Gnostic motifs in Doris Lessing's Briefing For a Descent Into Hell

 I’ve written a fuller review of Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell here, but I am also curious about the specific point of whether or not it is gnostic, so I want to explore that a bit further.

Robert Galbreath identifies it as ‘significantly gnostic’, making use of traditional gnostic features such as ‘the alien messenger, the prison-house of existence, sleep and awakening as metaphors of the human condition.’ The gnosticism presented here, however, is not that of early gnostic texts, he argues. Rather, the gnosis is ‘problematic’: this, then, is gnosis as the presentation of alienation, the corrupt state of modernity.

He further argues that, in modern gnosticism, where transcendence has been replaced by immanence, the gnostic prison house which embodies the alienation of mankind is no longer located in the cosmos, but in the mind, ‘where the polar opposites function as categories for states of consciousness and degrees of knowledge: ignorance/knowledge, sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, alienation/enlightenment (gnosis).’ Thus, this modern gnosticism could be seen as essentially psychological, something Lessing herself acknowledges when she calls her novel a work of ‘inner space. For there is never anywhere to go but in.’

One can certainly see these motifs throughout the novel. Watkins consistently describes existence in terms of bondage. He reminisces about his childhood, before the ‘prison shades’ descended and ‘the trap had shut.’ Elsewhere, children are ‘creatures about to be trapped and corrupted by what trapped and corrupted [the adults].’ People are bound by chains of ‘terrible bondage’, enduring the ‘dreadful breath of cold, of grief.’

Thus, we have humanity entrapped. It is enduring, in the words of RD Laing, whose work was a signficant influence on Lessing’s novel, ‘the condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind.’ And so, by the end of the novel, Watkins is clear that ‘People don’t know it but it is as if they are living in a poisoned air. They are not awake.’ This is classic gnostic despair, and as Watkins explains in the novel, ‘The advocates humanity has found to argue on the side of despair have always been more powerful than those other small voices.’

But the most gnostic element of the novel comes in the form of Watkins himself, who can be interpreted as a gnostic messenger from the gods, descending to Earth to warn mankind of its imminent (indeed, immanent) demise. A plot strand in the novel sees a character, presumably an incarnation of Watkins, receiving his briefing from the gods before a descent to Earth to save humanity. Clearly, however, this mission is not the first. He is told: ‘When the time comes, it will be our task to wake up those of us who have forgotten what they went for; as well as to recruit suitable inhabitants of Earth – those, that is, who have kept a potential for evolving into rational beings.’ Thus we have pneumatics already on Earth with, unknown to them, the seed of knowledge inside them, waiting to be awakened. And what is stopping them? The Archons, of course. In Briefing, the three Doctors (and, particularly, Doctor X, whom Watkins can’t even see) can clearly be identified as Archons, trying their best to keep man in a state of darkness and ignorance. Watkins attempts, throughout the novel, to find the knowledge he feels is there, but is consistently foiled by the medical men. And in the end, of course, he accepts their advice and takes the electro-therapy treatment which reverts him to his previous state of blissful ignorance: the Archons win, mankind stays in its prison house of the mind.

All of this can clearly be interpreted as gnostic in the modern sense of reacting against modernity. But in one respect, Lessing’s novel is very different. Lessing, of course, is an atheist, and for her the gnosis that man has lost and must somehow recover is not a theistic one, but a natural one. She quotes Rachel Carson at the beginning of the novel – Silent Spring would have only been a few years old when Briefing was published – and an ecopastoral message is clearly evident in it. The messengers are told in their briefing:

‘Now the Permanent staff on Earth have always had one main task, which is to keep alive, in any way possible, the knowledge that humanity, with its fellow creatures, the animals and plants, make up a whole, are a unity, have a function in the whole system as an organ or organism... Human beings... have not yet evolved into an understanding of their individual selves as merely parts of a whole, first of all humanity, their own species, let alone achieving a conscious knowledge of humanity as part of Nature, plants, animals, birds, insects, reptiles, all these together making a small chord in the Cosmic Harmony.’

James Lovelock first formulated his Gaia hypothesis in the sixties, while working for NASA, but he didn’t begin to publish his work until the early seventies, around the time Briefing was published (1971). There is a striking similarity between the holistic idea here of Earth as a single organism and Lovelock’s thesis. This link between humanity and nature is stressed throughout the novel. Human consciousness and that of the cosmos are internlinked. We are told:

There is nothing on Earth, or near it, that does not have its own consciousness, Stone, or Tree, of Dog, or Man. Looking into a mirror or into the glossy side of a toppling wave, or a water-smoothed shining stone like glass, we see shapes of flesh, flesh in time.

Man and animal are one, part of a wider connection of all matter. ‘It was the mind of humanity that I saw,’ Watkins tells us, ‘but this was not at all to be separated from the animal mind which married and fused with it everywhere.’

And this begins to take us to the message of the novel. If it is gnostic, it is a distinct flavour of gnosticism. The knowledge that we need to be awakened to is an ecopastoral one. We have founded societies based on materialism:

The chief thought was that our society was dominated by things, artefacts, possessions, machines, objects, and that we judged previous societies by artefacts – things. There is no way of knowing an ancient society’s ideas ecept through the barrier of our own.

And there is, by extension, no way of knowing our own inner space and inner knowledge without being able to connect to something more elemental, less materialistic. It is the community of ‘we’ and not the ascendency of ‘I’; and that ‘we’ must encompass more than simply human nature, because human nature – acquisitive, aspiring, solipsistic – is not enough. This is the gnostic message that Lessing is imparting: we must break through the alienation of the modern world; we must awaken to the values of the world around us. For me, it is a striking message. I do not share her pessimism about humanity, and I have strong reservations about the elevation of animals and even minerals to the status of human beings (here we are in the territory of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘optical democracy’) but it is a powerful battlecry for progress through understanding. Ultimately, I do not think this is a gnostic novel, despite the starkness of its ending. That ending, for me, is admonitory, but we should not take it literally. There is, in Lessing’s world, unlike that of other so-called modern gnostic writers, some possibility of gaining the knowledge.

Briefing For a Descent Into Hell by Doris Lessing

 

Charles Watkins – or somebody who seems to be Charles Watkins – is an amnesiac patient in some form of mental hospital, where he hallucinates, or remembers, or participates in (certainly mentally, perhaps even physically) disturbing, savage, dangerous, highly significant, real and mythical events. He is a traveller from another world; or perhaps he is a gnostic messenger seeking to awaken himself from the mundane reality in which he is imprisoned; or he is a lunatic; or perhaps he is simply a genuine amnesiac, struggling to make sense of the memories and feelings and fears which are being fired from his consciousness. Meanwhile, he is attended by two doctors who cannot agree on his symptoms, or on the appropriate treatment, or even on the patient’s response to that treatment. In this haze of confusion and terror, both patient and reader are borne on a wild adventure encompassing outer space and inner space, taking in a fantastic, genocidal war which may be occurring at the start or the end of our civilisation, a tragic story from the Second World War, an eternity adrift on a life raft in the ocean, a mission from the gods to awaken mankind and more; all the while focusing on the nature of our understanding (and, largely, lack of understanding) of what drives the human consciousness. Briefing for a Descent Into Hell is at once a novel of ideas and a novel of action. It is daringly experimental and challenging. It is fascinating and thought-provoking but, ultimately, it falls short of its own lofty goals.

Initially we know nothing of this man, Charles Watkins, and nor can we know anything. He is an enigma, a man who has completely lost his memory and who does not respond to any medical treatment. We are taken into his mind as he tries, himself, to uncover the key to his existence, but all is confusion. We are told a series of stories, all seemingly his own reminisences, all plausible, all concerning this character, and yet this character is not the Charles Watkins the doctors think he is. Or perhaps he is. Or perhaps he is, but he is someone or something else as well. This, a study of madness and alienation, takes up the first half of the novel.

Gradually, as the second half unfolds, the doctors investigate his background and make contact with people from his known past – his wife, his lover, a wartime companion, work colleagues – and each shed light on different attributes of someone who emerges as a difficult man. He is not easily likeable, we find out, but he can be charming, even seductive. He is highly intelligent, a Classics professor, but he is reduced now to helplessness. Throughout, he seems to be struggling to understand something greater than himself, aiming for something higher – redemption perhaps, or human happiness, or a deeper, greater truth, a knowledge. The novel ends with him making a dramatic decision, wholly unexpected, and with highly significant consequences, not only for him but, by extension, for us all. Is this it? might be the summary. Where lies madness and where sanity?

In all of this, Lessing’s theme is the consciousness which defines our reality and, more importantly, the narrow way our civilised minds tend to interpret both consciousness and reality. In our society, insanity is something to be feared, locked out of sight, talked of only in the passive. But, Lessing is showing us, the visions and notions of the mentally ill are not – or at least, not necessarily or not completely – pointless raving or rambling. They may, she argues, connect to another reality, or another view of life: ‘If you have shaped in your mind an eight-legged monster with saucer eyes, then if there is such a creature in the sea you will not see anything less, or more – that is what you are set to see.’ The events of the initial sections of the novel are clearly in some sense happening to Charles Watkins. But they make no sense to us. They are contradictory. Yet still, one feels, there may be a kernel of truth – knowledge – in there, which Watkins is struggling to reach.

Some commentators suggest Lessing draws heavily on the theories of RD Laing in her study of madness and alienation. For Laing, the state of mankind was ‘the condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind.’ Each of these is an accurate description of the various responses of Charles Watkins to his dilemma in the novel. Lessing’s argument appears to begin from the view that man is increasingly alienated from himself and his environment. ‘There is nothing on Earth or near it,’ we are told ‘that does not have its own consciousness, Stone, or Tree, or Dog, or Man.’ This is reminiscent of, for example, the Aboriginal Australian concept of Dreamtime, in which the wholeness of the world, in both space and time, is made clear and men have a direct connection with everything around them, animal vegetable and mineral, and past and present. But modern man has lost touch with the old truths. Instead, ‘[t]he chief thought was that our society was dominated by things, artefacts, possessions, machines, objects, and that we judged previous societies by artefacts – things. There was no way of knowing an ancient society’s ideas except through the barrier of our own.’

And so the character of Charles Watkins, unable to reconcile his inner and outer spaces, is symbolic of, in Douglass Bolling’s description, ‘the loss (perhaps irreversible) of psychic wholeness by modern-day Western man.’ We have, perhaps, lost our mythologies and, in so doing, some of our selves. Rationalism has taken the role of mythology, science is only ‘the most recent religion’. This is something with which religious anthropologists such as Karen Armstrong would agree.

This tension between rationality and dreams or mythology takes us to a central debate: in a rational world, there should be no place for the irrational, and yet it is there, and it impacts on us all whether we wish it to or not, and it invades both our outer and inner spaces whether we are aware of it or not; thus, to dismiss the irrational is, ironically enough, irrational. Judith Stitzel provides a fascinating quote from Lessing on the subject, from which the following is taken:

It’s very hard to be part of that complicated idea . . . that you are a rationalist and atheist and you don't believe and everything is already cut and dried and you already know everything and suddenly start throwing all that out the window and start thinking again.

Lessing advances the rational/irrational argument a stage further in this novel. It is not simply a question of reason versus unreason, because essentially that is a binary concept and where one stands on the stratuum is relatively straightforward. What Lessing forces us to consider is the nature of belief itself, and the way, in our modern society, we are driven towards certain flavours of belief, be they religious, agnostic or atheist. Within each, however, there are certain truths which appear to be unarguable, and with which no dissent is allowable. Whither the dissenter in such a world? is Lessing’s question. Citing the end of Briefing for a Descent into Hell, in which, on the face of it, Lessing appears to suggest that mankind, with its focus on science and reason, has lost its opportunity to find happiness, Stitzel argues that, rather, this is a ‘request for tolerance, for suspension, not of disbelief, but of too quick judgement.’ In the current climate, with the stridency of debate between creationists in one corner and Richard Dawkins’ band of atheists in the other, each spouting their own form of dogma and proving unable to listen to any voice but their own, this request seems well placed. But the concern, with this novel, is that in seeking to think again, Lessing may be going too far in accommodating an alternative view: scepticism may be taken to extremes. Michael Magie, for one, takes issue with Lessing’s scepticism about rationality and her tendency to eulogise mysticism and irrationality. One can certainly see, in this novel, what Magie means. Lessing suggests at one point, for example: ‘Better mad, if the price for not being mad is to be a lump of lethargy that will use any kind of strategem so as to remain a lump, remain nonperceptive and heavy.’ The novel’s conclusion, too, could be argued to suggest a similar premise.

Judith Stitzel, however, disagrees with Magie’s contention, arguing that Lessing stimulates in the reader ‘mental processes which allow us to move beyond where we are to stances less comfortable, but by no means necessarily less sane.’ Lessing, then, is allowing both herself and her reader the luxury of examining the world from a different viewpoint. And this, surely, should be the purpose of good fiction?

What does seem true is that we are losing something in our modern world – a sense of wonder, a delight in discovery, an inner space in which the arts, culture, education, love, nurture, the environment, the nature of being itself, combine to form some sort of experience of humanity. Whether this is expressed as spiritual in the religious sense is irrelevant, indeed it is a red herring. There is a feeling that, in our increasingly pressurised world, full of shallow relationships and frantic experiences, we are missing something that previous generations experienced. This sense of alienation, of course, is the essence of modernism, and while I have limited interest in pursuing humanity across the Waste Land towards The Waves or The Road, I can recognise some truth in it. There is something impoverished in our relations with the world around us. Earth ‘is far from grace.’  Man has become disconnected from his natural environment. We are ‘living in a poisoned air.’

But ultimately, for all the debate about rationalism, it must be a question not of man and god, good and evil, but of man and man, inner and outer – that is, how a man reconciles his inner thoughts and beliefs and desires, full of self-interest and even solipsism, with the nature of community and the collective responsibility of society. In a telling passage in the novel, Lessing notes:

Some sort of divorce there has been somewhere along the long path of this race of man between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, some sort of a terrible falling away… so that ever since most have said I, I, I, I, I, I, I and cannot, save for a few, say We.

This, to me, gets to the heart of the novel. All the debate about consciousness and madness and rationality and alienation resolves into this single point, that of basic humanity, and whether humanity can work together to survive modernism and the modern world. That is the fundamental debate. Lessing’s novel points to the question but, in the end, it shirks the answer.

Or maybe there is no answer, except time. And that is the one thing we cannot control.

Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

 

Surfacing is Margaret Atwood’s second novel, dating from 1972. All of the facts in that sentence are significant in defining the strengths and considerable weaknesses of a most curious novel. It reads very much as an apprenticeship novel – good, but not quite right – and it struggles to transcend the social politics of both its author and the time in which it was written. Nineteen-seventies feminism would have been all but mute without the didactic. And, despite the author’s attempts to the contrary, the didactic is the underlying tone of this novel. Overall, to be honest, it is a bit of a mess. But it’s an intriguing mess. The fine line between genius and nonsense is seldom more evident than in this novel. Thematically, it has tremendous power but in terms of writing craft it is all over the place.

An unnamed narrator, a young Canadian woman, returns to her childhood home on an island in Quebec following the unexplained disappearance of her father, a naturalist. Accompanying her are her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, David and Anna. The return to one’s roots is a familiar trope in fiction, of course, allowing protagonists to review the tracks of their lives that have brought them to the mature characters they are. Flaws can be traced, decisions or actions or events uncovered which help to explain their personalities. Ron Rash did much the same thing recently with Saints at the River, a novel which bears similar flaws to those in Surfacing. It is, one suspects, a structural fault with this type of psychological character study. It is too simplistic, perhaps, to reduce the complexity of human character into a historical recreation of past events or traumas and a concomitant extrapolation of cause and effect. We’re not that straightforward. In fairness to Atwood, there is more than that going in Surfacing,  but nonetheless it is a significant structural component of the novel.

However, you certainly can’t fault Atwood’s ambition. The novel is short – fewer than 200 pages – and yet she manages to pack in a thematic power which comes uncomfortably close to overload. There is gender, of course, as depicted by the cavalier, at times brutal ways the two women are treated by their menfolk. And there is a strong element of nationalism in the novel, particularly an aggressive anti-Americanism. All of this is quite acceptable, but when the thematic tableau extends to include specific linkages to the Holocaust, through the narrator’s Germanic origins, one feels the author is allowing herself to get carried away. Less is more.

Allied to her treatment of nationalism, there is a strong message about dispossession, the manner in which traditional Canadian ways and customs are being obliterated by incoming American culture. This is a very worthwhile thing to consider: the culture of a society is a powerful but fragile commodity and I’m certainly aware, as a Scot 250 years after the event, of the legacy of the Highland Clearances in my own country.

Therefore, this element of the novel could be intriguing, but it doesn’t work. This is because of the ridiculously cartoonish way in which the “Americans” in the novel are described. They are Beavis and Butthead on manoeuvres and as two-dimensionally obvious as it’s possible to be. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that Atwood inverts this by – shock, horror, who'd have thought it? – revealing that they are, in fact, indigenous Canadians and not Americans at all. The narrator's preconceptions about them may have been proved to be wrong, but the characterisation which brings about this revelation remains two-dimensional and over-the-top. It is, to be honest, simply a cheap trick on the author’s part, allowing her to make a thematic point that isn't warranted by the strength of the narrative.

From the start of the novel there is a sense of disconnection. The narrator cannot reconcile being back in the surroundings of her childhood while in the company of  friends from her adult life: “either the three of them are in the wrong place or I am.” The reason for her return is to seek traces of her father, who has inexplicably gone missing and may be dead or may still be alive. Back in the family cabin once more, the sound of road traffic to which she has become so accustomed is replaced by the birdsong she remembers from childhood. Past and present, nature and civilisation, ambition and fear, certainty and doubt, they begin to jostle in her mind. As is customary for this sort of “back to one’s youth” novel, the device is used to unravel the protagonist’s personality. Memories surface: family rancour, death, violence. And, in turn, more recent memories, buried deeply in her psyche, are revealed: an abortion, an affair, relationships and breakdowns.

All of this is revealed to us through the narrator – and how irritatingly postmodern is it that the central character doesn’t even have a name so she has to be referred to as “the narrator”? She is, of course, unreliable. By the end of the novel she has completely lost her senses. Or has she? Has she, in fact, regained them? Has she recovered the animal spirit that lurks within us, the gnostic spark of knowledge which modernity and its brutalising ways have extinguished? Because now the novel begins to take an ecopastoral turn. The rational world of science and machinery that we have created is in conflict with the animalism around us: this has been the Jungian rallying cry of fiction from Modernism onwards. Although it is well handled, in honesty others have done it better: Pincher Martin, The Orchard Keeper, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Housekeeping, The Glass Bead Game, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Life and Times of Michael K, the poetry of Ted Hughes. All of them explore similar territory to this, and, until the remarkable conclusion of Surfacing, all of them are superior.

Why? There are two reasons, one thematic and one craft. Thematically, there is just too much going on. There is nothing wrong, in a novel-length work, with thematic complexity, with a deep interlinking of themes and ideas. But here they don’t so much interlink as collide. It’s a dodgem car of a novel, its ideas forever careering into the buffers and crashing into one another. One minute it’s ecopastoralism, then it’s gender politics, then nationalism, then the Holocaust. And the underlying fault is that the only thing linking these strands together is the flawed and unreliable narration of the main character. At times she is clearly not sane and while it is possible to fashion a novel around the machinations of an insane protagonist, here it cannot work because the thematic targets are too varied. Crime and Punishment works because Raskolnikov’s obessions slide, in the course of the novel, from a greedy desire for both money and knowledge (specifically the knowledge of murder) into a gnawing desire for redemption. Although Raskolnikov’s sanity could be doubted, the linearity of the novel’s thematic exploration is entirely consistent. In Surfacing, that thematic exploration flails about like a woman beating off midges in the gloaming.

In terms of writing craft, the principal issue is characterisation. What do we have here? Firstly, men are shits – that old staple of feminist literature. Therefore, we have David who forces his wife to strip while he photographs her, while Joe comes close to raping the narrator. No. There needs to be a balance somewhere, a male character who is not a sexual predator. Secondly, American men are even bigger shits – that staple of leftist, anti-American writing. Thirdly, anyone embraced by modern culture is basically uncivilised, while anyone in touch with the natural wilderness has a primeval connection with some deeper spiritual knowledge. There is a ham-fistedness to much of this that is infuriating, because it damages what otherwise would be a very fine piece of writing.

Atwood’s admirers will argue that I’m simplifying what is in the text to make a point, and they may be right. The ending definitely suggests a far greater control of theme than I’m allowing. And certainly, the narrator is a remarkably complex character and it would not do to take anything she says at face value. Truth shifts and warps as the story progresses. Nothing is clearly understood. Therefore, it could be argued, some of the caricatures I complain of could, in fact, be representations of that very unreliability, and therefore inverted in meaning? Well, perhaps so, but it’s possible to make this sort of argument about virtually any novel of ideas that has ever been written. I agree there doesn’t have to be a moment when an author presents “this is what I believe” but somewhere along the line one needs to get a sense of what is being addressed. That only really emerges in the novel’s terrible and wonderful conclusion.

In this, the narrator breaks free from all shackles and reverts, briefly, to a Rousseauian state of natural savagery. The ending is far and away the most interesting part of the novel. This is where you see Atwood the novelist really beginning to emerge. All before is preliminary and, it might be argued, extraneous. William Golding would have started this novel here. It is surreal and terrifying. The narrator becomes something other – freed from rational instinct but somehow different from the wilderness dweller we might have expected. She doesn’t become some vessel for an ancient spirituality, nor does she find an animalistic core. She doesn’t become a visionary. And yet she does manage to channel some of those impulses and forces. It is a peculiar thing, and this is writing of impressive depth and complexity. It echoes Suttree’s sojourn in the mountains  in Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name but, here, the narrator finds some sense of inner truth that Suttree would not attain until his typhus attack: “I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.”

As a theme, that’s about as interesting as it gets. No man is an island. No victim can be despatched without a trace. No act, however guileless, is without consequence. No human can exist without exerting an influence – for good but also for ill – on other human beings. And for all its faults, it’s definitely worth reading Surfacing in order to come to this moment of departure.