Compartmentalization is the theme under dissection in Lessing’s novel of the makeup of a woman who is in the communist party, who is a wife, who is a writer and much more. It has a very structured framework that contains four separate notebooks, an extra notebook and a broken up novella. In this structure Lessing explores various aspects that makes up a human being and how these elements should be fused together, not divided.
In the political notebook (red) the narrator marks the latter days of
the communist party and it’s breaking up, it’s dysfunction. The notebook that details Anna’s life
as a writer (black) shows the difficulties of having your own voice and the
strength needed to resist being changed for the sake of commercial value. There is a notebook for her relationships
and her emotions (yellow), and a notebook for the events of the day
(blue). But the last
notebook, the golden notebook, unites all these different ties together giving
a complete picture of this narrator who we have gotten to know through her
different interests.
In her introduction Lessing says that having left school at fourteen she
went in to observe some classes to see how children were being taught and asks
the questions ‘Why are they parochial, so personal, so small-minded? Why do they always atomize, and
belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the
whole? Why is their interpretation
of the word critic always to find fault? Why are they always seeing writers as
in conflict with each other, rather than complementing each other…simple, this
is how they are trained to think.’
She is a doctor who gives her diagnosis of the western way of life,
challenging assumptions and penetrating systems. Lessing’s problem in this novel is the problem of being a
full and complete human being in a world of divided interest and competing
ideas.
In her Nobel Prize speech she used the platform for her political
observations and it is the same in her novels as her politics and her
literature cannot be separated. To
say that she has a message is true but is it fair to say that her preaching
undermines the flesh and blood of her characters, that her plots are molded on
her ideology? There is more to
Lessing than her politics and she controls her writing so that her message is
never the overriding force and driving influence, she is interested in a wider
spectrum of life. It has been said
that we read Lessing in order to find out what is going on and if one wants to
find out more of life than reading her is not the worst way of going about it
as her analysis of life is an educating experience.
The novella that runs through the book is called ‘Free Women’, which has
a certain amount of irony seeing that the writer of it, Anna, is in a lot of
ways a trapped woman. Having a
story written by one of the characters in the novel gives the book a flavour of
post-modernism but in the end it seems to me to be an anti-postmodern book seeing
how it is wholeness not separateness, not relativity, that is the main virtue. Clever-clever tricks may be all very
well but it is storytelling that has to triumph if it is to be worth something.
In the end Anna renounces the communist party and her character in the
novella gives up writing, her identity broken down ready to be re-made into
something new. It’s a mature piece
on changing through finding out about oneself either by new experiences or
painful situations.
Very Nice Sir
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