湖南自考英语毕业论文：Literary Review of Doris Lessing and The Golden Notebook

gmenting the book into the four notebooks and one realistic short novel, Doris Lessing allows the reader to perceive diverse facets of realities from multiple perspectives, just as cubists have done in their paintings. While keeping the traditional temporal form of story telling, she experiments with the techniques of juxtaposition and cross-reference to achieve the spatial effect of visual arts. The integration of time and space makes her work escape the limitation of literary narratives, thus, acquiring a greater potential in its readings. The device of making the novel rolling in time and at the same time, extending in space, bears much resemblance with the artistic technique of time-space union in cubists’ compositions. In addition, more than once the reader feels the presence and the intervention of the writer herself in the book. The intervention of the writer and her continual comments on the novel writing in the book render the book highly reflexive. The highly reflexive quality in The Golden Notebook also proves its heritage from Cubism.

It is not unexpected that the form of The Golden Notebook is a cubist work in a literary sense in terms of its aesthetic shaping principles since Lessing and Picasso share the same view as to the inaccessibility of reality and the technique of representing reality. So the form in The Golden Notebook itself is a representation and a metaphor of Lessing’s understanding of external reality and the relation between reality and the representing form.

The shaping principles of Cubism are only one part of the shaping principles of the form in Lessing’s remarkable work. The shaping dynamics of a work in a particular historical time is very complex and is determined by many factors. Nevertheless, it provides a fresh reading of the novel and proves Lessing’s great ability to produce a great work characteristic of creativity and originality.

The thesis has examined closely the technical characteristics and the shaping principles in the form of The Golden Notebook. As Terry Eagleton suggests, the form is the true bearer of ideology. The examination of the novel form in The Golden Notebook should go deeper to its ideological core, which constitutes broader and more complex social and political context from which a specific work arises. Although the ideology behind the novel form is too big a topic to be covered in this thesis, the research on the ideology in the form is a worthwhile effort. The further investigation on the ideology in the form of The Golden Notebook is to be tackled in the near future.

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