Sanghamitra Sadhu
Dr. Sanghamitra Sadhu is an Assistant Professor of
English in Cotton University, Guwahati. She is a former fellow at Indian Institute
of Advanced Study, Shimla.
Abstract
The article
reads Lessing’s fiction in a framework that underscores writing as a medium to
confront the self, and performance as a locus of self-recuperations. It
contends that narrative identities blur authorial distinctions and the collapse
of self-other binary in the narrative problematizes the realm of fiction and
reality, as much as it complicates the narrative self, that stands at the
interstices of history, fiction, and ideology. The article explores the
dynamics of self and its narrativization in Doris Lessing’s fiction The Golden Notebook (1962) and Love, Again (1996) underlining that
signifying the self in textual and visual medium is a complex project and
crises in the self are accompanied by dispersion of language. While The Golden Notebook interrogates the
problematic of self along with shifting conception of author; Love, Again explores the self that is
put on performance with its ramifications of actors, narrator, author and
spectators further implying the power of music, theatre and opera that can have
affective bearing on the self. The paper argues that Lessing’s fiction is
marked by a tension while rendering the self in its linguistics resonances and
immediateness.
Keywords: self, narrative, performance,
language, identity
Introduction
The discourse of
the self and the question of narrative authority assume a crucial significance
in the writings of Doris Lessing (1919-2013), the Nobel laureate African-British
writer of the post-war generation. The engagement with the self and its
ontological possibilities in a challenging cultural zone, that has withstood
variegated socio-political upheavals like settler colonialism, racism, gender
crisis and other forces operative in the Southern Africa, calls for an analysis
of the self’s complex negotiation with the other. The authorial self gives a
vantage point to examine how identity as well as agency is constructed in
European and Euro-African texts written by white African woman writers. In The Essential Gesture (1989), Nadine
Gordimer raises the question “Where Do Whites Fit In?” (1959) and her question
is directed towards the Euro-African authors who support or subvert the
imperial claim to the continent or manifest an uneasy ambivalence complicit in
the project of colonialism. Lessing articulates the difficulties of writing as
a white person belonging to Africa. Claiming an African identity, Lessing, even
though her experiences are personal, underlines the conflicting nature of
articulating a story in a specific Rhodesian setting. Like Gordimer, who has
experienced the apartheid, Lessing too, is a witness to the political turmoil
of segregated Rhodesia. The construction of a narrative identity in a
postcolonial set up is challenged in its plural antecedents and practices of
race related mythologies in that questions such as who speaks for whom become
problematic. The white African writers always carry the burden of what J.M.
Coetzee calls ‘complicit colonialism’. Their voices of representation are
always held suspect and the writer is always on the horns of dilemma regarding her
writing position and hence attempts to establish the individual narrative self
which is not constrained by the collective. In her writing, Lessing endeavours
to establish an independent speaking/writing self that is not subject to the
mandates of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy.
Writing
about the self – its transition from being to becoming in the ambit of
narrative is a constant theme that Lessing
engages in her fictional and non-fictional works. It veers around her early
fictional works like The Summer Before
the Dark (1973), the novel sequence Children of Violence (1952-69) and The Golden Notebook (1962), and late
works like Canopus in Argos: Archives series (1983-90), Love, Again (1996), and other non-fictional
works including her autobiography. Claire Sprague (1990) traces Lessing’s
depiction of a fractured and fragmented self in The Golden Notebook, a layered self in The Four Gated City, and a less central view of the self in the Canopus series. In Martha Quest Lessing develops the notion of the dialogic self
through the portrayal of Martha that is transpersonal. In her works, Lessing’s
concern has been to explore the possibility of delineating the fully realized
notion of the self in writing. Writing that enables one to evolve into being is
clearly reflected in The Golden Notebook
– a work that examines the location of a writer in the post war situation and
the crisis of writing in Britain in the 1950s and the 1960s. Located in the
interstices of modernism and postmodernism the novel addresses the shifting contours
of the notion of author through the character of Anna Wulf. The theme of mental
breakdown which Lessing claims in The
Golden Notebook as central to the novel is built around a series of
notebooks written by Anna. Anna’s notebooks are a means of writing the self to
overcome her self-disintegration. She simultaneously keeps four coloured
notebooks – black, red, yellow, and blue and divides her self into four parts
ascribing each notebook a distinct theme. The
Golden Notebook with its unique formal and structural complexity
incorporates five sections: each section is introduced by an episode entitled
“Free Women” which finally makes up the short conventional novel Free Women. Each section of Free Women is further followed by
episodes from each of four differently coloured notebooks. Finally, there is
‘The Golden Notebook’, the penultimate section of the novel The Golden
Notebook. The various coloured notebooks include a diary, the partial and
disrupted manuscript of a novel, a ‘historical’ and ‘factual’ record of events
related to the Communist Party in London in the 1950s and the manuscript of the
biographical details of the central character Anna’s life in Rhodesia. The novel
further interrogates larger questions of truth, fact, point of view, realism,
objectivity and so on, making the terrain of fiction and reality ever problematic.
In
consonance with the poststructuralist ideas of author and subjectivity, The Golden Notebook brings to the fore how
freedom for the writing subject emerges through the intermittent effacement of
the self. The ‘Free Women’ sections in the novel ostensibly evoke the notion of
freedom but freedom here signifies a chaos or ‘cracking up’ that accompanies
the breakdown of social convention and disintegration of the individual. In the
opening paragraphs of the novel Anna says to Molly, “the point is, that as far
as I can see, everything is cracking up” (25). Anna seems to understand her
world and her experience of the world as fragmenting and fragmented, where
‘unity’ remains an illusory fiction. Any work of art including the novel
captures fragmentation as Anna maintains, “the novel has become a function of
the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness” (75). Anna’s notion of
the fragmented self confirms the poststructuralists’ notion of subjectivity
positing “a centreless dispersed subject who is literally a composite of
various socially and culturally constructed roles or positions – not
perspectives – that cannot be reconciled” (40). Hence, the narrative self
veering around different subject positions can attain freedom without being
constrained by any dominant ideology. In the preface to The Golden Notebook, Lessing concedes how an ‘author’ writing
without being subjective could earn a greater sense of freedom. In section I of
Free Women the narrator reiterates
the effacement of Anna both within and outside the narrative. Anna, the writer
“deliberately effaced herself and played to the dramatic Molly” (30), when the
two would go out together. There are other occasions when Anna or her alter ego
Ella is being effaced in the narrative. Throughout her notebooks and the ‘Free
Women’ sections she appears faceless on the page. She undergoes ‘defacement’,
to use Paul de Man’s term in that she obliterates her subjectivity. Roberta
Rubenstein points out to the “dialectic between Anna’s projections and
self-cancellations” which is formerly expressed through the self-canceling
fictions that comprise the “layerings of the narrative” (102-103). With each
notebook replacing another, the self undergoes erasure and selects an
alternative. With each notebook that interconnects to and replaces another, the
narrative self undergoes erasure and selects alternative representation. As
Anna begins to record her literary experience in the Black Notebook, she
confronts textual resistance, “I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel
which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong
enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I
am too diffused” (76). Throughout the narrative, Anna is in search of a writing
that can capture her own self. Each notebook eludes truth that it claims to
unravel. The provisional nature of writing in the notebooks allows Anna’s
subjectivity ‘to be in process’, to use Julia Kristeva’s term, a subject which
is not fixed but constructed, improvised and negotiated through reading and
writing and therefore it is “constantly called into question”(129). At the
beginning of the Blue Notebook Anna realizes that her writing undergoes
displacement, and like Derrida’s ‘scene of writing’ her writing meets resistance
to be transformed into signified systems.
I
came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to
turn it into a story. It struck me that my doing this – turning everything into
fiction – must be an evasion… Why do I never write down, simply, what
happens...? Obviously my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of
concealing something from myself (325).
Correspondingly,
transition in the narrative whether
at the thematic or structural level also hints at the provisionality of the
narrative as well as the truths of life. The narrative transition in the novel
also hints at a partial closure since one notebook is exclusive of the themes
explored in other notebooks. However, one narrative closure creates another
narrative opening and a new narrative identity of the self. Hence the
effacement of the narrative self and closure of the narrative are closely
connected. The juxtaposed sections from the notebooks interpolated with
sections from Free Women and the
multiplicity of the narrative self create a rambling narrative. Writing is
conflated with Anna Wulf’s existence; indeed her existence is predicated to the
fact that she is writing. With words losing their meaning and the narrative
getting fragmented, Anna pronounces many times in the novel that she would
write no more – “I shall never write another” (214) but eventually falls prey
to her narrative compulsion. The theorists of ecriture feminine insist on the
textual practice of writing the female body that subverts the coherence of
language as a signifying system and assigns it with “a notion of feminine as
subversion, a transgressive force linked with the realm of the mother’s body
that continually threatens to disrupt the single fixed meanings of an
authoritative and repressive phallocentric discourse” (Felski 23). Anna does
write her body in the Blue Notebook, recording her physical symptoms of
illness, her experiments with sex and pleasure, and even the details of her
menstruation. Such a practice may lead the feminist critics to locate her in the
domain of ecriture feminine. But the paradox is that Anna writes her body
“without a body, dumb, blind” and articulates the impossibility of inscribing
the body – its truthful depiction in art. What becomes noticeable in Anna’s
case is the constant inscription and erasure of her self. As she mentions: “I
am always having, as it were, to cancel myself out” (283). Self-effacement
recurs in The Golden Notebook, and it becomes apparent that the Annas
of the text engage in repeated self cancellation through writing. Nevertheless,
the narrative self is not annihilated with each self erasure, rather it ensures
its free movement within the constraints of the discourse. Anna as a writer
struggles to distance herself from her subjective perception and develop an
impersonal aesthetic that nevertheless emerges out of her personal and specific
emotional experiences. Anna’s experiment with writing reinstates that the locus
of writing no longer lies within a sovereign, unified subject but it emerges
out of a split in the subject where its different facets enter into a
conflictual discourse. Helene Cixous theorizes that the splitting within the
subject is germane in the postmodern discourse of the subject and its
enunciation. The writing subject or the narrative self is never the coherent
“I”. Cixous formulates in Stigmata that
writing consists of “inscribing the abyss we are” (42).
The
displacement of the narrative self caused by its split goes beyond the present
time and incorporates the past. Thus, the present tense in Anna’s commentary
repeatedly resists the “I” in a uniform way and the text’s representation of
‘male’ subjectivities offer a critique of the unified subjectivity and further
substantiates the problematic of the narrative identity of the self. When Anna
rejects Saul Green’s “I” in The Golden
Notebook, she reacts against not only his “I” but also her own “I”, which
she believes, compromises her art. According to Anna’s logic, the artist needs
to erase her “I” from the text, as it may prove detrimental to art.
The writer’s
‘strategy’ of self-effacement further leads to the notion that the text is the
zone where the author can manipulate the meaning of the text and limit access
to veracity. The narrative matrix produces a simulacrum of itself; disguises
its recounting and effaces the act of writing. In this context, it is pertinent
to refer to the Canadian writer Aritha Van Herk, for whom the ‘writing place’
is the ‘hiding place’ (21). Writing is both a record of compulsions and of
resistances to write. The textual zone which is ostensibly a site of revealing
the truth may function to obliterate the same. Anna’s writing fails to capture
the truth about herself. Similarly, Janna, the protagonist in The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984), who claims writing as her ‘trade’ and
obsessively notes down whenever any thought comes to her lest it does not ‘fly
away’, discovers at the end that her novels are not a way of confronting the
truth but of evading it. For Janna it is too heavy a weight to be transformed
into language. The medium of language or more specifically writing is the field
where the self reveals as well as hides itself in a dual process. However, this
duality foregrounds the lack of control in the act of writing. The writer becomes
a ‘scribe’ (in Cixous’ term) who writes down and records what surges up in her
interior so that one does not write a text but it writes itself. Cixous’
conviction of a text that emerges by ‘creating itself’ is shared by Anna Wulf
in The Golden Notebook. When Ella
decides to write again, she searches for the text within her and which like an
‘interior scroll’ will gradually unfold and surface on the body of writing. In
the Yellow notebook Ella meditates on a situation in which she might abandon
her vocation, i.e. writing but it will not have much impact on her, as writing
for Ella is less an act of creation than it is about recording the story
already written in ‘invisible ink’. As Ella ponders, “…because of the act of
writing it was irrelevant – it was not an act of creation, but an act of
recording something. The story was already written, in invisible ink … well
perhaps somewhere inside me is another story written in invisible ink …” (283).
Foregrounding the writerly selves of Anna/Ella in their desperate attempts of
self narration the text creates an illusion of rendering the truth, or what
Ronald Sukenick calls “the truth of the page” (25). Performing the narrative
through the entries of diary and journal creates the reality of the writing
situation. The Golden Notebook
creates an immediacy of writing process by recurrently invoking the act of
writing through the border line of fictionality implying that the product of
writing is more ‘real’ than the act of writing itself.
The
narrative and structural complexity along with problematic theme of self-representation
pervades Lessing’s Love, Again with a
new dimension of the self. The schema of the narrative is much like The Golden Notebook : the novel’s
protagonist Sarah Durham, a sixty-year-old professional writer-producer shares
affinity with Anna Wulf of The Golden
Notebook. Like Anna, Sarah’s vocation as a writer has been foregrounded in
the novel, as she scripts plays for The Green Bird, a small London theatre
group. She chooses to base her play on the romantic life and death of Julie
Vairon, a historical figure of the French fin-de-siecle,
who suffers failure in love and ultimately ends her life. Julie’s journals, her
self-portraits, and music combined with Sarah’s rereading of those journals
form the basis of her play. Julie’s compulsive nature to signify her self
through narrative and visual modes overshadow the narrative: “She chose to live
alone, paint and draw and compose her music and, every night of her life, write
a commentary on it” (33). The narrative confirms a certain teleology of Julie’s
drawing of self-portraits; she draws her self portraits compulsively in water
colours, pastels, charcoal, and pencil not because she lacks a model, but she
finds it as a means to discover ‘her real hidden nature’. Writing the self
through the journal entries and through self portraits enables her to eschew
the phases of her life she hardly liked, and grant certain power and freedom to
her. Like Anna’s attempt to compartmentalize her writing by drawing a black line
in between the notebooks, Julie’s rendition of different sketches of her life
is also separately marked by a black line. The identity of the narrative self
encompasses a double vision of the self – as narrator and the narrated. The representation
of the self in the self portraits and the journals adumbrates this double
vision. In Politics of Postmodernism
(2002) Linda Hutcheon points out the fissure between the self-image and the
imaged self, between the represented and the representing self. The gap between
the ‘true’ self and the projected self is pronounced by Anna Wulf: “When I read
my notebooks I didn’t recognize myself. Something strange happens when one
writes about oneself” (499). The problem becomes turgid when the written text
has to negotiate with a different medium such as a film. In one episode in The Golden Notebook, Anna envisions the
film versions of her book projecting Michael and Anna; Ella and Julia; Anna and
Molly. But she feels the presence of the jeering projectionist (who runs the
films of her past) laughing at the credit ‘Directed by Anna Wulf’ and mocking her
with: “And what makes you think that the emphasis you have put on it is
correct?” (537). In the course of Lessing’s narrative, Sarah frequently
examines her ‘double’ – her reflection in the mirror and explores the different
dimensions of her being. The fissure in the subjectivity as revealed in Julie’s
journals, self portraits and music is amenable to the postmodern aesthetics of
self representation: “It is hard, listening to her late music, to match with
what she said of herself in her journal, and with her self-portraits” (27). At
several points Sarah finds that Julie’s journals and self-portraits do not
tally, the journals never mention of her dancing that is so conspicuous in her
self-portraits. The construction of Julie’s subjectivity in her self-portraits
ranging from an angel to an Arab girl with ‘a transparent veil’ indicates the
plurality of subjectivity implicit in the postmodern self-representation. Apart
from the self-portraits there is also a mention about the photographs of ‘real’
Julie. Barthes’ autobiography Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975) deploys both photographic and narrative
representation, reminding that self-representation remains, in all modes, a
contentious issue. The text announces in its epigraph that “all of this must be
thought of as being said by a character in a novel”. Here the narrative self
assumes the positions of narrator and character. This evasive technique is
exemplified in Barthes’ A Lover’s
Discourse (1977) where sexual orientation of the protagonist is kept in
dark by the narrative’s use of grammar from the original French. Various
self-revealing modes create less an opportunity to reveal the self than to hide
it, further reaffirming that signifying the self whether in narrative or visual
medium remains a complex issue.
The
discourse of self and its narrativization is more complicated in Love, Again. The novel narrates Julie’s
attempt to inscribe her self in her self-portraits, journals, and extracted
passages from the latter. Side by side, we have Sarah’s journal that keeps
record of what happens in rehearsals and performances and her emotional
upheavals toward the men in her life. The play ostensibly draws its source from
Julie’s journals, her self-portraits and music but is modified/rewritten by the
‘co-authors’: Stephen and Sarah. All these heterogeneous writerly selves
combined with both direct and indirect narration surge up in the novel, further
indicating the problematic and complexity of a ‘unified’ narrative self. Like
the final Golden Notebook which is co-produced by Anna and Saul, the script for
Julie Vairon is co-authored by both Stephen and Sarah. Both these fiction
problematize the self along with the issues of authority and subjectivity,
questioning the very notion of a single and unified authorship.
At one level, Love, Again revisits The Golden Notebook, but what is more important in the text is the
self that is put on ‘real’ performance with its ramifications of actors,
narrator/author and the spectators. The complexity of the narrative self is interpreted
by Flanagan as the ‘multiplex self’ which has the power to capture the
centrifugal forces of heterogeneous strands of life. In the essay “When
Narrative Fails” (2004), J. Melvin Woody points out the power of drama,
theatre, music, dance, and other spatial forms that can cope with the diversity
of the ‘multiplex self’, especially when the narrative fails. Theatre orients
the self to society by forming interactions with other selves, thereby
establishing a dialogic relation between the actors and spectators. The fusion
between the self and the world that the theatre incites enables the viewing
self into ‘becoming’, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term. The ‘becoming’ of a
self, according to Deleuze and Guattari, enables the viewing self to undergo
transformation in the process.
In
Love, Again evocation of theatre in
both literal and metaphorical levels further problematizes the correlation
between narrative and theatre and the function of the narrative self in the
matrix of theatre. The narrative evokes the idea of theatrical illusion,
‘theatrum mundi’, that life is just a spectacle. Even the characters in the
novel blur the boundary between living and playing roles (echoing the writerly
selves of Anna and Julie who erode the boundary between writing and living);
they speak as if they were playing a role each moment of their lives.
References to life as a stage overshadows the narrative, especially in Sarah’s
comment that “there are times when everything seems like a film set or a stage
set…” (58). The characters carry the baggage of allusions used in the specific
dramatic convention. One of the characters is described as “rakish – it would
have done well in Restoration comedy” (67); they seem to be living in a self
contained world, completely isolated and apart from the quotidian life, where
nothing but the role playing matters: “Perhaps the pleasure of any new company
of people, particularly in the theatre, is simply this, that the families… are
somewhere else, are in another life” (89). The interrelation between life and
theatre in the novel is provided by Sarah, when she is considering the
emotional loss and gain of being involved in show business: “The theatre, in
short, was just like life…, always whirling people and events into improbable
associations and then – that’s it” (191).
Such dialectic of theatre and life is best manifested in Charlotte
Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre? – a brief
autobiographical account of the writer that incorporates nearly eight hundred
paintings with the subtitle, “a tri-coloured play with music” (43).
Thematically, Charlotte’s text replicates Julie’s journals and self-portraits
on the premise that one’s life is analogous to the other in that they haunt
their works and the mind of the characters even after their death. Charlotte’s
and Julie’s attempts to enact their lives through various artistic means raise
questions about life, death and art carrying the implication that “performance
and theatre are instances of enactments predicated on their own disappearance”
(Phelan 2).
The
modern theory of narrative relies on the belief that theatre is not just a
convention outside the narrative, but theatricality is coded within the
narrative. The notions of point of view, scene, perspective, and focalization
refer not to the pictoriality of a text but to the theatricalized aspects of
the text. In S/Z (1970) Barthes
espouses that the representational codes are employed in a space whose model
can no longer be the painting (the tableau) but is instead the theatre (the
scene). Further, he obliquely refers to the scenic metaphors of textuality and
writing pertaining to modern literary theory. The theatrical apparatus frames
the elements of a text, disrupting traditional narrative codes and facilitates
fragmentation, narrative discontinuity, and the negation of any teleology. The
polyphonic textual effect of writing as well as language is manifested in the
theatre by the scenic metaphors. The self reflexivity of a text or mise-en-abyme inherent in modern writing
points to the ways in which foregrounding or ‘staging’ takes place in a text.
The equation between theatre and writing is further reaffirmed by Derrida in
“The Scene of Writing”. He emphasizes that Freud’s notion of the Darstellung of
the psyche signifies not only representation but also ‘visual figuration’ as
well as ‘theatrical representation’. For Barthes theatre is a ‘density of
signs’, and it encompasses a wide space where all the divergent paths of
writing cross. In Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes, Barthes does not delimit the scope of the theatre; rather
he promulgates its immense possibilities:
At
the crossroads of the entire oeuvre, perhaps the Theatre: there is not a single
one of his texts, in fact which fails to deal with a certain theatre, and
spectacle is the universal category in whose aspect the world is seen. The
theatre relates to all the apparently special themes which pass and return in what
he writes: connotation, hysteria, fiction, the image repertorie (imaginaire),
the scene, grace, the orient, violence, ideology…(177).
Theatre, for
Barthes, is the unifying figure of writing that can contain diverse fields of
study such as linguistics, cultural criticism, psychoanalysis, narratology, and
so on. The semiology of the theatre dovetails with the theory of writing and
justifies the novel’s inclusion of theatricality within it. However, it is
important to analyze the connection of narrative self with the theatre within
the parameters of a narrative.
Just
as writing or textualization is the medium to confront the self, theatre also
functions as a locus through which the self can recuperate and transform
itself. The theatrical setting and its impact on the lives of the participants
further exemplify psychological encoding underlying the narrative. By using the
metaphor of theater, Lessing attempts to capture the indelible imprints left on
the psyche of the characters. Lessing purposefully situates her ageing
protagonist Sarah in the opera that works as a catalyst to heighten her
emotional and long buried erotic feelings. Her emotional deprivation as a child
has deeply affected her sense of the self, which has made her emotionally
dependent on others. The narrative takes a detour in examining Sarah’s
emotional life and retrospectively discovering the cause of her emotional
wound. Sarah moving back and forth and in mining her childhood experiences
develops a strong sense of loss: “Perhaps, the paradise we dream of when in
love is the one we were ejected from, where all embraces are innocent” (181).
Sarah’s descent into the vortex, during which she confronts her long-forgotten
emotional experiences echoes The Golden
Notebook, which records Anna’s fragmentations of self.
It
is the power of collective theatrical experience that enables Sarah to come to
terms with her own sense of self and devise ways to recuperate it. It is Julie’s journals and songs that appeal
Sarah to form an affinity with the Martinique lady and subsequently she (Sarah)
begins translating Julie’s writings from the original French. Sarah feels
oneness with Julie’s life and it is an opportunity for her to relive her own
life: “Julie is that side of myself that was never allowed to live. The
Jungians have a word for it. My anima”
(62). Sarah was captivated by Julie’s life and worked becoming “part of Julie
Vairon, day and night, indefinitely” (82). Beguiled by Julie, Stephen, the
co-author of Sarah’s script, feels that both he and Julie are “made for each
other” (48). The composite script of Sarah and Stephen brings together an
international cast of performers over different locations such as France, a
country estate in Oxfordshire and finally, London. The rehearsals performed in
different locations create a bond among the company members – English, French,
American and they are all united by Julie and do not want to part with. The
play’s performance has its supreme effect on Sarah, the theatre-manager and the
director who becomes engrossed in the performance of a scene that is close to
her own life. In the course of rehearsals, Sarah herself sings for the cast her
version of a song that accompanies the scene of Julie’s desertion by her last
lover Remy. The enactment of Julie’s life has such an overwhelming impact on
Sarah that she becomes almost a spectator to her own life. Sarah’s case can be
interpreted in terms of psychoanalysis. Rubenstein points out that the
narrative’s employment of theatrical metaphor on the wider stage of the city of
London enables us to apply D. W Winnicott’s theory of psychoanalysis. In her
essay “‘All the World’s a Stage’: Theatricality, Spectacle and the Flaneuse in Doris
Lessing’s Vision of London” (2005), Rosario Arias views London as a potential
space that renders creativity to the female flaneurs. Sarah as a flaneuse or spectator strolls around
London; particularly Regent’s Park, watches others and becomes a spectator to
the real life scenes. The city of London becomes a greater theatrical stage for
Sarah in which she observes the sketches of real lives and develops affinity
with them. The scene of the mother with her son and daughter in flashback
kindles Sarah’s childhood memory while watching the scene she recognizes
herself and creates a bond of sympathy with the child. In Playing and Reality (1971) Winnicott advocates a transitional space
in which a moment of recognition is established between the mother and the child.
Applying Winnicott’s psychoanalytic ideas to the episode in Lessing’s text we
can say that a moment of recognition is established between Sarah’s subjective
world and the objective world of perception. Sarah’s engagement as a spectator
to real sketches of life as well as the performances in the theatre finds a
creative relationship between the subjective and the objective world, finally,
enabling her to re-experience life on those terms. So it is the subjective
engagement with the outside world that enables her to relive her life and
undergo a psychological healing of her wounded self. In her wanderings through
the alleys of London and the theatrical performances on stage, Sarah tries to
find an affinity with others. Diana Fuss, the poststructuralist theorist,
stresses on the need of identifying with the others. In Identification Papers (1995), Fuss focuses on the process of
identifying with other individuals and groups and argues that identification is
the ‘detour’ that ‘defines a self’.
The Golden Notebook and
Love, Again take recourse to the
power of music and opera at the moments of self crisis of their protagonists.
In the final section of the Golden Notebook, Anna seems to rely on the power of
music when words fail to make sense of the world and subsequently she suffers
mental breakdown: “she tried various passages of music, some jazz, some bits of
Bach, and some Stravinsky, thinking that perhaps music might say what words
could not…” (565). In Sarah’s case theatre works as a catalyst that brings out
her long buried emotional grief, and its collective experience leads to the
healing of her self.
In The Golden Notebook
and Love, Again, Lessing puts more
emphasis on mutation that the self undergoes in the process of creating an art
form. It goes without saying that transformation of the self in the enclave of
narrative is always followed by a positive value. Whether it is the medium of
writing or theatre, the narrative self constantly endeavours to transform
itself into an aesthetic product. Such an effort is clearly delineated in
Lessing’s fiction that almost obliterates the demarcation between art and life.
In his Nietzsche: Life as Literature
(1985), Alexander Nehamas propounds a willful shaping of one’s life into an
aesthetic product that endows it with meaning and importance. Nehamas maintains
that, “the self, according to Nietzsche is not a constant, stable entity. On
the contrary, it is something one becomes, something, he would even say, one
constructs…” (7). Lessing precisely captures the Nietzschian notion of the
evolving self, situating it in-between fiction and reality in the diverse
manifestations, while examining its contradictions in a work of art.
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