The Golden Notebook

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 1-4

Part 3

Part 4, Chapters 1-4

Part 5

Part 6, Chapters 1-4

Part 7

Part 8, Chapters 1-4

Part 9

Part 10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

Above all, The Golden Notebook is a künstlerroman, a novel of the making of an artist. Anna confronts her disappointment with her first novel, Frontiers of War, excoriating its excessive sentimentality and romanticization of war. She then enters a period of prolonged writer’s block; she is insistent that she will no longer write. Lessing herself points to this theme in her introduction to the novel: “a main character [of The Golden Notebook] should be some sort of an artist, but with a ‘block’” (xi). This is linked not only to her own disavowal of her earlier creation but also to the forces of modernity: In the face of the atrocities of the 20th century, art lacks the power to speak or to heal. In this way, Lessing is linked to other writers of the early 20th century, in particular James Joyce. Anna herself refers to Joyce and his work several times throughout her notebooks. As he famously wrote in Ulysses, “history […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce, James. Ulysses. Dover Publications, 2012, p. 34). Anna’s version relates to her nightmare of destruction: “I am back inside a nightmare which it seems I’ve been locked in for years” (345). Shortly thereafter, she notes how the men conscripted into endless wars “have been betrayed by history” (353). The creation of Anna the artist is the direct antitheses to the war and violence that have defined her era.

The story of Anna’s political disillusionment gives way to another constant theme of the novel: romantic disillusionment and its impact on creation. In one section, the yellow notebook is filled with ideas for stories in which women betray themselves for distorted versions of love. The most notable of these ideas is the story about a man falling in love with a female artist; instead of encouraging and supporting her, he feeds off of her creative energy, and she relinquishes her own artistic identity in order to support him. However, this engenders a rupture: “The moment when she is no longer an artist, he leaves her, he needs the woman who has this quality, so that he can create” (535). This is a thinly veiled version of Anna’s actual story: Her love affair with Michael is dominated by his criticism of her writing; thus, she quits writing (other than, secretly, privately, in her notebooks). Then, he leaves her. This is the dilemma a female artist inevitably faces, at least according to Anna (and, by extension, the author). She must either be an artist or a lover; the creative impulse cannot survive in the face of male desire.

The Anna who sublimates her identity to men, who splinters her personality into four parts and struggles to keep them separate, passes out of existence when she abandons the separate notebooks and begins the new one, the “golden notebook.” The shift is slow and painful, but it feels necessary for her rebirth as a fully-fledged artist in her own right. First, she dissolves into Saul, absorbing his anxiety, reproducing his “madness”: “I understood I could no longer separate myself from Saul, and that frightened me more than I have been frightened” (587). However, that fear also leads to the recognition that he was “repeating a pattern over and over” and that she was following along in this endless cycle of love and betrayal (587). Thus, she goes further, beyond Saul, and inhabits the personalities of others: Charlie Themba, soldiers from Algeria and Cuba, students from Budapest, a peasant in China. In the midst of this disassociation, Anna recognizes what her dream of destruction has been trying to show her: That without happiness, without love, people are inhuman; they are the nameless, faceless victims and/or perpetrators of war.

Anna—and everyone else in the world—is implicated in this endless, vicious cycle: “But instead of a pen I held a gun in my hand. And I was not Anna, but a soldier” (600). When she awakes, she is “a person who had been changed by the experience of being other people” (602). She is not quite at peace with herself yet, but she has begun to cohere, to heal. She will not relinquish the golden notebook to Saul—she will not relinquish her identity as an artist to a man. Instead, she will “start a new notebook, all of myself in one book” (607). The separate notebooks are thus concluded. With the golden notebook, Anna the artist has arrived.

“Isn’t it odd”: Modernity and the End of History

Molly coins the phrase at the beginning of the book, “It’s all very odd, isn’t it?” (7), and utters it multiple times in various iterations throughout the novel. She uses the phrase to describe the make-up of her and Anna’s families, unconventional in the sense that these “free women” do not depend on men or fathers in order to raise their children. It also serves to describe an exceptional period of history—odd in that it cannot be explained by the patterns of prior history. Both Molly and Anna have the sense that there is something different about the current age; Anna believes that they are having “the kind of experience women haven’t had before” (471), that “[t]here is something new in the world” (472). This belief fuels both her writer’s block and her ultimate escape from it.

Anna also grapples with disillusionment in her notebooks, from her increasingly unsatisfactory dealings with the British Communist Party (and communism in general) to her suspicions that the literary establishment cannot tell the difference between a parody and an authentic story or diary. The parody of the agonized artist that she writes in Part 6, Chapter 1 is so full of cliché and hyperbole as to make a mockery of a literary industry that takes it seriously: “It is a writer’s duty to betray his wife, his country and his friend if it serves his art. Also his mistress” (434), one of the entries reads; “At thirty I shall kill myself” (435), another proclaims. This trafficking in old stereotypes is exactly what Anna the protagonist—and Lessing the writer—wants to leave behind. Her artistic disappointment reflects her political disillusionment (and vice versa). The publishing industry is so stuck in the ideas of the past that it can’t tell when those ideas are being mocked. Meanwhile, Anna notes of her disappointment with the Party, “the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience” (448). Both realms—the artistic and the political--are clinging to values that have been rendered obsolete by the unprecedented events of the 20th century.

All of this is bound up with writing: The protagonist of The Shadow of the Third, Ella, decides to return to writing after giving up her old-fashioned “mistress” role; Anna figures out what she is feeling by disassociating from herself to write in the voice of Ella; and, ultimately, Anna recognizes that she is in the midst of dissolution, an unraveling of her personality—but that something new, something different will come out of it. Two moments give the reader a foreshadowing of how Anna will resolve her block. First, Ella has an idea for a new story about a man and a woman: “Both at the end of their tether. Both cracking up because of a deliberate attempt to transcend their own limits. And out of the chaos, a new kind of strength” (467). This story will later be replicated in the final notebook sections, in Anna’s actual life. Second, Anna’s “nightmare about destruction” (477) can be read, perhaps counterintuitively, as the annihilation of the past social structure, the old conventions, in order to pave the way for the birth of something new. Right after she describes her fears about the dream, Anna writes, “What is happening is something new in my life” (479). Discovery arises from destruction.

Anna’s blue notebook, in its final iteration, is formless; it contains no dates, and once Saul Green enters the picture, the notebook becomes even more unstructured. Anna provides numbered points that run into one another throughout long, rambling paragraphs, occasionally revealing sharp moments of insight. For example, the Anna who previously tries to convince her psychoanalyst, Mrs. Marks, that her new identity is emerging from a radically new environment recognizes that she is not alone in this assumption: “People know they are in a society dead or dying” (545). Later, she laments that war is the most pervasive element in current society, and her dream of the destructive impulse embodied as a sexless, malevolent figure reinforces that notion. It is the end of one phase of history and the beginning of another—but what that might be is still uncertain.

Novels Within Novels: Story as Structure

The Golden Notebook contains multitudes: It begins with the novel-within-the-novel, Free Women; it continues with Anna’s notebooks, which contain the partially completed novel, The Shadow of the Third, as well as details on Anna’s first novel, Frontiers of War; it relays a memoir in the form of the black notebook; in the yellow notebook, it proffers ideas for several other short stories and novels; and it refers to Saul Green’s novella about the war for independence in Algeria. If one is keeping track, then one would find no fewer than five fictional novels within the actual novel known as The Golden Notebook. The book functions as an extended meditation on what it means to make art in a moment of radical social transformation. The many novels within the novel dramatize the artist’s struggle to overcome the obstacles of an era in order to produce meaning.

In the blue notebook, it is notable that Anna continues to insist to her psychoanalyst, Mrs. Marks, that she does not intend ever to write again. Yet, the reader knows that this is untrue, and Anna is writing—she is writing a great deal. Anna is writing about the origins of her first novel, Frontiers of War; she is writing about her dealings with and doubts about the British Communist Party, and she is in the process of writing a novel entitled The Shadow of the Third—not to mention the work that will become Free Women. She says, quite definitively, to Mrs. Marks, “No, I shall never write another [novel]” (232). This indicates that Anna is not always a reliable narrator of her own life. She herself admits as much when she bemoans the creeping nostalgia of the account written in her black notebook. She had not thought the writing was nostalgic when she penned it. It is also ironic, in a meta-fictive sense, that the author has Anna keep a diary because she wants to avoid “turning everything into fiction” (228). Of course, the diary that Anna keeps is itself a work of fiction, written by Lessing.

In a further irony, the diary—normally the most personal form of writing—is subsumed by Anna’s collected newspaper clippings about the atrocities of the day. The line between the personal and the political becomes so blurred that the personal is nearly erased, and the diary goes from a creative work of self-formation to a mere collection of public records. The artist has no wellspring from which to draw.

This leads to the writer’s block from which Anna so acutely suffers. She feels that she cannot write in a world that has been given over to strife, violence, and war—not to mention that her identity as a female writer is even more problematic. She also denies the legitimacy of her first novel, Frontiers of War, because it romanticizes the very thing that she despises: “[T]he truth of our time was war, the immanence of war” (591). Anna rejects her own creations because they do not live up to her standards of truth and authenticity; she feels she has failed as a writer, and as a person—though, of course, Anna herself is only a character; this is the author expressing how it feels to fail, or to believe she has failed, at the creative act. The Golden Notebook itself decidedly succeeds at telling the story of how a writer finds the inspiration to write in a confounding world. In its very structure, the novel reveals how unity comes out of fragmentation. Anna cannot become the writer she is meant to be until all the notebooks, all the stories come together in the golden notebook—in The Golden Notebook—wherein her integrated self becomes the masterful teller of stories.

It is notable that the Anna of Free Women, the novel ostensibly written by the Anna of the notebooks, will end on a conventional note: She will take a job; she will volunteer; and she will relinquish her role as a writer. However, the Anna of the notebooks becomes the creator of the Anna of Free Women, just as Lessing becomes the creator of The Golden Notebook. Lessing imagines both Annas, both possibilities, and she writes for herself the possibility of what it means to be a female and a writer. There will be no conventional ending for the artist.