The Fiction of Doris Lessing by Ratna Raman

Author:Ratna Raman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

V

Eschewing Violence: Lessing’s Feminist Formulations of the 1980s

Lessing’s fictional output after the 1960s is characterised by increasing experimentation with form, indicating her innovation with narrative techniques. Using a whole range of genres, Lessing articulates an insistent questioning of older patriarchal structures of authority and knowledge. Her earlier work revealed its critical distance from Eurocentric belief in technological progress and the making of ‘computer man’1 and also registered how accelerating violence characterised most human activity—the wars of conquest, territorial and national disputes, bombs, the stockpiling of weapons and the existence of nuclear arsenals being some immediate examples that come to mind.

All of Lessing’s early novels explore violence in some form or the other. However, in her work written in the 1980s, she examines in minute detail the structures of violence that have been built into contemporary social and political life. Three novels written by Lessing which focus on the issue of violence are The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980),2 The Good Terrorist (1985)3 and The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987).4 There are obvious generic differences among the three novels and the nature of political struggles charted in them is extremely diverse, yet all three texts focus on extant violence.

Marriages, the second novel in Lessing’s science fiction series Canopus in Argos, is written in the format of ‘fable or myth’.5 It looks at the possibilities of growth in magical intergalactic space, in the absence of the violence and control exerted by different kinds of institutions. Although it is part of a series, Marriages also works as a self-contained unit—providing a significant point of reference for two other novels.

The Good Terrorist, placed in a First World country, provides an acerbic critique of radical left politics in Britain in the 1980s. Written in the realist tradition, it portrays the unmitigated disaster caused due to the adoption of violence by a Left commune in contemporary London. Chronologically the last novel in this discussion, The Wind is in part a travelogue—put together after Lessing’s survey of ground realities among dissident Afghan refugees in Islamabad. Although the travelogue documents the condition of the Afghan refugees—both civilians and the mujahidin—actively resisting Russian invasion, Lessing begins this account by invoking an ancient myth. She invokes the legend of sisters Helen and Cassandra, the daughters born of the mating of Leda and Zeus—which is supposed to have ushered in the very beginnings of European civilisation.

As adult women implicated in the war by belonging to one of the tribes at war, both of them wait for Troy to be vanquished. Helen, whose elopement with Paris triggers the invasion of Troy, is shown as excitedly anticipating the thrill promised by the event, to say nothing of meeting the men fighting in the war. Her sister Cassandra, whose response is very different, shudders as she prophesies its horrors. We are made to recognise that Helen and Cassandra are also in a sense ‘children of violence’, as they have witnessed and been subject to incessant warfare—from the very moment of their conception to their adult years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.