Novel-Worlds: Tracing the Ripples in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City

ABSTRACT

A persistent tension between the physical limits of the novel form and the expansive scope of its representative possibilities is present in much of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and made explicit in The Four-Gated City, the concluding volume of her five-part series The Children of Violence. Lessing tests the imaginative parameters of her novel in a succession of different ways: introducing the trope of telepathy into the final volume of a formerly realist series; allowing the text to break down in its final section into a series of fragmentary appendices; extending the narrative some three decades into the future; and finally moving entirely beyond the frame of her central protagonist’s perspective. The Four-Gated City both depicts and bears out through its structure a foundational conflict between the novel’s capacity to conjure worlds and its physical boundaries: paper, ink, binder’s glue; words on a page. Its significance as the first step in Lessing’s wide-ranging experimentation with science fiction has been extensively discussed in scholarly literature on her work; less studied is the way in which it functions as a commentary not only on the imaginative limits of realism but also on the material limits of the novel as a portable object.

KEYWORDS:

• Doris Lessing
• The Four-Gated City
• science fiction
• genre
• novel studies

Notes

1. Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969), 465.

2. Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962 (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1997), 77.

3. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 1962 (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1999), x.

4. Harvey Blume, ‘Doris Lessing: Hot Dawns,’ Boston Book Review (February 1998).

5. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012), 42.

6. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 257–325.

7. Doris Lessing, Martha Quest (London: Michael Joseph, 1952), 22–23.

8. Michael Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 166.

9. Claire Sprague, Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 107.

10. Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, ed. Paul Schlueter (New York, NY: Knopf, 1974), 68.

11. The Aldermaston Marches were a series of anti-nuclear street protests which occurred between London and Berkshire throughout the 1950s and 1960s, beginning in 1958.

12. ‘Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize,’ The Guardian (11 October 2007). See Harold Bloom’s well-reported response to Lessing’s Nobel win, when he stated that the award was ‘pure political correctness’ on the part of the Nobel Academy, and that ‘although Ms Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable […] fourth-rate science fiction.’ These comments echo those of John Leonard, ‘The Spacing out of Doris Lessing,’ The New York Times (7 February 1982). In his review of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, Leonard asked: ‘Why does Doris Lessing – one of the half-dozen most interesting minds to have chosen to write fiction in English in this century – insist on propagating books that confound and dismay her loyal readers? The answer: She intends to confound and dismay.’