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Tuesday, November 03, 2009
The Golden Notebook and the Sex War
Before I begin my griping on what some may find to be a point unrelated to the novel itself, let me say that The Golden Notebook is astonishing on every level; I have read few novels which strike me both emotionally and intellectually with equal force. Which is not to say that it is either a “novel of ideas” or a “novel of emotions"—if I were to think of a book I would feel almost comfortable calling “a pure novel” (a term which I inveterately distrust), this would be it. I certainly don’t guarantee its appeal to all audiences—I imagine the repetitious dilations on the nature of activity within the Communist Party or among socialists will seem merely repetitious to some, and the swirling cast of deficient men provoked more than a few sighs of frustration from me—but I imagine there will be some readers who, like me, will like it a lot.
Onto the gripe.
In her 1971 introduction, Lessing says [I’m going to skip around a bit in the introduction, but it will be better, I think, just to get all the quotes I want together now rather than spread them out over a number of paragraphs]:
[T]he book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as by hostile ones, as being about the sex war, or was claimed by women as a useful weapon in the sex war… But this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation… Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallisation of information in society which has not yet taken place. This book was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movements already existed… I was so immersed in writing this book, that I didn’t think about how it might be received… Emerging from this crystallising process [of intense focus purely on the writing of the novel], handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about the sex war, and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.
I naturally chafe at the sound of an author asserting her sole and sovereign ability to interpret her book, but I think this particular instance (the introduction as a whole and these lines specifically) is a fairly egregious example. Lessing’s book is, after all, about the condition that was called the sex war in the media and in the popular imagination of the time—it is about the ethical and rhetorical conflict of whether or not women could define themselves in ways not controlled or determined by men. What her disavowal of that theme (or its centrality to the novel) performs is not so much an effort to redefine the novel’s content as it is an assertion of its unrelatedness to the other events, persons, and statements that created the context of the “sex war.” That is, Lessing is trying less to deny that the novel is about a conflict between men and women than she is trying to say that her depiction of that conflict has nothing whatsoever to do with, for instance, Billie Jean King playing and beating Bobby Riggs. Her novel is, in other words, about what the “sex war” was about, but it is not “a novel about the sex war.” It is a novel about the same object, but emphatically not the same context.
That denial of context is placed in time in an interesting (if rather clichéd) way: it has “skipped a stage of opinion,” a notion which has a strong and doubtlessly intentional Marxian undertone to it. Lessing’s novel can have no context because it is not a novel that is produced within the current stage; it is thus inevitably misread, since no one (evidently) can read as if they existed in the next stage—one can only skip a stage by writing. This elevation of the author carries a blunt force of intimidation: arguing against it makes you automatically retrograde, reactionary, blinkered and provincial.
Lessing therefore allows herself to resent the novel’s use as a “weapon in the sex war” (a locution which again recalls Marxism’s “art as a weapon in the class struggle") without thinking of herself as breaking solidarity with women. Because her novel simply isn’t of the same time as “the sex war,” any deployment of it for any purpose—no matter how noble or correct—is inappropriate as long as it remains locked within the stage which the novel already skipped. It is not a question of politics or even of art, but a question of time: it was simply not time for the novel to be used.
I think, as you might imagine, that this is kind of baloney. For one thing, I question the whole idea that a political use of a book absolutely negates its aesthetic value (the basic fear which necessitates Lessing’s removal of her book into another time). This view probably has everything to do with her immersion in the doctrines of socialist realism, but what is obvious about her cutting observations of the products of that genre is that aesthetics is never truly suspended by politics, no matter how firm one’s commitments are. Politicized novels may be evaluated publicly on extra-aesthetic grounds, but few if any are ever able to evaluate any work of art privately in the total absence of aesthetic considerations; in private, I feel, we are able to marry politics and aesthetics in our readings in a way impossible in public. Keeping trust in that private fusion of aesthetics and politics should have assured her that many (obviously not all, but many) would in fact appreciate it in its moment, the moment of the sex war, for its aesthetic qualities. And since private considerations and evaluations of novels play a large—if nebulous—role in their survival past their social or political moment, Lessing should have been more confident that if her novel was in fact “good,” the political uses to which it was put were not an ultimate threat to its future appreciation.
Second, I am deeply suspicious of Lessing’s implicit idea that the use of her book as a “weapon” was the prime conditioning or even determining factor in its reception. Lessing seems to have thought that if the novel weren’t immediately politicized and put to use for Women’s Lib then it might have gotten a more positive or more sensitive reception among the men who found themselves being criticized by its female (and some male—John Leonard was a big proponent) readers. But I sincerely doubt this would have been the case: being brandished by feminists didn’t send any messages that the patriarchy couldn’t have read by itself. The themes which she preferred the book to be known for—the themes of the artist, of breakdowns and healing, of the experience of intellectual life in socialist circles at mid-century—would have been buried no matter to what use others put it by the very fact that its author was a woman. Lessing even admits as much when she says, “Of course this attempt on my part assumed that that filter which is a woman’s way of looking at life has the same validity as the filter which is a man’s way… setting that problem aside, or rather, not even considering it…” (my emphasis).
As I said, though, it is very tempting to read the novel on Lessing’s terms—as a sort of “pure novel,” much more so even than many another novel of its scope or ambition. Thomas Mann comes to mind as well, but not only are his novels also the closest to what I would feel almost comfortable calling “pure,” but Lessing herself uses him in this way: “Thomas Mann, the last of the writers in the old sense, who used the novel for philosophical statements about life.” So why not stand with Lessing (and Mann) and assert the artist’s inviolability to politics? Why can’t we, at the very least, have a few novels which we don’t fight over politically? There are already quite enough which are given over wholly to politics anyway; why can’t we keep a special preserve for the novels which we just want to read and love and re-read and re-love, a sort of arboretum for pure art?
I have to go back to my first objection to Lessing to answer that: politics does not harm aesthetics—not finally. In discrete public moments when the novel is used as a whipping-boy or as a bludgeon for one partisan cause or another, yes, maybe it does, but I am confident that these blows are never mortal. That is why, I feel, I can both ultimately disagree with Lessing’s political quietude at the close of the novel and ultimately appreciate its place in the whole.
Comments
I don’t agree at all. She is contrasting a certain way that she thought of the novel as she was writing it with the way that novel was received. She was immersed in the writing of it and didn’t anticipate that it would be read exclusively as a polemic in a particular cultural war. What’s wrong with making this kind of statement? Isn’t that exactly the sort of insight we expect and value out of a writer’s retrospective prologue to her own work? Aren’t you essentially conceding her point when you say at the end of your post politics does in fact harm aesthetics--in the short term? Isn’t that exactly what she is saying, that her novel was used as whipping boy or bludgeon?
In my copy published in 1990, Lessing adds an additional introduction in which it’s clear she’s pleased with the way her novel is now received. I think the take away from her original introduction is that she doesn’t want to be reduced to being a polemic weapon. Like Jonathan, I have no problem with that sentiment. Her real complaint is that the novel was out of its time, that it was reduced to being ammunition in a “sex war”—and therefore, she was placed in a “false position” because while she wants to support women she also knows she didn’t intend nor want her novel to be a weapon. At heart, Lessing is a writer in the realistic mode (this despite her inner and space fiction) and not a polemicist. As a weapon in the sex war, the novel IS a curious choice, because Lessing is extremely critical of women who allow men to dominate them.
Andrew, I don’t understand why you claim Lessing wants her novel to be read as a “pure novel.” Rather, she complains that the overarching theme was not recognized by most at the time of its publication. She doesn’t use the word “aesthetics”; she merely points out the structure of the novel and the existence of the “golden notebook” were ignored because the novel was instantly reduced to a weapon. Why can’t an author make such complaints? Isn’t her preferred way of reading the novel now more or less the consensus way? Wasn’t she essentially correct in her original introduction?
Why is being used as a polemic or a weapon “reduced”? Why is that automatically a bad thing? I mean, she writes that “This book was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movements already existed” and then, when it enters into a world where they don’t already exist, there is friction. None of this is surprising, but that seems to me to be exactly Andrew’s point: you can’t write a novel which presumes a set of conditions which are being fought over (are “political") and then be surprised when people take it to be political. Which is why I had the same reaction as Andrew to phrases like “belittled...as being about the sex war.” Why does being “about the sex war,” which it manifestly is in some sense, automatically equate with “belittling”? Why is it that recognizing the novel as political, which it manifestly is, means reducing it to a “tract”?
It’s a reduction because the novel’s complexity was lost. It’s about communism, art, human relations (including gender relations), and psychological breakdown and reconstruction. Using it as a bludgeon ignores most of that. I think it’s fair to say that’s a reduction.
At any rate, my quibble with Andrew really turns on what he means by “pure novel.” Depending upon what he means by that phrase, I may not be in actual disagreement. To me, it implies that Lessing doesn’t want the political to be emphasized at all. I think that overstates the case.
Jonathan,
I am skeptical that she could have been so completely immersed in her work that she did not see that she was describing the feelings of many other women at the time--in fact, there are numerous statements within the novel that imply that she was was quite aware of how her depictions of gender relations would resonate with many women. Her apparent naivete regarding the political value of such a resonance seems equally unlikely to me given her background in communism and its view of the role of art in the class struggle. Basically, Lessing is angry that her novel was turned into the equivalent of a proletarian novel—feminist realism, you could call it. What I’m asking is, first, why she finds this such a dreadful thing; second, why Lessing believed that a novel as full of fury written by a woman would pass by the patriarchy with the same kinds of approbation a novel by one of their number would; and thirdly, why anyone believes this dreadful thing--this “reduction,” as Trent says--is the last word on how we read.
That lack of finality is why I am not conceding her point when I say politics may harm aesthetics in a discrete moment. I don’t think that over time, the adoption of Lessing by the women’s lib movement has really altered her reception very much. She won a Nobel, one of only 11 (at the time, 12 now with Müller) out of some (if I’m counting right) 106 individuals to receive the prize. And I would argue that it’s probably been her science fiction writing rather than the adoption by feminists that delayed that award for as long as it did. I’m not saying that there aren’t still men and women who think of her only as something like “that writer of that feminist tract,” but surely we can acknowledge that this is a tiny minority.
Trent,
Politics isn’t complex? Gender politics isn’t complex? You write “human relations (including gender relations)” as if gender were only ever a subset of humanity, whereas I think it’s equally valid to argue that “human” relations are quite often a subset of gender relations. The idea that gender is always smaller than “humanity” (and perhaps small in comparison to art or psychology) is precisely what is at issue in the book, despite Lessing’s extra-novelistic comments to the contrary.
And that’s what I’m getting at with the idea of a “pure novel"--that there is a category of the human which perfectly encompasses all subsets thereof, and that it has an artistic corollary--the novel as an aesthetic totality which perfectly subsumes its disparate parts. I am skeptical of the reality--and even the desirability--of this notion; rather, I find its opposite--the novel as the site of unresolved and insoluble conflict(s)--as both more likely and more compelling.
By “pure novel” I don’t mean a novel which attempts to banish the political. Obviously, Lessing did emphasize the political in this novel--the novel has a lot of politics depicted in it. But how I think Lessing wanted it to be read was as a novel that encompassed the politics it depicted within a perfect structure. So it wouldn’t be read as making “statements” but as containing statements, as always larger than what it contains. I think this idea is both unachievable and ultimately not worth achieving—conflict is both inevitable and shouldn’t be avoided; Lessing’s novel in the end is actually tremendously conflicted, and the passion of the conflicts fought within it are what make it a great novel.
Andrew,
Perhaps your view is more sound. But let’s remember what Lessing is actually responding to. She often sees things on a very personal level. Notice in her work she rarely refers to academic criticism; she almost always refers to the personal. Thus it matters to her when a feminist is rude to a man. I remember a passage somewhere—perhaps in her autobiography—in which a feminist allows a door to slam into a man simply because he is a man. She complains often of the trashing of men by feminists. Insofar as her work is being used to justify such behavior, she objects.
For all her brilliance, I don’t think Lessing is a theoretical thinker. In the Martha Quest series, I don’t think there is a single passage in which she analyzes Marxism in any depth. Rather, she writes of how she and her circle assumed that communism was the answer to the world’s ills, and how over time that assumption became less tenable. This is not to say she is a simple thinker but rather that she places much importance on how people actually behave.
At any rate, Lessing clearly did not believe in her original introduction that the way the novel was received was the last word.
Andrew, of course politics and human (or if you prefer gender) relations are incredibly complex. I think you constructed a strawman by inferring that I thought politics or gender relations were not complex. But that gets to the heart of what she objected to. She believes her work was not used in a complex fashion; it was used as a bludgeon. Now I suppose you may be able to find some feminist analyses of the novel written soon after its publication that did appreciate the complexity of the novel, but as I said before, Lessing sees things on a personal level. That is one of the sources of her power as a novelist. Thus her objection to what she perceived as the silencing of men in classes taught by some feminists (I believe this statement is from an essay she wrote in which she described a trip to the United States—I apologize for not being more specific, but I’ve been reading her for decades and don’t always remember sources). What gets printed in a newspaper is more an indication to her of current sentiment than what gets printed in academic journals (which few read). I think that’s a fair characterization of her views.
Anyway, Andrew, as far as I know you may be right that she is being disingenuous, that she truly was not that naive. But if that is true, she has been remarkably consistent over the decades. Read any interview and you’ll encounter statements that seem terribly naive. Is it a weakness? I don’t know. She certainly has a very strong sense of self and makes assumptions that seem counter intuitive. However, and here I offer some support the notion that she is sometimes disingenuous, it’s also clear that she loves to push people’s buttons. She practically cackled about what she anticipated would be the reaction to The Cleft.
Look, she sees her novel as about many things and it upset her to see it simplified and used to support what she considers unreasonable behavior concerned with one thing. Surely that’s not unreasonable? As you know, she blames herself as well as others. She’s called The Golden Notebook a huge failure because it didn’t get the reception she hoped for (at least initially). We can evoke the intentional fallacy all we want, but surely her reaction is understandable and, dare I say, human.
I hate to do this, posting again before reading whatever response—if any—my previous comment garners, but ... Andrew, doesn’t the last three paragraphs of Lessing’s original introduction essentially concede much of what you say? But maybe not because she still holds that there is an intended and correct way to see an author’s work.
Trent, You’re absolutely right, it is a very strange three paragraphs to conclude with, particularly in relation to the one-line paragraph immediately preceding it: “But it is the same book.”
Without that line, it seems as if she has conceded that she doesn’t get to have sovereign say over what the novel says, but with that line, I think she pulls back to an affirmation of pluralist experiences of the book (rather than pluralized meaning) and an idea that a person shapes the kind of experience with a book that helps them--helps them reach out to others, helps them learn more about themselves, and that this is a good thing.
But she also ends with the idea of throwing the novel aside, and I think that is a clear statement of The Golden Notebook’s value to her at that point--as you said, it failed for her to be what she wanted. She brings herself in the introduction ultimately to some peace (or rationalization) that people have still been touched by it and that’s a good thing. But I don’t think she wouldn’t have rather had the type of reception she asked for earlier in the intro.
You definitely know a lot more about her other writings than I do. I am sure that what you say about her emphasis on the personal and behavior is a consistent theme elsewhere--it certainly is in The Golden Notebook. But I would argue that she could still well have made her qualms about feminists’ behavior known without removing herself to a “no sins will be committed in my name” stance. I find her position of trying to pull her novel away from feminism and out of the time it was written and first read in to be tremendously arrogant and, honestly, a denial that the type of patriarchal behavior she depicts in the book was ever really that bad. Bad enough for her to write about eloquently, but evidently not bad enough to understand why a feminist might be angry enough to slam a door ineloquently in a man’s face. I can’t concur.
As for the straw man bit, what I was trying to point out was that you seem to argue that a novel which didn’t have these other themes--a novel which only depicted gender politics--would necessarily be “simpler” or less “complex.” I disagree. Complexity is not about the number of themes put into a novel but about the treatment of the theme. And gender politics is a theme complex enough in itself that writing about it would certainly allow a treatment that is just as complex as any treatment of “human relations” or art or whatever else.
My response was slow, and by the time I got around to it, Andrew had already done the work. But this statement:
“It’s about communism, art, human relations (including gender relations), and psychological breakdown and reconstruction. Using it as a bludgeon ignores most of that.”
seems to me to not so much argue the point as beg it; using the book “as a bludgeon” is a reduction not to the extent that it is political, but to the extent that one does so in an imprecise and bludgeony way. But I don’t think there is a necessary connection between the two (though I’m not sure you said there was, now); one can be angry at critics for oversimplifying the issue without making their imprecision into a necessary function of its political use. One can do good political criticism and one can do bad political criticism.