Feature Articles

Notes on Doris Lessing, Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature
by Liz Johnson, Collection Development Bibliographer

Doris Lessing's oeuvre and skills demonstrate a combination of a deep understanding of the human condition, coupled with an unfearing and uncompromising ability to delve into her characters' inner psyches, often by way of her own, and the ability to let her imagination run away with itself into places, whether the smallest cave of the mind, vast savannahs of central-southern Africa or the limitless reaches of space, where others might not dare and probably wouldn't think to tread. With true authorial observational skills, nothing is lost on her, that is, nothing about humanity or its overall tenacity in the face of a continually tenuous place in the universe (albeit currently our tenuous existence is self-inflicted through toying with the atom). One may hope that it is this combination that made her the choice of the Nobel Prize Committee for that highest of literary honors, despite or perhaps flying in the face of what literary traditionalists such as Harold Bloom might say. Many would say that Lessing was not an obvious choice, in fact Bloom said this to the Associated Press: "I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable . . . fourth-rate science fiction," and also called the award "pure political correctness" (Maiello).

If the honor is only given to Lessing for political reasons, whether it be anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, or anti-sexist - which by the way are all topics she has treated unflinchingly - then that is a shame and dims the light of the literary enterprise. However, if you look at the entire body of her work you see that she has helped to expand that literary enterprise and expand human consciousness by way of not giving into the literary establishment. If she hadn't taken on the patriarchy by examining sexism in its many guises and if she had not committed the cardinal sin against the literary establishment of writing what she calls "space fiction" - if she hadn't taken on the arbiters of literature then the world would be the poorer, we would all have missed out on the full range of her intellect. Although she no longer agrees with communism, if the work she wrote while she was a member of the communist party were just dry dispassionate commentaries they would not be worth remembering now, even though in light of later history they now seem filled with polemic.

She says it better in her 1978 prefatory remarks to the Shikasta novels, AKA her five-volume science fiction epic Canopus in Argos: Archives:

". . . Space fiction . . . makes up the most original branch of literature now; it is inventive and witty; it has already enlivened all kinds of writing; and . . . literary academics and pundits are much to blame for patronising or ignoring it--while of course by their nature they can be expected to do no other. This view shows signs of becoming the stuff of orthodoxy."