Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing

you know. This is a thing I keep coming back to. We go through a terrible experience, it comes to an end, and it is as if it hasn’t happened, or it simply gets pushed off into words. It becomes verbalized. The First World War degraded and demoralized us terribly and the Second World War did it more thoroughly, and we have not got over either of these wars. The children of that war were profoundly affected by it. We tend to ignore this. We get steadily more and more demoralized, and barbarized, by the things we do, but we don’t like to really look at this fact. So, if in the middle of the Second World War a young woman, or very many young women, got married somewhat light-heartedly, it’s just a very minor symptom of the general lunacy.

      Hendin: Well, in what ways do you think the war affected trust in relations and the way people see themselves and each other? Is it the bomb, or simply the accessibility of so much violence through films?

      Lessing: No, it’s just one very small thing. I remember towards the end of the Second World War, after we’d had four and a half years of horror, non-stop, of the most vicious propaganda from both sides we were still capable of being shocked by the fact that the Russians publicly hanged Nazis. Well, no one would even lift an eyelid now to look at the photographs. Twenty years on, we’ve become so used to worse. That’s the horrible truth. We’re just not shocked at anything.

      Hendin: The characters, then, in The Four-Gated City in particular, seem to be as acute in terms of their ability to sense what’s going on about them. Particularly, I think, the character you describe as being mad, being insane, Lynda, and I think in that portion of the book when Martha selfconsciously drives herself mad. Do you think they’re the only people who remain in touch with these things?

      Lessing: The person in that book who has much more of a grasp of what’s going on, physically if you like, is a man. He has a kind of a blueprint of what’s going on everywhere, separating him off from what he thinks and does, from the others. These people were really into their own experiences with each other. People living together, who know each other very well, form some kind of a whole. They experience things through each other, and what one of them discovers becomes the property of the others usually. But also there are many different layers of ourselves. I mean, we know something in one part of ourselves that we don’t know in another.

      Hendin: There is a feeling in that book of being collective, not personal and unique. Even when Martha decides to go mad she describes it as being plugged into the self-hater, as though this were some almost universal force, which anyone would encounter.

      Lessing: This figure is very prominent in many schizophrenics. That’s a word I don’t like but these labels will have to do. You’ll find very many “mad people” saying: “They hate me. They’re talking about me all the time. They want to destroy me.” There are endless variations on this particular theme. This figure is common to very many people who are off-balance. I don’t think it’s very hard to explain either. All you have to do is to watch any mother bringing up her child; from the time this child is born this goes on: “Be a good boy and do this. Be a good girl and do this. You’re a bad boy. You’re a bad girl. If you do that I won’t love you. If you do that so-and-so will be angry.” This “conscience” is partly the externalization of what its parents can’t stand, mostly its manner. This figure, the self-hater, which mad people describe continually, and express continually as this very powerful destroying force, is this lifetime of conditioning.

      It’s very easy to send oneself round the bend for a couple of days. I did it once, out of curiosity. I do not recommend it. I’m a fairly tough character, and I’ve been in contact with a very large number of people who’ve been crazy, and I know quite a lot about it. I sent myself round the bend by not eating and not sleeping for a bit. There’s nothing remarkable about this process. It’s a process deliberately used by medicine men and witch doctors in “primitive societies” all over the world. It’s a process that can be described, let’s say, by prisoners in a prisoner-of-war camp, who’ve been not eating and not sleeping, and they start hallucinating, or have various kinds of experiences of dissociation and so on, or they discover this figure I call a self-hater. I could go on indefinitely. It’s described plentifully in religious literature, both Christian and Eastern.

      But what makes a difference is the society you’re in, and how this is accepted by the people around you. If in Africa somebody would turn up saying that they felt disassociated from themselves and heard voices, they wouldn’t be clapped into the nearest loony bin, drugged silly, and given electric convulsive therapy. Now when I, and I may say I’m not the only person who’s done this, deliberately sent myself round the bend to see what it was like, I instantly encountered this figure I call the self-hater. Now since I know, as I say, a little bit about it, I didn’t rush off to the nearest doctor and say: “Oh doctor, I’m hearing voices and I hate myself, and the voices say they want to kill me,” because I knew what was going on. But it is an extremely powerful figure, very frightening, and I’m not surprised that in this very unsophisticated society, unsophisticated psychologically, somebody experiencing this for the first time is scared, loses balance and goes off to the doctor, and I’m afraid to say, in very many cases is then lost. Because what happens is that a person who turns up at the out-patients or whatever, is slammed full of drugs, and then he’s diagnosed as being remote or incapable of contact, or can’t be reached, he’s slammed full of more drugs, and the end of this can very well be in some ghastly snake pit somewhere. I understand that in this country you have as many as in ours. But what is frightening is not the snake pits, because they’re out in the open and people know about them. What is frightening is what goes on in the name of orthodox and general treatment. This is where I think so much damage is caused out of ignorance and stupidity.

      

      Hendin: In the way Martha deals with it, though, she gets quite a bit out of her experience. Whatever she encounters in herself seems to be a source of strength and insight. Do you think that this kind of experience has a positive value?

      Lessing: You’ve put a whole lot of things together there. In the first place, Martha’s experience was not an account of mine. But it was similar in some respects. Yes, of course, I got a lot out of it because you learn a great deal about yourself. For one thing, one learns a lot about why some of one’s nearest and dearest land in loony bins.

      About the Briefing for a Descent into Hell, one of the starting off points for that was that it occurred to me that so many of the things described by people who are mad are the same. They use the same phrases. They’re fantastically stereotyped in fact, these experiences, and I was trying to think of different interpretations. Now, it is quite possible that this is distorted. It’s an attempt to express something which she’s trying to get through, from somewhere else. It’s probable that there’s another dimension, very close to the one that we’re used to, and that people under stress open doors to it, and experience it, in a very violent, unpleasant, or dangerous and possibly permanently damaging way. Briefing for a Descent into Hell was an attempt to suggest what in fact this experience could be.

      Hendin: Going back to Martha’s experience in the novel, I always wondered – this experience she has occurs right after she has seen her mother after so many years – since in describing it you mention the reproving voice of the mother of childhood as being bound up with it, do you think in some way the connection between …

      Lessing: No, not necessarily. This figure, this reproving “do this, don’t do that figure” is internalized, and I don’t think it’s got anything to do with what time an actual mother turns up.

      Hendin: I think that’s quite true. But I wonder, in some ways, if to Martha the visit of the mother seems to ruin the time that she’s been having in London, and precipitates a kind of break in her conception of things. Interesting that she sends her mother to her analyst. I thought that was a wonderful scene.

      Lessing: I must say, Martha’s not the only person to have done that. I’ve heard about it quite often. It’s using your support figure to say to your parent: “She says so and so.” It helps one out, I suppose.