Searching For Self-Perfection In A Chaotic World

As Doris Lessing's masterpiece, The Golden Notebook remains a staple coin in the currency of contemporary culture, registering since its publication 30 years ago the real gold value of novels that appeal to a general readership and engage, at the same time, scholars of the literary period. Further, it has, like a forceful magnet, pulled to itself the fibers of many contemporary concerns: feminist, modernist, postmodernist, Marxist, psychoanalytical, philosophical, social, and economic. For the novel is encyclopedic.For Lessing herself, although she has been vehemently and consistently opposed to labeling and compartmentalizing under any "ism", she still admits that The Golden Notebook, written before she encounters Sufism, is her "most Sufi book". It cannot be claimed that Sufism is the ultimate key to interpreting her work, and it offers another level for our understanding, which is just the perspective of this paper.The emblematically named protagonist, Anna Freeman Wulf, is now unmarried and a single parent engaged in hurt love affairs, one which remains divorced from love, family, work, even political hope. Since Anna's apparently free life is "cracking up" sexually, politically, professionally, and psychologically, she keeps four notebooks: a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which Anna makes stories out of her experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary. She keeps the four notebooks out of fear of chaos and of breakdown. Once she is able to deal with the fragmentation in her life, she gives up writing in the four notebooks and buys a "Golden Notebook".Concept of wholeness is among the building blocks of Sufism. Sufi's ultimate goal is to burn his ego and his individual soul until they are extinguished, on which point they attain "the soul of the soul" and become one with God. According to Sufism, this consummation of one's perfection is realized in four subsequent stages of "self becoming emptied", "self becoming illuminated", "self becoming adorned" and "self-having-passed-away". This paper intends to analyze Anna's process from psychological destruction to reintegration according to these stages through the form of her notebooks.The Black Notebook and Red Notebook record Anna's "self becoming emptied" stage. If one wants to get new understanding about himself and the world, he must abandon his old belief and experience. That is to say, before Anna gets her self-perfection, she has to experience some obstacles in order to abandon her old belief. Anna first resorts to racial and political activities for solution. But later she finds that the natives in African range from purely idealistic to purely opportunistic, and the white become either disillusioned or part of the dominant order. Even her novel set on this experience proves to present only nihilism, which is recorded in the Black Notebook. Her experience as a Communist in the Red Notebook is also disappointing. She feels distaste and disgust for the official party's behavior. She realizes that she has accomplished nothing in all the "frenzied political activity" in which she has been involved, so she leaves the party. When the disturbing effect of racial and Communist activities bring the sense of fragmentation to Anna to an especially serious degree, it demands her to abandon all her old believes and move on to a further level of commitment.Anna's "self becoming illuminated" stage is reflected in the Yellow Notebook and the Blue Notebook. After abandoning the negative qualities attached by the outside world, Anna begins to work on her inner being. The Yellow Notebook includes a novel, The Shadow of the Third. Through her fictional double, Ella, Anna finds her fragmentation in a fragmented world, and tries to get the acknowledgement of her emotional and sexual nature. She gradually understands those qualities that have led her into dependent relationships and learns to express her sexual needs in...