Doris Lessing’s London Observed And The Limits Of Empathy

Doris Lessing’s London Observed and the Limits of Empathy1

London Observed (1992)  portrays London  as a palimpsest  which  is profoundly different from the urban  representations in Lessing’s early novels. As opposed  to In Pursuit of the English (1960),  The Golden  Notebook (1962)  and The Four-Gated City  (1969),  the  volume  depicts  the  metropolis  as a joyful yet visibly controlled space, imagined  by an unnamed narrator who is relentlessly wandering in the city. The London  it presents  hides secreted  lives, yet it also requires  the repression  of empathetic affective responses  to the lives of others.  As I argue  in this paper,  the metropolis  allows the narrator to enjoy urban  life while remaining unaffected by its everyday traumas: she is not a hypersensitive urban  observer in this city, but a disil- lusioned  psychogeographer who  opts  for  indifference  in order  to  survive  in the metropolis. Instead  of offering  alternative possibilities,  as de Certeau  believed in “Walking in the City,”  walking  produces  a controlled and indifferent  vision of the city in London Observed: it appears  as an act that re-inscribes new narratives upon repressed  stories.  When  read  from  today’s  post-millennial vantage,  we might  dis- cern how Lessing’s collection  presciently  suggests that  the British capital,  from the late 1980s onwards, was becoming not only a more visibly gendered and multicul- tural place, but also an indifferent  and apathetic city, habitable at the price of decli- ning empathy.

London  Observed  (1992)  présente  la ville de Londres  comme  un palimpseste,  qui diffère  radicalement  des paysages urbains  des premiers  romans  de Doris  Lessing. Contrairement aux textes précédents,  In Pursuit of the English (1960),  The Golden Notebook (1962) et The Four-Gated City (1969), ce recueil décrit la métropole telle qu’imaginée par une narratrice anonyme occupée à y déambuler  sans fin, comme un espace certes plaisant mais régi par une forme de censure. La ville de Londres  y dis- simule  des  vies secrètes,  mais  amène  aussi à réprimer  toute  réaction  d’empathie envers l’existence d’autrui. Cet article démontre comment la métropole permet  à la narratrice de goûter à la vie urbaine tout en restant indifférente à ses tragédies quo- tidiennes  : plutôt  qu’une  observatrice  ultra-sensible  des existences  qui l’entourent, c’est une psychogéographe désabusée qui choisit l’indifférence pour pouvoir  survivre dans cet espace urbain.  Loin  d’offrir de nouvelles  vies possibles,  comme  le croyait Michel  de  Certeau  dans  «  Pratiques  d’espace  »,  la déambulation dans  London Observed conduit à une vision implacable et déshumanisée de la ville : c’est l’acte qui permet  d’enfouir  des histoires refoulées sous de nouveaux récits. Lues depuis notre point de vue du XXIe siècle, les nouvelles de ce recueil semblent suggérer comme par

1.   This research was supported by the Tempus Foundation, Hungary.

Ágnes GYÖRKE, Doris Lessing’s London Observed and the Limits of Empathy,  ÉA 70-1 (2017) : 63-77. © Klincksieck.

anticipation le lieu clairement  genré et multiculturel qu’est devenue  la capitale bri- tannique  depuis la fin des années 1980,  mais aussi et surtout  la ville indifférente et impassible exigeant de ses habitants  l’abandon de toute empathie.

London Observed, a collection  of stories and sketches published  in

1992, explores the narrator’s affective engagement with the city in ways which have anticipated new directions in diasporic writing. As opposed to Lessing’s early post-war London fiction, the volume depicts the metropolis as a joyful yet visibly controlled space, imagined  by an unnamed nar- rator  relentlessly wandering across the city. Couples,  strangers, broken families,  beggars,  taxi  drivers  and  the lonely  appear, all engaged  in interactions which help the reader visualise urban  life in the late 1980s. Nothing is permanent: snapshots of the conversation between a beggar and a social security worker, for instance,  or the chance  encounter of mother  and daughter in Regent’s Park, allow the reader to engage with serious social and psychological  questions  while keeping a safe distance from the ghosts haunting the streets of London. The sheer knowledge of the fact that the narrator can walk away any time without having to engage with what she sees offers a false sense of security both to her and to the reader.  It is my contention that  this problematic security,  which allows the narrator to enjoy urban life while remaining unaffected by its everyday traumas, is the result of an unacknowledged strategic refusal to empathise with the city she observes. The flâneuse is not a hypersensitive urban  observer in this city, as Deborah Parsons assumes (Parsons 225), but a disillusioned psychogeographer who opts for indifference in order to survive in the metropolis.

Lessing’s Cities

While Lessing was concerned with urban life from the very beginning of her career, few attempts have been made to explore her novels from this specific perspective. Although critics have noted her involvement with the city, most of them either read London  as the antithesis  of nature  in her novels or focus on the notion of the ideal, mythical city in her fiction (Rose

1983, Sprague 1987), failing to explore the manifold role the metropolis plays in her texts. Mary Ann Singleton, for instance, compares Lessing’s work to William Blake’s, claiming that Lessing’s main concern is the fall from a state  of wholeness  embodied  by the “African  veld”  (Singleton

34). London  is depicted as a space haunted by fragmentation and loss, Singleton argues, and the utopian visions in Lessing’s fiction, such as the Ideal City in The Four-Gated  City (1969), attest to the novel’s desire to regain a sense of harmony. This rather  reductive  view of the city does not only simplify the role that London plays in Lessing’s novels, but also fails to do justice to the memories of Southern Rhodesia which abound  in the early texts. Details from the place where Lessing grew up appear but

remain disconnected from the London  unfolding  in her writing,  such as the image of a cricket chirping in the veld glimpsed amidst the debris of post-war London in In Pursuit of the English (1960). Such images are not only fragmentary but also seem to disturb  the narratives ceaselessly. In an early book which explores The Children of Violence series (1952-69), Ingrid Holmquist also claims that  a binary  opposition between  nature and culture structures Lessing’s writings, and that the “Ideal City” sym- bolises “a wish to recreate an original state of harmony” (Holmquist 49) associated with the African past overseas. Such binary thinking has been challenged  not  only by poststructuralist theories  but  also by Lessing’s very narratives—most spectacularly, The Golden  Notebook (1962), her most experimental novel.2  I believe that references to Southern Rhodesia and the African veld do not allude to a prelapsarian state of wholeness in Lessing’s London  fiction, but rather  capture  the translocal nature  of the urban  vision unfolding  in these narratives.

Christine  Wick Sizemore was the first critic to call attention to the city as more than  the simple antithesis  of nature  in Lessing’s writings. In A Female Vision  of the City  (1989),  she canonised Lessing as an urban novelist who belonged to a group of women writers such as Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch, among others. According to Sizemore, London functions as a palimpsest in Lessing’s writings, since the repressed stories of women are hidden behind the surface text, most notably  in The  Four-Gated  City,  the final volume  of her Children  of Violence series. In this novel, the narrator describes London  in relation to the invisible struggles of women, their brains recording  “in such tiny loving anxious detail the histories of windowsills, skins of paint, replaced curtains  and salvaged baulks of timber” (Lessing 1969,  21), producing “a  sort  of six-dimensional map which  included  the histories  and  lives and loves of people, London” (21). In exposing London as a palimpsest, Sizemore called attention to a feature  of Lessing’s fiction that  Andreas Huyssen  subsequently explored  in his writings  about  cultural  memory and post-war Berlin (Huyssen 2003) and John Clement Ball also touched upon  in his book  about  London  writing  (Ball 2004).  By claiming that nature  and the desire for wholeness  lie within  fragmentary cityscapes, and are not juxtaposed with the grey and appalling metropolis, Sizemore subverted  the oppositions upon  which Holmquist and Singleton relied. Deborah L. Parsons,  too,  has argued  that  London  is “a palimpsestic site built from years of history” in The Four-Gated  City (Parsons 216). Nevertheless,  neither Sizemore nor Parsons has fully explored  the com- plex role London  plays in Lessing’s writings. Although  both critics offer

2.   As Nick Bentley claims, for instance,  “Lessing’s speculations  on the form and func- tion of the novel as a genre at certain  points  in The Golden  Notebook correspond with  later  theoretical positions  associated  with  postmodernism, and  in particular, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s discussion of the sublime and the unpresentable in postmod- ern aesthetics” (Bentley 45).

more sophisticated readings than  found in earlier critical discourse,  we might note that the city is by no means the same palimpsest  in Lessing’s later fiction as it was in her early novels. As I argue in this essay, London Observed depicts the metropolis  as a palimpsest which represses various aspects of female subjectivity. A detached and indifferent urban narrative often  unfolds  in these short  stories,  thwarting the empathy  with  “the lives and loves of people”  that often dominated Lessing’s earlier writing.

John McLeod has drawn attention to Lessing’s engagement with rac- ism, challenging the assumption that her work engenders only a limited postcolonial critique (Hanson 1990, Yelin 1998, Bentley 2009). McLeod claims that In Pursuit of the English is an important contribution to the discourse on race in the post-war period, especially the ascendance from the 1950s  of racialising  notions  of blood-lines  that  came to dominate definitions  of British national identity  in the subsequent decades.  For McLeod,  In Pursuit of the English presents  London  as a transnational location “in which dominant models of national identity are being chal- lenged by emergent alternatives that are by no means desirable” (McLeod

75). New versions of older racist attitudes are seen to be forming in the novel, he claims, and he reads Lessing’s portrayal of London  during this period  of instability  as a “guarded response  to the ossification  of the categories  of white  native  and  black  foreigner  effected in the 1950s” (79). McLeod  presents In Pursuit of the English, then, as an outstand- ing testimony  to the reconfigurations of race and  the city in post-war Britain, one which critically anticipates emergent paradigms of national identity.  Susan Watkins, one of the most  prominent Lessing scholars, also attributes a great significance to the notion  of renewal  in Lessing’s work,  though  she believes that  Lessing’s later novels rewrite  the legacy of the post-war era. Watkins comments on In Pursuit’s engagement with femininity, pointing out that the flimsiness which McLeod attributes to its portrayal of race and nation  is, in fact, characteristic of Lessing’s depic- tion of women. She believes that In Pursuit uniquely transforms the city into an open, transitory space through a number of epiphanic moments: “in the 1960s  and early 1970s,  Lessing rewrites  the experience  of loss as potentially  creative, productive  and transformative. In her vision of what  I am calling ‘melancholy  cosmopolitanism,’ Lessing challenges the closed-off, paranoid legacy of the Cold War in the 1950s” (Watkins

54). In other words,  the notion  of renewal is based on a creative, trans- formative  experience of loss in Lessing’s fiction, and it is not In Pursuit but novels such as The Golden  Notebook that  engage with the legacy of World War Two in ways that redefine existing paradigms of the city. To my mind, London Observed, which Watkins  does not include in her book  on Lessing, provides  a thought-provoking addition to her notion of melancholy  cosmopolitanism, since the book rethinks  the notions  of loss and nostalgia  which dominated Lessing’s early urban  fiction.

London Observed did not receive much critical attention when it was published,  which is partly due to the fact that by the 1990s Lessing was

more often dismissed as a white middle-class writer.3 After the release of John Akomfrah’s  film Handsworth Songs in 1987,  and the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), urban fiction and film had shifted to explore more explicitly vexed matters  of race, gender and multiculturalism. At the same time, some of the first works of literary psychogeography were appearing in Britain,  such as Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985)  and Iain Sinclair’s Downriver (1991).  In the midst of this vigorous  cultural activity,  Lessing’s volume  appeared unexceptional. However, it is my contention that  London Observed was actually  far more future-facing than outmoded, and anticipated some of the problems of London  in the twenty-first  century  that  have come to preoccupy  novelists,  directors and psychogeographers more recently. Its short stories portray London as a tense translocal palimpsest, profoundly different  from  the urban palimpsests in Lessing’s early novels. They seek to contain the sensitivity and affect which often haunt  the margins of the stories. In other words, London Observed presents  the British capital  from  the late 1980s  as becoming not only a more visibly gendered and multicultural locale, but also an increasingly indifferent  and apathetic city, habitable at the price of declining empathy.

London is depicted in the volume as a grand theatre,  as Rosario Arias points  out, “something to look at and enjoy, as a spectacle and perfor- mance” (Arias 6). In the eighteen pieces collected in London Observed we see snapshots of interactions between family members, couples, strangers, usually in public spaces, suggesting that the city is transitory and indeed theatrical. In “The New Café,” for instance, the narrator admits that she takes pleasure  in watching  “real-life  soap operas” (Lessing 1993,  97), such as the two German  girls’ uninhibited search for boyfriends,  while the narrator of “Storms” attempts to convince a taxi driver that London is a great place to live: “And now I began to tell him how much I enjoyed London, from that  ridiculous  need to make other people like what you like. It was like a great theatre, I said; you could watch what went on all day” (129, italics mine). However,  “The New Café” and “Storms,” the two short stories Arias explores,  depict a more joyful vision of London than  many of the other  tales. In “Debbie  and  Julie,”  one of the most famous stories in the collection,  Julie gives birth to an illegitimate child in a shed, an experience by no means pleasurable. Many others portray Londoners  as detached  observers of the city, suggesting that enjoyment is not the primary  sentiment  of London Observed. While its portrayal of London  can seem more optimistic  than in Lessing’s early work, to my

3.   As Deborah L Parsons  remarks,  even the ideal city Martha imagines  in The  Four- Gated  City  “is  built  according  to  a Western,  upper-middle class model”  (Parsons

218). According to Clare Hanson, however, it is rather  Lessing’s critical writings than her novels that  are responsible  for this reception,  since in “A Small Personal  Voice” she consciously situated  herself in the liberal-humanist tradition (Hanson 63).

mind the sense of enjoyment  that appears  on occasion masks the disen- gagement which pervades London Observed. Its London is a staged and shallow space that represses sensitive emotional responses. The apparent enjoyment which Arias finds so crucial arguably  conceals the emotional estrangement of the characters.

This estrangement is discernible in the characters’ activity of walking. London Observed challenges the vogue, especially for psychogeographers, for conceiving of walking as a transformative practice. Instead, through acts of walking,  the book anticipates a cold post-millennial metropolis. Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) has influenced psychogeography in its claim that walking momentarily transforms space. Tina Richardson, for instance,  argues that  “psychogeography is about crossing established boundaries” (Richardson 2) and critiquing received urban spectacles, just as de Certeau’s urban walkers “make use of spaces that  cannot  be seen” (Certeau  93). De Certeau  believes that  walking produces  powerful  alternative stories: “The  networks of these moving, intersecting  writings compose  a manifold  story that  has neither  author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments  of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation  to representations, it remains  daily and indefinitely other” (Certeau 93). Yet in London Observed walking constrains rather than  composes.  Its mobile narrators chart  the elision of sensibility and affect which haunts  the margins of their tales. Walking erases sentiment by compressing  traumatic experiences  within  more  readily  acceptable narratives: the flâneuses in London Observed perform  an apparently indifferent  quest  that  helps them  control  their  affective responses.  As I shall argue below, the city emerges in terms of this attempt at attain- ing mastery,  prefiguring  the over-controlled post-millennial metropolis to come.

The Bonds of Love

My subtitle owes something to Jessica Benjamin’s famous book, The Bonds of Love (1988), specifically the motif of the female bond. Adrienne Rich has criticised Lessing for “a real failure to envisage [...] any kind of really powerful  central  bonding  of women,  even though  women  get together  in her novels and go through intense things together” (Sprague

182). According to Lisa Tyler, “Among the Roses” is an exception in this regard, since in this story Lessing shows “women attempting to create such a bond,  although admittedly  with great difficulty and some reluctance” (Tyler 170). Tyler is certainly right in pointing out that “Among the Roses” offers a more positive portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship than Lessing’s early writings. Yet I think London Observed is more concerned with  problematising the lack of this bond.  Although  many characters desire some kind of affective connection throughout the volume,  there is no real supportive network, or even interpersonal relationship, which would  help them overcome  their  isolation  and loneliness.  In the three

short stories I wish to discuss—“Debbie and Julie,” “Among the Roses,” and “The Pit”—female subjectivity remains repressed within the disem- bodied urban  palimpsest  shaped by the narratives. The stories I discuss present different aspects of this repression: while “Debbie and Julie” and “Among the Roses” are concerned with the repression of female sexuality and the body, “The Pit” offers a glimpse into the empathic identification that the main characters need to suppress in order to survive in the city.

Perhaps  the best-known story in London Observed is “Debbie  and Julie.”4 It concerns a pregnant teenage girl in a sky-blue coat, Julie, who is determined to give birth  to her child alone.  The other  key character, Debbie, never appears in the narrative. While the title suggests that there is a strong bond between the girls, the only thing we learn about Debbie is that  she offered shelter to Julie when she left her parents’  house. The fact that the most concerned and empathetic character in the short story is absent  suggests the extent  to which  intimate  and meaningful  bonds are broken in this narrative. The shallow  encounters the metropolis offers only mask this emotional detachment. In the first episode we see a heavily pregnant Julie on her own grappling  with the erratic  heating of Debbie’s flat as she feels “cold water springing from her forehead,  hot water running  down her legs” (Lessing 1993, 2), signalling the impend- ing birth  of her child. The opening  paragraph suggests that  the notion of order  and  stability  as opposed  to chaos and  confusion  is the main concern of the narrative: Julie acts automatically, following the instruc- tions of a paperback, in which “everything was so tidy and regular” (2). The desperate  need to plan her actions  suggests that  Julie is trying very hard to cope with the loss of control: “The way she felt told her nothing, except that  what  was going to happen  would  be uncontrollable [...]” (3). Except for the dreadful  pain, she is unable to identify her emotions, and even physical sensations seem to be confusing: “Everything  she had planned  had seemed so easy, one thing after  another, but  she had not foreseen that she would stand at a bus stop, afraid to leave the light there, not knowing  what  the sensations  were that  wrenched  her body.  Cold? Nauseous? Hungry?” (4-5). This most important, and most traumatic, event of her life takes place on the streets of London. She does not wander around happily,  lost in the crowd  as a flâneuse, but  moves unsteadily and with utter isolation:  “A good thing the weather  was so bad, no one was about.  She walked boldly through the sleet and turned  into a dark and narrow alley where she hurried,  because it smelled bad and scared her, then out into a yard full of builders’ rubbish  and rusty skips. There was a derelict shed at one end” (5). It is the deserted and grey city that witnesses  her trauma and  isolation. Her  desperation to connect  with another underscores the empathetic emptiness  of her predicament, as

4.   The story was anthologised only three years after the volume was published (Charters

1995).

does the futility of her lonely muted  cry for help: “‘Debbie,’ she whis- pered, the tears running. ‘Where are you, Debbie?’ Not necessarily New York. Or even the States. Canada  ... Mexico … the Costa Brava … South America …” (11). Through these conjectures  around Debbie’s absence we get a glimpse of the world beyond the streets of London, as if these enchanting places offered an antithesis  to Julie’s claustrophobic vision, just like references to the Rhodesian  veld in Lessing’s early London writ- ing. Julie’s need to connect  via a meaningful  female bond  is associated with a translocal world  beyond  the walls of the shed and the margins of the city. Such affective spaces haunt  both  the story and the London it portrays, destabilising the quest  for order  and  exposing  the empty metropolis  as void of attachment.

“Debbie and Julie” repeatedly shapes images that are associated with emotional connection and its lack. Sounds, places, and objects become endowed  with  often  surprising  affective significance. The conjunction in the story’s  title already  stresses  the significance  of intersubjective connections. Despite the fact that Debbie never appears,  she is the most important reference point  for Julie in the narrative. Several apparently insignificant, sometimes even absurd, images underscore both the yearn- ing for and the lack of affective contact.  There is a dog in the shed, for instance,  that  witnesses Julie’s labour, “whining, in sympathy” (7), she believes. The dog’s whining evokes a phantom of much-desired compas- sion—any sound is better than the pervasive silence of the shed, perhaps. Shortly after Julie gives birth to her child, the depiction  of the umbilical cord draws attention to the corporeal, biological bond between mother and child, but one that needs to be cut and erased. The cord is depicted as the epitome  of material  connection: “the cord came out of the baby, a thick twisted  rope of flesh, full of life, hot and pulsing in her hand” (7). The scene is immensely physical: we witness the wet rush of water and blood on Julie’s legs, the baby lying in a pool of bloody  water,  and the dog eating up the afterbirth “in quick gulps” (9). The scene indexes a realm of emotional entanglement and turmoil,  of terrifying loneliness as well as perverse connectedness—signified by the dog and its visceral

repast—and of gendered  isolation  and  affective chaos—all  the things that  are kept out of sight or erased by the palimpsestic  presentation of “joyful” London  which London Observed ironically  lays bare.

Exhausted, after cutting  the umbilical  cord Julie carefully wraps the baby in a towel and leaves the bundle  on the floor of a telephone  box. This extremely cruel act seems to be discordant with her apparent need for empathy, yet it is the logical consequence of her traumatised actions.

Cutting the cord suggests that Julie is cutting all human connections  that would  upset her sterile, carefully constructed world.  As she leaves her child on the floor of the telephone  box, she walks towards “the brilliant lights of the pub at the corner” (10)—a crammed,  hot and noisy place, the very antithesis of the abandoned shed. Unlike the shed, which  is associated  with maternity and the female body,  the pub  is a distinctly

masculine space: music is playing from the jukebox while men are arguing about football. This loud, macho, hollow world spatially confounds  and conceals the silent shed and the unspeakable experience  it has cradled, and ensures that the physical, corporeal, female “Other” remains hidden within the normative urban masculinist metanarrative. From within this vantage, Julie can observe with clinical detachment the fate of her newly abandoned child, above the street and from a distance: “Unremarked, she went to stand near a small window  that overlooked the telephone  box. She could see the bundle, a small pathetic  thing, like folded newspapers or a dropped jersey, on the floor of the box”  (10). Hers  is a position which the collection’s narrators frequently  occupy: they seek to control and  master  the spectacle  they observe,  nullifying  sensitive emotional responses.  Julie retreats  to the window  as a means of control, just like the Benjaminian  flâneur who, according  to Deborah Parsons,  has “lost the involved  sensation  of walking” (Parsons  225).  She seeks to regain a sense of mastery in order to overcome the trauma she has undergone, yet this gesture erases the very position  which would  empower  a more empathetic, less controlling vision of the city. The spatial and temporal distance which Julie establishes between her safe place in the pub and her abandoned child in the telephone  box, cruelly exposed to the unknown and unpredictable city, permits  her to remain  disengaged.  Such disen- gagement, frighteningly,  is the prerequisite of securing one’s place in the metropolis  in Lessing’s volume.

The location where Julie chooses to abandon her baby is also significant: a telephone  box, the very icon of communication and connection. Julie observes how a young girl picks up the bundle while a young man makes a phone call. Ironically, after cutting the most intimate  biological bond, the umbilical cord, the lost biogenetic bond between mother and child is substituted with mediated forms of modern communication. Soon, Julie will see her child again on TV after returning to her childhood home: a woman  wearing an artificial smile announces that “At eight o’clock this evening a newly born baby girl was found in a telephone box in Islington. She was warmly  wrapped and healthy.  She weighed seven pounds  and three ounces. The nurses have called her Rosie” (Lessing 1993,  21-22). The news report  provides  a narrative of Rosie’s abandonment which replaces the trauma of birth  with the facticity of discovery.  This is the first time the reader  learns  that  the events took  place in Islington  and that  the time when  Julie was standing  at the window  of the pub  was eight o’clock in the evening. The news report subsumes lived experience by providing  missing data retrospectively; as such, the experience in the shed becomes more and more invisible beneath  its staged mediation.

Despite Julie’s desire for meaningful  bonds,  interactions remain per- petually shallow. After the ambulance takes away the baby, Julie’s “heart plunged into loss and became empty and bitter, in the way she had been determined would  not happen” (11). She desperately  wants  to talk  to Debbie,  who is inaccessible,  so her only other  option  is to re-establish

the bonds with her parents,  which have never been intimate.  Returning to her parents’ flat after a long absence, Julie feels as if she were a child again: her bedroom is still “pretty and pink”  (15), with her toy panda sitting on her pillow. The room, however, despite the fancy colours and toys, hides the very same emptiness that the theatrical city is attempting to forget so desperately.  While at Debbie’s flat “people  shouted, kissed, hugged,  argued,  fought,  threatened, wept,  and screamed” (19), Julie’s parents  sleep in separate  beds and  refrain  from  expressing  emotions. Debbie has even become Julie’s surrogate  mother and a latent homoerotic bond has developed between them: unlike her parents,  they sleep in the same bed, and  experience  the kind  of intimacy  which  Julie has never experienced  in her life before:

Julie even waited  for  “something” to  happen.  Nothing ever did.  Just  once Debbie put her hand down to touch the mound  of Julie’s stomach,  but took it quickly  away.  Julie lay entangled  with  Debbie,  and  they were like two  cats that have finished washing each other and gone to sleep, and Julie knew how terribly  she had been deprived  at home and how empty and sad her parents were. (21)

The intimacy  Julie finds with  Debbie  is exactly  the kind  of emotional bond for which she is in search, yet just like the experience in the shed, it is a passing moment  with little, if any, transformative agency. Hence, at the end of the story,  Julie resolves to leave her parents’  house  and find her place in London  alone, isolated again, reassured by the dubious consolation that  if she was able to give birth in a shed and survive, she is able to do anything.

The figure of the mother  occupies the centre of “Among  the Roses,” too, a short story set in Regent’s Park, one of the many public places that appear in London Observed. The story depicts an unexpected encounter between  mother  and daughter who have not  met for years. Myra  and her daughter, Shirley, have spent three years avoiding each other after a disagreement, and the meeting offers a rare moment  of reconciliation in the volume.  As in “Debbie  and Julie,” “Among  the Roses”  thematises issues concerning  control  and emotional needs. Myra clearly enjoys her sense of control  in the park:  “There  was no greater  pleasure  than  this, wandering through roses and deciding… I’ll have you… no, you… no,

perhaps…” (117). Walking alone and selecting roses is preferable to stormy human  relationships, as Tyler points  out  (Tyler 165),  and the sense of control which the act affords Myra is akin to the authority for which the unnamed narrator of the volume often strives. Myra is disturbed by her daughter’s  sexuality and is seeking to control  her troubled feelings. The first thing she notices about Shirley in the park is her strident scarlet and yellow dress, which “was  too tight,  and emphasised  a body that  man- aged to be thin and lumpy at the same time”  (Lessing 1993,  117-118). Myra’s  perception of her daughter is tinted  with  jealousy.  She recalls how her daughter stood  in the garden,  “with  her hands  on her round

hips, her big knees showing  under  a short  ugly dress, her face scarlet with rage—and [...] looked like the common little bitch she was” (119). Myra self-consciously degrades her daughter, seeking to distance herself from her in an act of rejection—of  her daughter’s  physicality but also of her own bodily nature, just as Julie rejected her child. The very reason of the quarrel  between  mother  and  daughter is Shirley’s uncontrolled sexuality: Myra visited her one day unexpectedly,  only to see her “having it off on the kitchen  table with some man certainly  not  her husband” (119).  Her daughter’s  unrestrained sexuality  seems to contrast sharply with  the orderly  rose garden  in Regent’s Park.  Walking  through city spaces affords  Myra  the opportunity to engage the city as a controlled spectacle in the story,  erasing not only bodily pain,  as in “Debbie  and Julie,” but female sexuality as such.

Most transformative encounters, such as they are, take place in pub- lic spaces in London Observed. In Regent’s Park,  the emotional bond between Myra  and Shirley is re-established via the act of cutting  roses. Although  Shirley has despised Myra for her obsessive interest in flowers and “claimed she loathed Nature except (wink, wink) for a little of what you fancy”  (120),  she gradually learns  to take  pleasure  in gardening. The characters’  meeting in the park  is not without irony,  of course, as they attempt to re-establish  the most intimate,  primary bond in a public space. Yet compared to Julie’s pink bedroom and sterile family house, the park  seems to be a preferable, telling choice. Indeed, in Lessing’s early novels nature is often associated with nostalgic memories of freedom (in The  Golden  Notebook, for instance,  Anna makes love in nature, feel- ing “desperately and  wildly and  painfully  happy,” 150):  it is an open space where  domestic  relations  can be redefined.  Therefore,  while the city in London Observed functions as a palimpsest that never allows the physicality and the pain of the female body to be fully visible, “Among the Roses” suggests that the city also offers possibilities for unexpected encounters and meaningful,  if temporary, intersubjective  interactions.

The Limits of Empathy

“The  Pit,”  contrastingly, is set in a private  place:  a small  flat in London, comprising  “two adequate rooms” (138).  Sarah,  a divorced woman  expecting her ex-husband, is arranging flowers, a “final spring of flowering cherry among white lilac and yellow jonquils, in a fat white jug” (138).  Both flowers and the “adequate rooms” recall the imagery of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1924),  though  the main  character, Sarah, never really walks in the city. Her age and the problems she is fac- ing also recall Woolf’s novel: she is a fifty-five-year-old divorced woman contemplating the wrong choices she has made. She does not leave her flat, which makes the perspective  of the narrative limited; like the shed in “Debbie  and Julie,”  the room  that  appears  in “The  Pit” is a closed place, hidden and detached, suggesting that Sarah’s story is yet another

invisible narrative in London Observed which is incompatible with the theatrical spectacle of London  ironised  throughout the book.

Although  the setting makes the narrative perspective limited in “The Pit,” just like in “Debbie  and Julie,” we still get a glimpse of the world beyond the walls of the room through a series of references which evoke a more  open,  translocal world.  The reader  learns,  for instance,  that Sarah is constantly on the move: “Because of her work she had lived in Paris, New York, various  towns  in England,  always moving, and good at moving.  She never felt she lived in one place more  than  another” (142-143). The pictures  on the wall of the room  also let us imagine  a less claustrophobic space: “Opposite the end wall with its square of blue sky she had hung a large seascape bought  for a few pounds  in a street market:  in it blue sea, blue sky, white spray, white clouds eternally tum-

bled over each other” (138). The seascape, a frequently recurring image of intersubjective relationships in psychoanalytic writings  (Winnicott

1971,  Benjamin 1988),  indexes a spatial  and  psychological  openness, while the reference to Sarah’s restless life offers a sharp  contrast to the lack of physical movement  in the narrative. The title of the story, “The Pit,” suggests that  it explores  stagnation and inertia.  While it refers to the traumatic past of Rose, the woman  Sarah’s ex-husband has married and who is a Holocaust survivor, it also suggests that Sarah is struggling to overcome her own distress and describes her concealed, subterranean place in the city. The image of the pit implies, too, that Sarah is dwelling palimpsestically, beneath  and below the daily business  of London  life, cut off from other  people and places. Sarah’s story bleakly depicts the repression  of empathy  as a survival strategy within a cruel metropolis.

George Robert Ellison Marshall and Claire Hooker claim that empathy can be understood as operating spatially,  “by the dimensions  of differ- ent intensities  operating across bodies”  (Marshall and Hooker 132). It possesses the capacity  to “bridge  the gaze” (129) and challenge those discourses  that  produce  the city as a normative object  of knowledge. But “The  Pit”  suggests instead  that  empathy  is ultimately  inaccessible in London Observed. Characters remain  emotionally detached, while London seems to leave no room  for empathic identifications. Sarah comes from a socially sensitive, altruistic family (after the war her parents helped  refugees) and  feels “invaded by some understanding”  (Lessing

1993,  163) which invites her to imagine the world  through the eyes of Rose, her ex-husband’s  wife. But she refuses to engage fully with Rose’s story:  empathy  seems to be too  overwhelming, too  destructive  for the self. Sarah feels she is becoming  Rose, literally:  “Rose,  it’s Rose. Not me, but  Rose”  (163).  Just as in “Debbie  and  Julie,”  Lessing portrays Sarah standing  by the window,  but it is no longer the city she observes: “Sarah  stood  by the window  in a dark  room  with  her eyes shut,  and her perspectives had so far changed that  she was almost  Rose, she was feeling with her. And what  she felt (Sarah knew, in her own bones and flesh) was panic”  (165). In other words,  Sarah’s empathetic connection

with Rose inhibits her capacity to engage with the city, and she remains trapped within her own urban  pit. If, in “Debbie  and Julie,” Julie’s con- trolling gaze functions  to contain  her traumatic experience and enables her to keep moving, in “The Pit” the inability to repress the experience renders Sarah, and by extension the reader, isolated, arrested and trapped. Ironically,  Sarah was prompted to think about  Rose by James’s sugges- tion  that  the two  of them  should  go on a summer  walk:  “‘Sarah,’  he said, in a low, intimate  voice, with the thrill of recklessness in it, ‘why can’t we two go off again somewhere,  this summer,  soon […]’” (149). James’s proposal makes possible an experience  which is less confining than Sarah’s “adequate rooms,” and an opportunity to revisit their failed marriage. For Julie, we might  remember, walking  offered  a means  to regain the illusion of mastery  and control;  but  Sarah and James never take their walk. As such, “The Pit” explores the loss of control and takes the reader closest to what remains repressed  by the city as a palimpsest than any other narrative in the volume. Furthermore, while in “Debbie and Julie” the telephone  is an image of connection and female bonding, in “The Pit” it seems to threaten Sarah with disintegration. She imagines Rose’s best friends calling her, followed by a call from Rose herself, and many other  calls, “casual,  offhand, insulting” (154),  either asking for James, or inviting Sarah to tea in a thoroughly decent, yet all the more upsetting  way. After imagining  these conversations, Sarah  receives an actual  phone  call from  Rose’s daughter, leaving her “standing by the telephone  in the dark  room” (162) and convinced  that  her only choice is to run away.  She withdraws from human  relationships, resolving to go on a walking  trip to Norway and rewrite  the story of her marriage alone,  leaving the city behind.  The reader  is left with the image of the telephone  ringing at the very end of story, reflecting on Sarah’s decision to refuse both attachment and empathy.

While London appears as something of a theatrical spectacle in London Observed, I do not think that  it necessitates a creative transitory space as Arias has claimed (Arias 6). In “The Pit,” Sarah first chooses to read Rose’s grim narrative as a performance, finding her “dramas” distasteful (Lessing 1993, 156), then refuses emotional engagement, deciding to focus upon her own story alone and elsewhere. She closes a door in herself, or rather, refuses to open it (164), which suggests that even though this story takes the reader as close as possible to the repressed layers of the urban palimpsest, it fails fully to articulate them.  The gaze of the characters remains  controlling in London Observed exactly  because  of the lack of empathy, and the city unfolds  as a staged spectacle to be mastered. Empathy would be the means to subvert the controlling gaze which pro- duces the city as an object of knowledge,  yet it is too overwhelming  for the characters to entertain, who otherwise  resolve to contain  emotional traumas via the act of walking as part of a repressive psychogeography.

As I have argued, London Observed portrays  London as a palimpsest which is profoundly different from the urban representations in Lessing’s early novels. The London  it presents  does not  only hide secreted lives in the city, but  it also requires  the repression  of sensitive, empathetic affective responses  to the lives of others.  The volume  challenges  the assumption that  walking  is a transformative practice:  it appears  as an act that re-inscribes new narratives upon repressed stories and traumatic experiences.  Instead  of offering alternative possibilities,  as de Certeau suggested, walking  produces  a controlled and indifferent  vision of the city in London Observed. In fact,  the city both  requires  and  results from attempts to (re)gain mastery: Julie and Myra struggle to establish control  over their bodies and emotional reactions, reproducing the city through apparently indifferent  walks,  while Sarah’s narrative and  her decision to walk elsewhere suggest that empathy  simply has no place in this metropolis. When  read  from today’s post-millennial vantage,  and after the publication of novels such as John Lanchester’s Capital (2012) and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), we might discern how Lessing’s collection presciently suggests that the British capital, from the late 1980s onwards, was becoming not only a more visibly gendered and multicultural place, but also an indifferent  and apathetic city.

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