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Identity and Narrative in Doris Lessing's and J.M. Coetzee's Life Writings

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Identity and Narrative in Doris Lessing's and J.M. Coetzee's Life Writings Identity and narrative in Doris Lessing's and J.M. Coetzee's Life Writings ENG-3992 Shkurte Krasniqi Master’s Thesis in English Literature Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education University of Tromsø Spring 2013 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Gerd Karin Bjørhovde for her constructive criticism and for encouraging me to work on this thesis. She is an inspiration to me. I would also like to thank my family for supporting me from afar: you are always on my mind. Last but not least, I am grateful to have my husband Jørn by my side. Abstract The main focus of this thesis is the manner in which Doris Lessing and J.M Coetzee construct their identities in their life writings. While Lessing has written a “classical” autobiography using the first person and past tense, Coetzee has opted for a more fictional version using the third person and the present tense. These different approaches offer us a unique opportunity to look into the manner in which fiction and facts can be combined and used to create works of art which linger permanently between the two. It is also interesting to see how these two writers have dealt with the complications of being raised in Southern Africa and how that influences their social and personal identities. In the Introduction I present the writers and their oeuvres briefly. In Chapter 1, I explain the terms connected with life writing, identity and narrative. In the second chapter I begin by looking into the manner in which their respective life writings begin and what repercussions does using the first and the third person have? In the third chapter I analyse their relational identities, i.e. the role that environment and family play in Lessing's and Coetzee's sense of self. In the fourth chapter I establish the “causal connections” which are the connections between the main events of one's life and how they have shaped the individual in the present. While analysing these causal connections I try to discover what Howard E. Gardner (2011) has called “the crystallizing experience”, that is the moment or episode that marked the beginning of Lessing's and Coetzee's interest in writing fiction. In the conclusion I compare the similarities and differences between their life experiences, trying to confirm the view that there is not only one identity, one life story, therefore looking for truth in life writing becomes superfluous. What we should be looking for instead is a unique vision of life and for what Coetzee has termed the “aura of truth”. Table of Contents Introduction................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Theoretical framework............................................................6 1.1 Identity and narrative ......................................................................................9 Chapter 2 Life writing in first and third person ..................................18 2.1 Tigger/Hostess and Lessing's personal identity ...........................................19 2.2 An English Afrikaans boy...............................................................................26 Chapter 3 Relational identities................................................................36 3.1 “Made by war”: Lessing and her war struck parents..................................38 3.2 “The prince of the house”...............................................................................47 Chapter 4 “Causal connections” and “crystallizing experience”.........55 4.1 The writer who escaped her circumstances...................................................55 4.2 Portrait of an artist as a young man..............................................................64 Conclusion.................................................................................................72 Bibliography..............................................................................................83 Introduction Doris Lessing and J.M. Coetzee are both Nobel laureates whose impressive oeuvres have inspired readers for decades. They were both raised in Southern Africa (Lessing in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Coetzee in South Africa), and even though they moved away from Africa physically, in their writing they seem rarely to be able to disconnect from the continent mentally. When Lessing is asked if she found it strange that she was still associated with Africa, she points out: “No, because it seems to me I belong to both places really. I certainly think I am returning to southern Africa when I write” (Lessing&Daymond, 2006, p.239). The mystery of the veld, the suffering they have seen growing up has inspired them in their creative endeavours, as Coetzee emphasised in his Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech in 1987: “The crudity of life in South Africa, the naked force of its appeals, not only at the physical level but at the moral level too, its callousness and its brutalities, its hungers and its rages, its greed and its lies, make it as irresistible as it is unlovable” (Coetzee&Attwell, 1992, p.99). Doris Lessing has written both realistic and space fiction novels. Her works display a tremendous versatility and cover a wide range of themes: from her first novel in which she describes life on an African farm (The Grass is Singing, 1950); to the metafictional experimentation in which she deals with the theme of breakdown and compartmentalization (The Golden Notebook, 1962); to space fictions (The Memoirs of a Survivor, 1974; Shikasta, 1979; Mara and Dann, 1999). Reading her novels I could not help but be impressed by the range of themes and concerns that stem from her experiential life and imagination. Her versatility can be illustrated by taking the last novel from the Children of Violence series The Four Gated City (1969) as an example. After 609 pages of realism, in the appendix she sets up a scenery of the world in decline, where people behave violently and the society has crumbled. This appendix took me completely by surprise, even though I had read some of her other space fiction before it; I just did not expect it to happen in the “realist” phase of her writing career. She tries to push the boundaries of the realist novel in order to give us a glimpse of the future, and it does not look good: “The human race had driven itself mad, and these sudden outbreaks of senseless violence in individuals and communities were the early symptoms” (The Four-Gated City, 1969, p. 628). The passion displayed in her writing challenges us to see that there are other ways of understanding reality, what she calls in The Four-Gated City “extrasensory powers” which enable “a significant portion of population” (p.637) to see things beyond what is visible to the eye. This is the “power” she wishes to cultivate for herself and in turn inspire us to 1 search for it ourselves. As Roberta Rubenstein (1979) summarizes in her concluding remarks about Lessing's work: “Her efforts to break through not only the intellectual blinders to perception and knowledge, and conventional assumptions concerning the nature of reality itself, but also the limitations of verbal expression, should assure her stature as one of the major, unique and visionary writers of our time” (p.256). J.M. Coetzee is prolific both as a fiction writer and as a critic. In his fiction he has been preoccupied with the manner in which literature can go beyond the historical and political discourses. He has been especially interested with questioning the representation of the Other in Western literature. Almost all of his characters live on the margin of society and in one way or another fight for survival, the main component of this survival being the escape from the impositions of their surroundings. Coetzee's interest in linguistics (he holds a Ph.D in linguistics from the University of Texas) has also shaped the manner in which he thinks and writes and he has experimented with the ways in which literature is able to capture reality. Michela Canepari-Labib (2005) points out that while postmodernists and poststructuralists have questioned the “existence” of reality and have developed theories in which reality is seen as a textual construction (p.115); Coetzee on the other hand “seems still to hold true the assumption that – because words refer to 'things', concrete referents, extralinguistic realities which corrupt every aspect of language – these relationships can be only partially linguistic” (Canepari-Labib, 2005, p.116). This is an important point to keep in mind while reading Coetzee's fiction, because it allows us to interpret it as a fiction which questions the manner in which reality is depicted. Nevertheless, it does not question the existence of reality; this probably comes as a result of his upbringing in the tumultuous South African environment, where he witnessed the injustices committed against the black population and the sufferings that the latter underwent at the hands of the white minority. If he questioned that reality, he would diminish their suffering. On the contrary, in his collection of essays White Writing: On the culture of letters in South Africa (1988), he emphasises that the white colonists who first came to Africa depicted the Hottentot tribe as lazy, dirty and primitive (p.18); but they never stopped to think that the way the tribe lived was actually a good life in which one is not punished to work all day, every day: Nowhere in the great echo chamber of the Discourse of the Cape is a voice raised to ask whether the life of the Hottentot may not be a version of life before the Fall (as Bartolomé de las Casas suggested in respect of the Indians of the New World), a life in which man is not yet condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but instead may spend his day dozing in the sun, or in the shade when the sun grows too hot, half-aware of the singing of the birds and the breeze of his skin, bestirring himself to eat when hunger overtakes him, enjoying a 2 pipe of tobacco when it is available, at one with his surroundings and unreflectively content (p.18). Questioning of the manner in which people, environments, political and historical situations are depicted is what marks Coetzee's fiction.
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