Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook
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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. Ann
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writing as it is viewed in the novel. Like two balanced columns Anna and Saul display the kind of binary oppositions that Anna has deplored as a method of trying to understand the world: "Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love." (42). The contrasts between the two writers do, however, follow just such a set of parallel qualities and actions: sane and insane, female and male, European and American, committed and uncommitted, and so on. These are, of course, precisely the kinds of comparative modes that dominate much of traditional fiction--one of the reasons Anna deplores them. But, like any other form of writing, fiction based on such rigid distinctions has a place in The Golden Notebook. Its place is even more important than some of the others, however, because Saul Green comes to embody most of the tendencies--in life and in fiction--against which Anna is struggling.
Saul's central importance in the novel comes through most clearly when one considers the qualities of the fiction Anna wants to write and relates them to the qualities possessed by Saul and his writing. Saul, the exemplar modernist fiction, possesses none of the postmodern characteristics which, seemingly ana
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2753
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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