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‘And so do all the others,’ I heard myself muttering.
‘What others?’
‘The others, all over the world, who are writing away in secret books, because they are afraid of what they are thinking.’
‘So you are afraid of what you are thinking?’ And she reached out for her appointment book, marking the end of our hour.
[At this point, another thick black line across the page.]
When I came to this new flat and arranged my big room the first thing I did was to buy the trestle table and lay my notebooks on it. And yet in the other flat in Molly’s house, the notebooks were stuffed into a suitcase under the bed. I didn’t buy them on a plan. I don’t think I ever, until I came here, actually said to myself: I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary. In Molly’s house the notebooks were something I never thought about; and certainly not as work, or a responsibility.
The things that are important in life creep up on one unawares, one doesn’t expect them, one hasn’t given them shape in one’s mind. One recognizes them, when they’ve appeared, that’s all.
When I came to this flat it was to give room, not only to a man (Michael or his successor) but to the notebooks. And in fact I now see moving to this flat as giving room to the notebooks. For I hadn’t been here a week before I had bought the trestle table and laid out the books on it. And then I read them. I hadn’t read them through since I first began to keep them. I was disturbed by reading them. First, because I had not realized before how the experience of being rejected by Michael had affected me; how it had changed, or apparently had changed, my whole personality. But above all, because I didn’t recognize myself. Matching what I had written with what I remembered it all seemed false. And this — the untruthfulness of what I had written was because of something I had not thought of before — my sterility. The deepening note of criticism, of defensiveness, of dislike.
It was then I decided to use the blue notebook, this one, as nothing but a record of facts. Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc. etc., and felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing. They have become, when I think, not the form into which experience is shaped, but a series of meaningless sounds, like nursery talk, and away to one side of experience. Or like the sound track of a film that has slipped its connection with the film. When I am thinking I have only to write a phrase like ‘I walked down the street’, or take a phrase from a newspaper, ‘economic measures which lead to the full use of …’ and immediately the words dissolve, and my minds starts spawning images which have nothing to do with the words, so that every word I see or hear seems like a small raft bobbing about on an enormous sea of images. So I can’t write any longer. Or only when I write fast, without looking back at what I have written. For if I look back, then the words swim and have no sense and I am conscious only of me, Anna, as a pulse in a great darkness, and the words that I, Anna, write down are nothing, or like the secretions of a caterpillar that are forced out in ribbons to harden in the air.
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About
The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Golden Notebook, digitized the book for us and generously gave permission to reproduce it here in its entirety at no cost.
Additional support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and New York University
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Philippa Levine December 7th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
When I got to the end of the session Anna has with Mother Sugar I was exhausted, profoundly exhausted. This is an incredibly relentless scene, so much going on here. I was particularly struck by the idea of people as cracked or split, and thus open to possibility. Wholeness is irrelevant here — but the discussion of form looms large — and unfinished as the session ends.
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Philippa Levine December 7th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Sorry if responding to my own comment is an indulgence — but I was just re-reading what Laura says on the very first page of the book about the centrality of form vs. formlessness in the novel, and what Naomi says on the blog (1/12/08) about fragmenting and cracking up. This comment Anna makes to Mother Sugar is part of that larger theme Naomi and Laura identify: Anna seeking shape in both her life and in her art, but resistant to the idea that such a possibility is achievable, perhaps more especially in as unstable a world as the late 1950s must have seemed in Europe.
And I see the second dash in my first entry on this page is wrongly placed — read it as intended to be after “unfinished” rather than where I’ve placed it!
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Laura Kipnis December 10th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Yes, the word “form” comes up almost as many times in the book as “orgasm”! Anna wonders about Tommy shooting himself because of the formlessness of the women’s lives on 329, when she tells stories to Janet, she’s making form out of the formlessness of the day… Formlessness gets equated with breakdown later in the book as she thinks she’s falling apart. And another section earlier on 247 where she talks about the notebooks in relation to her fear of chaos.
Relating this preoccupation to the exterior situation, to the state of the world is interesting: I do think it’s the larger question of this book. Are we reading something ultimately sociological, or ultimately about psychical states, and/or which direction do the causalities and influences flow?
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Harriet Rubin December 11th, 2008 at 11:18 am
“Words mean nothing.”
Interesting, Laura, about the frequency of “form,” formlessness and orgasms. Orgasms are the great moments of shattered form, timelessness and unity. But what are we to make of Anna’s statement that “words mean nothing”–another theme in this novel? Anna continually despairs over words’ ineffectiveness in capturing truths. Are we to take Anna at her word, even if words means nothing?
I once had a Jungian therapist tell me he was not listening to my words but to the formlessness leaking through my stories and to the energy in my presence–quite a comedown when I thought my narrative was so perceptive. There is a technique in family medicine called Balint in which doctors listen not to patients narrate symptoms–patients always lie–but listen for metaphors and pay attention to their own reaction to the patients–and base their diagnoses on these techniques of downplaying the intentional meaning. I mention this because I wonder if there a way to read this novel that allows us to do two almost contradictory things: accept that words mean nothing and yet mean something?
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Laura Kipnis December 11th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Yes absolutely Harriet, as far as reading other things here than the words. How about reading it as a topography of anxiety, for instance–mountains and plateaus and weather systems of anxiety that produce similar effects within us readers.
I’m attached to the notion that orgasms are the great moments of shattered form myself (and I love that phrase, Harriet), though there’s also a lot of *conceptualizing* about orgasms in this book: the right and wrong kind of orgasm discussion, the which man she can have what kind of orgasm with discussion, also the various sexual failures of the various men to satisfy her–one “sexual cripple” after another, to use Anna’s rather pointed term. Sex seems to be as much a cognitive experience as a bodily one here, and a bit less oceanic than you’d hope. But the fact is that there just ARE certain incommensurabilities between men and women sexually that make being a “free woman” a trickier enterprise than any of us want to admit, which Lessing in her scathing honesty, does admit.
Well, implicitly.
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