Textual Encoding Of Social Contradictions In The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook is a masterpiece of the British woman writer Doris Lessing.With this more than six-hundred-page-long novel, Lessing wants to present the world during the Second World War and the Cold War. To achieve this goal, Lessing must pay attention to the art of constructing reality in a fictional world. In The Golden Notebook, a distinctive feature is Lessing's encoding of social contradictions in the text. Here,encoding social contradiction in a text means that a writer chooses some particular social elements from reality and embeds them in a text in a metaphorical way. In literary encoding, the writer is not limited to reality, so he can surpass reality to find possibilities in imagination deriving from reality. This creative way sometimes is used to help writers achieve the goal of presenting social conflicts or finding ways to solve social conflicts. In order to know how Lessing encodes social contradictions in The Golden Notebook, the paper applies Fredric Jameson's aesthetic of romance and three horizons to the analysis of the text.The paper is composed of five sections. The first section summarizes Lessing's life and The Golden Notebook, proposes the necessity of the study after giving a general review about literary studies of Lessing and her works, as well as clarifies Fredric Jameson's aesthetic of romance and three horizons. The second section puts The Golden Note book in political horizon. In this horizon,"the black notebook"is interpreted as a text with which Lessing creates a utopia. In this utopia, Lessing projects contradictions in British colonies, such as oppression of the whites on the lower-class blacks, hierarchy in the whites and estrangement of middle-class communists from African lower class, in the text in the form of conflicts between representative individuals or groups. These complicated conflicts are actually irresolvable in reality and some are causes of wars.Lessing,by presenting a utopian Africa,implicitly presents a solution,collective compromise, to balance all powers. This solution is also a way leading to peace for an unstable society. The third section puts The Golden Notebook in the social horizon. In this horizon,the text of four notebooks and "Free Women" is interpreted as a text with which Lessing presents social contradictions in London. In the narrative,Lessing chooses representatives of different classes and groups in London,such as the middle-class capitalists represented by Richard, the middle-class liberals represented by Anna and Molly, the lower class represented by farmers and labors, to write in her text and makes them speak out their voices about communism. The contradictory state of voices is presented by Lessing to reflect contradictory ideologies of different classes. The fourth section puts The Golden Notebook in historical horizon. In this horizon, the whole text of The Golden Notebook is still divided into two parts. In "the black notebook," Lessing presents Southern Rhodesia in which the feudal mode of production dominates and in the rest four notebooks and "Free Women," Lessing presents London in which the capitalist mode of production dominates. By encoding the contradiction of the two modes of production in the conflicts of their cultural signs, such as the conflicts between nature and urban view, cottage and city, as well as in the conflict of their ideologies, such as idealism and utilitarianism, Lessing reveals expressions for the contradiction of the two modes of production. By revealing the relation between conflicts of cultural signs and social developmental stages, Lessing presents the way of studying social conflicts from a historical perspective. The fifth section gives a conclusion and points out the meaning of the study.