Deep South v.3. n.1. (Autumn 1997)
I shall discuss in this paper, Lessing's
deliberate appropriation of specific film imagery in The Golden
Notebook, published in 1962, The Memoirs of a Survivor,
published in 1974, and Under My Skin, Volume One of my Autobiography,
published in late 1994. The paper falls into three main sections
which, at times overlap and which are as follows. First, an introduction
to the concept of "autobiography" or "self-representational
writing" as Lessing and I both perceive it. Next, I shall
move on to attempt a more theoretical and detailed examination
of possible links which I can see between the genres of self-representational
writing and film. This section I undertake with the proviso that
my discussion does not stem from any background or expertise in
film theory and I confine myself only to the specific images of
film which Lessing uses. Finally, I shall use Lessing's use of
general film imagery to illustrate the workings of memory, the
working of which allows for the construction of a sense of "self"
or "selves," a past or pasts, and the creation of a
present. This examination of Lessing's use of film imagery as
a metaphor for the creation of an identity which may be built
on illusions, on false memories or on various different interpretations,
will bring me to the conclusion where I emphasise her concept
of autobiography as a presentation of a possible truth, the depiction
of a selfhood in a moment of time, one freeze-frame, in the evolution
of an organic process, a continuous film, or one film or even
camera angle among many.
Before I continue, however, it is important to realise that
Lessing's conception of the filmic situation does not necessarily
correspond to any one cinematic model. Having said this though,
I shall, in this paper illustrate links between Lessing's use
of the imagery of film and art cinema narration. I emphasise again
that this is not the only filmic model which one can apply to
Lessing since there are many parallels also with historical-materialist
narration within cinema. These parallels include the use of expository
titles, didactism, and montage, but because of time constraints
this paper deals only with art-cinema narration in relation to
Lessing.
To turn then to a working definition of "autobiography"
as it pertains to Lessing and the discussion at hand. Lessing
rarely comments on the "autobiographical" or "self-representational"
nature of her writing. It is apparent, however, that she uses
Jungian theory, particularly the idea of individuation, and that
she also embraces the Langian paradigms of an essential "Self"
which one can recover. She employs these theories to the extent
that they are the structuring principle of many of her novels,
especially the later books of Children of Violence, The
Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell,
and The Memoirs of a Survivor.
Individuation involves the process whereby an individual
such as Martha Quest in Children of Violence, Anna Wulf
in The Golden Notebook, the Survivor in Memoirs,
and of course Lessing herself in all of these texts as well as
Under My Skin, are able to move away from, and beyond the
claims of past experiences. The protagonists distance themselves
while paradoxically meeting, if perhaps not accepting or liking,
parts of oneself of which the individual had not been conscious.[1]
During individuation, therefore, an individual becomes familiar
with the "selves" which exist within herself or himself
while simultaneously struggling with the need to exert her or
his own voice and mastery over these different "selves."
The creation of selfhood and the sense of "self" then
for Lessing is organic, dynamic, and layered since the "self"
of an individual aged five will in no way be the same as the "self"
of that same individual aged fifty or even just six. Lessing makes
this point in Under My Skin when she says "I am trying
to write this book honestly. But were I to write it aged eighty-five,
how different would it be?"[2] The motif of a woman autobiographer
giving birth repeatedly to her self or "selves" is an
important one since it allows alternative and possibly feminist
discourses to surround the writing of "self." It is
possible to argue that the various Marthas of The Children
of Violence, Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, Jane
Somers in The Diaries of Jane Somers, and the Survivor
in Memoirs , the last of which she subtitled "An Attempt
at Autobiography", all represent younger, different, and
fictive "selves" of Lessing. The Memoirs of a Survivor
traces the actual individuation, that is, the realisation of "Self,"
of an unknown protagonist who is Lessing's fictive "self"
or more correctly "selves" since the Survivor, a middle
aged woman who lives alone in a world where civilisation is breaking
down, gradually meets, acknowledges, and comes to understand,
past selves. This novel explores Lessing's strained relationship
with her mother, as her later Under My Skin also does.
In Memoirs Lessing uses the metaphors both of architecture
and film to reveal her protagonist's exploration and recovery
of, past memories, and her creation of a "Self." The
Survivor says for example that her projected "self"
Emily's life and her own memories of past experiences were being
"run like a film behind my living room wall".[3] Here
it is possible to draw a possible link between Lessing's use of
filmic imagery and art cinema narration since David Bordwell in
Narration in the Fiction Film comments "[t]he art
film's 'reality' is multifaceted. The film will deal with 'real'
subject matter, current psychological problems such as contemporary
'alienation' and 'lack of communication'."[4] Bordwell then
goes on to discuss the presentation of dreams, hallucinations
and fantasies in art cinema narration, all of which occur in Memoirs,
as well as in other works such as Children of Violence,
The Golden Notebook, and Briefing for a Descent into
Hell.
Because of shifting perspectives, viewpoints, and often, the
dissolving of chronological boundaries when Lessing creates these
fictive "selves" through time, and the corresponding
dialogic nature of the texts, I shall include a comparison to
filmic imagery in my autobiographical approach. One can compare
the act of autobiography to the creation of a film because a post-structuralist
autobiographical approach positions the fragmented author figure
as simultaneously distanced from the experiences described by
time, shifting perspectives, maturity, a changing sense of self
or selves, and the tricks of memory, and as the chief
actors of the text. Thus a critic or reader can compare a self-representational
writer to a film director or producer who adjusts camera angles,
casts actors and positions them to create a desired scene, image,
mood. The mind of the autobiographer carefully shuffles, keeps,
or discards memories and events either "real" or "imagined."
Her or his work represents only one of many possible autobiographies
and genres just as a film can be re-shot again and again to create
different emotions and emphases. In a similar vein, what Lessing
chooses not to include, that is, memories she leaves on the cutting
room floor, may become her next filmic text. Because of this the
selection and presentation of events reveal more about the present
autobiographer/narrator than it does about her or his earlier
"selves."
Just as the artifice created by camera angles, lighting effects,
and props removes the viewers of a film from the immediacy of
the situation it portrays, the autobiographer and reader experience
the text only through authorial memory, and according to
Lessing, memory is "a lazy and imperfect organ" (UMS,
13). A "good" film can plunge a viewer right into a
"realistic" situation which she or he identifies strongly
with, and a self-representational text can similarly vividly bring
back the past to the narrator and re-animate past characters.
The links between film and the literature of self-representation,
therefore, appear to be strong. While the film theorists Bruce
Morrissette and Herbert Read do not discuss self-representational
works specifically, their comments on the novel and literature
respectively, are, I believe, pertinent to Lessing since I argue
that her texts whether "fictional" or otherwise, reveal
or contain her autobiographical impulses which she often examines
using the images of film. Morrissette for example, argues "[f]or
better or worse, the two genres, novel and film, must look to
a shared destiny."[5]
Although other film theorists including Claude Ollier and
Alain Robbe-Grillett debate the strength of such links between
the two genres, Lessing is, I think, in agreement with sentiments
such as these. Film imagery is significant for her: she exploits
it as a metaphor for the processes of the human memory, and it
links many of her self-representational texts because of its repeated
use and repeated themes. Lessing draws on film imagery, for example,
in Under My Skin when she comments on the ways in which
her memories differ from those constructed for her by her mother.
She says, "[w]hat I remember is something different, parallel,
but like a jerky stop-and-start film" (41). Lessing's autobiographical
or self-representational writings all have such a quality about
them - revealing, often painful, jerky and episodic, but never
complete. In Under My Skin Lessing reveals that,
[c]learly I had to fight to establish a reality of my own, against
an insistence from the adults that I should accept theirs. Pressure
had been put on me to admit that what I knew was true was not
so. I am deducing this. Why else my preoccupation that went on
for years: this is the truth, this is what happened,
hold on to it, don't let them talk you out of it. (13-14)
Her preoccupation, then with the presentation of her own truth,
an individual truth and validity, which Jane Somers in The
Diaries of Jane Somers also comes to value, means that one
can think of Lessing as the director, producer and actors of her
own film, a film she produces and re-produces constantly as her
perspectives and her own interpretation of the truth of an event
changes with age, emotional and chronological distance. In all
of her self-representational texts then, whether "fictional"
or "non-fictional," I argue that Lessing casts herself
over and over in different lights, shoots and re-shoots with different
angles, and in different situations.
To continue with the film analogy, fame and success trap
Lessing just as a film director becomes "known" and
categorised. A writer's earlier "self-representational"
or "autobiographical" works are of interest because
labels and reputations do not exist to the same extent to hamper
a writer while she or he is actively seeking to create a literary
and public image. A text the writer produces further into her
or his career displays a more self-conscious attempt at self-construction
as a defense. During the lifetime of an author her or his autobiography
is dynamic and plural rather than static, as is also the deliberately
constructed self-image of a well-known or popular film director.
Bordwell, for example, argues of art cinema that "[t]he authorial
trademark requires that the spectator see this film as fitting
into a body of work" (211). The self-representational texts
and autobiographical works of Lessing including her many interviews
are examples of the textual appropriation of a younger or "different"
"self" and the construction of a fictive identity. It
is an attempt to fix her past and her past selves in history.
The conscious or subconscious reconstruction of the landscape
of the past and the metaphor of film direction is important when
the reader considers it alongside Saul Green's revelations to
Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook. As projectionist during
one of her dream sequences Saul shows Anna the way in which she
has constructed her past. The people she had known and events
were not at all how she had imagined them to have been or how
she had presented them in her notebooks. Perhaps Lessing reading
over published novels or drafts of texts finds herself at the
same conclusion, a conclusion which forces her on to create yet
another image of herself, that is, to re-cast herself in another
light, to shoot the scene from a new angle.
A consideration of cinematic techniques is useful in an autobiographical
approach to Lessing since films and autobiography likewise allow
a panoramic vision and an intense, focused, and detailed vision.
Both effects can occur in the same work, and while this provides
a richness of scenery, a depth of detail, a coherence, perhaps,
of a vision or visions, it also means the possibility of tension
between that which is personal to an individual, and the wider
view of the collective which may have a different vision. In the
course of a film, an autobiography, or self-representational text,
or an actual life-time, different people and events become part
of the panoramic view and the focus of the close-ups change as
people, emotions, and events fade imperceptibly out of sight or
into each other.
Lessing is aware of the unreliability and unpredictability
of memory and of the tensions which arise from conflicting demands
from the past, and memories. Under My Skin, volume one
of her autobiography, is an attempt to shoot a panoramic view
of her early life. Despite this, she knows that it, like all of
her self-representational texts, can only ever be a freeze-frame
of a specific historical moment, a series of camera shots only,
one film of many. Lessing believes "[y]ou see your life differently
at different stages, like climbing a mountain while the landscape
changes with every turn in the path."(UMS, 12). Any
attempt to capture the broad scenery results, therefore, in one
particular view instead. She further comments that "[n]ot
only the perspective but what you are looking at changes"(13).
One can find an example of the way in which perspectives can change
in Lessing's account in Under My Skin of her mother lifting
up her dress to display her first bra to her father. "I was
consumed with rage and hatred", comments Lessing, "just
as I had been when I began menstruating, and she rushed through
the house to announce it to my father and brother(171-72). This
viewpoint of an adolescent contrasts sharply with that of the
much older Lessing who matter-of-factly comments "[i]t is
not tactful for a mother to lift up her fifteen-year-old daughter's
dress to expose her breasts to her father, but it is hardly a
crime"(172).The changing perspectives which Lessing mentions
provide one explanation as to why Lessing repeats incidents over
and over throughout her self-representational texts while she
deals with others scantily, once, or perhaps not at all. While
this notion of seeing things differently at different ages and
life-stages is attractive, one must remember that once Lessing
has dealt with any particular event she may simply feel that to
repeat it is unnecessary.
The question of point of view therefore, is central in the
cinematic situation and in a self-representational work and it
is a question which tantalises and teases Lessing. One can further
extend the analogy of film then, to discuss the notion of spectatorship
as it pertains to Lessing's self-representational texts. To follow
my argument that Lessing is both actors, director and producer
of her life text or texts means also that she becomes, through
the act of writing, both a spectator and a spectacle. Because
of this double role, a self-representational writer reveals the
tensions which exist between her or his personal positionings
within the text and society, and the pull of collective definitions
of identity and roles. As I have already discussed, Lessing's
self-representational texts, particularly Under My Skin,
are saturated with such tensions and ambiguities. Lessing as narrator
of her life text(s) brings her own prejudices and the expectations
of her patriarchal society to her text, and she is constantly
aware of the reader as the audience of her construction and presentation
of her self image or images. While a writer of self-representational
texts, in this instance Lessing, is both spectator and spectacle,
which can affect the work she or he may produce, there is yet
another dimension to any consideration of point of view in either
film or self-representational texts.
Fiction which is autobiographical, self-representational,
or judged to be so, always also involves a voyeuristic process
because there is the tendency for readers to view, or attempt
to view the author or authorial identities through the medium
of the text. Such a positioning of a reader in relation to a text
and its author has important feminist implications. A woman writer
may become an object for readers to observe, perhaps through the
lens of phallocentric identity and discourse. She becomes a product
of consumerism, subsumed to an extent by both her text and the
reader's own subjectivity and preconceptions. The situation presents
in miniature the position of women in patriarchal society who
are simultaneously observers and the observed. The reader can
understand this inner/outer duality or split in the context of
Lessing's fiction which is so analytical and self-conscious. Lessing
writes Under My Skin partly for herself, but in part is
prompted by, and responds to, patriarchal pronouncements about
women which she herself has abandoned but never forgotten. In
this text she directly addresses her first failed marriage and
gives her own reason for leaving her first husband Frank Wisdom
and her two children. She says "I would not have survived.
A nervous breakdown was the least of it" (265). She further
comments "[w]hen I said I was leaving Frank because I wanted
to live differently, no one believed me"(265). In Under
My Skin then, Lessing is able to at last tell her own personal
story, a story she constantly re-works. In her autobiography which
is her latest presentation of "Self," her manner of
writing is self-conscious and it appears she constantly is rehearsing
and preparing answers to the questions she expects from her readers.
Her position as the creator of her own identity again is similar
to the art cinema context where, Bordwell argues "the overt
self-consciousness of the narration is often paralleled by an
extratextual emphasis on the film maker as source" (211).
Bordwell further notes "[i]n the art film ... the very construction
of the narration becomes the object of spectator hypotheses, how
is the story being told? why in this way?" (211). Lessing
as spectator and critic of her own text constantly also asks herself
these questions.
There is now, particularly with the work of feminist autobiographical
critics, such as Sidonie Smith, increased emphasis on the autobiographer
as "story-teller" and "re-teller," rather
than historical chronicler, an emphasis which makes them so much
more the participant, creator, and shaper of their own text and
life-text. This paper examines Lessing's own use of film imagery
in The Golden Notebook, The Memoirs of a Survivor and
Under my Skin, to illustrate the way in which Lessing's
construction of a selfhood is dynamic, evolving, and organic.
This is because it presents her individual texts as films of her
identity, a representation of a "self" at a given moment
and I suggest that while Under My Skin may represent a
cohering of all that had gone before, it too is but one film of
many.
[1] Bordwell, David, Narration and the Fiction Film
London: Metheun, 1985.
[2] Lessing, Doris, The Memoirs of a Survivor London:
The Octagon Press, 1974
[3] Lessing, Doris, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography,
to 1949 London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1994
[4] Morrissette, Bruce, Aesthetic Responses to Novel and Film:
Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres, Ed. Morrissette,
Bruce Chicago: U of Chicago P., 1985. 12-27.
[5] Wehr, Demaris,S., Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
Copyright (c) 1997 by Lynda Scott
Notes
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