Doris Lessing: Poetics of Being and Time [1 ed.] 1443890111, 9781443890113

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Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing: Poetics of Being and Time By

Bootheina Majoul

Doris Lessing: Poetics of Being and Time By Bootheina Majoul This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Bootheina Majoul All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9011-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9011-3

To my husband Nooman Aouadi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix Lessing’s World of Words ........................................................................ 1 Doris Lessing’s Alchemical Dystopian Universes ...................................... 3 ‘To Be or not to Be’: The Question of the Social Persona in Lessing’s Fiction .......................................................................................................... 5 Doris Lessing’s Literature of Excess ......................................................... 17 Lessing’s Other Spaces............................................................................ 21 Doris Lessing’s Descent into the Inner Space ........................................... 23 Exegesis of Sufism in Doris Lessing’s Literature ..................................... 39 Memory Traces and Scars of History in Doris Lessing’s Literature ......... 55 Intersections: Lessing and Other Writers ............................................. 65 Poetics and Politics: Traces of Traumatic Memory in the Writings of Doris Lessing and Ahlem Mustaghanmi ............................................... 67 Terrorism in Doris Lessing’s The Wind Blows Away Our Words and Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes: Penetrating Geographies of Exclusion ............................................................................................... 81 Interpreting Otherness and Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child and Salman Rushdie’s Shame ............ 85 Doris Lessing: Beyond Time ................................................................... 93 Bibliography .............................................................................................. 95

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I wish to thank Professor Najet Mchala from the depths of my heart for every single word, for a long journey of “Learning How to Learn”. Special thanks to Dr. Anne Murray for her conscientious proofreading of the manuscript. Thanks to the Doris Lessing Society for the valuable research on Lessing’s literature. This book is also dedicated to my students and to all those who study and love Doris Lessing, a writer for all times.

LESSING’S WORLD OF WORDS

Anyone who has looked deeply into the world will probably guess the wisdom that lies in human superficiality. An instinct of preservation has taught people to be flighty, light, and false. We occasionally find both philosophers and artists engaging in a passionate and exaggerated worship of “pure forms”. —Nietzsche, 53

DORIS LESSING’S ALCHEMICAL DYSTOPIAN UNIVERSES

Man is not alone; is not a glorious individual - or not in the way he thinks. His ‘personality’, what he ordinarily knows of himself, is an assembly of shadows, of conditioned reflexes; his real individuality is hidden and will emerge slowly during the process of learning, like a stone in the tumbling machine which will show, after a rough passage, its real intrinsic qualities. —Time Bites, 259

Doris Lessing exposed many literary genres. Her texts are imbued with didactic messages. She imagines dystopian universes to compel her readers to cogitate about Being and Time. “Her fiction is visionary and revisionary in getting us to see that our reality is not the whole of reality and to imagine an elsewhere” (Greene, 20). In the two volumes of her autobiography Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1998), she narrates her life haunted by the dystopian engraved images of war, which she hardly could bury in her books. In her gothic novel The Fifth Child (1988) and its sequel Ben in the World (2000), she invents a monstrous creature, rejected by society because it does not fit its standards and norms; Ben Lovatt becomes the incarnation of society’s sins. In her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950) and her anthology African Laughter (1993), she portrays the dystopian colonialist past in Africa and highlights its ever-present traces. Both The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) narrate strange journeys. In Memoirs, a middle-aged woman in a futuristic sphere escapes from chaos into a world behind the wall of her living room; she sways between the claustrophobic atmosphere of her house, the violent world outside, and the future-past she finds behind the wall. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Lessing narrates the journey of her protagonist Charles Watkins, lost within the cobweb of his unconscious; he establishes an analogy between his strange inner universe and dystopian reality. The Nobel laureate tackles a postmodern dystopian reality, that of terrorism, in her novel The Good Terrorist (1985) and her book The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987). These narratives unveil truths and transfigure history. She also implicitly warns about human degeneration in

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Doris Lessing’s Alchemical Dystopian Universes

her futuristic space fiction narratives The Sirian Experiments (1980) and Shikasta (1979) that both portray dystopian realities and alert the readers to their apocalyptic impacts. Lessing writes to build an objective view of being and time, analysing history and using her characters as vivid testimonies to the past. They incarnate personal traumas as well as collective memories. Her fiction is imbued with both history and didacticism; she writes the past for the future and claims literature as the strongest weapon to defy time and debate being.

‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE’: THE QUESTION OF THE SOCIAL PERSONA IN DORIS LESSING’S FICTION

What is the Good? It’s possible that in our time the Good looks terrible. May be out of destruction there will be born some new creature. I don’t mean physically. What interests me more than anything is how our minds are changing, how our ways of perceiving reality are changing. The substance of life receives shocks all the time, every place, from bombs, from the all-pervasive violence. Inevitably the mind changes. —A Small Personal Voice, 70

Can we write objectively about people? Is it possible to report history objectively? Can we objectively understand being in the world? Can we reach an objective truth about our existence? Can others see, consider, and judge us objectively, without considering established relationships? Does ‘the social persona’ embody a subjective view of the real self? In Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way the Sufi scholar Idries Shah asserts, “Man has to come to understand how to see himself as he really is, so that he can achieve something in the area which he calls 'what he might be'.” (56) This paper is about divided selves in Lessing’s fiction; it juxtaposes social identity and the real inner self. Lessing’s writings provide objective/subjective views about being in the world through her characters’ divided selves and even in some novels schizophrenic selves. The writer is convinced that objectively cogitating about being is the way towards learning how to learn and achieving inner growth, peace, and fulfilment.

Anna Wulf: The Divided Self The Golden Notebook is about experiencing Communism and believing in political illusions; Anna Wulf incarnates Lessing’s subjective/objective views about the Communist phase she went through. When the protagonist started her writing career she argued:

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The Question of the Social Persona in Lessing’s Fiction I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write, I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this – why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would have not got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game – that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transported from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all – not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth? (The Golden Notebook 77)

Lessing is also puzzled by her own texts through which she tries to understand being in the world. The novelist tries to objectively analyse the Communist phase she went through by letting Anna excavate her deepest thoughts and feelings. Anna Wulf engages in the process of historicizing her lifetime experiences in a golden notebook is made up of four notebooks: the black one is about her life in Central Africa in World War II, the red one is about her Communist phase, the yellow one is about her love affairs and the blue one gathers her inner dreams and deepest thoughts. Lessing explains: "My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped." (A Small Personal Voice, 36) But the novel fails to provide any objective view about Communism, war, and love; it rather emphasises the “theme of 'breakdown', which, sometimes when people 'crack-up' it is a way of selfhealing, of the inner self's dismissing false dichotomies and divisions” (A Small Personal Voice, 28). "Her fictive 'self' Anna" (Scott, 1997) could only narrate her own feelings and perceptions, whereas being objective implies freedom from any subjective implication. Anna Wulf asserts: “I became 'a Communist' because the left people were the only people in the town with any kind of moral energy, the only people who took it for granted that the colour bar was monstrous. And yet there were always two personalities in me, the 'Communist' and Anna, and Anna judged the Communist all the time. And vice-versa. Some kind of lethargy I suppose.” (82) This state of confusion impedes Anna from objectively considering political ideologies; she resorts to writing: I came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to turn it into a short story. It struck me that my doing this – turning everything into fiction – must be an evasion. Why not write down, simply,

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what happened between Molly and her son today? Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? Why don’t I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself. (211).

Though the four notebooks include subjective feelings about personal experiences, they narrate a witnessed history; Anna states, “The real crime of the British Communist Party is the number of marvellous people it has either broken, or turned into dry-as-dust hair-splitting office men, living in a closed group with other Communists, and cut off from everything that goes on in their own country.” (307) The protagonist voices Lessing’s subjective disillusions and views: I remember very clearly the moments in which that novel was born. The pulse beat, violently; afterwards, when I knew I would write. I worked out what I would write. The ‘subject’ was almost immaterial. Yet now what interests me is precisely this – why did I not write an account of what had happened, instead of shaping a ‘story’ which had nothing to do with the material that fuelled it. Of course, the straight, simple, formless account would not have been a ‘novel’, and would not have got published, but I was genuinely not interested in ‘being a writer’ or even in making money. I am not talking now of that game writers play with themselves when writing, the psychological game – that written incident came from that real incident, that character was transposed from that one in life, this relationship was the psychological twin of that. I am simply asking myself: Why a story at all – not that it was a bad story, or untrue, or that it debased anything. Why not, simply, the truth? (77)

Within that phase of confusion and disillusion, Anna started to cogitate and think; she stopped accepting ideologies unquestioningly. When Jack says, “>T@he idea of humanism will change like everything else,” she firmly responds, “>T@hen it will become something else. But humanism stands for the whole person, the whole individual, striving to become conscious and responsible about everything in the universe. But now you sit there, quite calmly, and as a humanist you say that due to the complexity of scientific achievements the human being must never expect to be whole, he must always be fragmented” (The Golden Notebook, 3078).

Kate Brown: Sins and Social Conventions By trying to change her life and please herself, Kate had to transcend the social conventions she was confined to; she had to become a different woman, to free herself from social constraints. But her journey was quite

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The Question of the Social Persona in Lessing’s Fiction

short, because “feeling guilty seems almost a definition of motherhood in this enlightened time” (The Summer Before Dark, 110), and because “she had lived among words, and people bred to use and be used by words” (270). Kate tries to “learn through living” (7) and thinks, “We are what we learn. It often takes a long and painful time” (7). Life is “as good as theatre” (47) and grasping its rules was hard for the protagonist. Kate Brown could not make objective judgements because “her thermostat was set low” (48) and “it was seeming more and more as if she had several sets of memory, each contradicting the others” (59). She struggles to change and to survive within her inner turmoil. She is torn between her role of a mother and decent wife and her being a woman wanting to be loved. “She was like an old nurse who had given her years to the family and must now be put up with. The virtues had turned to vices, to the nagging and bullying of other people” (105). Kate Brown is thus a woman in quest of truth; she tries to locate herself in the cosmos, she sometimes feels rejected but attempts to find her ‘Way’. She goes through a cacophony of experiences and puts her femininity on trial. Her story incarnates a turning point in the life of every woman: “a web of nasty self-deceptions” (The Summer Before Dark, 256). At the end of the novel, she realizes: The mood she was in when she walked in at her front door again would be irrelevant: now that was the point, it was the truth. We spend our lives assessing, balancing, weighing what we think, we feel… it’s all nonsense. Long after an experience which has been experienced as this or that kind of thought, emotion, and judged at the time accordingly – well, it is seen quite differently. That’s what was happening, you think; and what you thought or felt about it at the time seems laughable, jejune. (256)

Lessing tries to excavate every woman’s deepest feelings through Kate’s feminine self, to liberate her readers from the conventional social barricades. In Time Bites, she quotes Idries Shah, “If you are uninterested in what I say, there’s an end to it. If you like what I say, please try to understand which previous influences have made you like it. If you like some of the things I say and dislike others, you could try to understand why. If you dislike all I say, why not try to find out what has formed your attitude?” (267-268) According to Shah, a personal view is always as questionable as that of the arguer; both could be objective/subjective.

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Charles Watkins: The Social Persona v. the Inner Self Charles Watkins is a dissenter; he refuses to be defined by others and feels an urgent need to free himself from social conventions: They hold me down, they cradle me down, they hush and they croon, SLEEP and you’ll soon be well. I fight to rise, I struggle as if I were a mile under heavy sour black earth and above the earth slabs of stone, I fight so hard and I shout, no, no, no, no, don’t, I won’t, I don’t want, let me wake, I must wake up, but Shhhhhh, hush, SLEEP and in slides the needle deep and down I go into the cold back dark depth where the sea floor is an earth of minute skeletons, detritus from eroding continents, fishes’ scales and dead plants, new earth for growing. But not me, I don’t grow, I don’t sprout, I loll like a corpse or a drowned kitten, my head rolling as I float and black washes over me, dark and heavy. (Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 155)

But the doctors objectively declare him “mad”; here objectivity is synonymous with conformism. Doctor Y thinks, “Patient has religious delusions. Paranoic. Disassociated” (163). Lessing defies through the character of Charles Watkins what she calls “group minds” (Prisons, 47): “Since my field is literature, it is there I most easily find my examples” (Prisons, 50). She narrates the story of a literature professor who dives into a state of conscious unconsciousness, and as a result comes to experience self-denial and social exclusion. But though Doctor X and Doctor Y consider him to be amnesiac or mad, Charles is rather what Lessing calls an “original mind” (Prisons, 54). The novelist explains, “Of course, there are original minds, people who do take their own line, who do not fall victim to the need to say, or do, what everyone else does. But they are few. Very few. On them depends the health, the vitality of all our institutions” (Prisons, 53). Charles incarnates “the lonesome individualist who overturns conformity” (Prisons, 54).

Ben Lovatt: A Monster in the World In a perfect family, there is no place for a monster-like child. Ben Lovatt’s parents objectively claim: “Ben makes you think – all those different people who lived on the earth once – they must be in us somewhere” (The Fifth Child, 137). Ben has to die at the end, he commits suicide, “And Ben left: he had no home in this world” (Ben in the World, 35).

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The Question of the Social Persona in Lessing’s Fiction

Lessing’s The Fifth Child and its sequel Ben in the World are gothic novels with objective/subjective messages about our humanity. They narrate the struggle of a beast-like Ben who tries to survive within a conformist world that is incomprehensible to him. Ben is against the fixed social model subjugated by the authoritative power of the collectivity and his difference and non-conformism cause him to be rejected by both his family and society. Ben Lovatt is just like Charles Watkins in Briefing for a Descent into Hell, who is classified by the doctors as an amnesiac. Both are rejected by society as being odd. But Lessing offers two different objective/subjective issues to her protagonists; Charles returns to society after a long journey of loss and cogitation within his unconscious, whereas Ben, the fascinating beast, leaves the world that rejected him and joins the vast universe of the unknown. While Charles’s regained lucidity suggests the impenetrable gloomy side of human beings, Ben’s final suicidal act occurs unexpectedly at the end of the novel, representing the repugnance of the monstrous world and his awareness that he must leave this hideous society and the unknown universe of his specie: He had been betrayed so dreadfully by these three who called themselves his friends – so he must feel; and they were afraid of what they would see. But he didn’t turn, seemed to hang there by the rock face, one fist resting on it. Then he did turn himself about, with an effort: they could see it was hard for him. He seemed smaller than he had been, a poor beast. His eyes did not accuse them: he was not looking at them. Teresa dared to go to him and put her arm about him, but he did not feel it, or know she was there. He stumbled along beside her on the long walk back to the hut. On the path that had the precipice below it he did stop a moment and look down, but went on at a touch from Teresa. In the hut they put more fuel on the little fire and made tea and offered him some. He did not see them. Then – and it was so sudden they at first could not move – he left them and went bounding back along the path they had just come from. A silence. Then Teresa understood, and was about to run after him, but Alfredo put his arm around her and said, ‘Teresa, leave him’. They heard a cry, and a slide of small stones, and silence. They slowly got up, slowly followed him. They made their way to where the precipice fell away from the path. There was Ben, far below, a pile of coloured clothing. His yellow hair was like a tuft of mountain grass. (Ben in the World, 176-177)

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Johor the Messenger: Voice for the Deaf, Sight for the Blind In Lessing’s novel Shikasta, Johor unveils truths about human existence in those galaxies imagined by Lessing; he objectively warns about human subjectivity: Poor people of the past, poor poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, not knowing anything, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for. I can’t stop thinking of them, our ancestors, the poor animal-men, always murdering and destroying because they couldn’t help it. And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted and filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined. And here we all are together, here we are… (Shikasta, 447)

Johor incarnates the voice of objective wisdom unheard by human beings entrapped within their subjective narrow visions of life, limited senses, and vulnerability. The messenger asserts, “Life? They did not have that conception: the thought of death as an ever-present threat was not in them” (Shikasta, 85). Shikasta is a space fiction narrative that takes the reader into imaginary outer galaxies; like old fables, it narrates stories and aims to warn and teach. Lessing claims: It is by now commonplace to say that novelists everywhere are breaking the bonds of the realistic novel because what we all see around us becomes daily wilder, more fantastic, incredible. Once and not so long ago, novelists might have been accused of exaggerating, or dealing overmuch in coincidence or the improbable: now novelists themselves can be heard complaining that fact can be counted on to match our wildest invention. (Shikasta, 8)

Thus, the imaginary galaxies are allegories of the real world. She talks about the genre in an interview: “Actually, it never crossed my mind with these later books that I was writing science fiction or anything of the kind! It was only when I was criticized for writing science fiction that I realized I was treading on sacred ground. Of course, I don’t really write science fiction (Qtd in Frick, 11). She adds: It was a way of telling a story—incorporating ideas that are in our great religions. I said in the preface to Shikasta that if you read the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Apocrypha and the Koran you find a continuing story. These religions have certain ideas in common, and

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The Question of the Social Persona in Lessing’s Fiction one idea is, of course, this final war or apocalypse, or whatever. So I was trying to develop this idea. I called it “space fiction” because there was nothing else to call it. (Qtd in Frick, 11)

Her space fiction narratives allow her to venture into outer layers of being, both inner universes and outer spaces. In her texts, she exploits her knowledge of the three great religious texts to teach through fable-like narratives. Her protagonists float subjectively in the universe like tragic heroes unaware of the fact that they are bringing about their own downfall. Indeed, instead of listening to Johor’s warnings, they subjectively pray: Save me, God, Save me, Lord, I love you, You love me. Eye of God, Watching me, Pay my fee, Set me free.... (Shikasta, 19)

Mujahiddins: Terrorists in the Air “We are full of ignorance and prejudice and so are they” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 46). How could we judge war objectively? In The Wind Blows Away Our Words Lessing tries to provide an objective view of war, colonialism and terrorism; she blames the Russian invaders, the Mujahiddins, the media and even her helpless self for not having been able to prevent any war. But objectively, could any war be prevented? Lessing argues, “But I do wonder more and more: suppose people had been prepared to listen then…to the few voices who were shouting warnings, would later disasters have been prevented?” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 71)

The Good Terrorist: Alice in Wonderland The world sees Alice Mellings as a terrorist whereas Alice believes herself to be a revolutionary! The whole question is a matter of objectivity/subjectivity. How should she be considered? Victim or guilty? Is she a guilty victim? Doris Lessing explains how The Good Terrorist was inspired by the true story of a revolutionary who turned into a terrorist:

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We knew a girl who, from the age of eighteen or so became a revolutionary, with the language: ‘We'll have to kill the reactionaries when we get into power’. But she always in a squat or group where she was the carer and the sharer, the cook, the general provider…Years ago, and by now most people have forgotten it, there was an 'accident' at Harrods in Knightsbridge. It was an ugly, brutal bombing…We - my friend and Ijoked that it must have been the girl we called Alice. (The Good Terrorist, 13)

The Good Terrorist and The Wind Blows Away Our Words confront readers with Lessing’s objective questioning of being a terrorist in times of war and revolution: “We should be asking, perhaps, ‘Why have we forgotten this terrible calamity?’, ‘What other calamities have we all chosen to forget?’, ‘What is it about certain types of disaster that numbs the human mind?’” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 20) The writer’s questions remained unanswered and history continues to record human atrocities committed in the name of political ideology.

The Memoirs of a Survivor: Shadows Out of Time Lessing creates a chaotic futuristic world. A stranger brings a young girl to a middle-aged woman; she notices that the girl is strange, as the protagonist puts it: “When brought to me first by the man, whoever he was, she was an elderly person, saw me very clearly, sharp, minutely, in detail” (Memoirs, 43). Emily lives in a “forlorn isolation” (Memoirs, 31) and does not communicate with the woman; she only cares for Hugo, “her yellow dog-like cat, or cat-like dog” (Memoirs, 44). The woman watches the young girl join gangs and have a barbarian lifestyle; she cannot help it. She finds refuge from these chaotic surroundings in “her visits behind the wall” (Memoirs, 37); as she puts it, “>I@t is as if two ways of life, two lives, two worlds, lay side by side and closely connected. But then, one life excluded the other, and I did not expect the two worlds ever to link up” (Memoirs, 25). The protagonist experiences two worlds: an objective and a subjective one. The subjective world, the world behind the wall, was a better alternative; “...in that realm there was a lightness, a freedom, a feeling of possibility. Yes, that was it, the space and the knowledge of the possibility of alternative action” (Memoirs, 39). Lessing also escapes into the imaginary worlds of her fiction to escape objective reality. Which world is objective: the chaotic present moment? Or the past behind the wall? Objectively, “this is a history, after all, and I hope a truthful one” (The

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The Question of the Social Persona in Lessing’s Fiction

Memoirs of a Survivor, 94); nonetheless, “we learn to like what we get” (The Memoirs of a Survivor, 90).

The Cleft: Of Gender, the Subjective Divide Lessing questions the origin of the species; “there is a great deal it seems we do not know” (The Cleft, 259). The Cleft is an invitation to objectively examine the subjectivity of scientific and historical claims about the human species. David Lodge claims that history is an invention (99), and thus Lessing writes a metafiction that reinvents the history of the past and questions the future. In the novel, a Roman historian narrates the story of the Clefts and the Squirts or Monsters, and claims it is “Compiled from ancient verbal records, written down many ages after their collection” (The Cleft, 29); his report cannot be considered objectively narrated history because it is fuelled by both his academic background and Roman origins. But Lessing intended this subjectivity in order to compel her reader to find an objective interpretation of the past. The novel paves the way for a long debate about the origin of humanity, the fragility of beings and of being; it blurs the boundaries between past and present and warns about the future.

Lessing’s Parents: Alternative History Lessing stops narrating war and exorcising the scars of her past, and reimagines a better past for her parents, trying to have a different past, “trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free” (Alfred and Emily, viii). In this novel, Lessing does not try to be objective, she just tries to offer her parents a different past, as she puts it: “I have tried to give them lives as might have been if there had been no World War One” (Alfred and Emily, vii). But instead of adjusting history and burying trauma, she resurrects painful memories and revives bitter souvenirs: “It was such a bad time for everyone, the war and its aftermath, but particularly for my mother. We now know the war did have an end – 1939-45 – but while it dragged on, we didn’t know, and no one foresaw the awfulness of the after-war years. It is so hard to convey the unremittingness of it all, the deadening slog” (Alfred and Emily, 256).

Time Bites: Metafictions Reading is an experience; it is the way to an objective view of the world. Doris Lessing asserts: “I could say as an autodidact - a condition

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that has advantages and disadvantages - that books have made me what I am” (Time Bites, 212). She insists on the importance of books: “To call oneself educated without a background of reading - impossible. Reading, books, the literary culture, was respected, desired, for centuries. Reading was and still is in what we call the Third World a kind of parallel education” (Time Bites, 69-70). Time Bites is an anthology subtitled Views and Reviews. It is a collection of literary essays and criticism that entails the writer's literary heritage and focuses on the books that influenced her life and inspired her writings. She thinks, "the real education is a good library" (Time Bites 157). Reading is personal and subjective but learning objectively occurs no matter the book being read. Time Bites dives into Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, David Herbert Lawrence amongst others’ literature.

Prisons: Laboratories of Group Minds Lessing asserts, “>Y@ou are living in a lunatic asylum” (63). We wear masks, we struggle to exist, we try to be objective…but we are confined to subjectivity…in fact, “What is useful is what survives, revives, comes to life in different contexts” (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 71). In Consciousness and the Novel, David Lodge asserts, “>I@n a world where nothing is certain, in which transcendental belief has been undermined by scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness” (87).

DORIS LESSING’S LITERATURE OF EXCESS

Lessing speaks to all of humankind and implores us to shake ourselves out of our lethargy. —Galin, 31

Doris Lessing: In Praise of Excess Doris Lessing is a writer who defies categorisation. She uses many literary genres and tackles a cacophony of themes. Her literature is stamped by her experience and the genres of her writing change with the different phases she went through: atheism, Communism, feminism, humanism and Sufism. Her lifetime experiences and her writings carry the prints of excess. The writer's poetics of excess arouse contradictory feelings; her fictional worlds drive us to cogitation. This abundance of experience and her background allowed her to win several literary prizes as well as the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. Lessing's literary career involves a cornucopia of success and excess: success in transmuting and transmitting her messages as well as excess of genres, excess of experience, excess of scepticism (nihilism), excess of criticism, excess of confusion and self-questioning, excess of knowledge, excess of love and hatred and excess of liberty and wisdom. In her case ‘excess is success’. Her books were successful partly because of their successful excess. She is still most acclaimed for the novel she calls her “albatross” The Golden Notebook (1962).

Four Seasons of Excess "I write as in legends or in fairy tales, by means of metaphors and analogies"1

Lessing's texts display wide reading of the classics (her literary heritage). Traces of Tolstoy, Woolf, Proust, amongst others, are present in her works. The writer draws on literary canons, and amalgamates past genres with postmodern writing techniques to build a literature of her own.

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Lessing qtd in Ingersoll, p 67.

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Doris Lessing’s Literature of Excess

She deconstructs subjective realities and imagines alternative worlds by name of distorting what we see as objective reality. In this context, the Slovenian philosopher Zizek explains in his book The Parallax View that, “fantasy is by definition not ‘objective’...however, it is not ‘subjective’ ... Fantasy, rather, belongs to the ‘bizarre category of the objectively subjective’” (170). The multiple and various defamiliarising strategies Lessing develops in her texts reveal the importance of excess in metamorphosing a simple story into a way of cogitation and a means of seeking for the truth. Her works use and abuse genres, and some of her texts (like the two volumes of her autobiography Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade) inform their readers, whereas some others (like her space fiction narratives Shikasta and The Sirian Experiment) hide their implied messages.

Avalanche of Experiences Lessing's memory is traumatised. Exorcised souvenirs and relics sway between excess, exhaustion and dearth. Her novels dwell on war scars, which excess of violence has the potential of leading to human degeneration. In fact, the writer herself embodies the ever-present wreckages of war. Out of what Derrida calls “an ever-present absence”, out of deep pain, nostalgia and sorrow, she published in 2008 Alfred and Emily, a novel that imagined a better past for her parents, that could have been possible if only there have been no world wars. She confessed in an interview: “I have always observed incredible brutality in society. My parents' lives and the lives of millions of people were ruined by the First World War. But the human imagination rejects the implications of our situation. War scars humanity in ways we refuse to recognize” (Qtd in Ingersoll, 17). Because of war, Lessing experienced dislocation; she moved from Persia (now Iran) to South Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to London. She witnessed colonialism, engaged in Communism; she married and divorced; she tried drugs and even experienced madness. She also experimented with being another self by publishing two novels as Jane Somers to publish; she claims that using a pseudonym “has been an extremely instructive experiment” (Qtd in Ingersoll, 146). She then dived into a moderate excess of spiritualism. In her case writing is at one time and the same remembering, cogitating and historicising; it is exorcising and burying, hiding and revealing.

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Excess of Scepticism The writer questions being, delves into confusion and nihilism seeking for truth, for a way out of meaninglessness, for a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’. In this context, the Sufi scholar Al Ghazali claims in his book Deliverance from Errors: “One should be most diligent in seeking the truth until he finally comes to seeking the unseekable. For primary truths are unseekable, because they are present in the mind; and when what is present is sought, it is lost and hides itself. But one who seeks the unseekable cannot subsequently be accused of negligence in seeking what is seekable” (5). Lessing sheds light on this state of floating in the universe in all her texts but mainly projects her way of deciphering the enigma of being in her space fiction narratives Shikasta and The Sirian Experiment.

Deluge of Feelings Lessing experiences through her protagonists (Kate, Anna, Martha) and through her imagined worlds of words (Shikasta, Argos, prehistory, Africa, London) an amalgam of feelings. She narrates love, longs for a better past, expresses nostalgia for her homeless memories, thinks about human sin, and denies her sensibility to only find herself diving into emotional excess.

Excessive Criticism "I had to be critical about everything, all my life" 2

Lessing's texts entail implicit and explicit messages of blame and harsh socio-political criticism. She unveils the horrors of war and its fallacious ideologies; she criticises media and the hegemonic forces for imposing their own agenda and their own way of reading history in her book The Wind Blows Away Our Words; she penetrates into the psyche of the terrorist in her novel The Good Terrorist and points the finger of blame at what she calls in her book Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, “group minds” (47). Her most teasing texts in this perspective are The Fifth Child and its sequel, Ben in the World, where a monstrous child unveils society's excess of monstrosity; in The Cleft she re-examines genesis and the origin

 2

Lessing, qtd in Ingersoll, p 87.

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Doris Lessing’s Literature of Excess

of creation; Briefing for a Descent into Hell explores the unconscious and defies scientific hypotheses with spiritual exegeses.

Beyond Excess Lessing's excess of genres, themes and implicit/explicit messages generates criticism, defies history and teases readers. Her works aim at producing deep social, political, and inner/outer psychological changes. The Nobel Laureate's multiple experiences, multiculturalism, and cornucopia of texts, themes and genres show how excess might be transformed into Art. In her Nobel lecture, Lessing highlights the importance of writers and books: “The storyteller is deep inside every one of us... for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the mythmaker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative” (26).

Excess of Knowledge and the Way to Truth Lessing's works emanate from an excess of knowledge, which leads her into an excess of rationality. The writer found answers in Sufism (during the 60's): “I read a book of Idries Shah, The Searchers, I realized that it answered many of my questions” (Qtd in Ingersoll, 66). She followed the road of excess (experience, criticism, nihilism), a way of excessive feeling; she reached the farthest edge of scepticism in an attempt to reach what Al Ghazali calls “the alchemy of happiness”. The Sufis reject excess, but they go through excess to reach moderation. The Nobel Laureate thus drew on the Sufi poetics of excess (excess of metaphor, satire, tales, travel, knowledge) to produce a literature of excess that involved narratives of learning and teaching, of what Idries Shah calls “learning to learn”. Lessing's works embody excess as a way to selfknowledge: emptying oneself and deconstructing being to end with an excess of wisdom and an ultimate truth.

LESSING’S OTHER SPACES

It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. So do you have to salt your truth to the point where it doesn’t quench thirst anymore? —Nietzsche, 60

DORIS LESSING’S DESCENT INTO THE INNER SPACE

To hold in one’s mind that a central transforming force is always at work in the world – the force of evolution itself – enables one to see that a person may be learning while not knowing he is doing so. ‘Nobody can stop the process of learning, real questioning, even if only because our ancestors started on this course many thousands of years ago. They set us on this course and we cannot escape from it’ (Reflections). The contention is that unless a man is enlightened, has been transformed into the high condition possible to him, he does not know his state, or stage, or what it is ‘the old nurse’ – the process of ordinary life – is teaching him. He knows that he is unhappy and always yearning for something other than what he is – that is all. —Time Bites, 257-8

Doris Lessing is a writer who defies categorisation; she tackles all literary genres in her fiction and deals with a number of social and political issues. Her texts are imbued with didacticism and spiritualism. Her book Briefing for a Descent into Hell, published in 1971, falls into the category of what she calls “inner space fiction”. In this novel Lessing highlights, through the inner experience of her main protagonist Charles Watkins, the illusions and disillusion of psychotherapy and the impenetrability of the human inner self. Through the characters of the therapists who attempt to cure Charles, she insists on the failure of exploring the enigma of being, of interpreting dreams and exploring traumas. She thus questions psychoanalysis and behaviourism and shows how the psyche might resist both psychiatrists and psychiatry. She leaves it to us to see that science cannot interpret feelings and souls. She underlines the importance of considering humanistic psychology and rethinking the closure of possibilities suggested by scientific interpretations.

Briefing for a Descent into Hell: an odyssey into insanity From realm to realm man went, reaching his present reasoning, knowledgeable, robust state – forgetting earlier forms of intelligence. So, too, shall he pass beyond the current forms of perception... —Rumi, Qted in Rubenstein, 181

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Doris Lessing’s Descent into the Inner Space

In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Lessing narrates a fictitious clinical experience through which she attempts to explore the realm of unconsciousness. Her main character, Charles Watkins, is an amnesiac professor lost within the bounds of his inner experience. He has forgotten his past, and experiences denial and disavowal. He tries to defy and transcend the outer space and then dives into an inner space of his own and explores other experiences in the mind. When the police first found him in the street on Friday 15th August 1969, they thought, “He was drunk or drugged. They describe him as Rambling, Confused, and Amenable” (Briefing for a Descent into Hell 3); he was in a state of loss and did not know who or where he was. His case seemed not to concern them, and they took him off to hospital. At the sanatorium, two therapists (Doctor X and Doctor Y), try to explore his identity, to understand his case in order to cure his undetectable illness. Doctor Y notices: “Patient still under the impression he is on some sort of voyage” (4), and suggests “Tomorrow: Sodium Amytal...a week's narcosis”; Doctor X disagrees and suggests “shock therapy” (7). They examine him, attempt several medical treatments and try to establish a dialogue with him in order to agree on a clear diagnosis. But in vain; the more the patient speaks, the more puzzled they are: Patient distressed, fatigued, anxious, deluded, hallucinated. Try Tofronil? Marplan? Tryptizol? Either that or Shock. (Briefing, 11)

Having exhausted all possible hypotheses, they start to consider all the possible ailments that fit his symptoms: Patient may have committed a crime and this is not just routine guilt? Doctor Y Accept hypothesis. What crime? Doctor X. (Briefing, 15)

In the meanwhile, the patient continues his inner journey; he resists psychotherapy and does not communicate with the medical staff. Then they decide to explore this enigmatic personality by bringing in his surroundings.

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Patient has religious delusions. Paranoic. Dissociated. I think he is more coherent however. Have not yet heard from Mrs. Watkins? DoctorY. (163)

As soon as the police here identified his identity, the therapists contact his wife, colleagues and friends and attempt through corresponding with them to understand what caused Charles Watkins’s amnesia, because they are convinced that since the unconscious is what Freud describes as a repository of repressed memories, then this state of anxiety could only be the result of a traumatic experience. The doctors cannot explain the patient's pathology: is it madness, daydreaming, melancholia, depression or neurosis? His case does not lie within their medical repertoire. They explore his physical symptoms and attempt several medical treatments, then enlarge the scope of their diagnosis towards a socio psychological perspective, and as soon as Charles starts talking to them, they try a psychoanalytic therapy. But Charles continues to subvert their scientific hypotheses and struggles to break the social chains and transcend the language barrier. Doctor, I can't talk to you. Do you understand that? All these words you say, they fall into a gulf, they're not me or you. Not you at all. I can see you. You are a small light. But a good one. God is in you doctor. You aren't these words. (167)

The two therapists cannot consider his case beyond the rational scientific and medical pragmatic spheres.

Science v. Spirituality: Physics and Metaphysics A man is a machine, or if he is not, then he is nothing. —Joseph Needham, 93

Lessing does not give names to the two therapists; they are only referred to as Doctor X and Doctor Y. She trivialises the role of doctors in an interview: “It's a matter of luck what doctors you have” (Qted in Tyrell). She does not give any importance to their identities, and refers to them with mathematical symbols through which the reader might identify them. Their speech is a mere collage of hypotheses and they establish little dialogue with the outer world outside the scientific sphere. They attribute a “logical” interpretation to every symptom, limit their diagnosis to what they judge as a convenient hypothesis, and try to convince their patient

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Doris Lessing’s Descent into the Inner Space

about the veracity and certainty of their scientific claim: “However that may be Professor, you must accept who you are. I am telling you the truth. Accept that - and try to go on from there” (Briefing, 165). But Charles resists and confronts them with a conscious dissent: “What you say is only what you know. You tell me it is so. But if I tell you what I know, you disagree” (Briefing, 166). The message he tries to deliver to the doctors could be interpreted in words of the psychiatrist Ronald David Laing: “I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience is man's invisibility to man” (qted in Levine); in other words, Charles tries to explain to his therapists that his world is different from theirs and that they do not share the same experience of life, or the same way of considering his “illness”. They do not share the same sense of reality. The scientific interpretation of Charles’s state of mind is limited to identifying of his symptoms and attributing them to a traumatic experience. “Instead of viewing madness as a potentially natural healing process, many analysts arrest the process by trying to cure the patient” (Levine). Doctor X and Doctor Y engage in what Levine calls in his article "R.D. Laing: The Politics of Mind", a “ceremonial of psychiatric examination, diagnosis and prognostication”, convinced of the efficiency of their therapies and medication. They observe the patient, prescribe drugs and report their diagnosis in a quasi-mechanical way and tweak treatments to every newly noticed symptom. As Lessing ironically puts it: “But what strikes me is that all these drugs treatments are so hit and miss. No one really seems to know what they are doing. It's all ‘if it works, good. If not, let's try something else’” (Qted in Tyrell). The British philosopher Philip Sherrard claims that “a science whose very categories exclude a recognition of the essential qualities of human nature clearly is not in a position to make man the subject of its investigation with any hope of telling us anything very important about him” (Sherrard, 17). The two therapists are not able to understand Charles’s state of mind or his inner journey; they stick to examining external factors and apparent symptoms; they fail in their diagnoses and do not admit it, continuing in their psychopharmacological perspective. Charles and the two doctors stand for the eternal discrepancy between science and spirituality: they consider him as mentally ill and he thinks they are stupid, Patient: You're stupid! Nurse, make him go away. I don't want him here. He's stupid. He doesn't understand anything. (Briefing, 68)

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In fact, it could be argued that “the term science implies a particular way of knowing the natural world based upon empirical and rational methods and excluding by definition other modes of knowledge based upon other epistemological and ontological premises” (Nasr, 208).

The Myth of Mental Illness Science arrived on the scene only about 400 years ago, and scientific medicine only 200 years ago. Some time ago I suggested that ‘formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic’. —Szasz, 2003

While interrogating the unconscious, Sigmund Freud lays emphasis on the cornucopia of thoughts that cross the human mind: “>O@ur most personal daily experience acquaints us with ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how” (143). This claim paves the way for innumerable explanations of Charles’s state of mind. The protagonist is delving into his unconscious dreams and thoughts; Freud states that the unconscious is “going beyond the limits of direct experience” (143); Watkins’s state of mind could not be identified as mental illness, but is rather a different layer of a conscious unconsciousness. The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “the premier critic of his own profession” (Krauthammer, qted in Weinberg) claims that mental illness is a myth. He argues, “because the mind is not an object like the body, it is a mistake to apply the predicate disease to it. Hence, as I asserted half a century ago, the ‘diseased mind’ is a metaphor, a mistake, a myth” (Szasz, 2007). Szasz thinks that it is nonsense to rely on bodily symptoms to diagnose that which is mental; he rejects the rigidity and limitations of medical interpretations and denies the existence of mental illness: “We call all manner of human problems ‘(mental) diseases’, and convince ourselves that drugs and conversation (therapy) solve such problems. Solutions exist, however, only for mathematical problems and some medical problems. For human problems, there are no solutions” (Szasz, 2003). Charles Watkins transcends social norms, subverting the therapists' therapies and describing the futility of their diagnoses, interpretation of symptoms and medical prescriptions: “The blind leading the blind. Around and around and around and around...” (Briefing, 14). His words suggest that neither the patient nor the doctors have a clear vision of things; they are blinded by ignorance. Szasz emphasises the limitations of the medical

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interpretation of human behaviour and feelings and criticises the therapists' claim that all symptoms are linked to a precise illness, and all disease is curable with a prescribed treatment: In actual contemporary social usage, the finding of a mental illness is made by establishing a deviance in behaviour from certain psychosocial, ethical, or legal norms. The judgment may be made, as in medicine, by the patient, the physician (psychiatrist), or others. Remedial action, finally, tends to be sought in a therapeutic - or covertly medical - framework, thus creating a situation in which psychosocial, ethical, and/or legal deviations are claimed to be correctible by (so-called) medical action. Since medical action is designed to correct only medical deviations, it seems logically absurd to expect that it will help solve problems whose very existence had been defined and established on nonmedical grounds. (Szasz)

Charles’s state of loss could perhaps be linked to his intellectual familiarity with literature and the Greek classics, for Lessing thinks that “intellectuals are very emotional” (Qted in Tyrrell), but the doctors neglect this facet of the patient's life and do not even attempt to explore it. When they discover that he is a literature professor, they go farther in their quest for symptoms linked to his job and colleagues, caring less about his intellectual background and research areas; his hallucinations are a mere expression of historical knowledge stored in his unconscious. Patient: You told me to talk. I don't mind thinking instead. (27)

The therapists diagnose his inner odyssey as a state of amnesia and somehow madness; they think he is hallucinating and do not listen to the poetic language he uses to narrate his inner journey: Man like a great tree Resents storms. Arms, knees, hands, Too stiff for love, As a tree resists wind. But slowly wakes, And this dark wood Wind parts the leaves And the black beast crashes from the cave. (Briefing, 25-26)

The doctors only describe the apparent state of loss and do not delve deeper to decipher the world of words he remembers, dreams of and reinvents.

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In his book Madness and Civilisation, Foucault subverts the medical interpretation of madness: The world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness, since in its struggles and agonies it measures itself by the excess of the works like those of Nietzsche, of Van Gogh, of Artaud. And nothing in itself, especially not what it can know of madness, assures the world that it is justified by such works of madness. (289)

Lessing attempts through Charles’s amnesiac experience to show that mental illness is a myth, but also that “... craziness is not quite as far away as we like to think" and that "people are that close to breakdown but they find ways to cope” (Qted in Tyrrell). I think that we are all much nearer being crazy than we ever want to think about. I once sent myself crazed on purpose. I wrote about it in my book The Four Gated City. I had been struck by the fact that, if you read accounts of what shamans do when they initiate people, and what people experience in prison camps, and what schizophrenics and others describe, the symptoms are nearly always the same. They hear voices, become disassociated and have revelations. The thing they all have in common is that they haven't eaten or slept well. (Qted in Tyrrell)

She emphasises the impact of daily life experiences on the human psyche and mental state. She even ventured into experiencing a journey of psychological disorder in order to confirm her claim about mental illness: I went down to my place in Devon where I knew I wouldn't be interrupted because it's difficult to have a couple of weeks by oneself in London. I went without food and sleep, deliberately watching everything that happened. It took about three days for me to begin going crazy. Then what happened was that a 'figure' appeared that I christened the 'self-hater'. It's a creature schizophrenics often describe. This figure, a person who shouts and screams at us, is obviously the conditioned conscience. It is what society creates in us, what daddy and mummy do to us; "Oh, you're a naughty girl", or "Oh, you're a naughty boy." It exists inside one but sounds as if it's coming from outside. (qted in Tyrrell)

She thus thinks that there is a fine line between sanity and craziness, and that any human being could at any time be at the edge of this border. Her brief journey into mental puzzlement helped her grasp the fragility of the psyche and blame the severe and narrow medical diagnoses: So I watched all these things going on inside me which would have landed me in a mental hospital if I didn't know what I was doing. Well, my time

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Doris Lessing’s Descent into the Inner Space in Devon was coming to an end and, after two weeks, I started to eat and sleep properly again. It took a long time, at least three weeks, to get back to normal. So I think that perhaps a lot of people are having breakdowns, or described as schizophrenics, who are simply not eating or sleeping enough. (Qted in Tyrrell)

The Social Persona: Isolationism and the Politics of Madness Denial of the supra-human, place man in the danger of falling into the sub-human. —Nasr, 212

Szasz claims: “The concept of illness, whether bodily or mental, implies deviation from some clearly defined norm” (1961), and Charles has all the symptoms of an out-of-the-usual state of mind; he is isolating himself from the outer world and refusing to communicate his ailments and his thoughts to the doctors. He listens to their mechanical medical interpretations and realises that “anything they are told is distorted to fit their own personal or group bias…like a pile of half-truths they already cherish” (Briefing, 130). What Charles calls “a pile of half-truths” could be explained by the psychiatrist Szasz's view that “conceptual ordering of phenomena we call "diseases" and of the interventions we call "treatments" is a human activity, governed by human interests” (2007). The doctors have the legitimacy to declare a patient mentally ill and society confirms this view. Charles no longer conforms to the social norms, and thus society refuses his state of mind and considers him as odd. Szasz, emphasises furthermore this social rejection of the non-conformist’s state: “Ostensibly, the term "mental illness" (or "psychopathology") names a pathological condition of disease, similar say to diabetes; actually, it names a social tactic or justification, permitting family members, courts, and society as a body, to separate themselves from individuals who exhibit, or are claimed to exhibit, certain behaviours identified as "dangerous mental illnesses” (Szasz, 2003). The unconventional and nonconformist state of being that Charles incarnates troubles social norms because it is not confined to the traditional mode of socialization; according to Lessing “the hardest thing in the world is to stand out against one's group, a group of one's peers” (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 49). Charles is not ill, he is rather what the British novelist calls an “original mind”, what she describes as “people who do not fall victim to the need to say, or do, what everyone else does”

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(Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 53), “the lonesome individualist who overturns conformity” (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 54). The protagonist dares to escape from the predefined mental state of consciousness, and consciously delves into his unconscious; he even defies the doctors' diagnoses and refuses to hear their medical interpretations for he is aware that his case is not part of their medical repertoire. He ironically describes the rigidity of social and cultural norms: “Why do you say Or? And is more like it. It's funny, I've just noticed. People say, Either, Or, this or that, because of the thud thud, fudd fudd, in or out, black and white, yes and no, one and two, the either-or comes from that, the beat, the fudd fudd in the blood, but it isn't either or at all, it's and, and, and, and...” (165). Lessing uses Charles’s statement to criticise the firm speech boundaries set by society, and reacts to this narrow sphere of conversation in an interview: Another thing that interests me is the fact that we have binary minds. We always have to have an 'either/or'. I see myself and others affected by this all the time. For example, if I'm giving a lecture, invariably half the questions begin, "Mrs Lessing, do you think this or do you think that?" "Is it A or B?" And I say, "Well, it's both, or something else entirely", this satisfies nobody. But this is how we think. We take some element out of a subject or person and use that to label it or them for ever after. It's as if we can only have one idea or fact - so we have to choose. We can't have a pattern in our minds about the subject or person, we have to have a single label that we can refer to all the time. (Qted in Tyrrell)

Lessing's readers might think her statement worth considering, but the doctors listen to Charles without hearing his words; according to them he is mentally traumatised and has to take medicines to get cured; his words do not make sense to them; they try to bring him out of his inner world: “However that may be Professor, you must accept who you are. I am telling you the truth. Accept that - and try to go on from there” (165). The British philosopher Philip Sherrard gives a harsh criticism of the preconceived social norms and their narrow consideration of spiritual experiences: The social form which we have adopted cuts our consciousness to fit its needs, its imperatives tailor our experience. The inorganic technological world that we have invented lays hold on our interior being and seeks to reduce that to a blind inorganic mechanical thing. It seeks to eliminate whole emotional areas of our life, demanding that we be a new type of being, a type that is not human as this has been understood in both the religious and the humanist ages—one that has no heart, no affections, no spontaneity, and is as impersonal as the metals and processes of

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Doris Lessing’s Descent into the Inner Space calculation in which it is involved. And it is not only our emotional world that is deadened. The world of our creative imagination and intelligence is also impoverished. (4)

In fact, attributing a fixed definition to feelings and thoughts narrows the scope of their very existence, and reduces them to sterile inhuman fabric devoid of meaning. In the novel the doctors are convinced that their patient is suffering from a traumatic past, and they keep seeking for the fake truth they have fixed and thus fail to understand and cure him. In fact, "Only after we admit that our solutions are illusions can we begin to develop more rational and more humane methods for dealing with ‘mental illness’ and the ‘dangerous mental patient’”(Szasz, 2003). In fact, “Lessing is concerned with the poor treatment afforded the mentally ill, whose dissenting perceptions make them powerless, but her aim is not only liberal reform or social amelioration. She wants, rather, an abolition of the traditional hierarchy of the sane and insane, and a recognition of the revolutionary nature of madness” (Sukenick). Lessing is convinced that insanity is a social construct, whether a conscious reaction against the collective pressure or an unconscious fleeing from individual traumas: I have a rather fanciful interpretation about schizophrenia, which is probably nonsense, but it might interest some people. It is that this selfhater part of ourselves, the conditioned conscience, is usually disassociated and is just sitting there ready to pounce. Then, then some Our collective cultural insanity crisis activates it, it gets plugged into the entire human psyche. It isn't just personal, it becomes an impersonal accuser, as if the whole of society is behind it. And that's why people can't bear it. It's so powerful. It isn't just the voice of mummy or daddy, it's total collective power of dislike, accusation and pure hatred. In other cultures this is probably a recognised aspect of a god — I wouldn't be surprised — certainly in India you'd find it in, probably Kali or another of those terrible goddesses. But I'm sure that schizophrenics get plugged into something so enormously powerful they can't bear it. (Qted in Tyrrell)

Illusion and disillusion of psychotherapy If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; if you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic. —Szasz, 1961

Charles is diagnosed with what Freud calls “hallucinatory psychosis” (509); the doctors explain his state of mind as an unconscious

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disconnection from traumatic events. Doctor X sums up the whole situation to the patient’s wife Felicity Watkins in a pragmatic way: “Look at it from our point of view. Your husband was brought in here nearly two months ago, by the police, in a state of shock, having been robbed, without papers, money or knowledge of who he was. He was talking to himself, hallucinated, he had religious delusions and he was paranoiac. We did what we could to get him better, that's all” (211). None of the medical staff could guess what was wrong with the patient; all of them considered him to be a mad amnesiac, unable to communicate his thoughts, dreams and fears. His wife Felicity could not accept the therapists' diagnosis either; she refused their scientific interpretations, questioning them: “if he lost his memory, then why does he speak as he always speaks? The same phrases. Everything the same” (212). This facet of the truth was not detected and considered by the doctors simply because they had never lived with the Professor and did not know anything about his past or personality. The scientists always looked for the truth outside; they collected testimonies from his wife Felicity, his colleague Jeremy Thorne, his mistress Constance, from one of his lecture audiences Mayne Rosemary Baines, and from his familiars and acquaintances; whereas the enigma lay inside him, proving the limitations of scientific explanation and representing a disappointment with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Lessing does not believe in the magical prowess of psychotherapy: “That's the trouble isn't it? There aren't enough people to listen. I think that's why some find therapy successful because they are buying a friend really. I had therapy when I was in my early 30s, for two or three years, a pretty relaxed affair. It wasn't analysis or anything like that. But now, when I look back, I know that I was buying a friend” (Qted in Tyrrell). Charles did not ask for the doctors' help, he needed no friends during his journey. He thus rejected the therapists' medicines and medical interpretations and continued to explore “the inner caverns” (33) of his conscious unconsciousness.

Whirling like a Dervish: Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through The vast labyrinth of the psychic world becomes confused with the luminous Heaven of the Spirit and the type of so-called spirituality resulting from this confusion can be made to converge with almost anything including science. (Nasr, 209)

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Charles is lost within the whirlpool of his inner journey “along the inner caverns of the flesh, yet clinging like sinking man to sight of sun” (33); ideas and memories are dancing inside his head like whirling dervishes attempting to reach a harmony between their bodies and the cosmos. He is going through the spiral of a ‘spiritual combat’ against his mind that is intoxicated by thoughts and dogmas. He in fact rebels against his consciousness and struggles against it from within to find self-healing to reach humiliation and mortification, which are in Sufi thought crucial qualities for the higher dimensions of being. Both Sufism and psychology attempt to solve the inner conflict with the self, to dissect the inherent dualism of good and evil, and to decipher the eternal dialogue between the soul inside the self. Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell highlights the close relationship between Sufism and psychoanalysis, and shows how both paths join in their quest for the perfect man. Charles, turning over and over again in his inner turmoil, whirling, attempting to reach the truth; tries to enter the cosmos in a trance and reach a state of spiritual elevation, a purification and liberation from the ‘other self’. His amnesiac state represents a rebirth, a cleansing, and a starting point for a different conscious self, and the experience of a new consciousness arising out of an unconscious journey. He deconstructed the very essence of his existence, and started his unconscious journey by questioning being and time: “What am I? What is this Time? What is the evidence for a Time that is not mortal as a leaf in autumn, then the answer is, that which asks the question is out of the world's Time...” (64). He is at the same time of time.

Soul and Solitude The apparent result of being out of touch with one’s inner self is a spiritual sterility. —Galin, 72

The protagonist is thus on the verge of what the theologian and Sufi scholar Al Ghazali describes as “the opening of a window in the heart towards the unseen” (The Alchemy of Happiness, 14). He considers his inner journey, as Foucault describes it in Madness and Civilization, from the point of view that “that crystal ball which for all others is empty is in his eyes filled with the density of an invisible knowledge” (15). Charles names himself “Crystal” (Briefing, 171). The word “crystal” might symbolise the transparency of the soul, the fragility of the senses, the clarity of the truth and the healing power of the quest. The word is

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repeated in the novel like a recurrent leitmotif; it is a metaphor for enlightenment and illumination. “Crystal” is that ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ that aspires to self-knowledge and the longed-for truth. Charles moves from questioning the mind to the path of the heart via a process of isolation and contemplation, delving into a self-therapy by detaching himself from his therapists and the outer world; thinking is a big moment of solitude and detachment. He is fleeing and floating within his existential odyssey, unaware of passing time. He has lost his sense of existence and presence and is only reminded of it when the therapists, the nurses and his wife talk to him and bring him back to the “real” world. This timeless unconscious experience liberates him from all social constraints of spatial and temporal restraint. Lessing “has made use of Sufi ideologies to enhance her own perception of human beings on earth and on other planets, in life and in an afterlife" (Galin, 4) "For there is never anywhere to go but in” (Lessing, Briefing).

Towards a Humanistic Psychology If you are uninterested in what I say, there’s an end to it. If you like what I say, please try to understand which previous influences have made you like it. If you like some of the things I say and dislike others, you could try to understand why. If you dislike all I say, why not try to find out what has formed your attitude? —Shah, qted in Time Bites 267-8

Lessing rejects behaviourist and psychoanalyst theories of interpreting madness, amnesia and neurosis and directs her readers towards a humanistic psychology and a mystical theology. Briefing for a Descent into Hell is a temptation to contemplation and cogitation. The two therapists in the novel advocated behaviourism and psychoanalysis to diagnose Charles’s state of mind. They concentrated on the patient's environment and tried to find answers in his past and from his surroundings. They also attempted to establish a dialogue with him in order to find in his words what matched the symptoms they noticed. But neither examining his behaviour nor using talking therapy helped them in their quest. Lessing, having experienced madness, calls on therapists to refrain from symptomatic analyses and rather delve deeper into the psyche and advocate a humanistic psychology, by concentrating on the human psyche and existential matters rather than focusing on apparently insignificant signs.

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Doris Lessing’s Descent into the Inner Space

Dr. Robert Frager joins Lessing in her spiritual interpretation of her character's journey: “The Sufi tradition, for example, doesn't talk about some of these fascinating defense mechanisms of the psyche - like repression or projection, the things that Freud and Anna Freud and the neo - Freudians laid out. Understanding this is very valuable. But if you think that's all the psyche is, that's absurd” (Frager, 2010) While Doctor X and Doctor Y bargain about the patient's symptoms, Charles happily considers that “not everyone has known these depths” (Briefing, 35). What the doctors fail to see is the "irrational side of the self, with its multiple metaphoric meanings” (Rubenstein, 182), and their limited medical interpretation impedes them from understanding their patient's inner journey, and his synchronicity between conscious and unconscious in the quest for truth and happiness throughout a process of amnesia and delirium. In his book The Divided Self, R.D. Laing asserts that the “cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed” (27). Al Ghazali, in The Alchemy of Happiness asserts that the way to “happiness” is first “real self knowledge”, and that “real self knowledge consists in knowing the following things: what art thou in thyself and from whence has thou come? Whither art thou going, and for what purpose hast thou come to tarry here awhile, and in what does thy real happiness and misery consist?” (11).

Madness: A Healing Hell In this journey there are many occasions to lose one’s way, for confusion, partial failure, even final shipwreck: many terrors, spirits, demons to be encountered, that may or may not be overcome. —Laing, Politics of Experience, 104

Charles is neither amnesiac, mad or ill; he is a human being going “round and round and round” (Briefing, 5); his intoxicated mind attempts to find self-healing; he awaits for a “good strong wind (Briefing, 4) of change, a new breathe, to confer a meaning to his existence. Madness in this context is not confined to its narrow sense of being insane or abnormal due to delusions and illusions; but rather suggests a state of liberation from social brainwashing and preconceived cultural constructs, what the writer calls “prisons we choose to live inside” (1987). Lessing sees madness as a state of rebellion rather than an illness, a repressive force that rejects the outer world and recognizes the inner truth. “Madness is a task, and she toils through it toward a higher condition of

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integrity, a deeper version of self” (Sukenick). She also establishes an analogy between a descent into one's unconscious, one's inner conflict, and a descent into the hell of the therapeutic process experienced by the patient. Knowing the inner space and being unable to communicate it to the outer world are hell. This dichotomy and divergence of insights further complicates the coexistence of the different ways of seeing the world and being into it. In his book The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing describes how “in some instances, breakdown does become break-through; trans-forming the ‘schizophrenic experience’ into a ‘tran-scendental experience’” is to question whether “this voyage is not what we need to be cured of but >that@ it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality?” (136). Thus Charles’s descent into the caverns of his inner space is an unconscious subversion of social conformism and an attempt to go through a schizophrenic experience of being another self and denying the outer world's gaze. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, “Lessing is only using Charles Watkins to mirror her own inner crisis, her own experience as far as madness is concerned” (Akujobi). On March 28th, 1977, Lessing sent a letter to her friend Roberta Rubenstein explaining mental illness as she considers it: I have spent nearly thirty years in close contact with mental illness, first through various brands of analyst and therapist and psychiatrist, and then through people who were ‘mad’ in various ways, and with whom I had very close contact. And still have. All this was not by any conscious choice on my part: it happened, presumably because of unconscious needs of my own.... I have always been close to crazy people. My parents were mildly, in their own ways. My father was done by the First World War, from which he really never recovered, and my mother had what is known as an unfortunate upbringing, her mother dying when she was three or so, and she never got over that. Both were acutely neurotic people. But I do not regard this as any personal fate, far from it, I believe that the world gets madder and madder, and when I say that it is not rhetorical or because the words sound attractively eccentric. (Qted in Rubenstein, 177)

In this letter, Lessing suggests that there are infinite ways of seeing mad people and considering madness, and considers that “there are a thousand other forms of Mind” (Jalaluddin Rumi, qted in Rubenstein, 181); she means to link this state of mind to the unease of being in this world: “Each individual of this species is locked up inside his own skull, his own persona experience” (Briefing, 142). She feels unconsciously concerned with craziness and attempts to use it to find answers to her

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Doris Lessing’s Descent into the Inner Space

existential questions. She regards “suffering, melancholy, and derangement as prerequisites to enlightenment” (Sukenick). In fact, she thinks that the “hell” of craziness might lead to wisdom and truth. Her protagonist's descent into the hell of knowledge, and his schizophrenia, are alternative ways of being. They symbolise a cathartic illness, a self-cleansing remembering/forgetting fever that may to heal past vices, erase past sins and reinvent a clean new self. Charles’s inner journey has a purgative role, leading to salvation. It is a “descent into the hell” of amnesia, hallucination and loss but at the same time a salvation from the hell of the world and its crazy organisms. Lessing uses through Charles’s inner journey and the therapists' incapacity to make a clear diagnosis for his state of mind, to argue that the medical repertoire has limited perspectives, whereas “the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions” (Barthes, 131).

EXEGESIS OF SUFISM IN DORIS LESSING’S LITERATURE

And I say over and over again in every way I can that words are not Sufism, but explain and prepare the approaches to it; that Wisdom is not in books, only how to find it. But man’s present state is that of one who uses words, books, to acquire information; behind information, in a different range altogether, is Wisdom: therefore I build the approaches of the “study” through words. —Time Bites, 264

The Path of the Sufi: Lessing and Idries Shah In Time Bites, in an article entitled “A book that changed me”, Doris Lessing sheds light on the importance of books and their impact on readers: “I do not believe that one can be changed by a book (or by a person) unless there is already something present, latent or in embryo, ready to be changed. Books have influenced me all my life. I could say as an autodidact >…@ that books have made me what I am” (Time Bites, 212). She thus narrates her own experience as a reader and tells about her literary journey as a seeker for the book that might change her; as she puts it: “But it is hard to say of this book or that one: it changed me. How about War and Peace? Fathers and Sons? The Idiots? The Scarlet and the Black? Remembrance of Things Past? But now they all seem dazzling stages in a long voyage of discovery, which continues” (Time Bites, 212). She then read and met Idries Shah; she thinks The Sufis was the book she was looking for: So I have settled for The Sufis by Idries Shah, as the book that had an immediate impact. I had been looking about for a way of thinking, of looking at life, that mirrored certain conclusions and discoveries I had made for myself…Then someone told me that there was a man called Idries Shah, representative of a very ancient way of approaching life – which, however, had always to be presented in contemporary terms, suitable for the society in which it found itself. (Time Bites, 212)

Robert Graves described The Sufis in similar terms: “At last, this is what I have been waiting for…so I am not crazy after all…many people

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before me have made exactly this journey and come to the same conclusion…” (qtd in Time Bites, 213). After reading Shah’s books, Lessing explains what she found in all Shah’s books: “All Shah’s books, whether an anthropological view of magic, collections of metaphysical jokes, or of tales, or of comments on our contemporary scene, are fresh, unexpected and full of surprises. They are full of unique insights into our psychology, our society, and the human condition” (Time Bites, 229). Meeting the Iranian scholar Idries Shah metamorphosed Doris Lessing’s way of reading books, of producing texts and of being in general; she thus changed the way she considerd time – past, present, and future – and followed another trajectory of narrativizing history and historicizing narratives.

Literature of Alchemy Lessing writes beyond the boundaries of gender and genre; she aims to instruct the mind and entertain the soul. She writes what could be classified as belonging to the repertoire of “the literature of alchemy”, a genre that was treated by Idries Shah in The Sufis: The literature of alchemy, lumped together as one phenomenon, is so immense that lifetimes have been spent in an attempt to understand it. It includes forgeries of greater or lesser plausibility in Greek, Latin, Arabic and later Western languages. These writings are sometimes incoherent, veiled in symbolism and shot through with allegory and such bizarre imagery as dragons, changing colors, blazing swords, metals and planets. (217)

After going through multiplex experiences and reconciling herself to her past, Lessing moved towards aiming at human improvement through literary means (metaphor, metafiction, satires, irony, space fiction). She started writing beyond gender and genres and the limits of any kind of classification. In The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, Muge Galin argues: Lessing was naturally inclined to promote “work” on oneself no matter the cost; >…@ The Sufi Way has offered her a very welcome avenue of escape beyond the limitations of psychology, psychiatry, politics, Communism, Jungianism, or any other “ism” she had tapped prior to her study of the Sufi Way.” (73) In fact, “within the context of Sufi mysticism, she found new pathways she had not explored before and the possibility of a more profound and comprehensive study of the human race. (The Path of Love, 73)

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Lessing in the World of Words of the Sufis Lessing insists on the fact that “Sufism is not a religion, but claims to be the truth that lives in the heart of all religions” (Time Bites, 229). Many Sufi writers are travellers, who go around the world looking for knowledge, for “learning how to learn”; they live in a perpetual state of cogitation. They transmit what they learn through several literary devices: folk tale, fable, story, joke, satire, metaphor, poetry; rhetoric is their tool and experience is their evidence. Lessing advocates these writing techniques to produce texts that mix fiction with reality, and thus experiences history through imagination. What Lessing learnt from Sufi scholars and from her literary heritage is mirrored in her texts; these are imbued with mysticism and spiritualism. Just like Rumi, Lessing does not imprison herself within the boundaries of a religion. She adheres to Rumi’s words underscoring the universality of Sufism: Why think thus O men of piety I have returned to sobriety I am neither a Moslem nor a Hindu I am not Christian, Zoroastrian, nor Jew. (The Secret Meaning: Rumi’s Spiritual Lessons on Sufism, 8)

This universality of message and faith is expressed in Lessing’s novel Shikasta where Johor is the messenger embodying all religions. No matter the religious path, in Lessing’s book and Rumi’s poetry “>t@here is a timelessness and universality” to these teachings “making them relevant in a modern world even after a passage of 800 years” (The Secret Meaning: Rumi’s Spiritual Lessons on Sufism, 7). In the introduction to Shah’s Learning How to Learn, Lessing emphasizes this idea: “I have to make it clear that Sufism respects all religions, saying that the Truth is at the core of each” (10). She explains that the Sufi’s task is to “>A@bjure the why and seek the how” (Learning How to Learn, 12) in order to reach the truth. Lessing, just like Sufi scholars, teaches through analogy; she transmutes her own experiences into her texts, then makes her protagonists speak for themselves and teach readers through these narrated journeys. Nonetheless, “>M@ost Sufi view direct experience, rather than teaching, as the only real way to learn, and feel that inner transformation can only be experienced, not discussed” (The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 17). Idries Shah claims that Sufism is more than a religious and pious way of considering things; he thinks it’s a science that leads to the truth:

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Exegesis of Sufism in Doris Lessing’s Literature The word "mysticism" [employed in English for Sufism] has an elusive atmosphere about it, whereas tasaawif [Sufism] is a regular science with its set laws and a full scheme in detail. It is based on palpable experiences, which can be reproduced, like in any other science, under set circumstances. Every pilgrim has to pass through the same stages in his spiritual journey and these stages are readily recognisable by their detailed descriptions given unanimously by all masters. The landmarks and pitfalls are described in equally exhaustive particulars. Just as in any other course of study, there are methods in it to test the progress of the disciple and his merit. As in any other branch of knowledge, there are geniuses in this branch of study who create a stir in the world. (58-59)

Lessing draws on this “Way” to provide knowledge to her readers and lead them to “Truth”. Shah insists on the importance of understanding the messages behind the stories in Sufi texts: “In Sufi circles, it is customary for students to soak themselves in stories set for their study, so that the internal dimensions may be unlocked by the teaching master as and when the candidate is judged ready for the experiences which they bring” (Tales of the Dervishes, 11). “The Sufis are known as Seekers of the Truth, this truth being a knowledge of objective reality” (Tales of the Dervishes, 33). Lessing’s protagonists embody this quest for truth and the writer tries to transmit her humanistic messages through their experiences. Lessing’s novels are indeed imprinted by Idries Shah’s teaching. The endings of her space fiction narratives point to the idea of predestination and confirm Shah’s saying, “However fast you run, or however skilfully, you can't run away from your own feet” (Learning How to Learn, 26). Johor tried to help the Shikastans but his words were not understood by the planet’s inhabitants, they could not see in these more than what that were predisposed to grasp, just like all humans, whose cognitive capacities are limited. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Charles’s journey into the realm of his unconsciousness teaches Lessing’s readers what Shah intends by “knowing more through knowing oneself; knowing oneself through knowing how one thinks about others; and 'seeing yourself with other eyes than your own” (Learning How to Learn, 30). During his amnesiac phase, Charles discovers other layers of his own identity. As the story goes on, Charles’s personality is revealed through correspondences with his surroundings. At the end of the book, Charles returns to himself and regains consciousness and provides an enigmatic statement about being and knowledge: There are people in the world all the time who know…but they keep quiet. They just move about quietly, saving the people who know they are in the

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trap. And then, for the ones who have go out, it’s like coming around from chloroform. They realise that all their lives they’ve been asleep and dreaming. And then it’s their turn to learn the rules and the timing. And they become the ones to live quietly in the world, just as human beings might if there were only a few human beings on a planet that had monkeys on it for inhabitants, but the monkeys had the possibility of learning to think like human beings. But in the poor sad monkeys’ damaged brains there’s a knowledge half buried. They sometimes think that if they only knew how, if only they could remember properly, then they could get out of the trap, they could stop being zombies. It’s something like that Violet. And I’ve got to take the chance. (303-304)

This statement recalls Rumi’s words “This world is the dream of a sleeper” (The Secret Meaning: Rumi’s Spiritual Lessons on Sufism, 16). And Charles was able to grasp the meaning of truth; he drew the right lessons from his journey of loss. In his book Learning How to Learn, Idries Shah points to the “Way” to be followed before reaching the “Truth”: If you want a shorter answer to the inference that Sufis simply want to titillate, here is an old proverb: 'If you believe it, and think that you are sure of it, know that you are in fact in need of improvement. Being sure and believing are stages to be superseded on the Path to Certainty.' Words like 'secret', too, are technical terms among the Sufis. A better rendition of 'secret' is often 'innermost consciousness'. (36)

Muge Galin suggests that “Lessing’s urgent prophecy, then, is for her readers to shake themselves out of lethargy and into conscious work in order to manifest their full potentials and thereby fulfil their destinies” (The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 93). And this message is proclaimed in all of her texts that aim at enhancing seeking for truth and reaching knowledge. Shah asserts: “The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when. Think of the proverb: ‘Words have to die if humans are to live’” (Learning How to Learn, 47). And it is the role of the intellectual to show “Seekers” the “Right Way”. Idries Shah insists on the importance of fiction in portraying reality and leading to recognizing the truth: “You can get something from a book. That something may be so important as to lead you to the recognition of the real thing. It is therefore in many cases all-important” (Learning How to Learn, 67). In the same context, Lessing sheds light on the importance of writing in raising questions and providing answers; she argues in an interview:

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Exegesis of Sufism in Doris Lessing’s Literature I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had – I don’t know what – the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on. (Qtd in Ingersoll, 164)

Rumi puts it that “there are a thousand other forms of Mind” (qtd in Rubenstein, 181), and Lessing confirms this with a quote at the preface of the novel: “For there is never anywhere to go but in” (Briefing). And while Charles Watkins, “the Seeker in home waters” (122) whirls within his state of delirium he refers to the dichotomous fact of being in and out of the world: “In and out, out and in, in and out…” (28), suggesting that there is no escape from this vicious circle to reach the truth.

Existential Theories and Perennial Truths Lessing’s discovery of Sufi texts and her delving into an existential cogitation informed her fiction and carried her into writing biblical-like narratives. Indeed, she talks about the origin of her space fiction in an interview: When I started that book, it all came out of sacred books – if you remember I read the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, the New Testament, and the Koran. I found the similar idea of the warner or prophet, who arrives from somewhere and tells the people they should behave differently, or else! It’s in all these books. And I thought, OK, what now? My language is not religious so I did it in space-fiction terms and created a good empire. You might notice that I haven’t described it very closely, because to describe goodness is almost impossible for us – we’re not good enough to. I shall be very careful never to do it. (Ingersoll, 169-170)

She refers here to her novel Shikasta that imitates sacred books to warn humanity about the future; the messenger Johor is there to help the Shikastans find their “Way” and save them from an apocalyptic fatality. Shikasta embodies a visible world whose deterioration is invisible to its inhabitants; Johor contends: “This is not always evident to the creatures themselves, who tend to become obsessed with what they consume, and to forget what in turn consumes them” (15). Unveiling bleak truth is Johor’s primary mission, but he also acts in this novel as a history recorder who warns all mankind about the danger of their degenerate way of being: “I am deliberately reviving memories, re-creating memories, and these

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attempts will take their place in this record where they may be appropriate” (14). Johor did not provide the inhabitants with any clear solution; all his utterances were mysterious and gloomy and he did nothing to help them, but only advised them and observed their deeds. He reports about one of the inhabitants: “We were all so pressed, so thinly spread, and the situation on the planet so desperate. One of my tasks was to observe him, to assess his present state, and if possible, to administer a reminder” (102). Johor is the main protagonist in Shikasta, but he also acts as a voice for Lessing, who herself is communicating a message to her readers through her fictitious universes. Moreover, in The Memoirs of a Survivor, the main protagonist, a middle-aged woman, acts as a silent messenger who transcends the barriers of time and space and journeys between the past and the future to narrate the chaos in the visible world she sees from her window and the mysterious dream-like invisible world she witnesses behind the wall of her living-room. The visible and the invisible world are dichotomous; they keep being contradictory, whereas the main protagonist is experiencing a deep inner change caused by what she observes in both timeless spaces: Because of this feeling born of the experiences behind that wall, I was changing. A restlessness, a hunger that had been with me all my life, that had always been accompanied by a rage of protest, (but against what?) was being assuaged. I found that I was more often, simply, waiting. I watched to see what would happen next. I observed. I looked at every new event quietly, to see if I could understand it. (The Memoirs of a Survivor, 88)

Just like Johor, The Memoirs of a Survivor’s protagonist is passively observing. “In The Memoirs, The Representative, and Shikasta, Lessing portrays a breaking and broken (Shikasta) people who are alive under the worst possible circumstances” (Galin, 89). But the messenger-like characters do not react, they just witness and report; both Johor and the middle-aged woman embody the silence and the patience of the Sufi. In his book The Enclosed Garden of the Truth, the Persian Sufi poet Hakim Abul-Majd Majdnjd ibn Ɩdam SanƗ'Ư writes a chapter entitled “On being silent” that praises the virtues of silence and cogitation: The path of religion is neither in works nor words; there are no buildings thereon, but only desolation. Whoso becomes silent to pursue the path, his speech is life and sweetness; if he speaks, it will not be out of ignorance, and if he is silent, it will not be from sloth; when silent, he is not devising frivolity; when speaking, he scatters abroad no trifling talk. (50)

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Exegesis of Sufism in Doris Lessing’s Literature

In Lessing’s space fiction as in Sufi teaching stories, the message is inductively transmitted; the narrative does not entail a magical panacea to life’s dilemmas, it rather imitates truth and compels the readers to draw their own conclusions. There are thus in these novels suggestive meanings inside the texts and outside of their context quite often implicitly expressed; her fiction is imbued with voices and silences that need to be detected and analysed. The chaotic universes Lessing creates for her protagonists aim at enabling them –as well as her readers – to grow and find their way. In Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, Muge Galin suggests: “The Sufi teaching story is meant to serve as a tool for growth and enlightenment” (103). “In the context of Sufism not all persons can evolve, but all beings at all levels are useful for the balance of nature and the cosmos” (87). In Briefing for a Descent into Hell and The Memoirs of a Survivor as well as in her Canopus series, there are protagonists that stagnate and even regress; these are stubborn beings, who do not aim at self-improvement and are not even concerned with questioning being and time. In Briefing, the doctors stick to their scientific interpretations and continue to consider Charles’s case within their limited medical diagnosis: “We did what we could to get him better, that’s all” (211). In Memoirs, Emily continues to engage with the chaos outside the house and refuses to evolve into the right way, as the middle-aged woman puts it: “And that was the last time I saw Emily there in what I have called the ‘personal’. I mean that I did not again enter scenes that showed her development as a girl, or baby, or child. That horrible mirror-scene, with its implications of perversity, was the end” (159). In The Representative, Doeg helplessly and passively questions the future of his freezing planet: “If we are not channels for the future, and if this future is not to be better than the present, then what are we?” (39). All these stagnating characters fall into the sphere of what Lessing calls “prisons we choose to live inside”, constructed Shikastan universes created by creatures blinded by their chaotic surroundings. Books play the role of a silent warning voice that only a Seeker can hear and be aware of. Johor puts all this into words at the end of Shikasta: Poor people of the past, poor poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, not knowing anything, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for. I can’t stop thinking of them, our ancestors, the poor animal-men, always murdering and destroying because they couldn’t help it. And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted and filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad

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muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined. And here we all are together, here we are. (447)

Lessing’s novels embody her visible imagination, representing fictitious worlds imbued with metaphors and symbolism; they are the perceptible part of her own thoughts and experiences. But there are also some unperceived messages and even prophecies in her space fiction narratives that remained locked within the invisible universes of Lessing. After surmounting the painful process of self-remembering and reconciliation with her past in The Golden Notebook, Martha Quest, Under My Skin, and Walking in the Shades, the writer dives into Sufi literature and ideologies which allow her to liberate her thoughts and self from the heavy burden of memory; as Galin explains, “the process of ‘voiding’ one’s self is an essential step toward acquiring real self knowledge” (The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 61). Lessing then reaches happiness and engages in a phase of spiritual emptiness that allows her to have the audacity to produce Sufic narratives.

Lessing’s Postmodern Sufi Interdisciplinary Insights It is a common characteristic shared by Sufi literature and postmodern narratives that they shock and shake the readers, in other words defamiliarise in order to familiarise. Both blur the boundaries of time. Nietzsche thinks that this defamiliarisation is a form of revenge taken on reality; he calls writers the “Wounded children, the born artists, who find pleasure in life only by intending to falsify its image, in a sort of prolonged revenge against life” (Beyond Good and Evil, 53). Linda Hutcheon highlights the very particularity of postmodern fiction, arguing: “The present and the past, the fictive and the factual: the boundaries may frequently be transgressed in postmodern fiction” (The Politics of Postmodernism, 69). Galin says the same about Sufi stories: “The Sufi tale aims to shake the audience’s existing worldview to such a point that one stops looking at the world through any single lens. The tale allows for no fixed points of reference, daring its audience to flirt with boundaries. It aims gently to remove blinders, to show the greater picture” (The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 27). Lessing’s novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell is a pastiche of Sufi texts. It is a confusing novel that carries readers into the cobweb of the unconscious. In a state of delirium, Charles murmurs poems that seem like the mystical prayers of the Sufi scholar Rumi. Rumi’s main concern is God’s love and the purification of the soul from human sin to reach a state of spiritual elevation that establishes a communion between the Lord and

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the Seeker. His poetry is imbued with questioning and cogitation and his language is gloomy and metaphorical: From the reed-flute hear what tale it tells; What plaint it makes of absence ills: From jungle-bed since me they tore, Men's, women's eyes have wept right sore. My breast I tear and rend in twain, To give, through sighs, vent to my pain. Who's from his home snatched far away, Longs to return some future day. I sob and sigh in each retreat, Be't joy or grief for which men meet. They fancy they can read my heart; Grief's secrets I to none impart. My throes and moans form but one chain, Men's eyes and ears catch not their train. Though soul and body be as one, Sight of his soul hath no man won. (Qtd in Sahiar)

Charles makes a conscious journey into his unconsciousness; his utterances recall Rumi’s poems: Misshapen Moon Tyrant Labouring in circles Reflecting hot Reflecting cold Why don’t you fly off and find another planet? Venus perhaps, or even Mars? Lopsided Earth Reeling and heaving Wildly gyrating Which is the whip and which the top? We have no choice but to partner each other, Around and around and around and around and around. (64-65)

His words whirl like the dervishes who dance to create a harmony between the body, the heart and the mind in order to reach a spiritual maturity. When his wife refuses to accept the doctors’ diagnosis, they firmly gave her a scientific interpretation: “Look at it from our point of view. Your husband was brought in here two months ago, by the police, in a state of shock, having been robbed, without papers, money, or knowledge of who he was. He was talking to himself, hallucinated, he had

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religious delusions and he was paranoiac. We did what we could to get him better, that’s all” (Briefing, 211). And Charles continues his journey caring still less about their treatments or words: Along the inner caverns of the flesh, Yet clinging like sinking man to sight of sun (33)

Along this conscious/ unconsciousness journey he tries to find his way. And when the doctor tries to help him regain his memory and find clues to compel him remember his past, Charles returns to his whirling thoughts: Doctor Y: You give lectures do you? What sort of lectures? Who do you lecture about? Patient: Sinbad the sailor man. The blind leading the blind. Around and around and around and around and around and…(14)

Charles ironically compares his being a professor to a “Sinbad”, an adventurer, and satirically calls himself as well as the doctor “blind”, because both ignore the truth and neither could help the other find it; they pivot around it without seeing it. Lessing considers madness as “a natural process of mind-healing” (The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 39), and the Sufis as well believe it to be a state of extreme consciousness. In his book Madness and Civilisation, Foucault contests the notion of madness and establishes an analogy between craziness and art: The world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness, since in its struggles and agonies it measures itself by the excess of the works like those of Nietzsche, of Van Gogh, of Artaud. And nothing in itself, especially not what it can know of madness, assures the world that it is justified by such works of madness. (289)

In his book The Divided Self, R.D. Laing asserts that the “cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people whose minds are closed” (27). Charles Watkins found happiness inside his unconsciousness, escaping from the real world allowed him to see sight. As Idries Shah explains it, “'Things of this world' include, according to the Sufis, anything other than Truth” (Learning How to Learn, 95) because the “Truth” is deep inside the “Seeker”. As Nietzsche puts it: “O Voltaire! O humanity! O nonsense! There is something to ‘truth’, to the search for truth; and when a human

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being is too humane about it – when ‘il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien’ – I bet he won’t find anything!” (Beyond Good and Evil, 35).

Away from Mysticism, a Way of Being Lessing thinks that experience enhances objective criticism and allows one to write the books that have been widely acclaimed: People who are continually examining and observing become critics of what they examine and observe. Look at all those utopias written through the centuries. More's Utopia, Campanella's City of the Sun, Morris's News from Nowhere, Butler's Erewhon (which is ‘nowhere’ backwards), all the many different blueprints for possible futures produced by science and space fiction writers who, I think, are in the same tradition. These of course are all criticisms of current societies, for you can't write a utopia in a vacuum. (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 7)

Lessing considers her space fiction series “as a framework that enables me to tell (I hope) a beguiling tale or two; to put questions, both to myself and to others; to explore ideas and sociological possibilities” (Qtd in Alter). Space narratives, just like Sufic narratives, unveil truths and warn about the future. In the preface to The Sirian Experiments, she starts by questioning human evolution and the improbability futurity of a future for humanity that can be foreseen: I would not be at all surprised to find out that this earth had been used for the purposes of experiment by more advanced creatures…that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don’t guess and that there might have been a science in the past which have forgotten…that we may be enslaved in ways we know nothing about, befriended in ways we know nothing about… that our personal feelings about our situation in time, seldom in accordance with fact, so that we are always taken by surprise by ‘ageing’, may be an indication of a different lifespan, in the past – but that this past, in biological terms, is quite recent, and so we have not come to terms with it psychologically… that artefacts of all kinds might have had (perhaps do have) functions we do not suspect… that the human race has a future planned for it more glorious than we can now imagine. (10-11)

Lessing examines postmodern societies and the changes that are occurring in daily life. She produces what she calls “space fiction” to fit this weird world. She mixes postmodern writing techniques with the Sufi narrative genre to convey her alchemy of being. Indeed, she advocates many postmodern writing devices; she uses intertextuality in her Canopus series, which represents a kind of parody of holy texts, and some of her

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works are metafictions, such as her novel The Cleft, which narrates the story of a Roman historian who himself is interpreting historical relics. She has also produced a fragmented text in her novel The Golden Notebook; in an attempt to re-construct her life, the main protagonist Anna Wulf deconstructs her main life concerns within five notebooks. But these writing techniques mingle with Lessing’s Sufi implications; she thus confuses her readers with postmodern Sufi texts. In order to convey social criticism she has also produced open-ended narratives. There are no fixed endings in her books; all of them are open to further interpretation and imbued with hidden messages. These narratives have improbable endings, just like human life itself. “Doris Lessing, successfully and brilliantly brings out the chaos, the confusion and the psychological tension of the modern life” (Famila, 5). She even advocates a journalistic style in her book The Wind Blows Away Our Words, to narrate the agony of refugees in Pakistan. She explains in an interview that in this book she had humanistic concerns rather than political ones: I went for something called Afghan Relief, set up by some friends, among them myself, which has helped several people to visit Pakistan, but not with money. I paid my own expenses, as did the others I went with. The point about Afghan Relief is that it has close links with Afghans, both in exile and fighting inside Afghanistan, and includes Afghans living in London, as advisors. These Afghans are personal friends of mine, not “political.” Afghan Relief has so far not spent one penny on administration; all the fund-raising work, here and in Pakistan, is done voluntarily. To spell it out: no one has made anything out of Afghan Relief, except the Afghans. (Qtd in Ingersoll, 168)

This interest in Afghan refugees bears the stamp of a humanitarian concern. Due to her past political involvement with Communism, Lessing was accused of having taken an erroneous position as to the Afghan Mujahidin and her visit to Pakistan provoked much criticism. One of these attacks accuses her of “mistakes and misinformation” and argues that she deals with the political conflict in Afghanistan with a subjective sentimentalism: The considerable irritation I felt while reading Ms. Lessing's book was tempered continually by the enormity of the tragedy with which she deals. Complaints about her mistakes and misinformation, her coyness and sentimentality and her broad generalizations about national character and attitudes pale before the tales of misery and torment that have become commonplace among the Afghans. It was Doris Lessing's deep outrage at

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Exegesis of Sufism in Doris Lessing’s Literature the destruction of an entire nation that drove her to write this book. How I wish that she had done a better job of it! (Laber)

But Lessing writes against the grain, she defies all kind of preconceived ideologies and ventures into different types of literary and humane experiences in an attempt to reach the truth. Among twentieth century English novelists, Doris Lessing is intensely committed to active persuasion to reform society. She talks of the "sense of duty" that makes her join organizations and defends her own support of Communism. Her sense of social responsibility leads her to search for her values and for the literary material among the working classes in London. Her commitment to a sense of social responsibility and a pursuit of those oppressed by society also infuses her fiction about colonial Africa which makes her theme humanistic. (Famila, 3)

The writer examines traces of the past, writes, tracks these traces into her texts and deconstructs them, following the path of truth and attempting to find the “Right Way”. She reconsiders facts and excuses human sins, believing in the possibility of self-improvement. After questioning and criticizing, she delves into a phase of exposition and leading by example. Her texts mirror vices and errors and it is the role of the reader to draw conclusions. “Lessing is not writing real-life testimonies, but imagined, fictional stories based on a combination of all that she has learned, from Marxist socialism to Islamic mysticism, of which Sufi thought constitutes only a part” (The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 180).

Lessing’s Path In The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, Muge Galin argues: “It would be difficult to call Lessing’s novels ‘entertaining’ for they are too obsessed with didacticism to provide light-hearted escape” (174). It is to be noted that in this part, “entertaining,” suggests another meaning than “light-hearted”, it means the euphoria of knowledge or what Al Ghazali calls “the alchemy of happiness”. Lessing stores personal experiences into her texts, and thus her novels become depositories of her memories and writing becomes a compulsion: “I have to write: it’s a neurosis. It’s true. I get out of balance, you know, if I don’t write” (Qtd in Ingersoll, 240). She needs to write to empty herself of the heavy burden of memories but also to historicize what she experienced and to report what she witnessed. Remembrance becomes linked to the Sufi trilogy: “dhikra” that stands for memory, “tathkiir”

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meaning reminding, and “thekr” to reach a unique perennial truth. Galin states the importance of memory and remembrance in Sufi tradition: “in keeping with the Sufi tradition, Lessing stresses the importance of commitment to self-remembering so that one may live by the guidance of one’s mind, body and heart, and make discoveries about the self who perpetually approaches that elusive shadow of ‘the Other’ one is to know” (In The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 43-44). Lessing sheds light on the openness of the path: “One religion is not better than another: each is an expression of local needs” (Time Bites, 266). She explains that “Beyond religion, most of whose practices are the ethics of the society in which it operates codified, is a range where experience becomes more complex than the rigidities of good/bad, black/white” (Time Bites, 266). In her book Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, Muge Galin asserts that “Sufi thought has confirmed Lessing’s insights and validated what she had suspected all along: the possibility of individual and world amelioration” (63). Lessing advocates Sufism as a way of being and a path towards an eternal truth rather than a religion and mysticism; “…for Lessing, it serves as a school of thought comparable to other “isms” such as Marxism, Feminism, and Jungianism, in which she has found a resonance of her own thoughts” (The Path of Love: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 20).

MEMORY TRACES AND SCARS OF HISTORY IN DORIS LESSING’S LITERATURE

The two World Wars have left the world with huge debris and everlasting scars. Modem scientific achievements have added much fuel to the fire. It is an age of pollution and explosion. It is an age of disillusionment and frustration. It is an age of neurosis and perversion. Life is but an extension of boredom. A vicious sense of failure is lurking from above and from within. —Famila 4

Doris Lessing stated in one interview: “I was formed by three main things: Central Africa, the legacy of World War One, and by literature” (Qted in Raskin). The writer published more than forty-two books of fiction and non-fiction, including several science-fiction novels and two autobiographical volumes, all of which map out her displacement (Persia, Africa, England), and her memory of war traumas, of books read and people met. “Her books have tended to pivot around certain persistent themes: the relationship between the individual and society; the tension between domesticity and freedom, responsibility and independence; and the tug of war between human will and the imperatives of love, betrayal and ideological faith” (Kakutani). From her first publication, she engaged in a kind of alchemical writing. Being transported within the whirlpool of history and memory she started questioning the world and its many truths by recollecting traces of memories and writing palimpsests of history. She started her quest by recovering fragments of personal experience, and then enlarged the scope of her examination, re-writing historical events in an attempt to re-right them. She does not only remember and write the past, she also re-remembers and re-rights it. In her writings, Lessing tackles a host of political, social and religious topics. In doing so, she is not only attempting to understand the enigma of being in this world, but also to record facts she witnessed, and present then history from a different perspective. For Lessing, the act of writing is an act of dissolution and transfiguration, an attempt at exorcising the ghosts of the past. In the process of tracing back bitter and sweet memories, she traces her “path” and leaves prints on the history of literature. “Her works provide a living

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testimony of the horrors of that war and its aftermaths” (Majoul Aouadi, 15).

From under the Skin Lessing engaged in the process of unconsciously emptying herself in her books. She entrapped herself within the painful process of remembering and re-membering, “‘a working through’ like that which occurs in psychoanalysis” (Greene, 37). In doing so, she started by looking for the traces of her childhood memories, of spaces, places and faces. She wrote semi-autobiographical novels in addition to attempting to revive her past in two volumes of autobiography. Lessing’s life is punctuated by displacement; space as a trace and an icon of memory is an important dimension in her works. When she visited the Refugees’ Camp in Afghanistan she became nostalgic for her birth place, Persia, and reports it in her book The Wind Blows Away Our Words: “I was born in Persia and lived there until I was five. Yes, all kinds of scents and sounds came back” (49). In fact “the trace, the archephenomenon of memory” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 70) revives feelings and restores facts. Memories come back as a simulacrum of a real past, remembered in a precise moment and space. A mere encounter with a providential scent, person or object might bring back long-forgotten memories left behind by a selective memory. Lessing needed the smallest traces of her past “to fall apart in order to find self-healing” (Connelly) and definitely bury her traumas in her books. Lynda Scott maintains that the act of remembering the past is so personal in terms of perception that “an individual's perception of her or his self is forever changing and the unconscious realm is a dynamic one” (Scott). In fact, distancing oneself from the past makes it easier to cure its scars, for time heals, “time bites”. Lessing waited before writing her autobiography because she thinks: our own views of our lives change all the time, different at different ages. If I had written an account of myself aged 20 it would have been a belligerent and combative document. At 30 – confident and optimistic. At 40 – full of guilt and self-justification. At 50 – confused, self-doubting. But at 60 and after something else appeared: you begin to see your early self from a great distance. While you can put yourself back inside the 10ear-old, the 20-year-old, any time you want, you are seeing that child, that young woman, as – almost – someone else You float away from the personal. You have received that great gift of getting older – detachment, impersonality. (Time Bites, 92)

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This compulsion to explore one’s self within the lines of a book, is driven by ageing and also by the wisdom she gained through her worldly experiences. In the first volume of her autobiography Under My Skin, she enclosed tangible traces of her past; she included “dilapidated photographs” (Alfred and Emily, 275) of her family, her cat, and her house, as if she needed these items to illustrate her text and give more veracity to her story, because she feels that there are passages in her life she has been unable to remember. She relied on traces from her archive: the photos she found, the stories she heard, and sometimes even her own interpretation of memories. She claims that “what I was told and what I remember are not the same” (Under My Skin, 40), so her past needs to be revisited, re-written and rerighted. Linda Hutcheon thinks that “we only have access to the past today through its traces – its documents, the testimony of witnesses, and other archival materials” (55). Conversely, Derrida considers that “the presenceabsence of the trace… carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, the body and the soul” (Of Grammatology, 71), and Lessing confirms this saying by arguing that: Behind my wall two different kinds of memory were being played, like serial dreams. There are the general, if you like, communal, dreams, shared by many, like the house you know well, but then find it empty rooms, or whole floors, or even other houses you did not know were there, or the dream gardens beneath gardens, or the visits to landscapes never known in life. The other kind was of personal memories, personal dreams. (Under My Skin, 29)

True, tangible traces might give evidence to the past, but their interpretation is quite personal. The photographs Lessing encloses in her book might show she had the happiest childhood ever: a charming young girl surrounded by her parents, grand-parents and brother, enjoying the company of a small cat and living in a country house while going to a Catholic school. But all these images only suggest traumatic memories to her. The writer’s parents were not happy with their lives; both of them were heavily affected both physically and psychologically by war: “There were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their proper course by the war – my mother was one” (Under My Skin, 9). She hated their misfortune and blamed them for their transparent fragility; but then after a journey within her texts she regrets her thoughts arguing that: “We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into

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when needed; they are always there for love or for hate; but it occurs to me that I was not always there for my father” (A Small Personal Voice, 89). She was rejected by her mother and suffered from that for a long time: “What I remember is hard bundling hands, impatient arms and her voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me” (Under My Skin, 25). Neither did Doris Lessing, the child, like the convent school she went to, with its firm system of education and the terrifying stories of hell, punishment and curse inculcated by the nuns: “I was at the Convent for four years. Or for eternity. I used to wake up in the morning with the clang of the bell and not believe that I would live through that interminable day until the night. And, after this endless day would be another. Then another. I was in the grip of homesickness like an illness” (Under My Skin, 96). She left school early, when she was fourteen years old. That was the starting point of her literary journey: “My fourteenth year was a make or break year, a sink or swim year, a do or die year, for I was fighting for my life against my mother. That was how I saw it. That was how it was” (Under My Skin, 155). As to her house, it suggests her displacement and recalls her parents’ sad past. Every photograph, every trace recalls a trauma. She decided to gather her life into lines in order to reconcile herself with these bitter memories. “She invests herself with authority and distance through the literary positioning of herself as ‘author’. She is able to exert power and command over the text while at the same time allowing her own silent past to be re-created” (Scott). Her “authority” allowed her to turn her trauma into hallucination in Alfred and Emily, imagining what her parent’s lives would have been if only there had been no war: “I have tried to give them lives as might have been if there had been no World War One” (Alfred and Emily, vii). The novel is like a daydream of a better destiny for her whole family, an alternative transfiguration within the pages of a book. Her book Alfred and Emily confirms Derrida’s claim as to the impossibility and impassability of denying the past as an ever-present trace in the present: “If the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in the form of a modified presence, as a present past. Since past has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name ‘past’” (Of grammatology, 66). So, Lessing’s ghosts of the past do not disappear, they keep haunting her texts and reappearing in her writings like a leitmotiv. She can never forget the traces of the inherited traumas; they are forever engraved “under

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her skin”: “That war, the Great War, the war that would end all war, squatted over my childhood. The trenches were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me. And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free” (Alfred and Emily, viii). But though she tried to get full access to her past and dissolve her traumatic memories, she still feels that her quest is not over: “if you try and claim your own life by writing an autobiography, at once you have to ask, But is this the truth? There are aspects of my life I am always trying to understand better” (Under My Skin, 15). She needs to know more about herself and better understand her past; and for that, she has to enter in a trance within her texts and let her pen record what her memory dictates: “The act of self-representational writing involves delving into one's past as an individual's memory constructs it, and it can question the importance and relevance of whatever memory retrieves from one's own history” (Scott).

The Wounds and Scars of History Lessing claims: “I read history with conditional respect” (Under My Skin, 11) because she has lived long enough to have a critical eye as to what history reports and because she thinks that “>W@hat we read in the newspapers was not mirrored in the people we met or in the life we experienced” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 94), and that history needs to reflect reality instead of reporting mere pragmatic interpretations of it. Lessing is herself a trace of a present past, having witnessed innumerable historical events: “I often feel like a Dinosaur”, she says in an interview (Ruskin). Her sense of and relation to history is intense: “I was born as a result of the First World War, which shadowed my childhood…the coming of the Second World War shadowed my growing up, and my two marriages were the result of this war” (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 43). She remembers and recalls traumatic memories linked to the two wars that destroyed her parents’ dreams and lives: “There were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their proper course by the war - my mother was one” (Under My Skin, 9). The war broke her hopes of a better future for her family in particular and for the world as a whole. She thinks, “we are all of us made by war, twisted and wrapped by war, but we seem to forget it” (Under my Skin 10). Readers of history, and even historians, have selective

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memories; they remember specific historical events, catastrophes and figures that bear a distant relationship with what they read or write, whereas Lessing is a very particular reader and writer of history, for what she narrates are things she lived through, witnessed and felt. The events she reports are the product of years of suffocation within the cobweb of history. She narrates history from a different perspective with a different breath. Her “novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot” (Time Bites, 139). Her main goal of writing autobiography and semi-autobiographical novels is to reconcile her present with her past: “Both her ‘selfrepresentational’ works and her ‘autobiographical’ works (are) more therapeutic than confessional” (Scott). But her main objective behind reporting historical facts is to criticize, to moralise and to believe in a better future for the whole of humanity. It is a conscious process of moralising through analogy. Whenever she recalls the trauma of war, of racism, of political conflict, she puts her readers on trial and forces them to question history “We should be asking, perhaps, ‘why have we forgotten this terrible calamity?’ ‘What other calamities have we all chosen to forget?’ ‘What is it about certain types of disasters that numbs the human mind?’” (The Word Blows Away Our Words, 20). Fuelled with much anger against “Man-made disasters” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 19), Lessing recalls the ever-present scars of past wars and criticizes the apocalyptic tendencies of modern societies in an interview: “There was a perpetual war-fear. I was reminded of it the other day when a man, now middle-aged, said, ‘Do you realize that my entire childhood and the childhood of all our children was terror of the bomb?’ It was a very poisonous atmosphere, very paranoid. It meant that everyone's reactions were extreme. Either for or against” (Garner).

Politics and its Traces Hutcheon claims: “Narrative representation - story telling - is a historical and a political act” (48). Lessing’s novels do not only historicize, they also criticize the politics of their times since there is an “inescapable connection between the political and the personal” (Kakutani). The author was a member of the Communist Party in the UK, as she confirms it: “I was a member of the Communist Party writers group. I attended about eight or 10 meetings.” (Garner). She adhered to the Party at twenty-three, fuelled with ambitions and dreams for better living

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conditions and equal chances for all. In The Golden Notebook, Anna writes about her involvement with the British Communist Party in a red notebook and the author really did believe in the Party’s possibilities. In an interview she purports: “Capitalism was dead. It was done and finished. And the future was socialist or communist. We were going to have justice, equality, fair pay for women, cripples, blacks -- everything, in a very short time. This nonsense was believed by extremely intelligent people. That's what interests me” (Garner). But then later on Lessing discovered it was all nonsense, mere traces of a political trickery: “I call it mass psychopathology. Because what we believed was rubbish. It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on in the world” (Garner). And, deceived, she contends: “I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion” (Under My Skin, 16). Examining the traces of her political engagement, she became convinced of the fallacy of political ideologies: “All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness” (Garner). She understood that in the political arena you have to be for, because otherwise you are considered to be against, in other words you have to belong to the vicious circle and as soon as you express a disagreement you are excluded and even persecuted for your ideas. She was banned from Southern Rhodesia and South Africa for her political opinions concerning apartheid, whereas all she was doing was pointing out racial injustice. When the country became Zimbabwe in 1980, the British writer was able to return to see the traces of her past (she left behind her husband and children and her childhood memories) and she wrote African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe. She “…drew upon her childhood experiences in Zimbabwe to write about the clashes between white and black cultures and racial injustice. She criticized the white colonialists for their sterile culture and for dispossessing the native black citizens” (Mushakavanhu). In 1956, Lessing joined to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In the 1980s she supported the anti-Soviet mujahideen in Afghanistan, and narrated the struggle in the refugees’ camp in her book The Wind Blows Away Our Words. She thus first advocated Communism and engaged in several sociopolitical projects, then stopped believing in all this and abandoned her political commitment because she discovered that was all disillusion, mere

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fabricated theories to silence truth; “the atrocity stories go on and on” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 114). Lessing abandoned her eagerness to change the world, and her texts changed along with her intentions. But the traces of the moraliser did not disappear, for she thinks that “a writer’s natural talent may drive him to transform what might have been a simple morality tale into something much more powerful” (A Small Personal Voice, 7). She left behind her worldly engagements and dived into mysticism: “Operating to bring some individual nearer to self-knowledge, understanding” (Shikasta, 175).

A Trace of One’s Own Lessing’s world of words is permeated by her past life. She deliberately records what she remembers in order to recollect fragments of her old self and corrode the traumas she feels inside. She claims: “YOU CANNOT SIT DOWN to write about yourself without rhetorical questions of the most tedious kind demanding attention. Our old friend, the Truth, is first. The truth… how much of it to tell, how little? It seems it is agreed this is the first problem of the self-chronicler, and obloquy lies in wait either way” (Under My Skin, 11). Derrida considers that “natural writing is immediately united to the voice and to the breath. Its nature is not grammatological but pneumatological” (Of Grammatology, 17). This metaphor appraises different insights to the written text, which becomes the inner voice of the writer that deliberately flows from the unconscious, as natural as breathing. Lessing was adept at recalling back even the smallest details of her life; “she is able to recreate past selves and commune in an inner dialogue with earlier and necessarily fictive selves while constructing a coherent text that represents a healed and unified self at a particular instant in time” (Scott). Gayle Greene sees in her “a sage, seer, prophetess – a Cassandra” (13); she is in fact the voice of wisdom that narrates the past in order to understand the present and improve the future. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, she imagines a world behind the wall, “a green world”, an alternative one into which her protagonist and herself escape from the chaos of the real: an imagined world within an imagined story, the outcome of the traumatic memory of the author. This world behind the wall suggests the Jungian self, the self-division into inner and outer selves and the world, the finest line between dream and reality, memory and forgetting, as well as the binary opposition between the material and the spiritual worlds. Passing over the wall symbolises leaving behind her

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traumas and tracing a new trajectory of being into this world. And Sufism is the world behind the wall she penetrated. In Time Bites she argues that “Sufism is not a religion, but claims to be the truth that lives in the heart of all religions” (229). Her encounter with the Sufi philosopher and writer Idries Shah metamorphosed her writings and her way of seeing life. She explains that in this path “We are talking here not of a word or even a vocabulary but a way of looking at life, and at the human story” (Lessing, 1999). Lessing advocated Sufism after losing faith in the possibility of a better world. She was in the midst of her quest and questioning when she met Shah, who made a visible imprint on her career: Why was I looking at all? I had reached the end of some road, and knew it: specifically, I had exhausted what I have described as "the intellectual package" of our time, which consists of material, both philosophic and that assumption of our culture that creature comforts must be everyone's chief aim in life; then, belief in one of the churches of Marxism; a belief that politics or a political party will solve everything; science in the place of God. I was by no means the only one to have tired of this "package." In my case it was writing The Golden Notebook that taught me I must look again. (Lessing, 1999)

She finds in the Sufi way her own quest for truth and for rest. Her unanswered questions were solved and she started looking at the remembered past with wisdom. Reading Idries Shah (amongst other Sufi writers) taught her that: “A real teaching story, whether thousands of years old, or new, goes far beyond the parables that are still part of our culture. A parable has a simple message: this means that. But in a Sufi teaching story, there may be layers of meaning, some of them not to be verbalized” (Lessing, 1999). The ‘Way’ helped her use the traces of memories that traumatised her for so long to convey moralism and become “the writer …the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times” (Barthes, 20). Her texts embody her need for an internal monologue and for confronting the Jungian self. This extraversion liberates the self from present-past traumas; Sufism is the way that helped her follow traces of her past, and then trace her own path. She concludes, “If our real self is initially only a ‘tiny shining precious thing’, then it is capable of infinite expansion” (Lessing, 1999). The design of Lessing’s books represents traces of the past, recalled, reassessed, and reinterpreted. Exorcizing the past is a deliberate act of refusal of the present, because her palimpsestic texts show how the traumatic past repeats itself, how the past is present, confirming Freud’s

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saying that “nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost” (The Interpretation of Dreams). Derrida thinks that the “unconscious text is already a weave of pure traces and differences in which meaning and force are united” (Writing and Difference, 265). Then, for Lessing, tracing back past memories is an unconscious attempt to reunite the self and acquire the strength to go on, but also to forget and forgive the traumas she experienced. Nevertheless, her books do not intend to heal personal scars only, but also to inscribe prints and transcriptions that historicize and record the traumatic traces that here affected the whole of humanity. The notion of the trace in Lessing’s fiction suggests larger insights than the word itself. It suggests memorising, forgetting, remembering, altering, selecting and sometimes even changing a past truth. “The meaning is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions” (Barthes, 141). She thus manipulates traces of her past and provides a palimpsest that might give justice and correspond to her desired and dreamt of history/past. “Walking in the shade” and shadows of her past traumas and exorcised forgotten souvenirs in texts that would leave their traces on the history of literature and belong to the literary (post) modern canon. “Throughout her books, Doris Lessing engaged in a process of unconsciously emptying herself in books. She entrapped herself within in the painful process of remembering and re-membering, ‘a working through’ like that which occurs in psychoanalysis” (Majoul Aouadi, 11). Thus, her poetics act as a receptacle and depository of the war’s heritage. Her texts recall “…whispers from the past, the immense past, voices that repeat what has been said by other voices, we have to interpret by what we know, what we have experienced – and our questions disappear as if they were stones into a very deep well” (The Cleft, 171). The ever-present traces could never provide a complete truth, because “the past still resists complete human understanding” (Hutcheon, 65), there are only traces; and “the universe is infinitely fertile in suggestions” (Barthes, 131).

INTERSECTIONS: LESSING AND OTHER WRITERS

There is this great mass of new information from universities, research institutions and from gifted amateurs, but our ways of governing ourselves haven’t changed. —Lessing, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 5

POETICS AND POLITICS: TRACES OF TRAUMATIC MEMORIES IN THE WRITINGS OF DORIS LESSING AND AHLEM MUSTAGHANMI

Ahlem Mostaghanmi is an Algerian sun which enlightens Arabic literature. She has carried Algerian literature to a level which evolves into the history of the Algerian fight. —Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella Doris Lessing is a chronicler of our time...she has come to be viewed by many as a sage, seer, prophetess- a Cassandra, her fiction is visionary and revisionary in getting us to see that our reality is not the whole of reality and to imagine an elsewhere. —Greene, 20

Both the British writer Doris Lessing and the Algerian novelist Ahlem Mustaghanmi focus in their works on writing about personal/individual wounds, remembering collective history and attempting to heal the vestiges of intergenerational trauma. Their books highlight the traces of an ever-present absence: the ghost of past wars. Both writers bear the marks and the wreckages of politics both in their poetics and under their skin/flesh. Lessing and Mustaghanmi engage in the process of producing political semi/autobiographical works. They both use the therapeutics of writing to dissolve and heal the wounds of time. They try to bury their memories between the pages of books, but in vain: Mustaghanmi embarks in the “chaos of the senses” and keeps her “memories in the flesh”, and Lessing continues “walking in the shades” of her past and having the traces of it “under her skin”.

The Inheritance of Loss: Cross-Cultural Perspectives Freud claims that, “nothing which we have once psychically possessed is ever entirely lost” (The Interpretation of Dreams); it always comes back to the surface. For the two women writers, Ahlem Mustaghanmi and Doris

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Lessing, their past traumas continue to haunt their books and the ghosts of their pasts are exorcised and subsumed in their writings. Their texts are imbued with the painful heritage of war trauma; and though they belong to two different worlds, they embody a cross-cultural empathy and share the pathogenesis of trauma. Both writers had their lives swallowed up by war and shaped by the politics of their time. Mustaghanmi emphasises in her novel her bond and bondage with the politics of her nation: “The revolution was entering its second year and I was in my third month as an orphan. I cannot remember now exactly when the country took over the character of motherhood and gave me an unexpected and strange affection and a compulsive sense of belonging” (Memory in Flesh, 14); she was dislocated by war and spent most of her childhood in Tunisia, away from her motherland Algeria. Her book Dhakirat al-jasad “has the merit of presenting a rare glimpse of the feelings of the children of the martyrs” (Bamia). And Lessing mournfully narrates the wars' effects on her childhood: “I was born as a result of the First World War, which shadowed my childhood” (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside 43). “Narrative representation -story telling- is a historical and a political act” (Hutcheon, 48) for both novelists. They attempt to deconstruct war discourses, analyse the politics of their time and historicise their traumatic experience in order to transmit their histories to future generations and thus transmute their destiny. Of Mostaghanmi's Memory in the Flesh, “we can deduce that this novel also bears a direct political message and that her text is recreating and critiquing a nation and homeland” (Stampfl, 220). She remembers her longed-for Algeria, its bridges, its scents, and its people “at every stone with love. I greet every bridge, one by one. I ask news of families, of the saints, and of their men folk, one by one” (Memory in Flesh, 237-238), and at the same time she points the finger of blame at its corrupt politicians: “I defy them all, the potbellies, the bearded ones, the bald ones, those with countless stars on their shoulders, those to whom I have given much and for return they have raped you before my very eyes” (Memory in Flesh, 237). Her post-colonial trauma novel “resists fact to persist as heritage” (Lowenthal) for all Algerians. She dissolves her painful memories in her books and transforms pain into art. Lessing not only remembers and recalls war traumas, she also bears the anguish of her whole family under her skin, she painfully describes the wreckages of the inherited loss: “When I look back at the Second World War, I see something I didn’t more than dimly suspect at the time. It was that everyone was crazy. Even people not in the immediate arena of war. I

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am not talking of the aptitudes for killing, for destruction, which soldiers are taught as part of their training, but a kind of atmosphere, the invisible poison, which spreads everywhere” (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 61). War becomes an inherent part of her existence; she carries the heavy burden of its trauma and walks in the shades of these bitter memories. “Lessing lived with the deeply-ingrained scars of war; she exorcises her demons and turns them into history” (Majoul Aouadi, 15). Both writers attempt to live with the painful ever-present presence of war scars. Their traumatic experiences establish an analogy between an Eastern and a Western text and gather testimonies about war from two similar though different perspectives. They constitute a collective memory. This “rhetoric of collective memory works by symbolically building bridges between today and yesterday” (Gronbeck).

Ahlem Mustaghanmi: Nation and Narration Poetry and country are primary cause. —Memory in the Flesh, 84

Memory in the Flesh (Thakiratu-l-jasad in Arabic) is the first novel written in Arabic by a woman. It is “constructed like a long monologue, intermittently interrupted by flashbacks recalling a platonic love relationship that provides an opportunity to assess contemporary Algeria” (Bamia). Ahlem Mostaghanmi uses a man's voice in her novel to narrate her country's story; she thus “places herself in a position of equality with men, adopting their language, presenting their arguments, and uttering their sexist opinions. Using a male narrator gives her both strength and freedo” (Bamia). Through her protagonist Khaled (or ‘the eternal’ in Arabic) she recounts the Algerians' struggle for freedom and re-assimilates her national identity. Khaled lost his arm in the Algerian war and was advised to write by his Eastern European doctor. He moved from a hospital in Tunisia to Paris, where he spent his time painting Constantine's bridges. He shares his sadness with his Palestinian friend Ziad. Both characters embody the turbulent political circumstances of the 1960s; through them Mostaghanmi remembers dismembered nations and reassemble her national identity and belonging. The Algerian Khaled continues to live in pain minus an amputated arm, just like his country, whose freedom is only half complete; the Palestinian Ziad dies, just like all hopes for freedom for Palestine. In his painful dislocation journey, he remembers Hayet, whose face brings better and bitter memories into his mind; his homeland Ksontina,

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his mother and his love. He first met her in Tunis where she was born and was given the name of Hayet (‘Life’ in Arabic). He later met her in Paris at the exhibition of his paintings. She writes books that nobody reads and has got engaged to an Algerian colonel, Si Cherif. Khaled's agony becomes deeper when his brother Hassen is killed by his countrymen, just like the Palestinian Zartyr ziad; neither was a ‘citizen’, both were ‘martyrs’ of a senseless nationhood, Ahlam Mostaghanmi writes. “Si Tahir died at the hands of the French. Ziad died at the hands of the Israelis. Here is Hassan who dies at the hands of Algerians” (Memory in Flesh, 257). This describes the banality and the atrocity of the act. Khaled comes back home to Constantina to bury his brother and attempts to find refuge and heal his sorrow through writing. The eternally wounded Khaled empties his pain in his thousand and one paintings that stand for the Algeria's one thousand and one martyrs; his canvases are a metaphor for the flowing blood of the war victims, and his drawings historicise the sorrow of the lost generation. His art is the receptacle and the depository of his trauma; as Lessing says: “Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares” (The Small Personal Voice, 11). Khaled's art transfigures his love for Ahlem (‘Dreams’ in Arabic) and fantasizes his longing for his motherland: “I felt as if I was painting you, just you. It was you with all your contradictions. I was painting another copy of you, more mature, yet more complex . . . I was painting with an amazing zest and perhaps with a lust. I wonder if it was then that lust for you slipped into my brush without my knowing it?” (Memory in the Flesh, 89) “Khalid is an artist who uses his paintings as mediations between exile and home, primarily intent on recreating Constantine, his native city, in Paris, his adopted city” (Stamfl, 209). Mustaghanmi also restates through her protagonist the suffering of the imprisoned revolutionaries whose lives were destroyed by colonialism; she/Khaled remembers: Al-Kudya prison was part of my first memories that time cannot delete...I entered them again as I had one day in 1945 with fifty- thousand other prisoners who were arrested after he demonstration of the Eighth of May…Should I forget those who entered the prison and never emerged: their bodies remaining in the torture chambers? ...Many years passed before I entered another prison, but that one was under Algerian control. The prison had no address, and Mother was unable to come and visit me, as she had in the past, weeping and begging help from every prison guard. That was al-Kudya prison. (Memory in Flesh 208-211)

Recalling the trauma of prison and imprisonment emphasises the agony of the war survivors and their disillusionment with post-war

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politics. They sacrificed their past for the sake of a better future, and with time realise their fight was mere illusion and their dreams mere disillusion, and here “the author tackles the extremely delicate issue of the forgotten freedom fighters and the exploited martyrs” (Bamia). Khaled mourns his country and remembers the corrupt political forces that tarnished its beauty and impeded its progress and freedom: “They listened but didn't hear, knew but seemed to forget. O Casantina! You had a Salah Bey, a tyrant ruler, for each of your eras with a different mask each time. But not every ruler is Salah (saintly) and not every saint (Salah) is a Bey, there was my home before me. Was that really my home?” (Memory in the Flesh 224) Algeria's history repeats itself, and the nation is fated to be given different tyrannical rulers who share similar corrupt political ideologies; even its Saints could not protect it from the evil of its leaders, or impede the oblivion of its people. Khaled does not recognize his motherland any more; the country had not really changed, he had rather become an outsider looking in. After having lived in Paris away from home, and having long spent time dreaming of his nation, he comes home filled with nostalgia but also contaminated by the host country. In this context, Homi Bhabha explains the dilemma of dislocation arguing that “the problem of outside/inside must always itself be a process of hybridity, incorporating new 'people' in relation to the body politic, generating other sites of meaning” (1990). Khaled is confused over the drastic situation in his country; he “falls victim to despair and despondency” (Bamia). He cries and implores Algeria's forgotten Saints; he attempts to conjure their mythical force to transmute and transfigure and cure this curse hanging over Algeria: What a sad night…O Casantina! Wretched are its saints; they alone sat at my table tonight for no clear cause, and booked a front seat to my other memory. And here I am, hailing them the whole night through, one after another. Ya Sidi Rached, ya Sidi Mabrouk, ya Sidi Muhammad Ghrab, ya Sidi Slimane, ya Sidi Bou Annaba, ya Sidi Abd El Moumen ya Sidi Msid, ya Sidi Bou Maiza, ya Sidi Jliss, I salute you you who rule the streets of this town, its pathways and its memory. Stand by me for I am weary, don't leave me. Who among you all is my father, Abi Aa Assawi, he who wounds and he who heals. Teach me how to suffer without bleeding dead "Ana Sidi Issawi yijrah wi dawi"; who is to heal my wounds. (Memory in the Flesh, 361)

Khaled's words sound like a helpless prayer; he has lost his faith in political leaders and thus recalls and calls on his country's dead Saints and begs them to bless Algeria with their blessedness and to fill its streets with their benedictions. Orphaned by colonial and postcolonial corruption, he

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attempts to find a father among the holy and virtuous people of the past. He then earnestly asks one of them to to stand by him and help him forget his painful memories. Like all Algerians who are aware of the social, cultural and political wreckages of war and colonialism, Khaled turns to his country's past Saints and attempts to find refuge in mythical and religious ideologies which have “acquired political significance” (Bamia) in Mustaghanmi's text. Only a supra-natural force is able to transmute the chaotic situation of the country and to erase the vestiges of the painful heritage of war, colonialism and post colonialism. “It seems only natural in these conditions of demoralization and disappointment that people would seek moral refuge and consolation in religion” (Bamia). When all alternatives are exhausted, “>N@ations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye” (Bhabha, 1990). Ahlem Mostaghanmi refuses to forget the legacy of the Algerian war; she nostalgically remembers her nation and painfully exorcises the memories she bears under her flesh, intentionally historicising them in her narration.

Doris Lessing: Homeless Memory There are more people in the world who have had to leave, been driven from, a country, the valley, the city they call home, because of war, plague, earthquake, famine. At last they return, but these places may not be there, they have been destroyed or eroded. —African Laughter 13

Lessing thinks that "we are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it” (Under My Skin, 10). She was born during World War I as she states it: “I was born on the 22nd October 1919...when half of Europe was a graveyard, and people were dying in millions all over the world” (Under My Skin, 8). Her parents met during the First World War: Alfred, a hospitalised soldier and Emily, a nurse who helped to amputate his leg; in Under My Skin, the first volume of her autobiography, she narrates how the war swallowed their lives: “There were also the wounded from the war, of whom my father was one, and the people whose potential was never used because their lives were wrenched out of their proper course by the war - my mother was one” (9). They spent their lives remembering their bitter wartime souvenirs and talking about the horrors of war. And Lessing inherited their war stories and kept them alive under her skin. In her novel The Golden Notebook, she attempts to exorcise her thoughts, her fears, and her feelings through her protagonist Anna Wulf.

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This character embodies the writer's history and stories. Lessing narrates her life through Anna: In a black notebook, Anna records her memories of Central Africa, in a red one, her involvement with the British Communist party, and in a blue one she seeks to understand her dreams and ambitions, the subconscious terrain of psychoanalytic interest. The golden notebook of the title hopes to bring these divergent documents together, seeking to understand how women resolve the tensions between their personal experiences and their political interests. (Kellum)

She tries to understand her past through her texts, and makes her characters embody her experiences in to re-create her traumas and re-live her memories. Lynda Scott claims in her article “Writing the Self: Selected Works of Doris Lessing” that: I suggest that Lessing's self-representational writing is a form of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy which is therapeutic and may involve wish-fulfilment or dreaming because Lessing uses the position of author to act as psychoanalyst and character simultaneously. A dialogic process thus develops both between Lessing as author and Lessing as character, and between Lessing's fictive selves, which exist in a variety of selfrepresentational texts. (Scott, 1996)

Lessing is traumatised by war; she longs for her past and feels nostalgic for the places she was compelled to leave: Persia and South Rhodesia. She bears the bitters vestiges of this dislocation in her texts, and she regretfully asserts “there are more and more people in the world who have had to leave, been driven from, a country, the valley, the city the I call home, because of war” (African Laughter, 13). In Under My Skin, she remembers when she had to move with her parents from her birthplace Persia (now Iran) to England her supposed to be homeland: “The smells of England, the smells of wet, dirty, dark and graceless England, the smells of the English. I was sickening for Persia and the clean dry sunlight, but did not know what was wrong with me” (44-45). As opposed to this bleak description of England, Lessing longs for Africa's scents and scenes: In Africa, when the sun goes down, the stars spring up, all of them in their expected places, glittering and moving. In the rainy season, the sky flashed and thundred. In the dry season, the great dark hollow of night was lit by veld fires: the mountains burned through September and October in chains of red fire. Every night my father took out his chair to watch the sky and the mountains, smoking, silent, a thin shabby fly-away figure under the stars. 'Makes you think - there are so many worlds up there, wouldn't

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Though these memories are mixed with her father's agony, Lessing longs for those places and continues to walk in the shades of her nostalgic memories.

(Dis) Embodied Pasts: Melancholy Minds and Painful Bodies Lessing's books and Mustaghanmi's novels represent lively testimonies to the repercussions of war on their psyches and bodies. Their texts are “flesh made word” (Norman, 156) and the although scars of war are visibly disembodied, their psychological impacts are embodied in their minds and visible in both writers' writings, and the “text becomes an expression of desire, and indeed an extension of the body” (Stampft, 213). Both novelists highlight the depth of pain engraved in the flesh and under the skin. They put words on paper to narrate wounds in their minds and bodies. Both Mostaghanmi’s Khaled with his amputated arm and Lessing’s father with his cut off leg bear the prints of war on their bodies, and thus for both the “connection to the homeland takes on physical dimensions” (Stampfl, 210). Michel Foucault introduces “the body [as] the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 148). Foucault's statement suggests that the extended metaphor of the body in both writers' texts stand for the inherited painful memories of the novelists, forever inscribed in their memories. They attempt to dissolve them in their writings but instead their ghosts are exorcised and historicised. For Mostaghanmi’s protagonist Khaled, “the body has become the palimpsest of the nation” (stampft, 223). And for Lessing, the bodies became a depository for her bitter and better memories, confirming what Judith Butler argues in Subjects of Desire: “We are recognized not merely for the form we inhabit in the world (our various embodiments), but for the forms we create of the world (our works); our bodies are but transient expressions of freedom, while our works shield our freedom in their very structure” (57-58).

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Memory, Mourning and Narration …Whispers from the past, the immense past, voices that repeat what has been said by other voices, we have to interpret by what we know, what we have experienced – and our questions disappear as if they were stones into a very deep well. —The Cleft, 171

Lessing and Mustaghanmi exorcise their individual traumas and narrate a collective history. Through their texts they remember and forget; and their rhetorics of the past prove to be narratives of self-exile. They are both imprisoned within their sadness attempting to free themselves from the heavy burden of the war’s legacy. Their texts are productive and “fecund” in suggestions and implications. Roland Barthes claims: “The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro” (The Pleasure of the Text 32). Both writers delve deep into their past memories and transmogrify the ghosts of their traumas into art. They divulge the ideologies of their times and represent history as they experienced it. In this context Doris Lessing asserts that “novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot” (Time Bites, 139). Throughout their writing journeys, Ahlem Mustaghanmi remembers her longed-for Algeria and mourns its martyrs, and Lessing recalls her childhood memories and historicises the trauma of the post-war generations. In Memory in The Flesh, the protagonist Khaled amalgamates his beloved Hayet with Algeria and resurrects her out of his memory for a specific purpose: “Let me admit to you at this moment I hate you and that I had to write this book to kill you” (28). He attempts to dissolve his sadness in writing, to disembody it from his memories. But in vain, the pain is deeply inscribed on his body: “Now you walk on my body with your feet, and your khalkhal pounds inside my chest, it traverses me like bells awakening memory. Stop, slow down…” (Memory in The Flesh, 361). Hayet is forever within his memories, and attempting to bury her on the pages of a book revives her memory and eternalises her presence in his life. Hayet is Algeria and Algeria is Hayet; both represent his ever-present past, both are inscribed on his body and in his text; there is no escape from them, they are part of his identity. Lessing historicised her lifetime experiences in her two volumes of autobiography, her anthology as well as in her novels. Scott states: “Both her ‘self-representational’ works and her ‘autobiographical’ works I

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consider to be therefore, more therapeutic than confessional” and argues that “>t@he process of self-representational writing enables Lessing to sustain a dialogue with herself and her past in an attempt to heal inner divisions and to create a unified self” (1996). In the first volume of her autobiography Under My Skin, she analysed and classified her memories: Behind my wall two different kinds of memory were being played, like serial dreams. There are the general, if you like, communal, dreams, shared by many, like the house you know well, but then find it empty rooms, or whole floors, or even other houses you did not know were there, or the dream gardens beneath gardens, or the visits to landscapes never known in life. The other kind was of personal memories, personal dreams. (29)

The novelist makes an analogy between collective and individual memories; she sheds light on the broad scope of memory perception and insists on the very personal process of recalling the past and narrating it. Though each writer belongs to her own historical context, both of them remember their fathers whose lives were destroyed by war. Zakirat Al Jasad is a stream-of-consciousness novel dedicated to Mosteghanmi's father and Lessing wrote an article in her book A Small Personal Voice entitled “My Father” (89). Both novelists' lives and texts are haunted by their fathers' traumas. Mosteghanmi is very proud of her father, though he died in the war; he died a hero, a martyr, who sacrificed his life for his homeland. Furthermore, the image of the father is frequently glorified in Arab society and is often associated with the protector While Mosteghanmi's father died honourably during his fight, Lessing’s could not free himself from his war memories, and became “misanthropic” (A Small Personal Voice, 97) and “was never able to reconcile his belief in his country with his anger at the cynicism of its leaders. And the anger, the sense of betrayal, strengthened, as he grew old and ill” (A Small Personal Voice, 93); then he died of sorrow and agony. Both writers were orphaned by war, and both are still unable to free themselves from the painful memories of their past; their texts have become like sanctuaries of trauma. They both used the therapeutics of writing to dissolve and heal the wounds of time. Mustaghanmi explains the purpose of writing: “We write in order to kill the people whose presence has become a burden on us, we write to eliminate them” (qted in Bamia, 123), and Lessing states: “And here I still am, trying to get out from under that monstrous legacy, trying to get free” (Alfred and Emily, viii).

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Feminine Voices of History and Truth: The Politics of Writing Beyond the Boundaries and the Art of Offending Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians' version of truth. —Rushdie, 14

Both novelists direct harsh criticism to socio-political corruption. Mustaghanmi is concerned about the erroneous political agenda of postcolonial Algeria: “Change began with factories, agricultural villages and huge buildings and establishments, while the human being was left till last...How can a desperate person, buried in some insignificant problems of daily life, with an old fashioned mentality . . . build a country, or undertake an industrial or agrarian revolution, or any kind of revolution?” (Memory in the Flesh, 148) She contends that her country is the victim of the wrong decisions of its leaders and the oblivion and frailty of its citizens. She “describes the people's endless struggle to obtain the basic necessities for survival, instead of channeling their energies in rebuilding the country. While engrossed in such pursuits, people's attention was diverted away from vital political and national issues” (Bamia). “Mustaghanmi's novel is among the strongest works forcing Algerians to confront themselves, in an effort to assess their failures, their mistakes, and their egotistic pursuit of individual aggrandizement and material comfort” (Bamia). Lessing is more concerned about the degeneration of all humanity. Her criticism is broader in scope; she blames all the destructive forces of evil: These were peoples who had no interest in the results of their actions. They killed off the animals. They poisoned the fish in the sea. They cut down forests, so that country after country, once forested, became desert or arid. They spoiled everything they touched. There was probably something wrong with their brains. There are many historians who believe that these ancients richly deserved the punishment of the Ice. (Qted in Kelloum)

Lessing’s writings embody her anger at all the wrong decisions taken against the welfare of societies. She rejects colonial discourses and shows the falsehood of political ideologies. She uses fiction to counterattack the forces of evil because she thinks “>T@here is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth” (Under My Skin, 314). The Indian writer Salman Rushdie claims: “Art is an event in history, subject to the historical process. But it is also about that process, and must

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constantly strive to find new forms to mirror an endlessly renewed world” (418). Thus the role of the writer is more than merely historicising events, it is also providing his/her own perception of these to change the world into a better one for the future generations. “We have to accept that we may offend someone. Writing is dangerous. There are risks” (Norman, 65). The danger of writing is that it imposes writers' views on readers who may not want to see their vices exposed. Both Mustaghanmi and Lessing were banned from several countries due to their texts. Mostaghanmi ventured to write in Arabic, the sacred language of the Koran and Saints in Memory in the Flesh; she also dared to direct harsh criticism at the politics and politicians of her country. She also warned against the threat of writing: For eternity we have been writing knowing full well that in the final analysis every book awaits a checkpoint searching our thoughts, interpreting our dreams, lying in wait for us between sentences, explaining our silences and the gaps between our words. What is new is that we used to write for an anonymous reader whereas now we write for an anonymous killer who condemns us according to his mood...Whereas we used to dream of living one day with what we write, we now dream of not dying one day because of what we write. (“Writing Against Time and History”, 87-88)

Lessing too asserts: “I was a Prohibited Immigrant” (African Laughter, 11). She was banned from South Rhodesia because she spoke up against apartheid. She held an anti-racist ideology and was aware that her ideas could not triumph at that time, and that it was impossible to change people's minds and wipe out inherited prejudices. Even her own mother could not grasp her views: “She didn't like what I wrote. She saw The Grass is Singing as a very seditious book. All the whites hated it. She hated it. I don't criticise her for this. It was hard for her to have a daughter like me. She was a good, conventional, British Empire-loving woman” (qted in Ross). Both writers narrate their (dis)embodied pasts. Their texts are imbued with bitter memories, filled with the traces of the traumatic memories they were unable to bury. Mostaghanmi claims: “Before, I thought that we could write about life only when we were healed from its wounds; when we were able to touch the old sores with a pen and not revive the pain; when we could look back free from nostalgia, madness, and grudge. But is this really possible? We are never completely cured from our memory” (Memory in the Flesh, 1).

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The ghosts of the past continue to haunt their books and lives, and endlessly revive and regenerate the shadows of the suffering they bear under their skin. “Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely rational and conscious one” (Rushdie, 408).

TERRORISM IN DORIS LESSING’S THE WIND BLOWS AWAY OUR WORDS AND ATIQ RAHIMI’S EARTH AND ASHES: PENETRATING GEOGRAPHIES OF EXCLUSION

In times of war, as everyone knows who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable…in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. —Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 9 This complex of attitudes is fascinating the psychologist, and will fascinate the historians even more. —The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 166

Doris Lessing was born in Persia and grew up in Africa; she is interested in world literature. She ventured into different literary genres, even into journalism. In 1986 she went to Pakistan to meet the Afghans at the refugee camp: “I have been associated with the Afghan struggle for some years, through the Afghan relief” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 34-35). Atiq Rahimi is from Afghanistan; he witnessed the war (from 1979 to 1984) and was one of the refugees in Pakistan. He studied in France and lives there. Both writers focus on the fate of a nation, describing the agony of its people; they attempt to understand the devastating war. In Afghanistan two different experiences – that of an outsider and that of an insider - trying to penetrate geographies of exclusion.

Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes Earth and Ashes narrates the history of Afghanistan at a time of war. Atiq Rahimi lost his father in the war and thus experienced dislocation and loss. This is a cathartic book, in which the writer empties his bitter memories and tried to understand the causes of that war, to remember those spaces and to reconstruct his identity. He dedicated his book to his

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father: “à mon père, aux autres pères, la guerre a volé leurs larmes” (“To my father, to other fathers, war stole their tears”). Atiq Rahimi is devastated by the horrors of that war that reduced his world to ashes; he tries to understand what he went through by creating characters that confuses readers about whether they are imaginary or real. The few narrated conversations entail the agony of a whole nation: “>o@n dit que la semaine dernière les Russes ont anéanti le village entire, est-ce vrai?” (“It is said that last week the Russians destroyed the entire village, is that true?” 33), “Oui, mon frère, j’y étais. J’ai tout vu. J’ai vu ma propre mort” (“Yes, my brother, I was there. I have seen everything. I saw my own death”, 33). And the old man incarnates the silent pain of his people: “Tu es incapable de décrier ton chagrin: il n’a pas encore pris forme” (“You are unable to decry your grief: it has not yet taken shape”, 38). Rahimi describes the horrors of war and terrorism as the outcome of fallacious political ideologies: “>L@’époque est à nouveau aux serpents de Zohak, des serpents qui se nourissent du cerveau de notre jeunesse” (“the time is again to Zohak snakes, snakes that feed the brain of our youth”, 47). He also explains, “>L@a loi de la guerre c’est la loi du sacrifice. Dans le sacrifice, ou bien le sang est sur ta gorge, ou bien il est sur tes mains” (“The law of war is the law of sacrifice. In sacrifice, or blood is on your throat, or it is on your hands”, 49). At the end of the book, the old man, who has spent days reaching his son Mourad to tell him about the terror he has gone through, discovers that his son does not even care about burying his mother, his wife and his brother; he thus loses faith and dives into his sorrow: “>T@a tristesse a maintenant pris forme, elle s’est transformée en bombe, elle va exploser, elle va te faire exploser” (“Your sadness has now taken shape, it has turned into a bomb, it will explode, it will make you explode”, 85). And the story ends in despair and leaves no hope either to the protagonist or to the reader. Indeed, the material, social and psychological wreckages of war can never be repaired. When he finally meets his son Mourad, Dastaguir his loses faith; he loses any hope in Afghanistan’s future generation.

Doris Lessing’s The Wind Blows Away Our Words Lessing also witnessed wars, and had all her life imprinted by their ever-present wreckages. She confesses, “My parents’ lives and the lives of millions of people were ruined by the First World War. But the human imagination rejects the implications of our situation. War scars humanity in ways we refuse to recognize” (A Small Personal Voice, 80). Due to that

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heavy heritage, Lessing wanted to scrutinize and question history. She went to the Afghan refugee camp to meet what history came to call “terrorists”, or “Mujahidin” as they call themselves. She went there because, as she puts it, “these refugees are never mentioned” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 169). She painfully asserts: “>I@t was horrible, moving around among these people, with nothing to give them, except the promise to publicise their situation” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 114). An Afghan woman said: “you people are hypocrites, your words are beautiful but your actions are ugly” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 137). And one of the Mujahidin argues, “We cry to you for help, but the wind blows away our words” (70). During her journey into the refugee camp she met the mujahidin who began their story: “and then the Russians bombed us and destroyed our food and we came across the mountains” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 109); as they talked also “about the killing of the Afghan intellectuals by the Russians” (136) and Lessing asserts: “>T@he atrocity stories go on and on” (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 114). The Afghans helplessly blame the west: “>I@f people in the west knew how we in Afghanistan are suffering” but Lessing silently asserts in her book: “>N@ot all the diagnoses of western motives are so innocent” (72); “what we read in the newspapers was not mirrored in the people we met or in the life we experienced” (94). She describes the men: These fierce men may seem to have come out of another century… they have no idea how to present themselves sympathetically to the westerner, going into kinds of heroic postures, talking about martyrdom, dying for their faith, Paradise with maidens and pretty boys and wine…when photographed they adopt warrior-like postures. They do this because they think this is what will impress…talking ordinarily they do not use this kind of bravado. They are sensible, non-fanatical people; or at least the ones I met were. (The Wind Blows Away Our Words, 42)

Lessing thinks they were normal people turned mad, brainwashed by the surrounding horrors, one of them “a mujahid with scars from many battles and fingers blown off by a ‘toy’ bomb” (72). She purports, “the Afghans are not a fanatical people by nature, though when you hear them talk about jihad, you may think they are. It is this war that has intensified what was only an aspect of their character” (135).

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Receptacles and depositories Lessing’s The Wind Blows Away our Words and Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes are emotional wastelands, receptacles and depositories of personal wounds and global traumas. These books express a deep anger at human degeneration and the “descent into barbarism” (Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, 3). They penetrate dangerous spaces and excavate traumatic identities. They portray terror and question terrorism. Lessing says, “>W@hen a war starts, nations go mad – and have to go mad, in order to survive” (Prisons, 61). She thinks, “We are living in a lunatic asylum” (Prisons, 63) and blames the ignoring of and inaction towards the witnessed horror; she criticises the fact that “we consider some forms of murder worse than others” (Prisons, 170) Atiq Rahimi helplessly states in his novel Syngué Sabour: Le soleil se couche. Les armes se réveillent. Ce soir encore on détruit. Ce soir encore on tue. Le matin. Il pleut. Il pleut sur la ville et ses ruines….. Il pleut sur les corps et leurs plaies. (The sun sets. Weapons awake . Tonight we still destroy. Tonight we still kill. The morning. It is raining. It rains on the city and its ruins ... It rains on the bodies and their wounds, 35)

Lessing regretfully asks in The Wind Blows Away our Words: “>S@uppose people had been prepared to listen then…to the few voices who were shouting warnings, - would later disasters have been prevented?” (71) Let us spare thought for all the refugees all over the world.

INTERPRETING OTHERNESS AND VOICING THE TERRORS OF POSTMODERNITY IN DORIS LESSING’S THE FIFTH CHILD AND SALMAN RUSHDIE’S SHAME

What is a Saint? A Saint is a person who suffers in our stead. —Shame, 141 Ben makes you think – all those different people who lived on the earth once – they must be in us somewhere. —The Fifth Child, 137

In the gothic novels Shame, The Fifth Child and its sequel Ben in the World, Salman Rushdie and Doris Lessing invent monstrous creatures who are rejected by society because they do not fit its standards and norms; Sofia Zinobia and Ben Lovatt become the reincarnation of society’s sins. The novelists tackle through these works a postmodern dystopian reality; they aim at unveiling truths and transfiguring history. They also implicitly alert their readers about human degeneration and warn about an apocalyptic futurity. Their texts are imbued with didactic messages induced into their narratives; both writers imagine dystopian universes that compel their readers to think about being and time. These monsters represent the incarnation of postmodern shame and embody the age of chaos.

Salman Rushdie’s Shame Rushdie wrote the story of “>t@he beast inside the beauty. Opposing elements of a fairy-tale combined in a single character” (Shame, 139). He created in his novel Shame a carnivalesque world in order to criticize the political system of the forces that dominate not only Pakistan but also the whole Third World. Inside his narration, he claims his text to be “an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge” (Shame, 173). He thus emphasizes the urgent need for transcendence and transgression to change

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these chaotic and hegemonic societies, which make “women feel like to cry and die” and make men “go wild” (Shame, 39). He historicises - through his female characters - the scars lying under the skin of every subjected and silenced woman incarcerated within the cobweb of every patriarchal society, “a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety” (Shame, 173). In Shame, the female protagonists suffer from erasure and psychological violence; they are entrapped within their “shameful” self-exile, submitting to pain and oblivion. Through his main character, “>t@he heroine of our story, the wrong miracle, Sufia Zinobia” (Shame, 89), Rushdie paves the way for an alternative to break the chains of oppression: he proclaims violence as the unique means of purgation. Shame opens with the patriarchal force of Shakil, who imprisons his three daughters Chhunni, Munni and Bunny, three “grotesque figures”. They were unable to free themselves from the chains of their father, till death tears them apart. Shakil dies leaving them ruined; his and their misfortunes also stand for and refer to Pakistan’s bankruptcy. Freed from his presence in their claustrophobic world, the three women live a mundane life. They then share a triune maternity and give birth to Omar Khayam, one more grotesque character. A family tree is drawn on the first page of the novel in order to make family bonds clear; this tree might also recall previous vanishing historical monarchies. Rushdie tries to situate the story in history; he sarcastically claims, “All this happened in the fourteenth century. I’m using the Hegiran calendar, naturally: don’t imagine that stories of this type always take place long long ago. Time cannot be homogenized as easily as milk, and in those parts, until quite recently, the thirteenth-hundreds were still in full swing” (Shame, 13). The novel opens with a mysterious and intriguing beginning. Rushdie leaves it to his readers’ perception and interpretation: “Messieurs, mesdames faites vos jeux” (Shame, 240).

Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child The Fifth Child is a provocative novel; it questions conventions and social constructs. Harriet and David Lovett fall in love, marry and live happily. They try to realize their utopian dreams of living in a big house and having a big happy family, it “was happiness, in the old style” (The Fifth Child, 28). They had four cute children, two boys and two girls. Their utopia collapses when Harriet gets pregnant with her fifth child for “this new foetus was poisoning her” (41). Ben is an abnormal child; he

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behaves savagely and becomes a threat to the whole family. Though Harriet is driven by her maternal feelings and refuses to imprison him in a specialized institution, David attempts to explain to her their child’s incompatibility with their world: “He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are” (The Fifth Child, 79). Ben turns into a monster and leaves his family in a search for acceptance elsewhere in the world: “I don’t have any people. I’m not like my family – at home. They are all different from me. I’ve never seen anyone like me” (Ben in the World, 126). At the surface level, the narrative bears realistic themes of families collapsing with the birth of a disabled, unusual, or different child. At the same time, it sheds light on the difficulty of being odd in this world, or, and mostly on normalization and its devastating effects. In its equivocations, it explodes our deeply held conceptions and deeply seated fragile balances.

Monsters and Monstrosity: Interpreting Otherness Lessing asserts: “Well I never saw Ben as evil, other people said he was an evil force. I thought he was simply a creature in the wrong place” (Barnes and Noble). She thinks that Ben is rather “like a fable or a legend” (Barnes and Noble); he represents an outsider, an odd creature that does not fit into society's norms, “>…@ a creature who was obviously a kind of scientific enigma” (Ben in the World, 121-122), and is therefore excluded from it: “We aren’t very good at dealing with outsiders. We can't tolerate much difference” (Barnes and Noble). The narrative points the finger of blame at the Lovatts, who were unable to deal with a monstrous child; it criticizes society for its rigid conventions and norms, and unveils a human facet often obscured by false ideologies. Ben Lovatt is a rejected violent monster. When still a foetus, “he was poisoning” (The Fifth Child, 41) his mother’s body. When he was born, “He was not a pretty baby. He did not look like a baby at all” (The Fifth Child, 60). When he grows up, “he could silence a room full of people just by being there, or disperse them: they went off making excuses” (The Fifth Child, 75). His mother Harriet wants to consider him as a normal child, she insists “But he’s normal…the doctor says he is” (The Fifth Child, 79), but his father claims, “He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are” (The Fifth Child, 79). When Ben is put into an institution for mentally ill people, happiness came back to the Lovatt’s household: In the days that followed, the family expanded like paper flowers in water. Harriet understood what a burden Ben had been, how he had oppressed

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Interpreting Otherness in Doris Lessing and Salman Rushdie them all, how much the children had suffered; knew that they had talked about it much more than the parents had wanted to know, had tried to come to terms with Ben. But now Ben was gone their eyes shone, they were full of high spirits. (The Fifth Child, 93)

Harriet could not bear his imprisonment in the institution; she gets him out and tries to adapt him to family life and society but “>i@t seems to her that these efforts she made to humanize him drove him away into himself” (Ben in the World, 139). He is rejected and always confronted by “Wow! That’s not human” (Ben in the World, 42). The only person who really cares about him is the prostitute Rita, who though she knows he was a “human animal” (Ben in the World, 42) ironically thinks, “Well, aren’t we all?” (42). At the end of his journey, Ben leaves this world for a probably better-unknown universe. He commits suicide. At the end of the novel, his friend Teresa says, “And now I know we are pleased that he is dead and we don’t have to think about him.” (Ben in the World, 178) Lessing sets her readers face to face with their own imperfections and harshly criticises the established social and cultural norms that impose a structured limited binary thought. This is what she highlights in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, where she warns about the danger of imprisoning oneself within a limited sphere of thoughts: “When we’re in a group, we tend to think as that group does: we may even have joined the group to find ‘like-minded” people. But we also find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group” (Prisons, 48). Ben is rejected because he is different. In fact, as stated in The Fifth Child, “Ben makes you think – all those different people who lived on the earth once – they must be in us somewhere” (137). Shame is a patriarchal novel, where women submit and are silenced. Rushdie states “I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry” (Shame, 173). Rushdie portrays protagonists who suffer from erasure and psychological intimidation. Rani and Bilquis, “two wives are abandoned in their separate exiles, each with a daughter who should have been a son” (Shame, 104). They embody exiled women whose only crime was not being able to give birth to a boy, an heir, and after a victory for their respective husbands, Iskander Harrapa and Raza Hyder. Rushdie denounces violence in patriarchal societies that used to put “hudud” (Sara Suleri) and restrictions in order not only to silence women but also to silence communities. He also blames wilful oblivion, which stands for what Lessing calls “prisons we choose to live inside” as well.

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“The wrong miracle” (Shame, 89), Sufiya Zinobia, daughter of Bilquis and Raza Hyder, is like “a saint, a person who suffers in our stead” (Shame, 141); she is innocent, pure and is able to preserve these qualities just because she is an idiot, for (according to Rushdie) “idiots are, by definition, innocent” (Shame, 120). She is in fact an extended metaphor of Pakistan’s shame and shamelessness. Sufiya kept transmogrifying and vomiting violence. The violence she incarnates is an anthological vortex, an inescapable issue from the shamelessness dominating this “imagined community”. She explodes wherever there is shame: killing the turkeys in the Pinkies’s house, violently attacking Talvar Ulhaq and beheading men after raping them. Every time there is shame and shamelessness, Zinobia is there to make justice in the world, justice for the silenced and betrayed women, anger against the patriarchal forces that reduce women to mere machines and bodies. Iskander's daughter Arjumand thinks with conviction that “this woman's body...it brings a person nothing but babies, pinches and shame” (Shame, 107). She is a “wrong miracle” (she should have been a son) and she is a victim as well for she is confined to hide her femininity to please her father, who warned her “[i]t's a man's world...Rise above your gender as you grow. This is no place to be a woman in” (Shame, 126). Sufiya embodies revenge for all the subjected women in this imagined world; she also stands for all mentally backward countries where “democracy had never been more than a bird of passage” (Shame, 204). At the end of the novel “the wrong miracle”, Sufiya Zinobia, kills Omar Khayyam her innocent husband, and not Raza her corrupt father. Through such an end, Rushdie underlines that what he hates most is not the corrupt leaders but rather the guilty victims that his character Omar Khayam represents. According to the writer, silence and oblivion are more dangerous than political sham and corruption. Just like Ben Lovatt, Sufiya Zinobia explodes at the end, leaving no room for any kind of alternative for this “imagined community”.

Monstrous Truths: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity In Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child and its sequel Ben, in the World, Ben Lovatt is a figure of exclusion and the embodiment of the monstrous world of exclusion. The novels narrate the journey of a monstrous creature, which disturbs the order of things in his family and in the world and who thus “had no home in this world” (Ben, in the World, 35). These imagined monsters, both in Lessing's and Rushdie's texts, represent now

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and then what Dr. Siv Jansson calls in an introduction to Frankenstein “a metaphor for our own cultural crises” (Frankenstein, VII). Indeed, when a scientist discovers the bestiality of Ben, he is amazed: “This… specimen could answer questions, important questions, important for science – world science. He could change what we know of the human story” (Ben, in the World, 153). But ironically, in his quest for knowledge, the scientist loses his human side and imprisons Ben in his laboratory like an animal and puts him in a cage. When Teresa and Alfredo, Ben’s friends, visits Ben, they are shocked by what they see: In tiers of cages were monkeys, small and large, arranged so that the excrement from the top cages must fall on the animals below. A bank of rabbits, immobilised at the neck, had chemicals dripping into their eyes. A big mongrel dog, which had been carved open from the shoulder to the hip bone and then clumsily sewn up again, was lying moaning on dirty straw, its backside clogged with excrement. (This dog had been cut open six months before and from time to time the wound was unpicked to see what its organs were doing, it was subjected to this drug or that, and then sewn up again like a hessian sack. The edges of the wound were in fact partly healed, in crusts, and through them could be glimpsed the palpitating organs). From cages monkeys stretched out their hands and their human eyes begged for help. (Ben, in the World, 146)

In fact, man becomes a savage in the service of science; the humanity of the scientists is questioned as is the monstrosity of Ben, whose only goal is to find his people, people like him; as he puts it, “To my people? Now?” (Ben, in the World, 156). In Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Lessing claims: “I think that when people look back at our time, they will be amazed at one thing more than other. It is this - that we do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past, but that very little of this knowledge has been put into effect” (5). The sisters Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny in Shame symbolise the infertility of this “imagined community”; though they gave birth, their child is a “bastard” who only inherited oblivion and loss. Omar Khayyam seems a happy character; he does not have one caring mother, but three; but this overdose of love is not enough. “He was not free. His roving freedom-of-the-house was only the pseudo-liberty of a zoo animal; and his mothers were his loving, caring keepers” (Shame, 35). He stands for a nation entrapped within its political system, unable to cope with it. Rushdie presents in his book examples of women who suffer from violence and are subjugated by terror: a girl killed by her father to preserve the family’s honour, a raped woman who keeps silent because she feels

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ashamed; Iskander’s daughter binding her breast in bandages to wage war on her feminine self and hiding her femininity to please her father’s desire for a son. “She will come to enjoy the war against her body” (Shame, 126). Rushdie exposes these cases of violence to denounce and express his fury at the shamelessness occurring in this ‘imagined community’ (Anderson) as well as elsewhere all over the world. Rani is a subjugated woman in the novel; she ingurgitates violence and oblivion in her exile. But she spends her time weaving the shawls she calls “shamelessness of Iskander the Great”, “shawls of international shame” (Shame, 193). Rushdie expresses sympathy for the character: “Iskander the assassin of possibility, immortalized on a cloth, on which she, the artist, had depicted his victim as a young girl, small, physically frail, internally damaged: she had taken for her model her memory of an idiot… and the autobiographical shawl, the portrait of the artist as an old crone” (Shame, 194). She represents thus all the artists in this world who silently transgress and transcend the ghost of the corrupt forces that hang over their freedom of speech. She silently works on her shawls, weaving unspoken words because in her world “there are things that cannot be said. No, it's more than that: there are things that cannot be permitted to be true” (Shame, 82); but also “because revenge is patient, it awaits its perfect moment?” (Shame, 144). These gothic novels raise important questions about our own humanity. They use violence as the unique alternative to shake and shock, purge and cure us from the dirt of postmodern societies and the corruption of the mentally backward socio-political systems of our time. Sufiya and Ben are myth-like monsters that ingest and emit violence and embody the sins, suffering and purgation of their respective societies and all societies. Rushdie asserts, “Any mythological tale can bear a thousand and one interpretations, because the peoples who have lived with and used the story have, over time, poured all those meanings into it. This wealth of meaning is the secret of the power of any myth” (Imaginary Homelands, 48). Ben Lovatt and Sufiya Zinobia not only incarnate an ingurgitated violence, but, thinks Lessing are “original minds, people who do not fit with the social order and conventions”; she asserts “Of course, there are original minds, people who do take their own line, who do not fall victim to the need to say, or do, what everyone else does. But they are few, very few” (Prisons, 53). According to her we “are living in a lunatic asylum” (Prisons, 63), and thus it is hard to recognize “original minds” from “group minds” (Prisons, 47).

DORIS LESSING: BEYOND TIME

Reading, writing or teaching Lessing is an enriching experience, where the real meets with the imaginary and blur the boundaries of time to narrate history and historicise narratives. The writer teaches us about being and time; she revives the past and foresees the future. In her Nobel Lecture, she left an unforgettable message about the crucial mission of the writer, the intellectual who narrates life and provides the world with artful didactic messages: The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative. (26)

Lessing died in 2013 at the age of 94 leaving behind a valuable literary heritage. One of the greatest messages Lessing left to the world: “We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.” (“On Not Winning the Nobel Prize”, 25) Thus, “Learning how to learn” is the right Way towards grasping the Truth about Being and Time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akujobi, Remi. "Madness (Autumn, 1973): A Study of Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent Into Hell". Department of English and Literary Studies, College of Human Development, Covenant University. IFE Psychologia, Vol 16, No 2. South Africa:2008. Al Ghazali. The Alchemy of Happiness. Trans. Claud Field, The Forgotten Books AG: 2010 —. Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalel), Trans. Richard J. Mc Carthy,Freedom and Fulfillment. American University Of Beirut, 1980. Alter, Robert. "Doris Lessing in the Visionary Mode". in The New York Times on the web, January 11, 1981. The New York Times Company: 1998. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Bamia, Aïda A. "Dhakirat al-jasad (The Body's Memory): A New Outlook on Old Themes". In Research in African Literatures. Volume: 28. Issue: 3. 1997. p 93. Barnes and Noble. “Ben, In the World: Author Chat Transcript”, August 23, 2000. < http://www.dorislessing.org/chat-ben.html> Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Vintage Books, 2009. —. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Bensmaïa, Réda. Experimental Nations, Or, The Invention of the Maghreb. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Bhabha, Homi K. "Narrating the Nation". Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. —. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Boeree, C. George. Carl Jung: Personality Theories, 2006

Bolling, Douglass. "Structure and Theme in Briefing for a Descent into Hell". In Contemporary Literature, Vol. 14, No. 4, Special Number on Doris Lessing, pp. 550564. (Autumn, 1973), University of Wisconsin Press. Butler, Judith. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in TwentiethCentury France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

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Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 2002 Ingersoll, Earl. G. Doris Lessing Conversations. US: The Ontario Review Press, 1994. Jung, Carl G. Man and His Symbols. New York: Doubleday, 1964. Kakutani, Michiko. “Tracing the internal tug of war at the heart of human life”. New York Times: October 12, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/books/12kaku.html?ref=dorisless ing Kellum, Dan. "The Political Doris Lessing" in The Nation, 2007.

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Laing, R.D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. England: Penguin Books, 1965. —. The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1970 Lessing, Doris. African Laughter. London: Flamingo, 1993. —. Alfred and Emily. London: Harper Collins, 2008. —. A Small Personal Voice. London: Flamingo, 1994. —. Ben, in the World. London: Flamingo, 2001. —. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. —. "Group minds". Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. New York: Harper Pernnial,1987. —. Martha Quest. Great Britain: Flamingo Modern Classic, 1993. —. On Not Winning The Nobel Prize, The Nobel Lecture. The Nobel Foundation, 2007. —. “On Sufism and Idries Shah's : The Commanding Self” in Sufi Studies Today. January 31, 1999. http://ishk.net/sufis//lessing_commandingself.html —. Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. New York: Harper Perennial, 1987 —. Shikasta. New York: Vintage, 1981. —. Time Bites: Views and Reviews. London: Harper Perennial, 2004. —. The Cleft. London: Harper Collins, 2007. —. The Fifth Child. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. —. The Golden Notebook. London: Harper Perennial, 2007. —. The Grass Is Singing. London: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000. —. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. New York: Knopf, 1982.

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