Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Lessing said that connections between English writers and universities were quite rare, but that in the United States it seemed very common. I explained that this was because of the existence of creative writing programs in the United States, which were not narrowly “academic,” but which allowed a writer-in-residence to meet with students once or twice a week, giving him much time for his own work. In England, many writers are forced to work in publishing houses or on magazines. The publishing world in London, Lessing said, is always changing; editors are always switching publishers, publishing houses disappear and new ones appear. In fact, she told me news I hadn’t heard (and probably would not have heard, since I am in a kind of dream world here, strangely out of contact with local literary events), concerning the paperback reprint house which publishes us both, Panther: the two top editors quit this week and are going to form their own publishing house. When I expressed surprise, she told me that this sort of thing is always happening. New York City, though also restive, is not quite so bad.

  Lessing’s American publisher is Knopf, and her editor the well-known Bob Gottlieb, with whom she enjoys working very much. She moved with Gottlieb when he left Simon & Schuster, and thinks he is an excellent editor; he helped arrange for her lecture series. I asked her if she was pleased, generally, with her writing and with its public response. Strangely, she replied that she sometimes had to force herself to write—that she often was overcome by the probable “pointlessness” of the whole thing. I asked Lessing if she meant that her own writing seemed to her sometimes futile, or was it the role of literature in society.

  “I suppose one begins with the idea of transforming society,” she said, “through literature and then, when nothing happens, one feels a sense of failure. But then the question is simply why did one feel he might change society? Change anything? In any case, one keeps going.”

  I told Lessing that her writing has worked to transform many individuals, and that individuals, though apparently isolated, do, in fact, constitute society. Her own writing, in my opinion, does not exist in a vacuum, but reinforces and is reinforced by the writing of some of her important (and nonliterary) contemporaries—Ronald Laing, Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Barry Commoner—and many other critics of the “self-destructing society.”

  “Yet one does question the very premises of literature, at times,” Lessing said. “Has anything changed? Will anything change? The vocal opposition to the war in Vietnam, in America—has it forced any real change?”

  “I think there have been changes, alterations of consciousness,” I said.

  Lessing received my opinion respectfully, but it seemed clear that she did not share it. She went on to remark that she felt rather out of touch with current writing, since she kept to herself, generally, and did not make any attempt to keep up with all that was being written. She asked me about the English writers I admired. When I told her that I very much liked Naipaul’s In a Free State, she agreed that Naipaul was an excellent writer. “But somehow I don’t feel a rapport with him, the kind of sympathy I feel for someone like Vonnegut, even though he writes about a part of the world, Africa, I know very well.”

  Of the younger English writers I admired, only Margaret Drabble was a familiar name to Lessing. She liked Miss Drabble’s writing but had not yet read The Needle’s Eye; I told her that I thought this novel shared some important themes with her own work—the conscious “creating” of a set of values by which people can live, albeit in a difficult, tragically diminished urban world.

  “Well, whether literature accomplishes anything or not,” Mrs. Lessing said, “we do keep going.”

  When I left Lessing’s flat and walked back down the hill to the Underground station, I felt even more strongly that sense of suspension, of unreality. It seemed to me one of the mysterious paradoxes of life, the inability of the truly gifted, the prophetic “geniuses” (an unforgivable but necessary word) to comprehend themselves, their places in history: rare indeed is the self-recognized and self-defined person like Yeats, who seems to have come to terms not only with his creative productivity but also with his destiny. Doris Lessing, the warm, poised, immensely interesting woman with whom I had just spent two hours, does not yet know that she is Doris Lessing, one day to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Yet it is natural, I suppose, for her not to know or to guess how much The Golden Notebook (predating and superseding even the most sophisticated of all the “women’s liberation” works) meant to young women of my generation; how beautifully the craftsmanship of her many short stories illuminated lives, the most secret and guarded of private lives, in a style that was never self-conscious or contrived. She could not gauge how The Four-Gated City, evidently a difficult novel for her to write, would work to transform our consciousness not only of the ecological disaster we are facing, the self-annihilating madness of our society which brands its critics as “mad,” but also of the possibilities of the open form of the novel itself. Never superficially experimental, Lessing’s writing is profoundly experimental—exploratory—in its effort to alter our expectations about life and about the range of our own consciousness.

  Her books, especially the Martha Quest series, The Golden Notebook, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, have traced an evolutionary progress of the soul, which to some extent transforms the reader as he reads. I think it is true of our greatest writers that their effect on us is delayed, that it may take years for us to understand what they have done to us. Doris Lessing possesses a unique sensitivity, writing out of her own intense experience, her own subjectivity, but at the same time writing out of the spirit of the times. This is a gift that cannot be analyzed; it must only be honored.

  III

  CONTEMPORARIES

  THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS:

  J. M. COETZEE

  Like J. M. Coetzee’s richly symbolic early novels Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life & Times of Michael K. (1983), the starkly narrated The Childhood of Jesus plunges us at once into a mysterious and dreamlike terrain. Where the early novels evoke Coetzee’s native South Africa and the madness of apartheid, and immerse the reader in situations of near-unbearable intensity, The Childhood of Jesus is set in a sort of posthumous limbo in which a haze of forgetfulness has enervated most of the characters, as in a paralyzing smog. We arrive by boat in a city called Novilla, in an unnamed but possibly southern European country, in the company of a middle-aged man named Simon, who has taken under his protection a child named David—“Not my grandson, not my son, but I am responsible for him.” It would appear that the travelers are refugees: they have come from a “camp” at Belstar, where they were given Spanish lessons and new passports. The child has been separated from his parents. Simon seems to have no family at all. Having been shorn of his memory on the ocean voyage, like all his fellow travelers, Simon arrives in unknown territory and must establish himself as a citizen; he must find shelter, and he must find work to support himself and the boy. If Simon has had a profession or a trade in his former life, he can’t recall it; he is grateful to find work as a stevedore, for which he is barely qualified. It will be Simon’s obsession to locate David’s mother, whose name he doesn’t know, and of whom he knows nothing, not even that she has arrived in this strange, nameless country.

  In time we learn that “Simon” and “David” are arbitrary names; no one in this place knows his or her birth-name; even ages and birth dates have been given out arbitrarily:

  The names we use are the names we were given . . . but we might just as well have been given numbers. Numbers, names—they are equally arbitrary, equally random, equally unimportant.

  It’s an unusual dystopian fiction in which a protagonist is so passive in his acceptance of his fate, but Simon exhibits virtually no curiosity about such decisions or who the anonymous authorities are who administer them; just possibly, the enigmatically titled The Childhood of Jesus isn’t a dystopian fiction at all.

  Though Spanish is the official language of the new c
ountry, it is not a native but an arbitrarily chosen language. As Simon tries to explain to David, who has begun to take refuge in jabbering to himself in a private, nonsense-language:

  Everyone comes to this country as a stranger. . . . We came from various places and various pasts, seeking a new life. But now we are all in the same boat together. So we have to get along with each other. One of the ways in which we get along is by speaking the same language. That is the rule. It is a good rule, and we should obey it. . . . If you refuse, if you go on being rude about Spanish and insist on speaking your own language, then you are going to find yourself living in a private world.

  The conflict between the “private” world of individual, childish fantasy (suggested by an illustrated copy of Don Quixote to which David clings) and the larger, public, impersonal world which demands conformity of all citizens would seem to be a predominant theme of The Childhood of Jesus.

  Here is not the chill, mounting terror of Orwell’s 1984, nor even the somnolent haze of Huxley’s Brave New World, but rather a quasi-socialist state in which conformity, mediocrity, and anonymity are both the norm and the highest values. There appear to be no threats of punishment—the very term “police” is used only once, as a warning when David refuses to attend school like other children; no “police officers” ever appear. The indistinctly dreamlike, minimally described atmosphere suggests a Kafkaesque cityscape or a near-barren Beckett stage. (The penultimate chapter of Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello is an “appropriation” of several fabled prose pieces of Kafka. Coetzee wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Samuel Beckett, and has clearly been influenced by Beckett.) Where an invisible but benign bureaucracy oversees individual lives at a considerable distance, most citizens are grateful for sustenance and accommodations in uniform housing blocks; some watch football on TV, and others attend night-school classes in the hope of self-improvement. All appear content to live lives somewhere below the level of what Henry David Thoreau has called quiet desperation. Boredom? Sexual yearning? Suffering, dying, death? Why be concerned? As a citizen typically remarks, “If he died he will go on to the next life.”

  Simon has difficulty adjusting to his new life. He has lost his memory yet retains a discomforting “memory of having a memory.” Though he tries to conform to the worker-ant society, he feels alienated from the very atmosphere of Novilla—a generalized “benevolence”—“a cloud of goodwill.” Nothing seems urgent here, nothing is “privatized.” All is generic, universal, impersonal. In uniformly plain, flat, unadorned prose, in which nothing so luxurious as a metaphor emerges, or a striking employment of syntax, or a word of more than one or two syllables, Coetzee never suggests any sort of nationalism or religious tradition—there are no churches, synagogues or mosques in this exhausted country. It would appear to be a wholly secular state, a non-nation, with a non-native-language and a quasi-socialist agenda lacking history; all its citizens are amnesiacs. Love, desire, even intense friendships are virtually unknown. When Simon complains that goodwill, a “universal balm for our ills,” is no substitute for “plain old physical contact” he’s met with a bemused rejoinder—“If by sleeping with someone you mean sex—quite strange too. A strange thing to be preoccupied with.”

  Surrounded by benevolent zombies, plaintively Simon demands, “Have you ever asked yourself whether the price we pay for this new life, the price of forgetting, may not be too high?” He is the only person to rage against the loss of a fuller humanity: “When we have annihilated our hunger, you say, we will have proved we can adapt, and we can be happy for ever after. But I don’t want to starve the dog of hunger. I want to feed it!” Literally, Simon wants to eat meat—“Beefsteak with mashed potatoes and gravy . . . Beefsteak dripping with meat juices.” He is deeply unhappy that the diet in Novilla is mostly crackers, bread, and a tepid sort of bean paste; there is no salt in Novilla, as there is no irony. “It is so bloodless. Everyone I meet is so decent, so kindly, so well-intentioned. No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. . . . How can that be, humanly speaking? Are you lying, even to yourselves?” As a militant vegetarian, Coetzee has written passionately and scathingly of the custom of eating meat; in the mock-autobiographical/confessional Elizabeth Costello, he has suggested that the Holocaust of 20th-century Europe is not essentially different from the Holocaust of daily animal slaughter, and that meat-eaters are not to be distinguished from the Nazis who made soap of human beings and fashioned lamp shades of their skin. (Delivered as a “fable-lecture” at Princeton University in the 1997–1998 Tanner Lecture series, this excerpt from Coetzee’s work-in-progress created a ripple of unease and indignation among the mostly meat-eating academic audience; if it was Coetzee’s intention to unsettle them, he succeeded brilliantly. At the official dinner that followed, no meat was served to any guest.) Yet, in this scene, as in others in The Childhood of Jesus, the reader is inclined to assume that Simon is speaking for the author, in a rare and welcome display of feeling in a novel so generally muted in emotion.

  Perhaps the issue of Simon’s unhappiness is essentially a philosophical one, however: not sex or love per se but the very phenomenon of “passion” needs to be examined, as in this rather prissy lecture put to Simon by the “gaunt” woman with whom he has been having a perfunctory affair:

  In the old way of thinking, no matter how much you may have, there is always something missing. The name you choose to give this something-more that is missing is passion. . . . This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of . . . nothing is missing. The nothing that you think is missing is an illusion. You are living by an illusion.

  This is the very vocabulary of Buddhist and Hindu epistemology: the world of transient attachments and desires is an illusion, and to free oneself from such is to free oneself from illusion. Yet, to attain this enlightenment is, in a sense, to renounce what is fully human; it is a kind of death. Like an obtuse naïf Simon is frequently rebuked: “This isn’t a possible world—it is the only world.”

  Starved for “feminine beauty” as well as for beefsteak, Simon tries to register with a service called Salon Comfort, where he will have sessions with sex-workers; his application is denied, with the tactless suggestion that he “withdraw from sex. You are old enough to do so.” In this, Simon is clearly akin to the emotionally starved “professor of communications” of Coetzee’s best-known, best-selling novel Disgrace (1999), whose rejection by an escort-for-hire whom he has been seeing routinely for years precipitates the disaster—the “disgrace”—of his life.

  One day, abruptly, in a display of irrationality that seems out of character, Simon decides that a woman he has seen playing tennis, a stranger, is David’s mother—“I recognized her as soon as I set eyes on her.” The woman, Ines, is a “blank slate, a virgin slate,” upon which Simon can project his private, highly idiosyncratic meaning. Except that The Childhood of Jesus is a fable of the Absurd and not a realistic novel, it’s difficult to see how or why Simon would act so brashly. He duly arranges for the “stolid, humorless” Inez to live with David in his flat, supported by Simon. In this way, a quasi-family is created, ex nihilo. The reader might wonder at this point: If David is, in some sense, the child “Jesus,” is the stolid Ines meant to suggest, or in some way to be, the Biblical “Virgin Mary”? In which case, is Simon an avatar of the Biblical St. Joseph? Given the solemnity of this far-fetched development it is also possible that Coetzee is gently parodying messianic delusions among people who have nothing else to sustain them.

  The remainder of The Childhood of Jesus is taken up with the protracted struggle of David’s pseudo-parents over the boy, not unlike the ongoing struggle of ordinary parents with “difficult” children. Ines infantilizes David as “the light of my life” and wants to keep him with her at home, while Simon wants to send him to school. Both are adamantly certain that David is “exceptional.” Not a very convincing child, David would seem to be a symbol in the author’s imagina
tion of “childness” in the Romantic, Wordsworthian, sense—that is, the child as close to God, “trailing clouds of glory” (Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”). Consequently, the reader has difficulty forming a coherent picture of him: at times David seems emotionally disturbed, possibly autistic, or mildly schizophrenic; he has no friends at school and his teacher finds him essentially unteachable, as he is a disruptive presence in the classroom, yet his immature behavior might be a consequence of adult over-indulgence. He is unusually bright at times, then again obstinate, exasperating. If David is indeed meant to be the child Jesus, Coetzee has not fashioned an appropriate early life for him, for David’s concerns are exclusively for himself, and not for others; indeed, David seems to have no sense of others’ existences, stubbornly convinced that whatever he thinks, is true. (Told that things have to have value before they can be placed in a museum, David typically rejoins, “What is value?” His argument is, in a sense, irrefutable: “I prize it. It’s my museum, not yours.”) Soon, the five-year-old begins to make grandiloquent pronouncements: “I haven’t got a mother and I haven’t got a father. I just am.” “Yo soy la verdad. ‘I am the truth.’” (225) A child psychologist diagnoses him as maladjusted: “The real . . . is what David misses in his life. This experience of lacking the real includes the experience of lacking real parents. David has no anchor in his life.” Yet, no one in Novilla has any “anchor” in life, since no one has any memory of a life before Novilla; in fact, Novilla seems scarcely to exist, a sketchily imagined fictitious place that might well be a bare, Beckett stage in which actors are reading scripts they don’t fully understand, at the bequest of a director who remains elusive and has relinquished the very responsibility of “direction.” In this existential stalemate even Simon is reduced to a primitive cri de coeur: “The life I have is not enough for me. I wish someone, some savior, would descend from the sky.”