Children of the Holocaust

The Memoirs of a Survivor is not an ordinary novel. Doris Lessing's work has generally focused on one woman's struggle so find and identity in the modern world Politically (she grew up in-Rhodesin and has spent a great deal of energy examining her colonialist background), and as a women, she seems more mature. so that Memoirs both resolves and transcends these earlier themes. This newest novel is a fantasy, the story of an unnamed woman in an unspecified future; the plot is often bizarre and confusing. Because it is so vague, the action serves as a vehicle for the long passages of reflection which have previously been, if not secondary, at least jumbled and undeveloped, it is as if she has finally resolved the most personal conflicts inner life, and can write a novel which comes across clearly and finds a university. In her struggles absent from her previous work.

Lessing has always created plausible characters, and those in Memoirs are no exception. Except for Hugo, the semi-anthropomorphic half-dog, half-cat mutation, they are realistic in spite of their bizarre behavior. In order to get past the first page of any fantasy one must suspend disbelief and as long as the characters' emotions are understandable their paws and whiskers don't matter. It's hard to carry fantasy off so well: authors tend either toward the cold creations of science fiction or totally unbelievable little critters with hairy toes. Lessing avoids both extremes. With Hugo as a minor exception, she deals with human beings, who stay human despite their unworldly surroundings.

It's never clear what holocaust has preceded the time the memoirs recall. The old order is rapidly disintegrating, young children as well as adults must adapt to a world of food shortages and wandering gangs, of fear and confusion. There are no guides for behavior. The struggle is only to survive: old moral structures are anachronistic, love is accidental. The memories are those of an elderly woman who is caught in the new world, unsure of her ability to adapt. Because she can remember the past, she sees her present objectively, aware of its insanity yet unable to pass judgement because, as she says. "I had abandoned all expectations of the ordinary for my inner world, my real life in that place." One cannot measure the world against the old standards when the abnormal has become normal--one can only struggle to understand, to survive.

Her passive watching is interrupted when she is given a child. Emily, a protect. It isn't clear why Emily should be the narrator's responsibility--a man drops the girl off and that's that. Such details are unimportant when the world is dissolving, and, like the narrator herself, we don't ask why Emily is given her, for the child's need for some kind of protection is clear. Emily, the twelve-year-old-girl-woman, belongs to the new age in a way the narrator cannot. She remembers only the present state of the world, she has no past with which to compare it. Emily is at first a child, self, protective, always isolated. She cannot articulate her emotions, nor can she respond to the narrators real affection for her. Only Hugo, that "botch of a creature," receives her love. Emily's only goal is to survive, to find food and shelter in the apartment, and the woman who gives her this protection is unimportant.

But children become adults in spite of the holocaust, and Emily's development becomes the main focus of the novel. The narrator can only watch helplessly as Emily readies herself to take her place in the world outside, where the struggle to survive has become steadily more intense. Finally she becomes "the woman" of the leader of one of the packs of adolescents who room the city looking for food, and begins to explore areas she has previously avoided--friendship, love and responsibility for other human beings.

The narrator continues her watching, unable to become more than peripherally involved with the world of survival. Emily takes care of her, for the older woman is unable to forage for food, unable to adapt to the callousness of the struggle. From being herself a child needing protection. Emily has become a protector, assuming an adult's responsibility to take care of others. But only the narrator can provide a backdrop to Emily's growth, for she alone can see a continuum, the "hinterland which had formed" the girl. Somehow, miraculously, the narrator is able to see through the walls of her apartment to Emily's past, where she watches her pre-holocaust infancy and childhood: the insensitive mother, the kindly but officious father. Emily's childhood was one of roles, of commands and prohibitions, far closer to our time than to the world of the novel. The morality of our age seems senseless in contrast to the narrator's present: Emily's mother's "don't touch," her anger at the "dirty little girl" seems ridiculous when juxtaposed against a world where four-year-olds live underground, eating rats, and sometimes people. Yet the older world, with its roles and facades, seems idyllic, secure and inviolable.

Outside the narrator's semi-illusory world Emily continues to grow, and the world becomes increasingly sinister and dangerous. Emily's attempt to organize a commune of unprotected children fails, a victim to the increasing savagery of the others. The air becomes unbreathable, cannibalism becomes more common. As Emily becomes a woman, her protective composure breaks. She weeps the tears of the "eternal woman"--tears in which "it is not the pain...that is the point, no it is the finality of the acceptance of a wrong. So it was, is now, and ever must be, say those closed, oozing eyes, the rocking body, the grief." And in the end, the struggle to survive becomes too intense. The city empties and order disappears, until the tour of them--Emily and those she loves most--can only wait quietly in the apartment for the inevitable.

But just as the struggle seems hopeless, the world beyond the wall opens up, and they escape into a world "which might present them with anything"--they walk "out of this collapsed little world into another order of world together." It is the narrator, the old sexless observer, who sees the way to this world of unlimited possibility; but Emily, transmuted into an earthmother, is the one who finally leads the rest. Emily, sure of her love and adulthood, has taken her place in a new order. The narrator can only watch and wonder as "the last walls" dissolve.

The Memoirs of a Survivor is not so much a novel as a fable. Obviously our own world is not so badly disintegrated few of us fear that our pets or those we love will be made into someone else's dinner. But Aesop's fables make sense to us even though we don't have many talking ravens around, and Lessing's setting is no more distracting. It serves to emphasize her moral, if it can be called that--her statement about the need for love, a collective need to protect one another in a world which is ultimately inhospitable. These are, after all, the memoirs of a survivor--ultimately one can survive anything if bonds can develop between those who struggle. Not bonds of the gang, which works together only to survive, but those of real affection which can only develop as people learn to assume responsibility for one another, to protect one another from the holocaust.

Clearly this moral marks a change in Lessing's perception of the world, or at least in the way she deals with it. In her earlier works, she has been caught up in the struggles of the main characters. Their growth has been partially obscured by the author's own involvement in it. Her involvement in this novel is defined: she is the watcher, and, although she understands Emily's growth, she stands back from it. She has already been through the struggle to achieve adulthood, and can only guide by example. While she has used an omniscient narrator in other books, the character's struggles have been her own, and their realism prevented resolution. Walls don't open up in real life, and women do not burst through into other world's. Africa, Lessing's nemesis, is only mentioned in passing in Memoirs, where in her previous work it has been a recurring motif. Political awareness is here, but in a more subile form, for, as she says government is an anachronism in a world of anarchy. "The last thing that interested anyone by this time was changing the form of government we wanted only to forget it." The New society must be a collective one. Authority must be based on love and caring rather than on power. Lessing, who described her departure from the Communist Party in The Golden Notebook, has abandoned rhetoric for a more humanistic tone, where individuals take the place of party lines.

And feminists who look to Lessing as a prophet of the movement may be disappointed with Memoirs. Emily's struggle is to become a woman, yes, but the message of the book has nothing to do with a woman's struggle to become independent. In fact, midway through the book the narrator discusses her own dissatisfaction with Emily's submission to Gerald her lover.

Why did she not have her own band, her own household of brave foragers and pilferers, of makers and bakers and growers of their own food."

...The trouble was, she did love Gerald; and this longing for him, for his attention and has notice, the need to be the one who sustained and comforted him, who connected him with the earth, who held him steady in her common sense and her warmth--this need drained her of the initiative she would have needed to be a leader of a commune. She wanted no more than to be the leader of the commune's woman...

Yet it is Emily's love which, in the end, holds them all together--her ability to nurture rather than Gerald's ability to organize. Lessing's first major character Martha Quest, whom she followed through a series of five novels (the Children of Violence series), had no such ability to love, and in her struggle to be independent abandoned her child to a boorish husband. Perhaps Lessing has mellowed now: perhaps Emily and the narrator are closer to Margaret, the earth mother figure of E.M. Forster's Howard's End, and, like her, can end with "Only connect..."