Doris Lessing's Strategies : Reading, Writing, and Feeling in The Golden Notebook(Kanto Review of English Literature)

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  • Doris Lessing's strategies: reading, writing, and feeling in The golden notebook

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Both the elaborate arrangement of texts and the fragmented state of them are characteristic of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Anna Wulf, the protagonist of the novel, produces four separate notebooks, which she tries to integrate into a golden notebook and into a new novel. Yet, at the same time, she refuses to paper over the conflicts in order to produce a superficial wholeness; accordingly, her attempt at integration is thwarted and her writings inevitably remain fragmented. Faced with this dilemma, she raises the fundamental questions about reading, writing, and language. This paper aims to elucidate the textual strategies of Lessing, who, as a compiler of Anna's writings, provides the reader with those fragmented texts and gives this unique aesthetic form to them. The form matters because it at once is given by the elaboration of texts and embodies the ideological formation, which underlies the difficulties that the protagonist undergoes. Through her literary praxis, Anna notes that language not merely reflects the world but also creates the object to write about, and that the subject, the object, and the world are interrelated to constitute the text. Elaboration concerns those entwined relations in the discursive process; therefore, the personal act of writing is linked with social relations and with the collective act of transforming the world. What Lessing attempts to do in the novel is to give the ideological "feel" of the time; this ideological "feel" corresponds to Jacques Ranciere's concept of the "partition of the perceptible" and Raymond Williams's methodological concept of the "structure of feeling." Both Ranciere's and Williams's conceptions are concerned with the effect of the interrelations in the textual process. Likewise, Lessing, in order to give the ideological "feel," elaborates the form, which acts out the ideological formation and embodies the effect of the interaction between the subjective and the collective.

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