Reflections on the puddle of life

I’ve made it my mission this year to explore more great female writers, and Doris Lessing was one I wanted to explore. I’ve been reading The Golden Notebook for the past couple of weeks. It’s a pretty good, book. No, actually it’s an excellent book. It’s made me think about a lot of things, you could say it’s opened my mind to a few possibilities, and has forced a degree of clarity on me. At the same time, it’s made me a little crazy, but good crazy. I think.

I don’t know a lot about Lessing. I’d like to research her life a little more. Lessing, from what I can glean from her writing, is the kind of woman I’d have liked to have known. She’s strong, independent, fiercely intelligent and astute. I think she is the kind of woman I would admire and fear at the same time. Admire her because she represents the kind of woman I would like to be; fear her because of her skill for analysis, because she would ‘name’ me and name me inadequate. She got my attention from the preface to my copy of The Golden Notebook. For a start, Lessing left school at 14, and she is quite scathing of ‘education’ as an institution, primarily in the way it causes people to think in terms of ‘success’ and ‘failure’, the grass roots origin of the ‘critic’. This is what Lessing has to say:

It starts when a child is as young as five or six, when he arrives at school. It starts with marks, rewards, ‘places’, ‘streams’, stars – and still in many places, stripes. This horserace mentality, the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to ‘Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z has shown himself as better than Writer A.’ From the very beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms of success and of failure. It is a weeding-out system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my belief – though this is not the place to develop this – that the talents each child has, regardless of his official ‘IQ’, could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success stakes.

The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgement. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply.

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question because he has never been told that they exist…

…It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don’t believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to each child is something like this:
‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it’s the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgement. Those who stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’’

I hear what she’s saying, though not, perhaps, in quite so an uncompromising way, particularly as I hear, too often, teachers who are trying to be ‘educators’ but instead find themselves frustrated by the system, because they are required to teach the ‘national curriculum’, because the requirements of ‘education’ are, at root, laid down by the state however free and enterprising that state may appear to be. We all must fit into this society somewhere, and for those with the desire to teach, to do so despite the restrictions lain upon them, must take extraordinary commitment. But at its core, I agree with what she has to say. In this world, in my society, we often equate intelligence with education but the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Lessing is a great example for how a person may be intelligent but not educated. I have spent many years coming to terms with that idea. I had been on a path that took me to university. I was expected, I expected of myself, to walk out with a good honours degree, a 1.1 or 2.1, no less than that. At 18, I left university after a day. Over the summer leading up to taking my university place, I had been subject to a creeping realisation that I was making a terrible mistake, that it was time to stop walking the path that had been laid down for me by years of social pressure, and start thinking for myself. I walked away from it, and by doing so it created a great deal of pain for me. It was painful turning away from a path I didn’t have to think about, except in the fine detail. It was painful ‘disappointing’ my parents and family who had expected ‘better’ from me. It was painful being subject to criticism of others, friends included, that I had ‘thrown it all away’, that I had rejected something which was simply, obviously the ‘right thing to do’. And there I was, faced with this empty, unstructured future, and from this painful point of nothing I had to build a new path.

Even now there are times when I feel the sting of regret about not getting that degree. I feel, somehow, as though it marks me as inadequate, that I have failed my ‘true potential’. And yet I know this is not true. I could get a degree, easily, because a degree is not about ‘learning’, it is not about ‘education’, it is about proving you can meet a certain set of parameters and once you know what those parameters are you can reach them with a little, well focused effort. A degree is kind of like a passport: it marks and identifies you, and confers upon you a privilege of movement. But it is also inadequate as a form of identity. It may say that you are such and such, and that you are a teacher, and that you are British, but what it does not say is who you are as a person, what kind of teacher you are, and what you feel about being British. It may confer upon you the privilege of movement, but it doesn’t mean that you can or will move, or even confer upon you the right to go anywhere you desire any time that you please. It does not make you ‘free’. In this way I would not trade myself as I am now, an individual having followed my own path, for the girl that I was, walking down the path that had been laid out for me: safe, secure, unthinking.

But I digress. I was talking about Lessing. The other thing she said in her preface which struck me was this, which is Lessing talking about her own struggle with people not understanding her book:

And from this kind of thought has emerged a new conclusion: which is that it is not only childish of the writer to want readers to see what he sees, to understand the shape and aim of a novel as he sees it – his wanting this means that he has not understood a most fundamental point. Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it.

And this, in itself, has formed, or perhaps consolidated, what I think about writing. I have, for some time, felt myself inadequate (there’s that word again) when it comes to analysing a work of fiction. I have, too often, been prepared to listen to those who would tell me my views about a particular work are ‘wrong’ or that I’ve somehow ‘missed the point’ because that is what I thought myself, I doubted myself. Lessing’s comments here have freed my mind on that point. When it comes to interpretation, there are no ‘wrong’ views, there are only views which you see and agree with or don’t see and don’t agree with. It extends to no more than that. And if you can 'see' it too easily, it offers you nothing.

In a strange way, reading that short opening to The Golden Notebook has freed me. It has freed me as a reader and a writer. I think, no I know, I was and have been afraid as a writer. I have been afraid of ‘getting it wrong’, of missing the point, of not fitting the laid down mould of what it means to be a writer and therefore missing the opportunity of being able to claim that as a part of my identity. I have been afraid of negative criticism, of people missing the point of what I’m writing, of writing something intended to be one thing, only for it to be interpreted as something else. I have been afraid of ‘failure’. I realise now what a ridiculous hang up that has been. Because writing is not about success or failure, it is not measurable or quantifiable, it is simply a form of expression, the process of putting words on a page, a narrative used as a vehicle to convey ideas to be interpreted by the reader in a subjective way against their own experience. I realise that novels are just another of our many imperfect forms of communication, that via the novel we can convey the deeper thoughts and ideas that are impossible to convey any other way, the thoughts and ideas that we hide in conversations about football or TV, about the neighbour’s failed marriage or Mrs. Baxter’s unexpected trip to casualty. It is a vehicle which permits me to have a meaningful discussion with someone I will not ever meet, to reach a part of their mind and say: ‘I think this, what do you think?’

The same can be said about life, about work, about relationships. Is there such a thing as ‘success’ or ‘failure’ beyond our own, subjective experience? I think not, and in thinking that thought I realise that I can free myself from a lot of my fears and hang ups. In my job, too, I have been afraid of ‘getting it wrong’, I have been trying to tread the safe path, the one that my manager lays out before me and which at the end of it has a bell that I can ring that says ‘success’. But I will never be happy following that path. It is time to look for my own path.

And I realise, at this point, that I have failed to say anything about what The Golden Notebook is about, and that is perhaps because it is not measurable or quantifiable. It is a strange and chaotic book about a person suffering some kind of mental breakdown. It is about relations between men and women. It is about desire. It is about politics. It is about identity and role. It is about the imperfection of communication, lies, truth and the bits in between. It is about finding your own path, reading the words and applying it to your own, subjective experience.

Why don’t you read it and see?