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Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 3

Nuclear Cassandra:Prophecy in Doris Lessing’sThe Golden Notebook

S ARAH HENSTRA

If you feel certain that society is heading for nuclear war, as

Doris Lessing felt in the 1960s, what are you supposed to do with that knowledge? How do you act ethically and responsiblyin the face of such a depressing conviction about the future?Or, more radically: to what action might the depression itselfcall you? Pursuing the social and discursive implications of fore-knowledge leads eventually to the question of prophecy—to therole and responsibility of the prophet. Lessing explores precisely

this question in The Golden Notebook (1962), a multi-layered,multi-voiced novel in which the lament for a threatened future

weaves its way through character, plot, dialogue, and narrativestructure. Reading this novel as an inquiry into prophecy andits consequences unearths some of the interactions between themany thematic preoccupations of The Golden Notebook and thesocio-political crisis with which it was attempting—in many waysunsuccessfully, Lessing felt—to engage. The author was frustratedby the precedence “the sex war” took over political and socialissues in reviews of the novel. That she considered the immi-nence of world-wide nuclear destruction more important thanother themes is evidenced by her impatience with the “sexualrevolution” in the 1960s: “I say we should all go to bed, shut upabout sexual liberation, and go on with important matters. Wemust prevent another major war. We’re already in a time of total

chaos, but we’re so corrupted that we can’t see it” (Raskin 175). What society cannot see is exactly what the prophet-narrator in


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4 PLL Sarah Henstra

Christa Wolf’s novelCassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1983),

although written twenty years later, originally in German, and

from the other side of the Cold War divide, serves here as apowerful intertext for my reading of The Golden Notebook, insofar

as Wolf’s novelization of the fall of Troy is also inflected with

its author’s sense of impending nuclear disaster.1 Wolf explains

why she finds the prophet(ess)’s role particularly relevant in

the nuclear age: “I try to trace the roots of the contradictions

in which our civilization is now entrapped. This is what I was

doing in the Cassandra book. That work is very much a product

of its time [1984]” ( Fourth Dimension 128). Wolf’s comments in

the essays that accompany the novel in Cassandra, along with

her ideas in Accident: The Events of a Day (written in 1986, in re-

sponse to the Chernobyl reactor meltdown) shed further light

on what foreknowledge does to a narrator and her story—and

to an author and her readership.

Prophecy, as I shall define it here, is both a narrative posi-

tion and a narrative problem, arising in response to the needto reconcile the demands of emotion and action, of knowledge

and living with that knowledge. Prophecy is perhaps one of the

most courageous responses to the extreme feelings of loss and

helplessness that arise under a culture of nuclearism—a culture

like Britain as well as the USA during the second half of the

twentieth century, in which the official discourses of defense,

deterrence, and “collateral damage” had begun to inflict their

own violence. Put simply, the kinds of losses suffered under

nuclearism cannot be properly mourned, commemorated, or

“worked through” in Western cultures because the detonation,

though perceived as inevitable, has not yet taken place. Instead,

the dread of nuclear destruction generates a kind of collective

1 An ongoing theme in Wolf’s lectures and writing is the link between the “alienation”

of objects (like Cassandra herself) in Western art and the ultimate alienation ofnuclear annihilation. It is the main theme of her 1981 Büchner Prize acceptance

speech (“Shall I Garnish a Metaphor.” Trans. Henry Schmidt. New German Critique


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melancholia: it produces proleptic mourning, a future-orientedgrief in abeyance or on hold.2 Julia Kristeva describes melan-

cholia as “impossible mourning” in order to emphasize how thedepressed person’s sorrow is not sanctioned by or received intothe symbolic economy of language (9). Words, for one facingunmournable loss, thus become devitalized and weak, on the onehand—unable to contain or express the extremes of desire—and,on the other hand, monstrously virulent in their powers of trivi-alization, exclusion, and denial. “The speech of the depressed,”says Kristeva, “is to them like an alien skin; melancholy personsare foreigners in their maternal tongue” (53).

Prophecy, then, struggles for a way of using language withoutallowing it to erase, dissimulate, or soften impending loss. Inthis endeavor it becomes extremely sensitive to the performa-tive uses of language—those that do things with words ratherthan merely say things, that enact a reality (for good or bad)rather than merely describe it. The burden of prophecy is

similar to what Derrida describes as the responsibility of liter-ary scholars under nuclearism: “We have to re-think the rela-tions between knowing and acting, between constative speechacts and performative speech acts, between the invention thatfinds what was already there and the one that produces newmechanisms or new spaces” (23). Motivated by her awarenessof history as itself performative, Wolf notes that it is a “senseof alarm at finding that reality is not a creation external to us,but a process which we are subject to and yet which we at thesame time bring about ourselves, which really prompts me to

write” ( Fourth Dimension 131). Finding a way to talk about whatthey know is coming, to speak publicly from a melancholic

2Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” approaches the problemof serious depression, or melancholia, by comparing it to mourning gone awry, a

complication in the normal course of working through the loss of an object of emo-tional and libidinal attachment (244). Melancholic subjects refuse, or are unable, torelinquish the lost one sometimes they may not even be consciously aware of what


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conviction that would rather enforce silence and withdrawal,is the challenge facing the prophet-narrators of both Wolf’s

and Lessing’s novels.3

The Golden Notebook ’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a blocked

writer who parses her experience into a series of notebooks in anattempt to impose order on what she perceives as mushroominginternal and societal chaos. The black notebook describes theevents in Africa that served as material for the very successfulnovel she did write; the yellow notebook is a draft of another

work entitled The Shadow of the Third ; the blue notebook recordspsychological and emotional aspects of Anna’s life; the rednotebook pertains to Anna’s (estranged) relationship with theCommunist Party. But this organizational strategy backfires:

Anna becomes more and more fragmented, until she suffers acomplete breakdown and the contents of the notebooks bleedinto one another. The golden notebook, as the product of thisthematic and structural fusion, is correspondingly impressionis-

tic, fluid, and disorienting. The novel suggests both the dangerof fragmenting life into categories and the need to acquiesce toa level of fragmentation and chaos, particularly as regards the

3It is important to note that these prophet-narrators are women and their perspec-tives decidedly, crucially feminist. The “roots” of society Wolf is hoping to unearthare patriarchal, and the terrifying social trajectory against which both authors are

writing can be seen as the product of a materialistic male ethos that systematicallyobjectifies human life in general and female life in particular. Femininity as a positiveforce of protest has been the focus of dozens of critical readings of these texts: seeas examples Heidi Gilpin’s “Cassandra : Creating a Female Voice” (Responses to ChristaWolf: Critical Essays. Ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989. 349-66), W. E. McDonald’s “Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra—Or Cassandra’s Wolf?: MaleTradition and Women’s Knowledge in Cassandra ” ( Journal of Narrative Technique 20.3[1990]: 267-83), and Linda Schelbitzki Pickle’s “‘Scratching Away the Male Tradition’:Christa Wolf’s Kassandra ” (Contemporary Literature 27.1 [1986]: 32-47) on Cassandra, and Elizabeth Abel’s “The Golden Notebook : ‘Female Writing’ and ‘The Great Tradition’“

(Critical Essays on Doris Lessing. Ed. Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger. Boston: G. K.Hall & Co., 1986. 101-07) and Sharon Spencer’s “‘Femininity’ and the Woman Writer:Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and the Diary of Anais Nin” (Women’s Studies: An


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humanist myth of “self” in an age when de-centered subjectivityis the norm.4

But Anna’s writer’s block is a symptom of more than too rigida view of herself as author. The reasons she is unable, and refuses,to write another novel are so complicated and deep-seated thattheir articulation requires all 640 pages of the novel and eventhen does not “cure” her of the problem. The reason most im-mediately apparent to the reader is Anna’s fear of what she per-ceives as increasingly imminent, large-scale doom. She tells herpsychoanalyst, Mrs. Marks, “It seems to me that ever since I canremember anything the real thing that has been happening inthe world was death and destruction. It seems to me it is strongerthan life” (237). Anna’s persona in the yellow notebook, Ella, ishaunted by “a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive forcethat worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in warand cruelty and violence” (195). “On the surface everything’sfine,” she explains, “all quiet and tame and suburban. But un-

derneath it’s poisonous” (196). The novel broaches again andagain this theme of surface normality versus underlying, increas-ing torment, and Anna’s comment about the role of art in thissituation also tells us something about the project of The GoldenNotebook itself: “Art from the West becomes more and more ashriek of torment recording pain. Pain is becoming our deep-est reality” (344). This “deepest reality” stifles Anna’s creativityand spurs her breakdown not because she cannot handle whatshe feels is the truth, but because the society around her seemsschizophrenically glib about the threat. She creates a personal

4Subjectivity is the most common focus in recent commentary onThe Golden Notebook, replacing the emphasis on the “sex war” that interested feminist readers of the decadesfollowing its first publication. Magali Michael, for example, argues that Lessing haspicked up on “the postwar nihilism that has created a rift in Being and necessitated

a reconceptualization of the subject as decentered and dispersed” (48). What isconspicuously lacking from all discussion of the novel, and what I am investigatinghere is what Lessing makes of this “nihilism” what is the historical moment(s) from


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gallery of horrors from news clippings that exemplify how theconcept of atomic war is becoming mundane, even popular, as

in the case of a hairdresser’s 1950 description of what he callshis “H-Bomb Style”: “the ‘H’ is for peroxide of hydrogen, usedfor coloring. The hair is dressed to rise in waves as from a bomb-burst, at the nape of the neck” (241). To Anna this self-delusionis horrifying and perverse, more reason for her to take literallyEinstein’s warning: “There emerges, more and more distinctly,the spectre of general annihilation” (245).

Anna’s inability to write also stems from her belief that con-temporary experience defies the models of comprehension thatliterature is capable of offering. She resists Mrs. Marks’s attemptsto contextualize her fears with reference to Jungian paradigms,protesting, “I believe I’m living the kind of life women neverlived before” (458). She insists, “I don’t want to be told when I

wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because ofthe H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-

bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world” (459).This conviction compels her to reject conventions of storytellingthat, by simply talking about nuclear war, would automaticallydomesticate it. Even Anna’s once-removed fictional endeavors,the stories Ella sketches out in the yellow notebook, run aground:“Now, looking for the outlines of a story and finding, again andagain, nothing but patterns of defeat, death, irony, she deliber-ately refuses them. She tries to force patterns of happiness orsimple life. But she fails” (454).

The inability of novelistic conventions to deal with nucleardread is symptomatic of a larger, ideological failure in society.

Anna is ashamed of how hackneyed and impotent the Com-munist Party’s precepts sound in the face of the nuclearism’santi-human realities. In the essays that accompany the novelCassandra, Christa Wolf also articulates the vertigo felt when old

models can no longer give meaning:Now you no longer need to be “Cassandra”; most people are beginning to see


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and loss of meaning, makes them afraid. We cannot hope that the used-up

institutions, to which many were accustomed, will supply a new direction.

Run a zigzag course. But there is no escape route in sight. You feel you are

standing at bay. (Cassandra 239)

With the passing of old institutions goes the discursive tools they

lent us; part of “standing at bay” involves the lapse of language

that nuclearism effects. Wolf expresses the frustration of work-

ing without the right words:

The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is un-

sayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go

on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe

what we see. We cannot express what we already believe. (Cassandra 226)

The prophet’s dilemma: what she knows exceeds what she can

say, to the extent that—in Anna’s melancholic opinion—noth-

ing is worth saying at all.

The irony arising from the fact that this struggle with lan-

guage takes place within literary discourse and is articulated by a

fictional character raises the question of whose crisis of prophecy we are actually bearing witness to in these texts. Does the nuclear

dread Lessing and Wolf describe properly belong to the narra-

tor, the author, or a hybrid of the two, a kind of writer-persona

who enacts the debate in the fictional context? It is extremely

difficult to discuss Anna’s melancholic foreknowledge without

simultaneously suggesting that, as an author, Doris Lessing is

working through questions of how to write meaningfully in thenuclear age. Even more explicitly, Christa Wolf’s Cassandra may

be a fictional character, but the authorial “voice” narrating the

essays accompanying the novel, and the writerly persona of Ac-

cident, are deliberately close to the public “voice” of Wolf herself.

So, while the prophet-narrator’s navigation of the writer’s role

in a culture desensitized to its own doom is not synonymous

with the author’s, these texts provide a meta-fictional forum for

exploring the creative and ethical limits of authorial power.One such limit arises in relation to the depiction of time in


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10 PLL Sarah Henstra

see clearly, the extremes of nuclearism affects day-to-day exis-tence in The Golden Notebook as much as it curtails the future.

The experience of present time in Lessing’s novel is reducedto an experience of fragmentation. In the story’s second line

Anna tells her friend Molly, “The point is [. . .] that as far as Ican see, everything’s cracking up” (25). By “everything” Annameans both society and the individual, though the emphasisshifts from the disintegration of social institutions to the frag-mentation of Anna’s own consciousness as the novel progresses.In an interview Lessing is explicit about the connection betweenthe internal, psychological fragmentation she portrays in herfiction and the breakdown of social stability under the nuclearthreat: “I feel as if the Bomb has gone off inside myself, and inpeople around me. That’s what I mean by the cracking up. It’sas if the structure of the mind is being battered from inside”(Raskin 171).

Mocking the categories into which life has been compart-

mentalized stresses the futility of the attempt to impose orderthrough language alone: “Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good.Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love. . . ”(63, ellipsesLessing’s). For Anna, to write would be to cater to the fragmen-tation, since the contemporary novel offers nothing more than“reportage”:

The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented

consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and moredivided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reachout desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groupsinside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is ablind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a meanstowards it. (79, Lessing’s emphasis)

Anna claims she is incapable of writing the only novel that inter-ests her, “a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion

strong enough to create order,” because she is “too diffused”(80). She relates this psychological diffusion to “alienation. Be-


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stands for the whole person, the whole individual” (354). Whileit is her dread about the future that exacerbates Anna’s sense

of internal division, witnessing events and writing about theminherently require some degree of “being split” insofar as the selfbecomes an object of narrative as well as a narrating subject. So

Anna suffers under both the writer’s dilemma and the prophet’s:seeing clearly what others are blind to creates a schism betweenthe knowledge and carrying on “as usual.” This is the same innersplitting against which Cassandra chafes when, in Wolf’s novel,she comments that her role as witness has “already brought abouta renewal of my old, forgotten malady: inner division, so that I

watch myself, see myself sitting in this accursed Greek chariottrembling with fear beneath my shawl. Will I split myself in twountil the end before the ax splits me, for the sake of conscious-ness?” (22). As an approach to cultural (and narrative) crisis,prophecy values consciousness above comfort and thus makesfor a fragmented, uneasy perspective.

Writing becomes a morally compromising activity for theprophet-narrator in both Lessing’s and Wolf’s novels. She isforced to examine her own contributions to the destructiveforces she fears, to relinquish the mantle of innocence or im-partiality traditionally worn by the “messenger.” Anna doesn’t

want to record her “feeling of disgust, of futility” because, shesays, “Perhaps I don’t like spreading those emotions” (58). Inter-rupting the “nuclear forgetting” that cushions us from collectivedespair carries a certain weight of guilt that makes the prophethesitate. As Wolf reminds us,

[Normal people] want to be presented with something that makes themhappy [. . .] but nothing which affects them too much, and that is the normalbehavior we have been taught, so that it would be unjust to reproach them forthis behavior merely because it contributes to our deaths. (Accident 101)

Wolf’s impatience with normalcy in the face of planetary suicide

doesn’t negate her doubt about the justice of trying to shakeit up Similarly Anna tells Mrs Marks that “what they [people]


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can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t standformlessness” (461).

But the prophet’s guilt derives from more than a reluctanceto spread dismal views. Anna’s deepest discomfort with herprofession stems from what she calls the “lying nostalgia” sheperceives in her previous novel, and in novels everywhere: a

writerly perspective that seems inherently to elicit and cultivatedestruction for its narrative juiciness.5 Frontiers of War seems “im-moral” to Anna now because “[t]he emotion it came out of wassomething frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitementof wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for license, for freedom,for the jungle, for formlessness. [. . .] Not one of the reviewerssaw it” (82). The fact that this destructive urge seems to Annainseparable from creativity adds to her immobilizing guilt:

And it is extraordinary how, as the nostalgia deepens, the excitement, “stories”begin to form, to breed like cells under a microscope. And yet it is so power-ful, that nostalgia, that I can only write a few sentences at a time. Nothing

is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everythingoverboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emo-tion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue [. . .]. That is why I amashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime. (82)

Wolf links the creative work of storytelling with the drive todestruction in a similar way. Trying to fathom what motivatesthe nuclear scientists responsible for the Bomb, she describes anihilistic excitement that at first sounds totally foreign to her:

I know of no defense against people who are secretly addicted to death. Therats. Once again the image of those rats which had been trained to stimulatetheir centers of desire by pressing a button. They love that button. Press,press, press. At the risk of starving, perishing of thirst, becoming extinct.(Accident 65)

5Betsy Draine defines Lessing’s use of “nostalgia” as a “moral sleep”: a “yearning for the

recovery of the stage illusion of moral certainty, innocence, unity, and peace,” whichin effect is “a desire for unreality and nonexistence” (33). Using the philosophicalexistentialism of Camus and Sartre leads Draine to oppose this nostalgia to a life of


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But Wolf graduates quickly from the animal analogy to the re-alization that as a writer, she shares the scientists’ reluctance to

stop their work and consider its impact:I should rather think of myself. Whether I would be able to stop [writing] words [that] could wound, even destroy, like projectiles [. . .]. [W]as [I] always able to judge—always willing to judge—when my words would wound,perhaps destroy? At what level of destruction I would back down? No longersay what I could? Opt for silence? (48)

Like Anna, Christa Wolf”s writer-persona in Accident confronts

the aspects of her own profession that prove disrespectful of lifeand too interested in crisis or destruction. The text crescendosinto a rambling (one sentence over two pages), aching lamentabout the virulence of words and a contemplation of silence asthe desperate final option for the writer horrified by the eventsaround her and swallowed by her own guilt. Wolf describesthe “cordon of word nausea” choking her (98), the dismay atknowing she betrays others through the “circle of destruction

surrounding a writer” (99). For this, she concludes, “I know ofno other remedy but silence, which transfers the ill from with-out to within, which means less consideration for oneself thanfor others, in other words, self-betrayal again” (99). Caughtbetween the need to articulate her dread about nuclear conflictand the fear of inciting further conflict with her work, Wolf isthreatened here with a lapse into melancholic silence—as she

describes it, “silent (not quiet: silent, without a sound)” (99).The affective risks of prophecy can be summarized most con-cretely by Wolf’s explanation for her reluctance to write aboutnuclear annihilation:

A deep-rooted dread prohibits me from “bringing on” the misfortune byimagining it too intensively, too exactly. By the way: Cassandra’s “guilt” isprecisely this, that she first brought about the doom with her prophecies. Forthis she feels she is justly “punished,” that is, forced to suffer the misfortune

of her countrymen in an intensified form. (Cassandra 254)


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The line between constative and performative discourse is un-clear in prophecy and the damage caused by speaking of disaster

threatens to overpower any positive results of forewarning.6

Toward the end of The Golden Notebook, when Anna is givingin to madness (or at least suffering an emotional breakdown)during her affair with Saul, her nightmarish “vision [of] thepower of destruction” also reveals her own contribution to thatpower. Not only has she indulged, and therefore spread, herlonging for dissolution in her past writing, but her very dreadof destruction augments the destructive forces in the world:“[T]he great armouries of the world have their inner force,and [. . .] my terror, the real nerve-terror of the nightmare,

was part of the force. And I knew that the cruelty and the spiteand the I, I, I, I, of Saul and Anna were part of the logic of war”(568). This revelation, and indeed this Book of Revelations-style recording in the novel’s latter sections, take The GoldenNotebook beyond other texts about cultural heedlessness and

individual conscience. In the last entries of the individual note-books, and in the golden notebook itself, Anna experiencesa fusion of all the conflicting parts of her life. This fusion, asLessing writes it, is non-linear, fragmented, and repetitive; itresembles very closely the “plaint” of a melancholic patient inpsychoanalysis. This section revisits and revises events that havetaken place throughout the novel—this time highlighting theirfictitiousness, their manipulation in memory by Anna’s desiresand regrets. The golden notebook is an excellent example of

6 John Guthrie calls Cassandra’s nearness to death a “terminal situation” that makesher narrative a “work of mourning” as she looks back over the events of her life (180).For Guthrie, however, this “pessimistic strand” is balanced by an optimistic one: ac-cepting her own destruction enables Cassandra to forge an autonomous subjectivityfor herself in the telling of her own story (184). I am reading Cassandra’s openingdeclaration, “With this story I go to my death” (in my translation: “Keeping step with

the story, I make my way into death” [3]), somewhat in reverse of Guthrie: he showsthat the certainty of death enables the story; I suggest that telling the story contributesto and hastens death Either a m reading conc rs ith G thrie’s statement that


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performative narration, in that it re-cites the “facts” in orderto highlight how the recitation itself effectively creates and

re-creates these facts. It dramatizes the violence involved inthe writer’s project on two major levels.7 First, its insistence on

Anna as “projectionist” who simultaneously directs and selectsevents as they flick past her on the screen of her dream/memorydissects the mechanisms by which life is subdued into fictional“material.”8 The violence of these mechanisms, we see here,mirrors the violence whereby human lives are turned into“damage collateral” and “overkill factors” in nuclear parlance.Here we move beyond Anna’s guilt about having profited from

war through her best-selling novel to an understanding of the way in which all Anna’s writing, all Lessing’s writing, all writ-ing exacts some expense from its narrative objects. Second, anacting-out of the writer’s “license” occurs on a metanarrativelevel too, in that the golden notebook interrupts and abrogates

what is previously established in the novel. It disorients read-

ers who might have only just succeeded in “getting straight”all the plots and characters of the various notebooks. Like a

7To describe the The Golden Notebook as violent is to concur with other critics who focuson conflict and violation in the novel. Marie Danziger, for example, investigates whatshe calls the book’s “arena of conflict,” arguing that “authors, characters, and readers[are linked] in a series of potentially violent encounters” (45). Danziger’s emphasison the “primal” confrontation between writer and reader leads her to consider the

scene in which Tommy insists on reading Anna’s notebooks as a “rape” (48). Readingand writing are indeed loaded with affective and metaphorical power in the novel,and an examination of how these activities change throughout the text would nuancein interesting ways my discussion of prophetic narrative.

8 As the “projectionist dream” is repeated, Anna eventually shifts roles from passive viewer of her life’s images to the operator of the machine. Simultaneously, the imageschange from those to which she has always given emphasis to ones she has previouslyignored, those that represent “the small endurance that is bigger than anything”(611). The dream at once forces Anna to take responsibility for her (unavoidable)

bias and offers her a universal perspective on suffering and hope that helps her to work through her melancholia (i.e., to mourn) and return to emotional “health.” Iam suggesting however that the readers are not given as easy an out: the narrative


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bomb going off in the pages of the text, the performative fu-

sion thwarts these plots and characters, casting the narrative

elements—and the readers’ expectations—into chaos. Formmirrors theme, then, and breakdown is enacted in the experi-

ence of reading as much as in Anna’s mind.

But while breakdown turns to fusion and then to the subdued

order of the closing “Free Women” section of the novel, while

Anna returns to being “sane” as though the penultimate sec-

tion in its entirety had been a bad dream, we as readers remain

caught up in the affective extremes of the golden notebook,

so that what follows seems anticlimactic, flat. It would seem as

though Anna has worked through her dread successfully and

come to terms with grief; this mourning is re-enacted for the

text as a whole with the return to, and closure of, the umbrella

plot: “The two women kissed and separated” (638). But upon

closer examination it is questionable whether Anna’s return

to normalcy doesn’t manifest the same plangent undertow felt

by the readers after closing the book. The question of Anna’srecovery calls for a look at the role of irony in the novel—not,

here, for its hand in Lessing’s comments on social conventions

and gender relations, though the novel is rife with those ironies

too, but in terms of its place in Anna’s coming to grips with

foreknowledge. Through most of the story the prophet-narra-

tor perceives irony as suspect or dangerous and conscientiously

steers around it whenever it crops up in her notebooks. Part

of her wariness stems from the melancholic subject’s perilous

relationship to language in general. She relates irony to the

“steadily deepening cynicism” that plagued her group in Africa,

wherein “our jokes, outside the formal meetings, were contrary

to what we said, and thought we believed in” (86). Such “en-

joyable ironies” (83), Anna warns, can “have developed inside

ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality”

(86). Later, when Anna reads a story written by a CommunistParty member and cannot tell whether it is “an exercise in


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“another expression of the fragmentation of everything [. . .]the thinning of language against the density of our experience”

(301). If life itself becomes ironic, how can linguistic irony anylonger make sense? More important: how can it be a responsiblemode for the writer threatened by future destruction? Annaconsiders irony in attitude to be unethical and dangerous eventhough—or more precisely, because—irony is everywhere incontemporary experience.

Struggling to define the negative ironic perspective further, Anna calls it a “refusal to fit conflicting things together to makea whole; so that one can live inside it, no matter how terrible.The refusal means one can neither change nor destroy; therefusal means ultimately either death or impoverishment ofthe individual” (83-84). Despite Anna’s early recognition ofthis cost, her notebooks are the product of her refusal to com-promise for the sake of wholeness or viability. Like Kristeva’smelancholic patients, she refuses to cover over loss—or her

overwhelming dread of it—in order to write coherently or evento write at all. But does Anna, in the novel’s closing chapters,finally capitulate and “fit things together”? Is the “fusion” ofthe golden notebook a catharsis, so that Anna gives voice to herdread and thereby lets it go? And if The Golden Notebook itself canbe read as an attempt to fit conflicting things together to makea whole—to counter what Lessing calls “false dichotomies anddivisions” (Preface 8)—is the novel successful in this attempt?Most commentators on the novel have said yes, that the bookboth thematizes and demonstrates the embrace of disparateelements into an inclusive, multi-vocal perspective.9 Witness

9Mary Cohen, for example, argues that, since the line Saul gives Anna as the firstsentence of her next novel is the opening line of The Golden Notebook, Lessing is tell-ing us that “Anna herself can, at the end of her struggle, write a novel likeThe Golden

Notebook.” This means to Cohen that “Anna has overcome her fear of formlessnessand that she will never again write a novel, like her first, which falsifies the experi-ence from which it is drawn” (192) Indeed Anna probably won’t write another book


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what has become the flagship phrase for the book, “Out of thechaos, a new kind of strength” (454): a motto for successful

mourning and moving on, certainly? And yet, at the end of thegolden notebook, Anna describes another kind of irony, onethat is unavoidable if she is to return to everyday life from aplace of melancholic silence where “words dissolve”:

But once having been there, there’s a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of theshoulders, and it’s not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It’s a question of bowing to it,so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know

you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don’t we? (609-10)

Agreeing to “preserve the forms” whilst always knowing theloss is there is a compromise similar to, but crucially differentfrom, the negation of loss Kristeva describes as required fornon-melancholic subjectivity.10 This intentional background-ing of dread happens only after Anna has deconstructed theloss, dwelt in it, and allowed it to swallow her completely; at

no point are we asked to believe she has gotten over it becauseshe closes the door on it. And The Golden Notebook ‘s final pagesdo create the impression of a “terrible shrug of the shoulders”

writing anything more at all. Cohen’s conclusion fills in the blanks left by the TheGolden Notebook ’s unfinished business. Similarly, while Draine notes the significanceof irony to Anna’s distress in the novel, she limits its role by arguing that Anna learns

to “balance irony with compassion and awareness with faith” and that “the expressionof her balanced perspective is the novel as a whole” (47). To call Anna’s ambivalenceand exhaustion a “saving schizophrenia” (48) paints a prettier picture than I seebeing portrayed at the novel’s close. For the many readers who are made nervousby the melancholic narrative, however, it seems the best “solution” to extrapolatealong a trajectory of successful mourning-and-moving-on that might not be safely orsatisfactorily endorsed by the text itself.

10In Black Sun Kristeva explains that any access to the symbolic economy of languagerequires for the subject a covering-over or “negation” of original, maternal loss: “‘I

have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother,’is what the speaking subject seems to be saying. ‘But no, I have found her again insigns or rather since I consent to lose her I ha e not lost her (that is the negation)


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as Anna carries on with finding another flat and getting a job(and still, she isn’t able to write).11 While she resists one kind of

irony as defeatist and crippling, another, perhaps deeper ironyproves to be necessary to existence: to live as though death

wasn’t around the corner, to speak as though words weren’tfutile and meaningless. While all living and speaking calls forthis dissimulation, Lessing’s prose leaves the sleight imperfect,letting the mechanisms of compromise and cost show through.Irony, for Anna and for the reader, arises in being forced to bearin mind what is set aside in the name of normalcy rather thanbeing allowed to forget it. The narrative of prophecy is ironicbecause it spells out the catastrophic outcome of carrying onas usual, while at the same time being forced, in order to belegible at all, to agree to the terms of “usual” narrative. To themelancholic “seer” in a culture of blindness, irony is the onlyalternative to silence.

The complex, highly organized structure of The Golden Note-

book responds to and reflects the novel’s subject matter.12

Moststraightforwardly, the fusion of fragments in Anna’s consciousnessis writ large in the flowing together of content from black, yellow,blue, and red notebooks into the golden notebook. Lessing’sPreface describes her intention “to shape a book which wouldmake its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the

way it was shaped” (14). Lessing wanted to capture the “feel” ofmid-century England, and this required a structural demonstra-

11Dagmar Barnouw calls the final exchange between Anna and Molly, in which theyagree that “it’s all very odd” (Golden Notebook 638), an expression of “exhaustion whichhas just enough strength left for ironical ambivalence” (493). This reading is closer thanmost to my own sense of the note of defeat on which The Golden Notebook ends.

12 Annis Pratt in 1973 was the first to attend critically to the novel’s structure, discuss-ing it as a dialectical form in which opposing impulses are brought into tension andbalance (“The Contrary Structure of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” World Lit-

erature Written in English 12 [1973]: 150-60). See also Draine, Herbert Marder’s “TheParadox of Form in The Golden Notebook ” (Modern Fiction Studies 26 [1980)]: 49-54),and many of the essays in Pratt and Dembo’sDoris Lessing: Critical Studies (Madison:


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tion of the social dichotomies she saw being insisted upon at theexpense of wholeness and collective understanding (11). But

reading the text for its exploration of melancholic foreknowledgesuggests further purposes for the multiple “frames” within whichthe story takes shape. The notebooks compress and suspendnarrative time, as the events in Anna’s life are redoubled, split,dreamt, “fictionalized” (as Ella’s), interrupted by heavy blacklines, and re-lived differently (as in the revisions from the goldennotebook to “Free Women 5”). Past and future bleed into presentin the novel, so that the reader experiences crisis and paralysisat once. The volubility and vastness of the narrative imply thatthere is always another version of events left outstanding andnever a final or finished story. Christa Wolf describes this anxietyof incompleteness as follows: “It is the feeling that everything isfundamentally related; and that the strictly one-track-mindedapproach—the extraction of a single ‘skein’ for purposes ofnarration and study—damages the entire fabric, including the

‘skein’” (Cassandra 287). This is precisely what Lessing is tryingto prove in The Golden Notebook, and the panoramic approach ofher own narrative emphasizes rather than disguises the sense of“damage” incurred in telling the story.

The novel’s structure also responds to the threatening, vola-tile aspects of its prophetic material. Foreknowledge makes fora frightening story, bound to alienate readers: the elaborate,even rigid structural plan can be read as an attempt (on Anna’spart, of course, but also on Lessing’s) to contain and tame thismelancholy content.13 Lessing notes repeatedly that the nar-

13Many critics interpret the multi-layered form as a way to distance, displace, or ne-gate painful material. Jean Tobin catalogues several techniques used by Lessing forthis purpose: shifting pronoun (e.g., “I” to “she” in the yellow notebook), shiftinggender (e.g., Lessing’s son Peter becomes Anna’s daughter Janet becomes Ella’s son

Michael), transposing (of names and relationships), shuffling (of material from onenotebook to another), and generalizing (166-71). Marie Danziger contends that itisn’t the content itself the writer fears; rather the “distancing impulse is generated


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rative seemed to have a life of its own: “I said I want this tightstructure, so I did the structure. But what came out in between

was something else, and not always foreseen” (Gray 336).14

Whilein 1971 she claimed “It was under control,” in a 1986 interviewshe admitted, “It was almost out of control” (Gray 336). Wolffelt a similar tension between content and structure in writingCassandra : “I experience the closed form of the Cassandra narra-tive as a contradiction to the fragmentary structure from which(for me) it is actually composed. The contradiction cannot besolved, only named” (266). To regard Wolf’s and Lessing’s novelsas prophetic—not just because of their clear-sighted narrators,but because of their confrontation with the looming possibilityof nuclear conflict and death—offers a new perspective on thedisagreement amongst readers about whether these novels areoverdetermined or infinitely open-ended. Dagmar Barnouwasserts, for example, that the structure of The Golden Notebook “hinders the process of self-knowledge”: the multiple, interwoven

narratives “yield only prematurely arrested analyses of relation-ships, closing off precariously for a time what will destroy themanyway in the end. The enemy is intensely feared but not known”(503).15 Similarly, Leslie A. Adelson has expressed discomfortover Cassandra’s fate, claiming that generic boundaries overtakehistorical necessity in Wolf’s version, canceling out hope (511).

Adelson links Cassandra to its context of nuclear anxiety whenshe complains that “Cassandra has, so to speak, internalizedThe Bomb,” and that the character exists “in a cage whose barsare demarcated, not by historical necessity, but by the lines ofthe text” (512). The objection to nuclear war being depicted as

14In the Preface, Lessing muses that “Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, makinglimitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it. All sortsof ideas and experiences I didn’t recognize as mine emerged when writing” (10).

15Barnouw juxtaposes this rigidity of structure with the fluidity of The Four-Gated City, which she feels is better able to explore the realities—and the potentialities—of


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inevitable—to an unforgiving foreclosure of narrative hope—iscommon amongst readers made uncomfortable by texts that

deal with melancholic foreknowledge. The point, of course,is that annihilation is inevitable for these narratives, and thediscomfort arises in response to precisely the textual stagingof “being done for.” That Cassandra knows her fate from thestart makes her tale an ideal framework for Wolf’s explorationof proleptic, future-oriented mourning under nuclearism.16

Edith Waldstein’s essay on silence and prophecy in Cassandra complains that the reader “suffers from unproductive anxietybecause the text has left neither a character nor the narrativespace required to ‘discuss’ the issues raised. Christa Wolf hashanded silence back to us” (198). In the end, this is exactly whatprophecy does in Lessing as well as Wolf—hands silence back tous. Prophecy is a performative narrative technique that rejectsthe consolatory mechanisms of storytelling and insists, throughirony, on leaving us with closing-down instead of closure, loss

instead of resolution. Prophecy, against all odds, provides alanguage for nuclear fear.

W ORKS CITED

Adelson, Leslie A. “The Bomb and I: Peter Sloterdijk, Botho Strauß, andChrista Wolf.” Monatshefte 78.4 (1986): 500-13.

Barnouw, Dagmar. “Disorderly Company: From The Golden Notebook to The

Four-Gated City.” Contemporary Literature 14 (1973): 491-514.Cohen, Mary. “‘Out of the Chaos, a New Kind of Strength’: Doris Lessing’sThe Golden Notebook.” The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criti- cism. Ed. Arlyn Diamon and Lee R. Edwards. Amherst: U of Massachu-setts P, 1977. 178-93.

16Nonetheless, Wolf also defends the openness of her novel by arguing that the storyis meant to be read together with the essays that widen its scope and problematizeits conclusions. Similarly, although Lessing’s 1971 Preface was written out of over-

whelming frustration for what she felt was a “belittling” critical concentration uponfeminism and “the sex war” in the novel (8), this Preface has become a crucial part ofTh G ld N t b k as e kno it toda The a thor’s disc ssion here in ites readers to


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Danziger, Marie A. Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, and Philip Roth. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead: SevenMissiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 20-31.

Draine, Betsy. “Nostalgia and Irony: The Postmodern Order of The GoldenNotebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 31-48.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” 1917. Trans. JamesStrachey. The Pelican Freud Library. Vol. 11. On Metapsychology: TheTheory of Physchoanalysis. Ed. Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Pen-guin, 1985. 245-68.

Gray, Stephen. “An Interview with Doris Lessing.” Research in African Litera- ture 17 (1986): 329-40.

Guthrie, John. “The Reconstructed Subject: Christa Wolf, Kassandra.” TheGerman Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism. Ed. David Midg-ley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1993. 179-93.

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Rou-diez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: Michael Joseph, 1982.Michael, Magali Cornier. “Woolf’s Between the Acts and Lessing’s The Golden

Notebook : From Modern to Postmodern Subjectivity.” Saxton and Tobin39-56.

Raskin, Jonah. “Doris Lessing at Stony Brook: An Interview.” New AmericanReview 8 (1970): 166-79.

Tobin, Jean. “On Creativity: Woolf’s The Waves and Lessing’s The GoldenNotebook.” Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold. Ed. Ruth Saxton and Jean Tobin. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1994. 147-83.

Waldstein, Edith. “Prophecy in Search of a Voice: Silence in Christa Wolf’sKassandra.” The Germanic Review 62.4 (1987): 194-98.

Wolf, Christa. Accident: A Day’s News. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and RickTakvorian. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.

——. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Trans. Jan Van Heurck. New York:Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1984

——. The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf. Trans. Hilary Pilk-ington. Introd. Karin McPherson. London: Verso, 1988.

S ARAH HENSTRA is Assistant Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto.Her current research explores the genre of the interview across different literaryand media contexts She has also written articles on the work of Djuna Barnes Julian


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