Doris Lessing
ON THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
The shape of this novel is as follows: There is a skeleton,
or frame, called
Free Women,
which is a conventional short novel,
about 60,000 words long, and which could stand by itself. But it
is divided into five sections and separated by stages of the four Note–
books - Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue. The Notebooks are kept by
Anna Wulf, a central character of
Free Women.
She 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.
Pressures, inner and outer, end the Notebooks; a heavy black line is
drawn across the page of one after another. But now that they are
finished, from their fragments can come something new,
The Golden
Notebook.
Throughout the Notebooks people have discussed, theorized, dog–
matized, labeled, compartmented - sometimes in voices so general
and representative of the time that they are anonymous. You could
put names to them like those in the old Morality Plays: Mr. Dogma
and Mr. I-Am-Free-Because-I-Belong-Nowhere, Miss I-Must-Have–
Love and-Happiness and Mrs. I-Have-To-Be-Good-At-Everything-I–
Do, Mr. Where-Is-A-Real-Woman? and Miss Where-Is-A-Real-Man?,
Mr. I'm-Mad-Because-They-Say-I-Am, and Miss Life-Through-Ex–
periencing-Everything, Mr. I-Make-Revolution-And-Therefore- I-Am,
and Mr. and Mrs. If-We-Deal-Very-Well-With-This-Small-Problem–
Then-Perhaps-We-Can-Forget-We-Daren't-Look-At-The-Big-Ones. But
they have also reflected each other, been aspects of each other, given
birth to each other's thoughts and behavior -
are
each other, form
wholes.
In
the inner "Golden Notebook," things have come together,
