seen what happens.
Bigsby: Early on in your work you were interested in the problem of the individual’s relationship to the group; that is, you had a conception of the individual as apart from the group and then negotiating his or her relationship with it. But isn’t individuality without meaning once you acknowledge sheer determinism?
Lessing: No, I don’t see that at all. I mean, this is a very ancient philosophical debate. Can you have free will if God has planned everything? Well, the answers to that, as you know, have been going on for centuries, particularly in the West.
Bigsby: But your view has changed, hasn’t it, because even in the Children of Violence series at the beginning Martha Quest is very much the focus of the book: things are filtered through her sensibility. But in the last volume, which I presume you hadn’t actually predicted when you started writing the sequence, we move through catastrophe to a situation in which Martha Quest disappears from the center of the novel, and she disappears because the situation has changed fundamentally and she exists only insofar as she serves the perpetuation of the race in some sense. It is the sheer survival of the group that becomes the important thing at that stage. The individual has been reduced by the impact of history.
Lessing: But she has lived her life and has influenced events and individuals.
Bigsby: Yes, but in the context of a deterministic move towards catastrophe. In your later books individuals seem to be admired to the extent that they realize that their chief function is to submerge themselves in a generality. You talk about moving from “I” to “we,” as though a state of being “I” were in some sense undesirable, something to be transcended.
Lessing: I am really not chopping logic. I think that the individual is extremely important. I think the individual is more and more important in what we are going into, which is horrific. I do think that what matters is evolution. I think that the human race is evolving probably into something better through its usual path of horror and mistakes because when have we ever done anything else, when has history ever shown anything different?
Bigsby: So history isn’t pure pathology; it reaches some kind of critical point of regeneration.
Lessing: I don’t think like this. I find it very difficult. You keep saying things are different from each other. You see it as either/or. While there is something in me which I recognize is uniquely me, and which obviously interests me more than other things and which I am responsible for, at the same time I have a view of myself in history, as something which has been created by the past and conditioned by the present. And when I die I will have left something, for good or for bad, not because I am a writer but because I am alive. In the mid-’50s I was preoccupied with the relationship between an individual and political groups because all the people I knew at that time, or nearly all of them, were political in one way or another; they were either Communists, or ex-Communists, or Labour Party. Also, don’t forget it was just after McCarthy in America and I had a lot of American friends and they were very preoccupied with the way they had either given evidence to the Committee or had refused to give evidence. This whole problem of the individual and the group was very strong at that time and in that particular form.//
Bigsby: There was a time when you accused Beckett and others of making what you called “despairing statements of emotional anarchy”: and you said that “the pleasurable luxury of despair, the acceptance of disgust, is as much a betrayal of what a writer should be as the acceptance of the simple economic view of man,” and you identified both of these approaches as a kind of false innocence. Is that a view that you would hold now, and what exactly is the writer’s function then if that isn’t his function?
Lessing: Well, I don’t hold those views now. About the simple economic view of man, of course I hold that; that was a specific statement about a communist view of literature. About the other I don’t remember. You see I don’t remember the emotion that made me write that. I don’t remember why I said those things about writers that I admire. So that has gone. What any writer should do is to write as truthfully as possible about himself or herself as an individual because we are not unique and remarkable people. Over and over again I have had the experience of writing themes that I thought were quite way out and I have discovered, simply by the letters I get, or because ideas surface, that I have been on a fairly low-class common wavelength. Over and over again I have written ideas down that shortly afterwards have become commonplace. I am saying it exactly like that because I don’t want to make it sound something high class. But I do think I have sometimes a sensitivity to what is going to come in five years’ time, and it happened with The Golden Notebook, for example, when I didn’t know I was writing what I was writing.
Bigsby: When you made that comment about Beckett you also said that the writer must become a humanist, feel himself an instrument for change, for good or bad: “it is not merely a question of preventing an evil but strengthening a vision of good that will defeat evil.” That puts enormous weight on art; art becomes an instrument for good in some way.
Lessing: I wouldn’t say that at all now because I don’t know what good and evil is. I think now that if writers write really truthfully (it is very hard, you know, to be truthful, actually) you will find that they are expressing other people.
Bigsby: You have had a sense that the human mind is changing, or the way that we perceive reality is changing; you were suggesting that this might be a result in part of advances in physics. Does that really filter down to the individual, or in what other ways is our sense of reality different now, being perceived differently?
Lessing: Well, I don’t think it is filtering down as fast as it ought, and I think the reason why it doesn’t is a fault in the education system. I am not talking so much about the new ideas in physics, but sociological ideas, some of which are quite shattering in their implications. And they should be taught to children. I think the child should be taught that you may easily find yourself in your life in a situation where you can behave as Eichmann did – I am using Eichmann simply because he is a symbol for mindless obedience. Eighty-five percent of all people, it has been proved, can be expected to behave like this. You may find yourself in such a situation and you must now think about it and prepare yourself for such a choice. In other words, give children choice; don’t let them be precipitated into situations that might arise. And then there is this whole business about thinking and acting as an individual instead of as a member of a group because we now know that very, very few people, a negligible number, are prepared to stand up against a group they are a part of. This has been proved over and over again, by all kinds of experiments; if you put a certain number of people together, people will do anything rather than stand out against it. And it explains, for example, why certain advances of knowledge get accepted with such reluctance. We have discovered a whole armory of facts about human nature since the Second World War. Because of the horror of the Second World War and what we discovered human nature was capable of, research has been going on in universities all over the world in this field. We now know what we are really like. There is also a great deal of knowledge about how groups function.
Bigsby: It seems to me actually that that is a running theme in your work, the need to escape the definition that has been offered to you as a member of a particular group, a race or a country, or in some sense as a sex – the need to escape the type that is offered to you.
Lessing: We live in a series of prisons called race, class, male and female. There are always those classifications.
Bigsby: But equally, I think, in the most recent books, you seem to be urging the breakdown of divisions within the sensibility as well, divisions between the mind and the imagination, the body and
