The Columbia History of the British Novel

What Anna does as dream work with the dwarf-figure, she accomplishes in waking life with Saul Green. In the terrifying but ultimately fruitful struggle between this woman and man that both concludes and generates The Golden Notebook, Anna and Saul relentlessly construct and deconstruct one another, entering each other's personalities and emotions, forcing each other through all the most painful and humiliating scenarios of the battle between the sexes, oscillating between hostilities so intense they can only be described in the language of armed combat and sympathies so profound they can only be depicted as convergences of the self with the other. Both Anna and Saul are brought to the brink of self-annihilation by the assault on the cage of selfhood they wage for and against one another, an assault Anna compares to the global wars seething incessantly around them. The 'I, I, I, I, I' Anna and Saul hurl at one another like bullets from a machine gun are 'part of the logic of war,' and the couple's construction of one another as enemies 'reflects the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power.' Yet they rescue one another finally through the teamwork that allows each to give the other the first line of the novel in which the breakdown or the crack-up of the self is experienced as a precursor to the discovery of an imaginative realm where 'joy [is] never anything but -929- the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.' As Anna watches a character she has created suddenly take on a new largess of personality, she muses to herself that 'quite possibly these marvellous, generous things we walk side by side with in our imaginations could come in existence, simply because we need them, because we imagine them.' In The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, a similar marriage of enemies is achieved between the solipsistic and hostile cultures of Zones Three and Four through the intercourse of their representatives, Al*Ith and Ben Ata. This marriage erodes the boundaries between the two zones, and, as Saul gives Anna the line she needs to begin her novel, so Al*Ith receives from the hitherto inaccessible Zone Five the words she needs to enter the hitherto unimaginable Zone Two.

Nowhere does Lessing enact this process of recognition and awakening on a grander scale, however, than in The Sirian Experiments, where she tells the tale of how Ambien II, one of five supreme rulers of the Sirian Empire, comes to identify herself with her intergalactic empire's archrival and enemy, Canopus. Representing Ambien II's efforts to explain herself to her four Sirian colleagues who have placed her in 'corrective exile' for treason, the novel is, of all Lessing's books, the one most explicitly about instruction, about how to learn and how not to. Ambien II's account of the process that led her to an awareness of the true nature of Canopus includes a detailed analysis of what led her astray and of what might explain her long and profound misreading of Canopean motives and methods. The account also details Ambien II's discovery that she has been under the deliberate tutelage of Canopus-that her Canopean mentor, Klorathy, has devised for her precisely the sentimental education she needs to become Canopean herself and to nudge her entire empire in that direction.

Ambien II is a peculiar creature, reflective perhaps of Lessing in her sixties, who described herself in an interview as 'unmarriageable, by now,' reflective certainly of a kind of woman we don't encounter often in Western fiction. As Ambien II explains early on in the novel, her childbearing years are far behind her, and though she sustains a close and trusting relation with Ambien I, the father of her two children, sex is no longer of much interest to either one of them. Being Sirian, Ambien has a long, long time to live past her childbearing years, and she has already inhabited for thousands and thousands of years a female body that is subject to neither reproduction nor overwhelming desire. -930-

Though certain men in the novel- Tafta, for example, who represents the purely self-serving planet of Shammat, or Nasar, when Ambien II encounters him in Koshi as Canopus 'gone wrong'-call her 'a dry bone of a woman' and deride her for being such a 'desiccated bureaucrat of a Sirian' instead of the silky, beguiling, dewy peach of a woman Adalantaland's Elyle is, the novel itself steadily undermines the potency of gender distinctions. Ambien II has outlived her female body and graduated to one more suitable and instrumental to her current purposes; Ambien I appears to have done the same with his male body; and the two have come to embody what is signaled in their names, a postgendered condition.

Though sexual desire in Ambien II rarely speaks above a whisper, she does want a special, intimate, warmly personal relation with her Canopean mentor, and this significantly impedes her progress. Prior to her first meeting with him on earth, Ambien II admits to a hope that Klorathy will take the place of a boon-companion recently struck by a meteorite. When she encounters him again shortly after the earth has toppled over on its axis and only partially righted itself, she is dismayed at his coldness and at his pedantic insistence that 'events,' not 'catastrophe,' is the proper term for the devastation of the planet: 'I was thinking that a being able to view the devastation of a whole planet with such accurate detachment was not likely to be warmly responsive to a close personal relationship: at the time, that my own personal concerns were being intruded by me did not strike me as shameful, though it does now.' Klorathy suggests that if she wants to understand his 'accurate detachment,' she should stay on with him for awhile. 'You want me to stay?' Ambien II replies. Though Klorathy says again that he thinks she should stay, he does not say, I want you to stay, and so Ambien II immediately leaves with Ambien I, her familiar with whom she shares an easy emotional and intellectual intimacy. Ambien II's sensual and personal inclinations interfere with her ability to be with Klorathy during their next encounter on Planet 11, as well. The light and atmosphere of this planet are repellent to Ambien II, and she is physically nauseated by the frail, pale, air-eating, insectlike creatures that inhabit it. 'I have never been able to overcome,' Ambien II acknowledges, 'an instinctive abhorrence for creatures dissimilar to my own species.' When Klorathy explains to her that these are among the most highly evolved of the beings under Canopean care, Ambien's senses are too affronted to allow her to remain long enough to discover why. -931-

While Ambien II's body-its senses, its sexuality, its gender, its instinctive investment in the pleasant, the personal, and the familiar-slows her progress toward Canopus, her mind erects far more effective barriers. Canopus is, after all, the old enemy of Sirius. It hasn't been so very long since they were at war with one another, and the peace between them has not yet achieved an end to hostility. Ambien II approaches Canopus with two powerful and oddly contradictory misconceptions. She assumes Canopus is her enemy and she assumes Canopus is her mirror image. Since suspicion dictates all of Sirius's interactions with Canopus, leading Sirians to lie to Canopean officials and spy on Canopean territories as a matter of course, Ambien II presumes that suspicion is also the fountainhead of Canopus's relations with Sirius. Since exploitation and greed dictate Sirius's relations with her colonies and subject peoples, Ambien II assumes these are the motives that guide Canopus's colonial policies. This habit of regarding Canopus as never more, and usually less, than the equal of Sirius leads Ambien II and her compatriots into consistent misreadings and misjudgments of Canopean undertakings. As Ambien II acknowledges in retrospect,

they have never had anything to learn from us. But we have consistently interpreted their attitude as one of dissimulation, believing them to be pretending indifference, out of pride, while secretly ferreting out any information they could, even sending spies into our territories and making use of our work without acknowledgement.

Language fails to bridge the gap between the two empires for a similar reason. Sirius persists in assuming that Canopus means what Sirius means by such words as harmony, good fellowship, and cooperation. Sirius confidently uses such words to describe its relations with the Lombis, for example, whom the Sirians have kidnapped from their home planet, dressed up in painfully cumbersome space suits to farm an otherwise uninhabitable planet, and then dumped on yet a third planet to be the subjects of an experiment to see if the evolution of a species can be prevented. And when Canopus uses the word «symbiotic» to describe the relation between a group of its colonists and the indigenous apes, Sirians interpret the word to mean 'the superior immigrants being set free for higher tasks by using the apes as servants.' The debate that has raged among Lessing's readers and critics about her use of the colonial metaphor throughout the Canopus in Argos series may have its -932- origins in a similar linguistic dilemma. Debased by the history of its implementation, colonialism-for us as for the Sirians-has come to be synonymous with exploitation and to signify the only possible relation of dominant to subject races or species. The result, as the witness from Rhodesia points out at the trial that concludes Shikasta, the first volume of the series, has been the abandonment of the colonized. To reacquaint our imaginations with the possibility of a responsible and benign tutelage of dependent races and species, Lessing attempts to infuse the concept of colonialism with new ethical imperatives, to revive our faith in a language of care and cooperation; but many of her readers persist in assuming she means what they mean by colonial service.

Only when Ambien II begins to suspect at last that Canopus means what it says and that Canopus is not