Beyond the Breakdown of Communication: Exploring Obstacles to Communicating in the Novels of Doris Lessing

This paper aims to explore the breakdown of communication in the novels written by Doris Lessing, and investigate into the nature of experience that is conveyed despite the failure of language. Lessing’s fiction is abundant with the symptoms of breakdown, and the heroines’ experience is often rendered by means of fragmentation of the narrative form. Anna Wulf, the heroine of The Golden Notebook, can only deal with her experience by writing about it in separate notebooks; the protagonist of Memoirs of a Survivor delivers a most confusing memoir in which facts and events intertwine with dreams and visions. According to Lacan’s theory of the three registers of human experience, the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, language fails in the face of the real. Nevertheless, the twentieth-century trauma theory allows for investigating into the realm of the real. Critics such as Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman emphasise the importance of reaching for what is without words, reading despite the silence and fragmentation. By applying their approach to Doris Lessing’s fiction one can truly appreciate her recognition of the human condition in the modern world, and read beyond the breakdown of communication.