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.
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