Radical Pedagogy in Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann

ABSTRACT

This article considers pedagogy as a consistent theme in Doris Lessing’s fiction. It draws on a deleted prefatory note in the typescript to Mara and Dann, which states that the heroine is “consumed with a passion to learn and go to school.” The article explores how Mara learns in a reimagined Africa after a future ice age. In the absence of formal schooling, a game is used in which children are asked repeatedly, “What did you see?” This game is compared to Henry James’s use of a child’s perspective in What Maisie Knew, to strategies for unveiling and “naming” the world in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and to ideas about teaching in Idries Shah’s The Sufis and Learning How to Learn. The article thus argues that radical and anticolonial approaches to learning are figured in Lessing’s fiction, and in her Nobel lecture, as essential for human survival.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• learning
• Mara and Dann
• Doris Lessing
• Paulo Freire
• Sufism

Notes

1. For example, in addition to Mara and Dann and its sequel, oral traditions are imagined in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980) and “The Reason for It,” a story in The Grandmothers (2003).

^2. Lessing gives an overview of her early involvement with the Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia in Under My Skin (258–92). Wayne Au claims that Freire’s work is “grounded in a thoroughly Marxist, or dialectic materialist, theory of knowledge” and that it is “difficult to grasp Freire’s pedagogy without understanding its Marxism” (175).

^3. In contrast, Lessing’s early autobiographical novel Martha Quest (1952) begins with the heroine as an adolescent and focuses on her early adulthood. The later The Fifth Child (1988) narrates Ben Lovatt’s childhood from his mother’s point of view; only in the sequel, Ben, in the World (2000) is his perspective considered, by which time he is an adult.

^4. I am indebted here to David Sergeant’s discussion of scale and environmental crisis in Lessing’s work.

^5. The quotations from the unpublished typescripts for Mara and Dann are from folder 23.1 of Lessing’s typescripts held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and are © 1999 by Doris Lessing. They are reproduced by kind permission of the Harry Ransom Center and Jonathan Clowes, Ltd., on behalf of the estate of Doris Lessing.

^6. Lessing replaced this note with a more playful preface in the published novel, which recounts how just before she completed Mara and Dann, her son, Peter Lessing, suggested a similar idea for a book: “This kind of thing happens in families, but perhaps not so often in laboratories” (vii).

^7. This is an idea that Lessing experimented with in The Memoirs of a Survivor, which describes the Ryan family who “opted out” of what “our old society aimed at” (in the 1970s) and who were a cause of despair to social workers. When the “bad times” start in the future imagined in the novel, the Ryans survive “capably and with enjoyment,” whereas their middle-class peers are incapable of learning how to survive (106).

^8. Lessing had earlier pondered the question of commitment in “The Small Personal Voice,” seeing it as linked to the qualities she noted in the nineteenth-century novel (10).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tom Sperlinger

Tom Sperlinger is a Reader in English Literature and Community Engagement at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published a memoir, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation (Zero Books, 2015), and is co-editor of Doris Lessing and the Forming of History (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).