Here She Be — The Battlements

     I started into one article on The Golden Notebook entitled “Doubletalk and Doubles Talk,” which seemed interesting and to coincide with some previously encountered analysis of the novel, but a different article caught my eye: “Breakthrough in The Golden Notebook” by: Marjorie J. Lightfoot. What caught my eye was this: “The sections called ‘Free Women’ are not presentations of what purports to be objective reality, but Anna Wulf’s ‘fictional’ account of possible adverse consequences should fragmentation and fear of chaos continue to govern people like herself and her friends and threaten the next generation” (277). While it is not especially interesting to recognize that “Free Women” is written by Anna, it is an interesting reading to take that as possible consequences of continued fragmentation. There was also a well put description of Lessing as “breaking through form to reflect content” with which I am inclined to agree (277). This seems like a very modernist undertaking in that respect, where mode of experience is privileged above more conventional objectives of a novel. Sometimes this leads to confusion, but we are meant to experience the confusion as Anna also experiences it, so that we might understand her emotions or state of mind clearer via what is essentially a wordless statement. I would say that Lessing does not break through form so much as manipulate it to reflect content, and in that sense she creates a sense of how interaction is taking place because it resembles how the reader is interacting with the novel.
     One of the distinctions the article draws as support for the notebooks as reality and the “Free Women” section as fiction is that the notebooks are written in first person and “Free Women” is written in third person. While this does not necessarily confirm which is which with certainty, I do agree that it provides a strong support case. There are many plays on the classical novel and the concept of what it means to be a classical novel, and this in particular is a similar gesture but one that renders a desired effect. First and third person can readily be understood as real and fiction simply by virtue of what those points of view achieve in most other works of fiction. I do not think it was unintentional of Lessing to make this distinction, but whether she did it in irony or in order to nudge her readers in the right direction is hard to say.
     The author of this article took the same tack I did when asked to reconcile “Free Women” and the notebooks, which is that Anna in the notebooks writes “Free Women” after the events in the notebooks occur. It is an easy thing to ask why we need to reconcile these ontological levels, but if they are readily reconciled in this way, that is with little difficulty on the part of the reader, why shouldn’t we? I believe that the possible infinite regress of notebook Anna writing “Free Women” Anna who writes notebook Anna, so on and so forth, is interesting, but I do not feel this critic is discredited in reconciling the events of the novel to a chronological timeline (perhaps because that is in some ways how I envision the underlying structure as well). Any number of avant garde pieces of literature manipulate structure in similar ways in order to manipulate the readers perceptions for the sake of theme or message. Sometimes these things can be resolved and sometimes not. Calvino, Kundera, Joyce, et cetera, et cetera, are all guilty of similar methods.
     Another interesting observation that I agree exists as a dichotomy in the novel is that although the “fictional” Anna of “Free Women” discredits the truth value of her notebooks, the notebooks are in fact open to us in the novel, which suggests that on one of the multiple ontological levels, faith in those words exists. The suggestion that the entirety of the book gives us true insight into a person, specifically Anna Wulf, seems like a highly effective method for a bildungsroman. At the very least, I think it can be said that Doris Lessing had faith in the capacity of the words in the notebooks to convey to her readers who Anna Wulf was, what the situation was, and what the stakes were. I doubt highly at this point that there is anything in The Golden Notebook that does not also have its opposite or a contradiction represented somewhere. Since this novel has been called an encyclopedic novel before, this seems only natural.
     The article overall gives praise to Doris Lessing, but she seems to cut short and not make a fully developed argument for anything in particular. The article reads more like varied investigations, which I do feel to a certain extent are fruitful, just not necessarily as cohesive as perhaps the writer thought.