The Columbia History of the British Novel

And again and again during that evening, these people dissolved into fits of laughter, putting together the white cripples of the area, the solemn lecture by the crippled farmer, and the picture of their two healthy young men, fighting briefly in the dust. They laughed and they laughed, staggering with laughter, rolling with laughter, howling with laughter.

In this series of takes and retakes of Lessing's memorials to her soldierfather, the wounded World War I veteran is portrayed from radically different points of view, and both the author and the reader undergo violent shifts of emotion and judgment as they awaken to ways of seeing this figure they had not known existed. The goal of the process is not to substitute the eyes of the black man for those of the white man or of the white woman, but to focus the reader's attention on this figure of the good soldier and to raise questions about why it is we call him civilized and civilizing, while we label the healthy young men fighting with their hands briefly in the dust barbaric.

The 'sharp slave's-eye view' that surveys British culture from below forms a counterpart in Shikasta to the equally sharp, intergalactic point of view that surveys British culture from immeasurably above. When read as a whole, Lessing's fiction reveals itself to be a system of visions and revisions, of dissolves and retakes, of sightings from different angles, of returns to the familiar after forays into the ever more disconcertingly alien and remote. The Martha Quest of the early volumes of Children of Violence — a young woman who reflects, more or less faithfully, the life, loves, and opinions of her author-dissolves into the multiple selves of Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, and the narrative itself begins to draw attention to its seams, to its existence as a product of its author's choices and strategies. Linda Coldridge, first sighted as the madwoman in the basement of her husband's house in The Four -922- Gated City, returns in Shikasta as a Canopean. Ben, the genetic throwback of The Fifth Child, is a contemporary descendant of the Lombi, encountered in The Sirian Experiments as a product of intergalactic genetic engineering. The long cold dying that is done by an ordinary old woman in The Diary of a Good Neighbor, and by an entire planet in The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, is also done, Lessing writes in her afterword to that novel, by a personal friend of hers and by the Scott antarctic expedition. In Shikasta, a history of the earth's near future is recorded simultaneously by people living it and by beings for whom it will be a very slim volume in a very large library. Falling in love opens gateways in the mind of an unexceptional middle-aged woman in If the Old Could., gateways between the sexes in The Golden Notebook, and gateways between realms in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. These multiple levels of awareness and enactment produce not cacophony or dissonance but the narrative equivalent of a chord or contrapuntal harmony.

The liberation of consciousness from the tyranny of self, the capacity to entertain multiple points of view-'to be in the world but not of it,' as Lessing likes to quote from the Sufis — is both the central project of Lessing's fiction and her solution to the discrimination and violence she has never been able to shut her eyes on. If not the last, at least the most thorough and indefatigable of the romantics, Lessing ultimately acknowledges no limits to the imagination and uses fiction, which she likes to compare to science, as her instrument of exploration of all areas of consciousness presumed to be closed to us (the consciousness of animals, for example, or of extraterrestrials, or of the enemy, or of the opposite sex, or even simply of each other). In fiction, Lessing becomes other people, undergoes experiences not available to her, inhabits other species, other times, other spaces.

Though she refuses to acquiesce to any circumscription of her imagination, Lessing does repeatedly remind her readers that she works in fiction, not in history or science. 'Why is it,' she asks in her preface to The Sirian Experiments,

that writers, who by definition operate by the use of their imaginations, are given so little credit for it? We 'make things up.' This is our trade.

I remember, before I myself attempted this genre of space fiction, reading an agreeable tale about a species of highly intelligent giraffes who travelled by spaceship from their solar system to ours, to ask if our sun was behaving cruelly to us, as theirs had recently taken to doing to them. I remember saying to -923- myself: Well, at least the writer of this tale is not likely to get industrious letters asking what it is like to be a giraffe in a spaceship.

Though accused as often of dogmatism as of bad writing, Lessing harps on her increasing predilection for speculation, her waning capacity for conviction. 'Once upon a time,' she writes in the same preface, 'when I was young, I believed things easily, both religious and political; now I believe less and less. But I wonder about more.' One thing Lessing wonders about is why we grant our scientists the most fabulous fictions, while we pin our novelists to the facts. 'What of course I would like to be writing,' she goes on to muse, 'is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Colored Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.' Lessing hints here that she missed her calling, but she yearns less for physics than for the license we grant our scientists to chart the unknown.

Though the territory Lessing has recently claimed is not 'as is' but 'as if,' she knows well enough how products of the imagination get harnessed to the wheels of the powers that be. Anna Wulf, Lessing's alter ego in The Golden Notebook, is acutely aware of her first novel as a commodity in a capitalist economy. The black notebook opens with 'scattered musical symbols, treble signs that shifted into the $ sign and back again,' and in that notebook Anna keeps a running account of the material that inspired her first novel (the color bar in Rhodesia), the profits she has made from it, and the uses to which the publishing, film, and television industries wish to put it. Anna is so appalled at the gutting of her novel for profit that she can't publish another. In the red notebook, Anna displays the same clear grasp of the uses to which communist ideology wishes to put her fiction; she finds them equally unnerving. The writer's block with which Anna struggles throughout The Golden Notebook is, in part, a response to the block so painstakingly erected between writer and reader by a publishing industry dedicated not to literature but to profit or propaganda. In her preface to The Golden Notebook, Lessing says that the last thing she wants to do is refuse to support women, but feminists and antifeminists alike have mutilated her novel by using it as a weapon in the sex war. When Lessing publicly admitted to the Jane Somers hoax-to publishing The Diary of a Good Neighbor in 1983 and If the Old Could… in 1984 under -924- a pseudonym-she said she wanted to show young writers that publishers and reviewers respond not to the work but to the name of the author on it. In her afterword to The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, Lessing emphasizes the volatility of all events and artifacts in history, a recognition that leads the archaeologist Frederick Larson in Briefing for a Descent into Hell to lose his faith in his profession. Visiting a dig in Wiltshire, Frederick witnesses a colleague assert authoritatively to a group of students that a recently excavated trench was the foundation for a stone building. A student pipes up that he has seen a similar trench in Africa function as the foundation for a wooden building on stilts. When the same colleague gives Frederick a tour of the site later that day, he announces in the same authoritative tone that 'this is the foundation of a wood and not a stone building.' What shakes Frederick's belief in his discipline to the roots at this moment is the sheer accident ('if there had been no student back from a jaunt to Africa… ') that has constructed this 'emphatic pronouncement of archeology.' 'What lies behind facts like these,' Lessing asks,

that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothingman called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed?

One thing that lies behind facts like these is that a writer cannot control how her fictions will be used, but Lessing does not regard this as an adequate reason to stop producing them, since we cannot become-we cannot even recognize-what we have not first imagined.

Lessing's refusal to let consciousness sleep, or even rest, is something many of her critics find unbearable in