THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

 Author: Doris Lessing
Year: 2007 (1962)
Publisher: Bokförlaget Forum
Language: Swedish (translator Mårten Edlund)

 ”That epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. This is how the Swedish Academy characterised Doris Lessing’s authorship when they announced her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. In many ways, it seems to provide valuable clues as to how to read Lessing, not the least her 1962 novel “Den Femte Sanningen” (“The Golden Notebook”).

For what is “the female experience”? The experience of what? And what is a “divided civilisation” contrary to the more commonly used “divided society”?

At the core of the novel is Anna, a writer who has had significant success with her first novel but has experienced writer’s block ever since, and her best friend Molly, a moderately successful actress. We follow Anna by her and Molly’s interaction with each other and people in their vicinity through sections of the book titled ”Free Women”, as well as through the notes that Anna makes in her four notebooks.

What do Anna and Molly talk about? What does Anna write about in her notebooks? Men! Ex-husbands; former, current, and future lovers; sons; film producers, directors, editors, and publishers; and Joseph Stalin. Even the introduction of Molly’s ex-husband’s new wife, Marion, turns out to be but a proxy for women’s relationship with men. When Molly and Anna speak about Marion, they really speak about Richard.

“... women’s emotions are still completely adapted to a society that no longer exists. My deepest emotions, my true emotions, are governed by my relation to a man.”*

The only meaningful conversation that Molly and Anna ever have about someone who is not a man is when they speak about the therapist whom they both see and who incidentally happens to be a woman: Mother Sugar.

The widely known Bechdel test is a measure of how well-represented women are in literature. The title passes the test if it features at least two women who talk to each other about something else than a man. If it doesn’t, the proposition is that it reaffirms established patriarchal structures. “The Golden Notebook” fails the Bechdel test in a spectacular way yet still manages to be a decisively feministic literary testament. It would be easy to dismiss it as dated and irrelevant but this would be a mistake.

What Doris Lessing does in the book is to give women voice and agency in a world, which is not yet theirs. It is a newly liberated woman’s perspective on what used to be a man’s world. And truth be told, it is not particularly flattering. Every man that Anna comes across, every single one, is flimsy, insecure, pompous, conceited, and needy to a degree bordering on farcical. Anna invites them all into her life, and into her bed, for the only purpose of saving their faces. It is a world of suppressed emotions and opinions, of empty pleasantries, of failed men, and women whose mission it seems to be to clean up after them and make them feel better about themselves. Every act of love or trust is an illusion. Every moment is a tussle. Every word an accusation. Anna is always on guard, never relaxed, and she accepts this as normality.

“We hated each other but the whole atmosphere was rather cosy.”*

The four notebooks form a portal into an artificially divided mentality. Anna makes vain efforts to compartmentalise her life as if certain aspects of it had no bearing on the rest. Her successful novel was based on her experiences from Africa so her memories from Africa and everything connected with the novel and money end up in the black notebook. Even though Anna spent most of her time in Africa among fellow communists and much of her political ideology must have been formed in that setting, she detaches all things political from the rest of her persona and places them in the red notebook which she dedicates to her political activity as a communist but also to her hesitations, disillusions, and disappointments particularly with the era of Stalinism. Again poorly isolated from the others, is Anna’s thinly veiled autobiography in the yellow notebook where she more or less consciously writes a diary in the third person under the guise of a draft to her next novel. Finally, there is the blue notebook which contains Anna’s futile attempts at an objective account of herself and her life based on her therapy sessions with Mother Sugar, but which Anna concedes is the least accurate of her notebooks and which basically boils down to a revolt against psychotherapy.

The notebooks become a manifestation of Anna’s forcibly split view of herself which eventually grows into a split personality. Anna even speaks of her different Selves at one point. We are used to the question “Who am I?” but Anna begins to think in terms of “Which I am I right now?”. By dividing up her life in arbitrary categories, Anna forces herself to choose which Self to apply in any given situation in something that resembles self-induced schizophrenia. The notebooks are nothing but a mockery of how we humans see each other and how we tend to label each other as “that writer” or “that communist”. If we apply this compartmentalisation to ourselves, we become aware of how inadequate and laughable it really is. This insight marks the threshold to postmodernism. The divided civilisation that the Swedish Academy spoke of begins with the divided individual.

And that is why the fifth notebook becomes unavoidable. The golden notebook. The fifth truth.

“The Golden Notebook” is a challenging read. The layered narrative, broken chronology, and jumps between Anna’s conscious and subconscious. It requires a good understanding of politics and psychology, as well as a substantial history of self-reflection. I willingly admit that I struggled with this book. I tore my hair, I moaned in exasperation, and toiled in sweat through each of the 599 satiated pages. If this is the female experience, I bow my head in respect, regret, and deep sympathy to all my sisters out there.

*The translations into English are my own from the Swedish copy for illustration purposes only. They are not Doris Lessing’s original writing. Do not quote them in the form as presented herein!