NEW MAN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES (ISSN: )

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Jemima Mathews
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1 3 DORIS LESSING S THE GOLDEN NOTE BOOK: NEGOTIATING INTEGRATION. Rajkumar Mandal (Research Scholar,Kumaun University, Nainital) & Dr,Anupama Tewari, ( Associate Prof & HOD of English Ranikhet Govt. PG, College,Almora) ( Abstract-The tale of breakdown and integration that the book The Golden Note Book tells makes it one of the best novels in English literature. It has been the purpose of his article to study the gradual progress of this integration. These four notebooks cover a period of seven years, The notebooks contain her thought about the relationship of the art to the artist, between art and society, between art and morality etc. and are scattered throughout the novel. They, more than anything else, highlight her self-critical mind and in the end enable her to make an integrated person of herself.) Key Words- integration, art, morality, self-critical) According to many critics this is the most important work of Lessing. One of the reasons for this view is that she shows herself to be much concerned over like a very conscious artist, the form of this novel. She is pre-occupied with not only form but the other aspect of the novel as well, as she makes clear in the preface to the edition which was published after she got the novel prize for literature in She considered the structure of the novel to be of greater importance then its other aspects since she laid so much stress upon it: The shape of this novel is as follows: There is a skeleton or frame called free women which is a conventional short novel, About 60,000 words long and which could stand by itself. But it is divided into five sections and separated by stages of the four notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue (TGNB7.) The protagonist is a woman named Anna Wulf. It is she who keeps the four notebooks and in the intervals between them her story is recounted in the third person. The notebooks themselves are like diaries kept by her so they are written in the first person, this is a technique that dickens had used for the first time in his novel Bleak House Dickens is a favorite novelist of Lessing and it is natural that she would make use of this technique. It is an attractive technique and she has made most competent and effective use of it in The Golden Notebook It might puzzle the reader as to why Anna should keep not one but four notebooks. Lessing tells us in the preface to the novel: 20

2 She keeps four and not one because as she recognize, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness, of breakdown. Pressures, inner and outer, end the Notebooks. (TGNB7) Anna herself is a writer and that is why she is so concerned about the form. The writer, Lessing, had wanted the main character of one of her novels to be an artist of some sort, who had a bloc within her a block that prevented her from expressing herself. So Anna has this block and so far has not published anything. This article is a study in her progressive integration. The quotation given above makes use of the word breakdown and here is the idea of a mental bloc. This would make one suppose that Anna is not perhaps a stable character emotionally and this is true. She is not exactly mad, definitely an unstable person. For example, she cannot put all her thoughts neatly in one notebook but keeps four them, for her different moods. These four notebooks cover a period of seven years, The notebooks contain her thought about the relationship of the art to the artist, between art and society, between art and morality etc. and are scattered throughout the novel. They, more than anything else, highlight her selfcritical mind and in the end enable her to make an integrated person of herself: After twenty years living in and around the left which means twenty years of pre-occupation with the question of morality in art, that s all I m saying is in fact, that the human person, that unique flame, is so scared to me, that everything else becomes unimportant. Is that what I am saying? and if so, what does it mean? (TGNB84) This question, this spirit of self analysis is what will help her integrate herself. But one feels that this is the feature of her character that is acting as a bloc to her writing. If one is continually asking oneself questions then one cannot create art. In the first free woman section (there are four of them) she is sharing is flat in London with a friend Molly and both of them have regular sittings with a psychiatrist, Mrs. Marks Lessing shows her feminine learning here in that she has made this person a woman where as usually at that time they were males. She helps Anna to achieve an integrated personality she has to travel a long way before she finally achieves it. The very first of the dualities that war in her personality and which she has to resolve is the conflict between the traditional and the modern woman. In the first of the notebooks, which start in 1950 we have Anna trying to lead an independent life, having rejected all the conventional ideas of womanhood. There are other dualities as well. There is first of all and one of the most important, the dualism between creative native and cynicism as an artist. There is next the dualism as a unavoidable morality. There are many other dualism and conflicts. One has to face the dualism between an isolated individual and a social being. There is also a quite uncommon dualism in her mind between what Anna calls Joy- in - destruction and Joy- in spite and generosity and helpfulness. All these dualisms go to make 21

3 a complex personality and seem to be tearing her apart so that she has to have regular sessions in psychiatry. Anna adopts several means to tackle these dualisms. First of all there are her psychiatric sessions. The fact that she recognizes the need for it is itself a positive factor. Then there are the confessional notebooks and later in the book a fit of madness which, according to the author, is nothing less than a journey into her psyche. The last part of the blue notebook and the golden notebook which is separate from all the others bring all these conflicts together in mixture of events that are real as well as imaginary, dreams and hallucinations. After all this is over she is finally able to think up plot and write or at least think of writing it down. The plot is anything but realistic. This is how she describes it: A woman, appalled by her capacity for surrendering herself to a man, determines to free herself. She determinedly takes two lovers the two men become instinctively aware of each other s existence; one, Jealous, falls in love with her seriously; the other becomes cool and guarded... She announces to both men that now she has become thoroughly emancipated, she has at last achieved the ideal of full sexual and emotional pleasure with two men at once. (TGNB532) The situation ultimate become farcical, because the man she loves and who loves her leaves her and she is left finally with: The man she does not love and who does not love her, exchanging intelligent psychological conversation. (TGNB532) Anna, however bizarre the plot is, calls it comic and ironic and this proves that she has reached integration, since she can laugh at herself. But the fact that finally proves that she has achieved a settled personality is her decision that she will take a job as marriage counselor with a doctor and also do educational work. She explains it to Molly with whom she is sharing a flat from the beginning of the novel. It is interesting to see how, stage by stage, Lessing brings her to this point. It has been already mentioned that Anna has to resolve certain conflicts within herself. The first of them is between tradition and modernity in a woman. This is seen the best in the first of the tallow notebooks. It has the form of a novel and the name The Shadow of the Third. The main character Ella is having an affair with a married man. She is a thoroughly feministic modern woman, yet when the question of a baby comes up she reacts in a conventional manner: 22

4 At which Ella cries out, My God, Paul, if at any time during the last five years, you d asked me to have a baby I d have been so happy (TGNB198) But then gradually her personality starts to disintegrate. So also does Anna s own. In the blue notebooks Anna is shown as having established perfect rapport with her male partner, achieved true equality. This is the way Anna resolves the conflict between tradition and modernity. The next topic is idealism. It is to be seen in the Free Women sections as well as in the notebooks. Anna is a rather pessimistic person. Fate, to her mind, always leads to misery, in her own personal life as well as in humanity in general. The blue notebook is an introspective one: People know they are in a society dead or dying. They work and despise their work and so freeze themselves. They love, but know that it s a half love or a twisted love and so they freeze themselves. (TGNB478) Anna here has the same dark vision of the world that Keats gives in the third stanza of his Ode to Nightingale. There is no glimmer of hope there. Keats does not find any consolation in love just like Anna: Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden eyed despairs. Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow. (Howlings167-8) Anna knows that she will have to conquer this dark attitude to the world in order to have a wellintegrated personality. In the section entitled The Golden Notebook she has partially achieved it at the end, she talks about it to her friend and lover Saul, using the image of a group of people who are pushing a boulder up a hill. She wants to be among the boulder pushers. Lessing or Anna has here adapted the old Greek myth of Sisyphus continual striving and failing continually. But in the Greek myth Sisyphus was being punished for a crime. Lessing has interpreted it differently. She has given it a positive meaning. The mountain stands for human stupidity but she does not specify what the boulder signifies, perhaps hope or progress or knowledge. Beside, the story implies that there is a slow but steady progress in the efforts of the people pushing the boulder. It is a very fine achievement of Lessing to have token a pessimistic story, given it a positive meaning and integrated it within the character in such a significant way. Next there is the dualism between the individual and the collective. In order to deal with this dualism Lessing takes on the communist party group Anna has joined. Everything is done collectively here and the description goes on, page after page, describing a communal life, a collective endeavour undertaken willingly by a whole group. But it does not last. Disillusion with communism, she leaves the party. This dualism is left inconclusive: 23

5 And now what? Russia s in the doghouse and what price the comrades now? Most of them having nervous breakdowns... The point is, said Anna that socialism is in the doldrums in this country And everywhere else. (TGNB40) It was this realization that brought nervous breakdown in Anna. So that she needed psychiatric treatment. It was from this conviction that the country was not going to be saved by socialism that she had to emerge. In the final episodes of the book, when her personality has disintegrated into madness that she has an odd experience. She feels, on one hand, as though her personality has disintegrated but gains, all the same, a glimpse of an underlying solidarity in which the individual merges with the collective. In the treatment she undergoes, she has many dreams. She is able to externalize her dream, see it embodied in another person and established kinship with it. This is no mean achievement for a schizophrenic personality. She is on the way to integration. There is another dualism in her. She is conscious of injustice and cruelty at the very base of life. This is what she calls Joy-in-life or Joy-in-destruction. She makes it more complex by balancing it against generosity on one hand, and the creative impulse on the other. She has to recognize the existence of these elements within herself and this is what she does in analyzing the dream of which she is afraid. She has another long dream that helps in her integration. It is a long dream and in it is to be found the alliance of the two opposite principles of creativity and destruction. She distinguishes between unhealthy and healthy art. Her own view is not the conventional one and in the end she is left with nothing: neither her own work nor that of others. At this time she is in great mental trouble, and has many sessions with her psychiatrist. When she comes back to ordinary consciousness she is at last ready to start writing about her gradual integration in her golden notebook. By the time she is capable of writing in it she has realized that she had been leading the life of a madwoman, a schizophrenic during the last few months and her realization of this wins half the battle. Now she has the idea of writing a novel comic and ironic which has already been mentioned before. She describes the highly feministic and completely immoral and unrealistic plot. It says much for Anna s integration that this hypothetical novel is not to be taken seriously, for it is to be a comic novel. But when he tells the story to soul and he urges her to write it down it appears that she cannot: I can t write that short story or any other because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulder and stops me. (TGNB553) This someone is nobody in real life, but metaphorical. She is suffering pangs of conscience for not taking action about the injustice in the world. But this is all the more effective evidence of an integrated personality the fact that she is so conscious about injustice that she is prevented from writing. 24

6 Lessing makes the two themes of the novel very clear in the preface. She was very concerned over the theme as well as the form this novel. The first theme of the book is that of breakdown and the second of unification. She tells us that this is to be found in the golden notebook which is the last one to be kept by Anna. But prior to this theme of unity comes the one of breakdown of fragmentation. She explains it thus:... in the inner Golden notebook things have come together, the division have broken down, there is formlessness with the end of fragmentation the triumph of the second theme, which is that of unity (TGNB7) The breakdown means the breakdown of individual personalities. But then, as is apparent in The Four Gated City published later schizophrenia does not, according to her, lead to insanity but a further development of the human psyche, she explains it by giving the example of Anna and Saul, and sums up: This theme of breakdown that sometimes when people Crack up is a way of self-healing, of the inner self s dismissing of false dichotomies and divisions. (TGNB8) At the end of the book Anna is well-integrated. What is more, she is truly free independent not only of her male partners but of her female friends also. This is the truly feministic ideal not that she is equal with men but that she is free of them at together. Theme and characterization and form have all three merged here inextricably. Lessing wanted the form itself to suggest a split personality. So she split the novel up into several parts, the Free Women sections and the several notebooks. (Abbreviation used for The Golden Notebook as TGNB) Works Cited Howlings, Norman, ed., A Keats selection. Macmillan, New York, Lessing Doris. The Golden Notebook, Harper Perennial. New York

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