“That’s what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life, but in a new way.”

—Doris Lessing

The announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature is always eagerly awaited, for the grist it provides to the mill of those who either greet it ecstatically, or decry it vehemently for one offence or another. The case of Doris Lessing has been no different. American critic Harold Bloom has denounced the Swedish Academy’s decision as “pure political correctness . Although Lessing, at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable... fourth-rate science fiction.” And feminists, among whom she is usually counted, describe her as not quite kosher, for her refusal to wholeheartedly support ‘The Sisterhood’.

Like two other African writers, Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, Lessing had virtually no formal education. What she learnt came from her reading — Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Kipling and Dostovesky. From them, she carried over into her writing a strong sense of 19th century ethical judgement. It is important to note that Lessing’s writings, especially the early ones, are heavily autobiographical, much of it emerging from her African experience. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her early engagement with communism and politics, she wrote of the social impact of racism and the apartheid system, the clash of white and African cultures. During the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with The Grass Is Singing, she wrote stories and novellas which exposed the oppression of blacks by white colonials, and the emptiness of the cocooned culture that the white had created. For her outspokenneness, she was banned in 1956 from entering Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and South Africa, finally returning only in 1995.

... contd.