The Golden Notebook #3: Nesting Dolls
Autofiction, Metafiction, and Subjectivity
Daunting Classic: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Progress: 63 Days, 228 Pages
The Golden Notebook #1: Artists Talking
The Golden Notebook #2: Cynicism vs. Idealism
Many a daunting classic are considered such because of their verbosity and style, but for The Golden Notebook its formidability is all about structure. In The Golden Notebook #1, we explored the opening 60-page scene which, while being impressive in its ability to set up the whole moral issue of the novel, is a somewhat conventional piece of fiction/autofiction—a writer making her protagonist a writer and putting them in a conventional novelistic scene (Wikipedia definition of autofiction as a helpful reminder: “An author may decide to recount their life in the third person, to modify significant details and characters, use invented subplots and imagined scenarios with real-life characters in the service of a search for self.”).
But autofiction is often the smoke that warns the fire of metafiction could be around the corner, and such is the case for The Golden Notebook (Wikipedia again: “Metafiction is a form of fiction that emphasizes its own narrative structure in a way that inherently reminds the audience that they are reading or viewing a fictional work.”). The title The Golden Notebook is a reference to the novel’s true structure, which is the novelist protagonist, Anna, looking back on her life through her notebooks:
“The four notebooks were identical, about eighteen inches square, with shiny covers, like the texture of a cheap watered silk. But the colours distinguished them—black, red, yellow, blue.”
In The Golden Notebook #2, we analyzed the first notebook—the black notebook—that was a portion of an autofictional novel that Anna writes about her youth as an idealistic communist living in Africa, and the inherent tension between idealism and cynicism. The black notebook is metafictional, but it is a group story—the narrator observing other characters and telling their stories—which keeps this device somewhat at a distance. So it’s not until the second notebook—the yellow one—that the metafictional aspect of The Golden Notebook announces itself more loudly. In contrast the yellow notebook “looks like the manuscript of a novel…It certainly began like a novel”, and is a much more intimate autofictional retelling of an affair.
The yellow notebook is where things get a little mind-bending structurally and metafictionally: we’re reading Lessing tell us about an affair she may have had through the mediation of Anna who is telling us an affair she may have had through the mediation of Ella who has an affair with the fictionalized Paul. This whisper-down-the-lane literary device is meant to show the reader that the writer is very aware of not putting any of her experiences or personal points of view into too neat of a box. By putting three layers of fictional interpretation between her actual experience and what’s expressed on the page, Lessing makes us hyper conscious of the subjectivity of traditional fiction and its role of prescribing pat themes and points of view through carefully constructing an authoritative narrative (in Lessings’ words mediated through Anna’s analysis of her own novel: “Literature is analysis after the event.”). But because we are aware that the truth is being slightly tweaked by Lessing, her character Anna, and Anna’s character Ella, their clear points of view about men or relationships or reality, never assert themselves as correct.
Auto and meta fiction paired together cut both ways. On one hand these techniques are the author telling the reader that the novel is fabricated and embellished. On the other hand, these nesting doll structures are an admission by the author to the sophisticated modern reader that they are bending the truth. The honest liar is more trustworthy than a liar who insists on their honesty (the Liar’s Paradox). It's no wonder then, given Lessings’ choice of structure, which constantly undermines the authority of the author, that her autofictional novelist Anna gives some of the best lines not to her autofictional creation Ella but to the characters around her.
Paul, the man Ella is having an affair with, delivers a more cogent moral speech than Ella ever does:
“You and I, Ella, we are failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened by his landlord and of the police is a slave.”
And it’s a character we never meet, Stephanie (whom we begin to suspect is Paul’s second mistress after Ella), who delivers the most devastating line about sexism in a story Paul tells Ella one night together:
“But my dear Paul, women of any sense know better, after all these centuries, than to interrupt when men start telling them how they feel about sex.”
Lessing, Anna, and Ella may each have their hard-earned points of view on the world, shaped by their experiences and observations, but Lessing never lets any of them rule the day. Structurally and ideologically The Golden Notebook is hell-bent on never letting the reader rest or forget the role of subjectivity. If you’re looking for an easy answer about political ideology, women’s liberation, or relationships, Lessing’s main point so far seems to be: good luck ever finding a simple answer.
Taking our head out of Lessings’ mind blender for a second, it is curious to think that the first daunting classic we read by a man in the 19th century, Melville who lived in obscurity as a novelist and had almost no reason to believe his authority, wrote with an absolute certainty about the way he saw the world (mostly that whales and the ocean were awesome); and that our first daunting classic by a woman in the 20th century, Lessing who won the Nobel Prize, writes in the most complex, tangled way as to never indulge herself in creating a novel with an authoritative point of view.
Thank you for returning to The Golden Notebook. I found your analysis very interesting and it helps me understand the book better.