| This study uses the insights gleaned from reader-response theory in general, and the theories of Wolfgang Iser, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes in particular, to address the causes behind the widely disparate critical and public responses to Doris Lessing's canon of speculative fictional works, comprised of: 'The Appendix' to The Four-Gated City, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, The Memoirs of a Survivor, and all five volumes of the Canopus in Argos: Archives novel-series. The alchemical metaphor is invoked by figuratively making the text the fixed catalyst which is mixed with two base elements: the imaginative ideas of the writer and the ideological codes of the reader. The reader's paradigms are thereby potentially transformed, as his or her ideological codes are challenged both by Lessing's metafictional narrative strategies, and by her unexpected fusion of rational and transcendental themes, thereby reflecting the provisional nature of reality in our post-Newtonian universe. |
