In the 1960s and 1970s a number of science fiction writers sought to develop a modern literary science fiction with advanced aesthetic techniques and they dealt with ‘soft’ sciences like psychology or sociology rather than ‘hard’ sciences like physics or astronomy. Many of these New Wave writers rejected outer-space stories entirely in favor of exploring the new frontiers of ‘inner-space’. Though not overtly related to the New Wave science fiction writers, Doris Lessing, interestingly enough, categorized her Briefing for a Descent into Hell as ‘inner-space fiction’. As an ‘alchemical writer’ (Kaplan and Rose 1988:5) Lessing has progressed from orthodox communism towards feminism, irrationalism, Sufism, anti-psychiatry and — most recently — cosmic mysticism.
Inner Space in Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The ‘inner space’ that the story explores is the magical manifestation of ‘one little spot within the heart’ upon which ‘resteth the Lord and Master of the worlds’, where ‘two worlds commingled may be seen’ (Lessing, Briefing 1). A typical schizophrenic journey is described by R.D. Laing: “The journey is experienced as going further ‘in’, as going back through one’s personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind” (Laing, Politics 104).
The protagonist’s “anti-clockwise” direction and his need to experience a birth in reverse suggest the circularity of his journey backward both in time and in the development of his own consciousness. While the ‘inner space’ journey traces the narrator’s subsequent efforts to reach the Crystal again, it figuratively recapitulates the cumulative history of life on earth.
Memoirs of a Survivor
In Memoirs of a Survivor the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ spaces of Briefing are represented in terms of the ‘impersonal’ and ‘personal’ level of existence and apprehension. In the time of ‘the general break-up of things’, Reality is a public prison, an ‘enemy’; whereas the journey through the ‘inner space’ becomes an encouraging escape, a revelatory release.
Jean Pickering argues that Lessing’s ‘politics of the left’ and ‘politics of madness’ both have the common image of an archetypal ideal city: “the collapse of the revolutionary dream does not lead to introversion and retreat into a private world, for the madness that Lessing espouses, being an extension of ‘I’ into ‘We’ as a further step in the evolutionary process is far from solipsistic” (Pickering 30).
Conclusion
Lessing’s inner space fictions question the readers’ preconceived structure of realities to tease out the possibilities of alternate realities beyond the confines of reasons and restrictions.
Works Cited
- Arnheim, Rudolf. “Outer Space and Inner Space.” Leonardo 24.1 (1991): 73-74.
- Ballard, J.G. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. New York: Picador, 1996.
- Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York: Viking Penguin Inc, 1972.
- Conboy, Sheila C. “The Limits of Transcendental Experience in Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.” Modern Language Studies, 20.1 (Winter 1990): 67-78.
- Fishburn, Katherine. The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in Narrative Technique. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985.
- Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British “New Wave” in Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 1983.
- Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. England: Penguin Books, 1970.
- Laing, R.D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. England: Penguin Books, 1990.
- Lessing, Doris. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. New York: Vintage International, 2009.
- Lessing, Doris. The Memoirs of a Survivor. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.
- Lessing, Doris. The Summer Before the Dark. New York: Vintage International, 2009.
- Pickering, John. “Marxism and Madness: The Two Faces of Doris Lessing Myth.” Modern Fiction Studies, 26.1 (Spring, 1980): 17-30.
- Vlastos, Marion. “Doris Lessing and R.D. Laing: Psychopolitics and Prophecy.” PMLA 91.2 (March 1976): 245-258.