Politics, Letters and the Novel of Ideas: Doris Lessing's Archive

Lessing was right. British literary culture, and above all the influential taste-making apparatus of our discipline which had become institutionalised in the universities, has been hostile to the novel of ideas. Jeanne Marie-Jackson's The African Novel of Ideas (2021) follows Lessing in seeking to defend the form (a key one in African writing) against what she calls ‘Eurocentric literary standards, often limitedly rooted in psychological depth to demonstrate character development’.² In this article, I will briefly anatomise the academic hostility to the novel of ideas, then look at what Lessing's work, and her archive, can contribute to our understanding of the form. These are rich resources that prompt a rethinking of the tradition of the novel of ideas and may help us to overcome some of the parochialism of which Lessing accuses us.

Novels of ideas give a central position to staged debates between characters about political, social, religious or philosophical ideas. Such debates were a normal feature of Victorian novels by the likes of George Eliot, Samuel Butler and George Meredith, but the modernist generation (and perhaps above all Henry James) rejected it. James accused George Eliot's novels of being ‘too clever by half’ and set out to write ‘some little exemplary works of art’ that would have ‘less “brain” than Middlemarch’ but ‘more form’.³ Novelists of ideas like H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton and Rose Macaulay were cast aside, as were the great Russian novelists of ideas, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (James called their books ‘fluid puddings’). Henry James, abetted by F.R. Leavis and others, established an agenda for the novel that prioritised psychological realism, rich characterisation, and the romantic and financial doings of the upper-middle class.

What is remarkable is the extent to which the animosity towards the novel of ideas persists in the contemporary academy, even while the marketplace proves more forgiving: writers including Zadie Smith, Kamila Shamsie and Ian McEwan have found popular success this century with novels of ideas. Sianne Ngai's recent Theory of the Gimmick (2020) takes on the form, arguing that novels of ideas are gimmicky because of the awkward way in which they incorporate ‘readymade’ ideas into the text, which operate as a ‘“transportable intellectual unit,” a deja là or self-standing proposition’.⁴ For Ngai, many of the characteristic formal devices of the novel of ideas – she lists ‘Allegory, direct speech by narrators, and direct speech by characters’ – are in fact ‘ancient didactic devices’ that work to ‘distance the novel from its métier – narration – and systematically push its form closer to those of the essay, lecture, or play’.⁵

The generic hybridity that Ngai finds gimmicky raises important questions about the relationship between a writer's archive and their fictional work. As readers of novels of ideas, we become used to situations in which ideas that the author advocates for in pamphlets or journals are also articulated, discussed and sometimes thrown into doubt in a novel. For example, H.G. Wells's ideas about progressive taxation were set out in works of social criticism such as This Misery of Boots (1907), but also in novels of ideas such as A Modern Utopia (1905), where they are discussed and tested.⁶ Working with Doris Lessing's archive, and in particular reading her opinionated letters about politics, sex and literature, we become aware that the ideas and arguments that she discusses with her correspondents feature, ‘readymade’, in her novels. Although (as is also attested in her archive) Lessing was a keen reader of Woolf, Joyce and Proust, she does not fit the modernist paradigm described by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): ‘within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’.⁷ Lessing's approach chimes more with Amanda Anderson's defence of the political novel of ideas, ‘capturing through literary art the lived commitment to ideas’.⁸

Reading Lessing's letters of the 1940s with these questions in mind, it is perhaps surprising to note the sense of moral crisis that was already present in the ways she thought about her own commitment to communism. Her early attraction to communism had been born from her colonial experience in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where she lived until 1949. This was one of the most racist colonial regimes in Africa – Chinua Achebe was shocked when he travelled there as a citizen of newly independent Nigeria in 1960.⁹ Rhodesia would declare its independence from Britain in 1965, still under minority White rule, only switching to majority rule in 1980 when Robert Mugabe became prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe. As Lessing writes in several letters, the trade union movement in Southern Africa during the midcentury was seeking to protect the wages of White workers, and viewed Black Africans as a threat to pay and conditions. In Southern Rhodesia, it was only the revolutionary left that had a critique of the ‘Colour Bar’ (which was the name for the apartheid-like system that prevailed in Southern Rhodesia). As an anti-racist, Lessing gravitated towards communism, but there was no Communist Party branch in Southern Rhodesia that was recognised by the Comintern, so Lessing and her friends set out to create one (a tiny talking shop, it was never recognised). After joining the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) some time after her arrival in Britain in 1949, Lessing, along with the other intellectuals of the first New Left, publicly and dramatically left the Party in 1956, following Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the twentieth congress and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution in that year. The Golden Notebook dramatises the intellectual debates that led to this departure and their psychological impact on its protagonist.

This letter, triggered by a Koestler-induced crisis of commitment, immediately resonates with the novels set during these years from Lessing's Children of Violence sequence: A Proper Marriage (1954), Ripple from the Storm (1958) and Landlocked (1965). Even though A Proper Marriage was published while Lessing was still a member of the CPGB, it is fair to say that in all three of these novels (and also in The Four Gated City (1969) when Martha Quest encounters more communists in London), the third person narration is often eye-rollingly ironic as it reports the fervid commitment of its various communist characters.¹¹

The letters already deal self-reflexively, then, with a set of ideas that Lessing herself thinks of as somewhat ‘readymade’, gimmicky even. They experiment with ways of articulating arguments and ideas in voices other than Lessing's own, and standing at an ironic distance from them – an effect which Lessing took to an extreme in her later novel of ideas The Good Terrorist (1985), where a group of young comrades tragically talk themselves into bombing a hotel by adopting the rote phrases of communist language. But while Lessing's letters and novels ironise some ideas some of the time, she never leaves behind the exploration of a ‘lived commitment to ideas’, in Anderson's phrase. Indeed it might be said that irony is the tool she uses to explore what such a commitment might mean.

It is not just the contents of her earlier letter, but also some of its communicative, formal and generic features, that are mobilised in this novel. Across Lessing's fiction and her archive the question of the addressee is foregrounded: to whom can you, a communist, talk about your doubts? Lessing made a show of being able to confide in John Whitehorn as a non-communist: ‘I envy your detachment, which must save you much agonising’.¹⁴ She asked John not to speak to Smithie about her agonised conscience. The epistolary form does not prevent Lessing from operating as an ironic omniscient narrator, describing how people fall in love with communism and then out of it again.

A few weeks after that V-J day letter, Lessing replies to Smithie, who had first sent her Koestler's The Yogi and the Commissar. Unlike John, he was a committed communist. And here we notice a total contrast in approach: her letter to Smithie attempts to absorb Koestler's arguments in a display of dialectical reasoning and to nudge Smithie back onto the path of commitment: ‘You should try and get the broad development of things as a whole,’ she tells him, ‘When its a question of us surviving at all (human beings) why should one get excited if Molotov talks nonsense about culture? He does. He will. So he should, if its o.k. in the long run.’¹⁵ This letter articulates significant areas of disagreement with communist theories of culture and opens up an ironic distance between the writer and those ideas. But it also presents a completely different relationship to the ideas than we saw in Lessing's letter to John: perhaps the ideas are better than the ways they are being lived; perhaps we have to tolerate some bad ideas because they are stubbornly attached to the one truly indispensable one (communism). The lesson of Lessing's archive is that there is no form – essay, letter or notebook – where the content of an idea or argument is separable from its mode of articulation, or from its relationship to its addressee(s).

So I cannot sympathise with Sianne Ngai's argument that novels of ideas fail as novels because they incorporate readymade ideas articulated elsewhere. When you go looking for an idea in the wild, it often turns out to be not readymade, but just as problematically boxed in with irony, point-of-view, equivocation and even free indirect discourse, as those in novels. Lessing marks this hybridity in the very structure of her novels: The Golden Notebook itself takes an archival form, with the frame narrative interspersed with Anna's four notebooks in a sheaf of documents. Like the best novels of ideas, it brings to consciousness the problem of how, in its fictional lifeworld – through thought, speech and documentary report – ideas are represented, challenged, communicated, misunderstood and lived. But such questions are a quality of writing itself, just as present in Lessing's letters as in her novels, and do not belong exclusively to the aesthetic of the novel form.

Lessing's novel Re: Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta: Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (Grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days (1979) – the first in her Canopus in Argos: Archives space-fiction series – takes us still further in this direction. Its readers encounter an even more heterogeneous bundle of letters, reports, lectures and other documents: some from the perspective of the alien civilisation observing the whole history of our planet, some produced by the humans under observation. As in Lessing's more obviously autobiographical fiction, Shikasta critically interrogates both colonialism and communism, including through staged discussions of ideas in character-character dialogue. Both Lessing's letters and her novels debate ideas in very direct ways – ways of which post-Jamesian novel criticism has taught us to be wary. Across her letters and her fiction, Lessing is always thinking about the emplacement of ideas and arguments, who is speaking and to whom, how implicit shared understandings about agreed scripts allow a writer (of a letter as much as of a novel) to stand at an ironic distance from ideas and arguments articulated on the page. An archive like Lessing's provides us with a powerful impetus to rethink and revive the category of the novel of ideas, not least because key texts like The Golden Notebook and Shikasta remake the novel of ideas as an archive.