Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing
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forget it was just after McCarthy in America and I had a lot of American friends and they were very preoccupied with the way they had either given evidence to the Committee or had refused to give evidence. This whole problem of the individual and the group was very strong at that time and in that particular form.//
Bigsby: There was a time when you accused Beckett and others of making what you called “despairing statements of emotional anarchy”: and you said that “the pleasurable luxury of despair, the acceptance of disgust, is as much a betrayal of what a writer should be as the acceptance of the simple economic view of man,” and you identified both of these approaches as a kind of false innocence. Is that a view that you would hold now, and what exactly is the writer’s function then if that isn’t his function?
Lessing: Well, I don’t hold those views now. About the simple economic view of man, of course I hold that; that was a specific statement about a communist view of literature. About the other I don’t remember. You see I don’t remember the emotion that made me write that. I don’t remember why I said those things about writers that I admire. So that has gone. What any writer should do is to write as truthfully as possible about himself or herself as an individual because we are not unique and remarkable people. Over and over again I have had the experience of writing themes that I thought were quite way out and I have discovered, simply by the letters I get, or because ideas surface, that I have been on a fairly low-class common wavelength. Over and over again I have written ideas down that shortly afterwards have become commonplace. I am saying it exactly like that because I don’t want to make it sound something high class. But I do think I have sometimes a sensitivity to what is going to come in five years’ time, and it happened with The Golden Notebook, for example, when I didn’t know I was writing what I was writing.
Bigsby: When you made that comment about Beckett you also said that the writer must become a humanist, feel himself an instrument for change, for good or bad: “it is not merely a question of preventing an evil but strengthening a vision of good that will defeat evil.” That puts enormous weight on art; art becomes an instrument for good in some way.
Lessing: I wouldn’t say that at all now because I don’t know what good and evil is. I think now that if writers write really truthfully (it is very hard, you know, to be truthful, actually) you will find that they are expressing other people.
Bigsby: You have had a sense that the human mind is changing, or the way that we perceive reality is changing; you were suggesting that this might be a result in part of advances in physics. Does that really filter down to the individual, or in what other ways is our sense of reality different now, being perceived differently?
Lessing: Well, I don’t think it is filtering down as fast as it ought, and I think the reason why it doesn’t is a fault in the education system. I am not talking so much about the new ideas in physics, but sociological ideas, some of which are quite shattering in their implications. And they should be taught to children. I think the child should be taught that you may easily find yourself in your life in a situation where you can behave as Eichmann did – I am using Eichmann simply because he is a symbol for mindless obedience. Eighty-five percent of all people, it has been proved, can be expected to behave like this. You may find yourself in such a situation and you must now think about it and prepare yourself for such a choice. In other words, give children choice; don’t let them be precipitated into situations that might arise. And then there is this whole business about thinking and acting as an individual instead of as a member of a group because we now know that very, very few people, a negligible number, are prepared to stand up against a group they are a part of. This has been proved over and over again, by all kinds of experiments; if you put a certain number of people together, people will do anything rather than stand out against it. And it explains, for example, why certain advances of knowledge get accepted with such reluctance. We have discovered a whole armory of facts about human nature since the Second World War. Because of the horror of the Second World War and what we discovered human nature was capable of, research has been going on in universities all over the world in this field. We now know what we are really like. There is also a great deal of knowledge about how groups function.
Bigsby: It seems to me actually that that is a running theme in your work, the need to escape the definition that has been offered to you as a member of a particular group, a race or a country, or in some sense as a sex – the need to escape the type that is offered to you.
Lessing: We live in a series of prisons called race, class, male and female. There are always those classifications.
Bigsby: But equally, I think, in the most recent books, you seem to be urging the breakdown of divisions within the sensibility as well, divisions between the mind and the imagination, the body and the spirit. Intuition, for example, which is usually treated with skepticism, becomes a real force. To feel something is not presented in your work as in some sense reductive; it actually has meaning. Feeling is a genuine response.
Lessing: It is interesting, you use the word feeling to cover both emotion and intuition. Because intuition has been banished from our culture, emotions are spread to include it, whereas in actual fact I think there is thinking and there are emotions and there is intuition which is something quite different. It is fascinating. You see it on television, for example, in God knows how many series. For example, Star Trek. Mr. Spock has no emotions and therefore he is handicapped, but the good Earth people have emotions and therefore they are on a higher level. The word emotion has been spread to include intuition and this is how we get round it. Intuition is not the property of women or of sensitives; everybody has intuition but somewhere in the past, probably in the Renaissance, there was an unspoken agreement to banish intuition. But none of us could operate for five minutes without it. I think we all use it all the time.
Bigsby: When you talked about evolution did you mean the intensification of those abilities which have decayed. Are you actually anticipating the restoration of these abilities or the intensification of them?
Lessing: I think any human being can, if he watches and listens, use them now. It takes practice.
Bigsby: Is that the appropriate moment to ask you about Sufi?
Lessing: Yes, it probably is. I became interested in this because I had to recognize that what I had experienced and what I was thinking and feeling had got nothing whatsoever to do with my philosophy. This happened when I was writing The Golden Notebook. Writing that book in the form I did forced me to examine myself in all kinds of ways. I was writing about experiences that I had never had. I have had some of them since, let me tell you, but I had to recognize that the way I thought then, my philosophy, was absolutely inadequate. I either had to pretend that I didn’t have the experiences I had, or thoughts I had, or admit them openly. I think enormous numbers of people do this. There comes a point where they have to make a choice and a lot of people decide to forget it. When I got to that point and I examined how I was thinking, the whole progressive package (which is shorthand for all the ideas the young people have now as if they are programmed, which they are – they are all materialists, and socialists and semi-Marxists or something of the kind and there is a whole set of ideas that go together). I decided I could no longer live with it so I started looking around. Now the interesting thing about that – I have described that in The Four-Gated City – is that I simply read extensively in areas which were regarded then as quite kooky, though they are not so much now because, in fact, they have got quite trendy.
I did an immense amount of reading and I came up with certain basic facts. One basic fact was that our education was extremely lacking informationwise. You could be brought up in this culture and not know anything at all about the ideas of other cultures. We are brought up with this appalling Western arrogance, all of us. This is the reason I am glad I haven’t been educated because it seems to me almost impossible not to have this arrogance if you are brought up inside the Western education system. The other idea I came up with was that if I was going to do this seriously, explore this area, it was a dangerous thing to do it without a teacher; people go crazy and they go wandering off. God knows