her, but it has made her a very long-distance thinker. In Canopus in Argos, Lessing's series for what she calls in The Fifth Child 'the barbarous eighties,' she claims as her proper sphere all time and all space. She claims this territory not metaphorically or microcosmically, as her nineteenth-century counterpart George Eliot did, but directly and descriptively. Canopus in Argos offers selections from the Canopean archives, historical records kept on a planet in a distant galaxy that document the experience of planets and galaxies over stretches of time and space barely comprehensible to the human mind. A 'home epic,' George Eliot half-modestly called Mid -925- dlemarch, a novel that shrinks the epic to women's sphere; 'space fiction,' Lessing brazenly calls Canopus in Argos, a series of novels that explodes our understanding of both home and epic by placing them in the context of 'a realm where the petty fates of planets, let alone individuals, are only aspects of cosmic evolution.'
Canopus, a name Lessing traces to The Lights of Canopus, an ancient Persian translation of the Bidpai tales designed to teach young princes how to rule, denotes simultaneously an intergalactic system, the most highly developed culture of that system, and any individual member of that culture. The consciousness of Canopus is not bounded by time, space, or personal identity (and certainly not by sex, class, race, nationality, religion, etc.), and it places all events on our own and on other planets in the context of the universe. This galactic point of view did not come easily or suddenly to Doris Lessing. First she had to work her way through all the more familiar perspectives women have taken in fiction. The first four volumes of Children of Violence (published between 1952 and 1965) fit comfortably in the genre most commonly associated with women novelists, the semiautobiographical, confessional bildungsroman. What is remarkable about them is how free of confession they are. Like Canopus in Argos, they read like history, but the history is the readily recognizable one of a young person growing up in a mappable place and a datable time, told by an author who has grown up looking over this young person's shoulder.
After the second volume of Children of Violence, however, Lessing had begun to find this way of seeing suffocating. The Golden Notebook (1962) records her struggle to to break free from the woman looking over her shoulder, from her habit of seeing herself and her world through her own eyes. The struggle is an urgent one, as though Lessing indeed is unable to breathe. Constructing a frame or skeleton novel, which she ironically calls Free Women and which she describes in her introduction to The Golden Notebook as 'a conventional short novel… which could stand by itself,' Lessing proceeds to shatter this familiar specimen of realistic fiction by hinting at fictions she might have told but didn't and by pouring in between the chapters of Free Women all the material that the conventions of the novel require her to omit. The Golden Notebook records Lessing's struggle with her medium, with the way of seeing the novel, as an inherited literary form, imposed on her.
Her instrument of expression, however, was only part of Lessing's problem. Though the novel encouraged her to see in the ways the form -926- had made familiar, she herself, as thought by instinct, was clinging to the personal point of view, to the conviction that she was the only truth she could know. Virginia Woolf's Lily Briscoe fights hard in To the Lighthouse to say, 'But this is what I see, this is what I see.' That battle Lessing won almost with ease; now she wanted to see the way others see. To break free from the gaze of her own eyes, Lessing chose to explore ways of seeing conventionally called insane. She began to pay urgent attention to people who claimed they were merely conduits for voices not their own, and to people who claimed they had lived or were living lives not their own. The breaking down of personality Lessing achieved through madness and mental telepathy at the conclusion of The Golden Notebook and throughout The Four-Gated City and Briefing for a Descent into Hell brought her back finally to history, but to a history made literary this time not by a personal point of view but by a multiplication of points of view that renders the historical, the documentary, the objective, and the personal equally fictive, and by the projection of history into unknowable regions of time and space. In Memoirs of a Survivor, Lessing so subtly interweaves present fact with future possibility that we slip into the future without knowing precisely when we have crossed the line. In Shikasta, Lessing's extended sense of history reaches to earth's unrecorded past as well as to its unrecordable future.
Lessing's assault on conventional constructions of the self as continuous, integral, and placed in time and space, derives its energy and its urgency not from her adherence to postmodernist assertions about the elusiveness of identity and truth, but from her growing moral conviction that the egoism of Western civilization will be the death of us all. 'There's something I have to reach. I have to tell people,' moans poor Charlie in Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and these two sentences summarize the ethical imperatives that have driven Lessing to write. The first fictional name she gave herself was Quest. Her devotion to writing (and she has been an extraordinarily productive writer who has published in a wide range of forms and venues) arises not out of a desire to entertain or make money or win prizes or even achieve aesthetic perfection. Writing is, for Lessing, an instrument of illumination. An urgent seeking and questioning permeate her early novels and continue to impel the protagonists of her later books. Martha Quest seeks the four-gated city, Charles Watkins needs to find 'Them,' the narrator of Memoirs of a Survivor has to get through the wall, Ambien II desires to enter the consciousness of Canopus, Al*Ith is compelled to seek admis -927- sion into Zone Two. While exploration and a quest for enlightenment structure the narratives of both her early and her recent novels, the Canopus in Argos series stages a new relation between Lessing and this narrative. While once she had something she had to reach, now she has something she has to tell. The five volumes of Canopus in, Argos purport to be textbooks, teaching manuals, how-to guides for those who wish to enlighten others, as well as vehicles for self-enlightenment. The quester has turned teacher, and the narrative is impelled not by exploration but by instruction.
Lessing's later fiction self-consciously stages for the reader the process of awakening that she herself, through the medium of her earlier fiction, discovered, explored, and mapped. The Summer Before the Dark, Canopus in Argos, and The Diaries of Jane Somers are carefully plotted routes to enlightenment-to a more accurate understanding of what it means to be human and to a vicarious experience of what it might feel like to be we, instead of I. 'Sleeping with the enemy' in the title of this essay signals a crucial adventure along this route, the transgression of the categorical imperative that demands that an individual, a group, a sex, a race, a culture, or a nation know itself and recognize itself only by excluding the other. Repeatedly in Lessing's later fiction, a man or a woman or the representative of a particular culture, realm, planet, or galaxy, moves from a position of enmity-an attitude of superiority and hostility to the other-to a recognition of a larger pattern in which the relation between the two is symbiotic rather than antagonistic.
This process of coming to recognize oneself in the enemy and of awakening to a larger context or pattern in which the bellicosity of a particular species or culture is an aberration in a benign necessity, a temporary dissonance in a cosmic harmony, is staged over and over again in Lessing's fiction. Her first and most fatalistic novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), is about the failure of this process, a failure embodied historically in the color bar in South Africa. The doom announced on the first page of the novel is embedded in the concept of apartheid itself, in the iron curtain it draws between white and nonwhite races. Mary Turner's recognition of the common humanity of a black man is a catalyst not for her enlightenment but for her murder, and Lessing herself refuses to enter imaginatively into the consciousness of her black male character. While Moses is intensely physically present in the novel, the reader is denied even the briefest glimpse of events from his point of view. -928- and maintaining hostility between the races, generates in Lessing a passion for transgression. The Golden Notebook forces its heroine, Anna Wulf, to gradually recognize herself in a creature she initially constructs as male, subhuman, and purely other:
I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male- female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice.
The lines between male and female, joy and terror, self and antiself disintegrate here, and the dream signals Anna's entrance into the world of the inner golden notebook where, as Lessing writes in her preface to the novel, 'things have come together, the divisions have broken down, there is formlessness with the end of fragmentation-the triumph of the second theme, which is that of unity.'
