Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing
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I am nothing if not obsessive, perfectionist, and boring when I am faced with this kind of situation, and I put a great deal of time and trouble into looking for a teacher. I went through some experiences which were quite interesting, making mistakes, and then I found Sufism as taught by Idries Shah, which claims to be the reintroduction of an ancient teaching suitable for this time and this place. It is not some regurgitated stuff from the East or watered down Islam or anything like that. And I read a book called The Sufis, which I knew was on its way. I waited for it and read it and thought simply, This is where I might find what I am looking for because my ideas were there and no other place; there was no other place for them. I did not want to become a Christian mystic. I couldn’t possibly be a Christian. I can’t be religious; I haven’t got the religious temperament in the way it is demanded of you. In parentheses, again, Christianity is a very emotional religion. In Hinduism you do not have to be emotional. But Christianity demands an emotional response, and I couldn’t do that. There are other things that demand of you a totally intellectual response, and I couldn’t do that. What I have found is the beginnings of a way of looking at things which unfolds as you go on, and if that is an annoying phrase I can’t help it. You discover all the time. It is not an easy thing.
Bigsby: You said that you couldn’t be religious, but is your outlook pantheistic or does it posit some sort of ultimate being?
Lessing: Is it any help if I say; yes, it believes in God? So what. Do you see the point I am making? Supposing I said it didn’t believe in God? What then? Supposing I said it believed in the Devil? These are words, they don’t mean anything.
Bigsby: But it does talk about oneness, doesn’t it? Is the sense of the oneness, not actually a being external to the self but in a sense the aggregate of the selves, is that what it means by unity?
Lessing: Perhaps I don’t know either. I am still at the beginning of it. You start off shedding prejudices and preconceptions. If I say “mysticism” or “Sufism” I don’t know what your particular set of associations is, but they are likely to be something like the Maharishi, Mantras, Yoga, chanting, dancing up and down, and Islam, something like that, because that is the culture we live in. You begin by shedding the ideas that you have, many of them unconscious. Let’s take the word “teacher.” A teacher is someone who stands at the end of the room on a dais and he lectures to you. But you see this is not a teacher as I have experienced it; it is something quite different, but it takes a long time even when you have accepted that intellectually, to translate it into how you experience what is happening, because all the time, unconsciously, you are thinking, Ah, one day the guru will announce, “My child, this is the truth.” Now I am caricaturing a very deeply rooted psychological need, and I was quite shocked to find how deep it is. One of the things that Shah says is that we are taught all the time in this culture that we are not conditioned, that we are free, that we have made up our own minds all through our lives about what we believe, and that we are here as a product of various acts of will made throughout our life. He will simply say, “I am sorry but this is not so, and in actual fact you have been programmed to want authority; you want to be told what to do, you want a guru, you want something to belong to, you want rules.” Now when he first says this to you, you say, “Oh, come,” but then you are put in a situation where you find out that it is true and very humiliating it is, because it is true. I did want all those things. Well, now, please God, I don’t. But the thing is you learn to shed all the time, not through an intellectual process at all; all the time you are put into situations where you see the truth about yourself and it isn’t at all pretty, actually. It is humiliating.
Bigsby: It seems to me that The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five is actually suffused with this kind of thought. Isn’t it about the breakdown of these kinds of assumptions, the recognition of a determinism?
Lessing: You keep talking about determinism. It is the opposite that I have experienced.
Bigsby: Well, Al.Ith, the princess, receives a summons. It is a summons which really doesn’t immediately operate on the conscious mind, but on the subconscious mind. It is a summons which must be obeyed. There is no scope for denial. That is what I mean by determinism; her actions are determined quite apart from her own sensibility. Now isn’t that what you were just talking about, the recognition of that determinism? And indeed the recognition becomes a kind of moral act; it is what you pay, it is what you owe, the recognition of an element of determinism.
Lessing: I don’t think that Marriages is a description of Sufi attitudes, unless what I have learnt has become very unconscious and has come out differently. But I am not at this moment qualified to judge. One cannot judge the processes of sea change until later. In ten years’ time I might be able to.
Bigsby: But one thing that Al.Ith has to learn sounds very close to what you are describing. You are saying that the individual has to learn to see himself outside of the group, outside of that set of assumptions. This is what Al.Ith herself has to learn; she has to move outside the group in which she feels so much at home, and for whom she in a sense resonates.
Lessing: I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but I suppose so.
Bigsby: And the marriage which is contracted and the subsequent marriage, as there are two, isn’t that the marriage of two people who are themselves being forced out of their set of presumptions? And presumably some kind of new quality is coming out of that, some third thing which pulls those zones together or breaks down the barriers between them.
Lessing: Yes, but let me do something different about this book. It was written out of this experience. When I was in my late thirties and early forties my love life was in a state of chaos and disarray and generally no good to me or to anybody else and I was, in fact, and I knew it, in a pretty bad way. Unconsciously I used a certain therapeutic technique which just emerged from my unconscious. I had an imaginary landscape in which I had a male and female figure in various relationships. And don’t forget this was twenty years ago or so and this whole business about what men are and what women are was a question of debate and, of course, it still is. I made the man very strong as a man, responsible for what he had to do and autonomous in himself, and I made the woman the same because I was very broken down in various ways at that time, and this went on for some years in fact. And then I read about it; it is a Jungian technique. They tell you that if you have some part of you which is weak, you deliberately fantasize it strong, make it as you would like it to be. Now the fact that when I wrote it it turned out somewhat differently has got nothing to do with it; this book goes right down into me pretty deep. How and why, I really don’t know. This book is the result not of any theories or ideas, but of some pretty close work of the imagination on my experience of the past.
Bigsby: Why did you take so long to get round to writing it down, if it came out of that experience?
Lessing: I suppose it went underground and came out in this form. It was marvelous to write this book. I really enjoyed writing it because it was so easy, and there is a level that I hit and I wrote it out of that level. It will never happen again.
Bigsby: Can I revert to asking you a question about novel-writing and the structure of the novel? The “Free Woman” section of The Golden Notebook is a conventional novel, but the book as a whole is about the inadequacy of the conventional novel in that it is about the complexity that has to be rendered down finally into a fixed form. Isn’t that reductiveness in a sense unavoidable, whatever technique you are using? In that novel you were drawing attention to the problem, but drawing attention to the problem doesn’t solve the problem. Is it a solvable problem? Isn’t art always reductive?
Lessing: Yes, it is, but that is why we are all breaking the form, we have to break it. The five-volume or three-volume realistic novel seems to me dead – the family novel. Well, maybe it is not dead, but I am not interested in it. I am much more interested in a bad novel that doesn’t work but has got ideas or new things in it than I am to read yet again the perfect small novel. I read somewhere the other day that in 1912 in China when the civil war was all around