Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 3

Nuclear Cassandra:
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
SARAH HENSTRA

If you feel certain that society is heading for nuclear war, as

Doris Lessing felt in the 1960s, what are you supposed to do
with that knowledge? How do you act ethically and responsibly
in the face of such a depressing conviction about the future?
Or, more radically: to what action might the depression itself
call you? Pursuing the social and discursive implications of fore-
knowledge leads eventually to the question of prophecy—to the
role and responsibility of the prophet. Lessing explores precisely
this question in The Golden Notebook (1962), a multi-layered,
multi-voiced novel in which the lament for a threatened future
weaves its way through character, plot, dialogue, and narrative
structure. Reading this novel as an inquiry into prophecy and
its consequences unearths some of the interactions between the
many thematic preoccupations of The Golden Notebook and the
socio-political crisis with which it was attempting—in many ways
unsuccessfully, Lessing felt—to engage. The author was frustrated
by the precedence “the sex war” took over political and social
issues in reviews of the novel. That she considered the immi-
nence of world-wide nuclear destruction more important than
other themes is evidenced by her impatience with the “sexual
revolution” in the 1960s: “I say we should all go to bed, shut up
about sexual liberation, and go on with important matters. We
must prevent another major war. We’re already in a time of total
chaos, but we’re so corrupted that we can’t see it” (Raskin 175).
What society cannot see is exactly what the prophet-narrator in
Lessing’s novel feels compelled to tell.

3
4 PLL Sarah Henstra

Christa Wolf’s novel Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1983),

although written twenty years later, originally in German, and
from the other side of the Cold War divide, serves here as a
powerful intertext for my reading of The Golden Notebook, insofar
as Wolf’s novelization of the fall of Troy is also inflected with
its author’s sense of impending nuclear disaster.1 Wolf explains
why she finds the prophet(ess)’s role particularly relevant in
the nuclear age: “I try to trace the roots of the contradictions
in which our civilization is now entrapped. This is what I was
doing in the Cassandra book. That work is very much a product
of its time [1984]” (Fourth Dimension 128). Wolf’s comments in
the essays that accompany the novel in Cassandra, along with
her ideas in Accident: The Events of a Day (written in 1986, in re-
sponse to the Chernobyl reactor meltdown) shed further light
on what foreknowledge does to a narrator and her story—and
to an author and her readership.
Prophecy, as I shall define it here, is both a narrative posi-
tion and a narrative problem, arising in response to the need
to reconcile the demands of emotion and action, of knowledge
and living with that knowledge. Prophecy is perhaps one of the
most courageous responses to the extreme feelings of loss and
helplessness that arise under a culture of nuclearism—a culture
like Britain as well as the USA during the second half of the
twentieth century, in which the official discourses of defense,
deterrence, and “collateral damage” had begun to inflict their
own violence. Put simply, the kinds of losses suffered under
nuclearism cannot be properly mourned, commemorated, or
“worked through” in Western cultures because the detonation,
though perceived as inevitable, has not yet taken place. Instead,
the dread of nuclear destruction generates a kind of collective

1
An ongoing theme in Wolf’s lectures and writing is the link between the “alienation”
of objects (like Cassandra herself) in Western art and the ultimate alienation of
nuclear annihilation. It is the main theme of her 1981 Büchner Prize acceptance
speech (“Shall I Garnish a Metaphor.” Trans. Henry Schmidt. New German Critique
23 [1981]: 3-11), for example.
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 5

melancholia: it produces proleptic mourning, a future-oriented

grief in abeyance or on hold.2 Julia Kristeva describes melan-
cholia as “impossible mourning” in order to emphasize how the
depressed person’s sorrow is not sanctioned by or received into
the symbolic economy of language (9). Words, for one facing
unmournable loss, thus become devitalized and weak, on the one
hand—unable to contain or express the extremes of desire—and,
on the other hand, monstrously virulent in their powers of trivi-
alization, exclusion, and denial. “The speech of the depressed,”
says Kristeva, “is to them like an alien skin; melancholy persons
are foreigners in their maternal tongue” (53).
Prophecy, then, struggles for a way of using language without
allowing it to erase, dissimulate, or soften impending loss. In
this endeavor it becomes extremely sensitive to the performa-
tive uses of language—those that do things with words rather
than merely say things, that enact a reality (for good or bad)
rather than merely describe it. The burden of prophecy is
similar to what Derrida describes as the responsibility of liter-
ary scholars under nuclearism: “We have to re-think the rela-
tions between knowing and acting, between constative speech
acts and performative speech acts, between the invention that
finds what was already there and the one that produces new
mechanisms or new spaces” (23). Motivated by her awareness
of history as itself performative, Wolf notes that it is a “sense
of alarm at finding that reality is not a creation external to us,
but a process which we are subject to and yet which we at the
same time bring about ourselves, which really prompts me to
write” (Fourth Dimension 131). Finding a way to talk about what
they know is coming, to speak publicly from a melancholic

2
Sigmund Freud’s 1915 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” approaches the problem
of serious depression, or melancholia, by comparing it to mourning gone awry, a
complication in the normal course of working through the loss of an object of emo-
tional and libidinal attachment (244). Melancholic subjects refuse, or are unable, to
relinquish the lost one--sometimes they may not even be consciously aware of what
exactly they have lost (245).
6 PLL Sarah Henstra

conviction that would rather enforce silence and withdrawal,

is the challenge facing the prophet-narrators of both Wolf’s
and Lessing’s novels.3
The Golden Notebook’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a blocked
writer who parses her experience into a series of notebooks in an
attempt to impose order on what she perceives as mushrooming
internal and societal chaos. The black notebook describes the
events in Africa that served as material for the very successful
novel she did write; the yellow notebook is a draft of another
work entitled The Shadow of the Third; the blue notebook records
psychological and emotional aspects of Anna’s life; the red
notebook pertains to Anna’s (estranged) relationship with the
Communist Party. But this organizational strategy backfires:
Anna becomes more and more fragmented, until she suffers a
complete breakdown and the contents of the notebooks bleed
into one another. The golden notebook, as the product of this
thematic and structural fusion, is correspondingly impressionis-
tic, fluid, and disorienting. The novel suggests both the danger
of fragmenting life into categories and the need to acquiesce to
a level of fragmentation and chaos, particularly as regards the

3
It is important to note that these prophet-narrators are women and their perspec-
tives decidedly, crucially feminist. The “roots” of society Wolf is hoping to unearth
are patriarchal, and the terrifying social trajectory against which both authors are
writing can be seen as the product of a materialistic male ethos that systematically
objectifies human life in general and female life in particular. Femininity as a positive
force of protest has been the focus of dozens of critical readings of these texts: see
as examples Heidi Gilpin’s “Cassandra: Creating a Female Voice” (Responses to Christa
Wolf: Critical Essays. Ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989. 349-66),
W. E. McDonald’s “Who’s Afraid of Wolf’s Cassandra—Or Cassandra’s Wolf?: Male
Tradition and Women’s Knowledge in Cassandra” (Journal of Narrative Technique 20.3
[1990]: 267-83), and Linda Schelbitzki Pickle’s “‘Scratching Away the Male Tradition’:
Christa Wolf’s Kassandra” (Contemporary Literature 27.1 [1986]: 32-47) on Cassandra,
and Elizabeth Abel’s “The Golden Notebook: ‘Female Writing’ and ‘The Great Tradition’“
(Critical Essays on Doris Lessing. Ed. Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger. Boston: G. K.
Hall & Co., 1986. 101-07) and Sharon Spencer’s “‘Femininity’ and the Woman Writer:
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and the Diary of Anais Nin” (Women’s Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Journal 1 [1973]: 247-57) on The Golden Notebook.
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 7

humanist myth of “self” in an age when de-centered subjectivity

is the norm.4
But Anna’s writer’s block is a symptom of more than too rigid
a view of herself as author. The reasons she is unable, and refuses,
to write another novel are so complicated and deep-seated that
their articulation requires all 640 pages of the novel and even
then does not “cure” her of the problem. The reason most im-
mediately apparent to the reader is Anna’s fear of what she per-
ceives as increasingly imminent, large-scale doom. She tells her
psychoanalyst, Mrs. Marks, “It seems to me that ever since I can
remember anything the real thing that has been happening in
the world was death and destruction. It seems to me it is stronger
than life” (237). Anna’s persona in the yellow notebook, Ella, is
haunted by “a vision of some dark, impersonal destructive force
that worked at the roots of life and that expressed itself in war
and cruelty and violence” (195). “On the surface everything’s
fine,” she explains, “all quiet and tame and suburban. But un-
derneath it’s poisonous” (196). The novel broaches again and
again this theme of surface normality versus underlying, increas-
ing torment, and Anna’s comment about the role of art in this
situation also tells us something about the project of The Golden
Notebook itself: “Art from the West becomes more and more a
shriek of torment recording pain. Pain is becoming our deep-
est reality” (344). This “deepest reality” stifles Anna’s creativity
and spurs her breakdown not because she cannot handle what
she feels is the truth, but because the society around her seems
schizophrenically glib about the threat. She creates a personal

4
Subjectivity is the most common focus in recent commentary on The Golden Notebook,
replacing the emphasis on the “sex war” that interested feminist readers of the decades
following its first publication. Magali Michael, for example, argues that Lessing has
picked up on “the postwar nihilism that has created a rift in Being and necessitated
a reconceptualization of the subject as decentered and dispersed” (48). What is
conspicuously lacking from all discussion of the novel, and what I am investigating
here, is what Lessing makes of this “nihilism”—what is the historical moment(s) from
which Lessing’s prophet-narrator derives and to which she addresses herself.
8 PLL Sarah Henstra

gallery of horrors from news clippings that exemplify how the

concept of atomic war is becoming mundane, even popular, as
in the case of a hairdresser’s 1950 description of what he calls
his “H-Bomb Style”: “the ‘H’ is for peroxide of hydrogen, used
for coloring. The hair is dressed to rise in waves as from a bomb-
burst, at the nape of the neck” (241). To Anna this self-delusion
is horrifying and perverse, more reason for her to take literally
Einstein’s warning: “There emerges, more and more distinctly,
the spectre of general annihilation” (245).
Anna’s inability to write also stems from her belief that con-
temporary experience defies the models of comprehension that
literature is capable of offering. She resists Mrs. Marks’s attempts
to contextualize her fears with reference to Jungian paradigms,
protesting, “I believe I’m living the kind of life women never
lived before” (458). She insists, “I don’t want to be told when I
wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of
the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-
bow. It isn’t true. There is something new in the world” (459).
This conviction compels her to reject conventions of storytelling
that, by simply talking about nuclear war, would automatically
domesticate it. Even Anna’s once-removed fictional endeavors,
the stories Ella sketches out in the yellow notebook, run aground:
“Now, looking for the outlines of a story and finding, again and
again, nothing but patterns of defeat, death, irony, she deliber-
ately refuses them. She tries to force patterns of happiness or
simple life. But she fails” (454).
The inability of novelistic conventions to deal with nuclear
dread is symptomatic of a larger, ideological failure in society.
Anna is ashamed of how hackneyed and impotent the Com-
munist Party’s precepts sound in the face of the nuclearism’s
anti-human realities. In the essays that accompany the novel
Cassandra, Christa Wolf also articulates the vertigo felt when old
models can no longer give meaning:
Now you no longer need to be “Cassandra”; most people are beginning to see
what is coming. An uneasiness, which many file under the names emptiness
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 9

and loss of meaning, makes them afraid. We cannot hope that the used-up
institutions, to which many were accustomed, will supply a new direction.
Run a zigzag course. But there is no escape route in sight. You feel you are
standing at bay. (Cassandra 239)

With the passing of old institutions goes the discursive tools they
lent us; part of “standing at bay” involves the lapse of language
that nuclearism effects. Wolf expresses the frustration of work-
ing without the right words:
The thing the anonymous nuclear planning staffs have in mind for us is un-
sayable; the language which would reach them seems not to exist. But we go
on writing in the forms we are used to. In other words, we still cannot believe
what we see. We cannot express what we already believe. (Cassandra 226)

The prophet’s dilemma: what she knows exceeds what she can
say, to the extent that—in Anna’s melancholic opinion—noth-
ing is worth saying at all.
The irony arising from the fact that this struggle with lan-
guage takes place within literary discourse and is articulated by a
fictional character raises the question of whose crisis of prophecy
we are actually bearing witness to in these texts. Does the nuclear
dread Lessing and Wolf describe properly belong to the narra-
tor, the author, or a hybrid of the two, a kind of writer-persona
who enacts the debate in the fictional context? It is extremely
difficult to discuss Anna’s melancholic foreknowledge without
simultaneously suggesting that, as an author, Doris Lessing is
working through questions of how to write meaningfully in the
nuclear age. Even more explicitly, Christa Wolf’s Cassandra may
be a fictional character, but the authorial “voice” narrating the
essays accompanying the novel, and the writerly persona of Ac-
cident, are deliberately close to the public “voice” of Wolf herself.
So, while the prophet-narrator’s navigation of the writer’s role
in a culture desensitized to its own doom is not synonymous
with the author’s, these texts provide a meta-fictional forum for
exploring the creative and ethical limits of authorial power.
One such limit arises in relation to the depiction of time in
the novel. Society’s inability to come to grips with, or even to
10 PLL Sarah Henstra

see clearly, the extremes of nuclearism affects day-to-day exis-

tence in The Golden Notebook as much as it curtails the future.
The experience of present time in Lessing’s novel is reduced
to an experience of fragmentation. In the story’s second line
Anna tells her friend Molly, “The point is [. . .] that as far as I
can see, everything’s cracking up” (25). By “everything” Anna
means both society and the individual, though the emphasis
shifts from the disintegration of social institutions to the frag-
mentation of Anna’s own consciousness as the novel progresses.
In an interview Lessing is explicit about the connection between
the internal, psychological fragmentation she portrays in her
fiction and the breakdown of social stability under the nuclear
threat: “I feel as if the Bomb has gone off inside myself, and in
people around me. That’s what I mean by the cracking up. It’s
as if the structure of the mind is being battered from inside”
(Raskin 171).
Mocking the categories into which life has been compart-
mentalized stresses the futility of the attempt to impose order
through language alone: “Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good.
Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love. . . ”(63, ellipses
Lessing’s). For Anna, to write would be to cater to the fragmen-
tation, since the contemporary novel offers nothing more than
“reportage”:
The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented
consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more
divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach
out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups
inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a
blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means
towards it. (79, Lessing’s emphasis)

Anna claims she is incapable of writing the only novel that inter-
ests her, “a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion
strong enough to create order,” because she is “too diffused”
(80). She relates this psychological diffusion to “alienation. Be-
ing split” (353) and clings to the ideal of a “humanism [that]
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 11

stands for the whole person, the whole individual” (354). While
it is her dread about the future that exacerbates Anna’s sense
of internal division, witnessing events and writing about them
inherently require some degree of “being split” insofar as the self
becomes an object of narrative as well as a narrating subject. So
Anna suffers under both the writer’s dilemma and the prophet’s:
seeing clearly what others are blind to creates a schism between
the knowledge and carrying on “as usual.” This is the same inner
splitting against which Cassandra chafes when, in Wolf’s novel,
she comments that her role as witness has “already brought about
a renewal of my old, forgotten malady: inner division, so that I
watch myself, see myself sitting in this accursed Greek chariot
trembling with fear beneath my shawl. Will I split myself in two
until the end before the ax splits me, for the sake of conscious-
ness?” (22). As an approach to cultural (and narrative) crisis,
prophecy values consciousness above comfort and thus makes
for a fragmented, uneasy perspective.
Writing becomes a morally compromising activity for the
prophet-narrator in both Lessing’s and Wolf’s novels. She is
forced to examine her own contributions to the destructive
forces she fears, to relinquish the mantle of innocence or im-
partiality traditionally worn by the “messenger.” Anna doesn’t
want to record her “feeling of disgust, of futility” because, she
says, “Perhaps I don’t like spreading those emotions” (58). Inter-
rupting the “nuclear forgetting” that cushions us from collective
despair carries a certain weight of guilt that makes the prophet
hesitate. As Wolf reminds us,
[Normal people] want to be presented with something that makes them
happy [. . .] but nothing which affects them too much, and that is the normal
behavior we have been taught, so that it would be unjust to reproach them for
this behavior merely because it contributes to our deaths. (Accident 101)

Wolf’s impatience with normalcy in the face of planetary suicide

doesn’t negate her doubt about the justice of trying to shake
it up. Similarly, Anna tells Mrs. Marks that “what they [people]
12 PLL Sarah Henstra

can’t stand is to be told it all doesn’t matter, they can’t stand

formlessness” (461).
But the prophet’s guilt derives from more than a reluctance
to spread dismal views. Anna’s deepest discomfort with her
profession stems from what she calls the “lying nostalgia” she
perceives in her previous novel, and in novels everywhere: a
writerly perspective that seems inherently to elicit and cultivate
destruction for its narrative juiciness.5 Frontiers of War seems “im-
moral” to Anna now because “[t]he emotion it came out of was
something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement
of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for license, for freedom,
for the jungle, for formlessness. [. . .] Not one of the reviewers
saw it” (82). The fact that this destructive urge seems to Anna
inseparable from creativity adds to her immobilizing guilt:
And it is extraordinary how, as the nostalgia deepens, the excitement, “stories”
begin to form, to breed like cells under a microscope. And yet it is so power-
ful, that nostalgia, that I can only write a few sentences at a time. Nothing
is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything
overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution. This emo-
tion is one of the strongest reasons why wars continue [. . .]. That is why I am
ashamed, and why I feel continually as if I had committed a crime. (82)

Wolf links the creative work of storytelling with the drive to

destruction in a similar way. Trying to fathom what motivates
the nuclear scientists responsible for the Bomb, she describes a
nihilistic excitement that at first sounds totally foreign to her:
I know of no defense against people who are secretly addicted to death. The
rats. Once again the image of those rats which had been trained to stimulate
their centers of desire by pressing a button. They love that button. Press,
press, press. At the risk of starving, perishing of thirst, becoming extinct.
(Accident 65)

5
Betsy Draine defines Lessing’s use of “nostalgia” as a “moral sleep”: a “yearning for the
recovery of the stage illusion of moral certainty, innocence, unity, and peace,” which
in effect is “a desire for unreality and nonexistence” (33). Using the philosophical
existentialism of Camus and Sartre leads Draine to oppose this nostalgia to a life of
consciousness “saturated with irony” (33).
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 13

But Wolf graduates quickly from the animal analogy to the re-
alization that as a writer, she shares the scientists’ reluctance to
stop their work and consider its impact:
I should rather think of myself. Whether I would be able to stop [writing]
words [that] could wound, even destroy, like projectiles [. . .]. [W]as [I] al-
ways able to judge—always willing to judge—when my words would wound,
perhaps destroy? At what level of destruction I would back down? No longer
say what I could? Opt for silence? (48)

Like Anna, Christa Wolf”s writer-persona in Accident confronts

the aspects of her own profession that prove disrespectful of life
and too interested in crisis or destruction. The text crescendos
into a rambling (one sentence over two pages), aching lament
about the virulence of words and a contemplation of silence as
the desperate final option for the writer horrified by the events
around her and swallowed by her own guilt. Wolf describes
the “cordon of word nausea” choking her (98), the dismay at
knowing she betrays others through the “circle of destruction
surrounding a writer” (99). For this, she concludes, “I know of
no other remedy but silence, which transfers the ill from with-
out to within, which means less consideration for oneself than
for others, in other words, self-betrayal again” (99). Caught
between the need to articulate her dread about nuclear conflict
and the fear of inciting further conflict with her work, Wolf is
threatened here with a lapse into melancholic silence—as she
describes it, “silent (not quiet: silent, without a sound)” (99).
The affective risks of prophecy can be summarized most con-
cretely by Wolf’s explanation for her reluctance to write about
nuclear annihilation:
A deep-rooted dread prohibits me from “bringing on” the misfortune by
imagining it too intensively, too exactly. By the way: Cassandra’s “guilt” is
precisely this, that she first brought about the doom with her prophecies. For
this she feels she is justly “punished,” that is, forced to suffer the misfortune
of her countrymen in an intensified form. (Cassandra 254)
14 PLL Sarah Henstra

The line between constative and performative discourse is un-

clear in prophecy and the damage caused by speaking of disaster
threatens to overpower any positive results of forewarning.6
Toward the end of The Golden Notebook, when Anna is giving
in to madness (or at least suffering an emotional breakdown)
during her affair with Saul, her nightmarish “vision [of] the
power of destruction” also reveals her own contribution to that
power. Not only has she indulged, and therefore spread, her
longing for dissolution in her past writing, but her very dread
of destruction augments the destructive forces in the world:
“[T]he great armouries of the world have their inner force,
and [. . .] my terror, the real nerve-terror of the nightmare,
was part of the force. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite
and the I, I, I, I, of Saul and Anna were part of the logic of war”
(568). This revelation, and indeed this Book of Revelations-
style recording in the novel’s latter sections, take The Golden
Notebook beyond other texts about cultural heedlessness and
individual conscience. In the last entries of the individual note-
books, and in the golden notebook itself, Anna experiences
a fusion of all the conflicting parts of her life. This fusion, as
Lessing writes it, is non-linear, fragmented, and repetitive; it
resembles very closely the “plaint” of a melancholic patient in
psychoanalysis. This section revisits and revises events that have
taken place throughout the novel—this time highlighting their
fictitiousness, their manipulation in memory by Anna’s desires
and regrets. The golden notebook is an excellent example of

6
John Guthrie calls Cassandra’s nearness to death a “terminal situation” that makes
her narrative a “work of mourning” as she looks back over the events of her life (180).
For Guthrie, however, this “pessimistic strand” is balanced by an optimistic one: ac-
cepting her own destruction enables Cassandra to forge an autonomous subjectivity
for herself in the telling of her own story (184). I am reading Cassandra’s opening
declaration, “With this story I go to my death” (in my translation: “Keeping step with
the story, I make my way into death” [3]), somewhat in reverse of Guthrie: he shows
that the certainty of death enables the story; I suggest that telling the story contributes
to and hastens death. Either way, my reading concurs with Guthrie’s statement that
“All creation implies destruction” (184).
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 15

performative narration, in that it re-cites the “facts” in order

to highlight how the recitation itself effectively creates and
re-creates these facts. It dramatizes the violence involved in
the writer’s project on two major levels.7 First, its insistence on
Anna as “projectionist” who simultaneously directs and selects
events as they flick past her on the screen of her dream/memory
dissects the mechanisms by which life is subdued into fictional
“material.”8 The violence of these mechanisms, we see here,
mirrors the violence whereby human lives are turned into
“damage collateral” and “overkill factors” in nuclear parlance.
Here we move beyond Anna’s guilt about having profited from
war through her best-selling novel to an understanding of the
way in which all Anna’s writing, all Lessing’s writing, all writ-
ing exacts some expense from its narrative objects. Second, an
acting-out of the writer’s “license” occurs on a metanarrative
level too, in that the golden notebook interrupts and abrogates
what is previously established in the novel. It disorients read-
ers who might have only just succeeded in “getting straight”
all the plots and characters of the various notebooks. Like a

7
To describe the The Golden Notebook as violent is to concur with other critics who focus
on conflict and violation in the novel. Marie Danziger, for example, investigates what
she calls the book’s “arena of conflict,” arguing that “authors, characters, and readers
[are linked] in a series of potentially violent encounters” (45). Danziger’s emphasis
on the “primal” confrontation between writer and reader leads her to consider the
scene in which Tommy insists on reading Anna’s notebooks as a “rape” (48). Reading
and writing are indeed loaded with affective and metaphorical power in the novel,
and an examination of how these activities change throughout the text would nuance
in interesting ways my discussion of prophetic narrative.
8
As the “projectionist dream” is repeated, Anna eventually shifts roles from passive
viewer of her life’s images to the operator of the machine. Simultaneously, the images
change from those to which she has always given emphasis to ones she has previously
ignored, those that represent “the small endurance that is bigger than anything”
(611). The dream at once forces Anna to take responsibility for her (unavoidable)
bias and offers her a universal perspective on suffering and hope that helps her to
work through her melancholia (i.e., to mourn) and return to emotional “health.” I
am suggesting, however, that the readers are not given as easy an out: the narrative
“recovery” is incomplete, and Lessing leaves us with more questions than answers.
16 PLL Sarah Henstra

bomb going off in the pages of the text, the performative fu-
sion thwarts these plots and characters, casting the narrative
elements—and the readers’ expectations—into chaos. Form
mirrors theme, then, and breakdown is enacted in the experi-
ence of reading as much as in Anna’s mind.
But while breakdown turns to fusion and then to the subdued
order of the closing “Free Women” section of the novel, while
Anna returns to being “sane” as though the penultimate sec-
tion in its entirety had been a bad dream, we as readers remain
caught up in the affective extremes of the golden notebook,
so that what follows seems anticlimactic, flat. It would seem as
though Anna has worked through her dread successfully and
come to terms with grief; this mourning is re-enacted for the
text as a whole with the return to, and closure of, the umbrella
plot: “The two women kissed and separated” (638). But upon
closer examination it is questionable whether Anna’s return
to normalcy doesn’t manifest the same plangent undertow felt
by the readers after closing the book. The question of Anna’s
recovery calls for a look at the role of irony in the novel—not,
here, for its hand in Lessing’s comments on social conventions
and gender relations, though the novel is rife with those ironies
too, but in terms of its place in Anna’s coming to grips with
foreknowledge. Through most of the story the prophet-narra-
tor perceives irony as suspect or dangerous and conscientiously
steers around it whenever it crops up in her notebooks. Part
of her wariness stems from the melancholic subject’s perilous
relationship to language in general. She relates irony to the
“steadily deepening cynicism” that plagued her group in Africa,
wherein “our jokes, outside the formal meetings, were contrary
to what we said, and thought we believed in” (86). Such “en-
joyable ironies” (83), Anna warns, can “have developed inside
ten years into a cancer that has destroyed a whole personality”
(86). Later, when Anna reads a story written by a Communist
Party member and cannot tell whether it is “an exercise in
irony,” “a skillful parody,” or “serious,” she calls the confusion
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 17

“another expression of the fragmentation of everything [. . .]

the thinning of language against the density of our experience”
(301). If life itself becomes ironic, how can linguistic irony any
longer make sense? More important: how can it be a responsible
mode for the writer threatened by future destruction? Anna
considers irony in attitude to be unethical and dangerous even
though—or more precisely, because—irony is everywhere in
contemporary experience.
Struggling to define the negative ironic perspective further,
Anna calls it a “refusal to fit conflicting things together to make
a whole; so that one can live inside it, no matter how terrible.
The refusal means one can neither change nor destroy; the
refusal means ultimately either death or impoverishment of
the individual” (83-84). Despite Anna’s early recognition of
this cost, her notebooks are the product of her refusal to com-
promise for the sake of wholeness or viability. Like Kristeva’s
melancholic patients, she refuses to cover over loss—or her
overwhelming dread of it—in order to write coherently or even
to write at all. But does Anna, in the novel’s closing chapters,
finally capitulate and “fit things together”? Is the “fusion” of
the golden notebook a catharsis, so that Anna gives voice to her
dread and thereby lets it go? And if The Golden Notebook itself can
be read as an attempt to fit conflicting things together to make
a whole—to counter what Lessing calls “false dichotomies and
divisions” (Preface 8)—is the novel successful in this attempt?
Most commentators on the novel have said yes, that the book
both thematizes and demonstrates the embrace of disparate
elements into an inclusive, multi-vocal perspective.9 Witness

9
Mary Cohen, for example, argues that, since the line Saul gives Anna as the first
sentence of her next novel is the opening line of The Golden Notebook, Lessing is tell-
ing us that “Anna herself can, at the end of her struggle, write a novel like The Golden
Notebook.” This means to Cohen that “Anna has overcome her fear of formlessness
and that she will never again write a novel, like her first, which falsifies the experi-
ence from which it is drawn” (192). Indeed Anna probably won’t write another book
like her first—in fact, at the novel’s conclusion, she decides to “get a job” instead of
18 PLL Sarah Henstra

what has become the flagship phrase for the book, “Out of the
chaos, a new kind of strength” (454): a motto for successful
mourning and moving on, certainly? And yet, at the end of the
golden notebook, Anna describes another kind of irony, one
that is unavoidable if she is to return to everyday life from a
place of melancholic silence where “words dissolve”:
But once having been there, there’s a terrible irony, a terrible shrug of the
shoulders, and it’s not a question of fighting it, or disowning it, or of right or
wrong, but simply knowing it is there, always. It’s a question of bowing to it,
so to speak, with a kind of courtesy, as to an ancient enemy: All right, I know
you are there, but we have to preserve the forms, don’t we? (609-10)

Agreeing to “preserve the forms” whilst always knowing the

loss is there is a compromise similar to, but crucially different
from, the negation of loss Kristeva describes as required for
non-melancholic subjectivity.10 This intentional background-
ing of dread happens only after Anna has deconstructed the
loss, dwelt in it, and allowed it to swallow her completely; at
no point are we asked to believe she has gotten over it because
she closes the door on it. And The Golden Notebook ‘s final pages
do create the impression of a “terrible shrug of the shoulders”

writing anything more at all. Cohen’s conclusion fills in the blanks left by the The
Golden Notebook’s unfinished business. Similarly, while Draine notes the significance
of irony to Anna’s distress in the novel, she limits its role by arguing that Anna learns
to “balance irony with compassion and awareness with faith” and that “the expression
of her balanced perspective is the novel as a whole” (47). To call Anna’s ambivalence
and exhaustion a “saving schizophrenia” (48) paints a prettier picture than I see
being portrayed at the novel’s close. For the many readers who are made nervous
by the melancholic narrative, however, it seems the best “solution” to extrapolate
along a trajectory of successful mourning-and-moving-on that might not be safely or
satisfactorily endorsed by the text itself.
10
In Black Sun Kristeva explains that any access to the symbolic economy of language
requires for the subject a covering-over or “negation” of original, maternal loss: “‘I
have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother,’
is what the speaking subject seems to be saying. ‘But no, I have found her again in
signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost her (that is the negation),
I can recover her in language’” (43).
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 19

as Anna carries on with finding another flat and getting a job

(and still, she isn’t able to write).11 While she resists one kind of
irony as defeatist and crippling, another, perhaps deeper irony
proves to be necessary to existence: to live as though death
wasn’t around the corner, to speak as though words weren’t
futile and meaningless. While all living and speaking calls for
this dissimulation, Lessing’s prose leaves the sleight imperfect,
letting the mechanisms of compromise and cost show through.
Irony, for Anna and for the reader, arises in being forced to bear
in mind what is set aside in the name of normalcy rather than
being allowed to forget it. The narrative of prophecy is ironic
because it spells out the catastrophic outcome of carrying on
as usual, while at the same time being forced, in order to be
legible at all, to agree to the terms of “usual” narrative. To the
melancholic “seer” in a culture of blindness, irony is the only
alternative to silence.
The complex, highly organized structure of The Golden Note-
book responds to and reflects the novel’s subject matter.12 Most
straightforwardly, the fusion of fragments in Anna’s consciousness
is writ large in the flowing together of content from black, yellow,
blue, and red notebooks into the golden notebook. Lessing’s
Preface describes her intention “to shape a book which would
make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the
way it was shaped” (14). Lessing wanted to capture the “feel” of
mid-century England, and this required a structural demonstra-

Dagmar Barnouw calls the final exchange between Anna and Molly, in which they
11

agree that “it’s all very odd” (Golden Notebook 638), an expression of “exhaustion which
has just enough strength left for ironical ambivalence” (493). This reading is closer than
most to my own sense of the note of defeat on which The Golden Notebook ends.
12
Annis Pratt in 1973 was the first to attend critically to the novel’s structure, discuss-
ing it as a dialectical form in which opposing impulses are brought into tension and
balance (“The Contrary Structure of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.” World Lit-
erature Written in English 12 [1973]: 150-60). See also Draine, Herbert Marder’s “The
Paradox of Form in The Golden Notebook” (Modern Fiction Studies 26 [1980)]: 49-54),
and many of the essays in Pratt and Dembo’s Doris Lessing: Critical Studies (Madison:
U of Wisconsin P, 1974) for schematic and structural analyses of the text.
20 PLL Sarah Henstra

tion of the social dichotomies she saw being insisted upon at the
expense of wholeness and collective understanding (11). But
reading the text for its exploration of melancholic foreknowledge
suggests further purposes for the multiple “frames” within which
the story takes shape. The notebooks compress and suspend
narrative time, as the events in Anna’s life are redoubled, split,
dreamt, “fictionalized” (as Ella’s), interrupted by heavy black
lines, and re-lived differently (as in the revisions from the golden
notebook to “Free Women 5”). Past and future bleed into present
in the novel, so that the reader experiences crisis and paralysis
at once. The volubility and vastness of the narrative imply that
there is always another version of events left outstanding and
never a final or finished story. Christa Wolf describes this anxiety
of incompleteness as follows: “It is the feeling that everything is
fundamentally related; and that the strictly one-track-minded
approach—the extraction of a single ‘skein’ for purposes of
narration and study—damages the entire fabric, including the
‘skein’” (Cassandra 287). This is precisely what Lessing is trying
to prove in The Golden Notebook, and the panoramic approach of
her own narrative emphasizes rather than disguises the sense of
“damage” incurred in telling the story.
The novel’s structure also responds to the threatening, vola-
tile aspects of its prophetic material. Foreknowledge makes for
a frightening story, bound to alienate readers: the elaborate,
even rigid structural plan can be read as an attempt (on Anna’s
part, of course, but also on Lessing’s) to contain and tame this
melancholy content.13 Lessing notes repeatedly that the nar-

13
Many critics interpret the multi-layered form as a way to distance, displace, or ne-
gate painful material. Jean Tobin catalogues several techniques used by Lessing for
this purpose: shifting pronoun (e.g., “I” to “she” in the yellow notebook), shifting
gender (e.g., Lessing’s son Peter becomes Anna’s daughter Janet becomes Ella’s son
Michael), transposing (of names and relationships), shuffling (of material from one
notebook to another), and generalizing (166-71). Marie Danziger contends that it
isn’t the content itself the writer fears; rather, the “distancing impulse is generated
by the writer’s fear of reader disapproval” (56).
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 21

rative seemed to have a life of its own: “I said I want this tight
structure, so I did the structure. But what came out in between
was something else, and not always foreseen” (Gray 336).14 While
in 1971 she claimed “It was under control,” in a 1986 interview
she admitted, “It was almost out of control” (Gray 336). Wolf
felt a similar tension between content and structure in writing
Cassandra: “I experience the closed form of the Cassandra narra-
tive as a contradiction to the fragmentary structure from which
(for me) it is actually composed. The contradiction cannot be
solved, only named” (266). To regard Wolf’s and Lessing’s novels
as prophetic—not just because of their clear-sighted narrators,
but because of their confrontation with the looming possibility
of nuclear conflict and death—offers a new perspective on the
disagreement amongst readers about whether these novels are
overdetermined or infinitely open-ended. Dagmar Barnouw
asserts, for example, that the structure of The Golden Notebook
“hinders the process of self-knowledge”: the multiple, interwoven
narratives “yield only prematurely arrested analyses of relation-
ships, closing off precariously for a time what will destroy them
anyway in the end. The enemy is intensely feared but not known”
(503).15 Similarly, Leslie A. Adelson has expressed discomfort
over Cassandra’s fate, claiming that generic boundaries overtake
historical necessity in Wolf’s version, canceling out hope (511).
Adelson links Cassandra to its context of nuclear anxiety when
she complains that “Cassandra has, so to speak, internalized
The Bomb,” and that the character exists “in a cage whose bars
are demarcated, not by historical necessity, but by the lines of
the text” (512). The objection to nuclear war being depicted as

14
In the Preface, Lessing muses that “Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making
limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substance where you least expect it. All sorts
of ideas and experiences I didn’t recognize as mine emerged when writing” (10).
15
Barnouw juxtaposes this rigidity of structure with the fluidity of The Four-Gated City,
which she feels is better able to explore the realities—and the potentialities—of
fragmentation in modern life (498).
22 PLL Sarah Henstra

inevitable—to an unforgiving foreclosure of narrative hope—is

common amongst readers made uncomfortable by texts that
deal with melancholic foreknowledge. The point, of course,
is that annihilation is inevitable for these narratives, and the
discomfort arises in response to precisely the textual staging
of “being done for.” That Cassandra knows her fate from the
start makes her tale an ideal framework for Wolf’s exploration
of proleptic, future-oriented mourning under nuclearism.16
Edith Waldstein’s essay on silence and prophecy in Cassandra
complains that the reader “suffers from unproductive anxiety
because the text has left neither a character nor the narrative
space required to ‘discuss’ the issues raised. Christa Wolf has
handed silence back to us” (198). In the end, this is exactly what
prophecy does in Lessing as well as Wolf—hands silence back to
us. Prophecy is a performative narrative technique that rejects
the consolatory mechanisms of storytelling and insists, through
irony, on leaving us with closing-down instead of closure, loss
instead of resolution. Prophecy, against all odds, provides a
language for nuclear fear.

WORKS CITED
Adelson, Leslie A. “The Bomb and I: Peter Sloterdijk, Botho Strauß, and
Christa Wolf.” Monatshefte 78.4 (1986): 500-13.
Barnouw, Dagmar. “Disorderly Company: From The Golden Notebook to The
Four-Gated City.” Contemporary Literature 14 (1973): 491-514.
Cohen, Mary. “‘Out of the Chaos, a New Kind of Strength’: Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook.” The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criti-
cism. Ed. Arlyn Diamon and Lee R. Edwards. Amherst: U of Massachu-
setts P, 1977. 178-93.

16
Nonetheless, Wolf also defends the openness of her novel by arguing that the story
is meant to be read together with the essays that widen its scope and problematize
its conclusions. Similarly, although Lessing’s 1971 Preface was written out of over-
whelming frustration for what she felt was a “belittling” critical concentration upon
feminism and “the sex war” in the novel (8), this Preface has become a crucial part of
The Golden Notebook as we know it today. The author’s discussion here invites readers to
an ongoing engagement with the social and psychological explorations of the text.
Prophecy in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook PLL 23

Danziger, Marie A. Text/Countertext: Postmodern Paranoia in Samuel Beckett,

Doris Lessing, and Philip Roth. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.
Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead: Seven
Missiles, Seven Missives).” Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis.
Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 20-31.
Draine, Betsy. “Nostalgia and Irony: The Postmodern Order of The Golden
Notebook.” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 31-48.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” 1917. Trans. James
Strachey. The Pelican Freud Library. Vol. 11. On Metapsychology: The
Theory of Physchoanalysis. Ed. Angela Richards. Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1985. 245-68.
Gray, Stephen. “An Interview with Doris Lessing.” Research in African Litera-
ture 17 (1986): 329-40.
Guthrie, John. “The Reconstructed Subject: Christa Wolf, Kassandra.” The
German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism. Ed. David Midg-
ley. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1993. 179-93.
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Rou-
diez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. 1962. London: Michael Joseph, 1982.
Michael, Magali Cornier. “Woolf’s Between the Acts and Lessing’s The Golden
Notebook: From Modern to Postmodern Subjectivity.” Saxton and Tobin
39-56.
Raskin, Jonah. “Doris Lessing at Stony Brook: An Interview.” New American
Review 8 (1970): 166-79.
Tobin, Jean. “On Creativity: Woolf’s The Waves and Lessing’s The Golden
Notebook.” Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold. Ed. Ruth Saxton and
Jean Tobin. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1994. 147-83.
Waldstein, Edith. “Prophecy in Search of a Voice: Silence in Christa Wolf’s
Kassandra.” The Germanic Review 62.4 (1987): 194-98.
Wolf, Christa. Accident: A Day’s News. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick
Takvorian. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989.
——. Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays. Trans. Jan Van Heurck. New York:
Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1984
——. The Fourth Dimension: Interviews with Christa Wolf. Trans. Hilary Pilk-
ington. Introd. Karin McPherson. London: Verso, 1988.

SARAH HENSTRA is Assistant Professor of English at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Her current research explores the genre of the interview across different literary
and media contexts. She has also written articles on the work of Djuna Barnes, Julian
Barnes, Angela Carter, Ford Madox Ford, and Graham Swift.