Lessing's Polyphony

Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 2007, is one of the most important contemporary novelists in Britain. She was described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny"The Golden Notebook is considered as Lessing's masterpiece and one of the greatest works in the contemporary literature. The excellence of this novel not only lies in Lessing's successful depiction of the free woman, Anna's spiritual pursuit, but also lies in Lessing's bold experiment on artistic forms of the novel, which breaks the restriction of the traditional novel. Since its publication, The Golden Notebook has attracted attentions of many critics both at home and abroad. Their discussions on the novel include feminism, post colonialism, post modernism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and so on. This paper purports to analyze this novel with Bahktin's theory of polyphony to show how Lessing's pursuit of wholeness in a fragmented world.The thesis consists of four parts. The first section discusses the new authorial position through the analysis of focalization in the novel. The multiple focalizations designate the author and the characters with equal status in narrating the events. Thus, the various consciousnesses of characters will be granted with equal importance as the author's, which makes the dialogues between various consciousnesses possible. The second and third sections focus on dialogues, including micro dialogue and great dialogue. The micro dialogues reveal Anna's split inner mind in face of complex environment. Great dialogues mainly exist between fiction and reality and contraposition of characters, which demonstrate the contending of consciousnesses in a greater sense. The fourth section focuses on the synchronicity and circulated structure in The Golden Notebook. With this time-space order and structure, Lessing encompasses different elements in one book, and impresses us with the features of openness and plurality.