Rhizomatic Writing in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Abstract

This paper tackles with a question of what Lessing is doing with the complex and unconventional form of The Golden Notebook by drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of rhizome. Lessing’s concern with form as a literary, personal, political, ideological, and historical problem in the novel reflects her striving for a new form or order after the disillusionment with the old orders of phallogocentrism throughout the two world wars and beyond. The pursuit of a new form necessarily involves a collapse of the established order that Lessing defines as “a weeding-out system” which operates by the principle of “false dichotomies and division.” Lessing’s endeavor to move beyond the dominant mold and to construct a new order free from the oppressive binary thinking of phallogocentrism in the The Golden Notebook is resonant with and is a literary articulation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome that they elaborate as a new image of thought alternative to a hierarchical tree-system of thought. The Golden Notebook is a rhizome which is an assemblage of heterogeneous elements without a centralizing unity, and this new form is related to a new concept of the subject as a complex assemblage of different selves. Specifically, I examine what motivates the pursuit of a new form, how the heterogeneous elements of the novel are connected to comprise a nonhierarchical and nonlinear assemblage which is not subordinated to homogeneous unity, and then how its form reflects a new concept of subjectivity as a multiplicity which is composed of differences in terms of the principles of rhizome.