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).