The Quest and the Quotidian: Doris Lessing in South Africa

Abstract

Doris Lessing’s Bildung, or life-search, as formulated in her fictional texts is read by Lessing critics as the symbolic history of the age. This is not unprecedented. Such ‘reflectionism’ is a central fallacy of our literary history. For example, D. H. Lawrence’s proposal that the Industrial Revolution began in the Eastwood of his boyhood and was finally exorcised in the woods of the Chatterley estate is a received fact of literary education. The motivation for such cultural fallacies is buried deep in the Zeitgeist and cannot be addressed here. What I aim to investigate on a more modest scale is one local pattern of reception of Lessing’s oeuvre that calls into question generalisations regarding the ‘universal’ significance and quality of her work. The South African reception of Lessing is instructive, not because of the quality of local reviews (they are unsophisticated on the whole), but because that small white elite from which both readers and critics are drawn is the author’s point of origin. Whereas these texts are, elsewhere, read bifocally — both as an ongoing pilgrim’s progress and as documents of unquestioned historical veracity, they strike the South African reader as raw and highly problematical representations of the quotidian — the riven beauty, grotesquerie and injustice which is our daily life.KeywordsCape TimeNews ItemAfrican National CongressResistance PoliticsSunday TimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.