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Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, a novel about the process of subverting the traditional novel, is the embodiment of the new type of fiction envisioned by its protagonist. For the novelist Anna Wulf the problems of achieving authenticity in life and in fiction are inseparable. Her compulsive desire to write fiction is constantly frustrated by her inability to produce work that imposes order on a world that she sees as descending into chaos. Such a fiction will provide a new way of viewing the world but it cannot be achieved, she feels, because she cannot impose such order on her own life--the source material for this transcendent fiction. Anna fears that the inability to achieve authenticity in her own life--demonstrated by her inability to get an ordering grip on it--means that she will never be able to write this type of book. Lessing's novel, with its multiple layerings of fictional versions of Anna's life, is about the process through which the artist examines her own life--from a number of angles--and tries to see why each approach fails to transmute itself into the truthful fiction that will satisfy her. Ultimately, however, it is the rejection of traditionally ordered fiction and the production of a multiple, self-referential and chaotic text that produces fiction that is authentic and has the power to order.

Anna's quest is driven by two obvious, but deep, paradoxes: the desire to produce order out of chaos and the desire to produce truthful fiction. Anna laments, at the beginning of the Black Notebook, that she is unable to write "the only kind of novel that interests [her]: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life" (58). But she does not say that such books have been written before. It becomes clear that she is not aspiring to write a kind of book that she has already read. She declares, for example, that all the subjects for ...

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Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 16:42, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707839.html