Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Preface, Free Women 1 – p. 7 – 230

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones." – Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Preface - Ten years after The Golden Notebook was first published, Lessing wrote this Preface in an attempt to explain the book’s structure as well as its various layers of meaning. While doing so, she also takes a few shots of critics and academics, settling some scores here and there, I imagine. Does this Preface change your reception of the text?

Free Women 1 drops us into the world of Anna, Molly, Richard, and Molly’s son, Tommy. They rehash a bit of their shared history of love, politics, and domestic strife. Then on to Anna’s notebooks…

Beginning with the Black Notebook, Anna gives us a quick glimpse of her writing life, then launches into an extended memory of the real events behind her somewhat famous novel.

Then on to the Red Notebook, where we encounter her experiences with the Communist Party in England. This part jumps around a bit and is more anecdotal.

The Yellow Notebook, Anna’s emotional life, begins “The yellow notebook looked like the manuscript of a novel…”, and indeed this section reads that way. It seems to be an alternative version of the “Anna and Molly” story, with the new characters being named “Ella and Julie”. After a lengthy narrative, Anna compares her real life to the fictional experience of Ella.

The Blue Notebook, everyday events, takes the form of diary entries, some personal, some impersonal real world events.


Lessing has taken a woman’s life and fragmented it, or maybe, compartmentalized it by category. At this early stage, do you have a feel for Anna as a whole? Does the fragmentation make it difficult to understand her? Or do the fragments serve to illuminate many facets of Anna?

To avoid spoilers, please limit your comments to p. 7 – 230

What a great Introduction. Lessing is obviously a writer completely in control of her work. I most enjoyed her advice to young readers and scholars. It is unfortunate that it has not been heeded more.

I just finished reading the introduction. This book is a re-read for me; it's been about 10 years (I think) since I first read it. I remember mostly the fact that it did impress and influence me, rather than the influence and the text itself, if that makes sense.

Already, with the preface, I am remembering why Lessing is such a favorite of mine. I found what she has to say about a traditional literary education tremendously moving, even more now that I am at a much greater distance from my own than my first time through The Golden Notebook, when I was only a few years from having finished my doctorate. She is absolutely on-the-nose-perfectly-correct about how this education can spoil literature, can spoil reading, and for those who were the most attached to it to begin with. More, how it can spoil your own sense of independence and thought and ownership with respect to what you read; make you feel that your own thoughts and reactions are poor and sad and worthless. I want to hold this introduction up like a flag, like a manifesto, and mount a battle under its aegis.

My edition also has a second, much shorter, preface from 1993, which ends this way: "Currently I am writing volume one of my autobiography, and thinking about some of teh people and events that went into The Goldern Notebook, I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand."

I think this, too, is very much exactly true; I read the first volume of her autobiography (but never the second, lazy) after having read Martha Quest twice. Whatever the reason, the novel seemed like a much more faithful record of what it was like to grow up, female and somewhat trapped, where and when Lessing did, than the autobiography, even though the former is a work of fiction about a person who did not exist and the later the best account Lessing can make of her own, real life. My hazy memory is that The Golden Notebook functions in very much the same way; not only does the personal stand in in many ways for a larger experience, but the fictional can, in competent hands, represent it better than the "real".

Such a long post for such a short number of pages.

In any case, my lunch break is over, so the text proper will have to wait for tonight.

@Mark and Nicole - The Preface is both amazing and startling in it's directness. At times, I couldn't help thinking of Stalin, who also was an intelligent person, but from outside the usual academic world, and so critical of professors and intellectuals.

I'm past the half way point in the book and I'm very much engaged in Lessing's stories. At this point I've been wondering if it would be possible to read the five elements sequentially/independently, i.e. Free Women and the four notebooks. I'm sure it could work, but the further I get, the more I realize this fractured narrative is actually all of a piece. Amazing, really.

I agree with you totally re: the fractured narrative. Isn't it an outstanding example of the collage? With that said, I am sure to want to revisit in a sequential fashion.

I've just gotten to the part in the Black Notebook where Anna is musing on the birth of Frontiers of War. It is a wonderful accounting of the trials of a novelist.

I'm about halfway through the first black notebook installation, and the story is starting to come back to me. The description of the group dynamics and how communism is working (or perhaps more correctly, not working) in their town, and in a colonial environment generally is just as vivid and engaging as I remember. I am too young and too American to have had this particular experience, and I always find Lessing's descriptions of this intellectual moment to be amazing documents of the lived experience.

I have also been thinking about fracturation, more with respect to the self than with respect to the structure of the narrative. I remember vividly from Lessing's autobiography her description of a fractured self from a very young age; she describes a sort of persona that she put on with her family, particularly her mother if I remember correctly, who was called Tigger. Already as a child she would regularly put on this persona even within the intimacy of the immediate family, but it was in some sense not really HER.

I see this theme very much in the narrative of the black notebook: people who are one way in communist meetings, another in the bar afterwards, even when with the same people. Also Anna's relationship with Willi: they both know it isn't working for them at a personal level, but they keep going in some sense because their roles dictate that they should. This fracturing of the self appears as something that has slipped out of their control and started to run them. Somehow I think this is tied to their political engagements and their "home" class standing, but it also seems to be a kind of habit they've picked up and cannot now break, like smoking.

I find this very intriguing, and think it informs the dynamics of the interactions in the "Free Women" narrative as well: Molly and her ex bickering, fighting the same fight they always have, Anna's role as little sister which does not reflect her true feelings, the work in therapy which has reduced by not eliminated this tendency. I think this unwilling system of masks and selves is also part of what Tommy fears when he says he does not want to take a job with his father, because this type of job means you have to become your job, not just be someone who could do any number of jobs, who happens to do this particular job.

Finally, I marked this passage on reporter truth versus novel truth, the theme Lessing describes in her 1993 intro. Anna is remembering the shame of her film treatment, and she describes the key element as a kind of out of control emotional experience, an emotion she has to shut down in order to write non-fiction:

"I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game.... I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all--not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debase anything. Why not, simply, the truth?

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company; yet I know that what made the film companyso excited about the possibilities of that novel as a film was precisely what made it successful as a novel. The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something firghtening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. it is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. And I know that in order to write another, to write those fift reports on society which I have the material to write, I would have to deliberately whip up in myself that same emotion. And it would be that emotion which would make those fifty books novels and not repotage.

When I think back to that time, those weekends spent at the Mashopi Hotel, with that group of people, I have to first siwtch something off in me; now, writing about it, I have to switch it off, or 'a story' would begin to emerge, a novel, and not the truth."

I think this starts to get at why a novel can seem truer than a reportage, and also why Lessing's accounts of her intellectual life are so riveting (to me, anyway), even more so than the actual theories and documents that inspired that life. It also starts to get at how writing and madness and the fractured self are all related to one-another; the writing of a novel is, for Anna, a powerful threat because it unlooses her emotions, and perhaps some aspects of her real, unfractured, unmasked, uncontrolled self, almost like that part of therapy where it gets worse before it gets better.

Ah, another immensely long post. Probably not the last....

I read all of Lessing's books in the Sixties when I was in my Twenties. I don't know if you younger readers are aware of how much her books, especially The Golden Notebook influenced the Women's Movement.
All my friends in Berkeley and New York City were reading Lessing at the same time we were reading Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinam etc. She helped us get out of gender-trapping relationships and move on to be independent women. Just thought this might be of interest. From your 70 year old literary buddy. Ricky

"And so now, looking back at my relationship with Michael (I used the name of my real lover for Ella's fictitious son with the small over-eager smile with which a patient offers an analyst evidence he has been waiting for but which the patient thinks is irrelevant), I see above all naivety."