what I have learnt has become very unconscious and has come out differently. But I am not at this moment qualified to judge. One cannot judge the processes of sea change until later. In ten years’ time I might be able to.
Bigsby: But one thing that Al.Ith has to learn sounds very close to what you are describing. You are saying that the individual has to learn to see himself outside of the group, outside of that set of assumptions. This is what Al.Ith herself has to learn; she has to move outside the group in which she feels so much at home, and for whom she in a sense resonates.
Lessing: I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but I suppose so.
Bigsby: And the marriage which is contracted and the subsequent marriage, as there are two, isn’t that the marriage of two people who are themselves being forced out of their set of presumptions? And presumably some kind of new quality is coming out of that, some third thing which pulls those zones together or breaks down the barriers between them.
Lessing: Yes, but let me do something different about this book. It was written out of this experience. When I was in my late thirties and early forties my love life was in a state of chaos and disarray and generally no good to me or to anybody else and I was, in fact, and I knew it, in a pretty bad way. Unconsciously I used a certain therapeutic technique which just emerged from my unconscious. I had an imaginary landscape in which I had a male and female figure in various relationships. And don’t forget this was twenty years ago or so and this whole business about what men are and what women are was a question of debate and, of course, it still is. I made the man very strong as a man, responsible for what he had to do and autonomous in himself, and I made the woman the same because I was very broken down in various ways at that time, and this went on for some years in fact. And then I read about it; it is a Jungian technique. They tell you that if you have some part of you which is weak, you deliberately fantasize it strong, make it as you would like it to be. Now the fact that when I wrote it it turned out somewhat differently has got nothing to do with it; this book goes right down into me pretty deep. How and why, I really don’t know. This book is the result not of any theories or ideas, but of some pretty close work of the imagination on my experience of the past.
Bigsby: Why did you take so long to get round to writing it down, if it came out of that experience?
Lessing: I suppose it went underground and came out in this form. It was marvelous to write this book. I really enjoyed writing it because it was so easy, and there is a level that I hit and I wrote it out of that level. It will never happen again.
Bigsby: Can I revert to asking you a question about novel-writing and the structure of the novel? The “Free Woman” section of The Golden Notebook is a conventional novel, but the book as a whole is about the inadequacy of the conventional novel in that it is about the complexity that has to be rendered down finally into a fixed form. Isn’t that reductiveness in a sense unavoidable, whatever technique you are using? In that novel you were drawing attention to the problem, but drawing attention to the problem doesn’t solve the problem. Is it a solvable problem? Isn’t art always reductive?
Lessing: Yes, it is, but that is why we are all breaking the form, we have to break it. The five-volume or three-volume realistic novel seems to me dead – the family novel. Well, maybe it is not dead, but I am not interested in it. I am much more interested in a bad novel that doesn’t work but has got ideas or new things in it than I am to read yet again the perfect small novel. I read somewhere the other day that in 1912 in China when the civil war was all around they were still writing the most exquisite little poems about apple blossoms and so on, and I have got nothing against exquisite little poems about apple blossoms and I very much enjoy reading the small novel about emotions in the shires, but I do regard it as dead.
Bigsby: Is that why you have responded so enthusiastically to science fiction? You said in the introductory note to Shikasta that it enables you to be both experimental and traditional, in a way that I suppose Marriages is because there is a recognizable traditional element there.
Lessing: I think that is a traditional book. I think it is almost a timeless sort of book, where Shikasta is a mess, but at any rate it is a new mess.
Bigsby: Marriages is a sort of legend or myth?
Lessing: Well, yes, I have been fascinated with science fiction and space fiction because it is full of ideas. In science fiction the real scientist who writes it will produce some scientific idea and take it to its logical conclusion and say, “Well, if you do this, that will happen,” and so on, which I find fascinating, though very often I can’t follow the science. And I am sure that this genre of science fiction has educated a whole generation of young people into thinking scientifically, which they certainly don’t get where they’re taught.
Bigsby: In the prefatory note to Shikasta you seem to suggest that the novelist is driven beyond realism because reality itself has become more fantastic. I wonder if that is really the reason or whether, at least in your case, it isn’t because you believe that reality is more dense, more profound, more various than we usually assume; in other words, reality has not changed. What has been failing is our perception of the fact that it has been this.
Lessing: This is true, of course, because our view of ourselves changes all the time. Sometimes this view is based on some kind of mythical framework, legendary framework, like people we describe as backward, or it can be based on fact. We like to think of ourselves as based on facts, but the facts are becoming so extraordinary.
Bigsby: I don’t know that they are any more extraordinary now than they used to be. For people who believed that the earth was flat it must have been quite a staggering thing to discover that it wasn’t. In a sense contemporary reality is much less extraordinary than that. We are now attuned to absorb almost anything within very rapid time. It becomes part of our world view. A few hundred years ago it would take a century to get people to accept things.
Lessing: Yes, that is true, I suppose. Things have speeded up so fast that we can cope with it … There is a point I want to make about writing, or telling stories. It is a thought that I can’t come to terms with: why do we tell stories? What is the function of the storyteller? We never stop telling ourselves stories. It is the way we structure reality; we tell stories all day, don’t we? And when we go to sleep we tell ourselves stories because a dream is a story, maybe sometimes very logical and straightforward and sometimes not, but there is something in us that needs stories. I heard someone on the radio the other night say that the dream is a way of reprogramming our minds. This is a theory, but when somebody sits down to write a novel, we don’t know what we are doing. Why does humanity have this need?
Bigsby: In fact storytellers play an important part in Marriages, don’t they? The narrator is a professional storyteller; that is, his cultural function is a storyteller, isn’t it? A singer of songs.
Lessing: I wanted one voice so I had to think who was likely to have that one voice. I couldn’t have either Al.Ith or Ben Ata because they were too partial, or even my lovely servant, who I adore.
Bigsby: You have an interest in the realm of the subconscious and to some extent what is now called paranormal. Now that is not just as metaphor, is it? You mean that literally?
Lessing: Yes, literally. It is what I have experienced and what a lot of other people have experienced.
Bigsby: Telepathy, for example.
Lessing:
