John Leonard on Doris Lessing's "Time Bites" and more

Doris Lessing died this weekend. She was a controversial figure with a body of work so vast it is difficult to know where to start. In this review of an essay collection of Lessing's from 2006, the late critic John Leonard gives a nice overview of Lessing's life and her major works. While obviously admiring Lessing, Leonard also gives the reader an idea why some people were less than kind to her and her novels. With this review as a starting point, you can decide whether Lessing is for you, and what period of her career might suit you best. From New York Review of Books, November 30, 2006. E-text available here<\a>.
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words only definitions & notes
  1. barbarous
    able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering
    Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of.
  2. imperious
    having or showing arrogant superiority
    Her default mode is usually imperious, as if ex cathedra were the normal respiration of her intelligence.
  3. snide
    expressive of contempt
    But for every lovely fugitive impression (“the first men probably did not know where their thoughts ended and the consciousness of beasts began”), there is a snide kick at “militant feminists,” and for every gut-wrenching account of the agony of Zimbabwe, a couple of twaddles about the “tyranny” of “Political Correctness.”
  4. doppelganger
    a person who is almost identical to another
    It was as if Martha Quest, until then Lessing’s alter ego and doppelgänger in the series, had somehow got hold of a copy of The Golden Notebook, been desolated to discover the bankruptcy of every master narrative of Western Civ from Euclidean geometry to class war to the Oedipus complex, and then battered her way headfirst through the library wall into a prehistoric realm of memory, myth, madness, and genetic mutation.
  5. rapture
    a state of elated bliss
    So she got to be cranky about Communists, feminists, journalists, shoplifters, progressive schools, conversion experiences, and grief therapy—but aside from the obligatory reference to yarrow stalks and the I Ching, the raptures of the deep went unmentioned.
  6. sage
    a mentor in spiritual and philosophical topics
    What she found, courtesy of Idries Shah, was the poets and sages of a 1,300-year-old current of Islamic thinking that sought, through otherworldliness, a strenuous spiritual calisthenics of pilgrimage, sleeplessness, fasting, and ecstatic dance, and a kick-the-can pedagogy of parables, aphorisms, fables, verses, and jokes, to see past mere appearances to the hidden reality and transcendent dimension of human life.
  7. calisthenics
    light exercises designed to promote general fitness
    What she found, courtesy of Idries Shah, was the poets and sages of a 1,300-year-old current of Islamic thinking that sought, through otherworldliness, a strenuous spiritual calisthenics of pilgrimage, sleeplessness, fasting, and ecstatic dance, and a kick-the-can pedagogy of parables, aphorisms, fables, verses, and jokes, to see past mere appearances to the hidden reality and transcendent dimension of human life.
  8. pedagogy
    the activities of educating or instructing
    What she found, courtesy of Idries Shah, was the poets and sages of a 1,300-year-old current of Islamic thinking that sought, through otherworldliness, a strenuous spiritual calisthenics of pilgrimage, sleeplessness, fasting, and ecstatic dance, and a kick-the-can pedagogy of parables, aphorisms, fables, verses, and jokes, to see past mere appearances to the hidden reality and transcendent dimension of human life.
  9. aphorism
    a short pithy instructive saying
    What she found, courtesy of Idries Shah, was the poets and sages of a 1,300-year-old current of Islamic thinking that sought, through otherworldliness, a strenuous spiritual calisthenics of pilgrimage, sleeplessness, fasting, and ecstatic dance, and a kick-the-can pedagogy of parables, aphorisms, fables, verses, and jokes, to see past mere appearances to the hidden reality and transcendent dimension of human life.
  10. transcendent
    exceeding or surpassing usual limits
    What she found, courtesy of Idries Shah, was the poets and sages of a 1,300-year-old current of Islamic thinking that sought, through otherworldliness, a strenuous spiritual calisthenics of pilgrimage, sleeplessness, fasting, and ecstatic dance, and a kick-the-can pedagogy of parables, aphorisms, fables, verses, and jokes, to see past mere appearances to the hidden reality and transcendent dimension of human life.
  11. ineffable
    defying expression or description
    As well as poets like ‘Attar, who elaborated on this ineffable topography in his Parliament of Birds, and Rumi, who founded an Order of Whirling Dervishes, the Mawlawiyyah.
  12. dervish
    a Muslim monk of an order noted for fast ceremonial dancing
    As well as poets like ‘Attar, who elaborated on this ineffable topography in his Parliament of Birds, and Rumi, who founded an Order of Whirling Dervishes, the Mawlawiyyah.
  13. latent
    potentially existing but not presently evident or realized
    I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white and black, is the continent itself, its presence which for some people is like an old fever, latent always in their blood; or like an old wound throbbing in the bones as the air changes.
  14. necrology
    a list of people who died recently
    It’s not just that Mara and Dann seemed to rehearse all of immemorial Africa—savannas, gorges, femurs, shamans, soldiers, refugees, empires, necrologies, genocides, and other affidavits of atrocity—and to catalog as well volcanic cataclysms in deep readings of ice caps, carbon clouds, and fossil dumps.
  15. anathematize
    curse or declare to be evil
    If her 1999 novel accused its century of specializing in refugees, in forced relocations of the outcast and anathematized, it never suggested that any other century had been nicer.
  16. aide-de-camp
    an officer who acts as an assistant to a more senior officer
    And when Dann retires to anguish over his sister, or to indulge his bitter envy of those “lost time” ancestors who were so much cleverer than he, the narrative chores fall to Griot, his dutiful, humorless, green-eyed aide-de-camp, a former child soldier who followed Dann all the way from Agre, who sees to the training of the army his general leads into pointless battle, and who, like all the griots before him, will sing praise-songs on the killing fields.
  17. conscript
    enroll into service compulsorily
    We also meet Mrs. Sussman, the analyst Lessing saw for three years before conscripting her so memorably into The Golden Notebook as Mother Sugar.
  18. Jungian
    of or relating to a Swiss psychologist or his theories
    Mrs. Sussman, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, was a Jungian who specialized in “unblocking” artists.
  19. archetypal
    of an original pattern on which other things are modeled
    In Doris she found archetypal residues of Electra, Medea, and Antigone.
  20. redolent
    having a strong pleasant odor
    There are many unpleasant smells in Lessing’s autobiographies—camphor, horses, paraffin, chamber pots, dead fish, wet wool, the habits of nuns, her father’s crotch—but none so redolent as the very idea of Anna’s compulsive washings of herself in The Golden Notebook, so that she won’t smell of her own period.
  21. inchoate
    only partly in existence; imperfectly formed
    In her ears was an inchoate grinding, the great wheels of movement, and it was inhuman…and no part of that sound was Martha’s voice.
  22. slapdash
    marked by great carelessness
    She has written tens of thousands of pages, many of them slapdash, millions of words, none of them mushy, one masterwork, The Golden Notebook, and may be the twentieth century’s least ingratiating great novelist, whose fatalism is often difficult to distinguish from complacency, and who is harder on women than on men: there is “a basic female ruthlessness,” she has said, “female unregenerate, and it comes from a much older time than Christianity or any other softener of savage moralities.
  23. complacency
    the feeling you have when you are satisfied with yourself
    She has written tens of thousands of pages, many of them slapdash, millions of words, none of them mushy, one masterwork, The Golden Notebook, and may be the twentieth century’s least ingratiating great novelist, whose fatalism is often difficult to distinguish from complacency, and who is harder on women than on men: there is “a basic female ruthlessness,” she has said, “female unregenerate, and it comes from a much older time than Christianity or any other softener of savage moralities.
  24. existential
    relating to or dealing with the state of being
    If she doesn’t believe in free will, liberal humanism, historical determinism, existential psychology, the holy ghost, the Enlightenment, or victimhood (and she doesn’t), what does she believe in?
  25. archetype
    something that serves as a model
    Then there are mothers and daughters, as old as archetypes get.
  26. neurotic
    affected by worry due to a mental disturbance
    No one before or after Lessing has better anatomized the sick self-sabotaging of smart women who allow themselves to settle for indentured servitude as house mothers, group mothers, householders, hostesses, caretakers, nannies, nurses, and “neurotic nurturers.”
  27. nihilist
    someone who rejects all theories of morality
    We see this from Kate Brown in The Summer Before the Dark, who so efficiently organized her family, her office, and the care and feeding of a whole continent that she practically abolished herself, to Alice Mellings in The Good Terrorist, a lunatic Mother Courage among bomb-throwing nihilist losers...
Created on Sun Nov 17 12:10:23 EST 2013 (updated Mon Nov 18 11:42:31 EST 2013)

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