The Golden Notebook

Above all, The Golden Notebook is a künstlerroman, a novel of the making of an artist. Anna confronts her disappointment with her first novel, Frontiers of War, excoriating its excessive sentimentality and romanticization of war. She then enters a period of prolonged writer’s block; she is insistent that she will no longer write. Lessing herself points to this theme in her introduction to the novel: “a main character [of The Golden Notebook] should be some sort of an artist, but with a ‘block’” (xi). This is linked not only to her own disavowal of her earlier creation but also to the forces of modernity: In the face of the atrocities of the 20th century, art lacks the power to speak or to heal. In this way, Lessing is linked to other writers of the early 20th century, in particular James Joyce. Anna herself refers to Joyce and his work several times throughout her notebooks. As he famously wrote in Ulysses, “history […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (Joyce, James. Ulysses. Dover Publications, 2012, p. 34). Anna’s version relates to her nightmare of destruction: “I am back inside a nightmare which it seems I’ve been locked in for years” (345).