“So Why Write Novels?” The Golden Notebook, Mikhail Bakhtin, and the Politics of Authorship

Abstract

More than fifty years on from the first publication of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, we have reached a juncture from which we can not only survey the history but also consider the future of the novel’s reception. This chapter suggests that the novel’s enduring critical importance proceeds not so much from the way in which it speaks to a particular political or social phenomenon, though that has been the subject of a great deal of illuminating scholarship, but from its metacritical commentary on the function of authorship per se and its relationship to readerly interpretation. In the final paragraph of her 1971 Preface to The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing suggests that the novel “is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood” (GN xx, emphasis in original). How do we as readers of Lessing keep faith with her resistance to codification and also perform our hermeneu-tic task? The Golden Notebook is a novel that sits in a problematic relation to generic definitions; it alternately inhabits and interrogates, underwrites and undermines, the conventions of the novel form and the expectations of a possible readership. The novel’s critical significance stems not simply from the subversion or overturning of existing forms in favor of new ones. Rather, as Nick Bentley suggests in his reading of the novel as “critical fiction,” Lessing has produced a text whose subject is the constant reformulation of literary form itself, a text that has consequently been able to remain in a productively antagonistic relationship with a succession of critical modes (Bentley).