Writing at a Loss: Nation and Nuclearism in the Twentieth-Century

English Novel

by

Sarah Henstra

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of English

University o f Toronto

© Copyright by Sarah Henstra (2002)

Abstract

Cold War fears of nuclear destruction

that culminated in England in the mid 1980s, which generated a collective

sense o f being

bereft o f a future. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962), .. stage[s]

the melancholia o f a future cut short through a prophetic voice that

seeks relief in storytelling

p 212

The Golden Notebook's protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a blocked writer who

parses her experience into a series of notebooks in an attempt to impose order on

what she perceives as mushrooming internal and societal chaos. The black

notebook describes the events in Africa that served as material for the very

successful novel she did write; the yellow notebook is a draft of another work entitled

The Shadow of the Third: the blue notebook records psychological and emotional

aspects of Anna's life; the red notebook pertains to Anna's (estranged) relationship

with the Communist Party. But the organizational strategy backfires: Anna becomes

more and more fragmented, until she suffers a complete breakdown and the

contents of the notebooks bleed into one another.

The golden notebook, as the product of this thematic and structural fusion, is

correspondingly impressionistic, fluid, and disorienting. The novel suggests both the

danger of fragmenting life into categories and the need to acquiesce to a level of

fragmentation and chaos, particularly as regards the humanist myth of "self' in an

age

213

when de-centered subjectivity is the norm.

But Anna's writer's block is a symptom of more than too rigid a view of herself

as author. The reasons she is unable, and refuses, to write another novel are so

complicated and deep-seated that their articulation requires all … pages of the novel

and even then does not "cure" her of the problem. The reason most immediately

apparent to the reader is Anna’s fear of what she perceives as increasingly

imminent, large-scale doom. She tells her psychoanalyst, Mrs. Marks, "It seems to

me that ever since I can remember anything the real thing that has been happening

in the world was death and destruction. It seems to me it is stronger than life" (216

instead of 237). Anna's persona in the yellow notebook, Ella, is haunted by "a vision

of some dark, impersonal destructive force that worked at the roots of life and that

expressed itself in war and cruelty and violence" (178 instead of 195). "On the

surface everything’s fine," she explains, "all quiet and tame and suburban. But

underneath it's poisonous" (178 instead of 196). The novel broaches again and

again this theme of surface normality versus underlying, increasing torment, and

Anna's comment about the role of art in this situation also tells us something about

the project of The Golden Notebook itself: "Art from the West becomes more and

more a shriek of torment recording pain. Pain is becoming our deepest reality" (344).

This "deepest reality" stifles Anna's creativity and spurs her breakdown not because

she cannot handle what she feels is the truth, but because the society around her

seems

214

schizophrenically glib about the threat. She creates a personal gallery of

horrors from news clippings that exemplify how the concept of atomic war is

becoming mundane, even popular, as in the case of a hairdresser's 1950 description

of what he calls his "HBomb Style": "the 'H' is for peroxide of hydrogen, used for

colouring. The hair is dressed to rise in waves as from a bomb-burst, at the nape of

the neck" (219 - 222 instead of 241). To Anna this self-delusion is horrifying and

perverse, more reason for her to take literally Einstein's warning: "There emerges,

more and more distinctly, the spectre of general annihilation" (222 instead of 245).

…"I don't want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total

annihilation, because o f the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the

cross-bow. It isn't true. There is something new in the world" (415 instead of 459).

This conviction compels her to reject conventions of storytelling which, by simply

talking about nuclear war, would automatically domesticate it.

... The inability of novelistic conventions to deal with nuclear dread is

symptomatic of a larger, ideological failure in society.

215

Society's inability to come to grips with, or even to see clearly, the extremes of

nuclearism affects day-to-day existence in The Golden Notebook as much as it

curtails the future. … In the story’s second line

216

Anna tells her friend Molly, "The point is [ ...] that as far as I can see,

everything's cracking up" (25). By "everything" Anna means both society and the

individual…In an interview Lessing is explicit about the connection between the

internal, psychological fragmentation and the breakdown o f social stability under the

nuclear threat: "I feel as if the Bomb has gone off inside myself, and in people

around me. That's what I mean by the cracking up.

221

In the last entries of the individual notebooks, and in the golden notebook

itself, Anna experiences a fusion of all the conflicting parts o f her life. This fusion, as

Lessing writes it, is non-linear, fragmented, and repetitive... This section revisits and

revises events that have taken place throughout the novel—this time highlighting

their fictitiousness, their manipulation in memory by Anna's desires and regrets. The

golden notebook is an excellent example of performative narration, in that it recites

the "facts" in order to highlight how the recitation itself effectively creates and re-

creates these facts.

225

…at the end of the golden notebook, Anna describes [a] .. kind of irony, one

that is unavoidable if she is to return to everyday life from a place of melancholic

silence where "words dissolve":

But once having been there, there's a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the

shoulders, and it's not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or

wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It's a question of bowing to it, so

to speak, with a kind o f courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know

you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don't we? (549 instead of

609-10)

…

This intentional backgrounding of dread happens only after Anna has

deconstructed the loss, dwelt in it, and allowed it to swallow her completely; at no

point are we asked to believe she has gotten over it because she closes the door on

it. And The Golden Notebook's final pages do create the impression of a "terrible

shrug of the shoulders" as Anna carries on with finding another flat and getting a job

…While she resists one kind of irony as defeatist and crippling, another, perhaps

deeper irony proves to be necessary to existence: to live as though death wasn't

around the comer, to speak as though words weren't futile and meaningless. While

all living and speaking calls for this dissimulation, Lessing's prose itself

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leaves the sleight imperfect, letting the mechanisms of compromise and cost

show through. Irony, for Anna and for the reader, arises in being forced to bear in

mind what is set aside in the name of normalcy rather than being allowed to forget it.

… it spells out the catastrophic outcome of carrying on as usual, while at the same

time being forced, in order to be legible at all, to agree to the terms of "usual"

narrative. .. in a culture of blindness, irony is the only alternative to silence.

…The Golden Notebook. The notebooks compress and suspend narrative

time, as the events in Anna's life are redoubled, split, dreamt, "fictionalized" (as

Ella's), interrupted by heavy

227

black lines, and re-lived differently (as in the revisions from the golden

notebook to "Free Women 5"). Past and future bleed into present in the novel, so

that the reader experiences crisis and paralysis at once. The volubility and vastness

of the narrative imply that there is always another version of events left outstanding

and never a final or finished story.