Zambezia (1975-6), 4 (ii).ESSAY REVIEWSOME RECENT CRITICISM OF DORIS LESSINGIN 1962 'Doris Lessing's following among the literary intelligentsia in the USwas miniscule': by 1973 things had clearly changed, and the character of thenew following can to some extent be gauged from the first of the books underreview.1 The overwhelming majority of contributors are women, and morethan half the articles on specific works deal with one novel, The GoldenNotebook. The editorial emphasis is spelt out in a fighting introduction byAnnis Pratt. The selection is seen as pointing the way for future critics to'turn their attention to social and feminist appraisals, as well as comparisonsbetween the work and that of other authors in the continuum of both women'sfiction and of Western literature in general'.2 This positive programme isreinforced by an explicit hostility to 'aesthetic' or formalist approaches, whichare repeatedly characterised as 'narrow':We will do justice to [the] fiction not by seeking to judge it withinnarrow formalist bounds but by giving ourselves to its values andby keeping our mind's eye open to the sentence of death under whichour age thinly lives.3The result is a lively, stimulating, often rewarding volume; but it does attimes demonstrate how the anxiety to avoid one sort of narrowness can pushus into another. It is of course a fallacy that formalist criticism can ever bedispensed with entirely, since works of art derive part of their meaning fromtheir form; and Mrs Lessing herself is quoted by Howe as complainingagainst critics who misread The Golden Notebook 'as a kind of latter-dayfeminism' precisely because they failed to notice its formal shaping: 'the wayit's constructed says what the book is about ... it was a highly structuredbook, carefully planned. The point of that book was the relation of its partsto each other'.4 Perhaps as the result of Mrs Lessing's insistence, The GoldenNotebook receives a generally balanced treatment, avoiding both the formalpedantries of the extremist New Critics and the free-wheeling social-feminismthat the editorial seems at times to prescribe. But only one other novelleceives this fullness of treatment, in Douglass Boiling's contribution, 'Struc-ture and Theme in Briefing for a Descent into Hell'; in view of the formalcomplexity of Mrs Lessing's art in The Grass is Singing, and even moreremarkably in the 'Children of Violence' series, it is a sad omission.Other imbalances are revealed on the contents page: nothing specificallyon the short stories, or the poetry; no consideration of the African worksas a whole ; nothing (except in passing) on the four 'Zambesian' novels of» A Pratt and L. S. Dembo (eds), Doris Lessing: Critical Studies (Madison, Univ.of Wisconsin Press, 1974), xi, 172pp. Rh$17,20 (This is a reprint in hard cover of theAutumn 1973 issue of Contemporary Literature, a Special Number on Doris Lessing).The quotation is from F. Howe, 'A conversation with Doris Lessing', ibid., 2.2 Ibid., x.3 Ibid., quoting D. Boiling, 'Structure and theme in Briefing for a Descent into Hell*,ibid.. 135.* Ibid., 7.103104ESSAY REVIEW'Children of Violence' ; no attempt to study the shape of the author's careeras a whole; no systematic engagement with that central Lessing problem, therelationship of her fiction to history and historical process.The contribution by Michele Wender Zak ('The Grass is Singing: Alittle novel about the emotions') exemplifies both the strengths and weak-nesses of a quasi-ideological approach. She is appropriately insightful aboutthe Marxist assumptions underlying the work, and about the way the pro-tagonist Mary Turner becomes the victim of a male-sexist society. She drawson the relevant works of R. D. Laing for a terminology to describe the mentalcondition into which Mary is forced. But, because she fails to heed the formalshaping of the work, she falls into an absurd conclusion:One rather wishes, in fact, that Mary had been able to sustain the'false self that preceded the accidentally overheard conversation.5One might equally wish that King Lear had got on better with his daughters(which is no doubt what* one would be forced to conclude after a social andgeriatric appraisal of Shakespeare's play). Zak's account of the plot reducesit from a highly-patterned causal sequence to a vague chronological flow,punctuated by 'meanwhile', 'at about this time', and 'then'; and it is only tobe expected that she should fail to make the significant connections which arcsurely the point of the novel. Lessing does more than show that economicstructures determine psychological and therefore sexual patterns: she offers acareful study of the authoritarian psychological dynamic that maintains theeconomic and political status quo, diagnosing it as a neurosis of which Mary'smadness becomes an extreme, illuminating, and fully tragic, instance. Again,insisting on the Marxist and feminist aspects, Zak misses the equally potentFreudian elements in the novel. Mary's represssive behaviour towards blackpeople is intimately connected with her denial of her own sexuality. Lessingbalances Marxist economic determinism with Fredudian physchologicaldeterminism, so that the physical order and human consciousness are seenas a continuum. The Grass is Singing is not, as Zak dismissively describes it,among Lessing's 'slightest' works. It is seminal: in some ways the most intenseand compact realisation of the author's master-theme of the 'integration ofconsciousness'.Irritating too, is Zak's assumption that the work is set in South Africa,and concerns an Afrikaner community. (We are explicitly told in the novelthat it is set in Southern Rhodesia, and that the Turners, though 'poor white',are not Afrikaners but members of an English community: even the name ofthe district, Ngesi, is meaningful.) It betrays a lack of curiosity about detailthat undermines some of our confidence in the critic's conclusions, but ischaracteristic both of ideologically-based criticism, in general, and muchAmerican Lessing criticism in particular.E. Hinz and J. Theunisson's contribution ('The Pieta as Ikon in TheGolden Notebook') is particularly rewarding Š an example of the kind ofinsight that flows when critics exploit a particular social and cultural theme,but discipline and develop their findings by a constant close scrutiny of thetexts. Their delicate extraction of the latent pictorial image (ikon) from thenarrative, and their consequent discussion of its significance, are most re-vealing. The ambivalent face of the Great Mother archetype in Westernculture, Lessing's anxiety about the destructive aspect of it, and the way thatanxiety is worked into the novel, are central to any reading of The GoldenNotebook. Again, one only wishes that the authors had pushed their conclu-s Ibid.. 73.L. B. RiX105sions further. From Mary Turner's problem with her mother and her ownmaternal role, to the supreme act of vicarious motherhood rendered by thenarrator of Memoirs of a Survivor ŠŁ this concern straddles Doris Lessing'sentire career. As it is, the essay leaves unclear whether it is merely a localconcern of Lessing's most overtly feminist novel.What does emerge from the Pratt and Dembo volume, in so far as itseeks to appropriate Mrs Lessing for feminist and 'social' ends, is para-doxically a sense of her largeness, her subtlety, her roundedness. It is instruc-tive that more than one contributor denies her a sense of humour. Any lackof humour is surely in the critics, as readers of In Pursuit of the English, or,indeed, the 'Children of Violence' novels, will know. The equally conventionalnotion that her 'style' is graceless is also repeated. Some day it will bepossible to do full justice to Doris Lessing as an artist, but a certain amountof dust will have to settle first.Paul Schlueter's book6 is usefully set against the Pratt and Dembo volume.For all their occasional narrowness, the 'Contemporary Literature critics writewith a degree of engagement with their subject, and even passion. Schlueter'sstyle and approach are exemplified in these opening sentences:The pressures of our time frequently force upon sensitive people agreater awareness not only of the era itself but also of the individualin that era. In particular, such an awareness frequently takes theform of an analysis either of the complicated and bewildered indivi-dual in the world, or of the manner in which that individual relatesto other human beings. Such 'personal relations', as they have beencalled . . . 7His text consists mostly of plot-summaries, broken by passages in which'themes' are identified (though what the author is doing with them, what theirmutual relations in the total structure are, are questions not pursued), orvarious suggestions made about which writers have 'influenced' the passagein hand. Lawrence is a favourite, and one gets the sense that Schlueterthinks Mrs Lessing is somehow respectable because she writes under such anaugust influence. The possibility that when she describes sex, for example, shemight be writing under the influence of her own experience, is not canvassed.This book is aimed presumably at a college audience: no serious critic willfind anything substantial or original in it.Schlueter's insensitivity to what has been described as Lessing's Africanbackground, but is in fact her Southern Rhodesian foreground, is equallydistressing. It has yet to be acknowledged by American criticism thatLessing's novels are by no means about 'Africa' in general Š the enterprisewould be portentous if they were Š but very exact scrutinies of a particularAfrican society, the one in which she was raised. The Grass is Singing exploresthe psychological mechanisms of a white, English-speaking farming com-munity in one area of Rhodesia. Of course the intention is to generalise fromthat to Rhodesia as a whole, and, on one level, to white-ruled SouthernAfrica (which she collectively terms 'South Africa') as part of the same racialand political pattern. But the working details are fiercely local. The 'Zam-besian' volumes of 'Children of Violence' are even more intimate in theirfocus. As Murray Steele shows, Lessing works, for example, with the intrica-cies of Southern Rhodesia Labour Party politics, reflecting historical decisionse P. Schlueter, The Novels of Doris Lessing (Garbondale, Southern Illinois Univ.Press, 1973), x , 144pp.. US$5,95."* Ibid., 1.106ESSAY REVIEWand personalities under the most flimsy fictionalisations.8 Overseas critics canhardly be expected to know perhaps, that the volumes contain a precisegeography of Salisbury, including the naming of actual streets, hotels, publicbuildings (including the statue of Rhodes); but they might at least notice that'Zambesia' is a country, not a town, as Schlueter9 has it, and located ex-plicitly between Northern Rhodesia and South Africa, and west of Mozam-bique. Mrs Lessing, for her own reasons, has repeatedly made warning-offnoises, disparaging attempts to see autobiographical or even historical detailsin these 'fictions'. Meanwhile, critics comment at will upon her 'commitmentto link private consciousness with historical event',10 while no attempt, otherthan Steele's has been made to examine what that means with reference toanything actual. Mrs Lessing should indeed not naively be 'confused with herheroines';11 but the relation between her and them is often an intimate one,as anyone will discover who cares to chart the writer's life month by monthbetween 1938 and 1949, side by side with that of her fictitious Martha Quest.Lessing, in sum, is currently receiving a rather limited kind of criticalattention. Since her fiction is so hotly relevant to our times, it is only naturalthat she should be appropriated bv embattled causes and attract critics whoseprimary interest is in the issues she raises. Perhaps this is a necessary firstphase of her general acceptance by the literary public. One simply hopes thata broader (rather than increasingly narrow) citicism will soon follow, perhapsindeed helped forward by the essays collected by Pratt and Dembo. It wouldbe a loss if the general reader, to whom she has so much to offer, were mean-while deterred and estranged by the more extreme positions taken by herpresent following.University of RhodesiaL. B. Rixe M C Steele, Ch'Jdren of Violence' and Rhodesia: A Study of Doris Lessing asHistorical Observer (Salisbury, Central Africa Historical Association, 1974), 28pp.Rh$1.30s Schlueter. 55JO L. Sukenick, 'Reason and feeling in Doris Lessing's fiction', Pratt and Dembo,Doris Lessing: Critical Studies, 100.H Ibid., 102.