Memoirs of a Survivor The City and Apocalypse
Doris Lessing - Memoirs of a Survivor
The Memoirs of a Survivor is a pivotal novel. The Memoirs of a Survivor is set in the near future at "a time of savagery and anarchy" (p.54), although it is never made clear what kind of global crisis brought about such anarchic conditions. In this respect, Memoirs is less explicit than the final dystopian section of the earlier novel, The Four-gated City (1969), which describes planet Earth as contaminated by the aftermath of war and radiation. In Memoirs, the degradation of the atmosphere, the collapse of law and order, and the loss of a material infrastructure lead to, among other destructive effects, the break-up of stable, biologically related families. Thus the novel demonstrates Lessing’s persistent interest in familial groups and collectives as alternatives to the nuclear family. Groups of people, disparate survivors of one kind and another, band together for self-protection. Feral children, selfish, primitive and lacking articulate language, are also forced to join together for survival.
The Memoirs of a Survivor is narrated throughout in the first person. The female narrator, the survivor of the title, is unidentified at the beginning of the novel. Her background is not sketched in and she is never named, but her character gradually emerges through her discourse. The narrator is casually "given" a teenage girl, Emily Cartright, to look after. She does not know or ask about the teenager’s earlier experiences, although she suspects that, as a child, Emily has been intimidated in some way (pp.17-9). Emily brings with her a large family pet called Hugo, species unknown. Hugo is forever in danger of being captured and eaten for meat. He is referred to as a cat-dog and appears to possess the capacity for deep thought. His arrival signals a shift in the novel from conventional dystopian fiction to a more fantastical plane. In the final pages of the novel, when the existing society in Memoirs collapses, the narrator’s motley "family", feral children and a metamorphosed Hugo break through into a transcendent world where the task of beginning a new civilization lies before them.
Doris Lessing is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of twentieth-century issues and concerns, from the politics of race that she confronted in her early novels set in Africa, to the politics of gender which lead to her adoption by the feminist movement, to the role of the family and the individual in society, explored in her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Memoirs of a Survivor involves elements from two traditions. The outer action complies with the familiar techniques of the nineteenth century realistic novel, and the inner action employs elements of myth and fable. This makes Memoirs of a Survivor a complex piece of writing, one which stubbornly refuses to be neatly categorized. It does not easily fit in with either her early realistic fiction or her later science fiction and therefore requires a caesura within Lessing's canon. The novel is set after an apocalypse where most services have stopped, and electricity, food, and water are scarce. People stay in their homes, as large gangs of kids run through the city, stealing useless electrical gadgets from homeowners. This paper is intended to investigate the psychological function of the apocalypse in the Memoirs of a Survivor.
Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster. Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten or become simply memories for the survivors. Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of technology remain.
The narrator of this book is a woman who turns a cool, faceless attention to the crumbling society around her. From her window she records the landscape of apocalypse with total control, and with a rhetoric that measures (and weights) her experience, that seeks out the phrases that will correctly answer the events of that time, "the protracted period of unease and tension before the end. . ." The city is besieged. Wandering packs of youths devastate an area and then move on. Hordes of people have already left for the country and relative safety. "While everything. . .broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives as if nothing fundamental was happening."
Lessing writes the collapse as entropic rather than catastrophic, although it has reached, in the novel, a sort of critical mass: ‘all over the city were these pockets of life reverting to the primitive, the hand-to-mouth. Part of a house … then the whole house … a group of houses … a street … an area of streets. People looking down from a high building saw how these nuclei of barbarism took hold and spread’ [p.94; those are Lessing’s own ellipses, there]. We’re never told what has precipitated the collapse (the narrator refers to this as ‘it’), but the familiarity of the post-collapse world, its un-weirdness, acts as an affective foil to the second strand of the novel, in which the narrator recounts a variety of visions, or transcendental insights, into myriad ‘rooms’, some dirty and cold, some splendid and inviting. This visionary other-world is not weird either; it is, as a Sufi might say, actually home; and the novel ends with the narrator breaking free of the constraints of her domestic perspective on collapsing world, and simply walking away into the land of visions
Lessing's fable takes hold with tremendous force in Memoirs of a Survivor, for it is obvious from the start that her beleaguered city is only slightly more grotesque than London or New York or Rome. There is an irrelevant government that maintains an unresponsive system of justice and a remote bureaucracy, a government that could "adjust itself to events, while pretending probably even to itself, that it initiated them." Polluted air, street gangs, meaningless violence, and the devaluation of language--it is all too close for comfort.
Apocalypse is not only about death and destruction, it has to do with the accumulation of patterns and structures. Human beings are creatures of habit and the tendency in their lives is to organize, categorize and put things into a familiar framework. But there comes a point where the patterns and structures which we build or which are built up around us become so complex and convoluted and ossified that they naturally break open again, chaotically releasing the energy locked up back into the wild.
After the catastrophic devastation, everything that people know is irrevocably shattered. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, people left the city although ''there was no single reason for people leaving. We knew that all public services had stopped to the south and to the east, and that this state of affairs was spreading our way.'' For most people, the means of survival is leaving the city and try to begin a new life somewhere else although everything has been destroyed inside the city and outside but it is the urge to do something that moves them.
The word "Apocalypse" comes from the Greek "apokalupsis" which means something which has been revealed or uncovered. The meaning was thus not originally associated with the end of the world or the final destruction of civilization, such as it is today. Those who are downtrodden and oppressed can imagine the evil rulers and the unrighteous being struck down by the hand of God.
Apocalypses let people mentally act out their fantasies of revolution and retribution. Their enemies are punished and those on the path of good find out that their actions and value systems will be vindicated at some point in the future. Apocalypses function to reveal what is hidden, and in difficult times what is hidden is hope. The narrator's revelation is her ability to see behind the walls, the ability that was restricted before the apocalypse and it unleashed it. It made her discover or rediscover another realm that made search deeper and deeper in her own self,
''Yet, there did come that moment when I had to admit that there was a room behind that wall, perhaps more than once, even a set of rooms, occupying the same space as, or rather, overlapping with the corridor. The realization of what I was hearing, the knowledge that I had been aware of something of the kind for a long time, became strong in me, at the time that I knew I would almost certainly have to leave this city.''
On the contrary, Emily's defensive mechanism makes her see everyone outside her as a threat.
''The point was that there wasn't anybody who came near her, into her line of sight, who was not experienced by her as a threat. This was how her experience, whatever that had been, had 'set' her.''(29)
She therefore seeks one shelter after another to protect herself and escape from her inner self. At first she indulges in eating and then she takes refuge in fantasy and then she takes a shelter in the collective with Gerald and his group.
Concerning the group under Gerald's leadership, they could not operate as individuals on their own accord ''they could now stand being alone for long; the mass was their home and their place of self recognition'(33). Such attitude takes away the burden of individual responsibility and promotes violence and perversity. The pattern and social norms that are formed by the society become perverted once social structures are weakened, which is the case after the apocalypse. The children of the new community are violent. They have reached the lowest degree of alienation and are reduced to the basic levels of existence – their means of survival is limited only to the biological level.
What makes the ordeal more complicated is that no sooner the old pattern and structures are collapsed, then another arises, but it doomed to repeat the ''old patterns''. Thus despite the break of all social structures, ''the old patterns kept repeating themselves, reforming themselves even when events seemed to license any experiment or deviation or mutation.''
The apocalypse has many functions in Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor. As a revelation, it revealed hidden powers in the narrator and gave her the ability to dissolve the walls. On the other hand, it reduced humans to be more animal like or maybe worse, they kill for survival and even if it is not necessary to kill. The Memoirs of a Survivor use the conventions of utopian fiction to foreshadow apocalypse through inner dreams and outer chaos.
The Memoirs of a Survivor is narrated throughout in the first person. The female narrator, the survivor of the title, is unidentified at the beginning of the novel. Her background is not sketched in and she is never named, but her character gradually emerges through her discourse. The narrator is casually "given" a teenage girl, Emily Cartright, to look after. She does not know or ask about the teenager’s earlier experiences, although she suspects that, as a child, Emily has been intimidated in some way (pp.17-9). Emily brings with her a large family pet called Hugo, species unknown. Hugo is forever in danger of being captured and eaten for meat. He is referred to as a cat-dog and appears to possess the capacity for deep thought. His arrival signals a shift in the novel from conventional dystopian fiction to a more fantastical plane. In the final pages of the novel, when the existing society in Memoirs collapses, the narrator’s motley "family", feral children and a metamorphosed Hugo break through into a transcendent world where the task of beginning a new civilization lies before them.
Doris Lessing is now widely regarded as one of the most important post-war writers in English. Her novels, short stories and essays have focused on a wide range of twentieth-century issues and concerns, from the politics of race that she confronted in her early novels set in Africa, to the politics of gender which lead to her adoption by the feminist movement, to the role of the family and the individual in society, explored in her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Memoirs of a Survivor involves elements from two traditions. The outer action complies with the familiar techniques of the nineteenth century realistic novel, and the inner action employs elements of myth and fable. This makes Memoirs of a Survivor a complex piece of writing, one which stubbornly refuses to be neatly categorized. It does not easily fit in with either her early realistic fiction or her later science fiction and therefore requires a caesura within Lessing's canon. The novel is set after an apocalypse where most services have stopped, and electricity, food, and water are scarce. People stay in their homes, as large gangs of kids run through the city, stealing useless electrical gadgets from homeowners. This paper is intended to investigate the psychological function of the apocalypse in the Memoirs of a Survivor.
Apocalyptic fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of civilization through nuclear war, plague, or some other general disaster. Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after such a disaster. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten or become simply memories for the survivors. Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in an agrarian, non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of technology remain.
The narrator of this book is a woman who turns a cool, faceless attention to the crumbling society around her. From her window she records the landscape of apocalypse with total control, and with a rhetoric that measures (and weights) her experience, that seeks out the phrases that will correctly answer the events of that time, "the protracted period of unease and tension before the end. . ." The city is besieged. Wandering packs of youths devastate an area and then move on. Hordes of people have already left for the country and relative safety. "While everything. . .broke up, we lived on, adjusting our lives as if nothing fundamental was happening."
Lessing writes the collapse as entropic rather than catastrophic, although it has reached, in the novel, a sort of critical mass: ‘all over the city were these pockets of life reverting to the primitive, the hand-to-mouth. Part of a house … then the whole house … a group of houses … a street … an area of streets. People looking down from a high building saw how these nuclei of barbarism took hold and spread’ [p.94; those are Lessing’s own ellipses, there]. We’re never told what has precipitated the collapse (the narrator refers to this as ‘it’), but the familiarity of the post-collapse world, its un-weirdness, acts as an affective foil to the second strand of the novel, in which the narrator recounts a variety of visions, or transcendental insights, into myriad ‘rooms’, some dirty and cold, some splendid and inviting. This visionary other-world is not weird either; it is, as a Sufi might say, actually home; and the novel ends with the narrator breaking free of the constraints of her domestic perspective on collapsing world, and simply walking away into the land of visions
Lessing's fable takes hold with tremendous force in Memoirs of a Survivor, for it is obvious from the start that her beleaguered city is only slightly more grotesque than London or New York or Rome. There is an irrelevant government that maintains an unresponsive system of justice and a remote bureaucracy, a government that could "adjust itself to events, while pretending probably even to itself, that it initiated them." Polluted air, street gangs, meaningless violence, and the devaluation of language--it is all too close for comfort.
Apocalypse is not only about death and destruction, it has to do with the accumulation of patterns and structures. Human beings are creatures of habit and the tendency in their lives is to organize, categorize and put things into a familiar framework. But there comes a point where the patterns and structures which we build or which are built up around us become so complex and convoluted and ossified that they naturally break open again, chaotically releasing the energy locked up back into the wild.
After the catastrophic devastation, everything that people know is irrevocably shattered. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, people left the city although ''there was no single reason for people leaving. We knew that all public services had stopped to the south and to the east, and that this state of affairs was spreading our way.'' For most people, the means of survival is leaving the city and try to begin a new life somewhere else although everything has been destroyed inside the city and outside but it is the urge to do something that moves them.
The word "Apocalypse" comes from the Greek "apokalupsis" which means something which has been revealed or uncovered. The meaning was thus not originally associated with the end of the world or the final destruction of civilization, such as it is today. Those who are downtrodden and oppressed can imagine the evil rulers and the unrighteous being struck down by the hand of God.
Apocalypses let people mentally act out their fantasies of revolution and retribution. Their enemies are punished and those on the path of good find out that their actions and value systems will be vindicated at some point in the future. Apocalypses function to reveal what is hidden, and in difficult times what is hidden is hope. The narrator's revelation is her ability to see behind the walls, the ability that was restricted before the apocalypse and it unleashed it. It made her discover or rediscover another realm that made search deeper and deeper in her own self,
''Yet, there did come that moment when I had to admit that there was a room behind that wall, perhaps more than once, even a set of rooms, occupying the same space as, or rather, overlapping with the corridor. The realization of what I was hearing, the knowledge that I had been aware of something of the kind for a long time, became strong in me, at the time that I knew I would almost certainly have to leave this city.''
On the contrary, Emily's defensive mechanism makes her see everyone outside her as a threat.
''The point was that there wasn't anybody who came near her, into her line of sight, who was not experienced by her as a threat. This was how her experience, whatever that had been, had 'set' her.''(29)
She therefore seeks one shelter after another to protect herself and escape from her inner self. At first she indulges in eating and then she takes refuge in fantasy and then she takes a shelter in the collective with Gerald and his group.
Concerning the group under Gerald's leadership, they could not operate as individuals on their own accord ''they could now stand being alone for long; the mass was their home and their place of self recognition'(33). Such attitude takes away the burden of individual responsibility and promotes violence and perversity. The pattern and social norms that are formed by the society become perverted once social structures are weakened, which is the case after the apocalypse. The children of the new community are violent. They have reached the lowest degree of alienation and are reduced to the basic levels of existence – their means of survival is limited only to the biological level.
What makes the ordeal more complicated is that no sooner the old pattern and structures are collapsed, then another arises, but it doomed to repeat the ''old patterns''. Thus despite the break of all social structures, ''the old patterns kept repeating themselves, reforming themselves even when events seemed to license any experiment or deviation or mutation.''
The apocalypse has many functions in Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor. As a revelation, it revealed hidden powers in the narrator and gave her the ability to dissolve the walls. On the other hand, it reduced humans to be more animal like or maybe worse, they kill for survival and even if it is not necessary to kill. The Memoirs of a Survivor use the conventions of utopian fiction to foreshadow apocalypse through inner dreams and outer chaos.
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