8/27/2018 0 Comments Delany, LeGuin, Lessing and moreA number of weeks ago, Samuel Delany posted a picture of Ursula K. LeGuin's Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places as a neglected text in LeGuin's ouevre, as yet uncollected and unanthologized, in print but unstocked. I ordered it on impulse; I'm always down for expanding my encounters with LeGuin; her words live on my flesh, tattooed about my clavicle. So it was with real pleasure that I stumbled into LeGuin's review of Doris Lessing's Shikasta - a novel I am currently struggling with, critically. Her review is crystalline and precise in its violent ambivalence. It totters between scathing excoriations of Lessing's shortcomings and snarky marveling at her achievements, and its final paragraph is the kind of paragraph you'd sell your soul to write: Intellectual fiction, the novel of ideas, all too often slides down into the novel of opinions. Science fiction gone self-indulgent rants and preaches, with no more right to, despite its vast subject matter, than any other kind of art. Lessing's opinions, her diatribes against 'science' and 'politics' and so forth, are very nearly the ruin of the novel. But beneath and beyond the opinions, not fully under her control, perhaps even disobeying her conscious intent, is the creative spirit that can describe a terrorist's childhood with the authority of a Dostoevsky, or imagine the crowded souls crying at the gates of life -- and the lurching, lumbering, struggling book is redeemed, is worth reading, is immortal diamond. (252) The most sterling endorsement of a book I've ever read is the one that demonstrates its ambivalence, the violence of the encounter with the work of art, the fact that it refuses our passivity, requires our participation, yanks us toward it and repels us simultaneously.
I suppose this is why Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is one of the most profoundly important texts I've read. It is a paean to failing to understand the object of one's keenest elective affinity even when there is nothing that one wants more. It is a book about not being able to write a book about a writer you love. I have, at this moment, composed five different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing -- including the fourth (which began: "I have, at this moment, composed four different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing) -- and which keep faltering. Each paragraph teetered and fell: into an abyss of the personal; into the psychoanalytic; into transference and counteridentification; into dispassion. Doris Lessing is the good mother and the bad mother, in all senses of the word. To rehearse her biography here seems relevant and a violence: she left her first two children behind in Zimbabwe with her first husband when she left for London with her third child. She kept the third child close, and he grew into something of a monstrously humored manchild, living with and on Lessing until his death, not long before hers. She took in a stray child from her son's class - an unruly, rebellious young Jenny Diski, whose end-of-life memoir In Gratitude marvels at the maddening incoherence of Lessing's surrogate maternity. She is the writer who tantalizes me and dances out of my way: no sooner do I commit some argument about her to print than I shy back and reconsider, uncovering some new object in her work that challenges any consistency to her thought at all. I fear my own writing is afflicted by the same inconsistency, -- and once more, I want to incept back to the beginning and begin again I have, at this moment, composed six different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing. I try again: my love for Lessing is wrapped into my love affair with academia. I read The Grass is Singing in a warm independent study on midcentury British literature with a gently lisping, Athenaesque professor who spoke with authority and generosity, and who was at home enthusing about prosody as insisting on intellectual rigor. I read The Golden Notebook the way so many women did - in a group of women, fellow students; the copy I have to this day was borrowed from a classmate and bears both archeological strate of errata. I finally took a class on Lessing with someone who I felt over and over again missed the point of Lessing; but I felt so thwarted by her myself that articulating why escaped me over and over again, too. But I couldn't stop reading Lessing; more and more Lessing, at that time. Shortly after, I submitted my first accepted publication to Doris Lessing Studies - on the trope of rejecting children in her fiction. Like all first publications, and children?, I feel ambivalent about that article: whence did I find the confidence to articulate moral judgment of any kind? -- I have, at this moment, composed seven different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing. Lessing was on the outside of the outside in Rhodesia; a white immigrant to rural parts distant from other white Europeans, distant in all but proximity to the Africans amongst whom she lived. She was a Communist in a country full of capitalists, a socialist amongst colonial democratic monarchs. She was, and I am, and was, and am, and cannot. I have, at this moment, composed eight different paragraphs attempting to explain my ambivalence about Doris Lessing.
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AuthorJames Arnett is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Archives
February 2019
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