Putting the Questions Differently. Doris Lessing

apple blossoms and so on, and I have got nothing against exquisite little poems about apple blossoms and I very much enjoy reading the small novel about emotions in the shires, but I do regard it as dead.

      Bigsby: Is that why you have responded so enthusiastically to science fiction? You said in the introductory note to Shikasta that it enables you to be both experimental and traditional, in a way that I suppose Marriages is because there is a recognizable traditional element there.

      Lessing: I think that is a traditional book. I think it is almost a timeless sort of book, where Shikasta is a mess, but at any rate it is a new mess.

      Bigsby: Marriages is a sort of legend or myth?

      Lessing: Well, yes, I have been fascinated with science fiction and space fiction because it is full of ideas. In science fiction the real scientist who writes it will produce some scientific idea and take it to its logical conclusion and say, “Well, if you do this, that will happen,” and so on, which I find fascinating, though very often I can’t follow the science. And I am sure that this genre of science fiction has educated a whole generation of young people into thinking scientifically, which they certainly don’t get where they’re taught.

      Bigsby: In the prefatory note to Shikasta you seem to suggest that the novelist is driven beyond realism because reality itself has become more fantastic. I wonder if that is really the reason or whether, at least in your case, it isn’t because you believe that reality is more dense, more profound, more various than we usually assume; in other words, reality has not changed. What has been failing is our perception of the fact that it has been this.

      Lessing: This is true, of course, because our view of ourselves changes all the time. Sometimes this view is based on some kind of mythical framework, legendary framework, like people we describe as backward, or it can be based on fact. We like to think of ourselves as based on facts, but the facts are becoming so extraordinary.

      Bigsby: I don’t know that they are any more extraordinary now than they used to be. For people who believed that the earth was flat it must have been quite a staggering thing to discover that it wasn’t. In a sense contemporary reality is much less extraordinary than that. We are now attuned to absorb almost anything within very rapid time. It becomes part of our world view. A few hundred years ago it would take a century to get people to accept things.

      Lessing: Yes, that is true, I suppose. Things have speeded up so fast that we can cope with it … There is a point I want to make about writing, or telling stories. It is a thought that I can’t come to terms with: why do we tell stories? What is the function of the storyteller? We never stop telling ourselves stories. It is the way we structure reality; we tell stories all day, don’t we? And when we go to sleep we tell ourselves stories because a dream is a story, maybe sometimes very logical and straightforward and sometimes not, but there is something in us that needs stories. I heard someone on the radio the other night say that the dream is a way of reprogramming our minds. This is a theory, but when somebody sits down to write a novel, we don’t know what we are doing. Why does humanity have this need?

      Bigsby: In fact storytellers play an important part in Marriages, don’t they? The narrator is a professional storyteller; that is, his cultural function is a storyteller, isn’t it? A singer of songs.

      Lessing: I wanted one voice so I had to think who was likely to have that one voice. I couldn’t have either Al.Ith or Ben Ata because they were too partial, or even my lovely servant, who I adore.

      Bigsby: You have an interest in the realm of the subconscious and to some extent what is now called paranormal. Now that is not just as metaphor, is it? You mean that literally?

      Lessing: Yes, literally. It is what I have experienced and what a lot of other people have experienced.

      Bigsby: Telepathy, for example.

      Lessing: Yes, I have experienced telepathy, but then I think a great many people do. I think we are probably at it all the time without knowing it. Ideas flow through our minds like water all the time. But my interest in the paranormal is not as kicks. I used to be terribly fascinated, but now I try to use it in a very quiet, sober sort of way. For example, I keep a diary where I note down the odd events, like coincidences and things, that I think are going to happen whether they do or not. I am quite objective about that, I don’t make things up. I use dreams all the time. I have done since I was a child. I use dreams in my work because I get ideas or I get warnings in my dreams about people or situations. I don’t know if that goes under paranormal or not, but humanity has been using dreams ever since it was born.

      Bigsby: Moving to your more recent books, there are constant images of devastation, but on the other hand humanity seems to come out the other side of that devastation. It was true, of course, of The Four-Gated City. But in the latest books you move towards a simple faith, isn’t it, in something not fully perceived? Obedience to some sort of cosmic will?

      Lessing: I don’t know about obedience. Do you choose to have obedience?

      Bigsby: But I think you use the word “faith” yourself. That is what finally they are left with.

      Lessing: I thought a lot about putting that word in because it has got religious connotations.

      Bigsby: What is it they are believing in, then?

      Lessing: Since the history of man began, has there been anything else but disaster, plagues, miseries, wars? Yet something has survived of it. Now our view is, of course, that we’re onwards and upwards all the time. I just have an open mind about all that. But I do think that if we have survived so much in the past we are survivors, if nothing else, and if nothing else we are extremely prolific. Has it ever occurred to you how prolific we are? We are worse than rabbits. We just breed; the world is full of babies. I like to think some of them will survive, perhaps even better. Also, is it possible that the radiation that we are going to inflict upon the world might make us mutate? We don’t know. There is now a theory that the dinosaurs died out not because of a shift of climates, but because of a different kind of radiation. We are bombarded by different kinds of radiation. Neutrons pour through us as we sit here, did you know? Well, you see, we don’t know what else pours through us and how we might react to a different kind of medicine.

      Bigsby: So this is faith?

      Lessing: Optimism.

       Writing as Time Runs Out Michael Dean

      

      

      Michael Dean’s interview was broadcast May 7, 1980, on BBC-2. Copyright © 1980 by British Broadcasting Corporation. Printed with permission.

      Dean: You spent your formative years growing up in Rhodesia with English parents who imagined, at least half the time it seemed, that they were still in England. Was it a happy childhood?

      Lessing: No, it wasn’t at all. Fighting every inch of the way I was. No, I had to. It was nobody’s fault. You have to get to be old like me before you can look back and understand your parents, and now I’m desperately sorry for my mother particularly.

      Dean: You were a late developer and had no formal education as we understand it, leaving school at fourteen.

      Lessing: That’s right.

      Dean: Why?

      Lessing: Well, it was part of fighting my poor mama. I went off and I was what is now called an au pair girl. I was a nursemaid in fact for about two and one-half years in Salisbury. I didn’t mind the work, because