The Grass Is Singing By Doris Lessing Analysis

An Overview of Doris Lessing’s Fiction Writing

Imran Majeed Bhat

Research Scholar

Jiwaji University Gwalior (M.P.)

Deptt. of English

Abstract Doris Lessing was admittedly the greatest fiction writer of the modern age. She was a versatile genius and a multi-dimensional personality. The scope of her fiction-writing is so wide that it astounds the critics of the English spoken world. She has touched all the issues confronting the modern world and her large out-put is characterized by a totality of vision rooted in human betterment. Human concern is her main concern. In her very first novel ‘The Grass is Singing’ we see her pleading the cause of the Black Native Africans. She had joined Communism in Africa simply for the betterment of the

In these statements, there is stress on integration, and wholeness, which are, in a way, against the experimental fiction of 1960’s. Still we will have to admit that ‘The Golden Notebook’ is not put in order or presents wholeness in the sense that classical realism asks for. Still Molly takes the middle way, when she says, “The Golden Notebook is ‘about coherence’ while it is by realist conventions incoherent”. This much is enough to say that such a great critic as Molly Hite sees some kind of modernism in this novel. For Danziger,

‘The Golden Notebook’ is ultimately a novel about our ongoing need to impose patterns upon the mess of experience-despite the ultimate falseness of these necessary patterns or

Finally in the golden-colored notebook, Anna synthesizes the various experiences kept separate in the other books, so that they approximate to a kind of wholeness. Attaining this integration enables her to write again. Anna wants to impose a certain order on chaos, so far, so good, up to this ladder, we can safely claim that Anna, the protagonist of the novel, or for that matter Lessing, the creator of Anna occupies the story of modernism. Anna abandons her notebooks and records events solely in the golden notebook. From here, Lessing steps onto the next ladder------the ladder of postmodernism. Which never means that we can challenge her modernist characteristics of her works, even though greatly intermingled with the postmodern characteristics? ‘The Golden Notebook’ has no real ending and neither of its narratives provides the reader with the satisfaction of its real ending. Anna, her protagonist, tries hard to overcome the problem of fragmentation and that is the lesson what the novel teaches us. In this way, ‘The Golden