Putting the Questions Differently - Doris Lessing

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sitting in a restaurant, you say, “She knew now, she had to know at last, that all her life she’d been held upright by an invisible fluid.” Do you think that’s true of women in general?

      Lessing: Really it’s true of everyone in general. But it’s certainly true of women because we’ve been taught to attract attention all our lives. You’re taught to be attractive and to dress attractively. For example, I notice that Women’s Lib women tend to be attractive and to dress attractively. They don’t despise the attention-attracting devices that women have always used. I’m not saying that they should. Far from it. I think a good deal of the depression and the mental breakdown of the middle-aged women are due to the fact they suddenly find they’re not able to command attention the way they’ve always been able to command it. Let’s put it like this: an attractive young woman finds it very hard to appreciate what she really is from her appearance, because she has only to walk into a room, or to put herself into an attention-getting situation, to find, in fact, that she can regulate the kind of attention she gets, fairly clearly. You only have to discover the difference between what you really are and your appearance when you get a bit older, which is a most fascinating experience. It really is. It’s one of the most valuable experiences that I personally have ever had. A whole dimension of life suddenly slides away, and you realize that what, in fact, you’ve been using to get attention, or command attention, has been what you look like, sex appeal or something like that. Once again it’s something that belongs to the condition of being a young woman. It’s a biological thing, yet for half your life or more, you’ve been imagining that this attention has been attracted by yourself. It hasn’t. It’s got totally and absolutely and unopposedly nothing to do with you. It really is the most salutary and fascinating experience to go through. It really is most extraordinarily interesting.

      Hendin: What do you think of the Women’s Movement?

      Lessing: Well, I know very little about it because I’m not involved in it. I’ve met some of the liberation women, and I like them very much personally, but I really do feel that I’ve said all I have to say about this in The Golden Notebook, and some of the things I said about Martha. One can’t go on being preoccupied with the same problem, or the same set of problems. I don’t want to say I’m bored by it, though that’s partly true. It’s just that you work your way out of something, and you go on to something else.

      Hendin: Many of the women in the movement would feel that way too. But I think they would see working their way out of it in maybe slightly different terms. I have a feeling that you stress a kind of individualistic approach, more than they would.

      Lessing: Well, being a writer is a very individualistic thing, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m not altogether sure that I hold with all this, the dogma that everything has to be done in groups. This is only one of the ways of setting up one’s life or one’s politics. It’s a new dogma, you know, one has to be in groups, but why?

      Hendin: I think some of the most important parts of life are lived alone and apart from everyone, men and women alike.

      Lessing: That’s right.

      Hendin: I once heard you lecture, and you described the situation of a writer having to battle against and confront the world’s indifference. Did you find when you first started writing that there was an audience for your work?

      Lessing: You’re putting it very melodramatically. I put it much more clearly than that. I said that when a writer starts, nobody has the slightest interest in reading what he or she has to say, that a writer has to create an audience. I didn’t say anything about battling or anything like that, which I think adds to this somewhat romantic myth about writers being heroic, battling away. I’m always against this romanticizing of situations or people because as soon as you start doing that you lose the capacity to look at a situation coolly, and to see what’s really going on. And there’s far too much of this glamorization of writers and the writing situation.

      Hendin: How do you feel about your own career as a writer?

      Lessing: Well, I have right here a quotation which I took off the wall from the wall-newspaper downstairs, and it reads: “The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible,” and that was written by Tolstoy. And that is what I feel about writing.

       Creating Your Own Demand Minda Bikman

      

      

      Minda Bikman’s interview originally appeared in The New York Times Book Review March 30, 1980. Copyright © 1980 by Minda Bikman. Reprinted with permission.

      Bikman: I found The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five to be a very different kind of novel from its predecessor, Shikasta.

      Lessing: I can’t think of another novel like that one. It’s more a sort of legend than anything. It’s in that kind of territory, a legend or myth. There’s never been a book that I enjoyed writing as much as that one. It was a piece of cake, very unlike most of my books, which are agony. I really loved it. When I finished, I was sad that it was ended. But the relationships between these sorts of stylized men and women – that doesn’t strike you as even somewhat comic? Which was my intention, slightly.

      Bikman: No, I found the relationships all too real. You described so well the problems men and women seem to encounter, the way people are locked into their perceptions of how things should be. But I found it rather sad that the Queen of Zone Three, the heroine of the novel, had to endure such suffering because her way of living no longer worked for her kingdom. I liked her way of life before it changed; I liked its lightness, its sense of ease.

      Lessing: You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, also easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant. I’m not saying good or bad anything. I’m just saying that this is so, whereas the natural male way of going about things is this pompous discipline and lack of subtlety in relations. I’ve recently acquired a thought – but not too seriously, of course – which is: is it possible that women arrived on this planet from a different planet from men at some point? We have such difficulty in relating, in understanding each other. It’s just possible we’re different species altogether. Anyway, that was the idea when I wrote the archetypes of male and female.

      Bikman: It has been reported that when you started writing Shikasta you thought it would be one book but that it expanded into five books. Is it definitely five books? Do you have the next three planned?

      Lessing: There’s no specific number at all. People have announced that I’m doing three or five. I never had any such thought. What I think is that with this kind of structure, there is nothing to stop me from going on quite a bit until I get bored with it. Because there are all kinds of possibilities. I finished the third one just the other day. It is about a Sirian female offical who’s been one for many thousands of years, and the plot, if you can use that word, is that she slowly discovers through those long ages that, in fact, Canopus is a very much more highly developed empire than Sirius [both Sirius and Canopus developed life on Shikasta] because of course Sirius regards itself in many ways equally good. But this is how she learns how much she might still learn. She is very much an official. She is a bureaucrat, and she thinks like one. I made her a female because, after all, female bureaucrats are innumerable now and I haven’t noticed that they’re all that different from men in operation. Somewhere along the line, female good qualities get lost very often when women are put into positions of certain kinds of power.

      I’ve

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