Reading Doris Lessing Author(s): Judith Stitzel Source: College English, Vol. 40, No. 5 (Jan., 1979), pp.

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JUDITH STITZEL

Reading Doris Lessing

IN "IDorisLessing and Romanticism," a long, dense, and carefully reasoned article, Michael Magie shares his disturbance over the effect that Lessing is likely to have on her readers.1 Praising her realism and her "clear-sighted analytical portraits" (540), he criticizes her excessive scepticism about reason and rationality and her excessive generosity toward madness and mysticism. He feels that her work is likely to have a bad influence on readers because its urgings to despair are based upon a faulty epistemology and a faulty ontology. And he concludes (in a statement about The which I think he would apply to most of her work since that novel Notebook Golden was published in 1962) that, in Lessing, "reason panders to will, in that understanding conducts to sympathetic approval rather than to critical assessment" (540). He fears that Lessing fosters moral obtuseness (547) and "self-indulgence"(552), that her "intelligence is invested in an invitation to stupidity" (540). Magie is aware that many of the positions of which he disapproves are positions about which Lessing herself is skeptical. TheFour-Gated City is such a long novel, he says, partly "because of its author's resistance to the ideas she was herself exploring there. .
.

. To say however that Doris Lessing thinks certain thoughts reluctantly is

yet to confess that she thinks them" (536), and from his point of view, that she thinks them is cause for us to be wary. I suggest, however, that what is involved in thinking thoughts reluctantly is what many of Lessing's stories and novels are about. Undoubtedly, there is in her work a sense of urgency, a sense I find in perfect accord with the present facts and future probabilities, a sense that we live in dangerous times and may no longer have the time for leisurely movements toward truth, the switchbacks and the careful assessments. There is also (and for me this quality creates much of the tension and resonance in Lessing's work) a compassionate awareness of humankind's elaborate, protective devices, our ability "to know something and then forget it"2 again and again. In short, I cannot agree with Magie's assumptions about the reader implied or created by Lessing's works. When I ask myself what happens to me when I read her, what happens because of the particular engagements, the particular exercises of mind, which the books encourage or demand, I answer that, most of the time, I find myself alert, mentally active, and far from despair. I find her developing readers who can attend to what they might otherwise disregard. I find her stimulating men"'Doris Lessing and Romanticism," CollegeEnglish, 38 (1977), 531-552. 'The Memoirs of a Survivor (New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 7. of Englishat West VirginiaUniversityand hasan articleon Doris Lessingin professor Judith Stitzel is an associate thefall 1978 issueof Regionalism and the Female Imagination. ENGLISH COLLEGE Vol. 40, No. 5 * January 1979

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ReadingDoris Lessing 499 tal processes which allow us to move beyond where we are to stances less comfortable, but by no means necessarily less sane. Far from leaping or collapsing into positions, as Magie suggests she does (544), Lessing reveals by precept and example the exhausting processes by which we move forward. Lessing's comments about herself in answer to a question during a series of talks at the New School for Social Research (Sept. 25, 1972) are instructive. The answer refers to her own experiences with extra-sensory perception, but its range of significance is wider, since it concerns what is involved in confronting the challenge of the "new." like myself should Well, it startedoff by my thinkinghow odd it was that a rationalist . . . have such a lively relationship with her dreamlife, for example, and take it for which took me a very long time to do. It's very hardto be partof that complicated idea . . . that you area rationalist and atheistand you don'tbelieveand everythingis already cut and driedandyou alreadyknoweverythingand suddenlystartthrowingall that out
the window and start thinking again. It was very hard for me to do that. . . . You can everybody. . . . We don't know why, do we? There is something there to be explored ... if we don't get upset. ...3 granted that I could pick up other people's thoughts. ... I started to think about it ...

see someonepick up what you are thinkingand start talkingabout it. It happensto

The trouble is that many of us do get upset. Perhaps because she has often been self-consciously at the edges of her own expanding awareness, Lessing seems more keenly aware than most of the enormous pressures upon us to think approved thoughts. And these pressures, though they may come from without and be in the service of maintaining the coherence of some official body, are experienced as coming from within. We feel the reluctance as our own; it is our own, our own fear to move into unchartered realms. So that often, even when we come to believe something or even to consider as worthy of serious thought something that previously we mocked or thought impossible, we often hesitate to admit our new belief. In part, because we know (judging from our own earlier responses) that we will be mocked. But also (and this may be the stronger deterrent) because there is within us a residue of the negative judgment, to which we now submit ourselves. We doubt ourselves as we doubted others. Until, perhaps, there are enough "others," a critical mass of changed opinion. There is, I think, an important connection between Lessing's own experience with the reluctance involved in acknowledging new experiences and ideas and her continuing interest in the dynamics and complexities of learning-and teaching. Because, for Lessing, it is never a question only of knowing the truth, but of knowing how best to tell it, to convey it to others. Francis' account in the Appendix to The Four-Gated City (New York: Bantam, 1973) is a good case in point and can provide us a handle on some of our own responses as we read the Appendix and the book as a whole. Francis listens to Lynda's and Martha's discussions of radical reinterpretations of madness and wide-spread extra-sensory powers with attitudes ranging from neutrality to euphoria. But each morning after the talks, he wakes "furious with them and with [himself]," angry, shocked and "gullible," "as if they had been trying to
3Quoted in Nancy Shields Hardin, "Doris Lessing and the Sufi Way," Contemporary Literature, 14 (1973), 570.

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trick [him]" (p. 622). He hates them, and ultimately he identifies the hatred as that which accompanies a renewed sense of obligation: "I was hating them for reminding
me that there was still fighting to be done .
.

." (p. 624). And his resistance to

accepting his mother's prediction of a catastrophe involving radioactivity, even though he thought, "Well, of course, it was bound to happen somewhere, sometime," is presented in careful detail-the various convolutions exposed. I could not believewhat I had been told. It is simpleto write that. I don't meanthat I thought Lynda and Marthawere lying, or that they were misguided.I mean, specifically, that while I acceptedwhat they said, I couldn'ttake it in. Ninetenthsof me, at
it hadnot heardwhat Lyndahadsaid, and what I replied.(p. least, did not believe in it, because

627, Lessing'sitalics) Three more times Francis talks similarly about the difficulty of "taking it in," about his failure to integrate the new knowledge. And though Francis does ultimately absorb the information fully enough to act upon it, his resistance, the terms in which he formulates this resistance, and his subsequent deliberations about how to convey the information so as to forestall panic and derision, offer me a model for conceptualizing my own reluctance.4 And if it is difficult to accept new truths, it can be as difficult for those teachers who feel the responsibility of sharing what they know with a resisting audience. This is the difficulty which faces the visitors from another planet in "Report on the Threatened City."5 And I turn now to an account of my experience with this story, one I find particularly useful since it contains many of the motifs that recur frequently throughout Lessing's work. What happened and happens to me as I read and reread the story is that I become aware of the shifting patterns of my relationships to it; I become aware that the processes involved in reading the story have analogies to the mental processes which the story examines. The story is an account through transmitted messages back to another planet of the failure of a mission to warn the inhabitants of a locality on earth that the locality is going to be destroyed in the near future by some kind of earthquake. At first the visitors think that the inhabitants, despite their fine technology, do not know what is about to overtake them. But the visitors find out that not only do the inhabitants know, but they have experienced something similar quite recently. What the visitors are never able to grasp is how people knowing what they know can act, or rather not act, as the inhabitants do. The visitors find it inexplicable, unfathomable, that a species would not be able to respond appropriately to warnings of disaster; they do not know what to make of an apparent inability to get beyond the short-range thinking that threatens survival. A number of things happen as I read this story. The first time I read it, and sometimes still, reading or recalling it, I felt smug, identifying with the visitors, sharing their amazement at the obtuseness and stubbornness of the population they confronted. How can they be like that? How can they be so dumb? I ask with the
4The other side of Francis' inability to take it in is the fear of being taken in oneself, of being made a fool of. The risks associated with gullibility are part of the cultural air we breathe. (Who, after all, wants to be the minute's sucker?) But the risks of scepticism can be as serious-especially when our fear of being foolish leads us to renounce our own responsibility for decision-making, in favor of an authorityan expert-with whom we identify and from whom we allow ourselves to draw strength. and OtherStories(New York: Bantam, 1974), pp. 79-117. of Jack Orkney 5TheTemptation

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ReadingDoris Lessing 501 visitors, dismayed, frustrated. But then something odd happens, and I become aware that the smugness I am feeling is totally inappropriate because I recognize that I respond to situations analogous to the coming disaster in ways distressingly similar to the inhabitants'-not without caring, to be sure (which, it is suggested, is too simplified a description even for the response in the story) but without caring enough to do anything, with a sense of powerlessness and apathy which, when I read-about such feelings, I condemn. From this perspective, I see my complicity with the state of mind being exposed, and I am forced to ask, "How can I be like that?", a question which is stripped of all smugness, though wonder and discomfort
remain.

There is another response which is, perhaps, a variation of the second mentioned above, a transformation effected through recognizing myself in the inhabitants and, therefore, sympathizing with them. Then I can be annoyed with the visitors, with their smugness and lack of humor, with their obtuseness, their inability to get outside their assumptions, which proves to be as crippling (though not as selfdestructive) as the inhabitants' inability to get out of theirs. From this perspective, I find myself questioning the attitudes and methods of the narrators. Weren't there, for instance, better ways to warn the people than they came up with? The problems surrounding the sharing of knowledge, especially when the knowledge is unpleasant or unusual, are, as I have said, problems that Lessing and her characters face frequently. How do you get the message across? Noah did listen to God, but that was God, after all, and many others didn't listen even to him. Prophets are not usually remembered for their receptive audiences. The truth, for all its alleged beauty, let alone survival value, is frequently unwelcome. Reading about the visitors' wonder over the fact that the inhabitants' responses to new information depend upon the information coming from respected sources (pp. 96-97), I feel myself responding in contradictory ways. I hear myself saying, "Well, what's so strange about that? Why should we accept as equally likely reports coming from drugged teenagers and reports coming from sober, responsible adults?" But then, thinking about where sober, responsible adults have often gotten us, I ask myself on what grounds I respect the sources I do respect. I even begin to wonder whether we have time for the luxury of liking or respecting those from whom we are likely to receive some truth. Another reversal of perceptions occurs in regard to the report's position on the appropriate relationship between talk and action. The visitors' scorn for the conferences and congresses by which the inhabitants typically respond to crises is familiar to readers of Lessing (especially from "The Temptation of Jack Orkney," the most concentrated attack). As an academic, I acknowledge myself particularly vulnerable to the charge. And yet, when I remember that human beings are not constituted as the visitors are, that we do seem to need to prepare ourselves for action through talk, I withdraw from identification with visitors. When I read in their report, "We have even concluded that they feel that by stating a problem it becomes in some way nearer solution" (p. 101), after a brief guffaw of shared disbelief, "Well, isn't that ridiculous?", I hear myself asking, "Well, it does, doesn't it?" Once again, the story engages me in dialogue with myself. There are also times that I find the story funny, feel that it is meant to be funny, as much at the expense of the visitors as at the expense of the inhabitants-and this, despite the fact that everything the visitors say is true and that the inhabitants are

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"guilty" of all the obtuseness that they are accused of. This response catches me up again, since laughing at the visitors, even when they "deserve"to be laughed at is a way of discrediting them, a way perfectly in line with the techniques to be expected of the people they describe. "Report on the Threatened City," then, stimulates me to look at myself, to observe from a number of perspectives not ordinarily available how and why I do or do not take action. Reading the story, I find myself strung out along a high tension wire, connecting me on the one end with the citizens of the city, on the other end with the visitors. And, as I oscillate between "we" and "they," between identification with and rejection of my species, identification with and rejection of the visitors, I am forced into an active analysis of how in fact I have come to know, come to believe, what I do believe; forced also to acknowledge, as my own, attitudes and mental techniques I might otherwise be able to ignore.6 I hope it is obvious that the kind of reader I suggest Lessing's fiction can create (has created in me) is very different from the one Magie fears Lessing encourages. For I read Lessing not as a stimulus to think this or that but as a stimulus to thinking about thinking. And if Lessing forces us to entertain the possibility that the truth cannot be known, it is because this possibility is the precondition for radical questioning of what and how we know-of what we accept and reject as truth-and why. As Lynn Sukenick demonstrates, Lessing, throughout her early work, had been a firm friend of reason.7 In those later works where she is questioning where reason is leading us, the questioning is that of someone who has described herself as a rationalist, but who has had experiences-call them mystical, call them mental or spiritual or imaginative-which others have not had, and which she must incorporate within her models of knowing and being. It is these experiences also which make her sympathetic to those who are still further from the mainstream than she is. What makes her accessible to some of us who are closer is her refusal to forget where she has been and what it was like to have been there-a scrupulous fidelity to reporting the pain involved in knowledge. Furthermore, Lessing's skepticism about reason and rationality is in large part a response to the ways in which these concepts have been set up as talismen within the established intellectual community, the words emptied of meaning and used honorifically. Relevant here is Lessing's refusal to accept a simple condemnation of science. Her attitude toward those tendencies of thought and assumptions about acquiring and testing knowledge which we lump together as "science" is careful and perceptive. In The Four-Gated City, Martha, wondering where she can find help in
6It is interesting that one of the characteristics of Martha Quest's hypersensitive state (or, more accurately, of the way that state is narrated) as she works her way toward knowledge in The Four-Gated City (New York: Bantam, 1973) is the shifting among the points of view from which she observes what is happening to her. Even the motif of the human race-"them, us [being seen] as visitors from a space ship might see them...." (p. 506)-is present. Disgusted and grieved by the ugliness and insensitivity of the creatures she sees, she is sickened further by the recognition that a creature whose ugliness and terrified eyes she shuns is herself. She then moves beyond pain through the objective reporting of a space traveller and back again to an awareness of her own involvement. And as readers we are likewise forced to hover uncomfortably, revealed and vulnerable, between our identification with Martha and our identification with those she condemns (pp. 506-9). 7"Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessing's Fiction," Contemporary Literature,14 (1973), 515-35, passim.

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ReadingDoris Lessing 503

understanding the new capacities which she is discovering in herself, implicitly rejects the simplistic condemnation of science by refusing to accept its opposite: Where were the people who knew? It couldn't be possible that everyone in the world had been frightened into obedience. No. For one thing, there was Rosa Mellendip, a perfectly sensible woman, if bound by her packs of cards and her tea leaves. Yes, but that was not where what was needed could be found. That world was cosy, self-satisfied, stagnant, the mirror and shadowside of the orthodox scientific world which was also cosy, self-satisfied, stagnant. One was a rationalism which once had been useful, a patterning of habit-thoughts already outdated by what was happening on its own outposts. The other, formed by coming into existence in opposition to "science," and then having to maintain itself as a humoured and tolerated minority, had the same quality of lifelessness. (p. 511) Similarly, I do not regard the "Afterword or End-paper" to Briefing for a Descent into Hell (New York: Bantam, 1972) primarily as an attack on science or reason. For me, it is best read as an instruction to the reader, a suggestion about how to respond to what might be some of our responses to the novel. It is a request for tolerance, for suspension, not of disbelief, but of too quick judgment. Lessing does not scorn reason but the equation of reason with a closed logical system based upon noncontradiction (a system which is being challenged empiricially and theoretically within contemporary scientific thought itself)-this equation she does object to, not even guarantee the nondoes this within that out system working pointing contradiction it values: the two experts to whom Lessing sends information about her friend "whose senses were different from the normal person's" (p. 277) come up with conflicting analyses. To the extent that during our own century, faith in reason has become dangerously linked with increasing specialization, self-doubt, and reverence for the expert, to that extent that faith must be challenged. From my point of view, seeing Lessing primarily within the context of traditional romantic epistemology and ontology seriously distorts. It blunts our ability to recis new in Lessing's fiction. The need ognize what is significantly different-what and ability to distinguish the new from the old, what has never been from what is another version or variation, is a theme which reverberates throughout Lessing's work, gaining much of its intensity and poignancy from her awareness of (and terror before) the repetitive aspect of experience. But the possibility of the new is a possibility she defends, as Anna vehemently insists to her analyst in The GoldenNotebook: I don't want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the crossbow. It isn't true. There is something new in the world. And I don't want to hear, when I've had an encounter with some Mogul in the film industry, who wields the kind of power over men's minds that no emperor ever did, and I come back feeling trampled on all over, that Lesbia felt like that after an encounter with her wine-merchant. And I don't want to be told when I suddenly have a vision (though God knows it's hard enough to come by) of a life that isn't full of hatred and fear and envy and competition every minute of the night and day that this is simply the old dream of the golden age brought up to date...." "Isn't it?" she said, smiling. "No, because the dream of the golden age is a million times more powerful because it's both are possible. ... I possible, just as total destruction is possible. Probably because want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the (pp. 472-3) myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be new...." Whether Lessing is concerned with conscience or consciousness, she is concerned

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with development. Whether she is exploring the individual's response to a collective movement or to the possibilities and implications of extra-sensory perception, she is aware that what is involved are the very processes by which we observe and organize and respond to our mental worlds. Although she is fascinated by the ways in which we assimilate the various doctrines and dogmas and formulas which surround us, she is not concerned to offer us a doctrine of her own. She does not tell us what to believe; she forces us to examine how. Creative and responsible thinking has always resulted from a healthy tension between conservative and revolutionary elements in our own minds-between the making and breaking of connections, the shaping and shattering of contexts. This is the tension that Lessing's works stimulate. I think we see this most clearly, and use it most profitably, when we focus not on what the works mean but on what they make happen to us-in us-as we read.

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