| Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook has been read as a novel about political economy, gender relations, the formation of consciousness and the psychopathology of everyday life. This thesis presents The Golden Notebook as a novel about novels. More specifically, I argue that this novel addresses the conventional language of novels and the limitations of this language in rendering lived experience. To advance this thesis, I borrow from Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism in the novel. As novels dialogize monologic, authoritarian forms of discourse, so The Golden Notebook throws into dialogue the pretensions of novelistic discourse to truth and realism. Parody, the central method of dialogics, is Lessing's primary tool for testing and revealing linguistic boundaries, especially that of social realist novels, and especially her own. This amounts to a self-criticism as well as a criticism of Bakhtinian dialogics as championed by the novel genre. |
