The Historicity of Self-Constitution in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook – A

Hegelian Critical Reading

David Proud

In The Golden Notebook Lessing set out ‘to give the ideological “feel” of our mid-century’,1

as “Marxism”, and its various offshoots, has fermented ideas everywhere’.2 And yet the

discrediting of the political system that had informed the moral and political certainties of the

novel’s protagonist, Ann Wulf, has left her disillusioned and disorientated, which is mirrored

in the book’s structure. A short novel called Free Women, featuring Anna as the central

character, divides into five sections that frame four notebooks appearing in consecutive

stages, black, red, yellow and blue. As Lessing explains: ‘[Anna] keeps four, and not one

because, as she recognizes, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of

chaos, of formlessness – of breakdown’.3

According to Thorpe, ‘Lessing aspired to meet the need for a more varied view of the

human condition… [Anna]… must make her life as she goes along, or be torn and

fragmented by it’.4 But fragmentation implicates a prior unity of that which is fragmented,

thereby raising the question, how did Ann arrive at this condition? In this essay, I shall argue

that Anna characterizes Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. Marx, an avowed ‘pupil of that

mighty thinker’,5 Hegel,6 was particularly inspired by the latter’s historical development of

self-identity, and whose philosophical outlook, as Wood has said:

1 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, p. XVII.2 Ibid., p. XVII.3 Ibid., p. XIII.4 Michael Thorpe, Writers and their Work: Doris Lessing (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1973), p. 26.5 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Random House, 1977), C1: 27/97, (quoted in Wood 1993: p. 414).6 In 1915, Lenin wrote: ‘… it is impossible to understand Marx’s Capital … without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!’ (Lenin 1961: p. 180).

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…treats the world as a complex of processes rather than things, reveals everything to be shot through with

tensions and contradictions demanding resolution and hence to be transitory, and involved in an inevitably

progressive process of development.7

I shall argue that, at some fundamental level, there is a narrative of human experience

underlying the manifest heterogeneity or variety of human existence recorded in The Golden

Notebook, the development of which accounts for Anna’s unhappy consciousness, and which

is intelligible in terms of Hegel’s account of experience as a process.8

Anna acknowledges to herself that each of her notebooks fails to record experience

faithfully. The yellow notebook, a manuscript of a novel, tells of an affair between Ella and

Paul, but Anna concedes that: ‘As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a

pattern. And the pattern of an affair… is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is

untrue. Because while living through something one doesn’t think like that at all’.9 That is:

‘Literature is analysis after the event’.10 And the blue notebook, Anna’s personal journal

wherein she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life, she ‘had expected to be the

most truthful of the notebooks’, and yet it:

… is worse than any of them. I expected a terse record of facts to present some sort of a pattern when I read

it over, but this sort of record is [just] false… because of its assumption that if I wrote ‘at nine-thirty I went

to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated’, this would be more real than if I simply wrote

what I thought.11

7 Allen W. Wood, ‘Hegel and Marxism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 416.8 Hegel uses erfahren for ‘experience’, the root meaning of which is ‘to set out on a journey to explore or get to know something’. (Inwood 1992: 95).9 Ibid. 1, p. 213.10 Ibid.11 Ibid., p. 438.

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Anna exhibits an acute sense of self-awareness, however, whereby, as Taylor has noted,

offering an Hegelian interpretation, the novel ‘is the stage where the formal and ideological

contradictions of both realism and liberal humanism are most explicitly acted out and the

position of the self-conscious, angst-ridden, isolated woman artist debated’.12 To put it in

Hegelian terms, Anna is self-conscious in that she is for herself, her self-conception, is an

important component of what she is in herself. How she appears to herself is part of what she

actually is. This, for Hegel, is the definition of self –consciousness:13

This in-itself has to express itself outwardly and become for-itself, and this means simply that it has to posit

self-consciousness as one with-itself.14

It follows from this that it is possible for Anna to make herself different through

apprehending herself as different. And because that which Anna is in herself is at any time

the consequence of such an unfolding process that is conditioned by her attitudes, as a self-

conscious individual she has a history as well as a past. Anna thereby provides for herself an

historical narrative,15 a distinctive method of understanding herself as an historical, self-

conscious individual.

But if to be for herself an historical individual is to constitute herself as in herself a self-

consciously historical individual, this raises the question, what does it mean for anything to

be something for something else? For Hegel ‘self-consciousness is Desire’,16 whereby

objects are classified into those that satisfy the desire and those that do not, and at the very

least the most basic form of Anna’s self-awareness may be understood as a development of

the primary structure of her sexual awareness, including her responsive activity. As Wilson 12 Jenny Taylor, ‘Introduction: situating reading’ (in Taylor 1982: pp. 1 – 42), p. 7.13 Lessing’s ‘biggest problem’ is to be ‘always wrestling with words that haven’t got the meaning you want them to have’. (Ingersoll 1996: , p. 92).14 Georg Wilhelm Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 26.15 Hegel’s ‘Erinnerung’, which means ‘a reminder’, but also ‘memory, recollection’. (Inwood: 1992, p. 186). ‘[He] takes erinnern to mean, not ‘remind’… but ‘to internalize’…’. (ibid., p. 187).16 Ibid. 14, para. 174.

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has said, ‘Lessing… rejects lesbianism and masturbation as alike pathetic substitutes which

bring only disgust and self-hatred. [Her] sexuality is a response to a man. It must also be a

response to love. Anna, through her creation Ella, bitterly laments the fact that men do not

‘really love’ women, and cannot therefore give them the ‘true’ vaginal orgasm. She longs

only to be swept away by such a love’.17 As Anna tells us about Ella:

… she realises she is falling into a lie about herself, and about women… that when she was with Paul she

felt no sex hungers that were not prompted by him… that her present raging sexual hunger was not for sex,

but was fed by all the emotional hungers of her life… A woman’s sexuality is… contained by a man, if he is

a real man; she is, in a sense, put to sleep by him, she does not think about sex.18

The object of her desire, Paul, has a subjective significance for Ella, defined by the attitude

that motivates her sexual activity. But Ella also assesses Paul, attributing to him an objective

significance, that which he is in himself, that is to say, a ‘real man’. If, however, the object

that was for Ella had not corresponded with what it was in itself this inconsonance would

have resulted in sexual disappointment.

Such experiential episodes are part of a process of learning, and in Ella’s case, her

subjectively appropriate responsive tendencies towards different objects of possible desire

satisfaction become more reliable, in the sense of being more objectively appropriately with

regard to the desire that motivates her sexual activity:

… men approached her and she refused them, because she knew she could not love them. The words she

used to herself were: I won’t sleep with a man until I know I could love him.19

17 Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Yesterday’s heroines’, (in Taylor 1982: pp. 57 – 74), p. 65 – 66.18 Ibid. 1, p. 426.19 Ibid.

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As Wilson puts it, with regard to Anna/Ella: ‘when she is aroused by a man who means

nothing to her emotionally, she catalogues with disgust the physical manifestations of her

arousal’.20 As for Anna’s assessing activity, concerning whether the object in question is in

itself a ‘real man’, she explains the criteria she employs when making such an assessment, in

her description of the American communist Nelson’s courtship of her: ‘He was talking about

me, the sort of life I led. And women always respond at once to men who understand we are

on some kind of frontier… they ‘name’ us. We feel safe with them’.21

Anna is thereby assessor and assessed, which is to say, if her self-consciousness is desire it

is also reciprocal recognition, or taking something as something that something else can be

something for, that is, recognizing it. To be a self-consciousness, as Hegel has said, is to be

something other things can be something for, that is, ‘self-consciousness… exists only in

being acknowledged’.22 To be merely for oneself is not to be self-conscious, for ‘it is only

the motionless tautology od: ‘I am I’.23 Anna’s self-consciousness is in need of another self-

consciousness that presents it objectively with an ideal with which it can identify, a woman

‘on some kind of frontier’. Self-consciousness is a social achievement: ‘A self-consciousness

exists for a self-consciousness’, which is to say, it is an ‘‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is’I’’.24

Anna’s recognition of an ideal man is appropriate given her desire to be recognized as an

ideal woman, a woman ‘on some kind of frontier’, but there is inevitably a disparity between

the self that she is and that which she wants to be. That an ideal aspect, her self-conception,

becomes in this way important to what she is imposes a history upon her, which is to say, by

altering through experience what she is for herself, she develops rather than merely changes.

And Anna is enabled to make a decision about who she is through her pursuit of that detail,

her self-conception, what she is for herself, through identification with that which she is

20 Ibid., p. 66.21 Ibid., p. 451.22 Ibid. 14, para. 178.23 Ibid., para. 167.24 Ibid., para. 177.

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willing to put at risk and perhaps sacrifice. As I am thereby no longer speaking in terms of

Anna’s desires but rather of her commitments, her discovery of her sense of independence, as

a woman ‘on some kind of frontier’, can be explicated in terms of Hegel’s account of a self

encountering another self as it endeavours to determine whether this other self, in this cae

Anna’s ‘real man’, is itself independent:

The presentation of itself… consists in showing… that it is not attached to life… In so far as it is the action

of the other, each seeks the death of the other… But in doing so… action on its own part, is also involved…

the staking of its own life.25

This struggle to the death is a metonymic figure for something more comprehensive, of

course, in that the pivotal component in Anna’s development towards independence is a

willingness to risk her life in the service of a commitment, that is, that which surpasses a

simple desire, such identification being a matter of her willingness to risk and possibly

sacrifice something she actually is in herself for something she is for herself, even if what is

risked is not her life, but only other commitments.26 For instance, she sacrifices her job at the

Party’s publishing house for her ethical principles, no longer accepting ‘the self-deceptive

myths’,27 or its ‘intellectual rottenness’,28 and yet she tells us:

… when I leave the Party… I am going to miss… the company of people who have spent their lives in a

certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their lives must be related to a central

philosophy.29

25 Ibid., para. 187.26 As Sprague has pointed out, Lessing always ‘comes down for commitment over noncommitment and for risk over safe repetition’. (Sprague 1987: p. 53).27 Ibid. 1, p. 324.28 Ibid., p. 326.29 Ibid., p. 321.

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Her sacrifice is a self-constituting act of identification with an ideal in the same sense that

risking or sacrificing her life for it would be, as: ‘The Communist Party, like any other

institution, continues to exist by a process of absorbing its critics into itself. It either absorbs

them or destroys them’.30 Anna refuses to be absorbed, but her simple independence is now

an empty abstract ambition,31 and thereby contradictory, the resolution of which can be

accounted for in terms of Hegel’s indirect representation of two self-consciousnesses that are

locked in conflict: ‘… one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be

for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is… to be for

another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman’,32 whereby there is ‘one being only

recognized, the other only recognizing’.33

Anna adopts a submissive consciousness as she pursues not her own desires and ideals, but

those of Nelson, her ‘real man’, who tells Anna that ‘he had a mortal terror of sex, could

never stay inside a woman for longer than a few seconds, and had never been different’.34

Anna asks herself:

….why did I go on with it? It wasn’t the self-flattery: I can cure this man… the truth is, women have this

deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man… what terrifies me is my willingness. It is what Mother

Sugar35 would call ‘the negative side’ of the woman’s need to placate, to submit. Now I am not Anna, I

have no will…36

However, Nelson, as dominant, and thereby rejecting any constraint on his self-constitutive

authority, is himself a product of Anna’s formative activity, as she builds him up. Anna can

she herself in this product of her labour, an expression of her development toward self-

30 Ibid., p. 322.31 That is, she lingers at ‘some kind of frontier’.32 Ibid. 14, para. 189.33 Ibid., para. 185.34 Ibid., p. 453.35 Anna’s psychotherapist.36 Ibid.

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understanding, but as she strives to understand her self-conscious individuality she becomes

unhappy with her dependent existence as a recognized or constituted consciousness. As

Hegel puts it:

… the duplication which formerly was divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is now

lodged in one… the Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely

contradictory being.37

Anna has attained the condition which Harris has described as ‘the pole of spiritual despair.

This self is the unity of two absolutely opposed selves’.38

Anna would be for herself what she is in herself if she understood that a social

configuration alone can reconcile the contradictions that are incompatible in her individual

self. Instead, she sees her dual nature as originating in two different kinds of thing, that is,

herself as a dependent individual desiring self, that which she experiences as being

fragmented, but which opposes that which Hegel calls the unchangeable,39 her celestial ‘real

man’, figuratively speaking, for whom there is no distinction between what things are for it

and what they are in themselves.

It is this that makes possible Anna’s experience of herself as fragmented, as she cannot

unite herself with that which is unchangeable without conveying her own changeableness into

it, initiating further struggle for herself, an instance of which is her sense of justice40 being

offended with the feel of her lover Michael’s erection against her buttocks as they are lying in

bed:

37 Ibid., para. 206.38 H. S. Harris, Hegel: Phenomenology and System (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1995), pp. 42 – 43.39 ‘… [the unhappy consciousness] comes before itself as opposed to the unchangeable essence’. (Ibid. 14, para. 2100.40 Derrida claims that ‘an idea of justice’ could supply the liberating possibility of Marxism, (Derrida 1994: p. 59), but this would result in just this sort of unhappiness.

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Of course he chooses now, when I am unrelaxed and listening for Janet. But the anger is not related to

him… It is the disease of women in our time… The woman’s emotion: resentment against justice, an

impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The

lucky ones like me – fight it.41

Anna’s initial response to this struggle, however, is a retreat into her inner feelings, in

reverence to the power over her that she grants to her ideal ‘real man’. It is a ‘movement of

an infinite yearning’,42 as Hegel describes it, the expression of a religious sensibility, in

effect, a ‘struggle of the heart and emotions’,43 whereby her ‘thinking is no more than the

chaotic jingling of bells, or a mist of warm incense’,44 or more precisely, in Anna’s case, and

expressed through her dream states, like cavorting butterflies:

… I was faced with the burden of re-creating order out of the chaos that my life had become. Time had

gone, and my memory did not exist, and I was unable to distinguish between what I had invented and what I

had known, and I knew that what I had invented was false. It was a whirl, an orderless dance, like the dance

of the white butterflies in a shimmer of heat over the damp sandy vlei.45

Anna recounts through her dreams this most subjective sense of her changeable individuality

in opposition with that which is unchangeable, Anna’s ideal self-conception that is at risk of

disintegration:

…there was personality apart from the Anna who lay asleep… who that person is I do not know. It was a

person concerned to prevent the disintegration of Anna.

41 Ibid., p. 312.42 Ibid., para. 217.43 Ibid., para. 223.44 Ibid., para. 217.45 Ibid. 1, p. 579.

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As I lay on the surface of the dream-water, and began very slowly to submerge, this person said: ‘Anna,

you are betraying everything you believe in; you are sunk in subjectivity, yourself, your own needs’… The

admonishing person said: ‘Fight. Fight. Fight’.46

Anna thereby aspires through ‘work and enjoyment’ to make her ‘unsubstantial existence a

reality’.47 As she envisages writing another story about Ella, she tells us that:

… I could positively mark the point where Ella left reality… I was thinking that quite possibly these

marvellous, generous things we walk side by side with in our imagination could come into existence, simply

because we need them, because we imagine them. Then I began to laugh because of the distance between

what I was imagining and what in fact I was, let alone what Ella was.48

In accordance with the religious analogy, anna hasa discovered sin,49 expressed through her

assessment of her novel Frontiers of War:50

I said nothing in it that wasn’t true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the

unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the

jungle, for formlessness. It is clear to me that I can’t read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I

were in a street naked.51

Anna’s consciousness now ‘renounces the show of satisfying its feeling of self’, while

languishing in guilt, for she ‘obtains the actual satisfaction of it… for it has been desire,

work, and enjoyment’.52 Her next phase is described by Hegel thus:

46 Ibid., p. 574.47 Ibid. 14, para. 223.48 Ibid. 1, p, 595.49 Anna describes her creation as ‘the woman altogether better than I was’, ibid., p. 595.50 Inspired by Anna’s experiences in Central Africa, before and during World War II: ‘A period of imaginative schizophrenia’, according to Sage, during which Lessing herself ‘was becoming… a psychic communist, [who] had… ‘turned her mind around…’’. (Sage 1983: p. 71).51Ibid. 1, p. 60.52 Ibid. 14, para. 222.

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… as regards the contradictory relation in which consciousnes takes its own reality to be immediately a

nothingness, its actual doing thus becomes a doing of nothing….53

Hence, Anna’s writer’s block.54

There then follows a process whereby Anna renounces her dependence of her particular self

on her ideal, as she sacrifices her individuality by giving up her will or authority to decide for

herself what things are for her:

… consciousness, having nullified the action as its own doing… the surrender of one’s own will is… the

positing of will as the will of an ‘other’… the will which, precisely because it is an ‘other’ for consciousness,

becomes actual for it, not through the Unhappy Consciousness itself, but through a Third, the mediator as

counsellor.55

Saul is the counsellor that is to bring Anna into harmony with her ideal self-conception.

Anna mocks him, accusing him of ‘making sets of moral axioms to save us both with, like

mottoes out of Christmas crackers’,56 but she also tells him ‘you’ve become a sort of inner

conscience or critic…’.57 Anna’s unhappy consciousness, as Hegel says, thereby attempts to

‘free itself from action and enjoyment, so far as they are regarded as its own’, and it ‘casts

upon the mediator or minister [priest] its own freedom of decision, and herewith

responsibility for its own action’.58 That is, it has ‘’… divested itself of its ‘I’…. having

turned its immediate consciousness into a Thing, into an objective existence’.59 Anna finally

53 Ibid. 14, para. 225.54 Or at least we could speculate so, were it not for Anna’s ontological status, that is, outside the fiction that is The Golden Notebook the designator ‘Ann Wulf’ has a failure of reference.55 Ibid. 14, para. 230.56 Ibid. 1, p. 596.57 Ibid., p. 580.58 Ibid. 14, para. 228.59 Ibid., para. 229. Hegel says that: ‘Consciousness is aware of itself as this actual individual in the animal functions’, (ibid., para. 225), and this is what we find with me: ‘… my body was distasteful to me… when I saw my breasts all I could think of was how they were when they were full of milk, and instead of this being pleasurable, it was revolting’. (Ibid. 1, pp. 571 – 572)

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decides ‘to join the Labour Party and teach a night-class twice a week for delinquent kids’,

thereby achieving an objective existence by becoming ‘integrated with British life at its

roots’.60

Anna herself, of course, would be scornful of such a reading of a text that, as Taylor puts it,

‘paradoxically, both operates within and frustrates a consistent history based on the unilinear

progression of narrative time’,61 and that, as Hanson argues, ‘reflects almost every possible

stage and process in the dehumanisation… of the individual… and should be seen as

postmodern and placed in the context of such critics as… Derrida’.62 And for Wilson,

‘Marxism and psychoanalysis – the theories she has used to make sense of her life – in the

end mask the formless inner reality’.63

Anna herself makes explicit to Mother Sugar her view of ‘individuation’:

‘So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognizes one part after another of his earlier life

as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I felt then, is only the

reflection of that… stage in history, then he is free, because he has separated himself from the

experience…’64

Anna is ‘convinced that there are whole areas of me made by the kind of experience women

haven’t had before’,65 and that ‘the raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was

valuable in it and I should holds fast to it’,66 and Wilson claims that ‘both art and theory in

the end go against this feeling’.67

60 Ibid., p. 622.61 Ibid., pp. 7 – 8.62 Clare Hanson, ‘Doris Lessing in Pursuit of the English’ (in Sprague 1990: pp. 61 – 73), p. 68. Similarly, Bentley’s reading suggests Lessing conjectures on the form and function of the novel, relative to the literary/cultural debates of the 1950s/1960s and to British postmodernism. (Bentley 2009: pp. 44 – 60).63 Ibid., p. 6264 Ibid. 1, p. 441.65 Ibid.66 Ibid., p. 221.67 Ibid. 17, p. 62.

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But experience for Anna is something that she does as well as something that happens to

her, and her experience of her ‘formless inner reality’ is to be understood within the context

of her own self-conception and understanding of herself as self-constituting. And as regards

any professed ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’,68 as Lyotard defines the postmodern

condition, for Hegel such scepticism expresses a ‘polemical bearing towards the manifest

independence of things’,69 that is, in the absence of any primary sceptical theory, it enacts a

piecemeal strategy of noncommitment to each claim seeking confirmation, as lacking in

justification:

Point out likeness or identity to it, and it will point out unlikeness or non-identity; and when it is confronted

with what it has just now asserted, it turns round and points out likeness or identity.70

It will therefore be objected that my quotations from the narrative have been intentionally

arranged to accord with a philosophical paradigm, precluding any stage at which the

metanarrative may be challenged. But if Anna’s experience presents to her something that

she assesses to be real, including her ‘real man’, but is instead a deceptive manner by which

something else appears, it is thereby not the process through which her consciousness

develops and educates itself, but only ‘a highway of despair’.71

However, as Mother Sugar tells Anna, ‘the end of an analysis does not mean the end of the

experience itself’.72 Anna may develop into a ‘free woman’, but her commitment to freedom,

as Schlueter has said, ‘is both relative and continually in need of re-examination and

modification as life goes on’.73 Shaw, in reference to Tennyson’s The Making of Man, has

68 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), Introduction, p. xxiv.69 Ibid. 14, para. 202.70 Ibid., para. 205.71 Ibid., para. 78.72 Ibid. 1, p. 235.73 Paul Schlueter, The Novels of Doris Lessing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 116.

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said that only ‘a man who is created in the image of an unchanging God is committed in

advance to a definition of who and what man is’.74 And for Lessing, an avowed ‘architect of

the soul’,75 only at the completion of the construction could she declaim, with the poet’s

‘prophet-eyes’: ‘Hallelujah to the Maker ‘It is finish’d. Man is made’’,76 an espousal,

according to Shaw, of ‘Hegel’s idea that the end of any self-constituting process is

immeasurably greater than its beginning’.77

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