Chapter ４
Destabilisation of the Framework of the “Real”
― on “To Room Nineteen” and The Memoir of a Survivor
Ⅰ
As I have mentioned previously, following Woolf’s nullification of the border between past and present – and fiction and reality – through such narrative devices as the tunnelling process in Mrs. Dalloway and the pageant in Between the Acts, Lessing similarly uses the novel’s form to oscillate either side of the same border in her Golden Notebook. In 1963, just a year after The Golden Notebook was published, Lessing wrote a story – “To Room Nineteen” – where she sticks to a realist mode throughout, keeping exclusively the protagonist’s point of view in the third-person narration, in marked contrast to the complicated form of The Golden Notebook. In 1974, eleven years after that short story and following some further experiments in form, she wrote The Memoir of a Survivor in which she unfolds a topographical schema, juxtaposing the realistically described world on this side of her living room wall and the fantastic one beyond it.
In this chapter I will highlight the way in which Lessing shows that what we call reality is not fixed, exposing again the intertwined relationship between collective history and the individual’s mind; the analysis will focus on two of the extremely different modes of narrative that she developed after The Golden Notebook, looking first at her short story, “To Room Nineteen,” and then at The Memoir of a Survivor. I examine these two works in order to see how Lessing employs various styles to convey the ambiguity of the framework of reality, thereby disclosing the interpenetrative relationship between the individual and the collective, and past and present, which
surfaces in an apparently personal situation. First, in the first section, I will discuss “To Room Nineteen,” focusing on how its persistent and exclusive point of view exposes paradoxically the protagonist’s unknowing entrapment by a logocentric discourse that is repeated throughout history and is epitomised also in Mary’s state of mind in The Grass Is Singing. Then, moving on to The Memoir of a Survivor, in the second section, I argue that the topographical juxtaposition of the world on both sides of the wall shows the individual in the process of becoming; a process in which – as is exemplified by Mrs.
Dalloway, Between the Acts, and The Golden Notebook – they are constantly moving and intertwining with other people or things. I will accentuate that, both in the urge towards collapse in “To Room Nineteen” and in the juxtaposition of the two worlds in Memoir of a Survivor, we find not only the self in flux but also the ever-changing condition wrought by its interaction with the individual or collective past. In the third section I focus on how one’s perspective can be confined to only one version of interpretation of human reality, which is effected in both in The Memoir of a Survivor and in “To Room Nineteen,” after examining Lessing’s attitude towards politics, which is critical for understanding her way of involving human society.
“To Room Nineteen” is a story about a woman named Susan Rawlings who, in spite of her favourable and seemingly happy family life, commits suicide after more than ten years of married life. It is never mentioned explicitly in the story what drives her to do so. The story was published in the early 1960s, as a reaction to the devastation of a post-war society where it was thought that women should find contentment in a traditional marriage and family structure; the women’s movement that would come to dispute this had not yet emerged and it was hard for women to ignore or challenge the
happiness that was expected of them. Besides, in the case of Susan – who belongs to the middle-class, where nothing is more admirable than respectability – self-restraint binds her not to question the conventional idea on women or marriage. However, one must not overlook the fact that Susan’s agony is an example of the struggle facing humanity in the modern world, where it is difficult for a person to realise their whole identity in an environment saturated with the huge and complicated network of capitalism. Perhaps this universality in the novel explains why the reviewers have persistently argued about it since its publication.
Janina Nordius explores Susan’s route to emancipation as an independent individual, relating it to the social discourse she is immersed in. Lysa Tylor, paying attention to “the devil” Susan sees in her garden and which appears also in other works by Lessing, maintains that it embodies her own self-hatred – her self-denial – which grows as she feels increasingly suffocated by society. Theresa L. Crater, meanwhile, compares the story to both George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. Crater insists that – after examining the defamiliarising of Susan’s words that arises because she does not articulate what she wishes to express – her death is anything but defeat, since she never renounces her own world.
My intention here, however, is not to unmask “the devil,” nor to speculate on the meaning of Susan’s death. Although the story provides the possibility of abundant interpretations, its main theme is – in my opinion – the question of what constitutes the self; an aporia that has been explored for more than a hundred years – ever since Freud brought it to the foreground – from such diverse points of view as the socio-pathological, the psychoanalytic, and the psychiatric. The ever-increasing availability of information as well as ever more confusing social conditions makes the
problem of self even more complicated today. Before embarking in earnest on such an argument, I will first introduce some salient points of the plot.
The story begins by defining the characteristics of Susan’s marriage: “This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlingses’ marriage was grounded in intelligence” (352). Phrases relating to the concept of “intelligence” and situations grounded in “intelligence” are omnipresent and recur insistently throughout the story:
“their sensible discrimination” (352), “this balanced and sensible family” (353), “their infallible sense for choosing right” (353), “the inner storms and quicksands were understood and charted.１ So everything was all right. Everything was in order. Yes, things were under control” (355). In other words, the marriage of Mr. and Mrs.
Rawlings is “grounded in intelligence,” they “choose right” through “their sensible discrimination” and succeed in building up a “balanced and sensible family” with a handsome husband, four fine children and an ideal house in the suburbs. This well-constructed married life seems nothing less than the ideal marriage, admired by both themselves and their friends; for, “[n]ot only they, but others, felt they were well matched: their friends’ delight was an additional proof of their happiness” (352).
Nevertheless, while their happy marriage receives approbation, it is suggested that something is missing in their lives. It is, they consider, lacking in purpose:
But there was no point about which either could say: For the sake of this is all the rest . . . . Their love for each other? Well, that was the nearest it. If it wasn’t centre, what was? . . . . And if one felt that it simply was not strong enough, important enough, to support it all, well whose fault was that?
(354)
Although their love for each other seems to be the dominant part of their life, Susan
comes to discover about Matthew’s, her husband’s, extramarital affair. Yet they agree that this divergence is simply what is likely to happen in an ordinary married life, and that they should manage to go on without quarrelling, and without tears or recrimination.
Mr. and Mrs. Rawlings – who have joked with one another even before his extramarital affair that it could be impossible to be faithful throughout one’s life – decide to do what any sensible people would do; that is, they “put the thing behind them” (357), and consign the word faithful to the “savage old world” (356) to which they think it belongs.
Though Susan is sometimes “pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness” (357), feels “as if life has become a desert,” and is “more often threatened by emptiness’ (358), it does not matter – “except in her moments of aridity” (357) – because “her intelligence continued to assert that all was well” (357). Their intelligence dictates that:
There was no need to use the dramatic words, unfaithful, forgive, and the rest: intelligence forbade them. Intelligence barred, too, quarrelling, sulking, anger, silences of withdrawal, accusations and tears. Above all, intelligence forbids tears. (358)
Thus she adheres to her principle of giving first priority to “intelligence,” not merely in her relationship with her husband but in every relationship in her life. She acknowledges the incongruous emotion inside her, but decides to ignore it.
Consequently, though she is embarrassed and annoyed – on sending the youngest of their children off to school – that she does not feel as free as she expected to, she can confide in her husband neither her fear nor her irritation because “intelligence”
dismisses the existence of her uncontrollable and inscrutable emotions as irrational and unreasonable. As a result of her self-restraint, “the enemy” – whose existence she senses from then on – appears; she says to herself, “the enemy – irritation, restlessness,
emptiness, whatever it was” (360). Even after she shouts abruptly at her twin children in spite of herself, she merely whimpers before her husband without telling him her suffering and her fears. She feels as if she were another woman; she does not understand why she contributes to her family. She cannot let him know any of these embarrassments, since her mentor – “intelligence” – forbids her on the basis of their irrationality. Thus, Susan feels a devastating agony when she has to suppress what she is fully aware of; that is, an ambiguous but insurmountable anxiety.
Failing to express or articulate what she feels, she begins to retreat gradually – at first from her husband and her family, and then from her real life entirely. After allotting a small room upstairs in her house as her shelter, and wandering in the mountains in Wales, she at last finds room nineteen in a shabby hotel in Paddington; it becomes the only space where she does not feel threatened by anything. By this time their marital intimacy is gone, and she is sure she is going mad.
Nevertheless, she keeps on suppressing her emotion to the last, continuing to converse on apparently familiar terms with her husband. When she finds that he not only suspects her of having an affair in the hotel but also “wish[es]” her to do so, she makes up the story he wants – never giving any thought to confronting him with her deeper feelings. Eventually, driven into a corner by this fabricated story, she cannot do anything but kill herself in room nineteen.
As stated within the novel, Susan always exalts “intelligence” as her guiding principle above all else, and intends to decide everything in her life based on it. She does so voluntarily, not through any external compulsion. Susan and Matthew are
“linked together voluntarily from their will to be happy together” (355). Indeed, she loses her integrated personality not because things go wrong against her will but
because everything goes well as she hopes. What, then, is her “will”? Is what she chooses not what she really wants? The problem here is what is implied by her “will”
based on “intelligence.”２
“Intelligence” is closely connected to language whose signification Anna in The Golden Notebook is skeptical of. Susan almost never doubts signification that language is supposed to mean; what she thinks she has to observe is rational and ordered reality that language can always articulate correctly. She never thinks of the need to know aforesaid m
é
moir involontaire or to imagine amorphous reality. Here I take Erich Fromm’s idea of schism between conscious and unconscious because he tries to explicate it in the simple terms, and because he always sees human mind with regard to the modern capitalism. While Freud introduced into psychology the systematic idea of the unconscious as a deeper part of self, Erich Fromm – who both respects Freud’s ideas and develops them critically – argues, in The Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought, that Freud’s tendency to regard all psychological phenomena as the result of sexual repression represents a psychology belonging to the bourgeois middle-class and grounded in Victorian ethics. However, sexual relationships in the modern world, Fromm insists, are no longer the main object of repression; the contradictions that are now virtually inescapable, but regarded as far less significant than the sexual problem, are those such as “consciousness of freedom – unconscious unfreedom,” “conscious feeling of happiness – unconscious depression,” and “conscious honesty – unconscious fraudulence” (26).These binary phrases seem applicable to Susan’s unstable state of mind: her panic, when she finds herself not as free as she supposed, might be the consequence of her inner contradiction of “consciousness of freedom – unconscious unfreedom”;
“conscious feeling of happiness – unconscious depression” corresponds to her restless mentality in which she is often threatened by “aridity” or “emptiness” in spite of her seemingly satisfactory married life; “conscious honesty – unconscious fraudulence”
suggests her struggle in which she tries – when her husband’s affair is disclosed – to suppress her irritation by persuading herself that it is too tiny a problem for her to be upset by it, and that they have discussed it “honestly” anyway.
It is Fromm’s insight on the alleged freedom of modern men that is most significant to my argument. He states, in Escape from Freedom, that while capitalism freed man from traditional bonds – contributing tremendously to the increase of positive freedom, and to the growth of an active, critical, responsible self (108) – it also made man a cog in service to a network of capitalism greater than himself, whose purpose is to acquire wealth and produce a profit; a capitalist circle of production that includes but exceeds the individual’s participation in it and undermined man’s responsibility and pride. In other words, though man acquired “freedom from” something, he could not lay his hands on “freedom to” something in order to realise his individuality. As for the self of modern man, Fromm writes:
The self . . . which is essentially constituted by the role the individual is supposed to play and which in reality is merely the subjective disguise for the objective social function of man in society . . . . While modern man seems to be characterized by utmost assertion of the self, actually his self has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self – intellect and willpower – to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.
(116-17)
It would be quite a significant function for “intelligence” to understand and accept what
Fromm calls “the role the individual is supposed to play” or “the objective social function of man in society,” though the terms objective and subjective are overshadowed by Cartesian epistemology. This role or function might be necessary for us to live. As a matter of fact, we have to adapt ourselves to society using “intelligence and willpower”; yet if we always give priority to adaptation, our total self will be reduced to a segment – “intelligence and willpower” only, excluding all other parts, as Fromm points out. Therefore, if Susan places an undue emphasis on “intelligence and willpower,” she at the same time suppresses such other aspects as “quarrelling, sulking, anger, silences of withdrawal, accusations and tears” (358).３
Fromm also questions the validity of conscious “will power” from different standpoint from Freud’s:
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs . . . . But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside;
we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort. (Escape 197)
According to this argument, what Susan thinks she does voluntarily is not what she really desires but what she does unconsciously to conform to the expectations of others;
she is “driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to . . . life, freedom, and comfort” and has only, as it were, a culturally defined desire. Thus the gap between her
“voluntary” choice and her real desire makes her feel that “she was a prisoner” (363) – a
status that is also suggested by the following description, in which she uses the word bondage:
The good marriage . . . depended just as much on his voluntary bondage as it did on hers . . . . And the word bondage – why had she used it? She had never felt marriage, or the children, as bondage. (365)
It might be what Fromm calls “a segment of the total self – intellect and willpower” that confronts Susan when she is supposed to feel free for the first time in the absence of her youngest children. She acquires “freedom from children” but not “freedom to do what she wants.” For, if her self is then reduced to just “a segment of total self,” she never knows what she wants – as it were, what her total self wants – which turns her freedom into an unfathomable emptiness.
It is noteworthy that Fromm suggests that this state of mind is the preserve of modern people, and that he connects it to the foundations for the rise of fascism. He explains the anxiety of modern man in the context of human history as follows:
The particular difficulty in recognizing to what extent our wishes – and our thoughts and feelings as well – are not really our own but put into us from the outside, is closely linked up with problem of authority and freedom. In the course of modern history the authority of the Church has been replaced by that of the State, that of the State by that of conscience, and in our era, the latter has been replaced by the anonymous authority of common sense and public opinion as instruments of conformity. Because we have freed ourselves of the older overt forms of authority, we do not see that we have become the prey of a new kind of authority. We have become automations who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals. (Escape 252)
Emancipated from visible authorities, we are still nevertheless the prey of the invisible authority represented by the social discourse of “the anonymous authority of common sense and public opinion as instruments of conformity.” The modern phenomenon of fascism utilises this aspect of human automation, based on “the illusion of being self-willing individuals”４ and consolidated by will-power. As I have mentioned in Chapter 2, the military procession that Peter sees in Mrs. Dalloway – which Woolf depicts as a precursor to fascist pageantry – are walking “as if one will works legs and arms uniformly” (MD 44). Indeed, “[t]he despair of the human automation is fertile soil for the political purpose of Fascism” (Escape 255). Therefore, one might say that Susan’s adherence to a purportedly happy family life with a nice husband, nice children, and a nice house could be taken advantage of by the discreet machinations of some political power.
Fromm’s concept of “the role the individual is supposed to play” is similar to the
“Other’s desire” named language suggested by Lacan. Lacan argues that, via the mirror stage, a human being enters the Symbolic – the world of language – by which he tries to establish his own self incrementally. Entrance into the Symbolic necessitates an acceptance of language and the social and cultural system of discourse, which is grounded in language and established even before one acquires it. Therefore, when one enters into the Symbolic without knowledge of what one’s own self is, one gets inescapably involved in the predetermined system of language or logos; the individual is thrown into the already established system of language – or rather, the already framed value-system of the Other’s desire.
What is real, however, can never be adequately represented by language and it is absolutely impossible for the self to be identified with language because of the
unbridgeable gap between language and the real.５ Intelligence, which Susan always counts on, belongs to the aforesaid system of language or logos. Susan tries to be so perfectly subject to language – to, as it were, the Other’s desire – and gets so exhaustively entangled in logocentrism that she undergoes a serious inner split between her whole self and her intelligence, or the system of language.６
In relation to this Anika Remaire refers, in Jaques Lacan, to Lacan’s idea of the subject’s conflict. The subject, according to Remaire, builds himself up at the suggestion of his illusions or dreams. In so doing, however, the subject eventually deludes himself as well as others. Once he begins to go in this direction, he can no longer alter course, and as a result, the distance between the subject he builds up and the original subject gets wider as time passes. This process is fatal for human beings, and yet whether or not a person is sane depends on the magnitude of this distance. Susan considers her illusion to be so perfectly “intelligent” that she has no need to stop and wonder what it means to be “intelligent,” despite the fact that she is subtly aware of her own inner split.
When Susan is occupied with her daily chores, she feels “as if the essential Susan is in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage,” and questions herself, “[W]hat, then, was this essential Susan?”(359). She secludes herself in room nineteen without finding an answer. R.D. Laing’s argument is useful to explain Susan’s inner condition, though he takes the existentialist standpoint. He states in The Divided Self – subtitled “An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness” – that both Shakespeare and Kafka describe
“the cruel irrationality of the conditions of human life.” Yet, according to Laing, while
“Shakespeare depicts characters who evidently experience themselves as real and alive and complete,” Kafka in our time has to make “efforts to communicate what being alive
is like in the absence of such assurance” (40). Those who cannot experience their own being as real, alive, and whole – and therefore suffer the inward split, as is the case with the modern man – are said to be in an ontologically insecure condition. For them, communicating with others seems nothing but a threat to their own autonomy and identity. Laing explains “implosion” as one of the forms of their anxieties:
Any ‘contact’ with reality is then in itself experienced as a dreadful threat because reality, as experienced from this position, is necessarily implosive and thus . . . in itself a threat to what identity the individual is able to suppose himself to have . . . . In fact, we are all only two or three degrees Fahrenheit from experiences of this order. (45-46: original italics)
In such a condition, “[T]he self then seeks by being unembodied to transcend the world and hence to be safe,” but in addition to that “[the self] becomes a vacuum” and
“nothing is here, inside” – so that, “the constant dread of all that is there, of being overwhelmed, is potentiated rather than mitigated by the need to keep the world at bay,”
because “in participation the individual fears that his vacuum will be obliterated, that he will be engulfed or otherwise lose his identity”(80). Laing represents this relationship between the self and body by distinguishing between the integrated self – where the
“self” and “body” are identical, in contradistinction to the “others” – and a
“pseudo-duality” where the “self” is dissociated from the “body” which is linked to the
“others.” In the latter case the self cannot make – to use Fromm’s words – even “the subjective disguise for objective social function of man in society.”
When Susan fails to detect what she wants, she feels “I’m a different person. I’m simply not myself” (364). According to Laing’s argument, Susan might after all communicate not with her real self but with another alienated self, since her real self is
not embodied. In other words – as a consequence of her adherence to intelligence – she is seriously distressed, when confronted with nothing but a vacuum in place of what Laing and Fromm call the self, or what Lacan calls the subject. Then, fearing
“implosion” by communicating with others or reality, she confines herself in room nineteen and lets only her alienated body maintain contact with her family or society.
Inside room nineteen is part of her whole self, which is detached completely from her social roles – as a mother, a wife, and a housekeeper. Whoever is playing such roles, she can no longer accept and endure these culturally defined selves that intelligence instructs her towards. That is why she yearns for a space where she can be anonymous and stay – or at least feel – free from social and cultural definitions of selfhood; that is, from the function of the system of language.
Lessing refers – in her second autobiography, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962 – to the affair that became her motive to write this story. A woman named Kate Rawlings – who had a husband and four children and a large house – gassed herself in a borrowed room in Paddington. Although the outline of the story is actually suggested by this incident, Susan remains Lessing’s creation and she has often written about characters – from Mary in The Grass Is Singing to Lynda in The Four Gated City – that are frightened to communicate with others, and suffer from split selves.
Lessing articulates her own fear concerning the story:
‘To Room Nineteen’ is a quite terrible story, not least because I don’t understand it, or rather the region of myself it comes from. (Walking in the Shade 268)
This sense of terribleness emanates from the story; it is the fear of modern people whose
self is “reduced to a segment of the total self,” resulting in the deceptive dependence on
“the illusion of being self-willing individuals.” When things are at their worst, the individual can do nothing but detach their self from their body, as Laing puts it.
Therefore, one could find a serious anxiety characteristic of modern times in the mental process of an ordinary and seemingly happy middle-class woman. Trapped by an intelligence or logocentrism which excludes amorphous reality, comprising of such incongruous emotions as upset and anger, modern people repeatedly reinforce the cultural grounds for fascism.
Lessing, not dispensing with the realist mode and sticking to Susan’s point of view, delineates the tragedy of a woman who adheres to visible and logocentric reality – without knowing that such a reality is only one version among amorphous and multifarious interpretations of reality, and that what she thinks is her desire is already invaded by the system of language that, as I discussed in Chapter 1, historically constitutes masculine-centred society.
Ⅱ
In The Memoir of a Survivor – published in 1974 – Lessing deploys a totally different form to that of “To Room Nineteen.” In The Memoir of a Survivor it is an anonymous narrator, a survivor of the near-future and presumably a middle-aged woman, who recollects and narrates her life thus far. In the story she narrates she is made aware, when living in a devastated society in the near-future, of another world which seems to exist beyond the wall of the living room of her flat – a world that she begins to visit sometimes. In that other world there unfolds scenes from the childhood of Emily – her roommate –as well as a variety of rooms and gardens. In the end the
narrator leaves for that world, together with almost all the other characters. Here, in Lessing’s tenth novel, two significant spaces are juxtaposed and contrasted: one is on this side of the wall, a “real” everyday life, described in a detailed realistic style; the other is on the other side of the wall, an ever-changing space described like a fantasy world.
Many critics have examined this enigmatic novel from various points of view.
Ellen Cronan Rose defines the world beyond the wall as a deeper part of life, which cannot be revealed on the surface, and insists – employing Jungian theory – that the fusion of the two worlds is critical for spiritual integration. Betsy Draine argues that the world on this side of the wall represents the occidental and materialistic vision of Marx and the one beyond it the oriental and spiritual vision of Jung. Therefore, she disputes the ending, which – being roughly and abruptly pulled together in the Jungian world – should provide both the destruction of the narrative frame and an escape from it.
Roberta Rubenstein, meanwhile, adopts the epigraph of the first version – “an attempt for autobiography” – and regards the novel as a compensatory fantasy where the narrator restores her own past by aligning her own mother with herself as a substitute mother of Emily in the present.
My purpose here will not be to focus on the plot of the novel, nor to define the respective sides of the wall as representing a particular type of zone. I will explore, rather, how the coming and going between both sides of the wall conveys – together with what happens in and out of the flat – the existence of the individual. It shows, in other words, the process of “becoming” of an individual, in which the individual is constructed repeatedly through the interpenetration of him/herself with other people or things, and between the present and past or his/her memory; these movements constitute
a considerable part of human reality. I will also investigate how this evanescent and changing reality is restricted and reduced to only one version.
In the novel the narrator and the city she lives in are given no name, and there are no details about her personal history, her career, or her private life. What is implied is that she belongs to the middle-class as she has lived in the building ever since it was built for just such a stratum of society. Now, however, many people from various ethnicities or social backgrounds live there as a result of the frequent departures of the residents. The area she lives in belongs to a decaying city of the near-future. Though there is still an institution called a government, it can hardly function in an almost anarchic society where the social infrastructure is on the verge of breaking down completely. People rely on candles for lighting, on firewood for heat, and on occasional bartering for food or goods. They can no longer use transport facilities without bribes.
News comes, informing them of the gradual breakdown of services in the city in the southern and eastern areas. Throngs of people, who are moving to the northern and western areas, pass frequently through the city the narrator lives in. Since the window of her flat faces the street, she often witnesses those drifting citizens passing by who, losing their houses, stay for a little while on the street in front of the flat and then leave – presumably for the northern or western areas.
One day strangers unexpectedly appear in her living room, a girl and a man, who – after saying simply “she is your responsibility” – leaves behind his female companion, Emily. After that the narrator lives with Emily and her pet – Hugo, a dog with a cat’s face. From that day forth she begins to be aware of another space beyond the wall of her living room, which faces the corridor in the building. Her sense that some space is there gets stronger each day:
. . . the consciousness of that other life, developing there so close to me, hidden from me, was a slow thing, coming precisely into the category of understanding we describe in the word “realize”, with its connotation of a gradual opening into comprehension. (7)
Thus the narrator feels “a gradual opening into comprehension” of “that other life,”
though she cannot enter it by design. However, in due course she sometimes finds herself – regardless of her own intention – on the other side of the wall, which has two characteristics. The world beyond the wall is never static and fixed, but fluid and evanescent. The rooms and gardens there are never in the same condition as when she has visited the previous time. Whilst they are neat and tidy on one of her visits, all of the furnishings are broken or overturned in the next. In one visit the rooms – whose ceilings are gone – are filled with fallen leaves, and in another, the walls that partition off the rooms have got higher or have collapsed. These walls never remain the same, and disappear as easily as does the wall of her living room.
And there for backdrop was the ambiguous wall, which could so easily dissolve, dissolving, too, all this extraneous life, and the anxieties and pressures of the time . . . and behind us that other indefinite region, shifting and melting and changing, where walls and doors and rooms and gardens and people continually re-created themselves, like clouds. (75-76)
Thus in the midst of ever-changing circumstance lies this world, removed from the restrictions of linear time or material existence, where everything is amorphous and changeable like a cloud. This amorphousness seems to be the counterpart of that of the throngs in the street, who gather and scatter alternatively and never settle anywhere.
Another feature of this world beyond the wall is that “characters” occasionally
appear there, and re-enact scenes from the past as if in a play or a film. Most of these characters are Emily’s family – her father, her mother, her baby brother, and a nurse – whose everyday life in the past the narrator is permitted to view. She calls these scenes
“personal,” contrasting them with the aforesaid rooms and gardens which she calls
“impersonal.” According to her description, she can discern “personal” by its tight and limited air and “impersonal” by its lightness, freedom, and feeling of possibility – as well as by its own inherent problems (41).
The narrator comes and goes between Emily’s past and her present life with Emily, which suggests that the wall not only represents a spatial partition between her living room and the corridor outside – and, in another dimension, between the “real”
world and her fantasy world – but also functions as a temporal boundary which separates past and present. Therefore, her spatial move through the wall could be considered a temporal move at the same time. On the other hand, if – as the narrator realises – the scenes behind the wall shows those “from her [Emily’s] memory, or her history, which had formed her” (45), the move between the two areas could imply the way one’s past and present interact with one another, as was delineated in Mrs.
Dalloway.
Moreover, the fact that the narrator discovers Emily’s past memories inside her own deeper self discloses the uncertainty of the corporeal frame of the individual as an existence confined to one body. She cannot even decide whether what is shown is Emily’s memory or her own memory, recollecting what she felt in the first time she has gone beyond the wall; “I knew these sofas, these chairs. But why? From what time in my life did they date? . . . . Yet it seemed that they had been mine, or an intimate friend’s . . . . Yet I knew everything in it” (24). When she watches the infant Emily in a
“personal” scene with her baby brother, her mother and a nurse, she finds herself both as an adult observer and at the same time as the infant Emily:
. . . and two females joined in a ceremony of loving while the baby wriggled and responded and cooed. And the little girl watched. Everything around her was enormous: the room so large, warm, and high, the two women so tall and strong and disliking . . . . I saw it as a small child might – that is, enormous and implacable – but at the same time I kept with me my knowledge that it was tiny and implacable – because petty, implacable . . . (43)
Her mother, the nurse, and all the furniture look huge and overwhelming to the infant.
Her mother, who makes Emily feel threatened, complains that her life is too busy with daily chores and child-raising for her to enjoy her own life and that Emily – her first child – is the most distressing of all. This complaint haunts her and induces a heavy depression which the narrator, who shares her perspective, also suffers.
The world beyond the wall, as could be inferred from that shared viewpoint and the aforesaid déja vu, begins to seem like a past world that the narrator and Emily share.
If so, one could hypothesise that the narrator and Emily are the same person and that Emily is not only the narrator’s roommate but also her younger self. In other words they could be one person, and yet each has a separate body. That possibility leads to another question about the anonymity of the narrator, that is, whether or not a boundary can be established between oneself and others.
The narrator, in her third and fourth visit to the past, holds a crying baby Emily and suspects that this is not Emily but her stout and much frustrated mother:
Who else could it possibly be but Emily’s mother, the large cart-horse
woman, her tormentor, the world’s image? It was not Emily I took . . . . I knew I was seeing an incident that was repeated again and again in Emily’s? her mother’s? early life. It was a continuing thing; had gone on, day after day, month after month. (149-50)
The suggestion that the crying baby is both Emily and her mother at the same time foregrounds the universality of the relationship between a mother and a child.７ The narrator describes the relationship between an ever-complaining mother and a child who is distressed by her mother’s grumbling as something that can “go on, day after day, month after month.” Thus Emily’s, or the narrator’s, past could be also that of Emily’s mother – implying that a person’s experience is not peculiar to him or her, but one shared with others. The individual’s experience, memory or past is therefore also that of other people – a collective – as is recollected in an earlier part of the novel that gives a foretaste of the collapsed division between the “personal” and the “impersonal”:
I . . . certainly did not know how much of my own personal experience was common, was shared: this is what looking back, we acknowledge first – our similarities, not our differences. (4)８
Perhaps the most significant point, however, about the world on the other side of the wall is the correlativity it establishes with its antithesis. One day the narrator becomes aware, during one of her visits, that the fluidity of that world has some correlation with the shift of this world:
It was about then I understood that the events on the pavements and what went on between me and Emily might have a connection with what I saw on my visits behind the wall. (40)
The more the condition on the street worsens and the more its degeneration infringes on
the private life or mind, the more the rooms in that world become disordered and the sense of disturbance and suffocation is intensified. The “real” world on this side of the wall, the narrator begins to sense, has a considerable connection with the world beyond the wall.
This connection seems to get stronger and stronger. At first the two worlds exist distinctly, with the narrator never conscious of the two’s co-existence. However, the boundary between the two, which seems to exclude one from the other initially, gradually blurs. The narrator begins to hear the cry of the child she meets in the other world even when she stays in her living room in the “real” world:
I could hear it in the day, in my “real” life . . . when I was in one world . . . the ordinary logical time-dominated world of everyday did not exist . . . . But now began a period when something of the flavour of the place behind the wall did continuously invade my real life . . . two sounds [the sobbing of the child and the complaint of the mother] went on side by side, theme and descant . . . (145)
The narrator hears constantly, even in this “real” world, the infant Emily’s cry and her mother’s grumbling, which Emily in this world can not hear. In the other world the
“impersonal” area is being affected by a sense of suffocation in the “personal” area, corresponding to the devastation of this world where inhabitants begin to abandon the city partly because uncanny and incongruous children – who kill people at a whim – begin to emerge from underground.
In addition to the fusion of the two worlds, the superiority of the “real” world is subverted. One day, when the boundary between the “personal” and the “impersonal” as well as that of the two worlds is utterly destabilised, the narrator considers the space
beyond the wall whilst actually looking out of the window of her flat in the “real”
world:
. . . and though it was hard to maintain a knowledge of that other world . . . . I did hold it. I kept in mind . . . intimations of that life, or lives, became more powerful and frequent in “ordinary” life, as if that place were feeding and sustaining us, and wished us to know it . . . as I came to the window after an escape into the space behind the wall, there would be a moment of doubt; my mind would sway and have to steady itself as I reassured myself that no, what I was looking at was reality, was real life . . . ( 159-60)
Here the narrator calls into question the hierarchy that presupposes the ascendancy of the “real” world. In ordinary circumstances one expects to visit the world of fantasy only occasionally, and to have the “real” world as one’s base. However, the narrator begins to suspect that it is that other world rather than this “real” one that forms the neglected foundation of experience. Whilst looking out of the window, therefore, she has to persuade herself, “[N]o, what I was looking at was reality, was real life” (159).
The nullification of the wall, the fusion of the two worlds, and the destabilisation of the ascendancy of the “real” world are the events that converge into the story’s ending where the characters go away together into the other world and the wall disappears.
What is described here is an ever-changing yet correlative relationship; the interactive movement between the individual or the self and its past, or the collective. If, as Bergson argues, as I have quoted in Chapter 1, “the self is in fact memory” and “a real entity that experiences continuous growth by reabsorbing and reinscribing the whole of its experiences and perceptions at any single moment” (Gillies 104), then the subject – as an individual who lives in the present “real” world – is an entity who, at any
single moment, is inspired by memory and, inversely, reinterprets and reconstructs his memory and the past. This is the process of becoming. The individual is an existence with a body that functions in the everyday world – yet at the same time his experiences always involve a community of others, whose effect leaves an inerasable inscription on the process of the self’s becoming. Therefore, the individual has two bilateral vectors both in to and out from the self; he maintains this interactive and interpenetrative relationship between the inside and the outside – being inspired and inspiring, or being suppressed and suppressing.
The individual absorbs his experiences in external society into his inner self and inscribes them on his memory or unconscious, and then that memory or unconscious inspires or suppresses the self, through which he is projected to the external world.
When this interactive movement repeats itself, the present of the individual is posited in the front line of the accumulated past. In the novel this movement of the self is displayed spatially, as if adopting Freud’s topographical image, and by juxtaposing it with the life on the street the relationship between inside and outside the individual is made visible. What is more, by emphasising the evanescence and amorphousness of every area, the novel portrays an indescribable movement where the individual – in the process of becoming – is decided and re-decided incessantly.
The societal anxieties of Britain at the time when the novel was published pervade its tale. From the 1960s to the 1970s the acute decline of the British Empire, though already in the process of shrinking that I referred to in Chapter 3, began to become more obvious with the successive loss of its colonies. The worse the economical stagnation of the post-war period became, the more the rate of the
unemployment increased – which induced a distrust of politics, resulting in the collapse of the two-party system. Its collapse inflicted further political instability, the state falling into a vicious circle. The societal situation in the novel has a connection, it seems, with these overall suffocation or deterioration of British society where the governmental institutions remain yet do not function properly.
It is, however, true that culture was ironically activated in this decayed society; or rather, the meaning of the word “culture” was transformed, and this cultural flow is omnipresent in the novel where the city is on the verge of collapse. Britain could not be immune to the political tide in Europe from the late 1960s to the 1970s – traditional morality was condemned, and so was the conventional sense of values, from the diverse standpoints of women, young people and homosexuals; those, that is, who had hitherto felt marginalised. The throng, whom the narrator observes as an emblem of social movement in the novel, is reminiscent of “hippies” – a popular movement at the time – in their casual wear, their youth and their unconventional behaviour. In the same way “a small band of girls” (165) on the street reminds one of the women’s movement. Such expressions as “out of date, old fashioned words” (29) and “their old wartime songs, or revolutionary songs that seemed as inappropriate as sex songs are to old age” (82) frequently appear in the novel and the narrator states as follows:
Styles in morals had changed so sharply and so often in my lifetime, and were so different in various sections of the community, that I had learned long ago to accept whatever was the norm for that particular time and place.
(154)
Here I need to digress a little, back to the 1950s, not only because Lessing’s involvement with British culture and politics underwent some critical phases in this
period, but because the general culture in the 1960s and the 1970s was substantially affected by what had happened in that decade.９ Whichever period the narrator’s
“lifetime” takes place in, the radical changes of the late 1960s and the 1970s had their origin in the 1950s – as Carole Klein points out, in Doris Lessing: A Biography, where she refers to the New Left Review, of whose editorial board Lessing was a member:
New developments in capitalism were exploding in the fifties: television and mass consumerism chief among them. Economic lines were blurring, as working-class people bought television sets and shopped in the supermarkets that were beginning to open, stocked with some luxuries as well as staples. They were unknowingly involved in a cross-class experience, and their dreams and expectations became newly middle-class.
Where was the old working-class culture? Where would this sense of classlessness lead? (170)
As the conglomerate mass culture and its activity developed on a larger scale in post-war society, the divisions between the classes and between the centre and the marginalised began to blur,１０ and consequently the very definition of the word
“culture” began to be questioned.
Consonant with this societal and cultural vacillation, Lessing herself – in this period – wavered in her commitment to the Communist Party, as is detailed in The Golden Notebook. I will examine briefly Lessing’s involvement with politics, especially left-wing, since her involvement is a key factor in understanding her attitude towards life and novel-writing.
Klein considers that:
The year 1956 is considered a watershed for the British left. The invasion
of part of Egypt and the Suez Canal by the British and French was shocking to many English people, particularly those of a leftist bent. Even more horrifying for the staunch Communist was the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union to quell a popular uprising. (156)
Perhaps with the intention of avoiding a media fuss, Lessing – as Klein goes on to state – “simply neglected to renew her Party card for 1957” (156). Before these events the historian Edward Thompson and the economist John Saville, both of whom were then members of the Communist Party, issued independently a mimeographed news sheet called the Reasoner. After the 1956 revelation they officially quit the Party, and “started a larger, independent journal called the New Reasoner” (168) whose editorial board Lessing served on. The New Reasoner “join[ed] forces with another publication – begun in 1957 by Oxford undergraduates – called the Universities and Left Review, whose four editors included Stuart Hall, and these two journals were united under the name New Left Review.
Clearly, however, Lessing was not much interested in the New Left Review; this can be inferred from several facts. For one thing, while Lessing always attended New Reasoner board meetings, she “appeared at editorial sessions of the New Left Review only intermittently” (169). In addition to this, Stuart Hall remarked her absent-minded attitude in meetings. Remembering her as not participating in the discussions but just
“watching” them, Hall decided that “it was just clear that what was going on in her mind wasn’t any of our business” (169). Then she began to retreat from political activities, except those such as the Aldermaston march for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament around 1960, while she wrote novels of various forms to evoke the cultural upheaval in the 1960s.
These acts of hers do not, however, prove her complete change of heart and mind concerning communism, nor a radical shift from pro-politics to anti-politics as is sometimes indicated by some readers or reviewers.
She declares – in the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin – that she joined the Communist Party not because she approved of Marxist theory or the political world, but because the Party was the only place where she could talk about the colour bar, or racial discrimination:
In my case it was because for the first time in my life I was meeting a group of people . . . who read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read, and among whom thoughts about the Native Problem I had scarcely dared to say aloud turned out to be more commonplace . . . (259)
Growing up in the veld in Southen Rhodesia, the young Lessing could not rid herself of the suspicion that there was something extremely contradictory, or something terribly inhuman, in the relationship between white people and black people; yet she could not articulate her feelings, being suppressed by the tacit acceptance of it in the colonial society. Then she found in the Communist Party what she had yearned for – a place where she could share and discuss the question with other people.
Her rather straightforward motivation testifies her love for other human beings;
she announced, in a letter to Edward Thompson of February 1957, her affection for people as well as her loss of faith in politics:
What I feel is an immense joy and satisfaction that the world is going so fast, that the peasant in China no longer starves, that people all over the world care enough for their fellow human beings to fight for what they feel, at the time, to be justice. I feel a sort of complicated gigantic flow of
movement of which I am a part, and it gives me profound satisfaction to be in it. But what has this got to do with political attitudes? (Walking 216) She realises that she is a part of “complicated gigantic flow of moment,” and what offers her “an immense joy and satisfaction” is that “people all over the world care enough for their fellow human beings to fight for what they feel, at the time, to be justice.” She refers to the “gigantic flow” also in “Afterward to The Story of an African Farm,” saying that human beings are “small things in the grip of gigantic forces,” and yet they “cry out and fight and struggle to understand the incomprehensible” (104). This
“endeavour, a kind of hunger, that passionate desire for growth and understanding”
Lessing admires as “the deepest pulse of human beings” (“Afterward” 100), and it is exactly what occupies Anna in The Golden Notebook. When Anna hopes to acquire “the pleasure of recognition” through “a rescuing of the formless into form” (GN 414) – as I cited in Chapter 3 – this rescuing is synonymous with the struggle “to understand the incomprehensible” and the “passionate desire for growth and understanding” leads to
“the pleasure of recognition” – a pleasure that Woolf calls “the strongest pleasure known to me” when “putting [reality] into words” (“A Sketch of the Past” 72). In other words, what Lessing terms “the deepest pulse of human beings” is something also recognised and admired by Woolf. For Lessing, and perhaps for Woolf as well, it is not political activity in a narrow sense that matters most, but the pleasure that persists as the deepest pulse of human beings. This attitude leads her to declare, in an interview with Nissa Torrents in 1980, that “I have never thought that politics resolved anything, nor have I ever defended any definite political position. I have simply limited myself in writing about people who are active politically” (Conversations 8).
Lessing has written novels, it seems, to express her concern for “the deepest
impulse of human beings” – no matter if they are left-wing or right-wing, committed or uncommitted politically, religious or unreligious – and, consequently, political matters are for her nothing more than an unavoidable aspect of life. What matters for her, and for Anna, is how as writers they can express the reality of human beings who embrace
“the deepest pulse” for “desire for growth and understanding.”
Lessing’s sense of purpose in this respect is present in almost all of her works. In The Four Gated City – the last book of the “Children of Violence” series published in 1969, just before The Memoir – she seems to jump from a realist novel into an apocalyptic one, with the last part recounting the outbreak of nuclear war as if betraying the reader’s expectation about the ending of an autobiographical novel. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell from 1971 – to which I referred in my Introduction – the dialogue between the protagonist, a schizophrenic patient, and the doctor in the “real” world is defamiliarised with the effect that the “real” and “hallucination” appear to be reversed.
In The Summer Before the Dark, published in 1973, the metamorphosis of Kate – the protagonist – in her “real” life corresponds with the transition of her dreams.
Thus Lessing, by manipulating literary forms, calls into question the established,
“real” world; for her human reality is not framed by the visible world and linear time but an ever-changing conglomeration – as is adumbrated by Between the Acts, where past and present are intertwined with each other. As a matter of fact, in The Memoir of a Survivor – in spite of its multiple references to the rapidity of changes in social values from the late 1960s to the 1970s – the novel’s setting in the near-future implies the cyclical nature of history: any historical event, it suggests, could come back at any time.１１ The collapse of the wall suggests a challenge to the “real” world as does its ending, where Lessing – seemingly escaping into fantasy and discarding realism –
defies the dominance of the established “real” world.
Ⅲ
In this section I discuss how Lessing makes clear the mechanism by which Susan or Emily’s mother unwittingly grants privilege to just one version of reality. For this purpose Althusserian theory of ideology will prove a useful conception for the elucidation of this mechanism, or the interpenetrative relationship between the individual’s inner state and the outer society that is critical to Lessing’s novels.
According to Althusser, ideology designates the “‘system of representation’
worked up in specific material practices, which helps form individuals into social subjects who “freely” internalise an appropriate “picture” of their social world and their place in it” (Kavanagh 310).１２ Although Althusser constructs his theory of ideology based on Marxism, it offers now, Kavanagh argues, not narrowly political ideas but “a fundamental framework of assumptions that defines the parameters of the real and the self; it constitutes what Althusser calls the social subject’s ‘lived’ relation to the real”
(310). This fundamental framework of assumptions is realised through what Althusser calls “state apparatuses.” According to Paul Ricoeur, there are two kinds of state apparatuses; the first is “the repressive and coercive state apparatuses: government, administration, police, courts, prisons, and so on,” and the second is “the ideological state apparatuses: religion, education, the family, the political system, communications, culture, and so forth” (Ricoeur 51). It is through the latter ideological state apparatuses that the individual or the social subject is, in his/her unconscious, inscribed unknowingly with “a fundamental framework of assumptions.” Ricoeur goes on to refer to what Althusser calls “interpellation,” quoting Althusser’s remarks:
Althusser’s interesting analysis of what he calls ‘interpellation’
demonstrates more specifically the relationship between ideology and the subject. ‘As a first formulation, I shall say: all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject’ (Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books, 1971. 162). We are constituted as subjects through a process of recognition . . . . In its ability to interpellate subject, ideology also constitutes them. To be hailed is to become a subject.
‘The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’ (Lenin 163). (Ricoeur 64)
This function of ideology and its “interpellation” is epitomised by Susan’s case.
Obviously “a fundamental framework of assumptions” for Susan is the discourse – rife in the early 1960s – that women’s happiness comes from having a handsome husband and nice children along with a beautiful house and a fine garden in the suburbs. When she is “interpellated” through one of the “ideological apparatuses” designed to engender a “concrete subject” – in this case the concept of family, which makes of her a magnanimous wife, a caring mother, and an efficient housekeeper – she internalises the aim of “interpellation” to play a role in society, to live her “‘lived’ relation to real,”
without knowing that her “will” is no more than the result of what Fromm calls “the subjective disguise.” Besides, if ideology is constituted by a predetermined system of language, here again the system of language is waiting – along with the framework of ideology – for Susan to be incorporated within it. In Memoir of a Survivor, “a fundamental framework of assumptions” or “interpellation” is explicit in the remarks of Emily and her mother, and the descriptions of them. In the “personal” room behind the
wall Emily’s mother complains to her husband of her irritating everyday life with an over-demanding child. She grumbles: “I’m not what I was – I know that only too well, I am afraid”(69), on which the narrator comments:
She was trapped, but did not know why she felt this, for her marriage and her children were what she personally had wanted and aimed for – what society had chosen for her. Nothing in her education or experience had prepared for her what she did in fact feel, and she was isolated in her distress and her bafflement, sometimes even believing that she might perhaps be ill in some way. (69)
Like Susan, Emily’s mother has internalised the direction of “interpellation” through one of the “ideological apparatuses” – family.１３ Yet in reality “what she personally had wanted and aimed for” is no more than “what society had chosen for her,” a fact which she is vaguely aware of. In this respect her remark, “I’m not what I was,” has precisely the same significance as the description of Susan’s condition being “as if the essential Susan is in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage”; neither of them can sneak away from “a fundamental frame of assumptions,” though feeling subtly their entanglement with it. Emily’s mother is not, however, only a victim of “assumptions,”
but herself conveys them when she dictates to Emily: “You are this; and this and this – this is what you have to do, and not that’” (92: original italics). Then Emily’s turn comes, and she orders in the farm the children under her care to do this and not that (130). It is never a matter of individual bias, but of something in the system of human society.
What, therefore, is the “real” world for Susan, who is entangled by “a fundamental framework of assumptions” and “interpellated” through an ideological
appratus? Regarding the “constructed” reality created by ideology, I will refer to Graeme Turner’s argument in British Cultural Studies: An Introduction and Stuart Hall’s essay, “The rediscovery of “ideology”: return of the repressed in media studies.” Turner maintains that Hall’s essay is presumably the most comprehensive attempt at describing chronologically the theories around ideology within cultural studies, emphasising Hall’s contribution to analysing the ideological function through and in the media – one of the ideological apparatuses. Hall states that the repressed – i.e., ideology – returned to the agenda of media studies after the “end to ideology” that was pronounced by mass communication theorists, in which the “natural” and “spontaneous” formation of the general consensus is based on the tolerant acceptance of differences in society. When ideology “returned,” however, obviousness and presupposed credibility of the consensus approach was questioned and, consequently, its groundlessness was revealed. Thereafter the idea, not of the reflection upon, but of construction of the “real” became the main topic in critical media research. Drawing on post-Saussurean structuralist appropriations of semiotic models, Hall goes on to present the question of the “politics of signification”
– that is, “the ways in which the social practice of making meanings is controlled and determined” (172). He points out that the roots of ideology are much deeper than those of social practices like the media:
. . . it [ideology] structures the most basic systems of cultural organisation . . . . Every culture has its own ‘forms of episodic thinking’
that provide its members with ‘taken-for-granted elements’ of their
‘practical knowledge’ (p.73). This ‘common sense’ is rarely made explicit, and is often in fact unconscious, but it too is built upon a comprehensive foundation of ideological premises. (172)
The effect of ideology on the process where “forms of episodic thinking” offer
“taken-for-granted-elements” of “practical knowledge” (Hall 73), or where it
“signif[ies] events in a particular way” (Hall 69), is to erase the trace of ideology itself – making itself inconspicuous so that the message is regarded as a “natural” and
“spontaneous” representation of the “real”; this effect Hall terms the “reality effect,” by which one recognise a particular representation as obvious, natural, and spontaneous.１４ Hall states that “this recognition effect was not a recognition of the reality behind the words, but a sort of confirmation of the obviousness, the taken-for-grantedness of the way the discourse was organised and of the underlying premises on which the statement in fact depended” (Hall 75). Indeed, as Turner puts it, “[t]he circle closes, as this recognition effectively validates the representation” (Turner 172).
It is this “reality effect” that sways Susan; when it legitimates and fixes just one of the diverse representations of the “real” as the only “natural” and “spontaneous”
premise, it offers no alternative “real” for Susan. Therefore, Lessing delineates in “To Room Nineteen” – exclusively from Susan’s point of view – the predicament of a woman who is suffocated by “a fundamental framework of assumptions” and constant
“interpellation” – closing herself within the circle, without knowing any other meaning of her role in society. By unfolding, through Susan’s eyes, a fixed and confined representation of the “real” world, Lessing calls into question what the “real” is. In The Memoir of a Survivor she destabilises the boundary between the “real” world and the
“non-real” world, juxtaposing the inner self and external society – which is similarly considered to be “real”; it is, above all, the book’s ending – in which almost all the characters go away into the “non-real” world beyond the wall – that implies a rejection of the hierarchal dominance of this “real” world, which is shown to be nothing but one
version of other possible representations.
When Hall – referring to the “polysemy of language” – indicates that “the same set of signifiers could produce different meanings and thus made the effect of naturalisation something to be worked at, produced,” his argument is exemplified by the narrator’s recollection at the very beginning of Memoir:
We all remember that time. It was no different for me than for others. Yet we do tell each other over and over again the particularities of the events we shared . . . as if we are saying, “It was like that for you, too? Then that confirms it, yes, it was so, it must have been, I wasn’t imagining things.”
We match or dispute like people who have seen remarkable creatures on a journey: “Did you see that big blue fish? Oh, the one you saw was yellow!”
But the sea we travelled over was the same . . . (3)
The narrator knows that the same signifier – the fish – produces different meanings; it means the blue fish for one, and also the yellow one – so that they have to “tell each other over and over again” to confirm what is “real.” In reality, however, the one meaning or the one signified is legitimated and established as the predominant one – or as “a fundamental frame of assumptions” – whereas the others are dismissed and marginalised as inappropriate in order to preserve the concept of common sense, normality or sanity. Hall, asking himself how this process of attribution of the predominant meaning is structured, suggests that the process is “a property of the system of relations involved,” rather than “the overt and intentional biases of individuals” (85). Susan’s and Emily’s mother’s predicament is therefore, as mentioned previously, not necessarily their own fault; the central assumptions vary, depending on time and areas, and are each time conveyed repeatedly. We close the circle again and
again.
Lessing challenges this closing of the circle that reduces versatile reality to only one version; her notion is condensed in the subtitle of The Memoir of a Survivor – “An Attempt at Autobiography” – which was somehow omitted after the second version.
Lessing states about the subtitle as follows:
When I wrote Memoir of A Survivor I called it, ‘An Attempt at an Autobiography’, but no one was interested. Foreign publishers simply left it off the title page, and soon no one remembered to put it on reprints in English. People seemed embarrassed. They did not understand it, they said.
For thousands upon thousands of years, we – humankind – have told ourselves tales and stories, and these were always analogies and metaphors, parables and allegories; they were elusive and equivocal; they hinted and alluded, they shadowed forth in a glass darkly. But after three centuries of the Realistic Novel, in many people this part of the brain has atrophied.
(Under My Skin 28)
For Lessing human reality includes not only the “tangible world” (Conversations 148), but also the world of the imagination that – using “this part of the brain” – can express itself through “analogies and metaphors, parables and allegories.” This method of storytelling is what humankind has done for thousands years; it is not Lessing’s original but the historically accepted style.１５ It is natural, therefore, for her to juxtapose the two worlds in her autobiography, since “reality and dream, marked off by the wall, complement each other to give an all-encompassing vision to the narrator’s past”
(Conversations 148). For her it is not a question of whether realism is appropriate or not, but a question of how she can convey this amorphous and miscellaneous reality through
