certitude in George Eliot which you would not find, let’s say, in Chekhov. There’s something tight there in judgment. I admire George Eliot enormously, I am not saying I don’t. But there is something too cushioned in her judgments.
Bigsby: In talking about a climate of ethical judgment were you suggesting that there is a necessary relationship between art and morality, or that there should be, that art is a moral force in some way?
Lessing: I don’t know if there should be. But if you write a book which you don’t see as moral believe me your readers do, and that’s something that I can’t ever quite come to terms with. Now The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five I almost regard as outside judgment because it’s a legend. It is full of forgiveness. Wouldn’t you say it was full of forgiveness? An old warrior of the sex war simply shrugs his shoulders and gives up and laughs; I mean, that is something.
Bigsby: Yes, I think it is, but reverting to this question of why you admire the nineteenth-century novel, why did you yourself move away from that tradition which you wanted to claim early on?
Lessing: Because it’s too narrow, that’s why, because we have gone beyond it. Let’s take Anna Karenina. What a marvelous book! It is all about the social problems which existed in a very narrow, bigoted society and which was completely unnecessary. In fact, a good deal of Victorian fiction can be classified like that. Look at Hardy, for example. These tragedies are mini-tragedies because they derive from fairly arbitrary social conditions; they are not rooted in any human nature. When you finish reading Anna Karenina you think, My God, here is this woman ruined and destroyed because of this stupid, bloody society and it does make it a smaller novel in my opinion. Because it is Tolstoy it is full of the most marvelous things but in actual fact the basic story is a story about nothing, about a local society, a very local, temporary set of social circumstances. My train of thought was that we now live with our heads in the middle of exploding galaxies and thinking about quasars and quarks and black holes and alternative universes and so on, so that you cannot any more get comfort from old moral certainties because something new is happening. All our standards of values have been turned upside down, I think. Not that I don’t think life doesn’t do that for you anyway because it seems to me there is a process of losing more and more conviction all the time. I really did have very firm opinions about all kinds of things even fifteen years ago, which I am unable to have now because the world has got too big, everything is too relative. What’s true in one society isn’t true in another. What is true for one time isn’t true five years later.
Bigsby: So in fact there are no fixed moral standards.
Lessing: No, I don’t think there can be any fixed moral standards. I mean, you can pay lip service to a fixed moral standard because it saves you trouble, which I am perfectly prepared to do. I have got a different attitude towards hypocrisy, perhaps.
Bigsby: Yet isn’t there a strong moral drive in your work, a sense of trying to stop a headlong rush towards disaster by deflecting your reader away from a dangerous path.
Lessing: When you say that, it sounds as though I believe I can do it.
Bigsby: I half-think you do.
Lessing: I think in the past I have had some such thoughts, that if enough writers write this, which God knows we do, if enough writers say, “For God’s sake, look at what is happening,” things might change. But I have gone back to a thought I had in the Children of Violence series right at the beginning. I reread Martha Quest recently. Do you remember the passage when she stands at the door and watches the prisoners walk past in handcuffs and thinks that this has been described now in literature for so long and nothing has changed. Well, you know, this is a very terrible thought for a writer to have, and this is another of these complexes I live with because with one-half of myself I think I don’t see the point of it, I don’t think we change anything.
Bigsby: That is the function of art then, is it, to change reality or to change the way people perceive reality?
Lessing: I think the function of real art, which I don’t aspire to, is to change how people see themselves. I wonder if we do. If we do it is very temporary. Let’s go back to the Russians. You can say that Turgenev and Tolstoy and all that crowd of giants, in fact, changed how people saw themselves. They did, but to what end? Because look at the Russians now. I have just finished reading a book called The Russians, by an American correspondent in Russia, and it is very clear there is very little difference between a communist society and a capitalist society. I think perhaps the communist society is worse, but there isn’t very much difference; they have got a new ruling class, a differently based class, but it is a highly privileged class that has got every intention of hanging on to its privileges, and a whole mass of serfs who get very little. And, as for freedom, there is as little of it as there was under the czars. So you ask yourself, I ask myself, if you can have a blaze of marvelous writers, which they had, all shouting the same thing, which they did, in one way or another, and yet they have so little effect, what then?
Now it so happens that I am a writing animal and I can’t imagine myself not writing; I literally get quite ill if I don’t write a bit. Perhaps that is my problem and not anyone else’s.
Bigsby: But I wonder if in a sense you don’t compound that determinism. Take a book like Shikasta. Contained in it is a version of world history, history as pathology, as degeneration, as movement towards catastrophe. But we discover that that movement is not chance, it is not arbitrary; it is actually the result of intervention, of manipulations by various distant star systems. That being so, aren’t you proposing a determinism in which it is impossible to resist this onward movement because it derives from outside of humanity?
Lessing: Well, you see, this is what I think I think, or what I think now. I don’t know what I will think in ten years’ time. I think, in fact, that we do not have much influence on events, but we think we do, we imagine we do. There is a marvelous Sufi story about the mouse who, through a series of accidents, becomes the owner of a cow. It has the end of a rope which goes around the cow’s neck in its mouth and as the cow wanders out across the countryside it cannot control the cow. But as the cow stops to eat some grass it shouts, “That’s right, eat up some grass,” and when the cow turns left it shouts, “That’s right, turn left.” Well, this is what I think we’re like because it seems to me self-evident. I know that is arrogant, but just look at the course of events. We are continually, and by “we” I am now talking about politicians, suggesting decisions to cope with the results of other decisions which have turned out quite differently from what was expected. We do not plan, we do not say what is going to happen.
Bigsby: And is there a governing manipulative force behind this?
Lessing: No, I don’t think so. But I do not see humanity as the great crown of all creation. Let’s put it this way: we are sending rockets at this moment around Jupiter. Why do we assume that we are the only people with technological knowhow when the astronomers and physicists talk in terms of planets, many many hundreds of thousands of inhabited planets. I mean, it is not some lunatic novelist who is talking. The novelist now cannot keep up with the physicists in what they say.
Bigsby: Isn’t there a danger, though, that if you accept this view you are in fact advising people that there is no point in playing a role in the social world or indeed in attempting to intervene in history at all? You are inviting them to be supine in the face of violence.
Lessing: No, I am not. Certainly I would never have anything
