy nature, and reveals to us the literature of truth. It is said that the invention of photography in 1839 and the concepts of precision, scene, fact and episode had a great effect on the way people looked at the world and existence in general. In addition, the realist novelist paid particular attention to exact documentation, and to getting the facts correctly. Later, Realism was considered to give too much emphasis on external reality. As a result, many turned to a psychological realism that examined the complex workings of the mind and the analysis of thought and feeling. The use of the stream of consciousness method is fundamental in psychological realism.
It is believed that Realism is an art that can be compared with life. However, from The Golden Notebook emerges the notion that Realism has not a so deeply relation to nature. It is, as a result, a convention like any other. Lessing´s novel´s dilemma is that the scene it tries to capture has already been harboured in our minds by television programs and newspaper photographs. The book relates to images that journalist and reporters have often delivered. As a result, words are not the most noteworthy form to project images of disorder and chaos.In The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing adopted a new style of narrative form abandoning the realist form used in her previous works.
Critic´s interest in The Golden Notebook relies on the way this work questions the assumptions of Realism that Doris Lessing has always proclaimed, perform and deny. For instance, in early productions such as The Grass is singing, Children of Violence, and A Proper Marriage, among others, Lessing displayed a traditional realism. On the other hand, The Golden Notebook is one of the first novels of the seventies, in England, to have incorporated to the narrative speech the problematic nature of the contemporary novel. The structure of the novel reflects the fragmentation of the industrialized modern societies. Anna Wulf, the main character of the novel, divides her experience into the short story “Free Women” and four books:
“The Black Notebook” covers the part of Anna´s life related to Africa;
“The Red Notebook” contains her experience as being part the Communist Party;
“The Yellow Notebook” shows Anna´s own experience as a writer in the creation of the novel;
And finally the “Blue Notebook” which is Anna’s personal diary.
Since the publication of The Grass is singing in 1950, the themes of Doris Lessing´s works have been related to four essential points:
The racial issue within an English colony in Africa (Zimbabwe).
Feminism.
And mental imbalance.
In The Golden Notebook, she introduces a topic that has been predominant throughout the production of the author: The Nuclear Warning. In her “Blue Notebook”, Anna Wulf, gathers press cuttings with news about nuclear weapons and about other warlike and military topics.
From a formal and thematic standpoint, the central matter lies in the connection between the different experiences and the literary presentation of the complex and contemporaneous reality. In The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf, is incapable of writing another novel after the success of Frontiers of War because she has not found the narrative form that expresses the reality. In this way, her diary is a reflection of her chaotic experience.
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In The Golden Notebook different narrative resources become assimilated without abandoning the mimetic realism. These narrative resources are the parody, pastiche, the diary, the essay and the tale within the tale. In The Golden Notebook there is a parody on the realist obsession for the detail. Thus, Anna Wulf makes a meticulous recount of her everyday activities in her diary.
The postmodern novel presents the difficulty of writing about contemporary life according to the rules of Realism. When a writer wants to reflect some visions pertaining to the end of the world in the last decades of the 20th C, the realist method results inadequate.
The fragmentation of the novel’s narrative form not only reflects Anna’s inability to integrate her identity, but also the unattainable task to write a realist novel within a divided world. As regards this fragmentation, Doris Lessing considers that:
“…everything is cracking up…It had been falling apart since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima… I feel as if the Bomb was gone off inside myself, and the people around me. That´s what I mean by the cracking up. It´s as if the structure of the mind is being from inside. Some terrible thing is a happening…”
(Lessing, 1977:56)
By the mid 20 th C, Realism was deeply altered because realist fiction marks a seizure between the individual and the society. In the 1960s, British society was not homogenous any more due to the immigration and the consciousness arising that was generated by the Women’s Liberation. Although Doris Lessing’s intention was not to write a feminist novel, she seems to have been moved by the Women’s Liberation quest for a more equal society where women do not feel marginalized or treated as second-class citizens. Lessing does not share the Marxist’s idea that society is made up by two groups determined by economic status namely the exploiting class and the working class. On the contrary, she believes that society is far more complex having multicultural dimensions including too different groups: men and women. By means of Anna’s four notebooks in which she divides her experiences, Lessing represents the chaotic and fragmented reality which is comprised in the different societies within The Society. Thus, integration is only possible by disintegrating the narrative form. According to Gayle Greene; Lessing shows how both male and female behavior are clipping adjustments in a destructive society.
By the use of metafiction, Lessing enables Anna to increase the degree of self-consciousness by the revision of her own experience. Thus, instead of Lessing narrating upon her protagonist’s experiences, the fictional writer Anna Wulf, narrates and examines her experiences directly. The narrator of a metafictional work calls his or her attention to the writing process itself. Explicit use of metafictional technique stems from the modernist questioning of “consciousness” and “reality”. According to Patricia Waugh, metafiction can be defined as fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
All in all, Realism is a literary movement that depicted objects and subjects as they appear in everyday life. However, Realism portrayed the reality of those in power, usually man, white and privileged. On the other hand, the reality of those without power such as women, people of color and people of lower economic means was often marginalized and ignored. In The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing expresses her dissatisfaction with the “conventional novel” and she expresses this dissatisfaction by making her protagonist a novelist who is similarly dissatisfied. Being centered on a “female experience”, the novel is based on the experience of both the novelistic form and the crisis of the 20th C society. In addition, we can conclude that The Golden Notebook is a feminist novel since it chronicles the psychological journeys taken by women who come to a gradual understanding of the way in which gender prescribes their lives.
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