research paper

DorísLessinSStuJiesYol 27Ños. 1 fir' 2 i

Reading Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook As Feminist Trauma Narrative

Suzette Henke University oí Louisville

Doris Lessing declares that, in composing The Golden Notebook: "1 was so immersed in writing . . . because of what I was learning as 1 wrote. . . . The actual time of writing . . . was really traumatic: it changed me" (PV 21). At one point in The Golden Notebook, Lessing has her protagonist Anna Wulf define a principal conundrum of modem life by speculating that the "essence of neurosis is eonflict. But the essenee of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is eonflict. . . . People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves" (469). The ehallenge of twentieth-eentury society, she implies, involves confrontation with existential, cultural, relational, and oneiric trauma. As Lessing told Jonah Raskin in a 1969 interview, "1 feel as if the Bomb has gone off inside myself, and in other people around me. That's what I mean by the eracking up. It's as if the strueture of the mind is being battered from inside" (PV 65-66). In Play with a Tiger, staged in 1958, Lessing signaled the psyehic defenselessness ofthe contemporary subject by a symbolie dissolution of barriers between outer world and internal mindscape, as walls vanish towards the end of Act 1 and the stage setting defies audienee expectations of theatrical security.

Theorists like Judith Herman, Ruth Leys, and Cathy Caruth have all suggested that traumatie events shatter the soeial and psychological identifieatory ego and precipitate existential crisis. According to Leys, "the symptoms char- acteristie of PTSD—flashbaeks, nightmares and other reex- perienees, emotional numbing, depression, guilt, autonomie arousal, explosive violenee or a tendency to hypervigi- lance—are thought to be the result of this fundamental men- tal dissociation" (2). In Lessing's Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf engages in self-eonscious projeets to reformulate traumatie emotional events into healing narratives through a proeess of seriptotherapy, whereby she attempts to eonvert haunting and dissociated post-traumatic images into eoher- ent and manageable fietional stories (Herman 175; Henke xi-xix). Like a classie trauma survivor, Anna is intermit- tently afflicted with flashbacks and vividly recurring night- mares; aggressive outbursts; post-traumatie dissociation; obsessive repetitions; psychic fragmentation and dysphoria (the opposite of euphoria); flatness of mood, numbing, and anhedonia (loss of sensation and enjoyment); disinterest, distrust, and an eventual sense of anomie, self-hatred, and eorporeal abjeetion.

In the following essay, I would like to suggest that The Golden Notebook revolves around a post-traumatie aporia or psyehologieal riddle—a mental wound haunting the novel's textual uneonseious, the source of which defies iterability. If one builds on Marlene Briggs's provoeative essay "Bom in the Year 1919," it might be possible to identify Anna Freeman as a "ehild of violenee" intimately affeeted by the repercussions of Europe's 1914-1918 war. Anna, bom in the year 1922 as the daughter ofa British military offieer, would seem to share a good bit of personal history with Lessing, her ereator, as well as with Ella, a fictional alter ego in The Golden Notebook. Just as Anna is—and is not—identieal with Lessing, so Ella, the protagonist of Anna's yellow notebook, shares her ereator's biography while diverging from its historieal trajectory. What little we know of Ella's shadowy father, who undoubtedly must have served as an army offieer during the Great War, is revealed in a chilling colloquy wherein he eonfesses to his daughter that he has totally disengaged from "blood ties" and can no longer feel any kind of emotional response to "family stuff, marriage, that sort of thing," all of which he fmds "pretty unreal" (GA' 463). Although Ella acknowledges "some sort of [filial] bond," her impassive progenitor fails to reeiproeate. He boasts that he "went out and bought [him]self a woman" when Ella's mother remained puritanically unresponsive to his conjugal advanees. "Yes, sex," he insists, ". . . [w]as left elean out of her make-up" (GA' 462).

If Anna Freeman shares her alter ego's familial history (in a narrative similar to that revealed by Lessing in her memoir Under My Skin), then she has grown up in a household characterized by a traditionally passive mother and by a cold and emotionally inaeeessible father figure, possibly traumatized by military experienees that he refuses to deseribe or articulate. As Jessica Benjamin explains in The Bonds of Love, "the failure ofthe idealized father of rapprochement to provide a recognizing response is often a pivotal issue in a girl's self-formation. This idealized figure is maintained intemally . . . beeause he remains the symbol of . . . self-realization," even as the child protests against her mother's "helplessness and ineffeetuality" (119). Ella's father feels eonvineed that people are "just cannibals unless they leave eaeh other alone" (GA' 464), and he takes misanthropie solace in composing "poems about solitude, loss, fortitude, [and] the adventures of isolation" (GA' 465). Believing that Ella's mother never liked sex and simply had no libidinal drive, he must have interpreted his wife's so-ealled frigidity as a response that made sexual expression an aet of force. This military stoie, unable to satisfy urgent erotie needs of intimacy within marriage, appears to have suffered a numbing sense of eonjugal rejeetion.

The father figure, wounded psychologically (and perhaps, like Alfred Tayler, physically as well) evidently turned in upon his losses and refused his daughter the kind of emotional valorization crucial to female development. Anna/Ella, suffering the effects of intergenerational

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[ Doris LessinS StucliesYoí. 27 Nos. 1 &-2

trauma, became eager to compensate for the gift of paternal affection so brutally denied. The composite protagonist of Lessing's Golden Notebook salves her sense of filial inadequacy by seeking erotic validation from egotistical, withholding males who reflect her father's remote, disaffected demeanor. Daddy's denial of love sets the stage for Anna/Ella's involvement in a series of disastrous sadomasochistic relationships that shatter her sense of self and effect a life-denying repetition of her father's emotional inaccessibility. Because this detached military man refused to reinforce his daughter's fragile self-image, Lessing's fictional protagonist(s) seek amor- ous compensation from males who exploit their neediness and betray relational commitment. Alienated by her father's implicit emotional abuse, Anna/Ella repeats the traumatic wound of paternal rejection in every love relationship she naively constructs. With an air of bravado and feminist independence, she blindly replicates the emotional self-sacrifice of earlier generations of women, while remaining oblivious of the obsessive-compulsive patterns that characterize her post-traumatic revictimization.'

For Anna Wulf, the most insistent trauma that requires narrative reformulation entails a sadomasochistic self-abnegation that culminates in the dissolution of her long-term love affair with Michael, a married physician whose companionship has sustained her for the past five years (in a partnership mirrored in the fictive Ella's liaison with Paul). Attempting to fend off hysteria, Anna uses her blue notebook to delineate, with an air of scientific objectivity, a history of the couple's hostile encounters prior to relational failure. She describes, in fastidious detail, her painstaking preparation of a "last supper" for Michael. The reader watches Anna cooking, then waiting, in amorous anticipation of a disaffected lover who refuses to come. When the relationship finally disintegrates, so does Anna's psyche. The actual break-up is implicit but textually elusive, since Anna's trauma narrative is repressed, then imaginatively re-created in scenarios attributed to Ella, Anna's fictive surrogate in the yellow notebook.

Even as the ingenuous Ella longs to have a baby with her married lover Paul, he is scheming to free himself from the bonds (and implicit bondage) of affection that Ella naively projects onto their partnership. After Paul takes a job in Nigeria with unexpected suddenness, Ella is disabused about the nature of their love affair. She learns from her employer Dr. West that Paul fled England to escape an annoying London consort, a "flighty piece" who had been "pestering him to marry her" (GN 224-25). At first, Ella assumes that the anecdote refers to Stephanie, whom she suspected Paul of seeing when their affair began to falter. A shocking dream reveals to her that she "was the flighty piece" (GN 226). Stunned by crude and degrading stereotypes that relegate her to emotional abjection, Ella feels profound shame over her inadvertent

collusion with Paul's fantastmatic (mis)casting of her in the role of licentious seductress.

Shattered by Paul's treachery, Ella proceeds to enact obsessive-compulsive patterns of post-traumatic dysphoria. Desperately lonely and tormented by nostalgic desire, she slips into a loveless affair with a comically infantile American, Cy Maitland, to whom she bemusedly offers sexual pleasure and erotic instruction. Ella paradoxically replicates the post-traumatic behavior everywhere reiterated in the life of her creator and alter ego, Anna, who repeatedly (re)constructs narratives of sadomasochistic conflict, both in her notebooks and in the "Free Women" stories that constitute a mocking and illusory frame for the novel (Krouse 39—40). The Golden Notebook turns in upon itself in metafictional involution, as Anna continues to rehearse an oft-told story of emotional betrayal and struggles to reformulate the traumatic dissolution of her own disappointing involvement with Michael. As in classical drama, Michael's death-blow is delivered offstage, and the breakdown of this pivotal relationship is analyzed in retrospect, through Anna's autofictional recapitulation of a series of ill-fated affairs.

The Golden Notebook reveals fragmentary shards of Anna's biography in a succession of obsessive erotic encounters reported in the final section of the blue notebook. Anna the author appears to be working through, both psychologically and artistically, the debilitating effects of relational trauma in terms of sadomasochistic liaisons that replicate paternal rejection. When she uses her burgeoning literary talent to cope with romantic loss, she achieves tentative mastery over compulsive traumatic repetition through the practice of seriptotherapy, or writing as an instrument of healing. A victim of post- traumatic stress disorder, she fears that words have been evacuated of meaning; and that, indifferent to either pain or pleasure, she has lost the ability to feel. Her dreams are dominated by the recurrent figure of a Russian wooden vase emblematic of "joy in destruction" (GN 477).

Emotionally numbed, Anna foggily agrees to go to bed with Nelson, an American communist Jew who suffers from sexual terror and profound misogyny (GN 482). The nadir of her obsessive-compulsive experiments in sexual sleepwalking, however, occurs in an encounter with DeSilva from Ceylon, a ruthless cad who embodies the oneiric demon, "joy-in-giving-pain" (GN 497). Smiling, malicious, manipulative, and detached, this exotic lover coyly asks permission to invite a prostitute to Anna's flat. He plans to engage in a bizarre erotic performance geared voyeuristieally to torment his hostess with auditory echoes of sexual jouissance. Not surprisingly, DeSiiva's personal confessions hinge on fabulation and exhibitionist melodrama: his auto- biographical narrative is filled with distortions, exaggerations, and boldfaced lies. He has casually abandoned his wife and family in Ceylon, after persuading his spouse, against her better judgment, to have a second

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Doris LessinS StuJiesYoL 27 Nos. 1 & 2

child. Anna complains about a contemporary syndrome embodied in DeSilva: "people everywhere are trying not to feel" and cutting themselves off from emotional intimacy in an effort to protect themselves from crushing disappointment. "People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion. . . . They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves" (GN 545). Traumatized by the failure of familial and personal relationships, the twentieth- century subject unwittingly forfeits emotional commitment and embraces post-traumatic anhedonia as a deliberate ploy against the overwhelming pain of rejection.

Toward the end of her blue notebook, Anna's fragmented mental processes reflect a chaotic dissociative reverie—part dream, part psychic fragmentation. She entertains hallucinatory revelations analogous to the "healing schizophrenia" described by R. D. Laing in The Politics of Experience and similar, as well, to the nightmare fantasies recounted by another (Australian) Anna in Lessing's Play with a Tiger. The play clearly served as a practice piece for Lessing's experimental novel, with a tough-minded 35-year-old postcolonial protagonist who takes pride in being "economically independent" and emotionally free of the "urge for security" (Play 16). Dave Miller, a left-leaning American writer based on Clancy Sigal, serves as the boyish avatar of Saul Green. He shares the latter's adolescent philandering drives and sows seeds of traumatic discontent by sexually colonizing the body of a star-struck, twenty- something college graduate—a dangerously naive aspiring home-maker eager to domesticate her partner when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. The Australian Anna's nightmare fantasy of a tiger savagely wounding its would-be captors provides an intriguing, sunxalistic metaphor for repressed traumatic memory suddenly erupting from the unconscious and attacking the ostensibly defended ego with shattering force. Both Dave Miller and Saul Green resemble William Blake's mysterious tiger, insofar as their erotic dynamism energizes lovers mesmerized by their dazzling creativity, but the bright fiash of purported genius incinerates—and traumatizes— obsessed partners smitten by these brilliant, domineering males.

In The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf descends into the unconscious and battles the turbulent upheavals of post-traumatic stress disorder in the company of (a perhaps fictive) Saul Green to reach a new focus of self- integration via immersion in a tormented landscape of corporeal abjection. Saul, a truculent and egotistical American, appears to be suffering from megalomania (with an emphasis on mania), as well as from a condition that might be diagnosed as narcissistic borderline personality disorder (with an emphasis on narcissistic). As he spatters a relentless, machine-gun volley of "I's," Anna asks curiously: "Are you ill, and if so in what way?" (GN 573). Like most borderline personalities, Saul proves

alluring and seductive, especially in erotic encounters, "like a caricature of that young American . . . sexy he- man, all balls and strenuous erection" (GN 553). A chilling sociopath, Saul is unable to identify emotionally with other human beings, whom he persistently sees as objects to be manipulated and exploited for his own advantage. He cannot relate to others as conscious, intentional subjects with a panoply of needs, desires, fears, and vulnerabilities of their own. Hence Saul's defiant fabrications in the face of Anna's hysterical jealousy. He angrily denies involvement with Jane, Marguerite, Dorothy, and all the other women named in his secret diary.

When Saul and Anna surreptitiously begin reading each other's notebooks, they embark on an exercise in life-writing as a titillating performance that precludes emotional commitment and enacts the post-traumatic symptoms of numbness, constriction, and the inability to feel. This is a game that proves emotionally perilous, driving both players into deeper strata of mental confusion. Saul confesses in his diary: "Anna doesn't attract me. . . . I don't enjoy sleeping with her" (GN 572). Despite momentary exhilaration at exposing Saul's hostility, Anna feels devastated to learn that her partner interprets their intimacy as little more than casual sex. Locked in a state of protracted anxiety, the lovers exacerbate their collaborative madness and "circle around each other like two animals" (GN 577) in obsessive- compulsive cycles of tenderness and bullying. As Lessing's protagonist laments in Play with a Tiger, "the exquisite understanding and intimaey of the bed doesn't last into the cold light of day" (6), with erstwhile lovers "conforming to the well-known rule that when an affair ends, the amount of violence and unpleasantness is in direct ratio to its heat" (II). Lessing acerbically suggests that the abrupt ending of a love affair, with its implicit betrayal of intimacy on both sides, can have traumatic repercussions for wounded lovers seeking vengeance for the vulnerability exposed by the dissolution of an affective bond.

Anna's post-traumatic dissociative breakdown in The Golden Notebook entails a vertiginous descent into the unconscious, evocative of visceral anxiety and an over- whelming sense of shame and corporeal abjection. Ac- costed by feelings of self-loathing and revulsion, idiosyn- cratically identified as "homosexual . . . disgust," Anna envisages her body in the monstrous guise of a voracious female spider, "all elutching arms and legs around a hairy central devouring mouth," potentially ingesting its mate in an ecstasy of postcoital cannibalism. "My wet sticky cen- tre seemed disgusting, and when 1 saw my breasts, . . . it was revolting. This feeling of being alien to my own body caused my head to swim" (GN 612). ^ Anna imagines the curtains in her bedroom degenerating into rotting animal flesh, "slippery, slimy" reminders of physical decay: "dead stuff, to hang like dead skin, or a lifeless corpse at my windows" (CA' 592). Even the carpet seems abhorrent.

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"a dead, processed thing; my body was a thin, meager, spiky sort of vegetable, like an unsunned plant. . . . I was moving . . . further away from sanity than I had ever been" (GN 613). Animal images prevail in this atavistie land- scape, as Anna hallucinates an encounter with a predatory tiger hovering on the ceiling of her bedroom, with emerald eyes and a bestial, hypnotic gaze reminiscent of the green- eyed Saul. Although this alluring feline seems crouched to spring, Anna feels protective of the panicked beast, which she recognizes as prey to hostile authorities scheming to trap deviant spirits who threaten the status quo. When she identifies the tiger as a figure for Saul, Anna admits: "I don't want him to be eaught, I want him to be running wild through the world" (GA' 616).

If Lessing has complained about "Women's Libera- tion Groups" interpreting her Play with a Tiger as a "self- righteous aria for the female voice," it is because her orig- inal dramatic scenario intended to foreground Dave Mil- ler's political "commitment to social change, his courage in living as he believes he must live" (Play, "Postscript 1972," Front matter). Jn The Golden Notebook, Anna ex- periences a breakthrough when she recognizes Saul's manic and/or borderline behavior as a repressed dimension of her own beleaguered consciousness. Saul's deceptive infidelities are balanced, in sadomasochistic self- mirroring, by Anna's anger, jealousy, and sexual posses- siveness. Locked in a deadly cocoon of irascibility and fear, the two characters re-enact post-traumatic dysphoria. "I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I, I, 1, I of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war" (GN 589), Anna realizes.

Personal antagonism segues into political conflict, as Anna falls into the "fearful trap" of emotional fragmenta- tion and succumbs to the "solemn, self-pitying organ note" of "being betrayed" (GN 596). In her surrealistic dream state, a post-traumatic conviction of personal anguish evokes fantasies of political disaster, as she emotionally identifies with an Algerian soldier being tortured, a jailed communist in Russia, a revolutionary in Cuba, a student in Budapest, and a peasant in China. Anna's private indigna- tion over Saul's mental cruelty is transmogrified into pro- found political empathy for fellow men and women trapped in cages of social injustice. "I had understood that war was working in us all" (GA' 594), she concludes.

I slept and 1 dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. 1 was the malicious male- female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in- destruetion; and Saul was my counterpart, male- female, my brother and my sister, and we were danc- ing in some open place, under enormous white build- ings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, . . . we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We eame together and kissed in love. (GA' 594-95)

Allied with the allegorical figure of "joy-in- destruction," the traumatized Anna becomes a "stranger to herself" As Julia Kristeva would argue, "the other is in me. It is my unconscious. And instead of searching for a scapegoat in the foreigner, I must try to tame the demons that are in me . . . which 1 now project to the exterior, making seapegoats of others" (Interviews 41). For the first time in her embattled relationship with Saul, Anna is able to come to terms with the destructive forces in herself and to identify her own sadomasochistic impulses initially generated by paternal rejection. She finally acknowledges the anger and rage associated with emotional betrayal, turned inward in gestures of self-hatred and corporeal dis- gust. Acting out the explosive chaos of a traumatic histori- cal moment begun by the Great War and carried forward into nuclear threats at mid-century, she joins Saul in flirt- ing with annihilation and directly confronting the power of total destruction released by the contemporary shadow of nuclear warfare. Anna comes to understand "that the truth for our time was war, the immanence of war" (GA' 591) on a vertiginously moving planet spinning dangerously out of control. And the war that inaugurated intergenerational trauma for Anna and her fellow "children of violence," bom after 1918, set up a century of aggression and explo- sive anger described in Briggs's essay as an overwhelming intergenerational legacy of trauma.

As the invisible projectionist of a rich, surrealistic dreamscape that fuses history with fiction, nightmare with biographical reality, Saul metamorphoses in the interior golden notebook from tiger/lover into an inner conscienee enabling Anna to name and to reify the events of her past—to revisit painful memories and work through the resonance of sadomasochistic relationship and post- traumatic stress disorder. The speeded-up film is a com- posite personal history that fuses biography with art in therapeutic amalgamation. Through oneiric moments of narrative reformulation, Anna is able to envisage the aes- thetic re-integration of past experience, as segments of her life begin to coalesce in a new dramatic scenario. The dream-film opens an extraordinary path to self-knowledge by forcing Anna creatively to re-integrate the people, ideas, and emotions retained in a fragmentary post- traumatic landscape. When the fictional Paul Tanner and Anna's lover Michael are conflated into a single eharacter, they triumphantly eling to a common goal as idealistic "boulder pushers"—Sisyphean laborers in the eause of social justice, whose efforts propel humanity slightly for- ward in the direction of enlightenment, while prophétie geniuses stand on mountain tops and foresee the possibil- ity of racial evolution. By virtue of this dream-fllm, Anna learns to honor the "small enduranee that is bigger than anything" and to eelebrate the "painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life" (GN 535-36). True hero- ism, she coneludes, consists of valorizing and incorporat- ing the abject(ed) self, then putting one foot in front of the other until we step into the void—and, along the way.

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summoning enormous compassion for our fellow travelers on a life journey fatefuJly doomed from the start.

By directly confronting the terror and dis/ease of psy- chological trauma, then reformulating traumatic experi- ence in the shape of a healing narrative, Anna is able to embrace, in the words of Gayle Greene, the "destructive principle within her—a process symbolized by the dream of the dwarf, which evolves through various male incarna- tions before coming to rest finally in her; it is this which enables her to relinquish her role as victim. . . . The blue notebook becomes a record of breakdown, which be- comes, in the golden notebook, a record of breakthrough" {Stoiy 122-23). Arising from the debilitating effects of relational trauma, Anna is able to piece together coales- cent fragments of her shattered psyche and to engender a meaningful life-script as author of the "Free Women" sec- tions of The Golden Notebook {GN 639). ' It is precisely the artistic reformulation of post-traumatic stress engen- dered by familial, as well as existential alienation, that lies at the heart of Lessing's feminist epic.

Anna Wulf triumphs over obsessive-compulsive sadomasochistic patterns of post-traumatic repetition insofar as she and Saul Green successfully manage to define themselves as Sisyphean "boulder-pushers." In a literary tradition of Utopian idealism, they self-consciously embrace experimental life-styles that defy the ideological state apparatus of western culture. Although traumatized by the breakdown of love relationships and communitarian alliances, Anna still has the courage to explore the orts, scraps, and fragments of her shattered subjectivity. The emerald crocodile of her dreams, an emblem of the lacrimae renini of modernity, functions as a symbol of ongoing psychological faith in narrative recovery. The cathartic tears of art may indeed reflect a false simulacrum of emotional healing. But in the face of traumatic rupture, narrative reformulation may provide the only viable strategy for ascribing provisional meaning to experiences of profound bereavement. " When Anna dreams about the happiness wrought by successful acts of aesthetic fusion, she directly confronts the demonic satyr identified as "joy- in-destruction" and, with a shock of recognition, acknowledges its monstrous figure as a repressed need for vengeance that must be disinterred from her psyche before she can be made spiritually whole. She realizes that the cultural pathology of aggression seeps into the mental and emotional terrain of every child of twentieth-century violence and haunts the unconscious scripts of traumatic repetition dominant in post/modem identity formations.

NOTES

For a provocative discussion of masochism, see Mi- chelle Massé's In the Name of Love, which describes the Oedipal foundations of sadomasochistic practices embedded in a traumatic "process through which a woman becomes a masochist and assigns subjectivity to another"—a trauma

culturally imbricated in western society's implacable gender arrangements (3). Not merely an individual psychodrama, sadomasochism must be anatomized as "part of a larger cul- tural production of discipline and punishment. Women do not merely reflect but help to shape that system: insofar as they intemalize its values, they potentially remain victims or accomplices" (5). Throughout her autobiography Under My Skin, Lessing insists that her mother, Maude Tayler, never loved her, nearly starved her by bottle-feeding her diluted cow's milk in the first year of life, and transferred all mater- nal affection and nurture to Harry, Doris' younger brother. Even Lessing's writing proved disappointing to this ever severe critic: "it was her misfortune to have an over- sensitive, always observant and judging, battling, impres- sionable, hungry-for-love child. With not one, but several, skins too few" {Under My Skin 26). Lessing describes what might have been an "abusive" nightly ritual of family pil- lowfights, followed by her father's "disguised bullying" in tickling his daughter to the point of tears. Doris dreaded "the moment when Daddy captures his little daughter and her face is forced down into his lap or crotch, into the unwashed smell" that was "horrible." She reports "helpless, hysterical, desperate" screams, as well as incessant "nightmares about those great hands torturing my ribs." The traumatic "night- mare of being helpless and 'tickled' was the worst" (31). Lessing associates these paternal attacks with female sado- masochistic propensities: "I wonder how many women who submit to physical suffering at the hands of their men were taught by 'games,' by 'tickling'" (31). Although she has never been "hit, slapped, or in any way at all physically mal- treated by a man," Lessing concludes sardonically: "There are worse kinds of bullying" (31).

" In an essay on "Historicizing Homophobia in The Golden Notebook," Judith Kegan Gardiner compares Less- ing's novel with an earlier short story, "The Day Stalin Died," to contravene Joseph Allen Boone's attribution of homophobia both to Lessing's fictional protagonist in The Golden Notebook and to the author herself For a fascinating analysis of Anna's effeminophobia in the context of Kriste- van abjection, see R. R. Wilson's discussion of The Golden Notebook in The Hydra 's Tale: Imagining Di.^gust (269- 82). "Even the images that Anna employs to record herself to herself," says Wilson, "have been taken from the lan- guage of men." When she imagines herself "as a spider, Anna is living within a fictional world she has created for herself out of misogynistic and anti-female motifs embed- ded in her culture" (274). As Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror, abjection is a "precondition of narcissism" evoked by a "prohibition placed on the maternal body" (13-14). "Why," she asks, "does corporeal waste, menstrual blood and excrement. . . represent . . . the objective frailty of the symbolic order? . . . Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to iden- tity that comes fi-om without" (71). I use the term "abjec- tion" both in the sense delineated by ICristeva, to connote physical exudations of the female body that incite horror in

\ Doris LessinS StucbesYd. 27 Nos. 1 &- 2

the male imagination; and in the Lacanian psychoanalytic sense, to denote a fantasmatic projection of the self/ego as an "abjected" and cast off product ofthe maternal body that serves, in fantasy, as an imaginary matrix of wholeness and cohesion.

•* Roberta Rubenstein observes: "One of Laing's central (and controversial) hypotheses is that the psychotic break- down manifested in acute schizophrenia is a natural process of mind-healing which, if allowed to run its full course, will be therapeutic rather than destructive" (179). Both Lessing and Laing envisage "the mad person as symptom and as victim of a sick society and fmally as prophet of a possible new world" (Vlastos 246). In Special Delivery, Linda Kauffman offers a provocative "schizoanalytic" reading of Anna's breakdown, charting "deterritorialized flows of de- sire" (140) in the mode of Deleuze and Guattari.

"* See Marjorie Worthington's discussion of Anna's en- igmatic dream, which she interprets as suggesting that "both this novel and Anna are much like the little crocodile: a new, beautiful and living thing emerging from the amalgam of seemingly unrelated fragments, . . . Anna's crocodile dream is an apt description of The Golden Notebook entire, a work in which all the various fragments come together to form, if not a whole, at least a unity of sorts" (76).

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