Fundamentación del sistema de actividades

The beginning of The Golden Notebook, however, as well as the beginning of

Free Women, starts with Tommy’s issue with liberal individuation which is closely

related to his sense of the loss of moral foundation. He says that “I know what I don’t want, but not what I do want” (GN 37). His moral conflict seems ironically reflected in his parent’s relations, his mother, a communist, usually appearing antagonistic to her ex-husband, Richard, a capitalist, but they are in agreement in trying to persuade him into taking up his father’s work. His situation seems to reflect what “neo-Aristotelianism” proposes: that late-capitalist societies suffer from “a loss of moral and almost civilizational orientation, caused by excessive individualism, libertarianism, and the general temerity of liberalism” (Benhabib 24). The moral conflict about one’s selfhood is examined under different concepts of “freedom,” and Lessing’s intention to interrogate these is implied even in the title of this frame novel—Free Women, as well as Anna’s family surname—Freeman, and then her ex-husband’s surname—Wulf.4 Anna’s hesitation and transformation of her attitude towards writing are also related to her realization of the dilemmas of “freedom.” Hegel proposes the concept of “freemen” in an idealisation of the Greek polis where “in public as in private and domestic life, every individual was a free man, one who lived by his own laws. The idea (Idee) of his country or of his state was the invisible and higher reality for which he strove, which impelled him to effort” (qtd. in Benhabib 46:154).5 Benhabib explains that “the rights of subjective welfare and conscience are among the constituents of the moral freedom of the individual, and the individuals’ pursuits can never be wholly integrated within a concrete ethical totality” (46). The conflict arising in the realm of the domestic raises the questions about the possibilities for repair and reconstruction of

4 _{The short biography of Anna is later proposed in the third part of the Blue Notebook.} 5 _{See Hegel’s Early Theological Writings.}

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relationships between people, rather than the large questions of public or organised politics.

Tommy’s ambition to be a writer also suggests his intention to take his place in a wider civic society and to take up responsibility for the public sphere. The dialogic relation between their positions echoes the Brecht-Lukács debate on the form of the novel and political efficiency. He criticises Anna for writing exclusively in her notebooks as an “arrogant” and even solipsistic act—a version of modernism—unconnected to the public good. Instead of addressing her concerns to a wider public, she locks away her notebooks, almost like Orwell’s Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) writing his secretive diary hidden away from the Thought Police. But Lessing, as the writer of The Golden Notebook itself, uses the

contretemps to begin to raise questions about the role and responsibility of the

writer in modern society. She actually proposes in the essay cited above that the “act of getting a story or a novel published is an act of communication, an attempt to impose one’s personality and beliefs on other people” (SPV 70). When she fails to take responsibility as a writer to communicate her true feelings to the public, Tommy is ironic about Anna’s protest against politicians not telling the truth.

Tommy’s paralysis of will reflects Anna’s lack of feelings in her notebooks. He seems to imply that the solipsism is aroused from one’s inability to deal with the chaos. He is critical that “people are not good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else” (GN 234). Tommy’s numb will is represented through his “inward-seeming stare” and, behaving like a blind man, full of hysteria, is presented as in parallel with Anna’s inward act of secret writing to herself. However, for Tommy, writing is his possibility to break out of the boundaries and the alienation that grows between people. Insisting that it is irresponsible to spread feelings of disgust, Anna turns down Tommy’s hope of expressing his confused self through his writing. But neither is she able to face what Tommy insinuates is the dark or shadowy side of herself or of others. He very directly points out that Anna could not live with the fact that she keeps “trying to write the truth and realizing it’s not true” and also blames her for being “afraid of being chaotic” (GN 233). What he feels particularly disappointed about is that Anna does not share her chaos with him or other people but endeavours instead to

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impose what might be viewed as arbitrary patterns on her life in order to create a kind of inauthentic order (GN 234). When he asks what she still believes and which beliefs provide her with sustenance in her life, her insincere answer is the last straw leading to his suicide attempt.

Anna’s conflict over writing is also a reflection of a broader struggle to adjust the relationship between herself and the world. A morality of certainty seems incompatible with her living as a modern woman. She firstly has to figure out the sources of the conflict between her personal role as a mother, and her public role as a writer. Benhabib suggests that “contemporary universalist moral theory has inherited this dichotomy between autonomy and nurturance, independence and bonding, the sphere of justice and the domestic, personal realm” (158). It could be said that Anna struggles in these antagonistic discourses. Alongside the various pressures on her professions in each of the notebooks, (novelist, magazine editor, social worker), she is simultaneously forced to confront her sense of frustration in her various roles as a mother, a mistress, and lover. Although she seems to be trapped in these roles, with no way out or forward, the separated notebooks are like stages on the way to figure out her problems from a variety of not always readily compatible perspectives. Tonya Krouse suggests that, “by refusing to define the subject in one way or the other,” The Golden Notebook is difficult to label simply as “modernism, post-modernism, or feminist” (40).

The laying bare of her different aspects represents Anna’s attempt to fathom the social construction and constitution of her identity and her attempt to break out of it. As Lessing explains, a writer should recognise “the responsible individual, voluntarily submitting his will to the collective, but never finally; and insisting on making his own personal and private judgement before every act of submission” (SPV 12). She appears to be searching for a balance between the dominant concepts of self internalised from those culturally available, and the conflict in her own mind.

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1.2. Women Writers’ Anxiety

Through her writings, Anna reflects the immediate and historical context of Lessing’s own historical moment, with its sociological concepts of self, role and performance. The first line of the Black Notebook describes them collectively: “The four notebooks were identical…(b)ut the colours distinguished them—black, red, yellow and blue” (GN 55). Socialisation as a kind of “performance” between the performer and the audience was first foregrounded in the highly influential work of Erving Goffman but became the dominant within later, fully-fledged postmodernism.6 If the interaction between the performer and the audience is routinized through certain ritualised articulations, then this “constitutes one way in which a performance is ‘socialized,’ modulated, and modified to fit into the understanding and expectations of the society in which it is presented” (Goffman 30). Writing out of a post-structuralist context, some thirty years later, Judith Butler’s construction of performativity bears some similarities with the work of Goffman, but she also develops the concept that “gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be” (Gender

Trouble 33). In order to break away from these constituted actions and routines,

Butler proposes that the “practice of parody” can “reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a privileged and naturalized gender configuration” (Gender Trouble 186). In The Golden Notebook, this kind of performance is shown in the arrangement of the notebooks and the frame fiction: while the frame fiction

Free Women performs as a conventional narrative telling stories from various

characters’ perspectives and in a formally conservative way, the title of the whole book The Golden Notebook reflects the writer’s intention to represent the work as a more personal, individual and diverse kind of writing, one that might also reveal her reluctance to obey the rules of performance.

For Anna, her four notebooks are a kind of performance of her life in which to reveal those “Annas” in different contexts and also the “Annas” who try to speak

6 _{Erving Goffman explains that “when an individual or performer plays the same part to the}

same audience on different occasions, a social relationship is likely to rise” (14). See Goffman.

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in their own ways. She even uses parody as a means to reconstruct and review herself. Her division of her life into four notebooks implies her various roles, and also her conflict within. On the one hand, Anna inherits a Western tradition of rationality that searches for order and reason through the processes of logic and the imposition of system. Therefore, Michael argues that Anna’s clarifying her life into four notebooks “will stave off the chaos of contemporary existence and enable her to retain a concept of wholeness; it is her way of staying “above all this—chaos” (88). However, Anna’s compartmentalising of her life, explained by Patricia Meyer Spacks as similar to women’s pattern of dividing “their lives into compartments” (97), also reflects her anxiety as a mother, used to following the routines of her children and husband.

In addition, her use of the different genres is actually a kind of challenge to Lukács’s ideal of realistic writing.7 Avoiding being simply subjective in her notebooks,8 Anna attempts, throughout, to find ways to connect her personal life to the outer world. Michael suggests that the novel “breeches the dividing line between public and private events and life” (103). The form which she chooses also reflects her embarrassment about expressing her confusion as a female writer in relation to a male-centred culture. Estelle C. Jelinek suggests that, through autobiographical form, the diary and the letter form, women reflect their diffused, multiple roles and their sense of fractured consciousness (5). The interrupted notebooks are similar to Anna’s split and chaotic situation. These notebooks become a way of expressing herself that seems more manageable, less threatening; thus, as Michael proposes, the novel “challenges the conventional distinction between high art and daily representation” (103).

These notebooks also allow her to locate her frustrated existential feeling, which seems so threatening and personal, in a more social and even Marxist perspective. Every time she sits down to write, she lets her mind slacken, allowing

7 _{Lunn explains Lukács’s idea of realism in that “the best realist novels presented general}

historical reality as a process revealed in concrete, individual experience, mediated by particular groups, institutions, classes” (78).

8 _{In A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, it is proposed that the use of}

“reportage, diaries” are deemed by Lukács as “the result of a narrow concern for subjective impressions, a concern which itself stems from the advanced individualism of late capitalism” (96). See Selden.

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words to lead her to “darkness. Terror. The terror of the city. Fear of being alone” (GN 55). The image suggests some need to balance the claims of narcissistic regard with the need to inhabit, comfortably, the outer world. Anna has refused to be defined as a traditional artist although she has not yet found a satisfactory alternative way of reconciling her private selves and public persona as a writer. In Mrs. Marks’ consulting room, for example, she feels that the delicate and beautiful paintings on the wall no longer correspond with the “crude, unfinished, raw, tentative quality of her life and of others”; she also considers that she should endeavour to “hold fast to it” (GN 203) and also transform it into “aesthetic” form.