KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
of a Survivor (1974) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), alongside Jenny Diski’s memoir, In Gratitude (2016), Susan Watkins introduces the concept of ‘apocalyptic imaginative memoir’ that she observes Lessing and Diski develop as a way to ‘imagine the transformation of conventional mothering and family’.110 Watkins’s comparative reading of their works as examples of such ‘apocalyptic imaginative memoir’, and their concurrent lived experimentations with new images of the mother/daughter relationship, demonstrates how Lessing’s fiction genuinely offers ‘a new form of family’ through ‘a new genre’.111
I examine The Memoirs of a Survivor and Ben, in the World as Sufi novels that illuminate the ways in which Lessing ‘problematises and reconfigures the family’ both at personal and fictional levels.112 I further suggest that ‘the simultaneous presence of Diski and Sufism in Lessing’s life allows her to realign family and parenthood in her fiction’.113 My reading of the novels through a Sufic lens introduces three novel concepts, ‘Sufi family’, ‘Sufi parenthood’, and ‘Su-feminism’, which together demonstrate Lessing’s resistance to ‘social conventions [and] power structures, specifically here, in the example of parenthood and family’, through new forms. Terry Reilly examines the traces of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1995) in and through Lessing’s novella “The Grandmothers” and Diski’s memoir In Gratitude, illustrating how these works intersect in their representations and reworking of alternative and taboo familial relationships. He argues that ‘Lessing ←57 | 58→and Diski are linked in that they reference Lolita as a way to expand the notion of traditional family to include the alternative relationships that they explore’ in their texts.114 Reilly’s article is an example of how Lessing’s fiction is transformative of conventional and taboo family relationships. Taken as a whole, this issue has been key in demonstrating how Lessing’s fictional family transforms ‘conventional ways of thinking and writing’ in a collaborative and bidirectional manner through the works of others.
When family is addressed by critics in Lessing’s fiction, it has mainly been read in relation to ideas from the anti-psychiatry movement. R.D. Laing has been influential for Lessing scholars in understanding the origins of schizophrenia in the family. James Arnett reads the Children of Violence series by employing insights from Laingian family theory and progressive politics to ‘undo the logic of the family.’115 He suggests that ‘fighting so hard to preserve the self’, as Martha Quest does, is indeed a way of preserving historical circumstances that have constructed the self. The solution to the distorting effects of the family lies in the dissolution of oneself by becoming schizophrenic. Therefore, schizophrenia is not to be seen as a problem but a way of escaping from the conventional family. Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) mirrors Laingian family theory. Professor Charles Watkins suffers from a mental breakdown due to being stuck between his family obligations and his own sense of self. Lessing extends Laing’s theory, including men as sufferers of schizophrenia alongside women to suggest that the family is equally oppressive to men and women alike.
The Fifth Child also evokes a Laingian theory of the family when Harriet Lovatt has an unwanted child. She has to decide either to accept her son, Ben, or send him away as the destroyer of the family happiness. Ben’s assumed abnormalities create a tension in Harriet as the mother. Laing wrote: ‘A crisis will occur if any member of the family wishes to leave by getting the “family” out of his systems, or dissolving the “family” in himself. […] Dilemmas bound. If I do not destroy the “family”, the “family” will destroy me.’116 This dilemma creates a conflict for Harriet between either destroying or protecting her family or the family. Rather than destroying the family or letting it destroy her, Harriet dissolves the idea of ←58 | 59→the family in her mind. The conflict is resolved when she saves Ben from the straightjacket he is made to wear in the institution for his assumed abnormality. The fact Ben is transferred between the disciplinary institutions of school and hospitals reveal Michael Foucault’s idea of family as an interlocking disciplinary mechanism.
Lessing scholars have considered The Fifth Child as challenging traditional family arrangements. Watkins reads the novel as a critique of Thatcherism and its promotion of family values.117 Clare Hanson also introduces Ben Lovatt as ‘a signifier of difference who […] challenges normative family values […].’118 The Fifth Child is a key feminist text that shows how the family situation can be oppressive to men and children beyond women. By depicting Harriet’s relationships with her children, husband and parents, Lessing illustrates how the ideology of the family cannot accommodate difference and is oppressive to its members. Jeanie Warnock argues that the mother-daughter relationship is a recurring theme in Lessing’s fiction whereas critical studies overlook father-daughter relationships which could offer new readings, especially considering Lessing’s conflicts with her own father.119 In my reading of The Fifth Child I illustrate that Ben is not an extension of his father, which challenges the patriarchal ideology and its continuance.
Several Lessing scholars have discussed Sufism in Lessing’s fiction and the ways it has influenced her style, technique and language. Muge Galin’s Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing (1997) is the first complete critical assessment of Sufism in Lessing’s fiction. For Galin, Sufism sheds a new light on Lessing’s work. She suggests that it is thanks to Sufism that Lessing writes with ‘self-assurance’, and becomes ‘more didactic’ in her writing.120 Following communism and feminism, Lessing employs a non-political philosophy of Sufism in ←59 | 60→her fiction that adds novelty to the content of her writing and style. Contrary to her ambivalent relationships with communism and feminism, Lessing expresses an open interest in Sufism. However, Galin’s assertion that Lessing becomes ‘more didactic’ contradicts the very nature of Sufism which avoids didacticism to enable individuals’ potential for self-learning. As shown in Chapter Three, this is evident in Memoirs and Ben, in the World in which Emily and Ben follow the Sufi way as free from any prescribed behaviour and conventional thinking.
Galin proposes that Sufism ‘will not only complicate our understanding of [Lessing’s] work but also reshape our assessments of its quality’.121 In a similar fashion, Nancy Topping Bazin celebrates Lessing’s move into Sufism, suggesting that her ‘ideas have been nourished and clarified through her interest in Sufism’.122 This book offers ways of reassessing Lessing’s work and Sufism within the context of non-normative families.
There have been several discussions of Memoirs as a Sufi novel, but these do not link Sufism to the family. For example, Roberta Rubenstein reads the novel as a breakthrough in Lessing’s fiction ‘rendering […] the mystical path of self-transcendence’.123 Muge Galin takes The Memoirs of a Survivor as a Sufi novel which ‘traces the steps a would-be Sufi takes toward enlightenment’.124 When Memoirs is read in relation to the family, there is no connection made between family and Sufism in the novel. Watkins suggests that ‘the narrator experiences the collapse of civilized society and the nuclear family’.125 For Sunita Sinha, the novel demonstrates Lessing’s ongoing interest in alternative groups to the nuclear family structures, and ‘the degeneration of atmosphere, the collapse of law and order and material infrastructure led to the breaking of stable, biologically related families’.126Although critics spot the representation of the family either as Lessing’s view of the family or her interest in the alternative structures, there has yet not been a reading that examines the connection between Sufism and Lessing’s representation of the family. Gerald’s commune functions within the context of a non-normative family that reflects Sufi principles. Therefore, Sufism enables a shift from the collapse of the nuclear family to Lessing’s creation ←60 | 61→of non-normative families in the novel. A focus on the family also contributes to studies of Sufism as there has yet not been any detailed studies or theories of how Sufism deals with the institution of the family. This is because, unlike political movements, which prescribe certain behaviours within the family, Sufism avoids any form of prescriptive behaviour in order not to limit individual development.
There have also been readings that unpack the relationship between patriarchal systems of colonialism and family. Reading The Fifth Child, Debrah Raschke highlights the ‘domestic scene […] as a breeding ground for colonial domination’.127