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Introduction 1. the Visionary Experience Is Apparent As Early As the Grass Is Singing in Mary Turner's Moments of Intense Illumi

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Introduction 1. the Visionary Experience Is Apparent As Early As the Grass Is Singing in Mary Turner's Moments of Intense Illumi Notes Introduction 1. The visionary experience is apparent as early as The Grass is Singing in Mary Turner's moments of intense illumination, which has resonance in the process of conscious evolution in the later novels. 2. Michael Magie, 'Doris Lessing and Romanticism', College English, Vol. 38 (Feb. 1977), p. 552. See also Robert K. Morris who argues in Continuance and Change, 1972, p. 26, that in her later novels Lessing depicts a 'dead-end world', and Ingrid Holmquist who objects to The Four-Gated City on the grounds that the 'mystical consciousness leads to social nullity', in From Society to Nature: A Study of Doris Lessing's 'Children of Violence', 1980, p. 162. 3. See Nancy Corson Carter, 'Journey Towards Wholeness: A Meditation on Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor', Journal of Evolutionary Psychology (2 Aug. 1981), pp. 33-47, and Alvin Sullivan, 'Memoirs of a Survior: Lessing's Notes toward a Supreme Fiction', Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring 1980), p. 157. 4. Nissa Torrents, 'Doris Lessing: Testimony to Mysticism', Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter 1980), p. 13. 5. Doris Lessing, 'A Small Personal Voice', in A Small Personal Voice: Doris Lessing, Paul Schlueter (ed.), 1974, p. 12. 6. Ibid., p. 14. 7. In an interview with Nissa Torrent she asserts: I recently had to read all my work for reprinting, and in my first work, The Grass is Singing, all my themes already appear. Critics tend to compartmentalize ... At first they said that I write about the race problem, later about Communism, and then about women, the mystic experience, etc. but in reality I am the same person who wrote about the same themes ... I always wrote about the individual and that which surrounds him. (Nissa Torrents, 'Doris Lessing: Testimony to Mysticism', Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter 1980), p. 1) 8. Doris Lessing, Preface to The Golden Notebook (1962), rpt., 1973, p. 11. All subsequent references to this novel will be to this edition. 9. Doris Lessing, Going Home (1957), rpt., 1968, pp. 103, 311. 10. Joseph Haas, 'Doris Lessing: Chronicler of the Cataclysm', Chicago Daily News (14 June 1969), p. 5. 11. Doris Lessing, 'Smart Set Socialists', New Statesman, Vol. 62 (1 December 1961), pp. 822, 824. 12. In his account of 'socialist realism', Damian Grant argues that the 240 Notes 241 socialist writers' attempt at synthesis is 'illusory, or at least artificial, because the absolute reality which shall be discovered by the process of dialectic is pre-determined, it must be socialist reality, conforming to political ideal . the vision of socialist society' (Damian Grant, Realism, 1970, p. 77). 13. Lessing, 'A Small Personal Voice', in A Small Personal Voice, Schlueter (ed.), p. 6. 14. Ibid., p. 4. 15. Diane Johnson, The New York Times Book Review (June 4 1978), p. 66. 16. Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 1963, p. 19. In his essay, 'The Intellectual Physiognomy of Literary Characters', Lukacs defines 'Weltanschauung' as follows: Weltanschauung is a profound personal experience of each and every person, . and it likewise reflects in a very significant fashion the general problem of his age. (Georg Lukacs, 'The Intellectual Physiognomy of Literary Characters', L. E. Mins, in Radical Perspectives in The Arts, Lee Baxandall (ed.), 1972, p. 90) 17. Preface to The Golden Notebook, p. 11. 18. Lukacs, Realism in Our Time, 1964, p. 19. 19. Lukacs, The Historical Novel, 1962, p. 91. 20. Lessing, 'A Small Personal Voice', in A Small Personal Voice, Schlueter (ed.), p. 7. 21. Ibid., p. 4. 22. Ibid. 23. Susan Stamberg, 'An Interview with Doris Lessing', Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Fall 1984), p. 4. 24. Lessing, 'A Small Personal Voice', in A Small Personal Voice, Schlueter (ed.), pp. 10-11. 25. Holmquist, p. 168. 26. Humanistic Psychology in the narrower sense of an organized 'move­ ment' sprang up in America in the early 1950s, initiated by Abraham H. Maslow (1908-70), and was established as the 'Association of Humanistic Psychology' in 1962 with James F. T. Bugental as first president. I use the term in its broader sense as referring to a form of psychological theory and therapeutic practice based on the humanistic belief in the possibility of the free individual in a free society and the view of man as potentially positive. The motivation behind it is the strong discontent with the two dominant psychological theories, Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviourism. Both approaches were felt to be based on a negative view of man. Humanistic Psychol­ ogists feel that man is neither the arduously socialised 'cauldron of seething excitement' (Freud) nor the outcome of reflexes to which these theories reduce him. They demand a psychology which takes account of man as potential being capable of self-realization. Ronald D. Laing, a British psychiatrist more often labelled as an 'existential psychiatrist', is an exponent of a parallel approach in England. His books The Divided Self in 1957 and The Politics of Experience in 242 Notes 1967 introduced important new ideas into the field of psychiatry at that time. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), however, wrote on the issue of the individual's psychological potential long before Laing developed his approach. Jung's description of human individuation is an analysis of the process of self-realisation whose depth and comprehensiveness makes him eligible to be seen as the spiritual father of Humanistic Psychology in this broader sense. The first issue of the movement's periodical, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 1 (1961), names Jung amongst the psychologists whose writings illustrate the approach which the movement has in mind (Anthony J. Sutich and Miles A. Vich (eds), Readings in Humanistic Psychology, New York 1969, p. 7). I shall draw extensively on the work of both Jung and Laing in the study of the motif of descent in Doris Lessing. 27. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Marx/Engels, Collected Works III, M. Milligan (trans.), 1975, p. 296. 28. The Enlightenment, as is evident from Kant's reference to the move­ ment, valued highly the power of reason as a weapon in the struggle for the individual's emancipation, given 'a priori... in the concep­ tions of pure reason'. See Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, T. Kingsmill Abbot (trans.) (1879), rpt., 1900, p. 4ff. 29. Carl Gustav Jung, 'Approaching the Unconscious', in Man and His Symbols, Carl G. Jung et al. (eds), 1964, p. 94. 30. Jung, The Integration of the Personality, Stanley Dell (trans.), 1940, p. 52. 31. Jung, The Archetype and the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works ofC. G. Jung, Vol. 9, part I, R. F. C. Hull (trans.), 1968, p. 43. 32. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, The Collected Works ofC. G. Jung, Vol. 12, 1968, p. 41. 33. Jung, Psychological Types, The Collected Works, Vol. 6, H. G. Baynes (trans.), 1959, p. 419. 34. Increasingly, critics have referred to the correspondence between men­ tal states of Lessing's characters and those of Laing's patients to the extent that parallels have been drawn between patients' experience recorded in Laing's books and figures in Lessing's novels, as in the case of Charles Watkins of Briefing for a Descent into Hell and a patient of the same surname in Laing's Politics of Experience, pp. 120-37. See Marion Vlastos, 'Doris Lessing and R. D. Laing', PMLA, Vol. 91, No. 2 (March 1976), p. 253, and Douglas Boiling 'Structure and Theme in Briefing for a Descent into Hell', Contemporary Literature, 14 (1973), pp. 550-63. 35. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, rpt. 1970, pp. 18, 128-30. 36. Ibid., pp. 18, 128-30. 37. Laing, The Divided Self: A Study of Sanity and Madness, 1960, pp. 40-45. See infra., for further definition of these terms in my study of The Grass is Singing. 38. Laing, Self and Others, 1961, p. 30. 39. Laing, The Divided Self, p. 40. Notes 243 40. N. Torrents, 'Doris Lessing: Testimony to Mysticism', Doris Lessing Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter 1980), p. 13. 41. Letter from Doris Lessing to Roberta Rubenstein, dated 28 March 1977, quoted in Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness, 1979, p. 199. 42. Letter from Doris Lessing to Roberta Rubenstein, dated 28 March 1977, Ibid., pp. 230-1. 43. Although Jung's exploration of the unconscious led some critics to refer to him as a right-wing thinker involved in obscurantist mythology because of the ahistorical and non-rational nature of the concept of the 'collective unconscious', yet he still remained fundamentally loyal to the scientific approach in psychology which limited his explorations. In his essay on 'the transcendental function' this confining attitude is evident in his assertion: 'It is unprofitable to speculate about things we cannot know. I therefore refrain from making assertions that go beyond the bounds of science' (Jung, The Structure and Dynamic of the Psyche, The Collected Works, Vol. 8, R. F. C. Hull (trans.), 1960, p. 90). 44. Idries Shah, The Sufis (1964), rpt., 1977, p. 297. 45. Robert E. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (1972), rpt., 1977, pp. 152-3. 46. I refer to the Sufi philosophy's exploration of that realm to denote a reality which transcends the empirical level in a spiritual or intuitive sense, but without involving religious exegesis, and it is in that sense that I use the term ascent (see Shah, The Sufis, pp. 23, 43-4, referring to the 'nonreligious viewpoint' of Sufism). 47. Idries Shah's position as spokesman for contemporary Sufism has been acknowledged by a large number of authorities, and Doris Lessing was introduced to Sufism through his books.
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