“Through That Gap the Future Might Pour”: Dreaming the Post-Cold War World in The Golden Notebook

Abstract

One of the complexities a reader encounters in the formal design of The Golden Notebook is the text’s constitution by a dizzying assortment of subtexts of varying style and mode. There are not only the five notebooks kept by Anna Wulf and the manuscript of her new novel, Free Women, which frames them, but these inner texts are themselves filled with recounted stories, fictional scenarios, memory exercises, and literary parodies. At the experimental edge of this range of material are two particular forms: the several assemblages of newspaper cuttings—the reports of violence, unrest, and war which, at different times, Anna pastes into each notebook and with which she covers the walls of her flat near the emotional climax of the novel—and numerous recorded dreams. These, like the newspaper cuttings, appear in nearly all sections of The Golden Notebook. In this chapter, I want to pursue the links between these most outward- and inward-facing of the modes that Doris Lessing portrays as available for interpreting the world, for together they advance her search, with this novel, for a literary form relevant to what Anna calls “the fragmentation of everything” in the social and psychic environment of postwar Western life (GN 288). This “painful disintegration,” I will emphasize, includes the coherent world-picture and dreamworld that communism had provided but which has for Anna—as it had for Lessing and many of her erstwhile comrades in the fifties Britain—been seen to shatter, crack up, or dissolve “against the density of our experience” (288).