Putting the Questions Differently

Bigsby: Early on in your work you were interested in the problem of the individual’s relationship to the group; that is, you had a conception of the individual as apart from the group and then negotiating his or her relationship with it. But isn’t individuality without meaning once you acknowledge sheer determinism?

Lessing: No, I don’t see that at all. I mean, this is a very ancient philosophical debate. Can you have free will if God has planned everything? Well, the answers to that, as you know, have been going on for centuries, particularly in the West.

Bigsby: But your view has changed, hasn’t it, because even in the Children of Violence series at the beginning Martha Quest is very much the focus of the book: things are filtered through her sensibility. But in the last volume, which I presume you hadn’t actually predicted when you started writing the sequence, we move through catastrophe to a situation in which Martha Quest disappears from the center of the novel, and she disappears because the situation has changed fundamentally and she exists only insofar as she serves the perpetuation of the race in some sense. It is the sheer survival of the group that becomes the important thing at that stage. The individual has been reduced by the impact of history.

Lessing: But she has lived her life and has influenced events and individuals.

Bigsby: Yes, but in the context of a deterministic move towards catastrophe. In your later books individuals seem to be admired to the extent that they realize that their chief function is to submerge themselves in a generality. You talk about moving from “I” to “we,” as though a state of being “I” were in some sense undesirable, something to be transcended.

Lessing: I am really not chopping logic. I think that the individual is extremely important. I think the individual is more and more important in what we are going into, which is horrific. I do think that what matters is evolution. I think that the human race is evolving probably into something better through its usual path of horror and mistakes because when have we ever done anything else, when has history ever shown anything different?

Bigsby: So history isn’t pure pathology; it reaches some kind of critical point of regeneration.

Lessing: I don’t think like this. I find it very difficult. You keep saying things are different from each other. You see it as either/or. While there is something in me which I recognize is uniquely me, and which obviously interests me more than other things and which I am responsible for, at the same time I have a view of myself in history, as something which has been created by the past and conditioned by the present. And when I die I will have left something, for good or for bad, not because I am a writer but because I am alive. In the mid-’50s I was preoccupied with the relationship between an individual and political groups because all the people I knew at that time, or nearly all of them, were political in one way or another; they were either Communists, or ex-Communists, or Labour Party. Also, don’t 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 what they don’t do. They go off to Katmandu, etc. So I took a great deal of trouble. 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 they were still writing the most exquisite little poems about apple blossoms and so on, and I have got nothing against exquisite little poems about apple blossoms and I very much enjoy reading the small novel about emotions in the shires, but I do regard it as dead.

Bigsby: Is that why you have responded so enthusiastically to science fiction? You said in the introductory note to Shikasta that it enables you to be both experimental and traditional, in a way that I suppose Marriages is because there is a recognizable traditional element there.

Lessing: I think that is a traditional book. I think it is almost a timeless sort of book, where Shikasta is a mess, but at any rate it is a new mess.

Bigsby:Marriages is a sort of legend or myth?

Lessing: Well, yes, I have been fascinated with science fiction and space fiction because it is full of ideas. In science fiction the real scientist who writes it will produce some scientific idea and take it to its logical conclusion and say, “Well, if you do this, that will happen,” and so on, which I find fascinating, though very often I can’t follow the science. And I am sure that this genre of science fiction has educated a whole generation of young people into thinking scientifically, which they certainly don’t get where they’re taught.

Bigsby: In the prefatory note to Shikasta you seem to suggest that the novelist is driven beyond realism because reality itself has become more fantastic. I wonder if that is really the reason or whether, at least in your case, it isn’t because you believe that reality is more dense, more profound, more various than we usually assume; in other words, reality has not changed. What has been failing is our perception of the fact that it has been this.

Lessing: This is true, of course, because our view of ourselves changes all the time. Sometimes this view is based on some kind of mythical framework, legendary framework, like people we describe as backward, or it can be based on fact. We like to think of ourselves as based on facts, but the facts are becoming so extraordinary.

Bigsby: I don’t know that they are any more extraordinary now than they used to be. For people who believed that the earth was flat it must have been quite a staggering thing to discover that it wasn’t. In a sense contemporary reality is much less extraordinary than that. We are now attuned to absorb almost anything within very rapid time. It becomes part of our world view. A few hundred years ago it would take a century to get people to accept things.

Lessing: Yes, that is true, I suppose. Things have speeded up so fast that we can cope with it … There is a point I want to make about writing, or telling stories. It is a thought that I can’t come to terms with: why do we tell stories? What is the function of the storyteller? We never stop telling ourselves stories. It is the way we structure reality; we tell stories all day, don’t we? And when we go to sleep we tell ourselves stories because a dream is a story, maybe sometimes very logical and straightforward and sometimes not, but there is something in us that needs stories. I heard someone on the radio the other night say that the dream is a way of reprogramming our minds. This is a theory, but when somebody sits down to write a novel, we don’t know what we are doing. Why does humanity have this need?

Bigsby: In fact storytellers play an important part in Marriages, don’t they? The narrator is a professional storyteller; that is, his cultural function is a storyteller, isn’t it? A singer of songs.

Lessing: I wanted one voice so I had to think who was likely to have that one voice. I couldn’t have either Al.Ith or Ben Ata because they were too partial, or even my lovely servant, who I adore.

Bigsby: You have an interest in the realm of the subconscious and to some extent what is now called paranormal. Now that is not just as metaphor, is it? You mean that literally?