by Gore Vidal
If this book has any recent precursor, it is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Lessing has praised him elsewhere: “Vonnegut is moral in an old-fashioned way…he has made nonsense of the little categories, the unnatural divisions into ‘real’ literature and the rest, because he is comic and sad at once, because his painful seriousness is never solemn. Vonnegut is unique among us; and these same qualities account for the way a few academics still try to patronize him….”
Lessing is even more influenced by the Old Testament. “It is our habit to dismiss the Old Testament altogether because Jehovah, or Jahve, does not think or behave like a social worker.” So much for JC, doer of good and eventual scientist. But Lessing’s point is well taken. Because the Old Testament’s lurid tales of a furious god form a background to Jesus’ “good news,” to Mohammed’s “recitations,” to the Jewish ethical sense, those bloody tales still remain an extraordinary mythic power, last demonstrated in full force by Milton.
In a sense, Lessing’s Shikasta is a return more to the spirit (not, alas, the language) of Milton than to that of Genesis. But Lessing goes Milton one better, or worse. Milton was a dualist. Lucifer blazes as the son of morning; and the Godhead blazes, too. Their agon is terrific. Although Lessing deals with opposites, she tends to unitarianism. She is filled with the spirit of the Sufis, and if there is one thing that makes me more nervous than a Jungian it is a Sufi. Lessing believes that it is possible “to ‘plug in’ to an overmind, or Ur-mind, or unconscious, or what you will, and that this accounts for a great many improbabilities and ‘coincidences.’ ” She does indeed plug in; and Shikasta is certainly rich with improbabilities and “coincidences.” Elsewhere (“In the World, Not of It”), Lessing has expressed her admiration for one Idries Shah, a busy contemporary purveyor of Sufism (from the Arab word suf, meaning wool…the costume for ascetics).
Idries Shah has been characterized in the pages of The New York Review of Books as the author of works that are replete with “constant errors of fact, slovenly and inaccurate translations, even the misspelling of Oriental names and words. In place of scholarship we are asked to accept a muddle of platitudes, irrelevancies, and plain mumbo-jumbo.” Lessing very much admires Idries Shah and the woolly ones, and she quotes with approval from Idries Shah’s The Dermis Probe in which he quotes from M. Gauquelin’s The Cosmic Clocks. “An astonishing parallel to the Sufi insistence on the relatively greater power of subtle communication to affect man, is found in scientific work which shows that all living things, including man, are ‘incredibly sensitive to waves of extraordinarily weak energy—when more robust influences are excluded.’ ” This last quotation within a quotation is the theme of Shikasta.
It is Lessing’s conceit that a benign and highly advanced galactic civilization, centered on Canopus, is sending out harmonious waves hither and yon, rather like Milton’s god before Lucifer got bored. Canopus lives in harmony with another galactic empire named Sirius. Once upon a time warp, the two fought a Great War but now all is serene between the galaxies. I can’t come up with the Old Testament parallel on that one. Is Canopus Heaven versus Sirius’ Chaos? Anyway, the evil planet Shammat in the galactic empire of Puttiora turns out be our old friend Lucifer or Satan or Lord of the Flies, and the planet Shikasta (that’s us) is a battleground between the harmonious vibes of Canopus and the wicked vibes of Shammat, which are constantly bombarding our planet. In the end, Lucifer is hurled howling into that place where he prefers to reign and all is harmony with God’s chilluns. Lessing rather lacks negative capability. Where Milton’s Lucifer is a joy to contemplate, Lessing’s Shammat is a drag whose planetary agents sound like a cross between Tolkien’s monster and Sir Lew Grade.
Lessing’s narrative devices are very elaborate. Apparently, the Canopian harmonious future resembles nothing so much as an English Department that has somehow made an accommodation to share its “facilities” with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The book’s title page is daunting: “Canopus in Argos: Archives” at the top. Then “Re: Colonised Planet 5” (as I type this, I realize that I’ve been misreading “Re: Colonised” as recolonised): then “Shikasta”; then “Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by JOHOR (George Sherban) Emissary (Grade 9) 87th of the Period of the Last Days.” At the bottom of the page, one’s eye is suddenly delighted by the homely phrase “Alfred A. Knopf New York 1979.” There is not much music in Lessing spheres.
Like the Archangel Michael, Johor travels through Shikasta’s time. The planet’s first cities were so constructed that transmitters on Canopus could send out benign waves of force; as a result, the local population (trained by kindly giants) were happy and frolicsome. “Canopus was able to feed Shikasta with a rich and vigorous air, which kept everyone safe and healthy, and above all, made them love each other….This supply of finer air had a name. It was called SOWF—the substance-of-we-feeling—I had of course spent time and effort in working out an easily memorable syllable.” Of course. But the SOWF is cut off. The cities of the plain are blasted. The Degenerative Disease begins and the race suffers from “grandiosities and pomps,” short life spans, bad temper. The Degenerative Disease is Lessing’s equivalent for that original sin which befell man when Eve bit on the apple.
There is a certain amount of fun to be had in Johor’s tour of human history. He is busy as a bee trying to contain the evil influence of Shammat, and Lessing not only brings us up to date but beyond: the Chinese will occupy Europe fairly soon. Lessing is a master of the eschatological style and Memoirs of a Survivor is a masterpiece of that genre. But where the earlier book dealt with a very real London in a most credible terminal state, Shikasta is never quite real enough. At times the plodding style does make things believable, but then reality slips away…too little SOWF, perhaps. Nevertheless, Lessing is plainly enjoying herself and the reader can share in that enjoyment a good deal of the time. But, finally, she lacks the peculiar ability to create alternative worlds. For instance, she invents for the human dead a limbo she calls Zone 6. This shadowy place is a cross between Homer’s Hades and the Zoroastrian concept of that place where eternal souls hover about, waiting to be born. Lessing’s descriptions of the undead dead are often very fine, but when one compares her invention with Ursula Le Guin’s somewhat similar land of the dead in the Earthsea trilogy, one is aware that Le Guin’s darkness is darker, her coldness colder, her shadows more dense and stranger.
Lessing’s affinity for the Old Testament combined with the woolliness of latter-day Sufism has got her into something of a philosophical muddle. Without the idea of free will, the human race is of no interest at all; certainly, without the idea of free will there can be no literature. To watch Milton’s Lucifer serenely overthrow the controlling intelligence of his writerly creator is an awesome thing. But nothing like this happens in Lessing’s work. From the moment of creation, Lessing’s Shikastans are programmed by outside forces—sometimes benign, sometimes malign. They themselves are entirely passive. There is no Prometheus; there is not even an Eve. The fact that in the course of a very long book Lessing has not managed to create a character of the slightest interest is the result not so much of any failure in her considerable art as it is a sign that she has surrendered her mind to SOWF, or to the woollies, or to the Jealous God.
Obviously, there is a case to be made for predetermination or predestination or let-us-now-praise B. F. Skinner. Lessing herself might well argue that the seemingly inexorable DNA code is a form of genetic programming that could well be equated with Canopus’ intervention and that, in either case, our puny lives are so many interchangeable tropisms, responding to outside stimuli. But I think that the human case is more interesting than that. The fact that no religion has been able to give a satisfactory reason for the existence of evil has certainly kept human beings on their toes during the brief respites that we are allowed between those ages of faith which can always be counted upon to create that we-state which seems so much to intrigue Lessing and her woo
llies, a condition best described by the most sinister of all Latin tags, e pluribus unum.
Ultimately, Shikasta is not so much a fable of the human will in opposition to a god who has wronged the fire-seeker as it is a fairy tale about good and bad extraterrestrial forces who take some obscure pleasure in manipulating a passive ant-like human race. Needless to say, Doris Lessing is not the first to incline to this “religion.” In fact, she has considerable competition from a living prophet whose powerful mind has envisaged a race of god-like Thetans who once lived among us; they, too, overflowed with SOWF; then they went away. But all is not lost. The living prophet has told us their story. At first he wrote a science fiction novel, and bad people scoffed. But he was not dismayed. He knew that he could save us; bring back the wisdom of the Thetans; “clear” us of badness. He created a second holy book, Dianetics. Today he is the sole proprietor of the Church of Scientology. Doris Lessing would do well to abandon the woolly Idries Shah in favor of Mr. L. Ron Hubbard, who has already blazed that trail where now she trods—treads?—trods.
The New York Review of Books
DECEMBER 20, 1979
Sciascia’s Italy
Since World War II, Italy has managed, with characteristic artistry, to create a society that combines a number of the least appealing aspects of socialism with practically all the vices of capitalism. This was not the work of a day. A wide range of political parties has contributed to the invention of modern Italy, a state whose vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last living legacy anywhere on earth of the house of Bourbon (Spanish branch). In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.
Although the Italian treasury loves the personal income tax quite as much as other treasuries, any attempt to collect tax money is thwarted not only by the rich (who resemble their counterparts in the land of the free and the home of the tax accountant), but by nearly everyone else. Only those unfortunate enough to live on fixed incomes (e.g., industrial workers, schoolteachers) are trapped by the withholding tax, Zio Sam’s sly invention. Since many Italians are either not on a payroll or, if they are, have a second job, they pay little or no personal tax to a state which is then obliged to raise money through a series of value-added and sales taxes. Needless to say, the treasury is often in deficit, thanks not only to the relative freedom from taxation enjoyed by its numerous entrepreneurs (capitalist Italy) but also to the constant drain on the treasury of the large state-owned money-losing industrial consortia (socialist Italy).
Last year one fourth of the national deficit went to bail out state-controlled industries. As a result, the Communist Party of Italy is perhaps the only Communist Party anywhere on earth that has proposed, somewhat shyly, the return of certain industries to the private sector of the economy. As the former governor of the Bank of Italy, Guido Carli, put it: “The progressive introduction of socialistic elements into our society has not made us a socialist society. Rather, it has whittled down the space in which propulsive economic forces can operate.”
The Italians have made the following trade-off with a nation-state which none of them has ever much liked: if the state will not interfere too much in the lives of its citizens (that is, take most of their money in personal taxes), the people are willing to live without a proper postal service, police force, medical care—all the usual amenities of a European industrialized society. But, lately, the trade-off has broken down. Italy suffers from high inflation, growing unemployment, a deficit of some $50 billion. As a result, there are many Italians who do not in the least resemble Ms. Wertmuller’s joyous, life-enhancing, singing waiters. Millions of men and women have come to hate the house of Bourbon in whose stifling rooms they are trapped. Therefore, in order to keep from revolution a large part of the population, the government has contrived an astonishing system of pensions and welfare assistance.
In a country with a labor force of 20.5 million people, 13.5 million people are collecting pensions or receiving welfare assistance. Put another way, while the state industries absorb about 5 percent of Italy’s GDP or $9.5 billion, the pensioners get 11 percent or $25.2 billion a year.
The shrewd condottiere who control Italy realize that the state must, from time to time, placate with milk from her dugs those babes that a malign history has left in her lupine care.
Ten years ago, in the Sicilian town of Caltanissetta, a forty-eight-year-old schoolteacher and clerk in the state granary was given a pension for life. As a result, the part-time writer Leonardo Sciascia became not only a full-time writer but, recently, he has become a political force…well, no, not exactly a force (individuals, as such, exert little force in Italy’s Byzantine politics) but, rather, a voice of reason in a land where ideology has always tended to take the place of ideas. In the last election, Sciascia stood as a candidate for the Radical Party. The fact that the Radicals nearly quintupled their delegation in the parliament can be attributed, at least in part, to Sciascia’s ability to make plain the obvious. After Marco Panella, the Radical Party’s unusual leader (one is tired of calling him charismatic), Sciascia is now one of the few literary political figures who is able to illuminate a prospect that cannot be pleasing to anyone, Marxist or Christian Democrat or neither.
Elected to the national parliament last spring, Sciascia opted to go to the European parliament instead. “Sicilians,” he muttered, “gravitate either to Rome or to Milan. I like Milan.”*1 Presumably, Strasbourg is an acceptable surrogate for Milan. Actually, Sciascia is unique among Sicilian artists in that he never abandoned Sicily for what Sicilians call “the continent.” Like the noble Lampedusa, he has preferred to live and to work in his native Sicily. This means that, directly and indirectly, he has had to contend all his life with the Mafia and the Church, with fascism and communism, with the family, history. During the last quarter century, Sciascia has made out of his curious Sicilian experience a literature that is not quite like anything else ever done by a European—because Sicily is not part of Europe?—and certainly unlike anything done by a North American.
To understand Sciascia, one must understand when and where he was born and grew up and lived. Although this is true of any writer, it is crucial to the understanding of someone who was born in Sicily in 1921 (the year before Mussolini marched on Rome); who grew up under fascism; who experienced the liberation of Sicily by Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, and the American army; who has lived long enough to see the consumer society take root in Sicily’s stony soil.
Traditionally, Sicily has almost always been occupied by some foreign power. During Sciascia’s youth the Sicilians despised fascism because it was not only an alien form of government (what continental government is not alien to the Sicilians?) but a peculiarly oppressive alien government. The fascists tried to change the Sicilians. Make them wear uniforms. Conform them to the Duce’s loony pseudo-Roman norm. Although Mussolini himself paid little attention to the island, he did manage to get upstaged in the piazza of Piano dei Greci by the capo of the local mafia, one Don Ciccio Cuccia. Aware that appearance is everything and substance nothing, Mussolini struck back at Don Ciccio (he put him in jail), at the Mafia in general (he sent down an efficient inspector named Mori who did the Mafia a good deal of damage post-1924), at Piano dei Greci (Mussolini changed the name Greci to Albanese…more Roman).
By the time that Sciascia was fourteen years old, Mussolini was able to announce—almost accurately—that he had broken the back of the Mafia. Pre-Mori, ten people were murdered a day in Sicily; post-Mori, only three were murdered a week. Meanwhile, Inspector Mori was trying to change the hearts and minds of the Sicilians. In a moment of inspiration, he offered a prize to the best school-boy essay on how to combat the Mafia. Although there were, predictably, no entries at the time, Sciascia has been trying ever since to explain to Inspector Mori how best to combat or cope with the Mafia, with Sicily, wi
th the family, history, life.
“I spent the first twenty years of my life in a society which was doubly unjust, doubly unfree, doubly irrational. In effect, it was a non-society Society. La Sicilia, the Sicily that Pirandello gave us a true and profound picture of. And Fascism. And both in being Sicilian and living under fascism, I tried to cope by seeking within myself (and outside myself only in books) the ways and the means. In solitude. What I want to say is that I know very well that in those twenty years I ended up acquiring a kind of ‘neurosis from reasoning.’ ”
Sciascia’s early years were spent in the village of Racalmuto, some twenty-two kilometers from Agrigento. As a clerk’s son, Sciascia was destined to be educated. When he was six, the teacher assured the class that “the world envied fascism and Mussolini.” It is not clear whether or not the child Sciascia was ever impressed by the party line, but he certainly disliked the balilla, a paramilitary youth organization to which he was assigned. Fortunately, at the age of nine, “a distant relative was appointed the local leader of the balilla.” Influence was used and “I was relieved of my obligations” because “in Sicily the family has its vast ramifications….The family is the main root of the Mafia, which I know well. But that one time I was the willing beneficiary.”