MML Computer-Assisted Translation
The Golden Notebook, 1962 - Doris Lessing
Hugo Azčrad
During that period of three months when I wrote reviews, reading ten or more books a week, I made a discovery: that the interest with which I read these books had nothing to do with what I feel when I read — let’s say— Thomas Mann, the last of the writers in the old sense [1], who used the novel for philosophical statements about life. The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost [2] of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal mining village [3], coteries [4] in Chelsea, etc. Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society [5], a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately [6], not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone among groups on other countries. It is a blind grasping out [7] of their wholeness [8] and the novel-report is a means towards it. Inside this country, Britain, the middle-class have no knowledge of the lives of working people, and vice-versa; and reports and articles and novels are sold across the frontiers and read as if savage tribes were being investigated.
Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffuse [9]. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty “subjects” I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses.