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The article examines Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook as a crucial transitional text between modernist and postmodernist periods. In situating the novel between these two periods, special attention is paid to the way that the narrative seems to construct authorial and female subjectivity through intermittent effacements of the physical self, which the text constitutes as a gesture toward "freeing" writing from the constraints of embodied expression. Engaging the theories of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Helene Cixous, the article looks at The Golden Notebook's representations of pleasure, subjectivity, and the author-figure's authority to examine how Lessing's novel both borrows from and reacts against its modernist predecessors James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, as well as how it imagines potential possibilities for authorial and female subjectivity in the postmodern era.
Keywords: Doris Lessing / modernism / postmodernism / subjectivity
The structure of The Golden Notebook depends on the conceit that Anna, the protagonist, is a "real" woman and writer. Initially, the narrative indicates this by organizing the notebooks, which readers believe that Anna composes and which make up the bulk of the text, in such a way that they seem to interrupt the objective narration of Anna's "real" story that takes place in the Free Women Sections. As readers proceed to the end of the novel, however, making their way toward the end through the inner Golden Notebook, it becomes apparent that Anna also writes the Free Women sections, and that, in fact, Free Women is not Anna's "real" story but rather a fiction, her second novel. Once readers realize this, they can therefore perceive, as Molly Hite notes in "Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City: Ideology, Coherence, and Possibility," that the novel's structure works like a Möbius strip: its content folds back in on itself, with the "end" of the novel returning the reader to its beginning (22).2 Thus, as readers consider The Golden Notebook, they must consider the interlocking issues of how Anna operates as a "real" writer, which the turn at the novel's end with regard to Free Women only reinforces, and how the novel's structure compels readers to look both forward and backward as they read, distinguishing the characteristics of a fictionalized character Anna from the...