LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/4. DORIS LESSING (1919)

● Born in Persia in 1919, and living in Southern Rhodesia until she was thirty, in 1949, when she came to England, Lessing can be said to reflect displacement in her work, especially as she wrote her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, before she left Africa. All her heroes are displaced in one way or another, though not always geographically. Some live in a political belief that does not suit them (The Good Terrorist), others in a time they reject (taking refuge in Victorianism, for instance, in The Fifth Child), or in a society they cannot change (The Golden Notebook). From displacement to dystopia there is one short step. Lessing makes it when she starts imagining a future world full of teenage violence (The Fifth Child; Ben, in the World) and a crisis of civilization (The Memoirs of a Survivor). Wherever she is, whatever world she inhabits, whether real or imaginary, Lessing is not at ease. She is restless by definition. Her books are restless, inquisitive, migrating from world to world. They are written by an eternally displaced mind, in search of more and more pretexts for minute dissection and analysis.

● When Ulysses and The Waste Land were published, in 1922, Lessing was only three. She wrote her first novel in 1939, when whatever devices Joyce and Eliot had discovered had started to wane. Lessing is in fact a reaction to experimentalism. She has the sharp feeling that, if the novel is to survive, it must go back to narrative at once. She is totally aware that the author stands to gain nothing by withdrawing from his text, so she boldly steps on stage and speaks in the first person. When she speaks in the third person she is never afraid of omniscience. In short, she is not afraid of anything, whether the devices are well-known or of her own concoction. She is against by definition, but feels free to make ample use of whatever comes her way.

● If Joyce, Woolf, Eliot planned their fragmentariness, Lessing’s piecemeal narrative flows just like life, surprising both author and reader. She does not have an elaborate plan for the arrangement of incidents, the plot grows out of heaps of detail that come naturally. The final impression is one of life witnessed as it goes by.

● Lessing’s novels hardly ever end. They are hesitant as to where they should stop, they drift into inconclusiveness. We seem to leave the characters and plot just for a short break, only to return and reread with new curiosity, renewed participation. They are endless novels in the traditional way. Just like the other Desperadoes, she devises her own plot, which advances at the pace of a consciousness recording or remembering, and which has no intention of desisting as long as the creative mind can continue the game. It may be improper to call Lessing’s novels games, as she is very much in earnest in everything she writes, and that may be the real source of her stubbornness to go on, even beyond the last page, in the reader’s mind.

● Lessing’s characters, even when most rational, seem on the verge of insanity. Intensity damages their safety, and their experiences are very intense. Confusion is carried to its utmost limits. The world outside seems to attack the inner being, bewildering it with lack of meaning, of direction, and mainly with hopelessness. Lessing’s women, since they are usually the filtering conscience, never fear the worst, but never expect the best, either. They live the intensity of the day. When their days gather in years of memories, they panic. Ageing and death are taboo words for this vital author.

● As with other Desperado heroes, Lessing’s women have a laziness of body that does not seem to keep up with their alert mind. We never get to know much about their physical appearance. The main hero, who is usually the only important one, can be anybody, can look like any of us. This physical indeterminacy broadens this hero’s appeal. We can imagine this character as we please. The peace of the body, awkward as it may seem at times (because of the lack of beauty, guilty neglect), is frantically opposed by the agitation of the mind. Out of the precipice between the two, the ghost of unhappiness rises like a cloud that darkens all moments. The beauty of what Lessing writes does not rely on relaxed enjoyment of the moment (or of the text), but on the pang of loss. The characters lose everything – time, hope, love, beauty, peace, happiness – and learn to enjoy their loss. They make a victory out of defeat. They contradict the traditional. closed, whole hero, who ceases to exist on the last page of a book. Lessing’s heroines haunt us forever with their unfulfilled lives.

● There is no love lost between the author and her heroines. Lessing is not a compassionate writer. She records faithfully, yet not sympathetically. The eye of the novelist is deliberately cold. The reason might be found in the autobiographical source of her narratives, and in the fact that she hates self-pity. Most Desperadoes avoid sentimentality, even when they fall in love with their heroes, as Ishiguro does with his butler, painter, pianist. Lessing feels she is not called upon to write in appreciation or to show emotion for her imaginary beings. She has a critical eye that sees everything and forgives nothing. Her scolding mood makes her characters even more vulnerable, and the reader is overwhelmed with apprehension. Apprehensive reading is what she gets in exchange for her tense writing.

● Lessing loves stories and makes them up continually. She does not escape into lyricism like the stream of consciousness writers. Her narrative is vigorous and bushy. She writes as she lives, tortuously, in complicated sequences, defying the chronological causality past-present-future. This is the inheritance of the stream of consciousness, but she takes it even farther. She smashes the deliberate
non-chronology by simply ignoring the idea of evolution. Inner life does not grow. It travels. The departure and destination do not matter in the least. Every book is a spiritual pilgrimage. Life is a lonely trip, but one full of colourful incidents, worth retelling.

● The style of Lessing’s novels is not choosy, delicate or adorned. She tells her stories bluntly, in sentences that gasp with the quickness of thought. She does not linger inside a phrase to make it more appealing. The words have to be apt. Lessing never courts language for her effects.

● Lessing claims in an interview that she is no feminist. Her heroes are all women, but they are strong and defy themselves. Their freedom from men is burdened with a painful bondage to ageing, solitude, confusion. They may be free from the convention of marriage, but they are slaves to life. The beauty of Lessing’s women is their indomitable determination to stand up. Love comes and goes – love interest is secondary, but is there, even when concealed – yet awareness of oneself builds constantly, no matter who is next to the heroine or if there is anyone at all. Most often than not, she is heroically alone.

● Political belief plays an important part in Lessing’s fiction. She is rather concerned with misbelief, and she remonstrates with her heroines indirectly, for their mistaken beliefs. During her youth in Africa, Lessing confesses to having been a communist. She does not repent. She merely changes her mind. Anna Wulf does the same. Alice does not even stop to think what or if she believes in anything. Although she does write dystopias, Lessing does not provide a political background. Her negative view overlooks politics, and delves into human nature. Politics is a stage long left behind, which the author will not consider any longer. When she does, she is disgusted with former involvement. Wrong causes take up too much of our lives, Doris Lessing seems to say.

● Lessing’s attitude to communism, like all Desperadoes’, is unsympathetic. She does not explain, she does not complain. She notices the drawbacks that are accessible to her from the outside: the lies, the human failures. She does not care to envisage the fall of communism, or to follow anyone inside the system. She merely discredits it thoroughly.

● Desperado irony is Doris Lessing’s forte. Cold irony, which deconstructs a character into bits and shows why he cannot function right. This irony is, paradoxically, tragic. It examines all beings under the microscope. They all have deformities, are partly, at least, heartily disapproved of. Some people deserve their sad fate (Molly’s son, Alice), others are unaware of what they did wrong. In both cases, the writer dissects them carefully and shows us the defect. She watches her heroes fail and enjoys the fall. She knows from the very beginning there is going to be a fall, and makes her readers anticipate it. Anticipation of disaster is Lessing’s favourite mood.

● As is the case of all Desperadoes, the relationship parents-children is at least awkward, if mentioned at all, and the idea of a family is discredited. Ishiguro discards the family feeling with sadness, Barnes with irony, Lodge with melancholy humour, Lessing with bitterness. Families are made to be broken. We see them breaking (The Fifth Child), or find them broken (The Golden Notebook). Lessing’s heroes need to be free from matrimony, though not from emotional bonds, which they desperately cling to. Women leave or are left by their husbands with no regret whatever. Children leave their parents, become estranged with cruelty, hating the family that gave them an unhappy childhood, although Lessing makes it pretty obvious that any growing up is a misadventure, and it is not the fault of the family. She seems to be unable to convince herself of that, because she keeps blaming parents for the children’s malformations of the soul.

● The diary-like quality of the Desperado text is extremely obvious with Doris Lessing. The stream of consciousness writers meant to come closer to life in their books, by breaking tradition and deliberately devising a new technique. Lessing takes that intention a significant step further: she pretends there is no technique. She conceals all conventions and pretends she is using none. She resorts to an artful simplicity. She no longer uses the subconscious to order her novels, she no longer withdraws from the text in order to allow the mind of the hero to reach us. She claims she has a right to disorder, and does not need the theory of subconscious rememoration to support her deliberate divagations, which have become the substance of writing. She does not care about our perception of the thoughts she has, she means to make us face life, so she comes back to the text and is not ashamed to state flatly: I am here, I am true, I am myself. If she is simple, so is the text. But, frankly speaking, like any Desperado, again, simplicity could not be farther away from her. She is a web of complications. A maze of thoughts. New thoughts and approaches, but a maze nevertheless.

● Motherhood is a guilty theme with Lessing. Mothers are no happier than their children. One of them breeds a monster, another a child who tries to commit suicide, a third is thoroughly hated by Martha Quest. Whether this somber view of mothers has autobiographical reasons or not is hard to speculate. We do get a possible idea from the first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, Under My Skin. Her own parents were distant and she was an isolated, distant child. Later on she left two children for the sake of communism, or in the process of being a communist, which she later on realized had been a mistake. There is never any tenderness where mothers and children are concerned. Anna Wulf tries and fails; her daughter prefers going to a boarding school and put an end to her mother’s emotional reliance on her. On the whole, the relationship is always dry and bitter.

● The lonely illusion of love is the major theme of The Golden Notebook, but not many other novels analyse it that cruelly and carefully. In most texts by Lessing, in most Desperado texts, love is taken for granted and shyly left unexpressed. We have to guess its presence in Ishiguro, Barnes, Gray, Swift. Love interest has not disappeared, as Virginia Woolf suggested should happen. Woolf herself could not do without it. What has happened is that plots no longer focus on (un)happy endings in marriage or separation. Matrimony is no longer the pattern, as in Austen, for instance. Love is no longer a source of stream of consciousness interior monologues, either. Love is a part of life, not all of it, so it cannot be the star of the book. It shares the plot with many other themes, from politics to a philosophy on life. Silent, reticent and awkward, love interest brings Desperado books closer to the texture of real life, while it used to take Victorian novels farther away from it. Consequently, it does not need to be perfect. Quite the reverse, the more unfulfilled, the more painful, the better. Lessing’s Anna Wulf and Ishiguro’s butler are equally denied love. It turns out that love denied is a much more appealing and impressive asset than love fulfilled. Lessing, actually, is very good at denying love.

● We learn from Lessing, as from all Desperadoes, the lesson of hazard. The narrative is not a coherent statement. It is a source of disarray, just like everyday life. We have many stories in one, yet few meaningful incidents, few stages in view of a traditional plot. Moments keep accumulating till the time comes for the book to end. The decision of ending the book looks arbitrary to the reader. It would not have made any difference if the book had continued for a few more pages, as nothing would have been resolved anyway. Life happens and Lessing hates to impose a pattern on it.

● Doris Lessing creates her own reader, who is totally different from the reader of her predecessors, whether traditional or experimentalist. She needs a disabused reader, who can take anything, who never complains yet never hopes, who, in short, can keep up with her. A reader for whom no surprise can rise again from whatever literary device. A reader so used to literature that he is ready to mistake it for life. Not life assimilated to the book, but the book re-integrated into life. This is, in the end Lessing’s, and all the Desperadoes’, lesson: read as if you were living. Literature is not the faithful mirror of life. It is life.

● Subconscious violence finding good soil in communist theory is a typical Desperado idea, present in dystopias, comical trips to East European countries, novels about the iron curtain (Rates of Exchange, Honey for the Bears, The Long Shadows, The Porcupine, The Good Terrorist). Lessing analyses the prolonged childhood of the mind in the case of primitive beings embracing totalitarian ideas. The heroes are dehumanized. Hideous ideas rise out of their apparently harmless, naive heads. They imitate the communist behaviour and language (using ‘comrade’ and other Stalinist slogans), start hating the capitalist society that feeds them, go to meetings, marches, demonstrations, place bombs, even get killed inadvertently. From communisn to terrorism (IRA) there is one small step. The persons involved are not only dehumanized, but also different from the vast majority: they live in ‘squats’, some are homosexual, one is a hysterical female who gets killed by her own bomb, they steal from the rich, thinking they are entitled to everything. This concern with an explanation of violence, whether in children or childish adults, is a major Desperado concern.

● Irony and sarcasm reveal absurd elements of life, whether it is foolish belief in communism when you are lucky enough to have been born outside it, or other forms of inadaptability. Lessing saves her sarcasm for all the kinds of hatred in The Good Terrorist, from private, to social and political. The author even handles her words with hatred, and hates her characters, too. She allows the reader no refuge from hatred, either. The heroes are estranged from their own lives because of their
all-pervading hatred. They become dangerous atoms of violence, and the warning implied in Lessing’s sarcasm is: Stay away from utopias.

● Failure is an obsession of the Desperado hero, who cannot escape it. Each fails in his own way. Lessing’s heroines fail emotionally (they fail to find or keep love) and in their political belief (they are naively trapped by communism). Lessing is a recorder of human failure. Her characters undergo a private ordeal. Her work is, most of it, a primary on how to ruin a life. Strong yet not optimistic, her personality steals into her heroes, lending a few autobiographical data here, an emotion there. This sensibility stifles the heroes and leaves them no choice but to head for disaster. The inconclusiveness of her novels is not liberating, as it is in Gray, Ishiguro, Swift. It is oppressive, discouraging. Yet, these dark novels have a halo of energy, a fearlessness that teaches the reader how to survive the worst, never to give in.

● Desperadoes are uncomfortable novelists, and Doris Lessing is preeminently so. In all her books, she teaches her readers that dystopia is in fact inside themselves, which means they will never be able to escape it. Whether communism, terrorism or the ‘goblin children,’ darkness is the lot of human beings. It is amazing how, after feeding us on despair and hatred, Lessing manages to make us feel so very much alive. Even though uncomfortably so. Faced with characters who brim over with emotion but deny their own sentimentality, who are very much in earnest but react with irony or self-hatred, the reader is confused and feels lost.

● Apparently, Desperadoes are pure realists. Everything they write about is true, the hero lays bare his own life, we could not doubt it. We go along, details start to accumulate, suddenly nothing makes sense, yet everything is a hundred percent true: we are trapped in verisimilitude. Martha Quest is such a narrative that claims to be as commonplace as narratives can get. Martha resents her parents, the man she marries, and even herself. Lessing predetermines her to lose her way and Martha does so conscientiously. Short of a miracle – which always takes place at the end of a Lessing volume – she may cease to exist. The novel narrates continuously, yet we find it hard to retell what happens. This is the secret of the Desperado vanishing plot. Everything happens, yet the plot is void. Read by, the novel says. All life is a journey, and literature an imperfect window. Behind which Doris Lessing will not wave to us.