A Small Personal Voice. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ responsibility for his fellows and his brotherhood. Art from the West becomes more and more a shriek of torment recording pain. Pain is becoming our deepest reality …” I have been saying something like this. About three months ago, in the middle of this lecture, I began to stammer and couldn’t finish …’

      Anna’s stammer was because she was evading something. Once a pressure or a current has started, there is no way of avoiding it: there was no way of not being intensely subjective: it was, if you like, the writer’s task for that time. You couldn’t ignore it: you couldn’t write a book about the building of a bridge or a dam and not develop the mind and feelings of the people who built it. (You think this is a caricature? – Not at all. This either/or is at the heart of literary criticism in communist countries at this moment.) At last I understood that the way over, or through, this dilemma, the unease at writing about ‘petty personal problems,’ was to recognize that nothing is personal in the sense that it is uniquely one’s own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions – and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas – can’t be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of ‘subjectivity,’ that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvellous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personal, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, transforming a private experience – or so you think of it when still a child, ‘I am falling in love,’ ‘I am feeling this or that emotion, or thinking that or the other thought’ – into something much larger: growing up is after all only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

      Another idea was that if the book were shaped in the right way it would make its own comment about the conventional novel: the debate about the novel has been going on since the novel was born, and is not, as one would imagine from reading contemporary academics, something recent. To put the short novel Free Women as a summary and condensation of all that mass of material, was to say something about the conventional novel, another way of describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped.’

      But my major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

      As I have said, this was not noticed.

      One reason for this is that the book is more in the European tradition than the English tradition of the novel. Or rather, in the English tradition as viewed at the moment. The English novel after all does include Clarissa and Tristram Shandy, The Tragic Comedians – and Joseph Conrad.

      But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: ‘Of course I know nothing about German literature.’ It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

      As for the rest – well, it is no accident that I got intelligent criticism from people who were, or who had been, marxists. They saw what I was trying to do. This is because marxism looks at things as a whole and in relation to each other – or tries to, but its limitations are not the point for the moment. A person who has been influenced by marxism takes it for granted that an event in Siberia will affect one in Botswana. I think it is possible that marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.

      This business of seeing what I was trying to do – it brings me to the critics, and the danger of evoking a yawn. This sad bickering between writers and critics, playwrights and critics: the public have got so used to it they think, as of quarrelling children: ‘Ah yes, dear little things, they are at it again.’ Or: ‘You writers get all that praise, or if not praise, at least all that attention – so why are you so perennially wounded?’ And the public are quite right. For reasons I won’t go into here, early and valuable experiences in my writing life gave me a sense of perspective about critics and reviewers; but over this novel, The Golden Notebook, I lost it: I thought that for the most part the criticism was too silly to be true. Recovering balance, I understood the problem. It is that writers are looking to the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself who has seen what you are reaching for, and who judges you only by whether you have matched up to your aim or not. I have never yet met a writer who, faced at last with that rare being, a real critic, doesn’t lose all paranoia and become gratefully attentive – he has found what he thinks he needs. But what he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.

      It is not possible for reviewers and critics to provide what they purport to provide – and for which writers so ridiculously and childishly yearn.

      This is because the critics are not educated for it; their training is in the opposite direction.

      It starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he arrives at school. It starts with marks, rewards, ‘places,’ ‘streams,’ stars – and still in many places, stripes. This horserace mentality, the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to ‘Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z has shown himself as better than Writer A.’ From the very beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms of comparison, of success, and of failure. It is a weeding-out system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my belief – though this is not the place to develop this – that the talents every child has, regardless of his official ‘I.Q.’, could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

      The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgement. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply.

      As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

      These СКАЧАТЬ