THE TELLER IN THE TALE: THE EYE'S I IN FOUR NOVELS BY DORIS LESSING AND CARMEN MARTIN GAITE (SPAIN, ZIMBABWE)

This study assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen Mart(')in Gaite: (1) Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and Mart(')in Gaite's Retah(')ilas (1974) and (2) Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Mart(')in Gaite's The Back Room (1978). The three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for (1) feminism, (2) literary narrative, and (3) the lives of people-at-large. Distinctions between narrating author and writer-at-large as well as between psychal (pertaining to psyche) in contra- distinction to psychological (pertaining to psychology) open into literary analyses which return the teller to the tale, specifically via a concatenation of narratively essential elements involving what I call dark sense, narrative authority, and narrative homeostasis. In the earlier novels, narrative authority is undermined by imposing authoritarian narrative which overmanages the protagonists. In the later, more intimate novels, narrative authority emerges from an author who manages herself first, thus allowing for emergence of what I call persona, (as distinct from anti-heroine or heroine). The study examines the novels both critically and historically, particularly in the light of potential for narrative and human intimacy and traces a related shift in compositional-human focus from manipulation of words (tongue) to envelopment in language. Philosophically, the study embodies a proposition that absence (a gap between words and things) is no more ontologically inherent than presence (imme- diacy of words and things). Consequently, only by managing the two simultaneously can literary criticism appreciate the vital role of the teller in the tale. The novels of Lessing and Mart(')in Gaite examined here manifest in their narrative evolution the importance of the indi- vidual to herself--in her language as intimate moral action, in the mid- life arena that awaits maturing women, and in the hopeful potential in evolving feminism.