"The Golden Notebook," The Semiotic Interpretation

In the research of foreign languages and literatures in China, how to use the theories and methods to decipher foreign literary works has been a heated topic for discussion. This dissertation aims at analyzing The Golden Notebook written by a modern British female writer Doris Lessing(1919-2013)——a Nobel Prize Winner by using semiotics theories and researching methods of Susanne K. Langer, Борис Андреевич Усленский,Юрий Михайлович Лотман. This research does not generalize the theme of The Golden Notebook, but explores the subjectivity of the text itself. On one hand, this subjectivity relates to the world outlook and ideology of the author herself; on the other hand, it is the author’s self overcoming and exceeding of the subjectivity, and endowing the text with live subjectivity, strengthening the consciousness of subjectivity of the readers, thus creating meanings continuously and actively.From the perspective of Susanne K. Langer’s statement that "art is the reflection of emotional symbols", The Golden Notebook not only holds the rhythm of the pulse and reflects the social life of the world during the1950s, but also focuses on the concentrated reflection of the conflicting emotion of that generation.The style of the emotional pattern of manifestation is very special, making the emotion reflected in the isomorphism of the reflection of the style and content of this text, and at the same time, the symbolic meaning contained in the synergism of the mixture of the inner world and external one, and also let the unlimited interpretability implied in the combination of the real world and the virtual world. All of these lead to the special artistic effect.According to the theory of the structural poetics of Борис Андреевич Усленский, the special and ordered narrative style of the novel, with the changing of the time, is constructed in different meanings of ideology, dialogue and psychology. The Golden Notebook displays the high artistic value of the textual structure, and the dialogue mechanism of the novel as well, by, at different levels, mixing the inner and outer viewpoint, and interweaving narrative technique of four colors, black, red, yellow and blue and "free woman".According to the argumentation of function of social interaction and function of information generation of the literary text by Юрий Михайлович Лотман, this kind of structural design in the novel involves the skillful weaving of five lines in the plot, with the main line (the fifth line of the plot) focusing on emancipated women, and the other four parallel lines being the black notebook, the red notebook, the yellow notebook and the blue notebook. Such an artistic design highlights the main theme of The Golden Notebook, which can be summarized as freedom, belief, love, spirit, survival and various crises in human life. Meanwhile, the author reveals, through the use of creations in the novel and notes along with their corresponding comments, that the absurdity and worth of life lies in the course of events. Such revelation holds true both for life and literary creation. The vague, synaesthesia, rhyme and rhythm, along with the dialogue among characters, inner feelings, text, and culture, can stimulate the imagination of the readers. Readers may feel the beautiful melody and multi-meanings which, definitely, construct the generative mechanism of meanings in The Golden Notebook.This dissertation tries to show that "form can create content" in the classical literary text; the value of classical literary works lies in their unlimited interpretability.The task of literary criticism is not to reveal the settled meaning of classical literary works, but to explore their unlimited interpretability. Literary criticism can not gain the final meaning, but only enrich the meanings of the literary works, and further, promote the dialogue between the classical works and the readers of different generations. Thus, this research has important meanings to the development of literary criticism and the construction of literary theory in China.