Where did this article come from? Dan On Sun, Aug 23, 2020, 12:46 PM Louis Proyect <[email protected]> wrote:
> ESSAY > Doris Lessing’s ‘Golden Notebook’ and Our Era of Unrest > [image: Doris Lessing in 1994.] > Doris Lessing in 1994.Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times > > By Karan Mahajan > > - NY Times, Published Aug. 15, 2020Updated Aug. 22, 2020 > - > - > > <https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F08%2F15%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fdoris-lessing-golden-notebook.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&name=Doris%20Lessing%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%98Golden%20Notebook%E2%80%99%20and%20Our%20Era%20of%20Unrest&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F> > - > > <https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F08%2F15%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fdoris-lessing-golden-notebook.html%3Fsmid%3Dtw-share&text=Doris%20Lessing%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%98Golden%20Notebook%E2%80%99%20and%20Our%20Era%20of%20Unrest> > - > > <?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20Doris%20Lessing%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%98Golden%20Notebook%E2%80%99%20and%20Our%20Era%20of%20Unrest&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0ADoris%20Lessing%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%98Golden%20Notebook%E2%80%99%20and%20Our%20Era%20of%20Unrest%0A%0ALessing%E2%80%99s%201962%20novel%20is%20far%20from%20a%20manifesto.%20But%20in%20its%20embrace%20of%20chaos%20and%20split%20identities%2C%20it%20captures%20the%20mood%20of%20both%20its%20time%20and%20ours.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F08%2F15%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fdoris-lessing-golden-notebook.html%3Fsmid%3Dem-share> > - > - > > When Doris Lessing, the British-Zimbabwean novelist who died in 2013 > <https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/books/doris-lessing-novelist-who-won-2007-nobel-is-dead-at-94.html?_r=0>, > sat down to write “The Golden Notebook” in the 1950s, she was responding to > a feeling of defeat in leftist circles, one similar to the whiplash > experienced by liberals after the election of President Trump. The marquee > intellectual philosophy of the young 20th century — communism — was sagging > from the revelation that “Father Stalin” had overseen the death of > millions; communist stalwarts in the West, like Lessing, felt they’d had > the carpet pulled out from under them. They became intellectually homeless. > Meanwhile, Senator Joseph McCarthy was raving like a proto-Trump at > left-leaning Americans. What had this generation’s progressive causes > amounted to? > > Then there were more personal crises. In the 1950s, from the tumult of > wartime emerged a new type of woman whom Lessing, in “The Golden Notebook,” > terms a “free woman”: Such a woman could work, raise children on her own, > date around. Yet just as members of today’s Tinder generation can be > flummoxed by a surfeit of options, she often felt depressed by the new > freedom, and worried whether her emotions were “still fitted for a kind of > society that no longer exists.” > > Lessing herself was one of these women. She had married twice in Southern > Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) — where she was an activist against racial > segregation — and had come to London, where she published the best-selling > novel “The Grass Is Singing” and embarked on a series of love affairs. Her > third novel, “The Golden Notebook,” was her most heroic reckoning with a > “kind of experience women haven’t had before.” Published in 1962, the book > was labeled a feminist classic, though like all labels this one has the > effect of reducing it. > > The book is far from a manifesto. It charts a smart, sensitive woman’s > exhaustion with modern gender dynamics, “the men vs. women business.” It is > also, to my mind, the novel that best captures the mood of our own era of > political unrest. > > ADVERTISEMENT > Continue reading the main story > <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/books/review/doris-lessing-golden-notebook.html#after-story-ad-1> > > Bombarded on all sides by news and newness, we, too, feel exhausted and > don’t know how to respond. Anna, the protagonist, is, like Lessing, a > novelist from Africa. At the start, she is living with her 10-year-old > daughter in a flat in the “wastes of London’s student-land” and is blocked, > unable or unwilling to write for the public after a very successful first > novel set in Africa. “At the moment I sit down to write,” she admits, > “someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me. … It > could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro’s guerrilla fighters. Or an > Algerian fighting in the F.L.N.” Her plight is more than just a form of > white liberal guilt or piety. Anna is hopelessly split among identities: > exile, communist, novelist, mother, lover. How to put all these strands > into one book without delicately pickling each in its own predictable > social novel? > > As a writer torn between countries and careers, I have often struggled > with such questions, and I have seen few more brilliant solutions to the > problem than the daring form of “The Golden Notebook.” While the novel is > framed by a conventional and delicious third-person story of Anna and her > best friend chatting about their lives, it is broken by Joycean interludes > of frightening honesty, the so-called notebooks in which Anna pours out her > guts. > > - Give the gift they'll open every day. > > Subscriptions to The Times. Starting at $25. > <https://www.nytimes.com/subscription/gift?campaignId=9JW8F> > > Each notebook is given a color, corresponding to its theme. In the black > notebook, Anna tracks her memories of being a young and unseeing privileged > white activist in racist Rhodesia during World War II; in the red, her > experiences as a reluctant and then disillusioned member of the British > Communist Party. In the yellow, we find fragments of a novel based on her > love life; in the blue, a record of daily events. In each she pitilessly > examines her fear of speaking the truth about her condition. “People stay > sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves,” Lessing writes, adding > elsewhere: “I see that people everywhere are trying not to feel. Cool, > cool, cool, that’s the word.” > > Anna quits years of therapy, recognizing it is an evasive way of “rescuing > the formless into form.” Thinking back to her successful first novel, Anna > wonders: “Why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of > shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fueled it. > … Why a story at all — not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it > debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth?” > > What she wants to do is quit simplifying and pruning, and inhabit the > chaos of life — the breakups, the contradictions, the depressions, the > sexual enchantments. At one point she realizes that her “life has always > been crude, unfinished, raw, tentative … the raw unfinished quality in my > life was precisely what was valuable in it.” She adds that “sometimes I > meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across, they’re > split, means they are keeping themselves open for something.” She dreams of > generating “a new kind of strength” out of chaos, of wearing words like > “insecure” and “unrooted” as a sort of badge. (How different this is from > our current generation of nationalists, whose desperation for roots drives > them back to imagined Edens.) At the end of the novel she abandons all > divisions and sweeps everything into a single “golden notebook.” > Editors’ Picks > Sabudana Khichdi Is Your New Favorite Comfort Food > <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/magazine/sabudana-khichdi-is-your-new-favorite-comfort-food.html?action=click&algo=bandit-story_desk_filter&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=418203290&impression_id=fd85f550-e55f-11ea-8b44-17e6c3695a87&index=0&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=154517895&surface=home-featured&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending> > Sorry, the World’s Biggest Bike Maker Can’t Help You Buy a Bike Right Now > <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/business/giant-bikes-coronavirus-shortage.html?action=click&algo=bandit-story_desk_filter&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=14638328&impression_id=fd85f551-e55f-11ea-8b44-17e6c3695a87&index=1&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=154517895&surface=home-featured&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending> > My Colleagues Have Great Work-Life Balance (Thanks to Childless Me) > <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/business/should-i-quit-my-job.html?action=click&algo=bandit-story_desk_filter&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=861765658&impression_id=fd85f552-e55f-11ea-8b44-17e6c3695a87&index=2&pgtype=Article®ion=ccolumn&req_id=154517895&surface=home-featured&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending> > Continue reading the main story > <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/books/review/doris-lessing-golden-notebook.html?action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick> > > ADVERTISEMENT > Continue reading the main story > <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/books/review/doris-lessing-golden-notebook.html#after-story-ad-2> > > This sounds fine in theory, but what does chaos look like in a novel? As > it turns out, a lot like the fierce, fast, minutely attuned > autobiographical writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard — whom Lessing predates by > 50 years. The form of the notebooks allows Lessing to pour out the contents > of her brilliant mind in lyrical cascades of prose: the varying moods of a > love affair with an ex-communist bipolar American; discussions with racist > and foolish film scouts who want to adapt Anna’s African novel to an > English setting, wiping clean its political content; the cancel culture of > the British Communist Party; what it feels like to wash off your menstrual > blood in the toilet while at a party office. > > The novel doesn’t progress so much as thicken, like molasses. Unlike her > male postcolonial contemporaries and fellow Nobel laureates V. S. Naipaul > or J. M. Coetzee, Lessing — like Anna — is unafraid to dirty her hands in > the quest for truth. She might write with an acid touch but she doesn’t > keep an Olympian distance from new causes or passionate affairs. Imagine if > a woman who had engaged in every Twitter battle, canvassed for Obama, > joined Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and thrown her lot behind Senator > Bernie Sanders before falling out with the sexist Bernie bros were now > writing a book about the experience of being pulled in a thousand different > directions. > > Yet, while often blistering in its depiction of political groups, the > novel seeks to transcend what Anna calls her own “critical, balancing > little brain.” In the yellow notebook’s novel-within-a-novel, a married > psychiatrist explains the meaning of his life to his lover: “You and I are > the boulder-pushers,” he says. “We spend our lives fighting to get people > very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great > men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock > a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known > for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord > and of the police is a slave. … But do the great enlightened mass of the > British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell > them.” > > This is bleak, but not hopeless. It is as moving and cleareyed a defense > of activism as I have read. It is also, perhaps, an author’s > self-deprecating observation about her own novel, which she might have felt > was a boulder she was pushing up a mountain of untruth. But it isn’t a > boulder. It is a comet from the 1960s. > > Karan Mahajan is the author of the novels “Family Planning” and “The > Association of Small Bombs,” a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award. > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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