What's Left of Feelings?

The Affective Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing's The Golden

Notebook
Author(s): James Arnett
Source: Journal of Modern Literature , Vol. 41, No. 2, Environments of Invention (Winter
2018), pp. 77-95
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.41.2.05

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What’s Left of Feelings? The Affective
Labor of Politics in Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook

James Arnett
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

In The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s fragmented narrative, invocations of

Sisyphean labor, and characterization of political work demonstrate that the most effec-
tive route to progressive political change is through embodying an optimism that may
seem naïve, but whose efficacy is evident in the production of the meta-textual narrative.
On the other hand, progressive politics is prey to what Wendy Brown calls “ left mel-
ancholy,” a political and affective paralysis, a mood that is grappled with from within
an experience of political depression. The question posed by Lessing is: What can to be
done facing such disempowering affective responses to the apparently inevitable defeat
of progressive politics?

Keywords: affect / politics / melancholy / depression / optimism

But when “left” or “progressive” or “communist” feeling—whichever

word is right, and at this distance, it’s hard to say—was at its height in
our town, the inner group of people who had initiated it were already
falling into a sort of inertia, or bewilderment or at best worked out of
a sense of duty. At the time, of course, no one understood it; but it was
inevitable.
—Doris Lessing,
Golden Notebook 64

James Arnett (jamesj.arnett@gmail.com) is an assistant professor of English at the

University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. His work has appeared in Genre, Ariel, Literature
Interpretation Theory, African Literature Today, Doris Lessing Studies and others. He is cur-
rently at work on a book manuscript about the literal and figurative role of the market in
contemporary African literature.

Journal of Modern Literature  Vol. 41, No. 2  •  Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University  •  DOI 10.2979/jmodelite.41.2.05

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78 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

We’ve got to remember that people with our kind of experience are
bound to be depressed and unhopeful.
—Doris Lessing,
Golden Notebook 542

D
oris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook has provided tremendous
fodder for analysis—and in particular, for incisive critiques of its poli-
tics. In the wake of its publication, in the 1970s, critic Anne Mulkeen
foregrounded the communist political elements, explaining that “Lukács and
Lessing demand, then, of the twentieth-century novelist, belief in man and his
capacity to affect his world” (263), a vision grounded in Lukács’s claim that “every
action, thought, and emotion of human beings is inseparably bound up with the
life and struggles of the human community” (Realism 9). Left-political readings
of Lessing’s work have, however, tapered off in the ensuing years, as critics have
rushed to embrace the evolution of her politics away from explicit engagements
with communism.
The Golden Notebook is one of the most daunting texts to emerge in British
literature after World War II. Jed Esty characterizes the novel as a transitional
text, between modernism and postmodernism. Its self-consciousness speaks to
its modernist elements; its self-conscious self-fragmentation to its postmodern-
ist elements. The novel is all ostensibly composed by Anna Wulf, in a series of
color-coded notebooks, all of which come together in the final notebook, the
eponymous Golden notebook. The four primary notebooks all correspond to
some distinct layer of Wulf ’s self-consciousness. The black notebook is “autobi-
ographical” for Anna, focused on details of her life in Southern Rhodesia. The red
notebook contains reflections and references to her Communist political work. In
the yellow notebook, the fictional Anna is working on a new fiction that is also
autobiographical. Finally, the blue notebook, kept at the insistence of Mother
Sugar (her psychoanalyst), contains reflections on her dreams, visions, and other
metaphysical topics. All of these texts are contained within the novel, and its com-
plexity arises out of the several layers of fiction and meta-fictional self-awareness
that navigating these component texts requires. In what follows, I argue that the
labor it takes to read the novel mirrors the productive capability of the novel’s
composition, and that both redound upon the novel’s systemic reflections on the
nature of progressive politics.
Lessing changed her mind several times as to the value and nature of this
political novel. Her 1971 introduction registers her discomfort with it being
taken as a “trumpet for Women’s Liberation” (xiii). On the other hand, her 1993
introduction to it emphasizes that the novel is “a useful testament to its time,
particularly now that communism is dead or dying everywhere” (viii). Lessing’s
ambivalent politics are reflected in the fragmentation, analysis, and creativity of
the protagonist Anna Wulf. Anna’s drift away from Communist party politics
over the course of the novel lives alongside her meta-fictional reflections on the

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 79

crypto-autobiographical narrative of her political life in Rhodesia, which in turn

nests inside the record of her psychoanalysis, the form of which requires her to
segregate her creative, family, and political lives. These multiple narratives require
her to confront the intercalation of politics and art at work in creating a cogent
(even if fragmentary) picture of midcentury progressive politics, and a profound
investigation of the persistent value of artistic creation in spite of its failures.
The recent emergence of affect theory as discourse permits a more nuanced
exploration of the values, valences, and nexuses of Lessing’s novelistic politics.
Affect theory, as it stands now, has emerged from a panoply of disciplines, com-
bining literature and literary theory, political theory and philosophy, philosophy
qua philosophy, sociology, area studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, neuro-
science, and other disparate fields. There is no question, though, that the emer-
gence of affect theory speaks to an area of discourse that has all too often been
strategically left out of intellectual considerations, especially in the long shadow
of Cartesian dualism.
One such application that traverses disciplinary limits is the notion of affec-
tive labor. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s persuasive account of affective
labor has served as a watershed at the confluence of the material body, labor,
and affect. Although Lessing’s novelistic description of what I’ll likewise term
“affective labor” well precedes Hardt and Negri’s articulation, their critique of
neoliberalism mobilizes affective labor as a way to describe how immaterial,
intangible, intellectual, or interpersonal labors “produce collective subjectivities,
produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself ” (Hardt 89). As contem-
porary capitalism shifts focus to these modes of production, it has become quite
important to interrogate how these modes of labor—always-already present, if
not hegemonic—serve the economic interests of the State, thus overbalancing
the operation of politics. Hardt and Negri acknowledge that a notion of affective
labor emerges first in the devaluation of ‘women’s work’ through the work of
subsumption: “Value is thus assumed [by the State in neoliberalism] by stripping
it from labor (the labor of women—in this case, mothers and wives) which before
the contemporary economic order emerges, strip[s] it [also] . . . of affect” (Negri
79). Hardt calls this kind of affective labor the “second face” of affective labor,
its manifestation as “caring labor [which] is certainly entirely immersed in the
corporeal, the somatic, [even as] the affects it produces are nonetheless imma-
terial. What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community,
biopower” (96). This notion of affective labor has been explored far more exten-
sively by Silvia Federici and Selma James in the context of socialist feminism.
Federici explains that her mandate has been to address “the crisis of the tradi-
tional sexual division of labor that confined women to (unwaged) reproductive
labor and men to the (waged) production of commodities,” upon which “all the
power relations between men and women” have been built (51). What Lessing
stages in The Golden Notebook is less a commentary on reproductive labor, but
rather affective, productive labor.

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80 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

The affective valence of “actual” political labor also needs to be considered,

something a cadre of affect theorists, whose commitments grow out of largely
feminist and queer theoretical frameworks, have addressed. Unfortunately, many
contemporary studies of affect explore negative emotions; as Kate Zambreno
establishes, these studies “seek to interrogate or re-claim so-called bad feelings”
(“Melancholy”). Indeed, it can worryingly seem as if affect theory is ultimately
concerned with subjective disempowerment. On this end of the affective spec-
trum, Wendy Brown elaborates on a concept from Walter Benjamin, arguing
that “left melancholy is [his] unequivocal epithet for the revolutionary hack who is,
finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure
of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present” (20).
Left melancholy is one of what Kathleen Stewart describes as “ordinary affects,”
a mood experienced daily regarding the material ways that politics and ideology
shape society. “Ordinary affects . . . give circuits and flows the forms of a life,”
Stewart explains (2). “They are a kind of contact zone where the overdetermina-
tions of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally
take place” (Stewart 3).
Ann Cvetkovich, an ally in Stewart’s Public Feelings project, elaborates on
another negative affect that she labels, broadly, “political depression.” She argues
that “depression should be viewed as a social and cultural phenomenon,” a point
she acknowledges is “absolutely unobjectionable” in a cultural studies context (90).
This claim broadens into a question, “What if depression . . . could be traced to
histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segrega-
tion and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbal-
ances?” (115).1 In rigorously linking depression to dense intersections of cultural,
historical, political, and social ideologies, she extends the work of some trauma
studies that point to the longer-term after-effects of world-historical traumas.
Lessing’s The Golden Notebook well precedes these theorists in its depictions of
a wide range of affective failures in the work of left politics. Her novel, against
the worrisome stasis theorized by Brown, Flatley, Berlant, and others, mobilizes
a recurring motif of Sispyhus to illustrate the tedium that attaches to the labor
of experiencing and alleviating this trauma with material labor. This Sisyphean
image shifts over the course of the novel, giving us clues to the resolution of the
narrative as it argues not for recurrent stasis, but, ultimately for the satisfying and
spontaneous leaps forward made by historical necessity, engendering political
progress.
The historical tension emerging in the present of the narrative—the end of
the Second World War, the uncertain political and economic moment in Britain,
flux with regards to Britain’s imperial status—is introjected by Anna. Her struggle
with this unsettled tension mirrors a larger disillusionment and hesitancy about
left politics following the war. This haunts Anna from the first page: “the point
is, that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up” (GN 3). This fracturing serves
particularly to dramatize the “optimistic” side of Anna’s micropolitics. It emerges
in concert with what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism”: “the affective structure

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 81

of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene

of the fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will
help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (Cruel 2; emphasis
original). Berlant’s formulation echoes the oft-circulated folk-wisdom definition
of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different
result.” It is this exhausting repetition, and its familiar product cynicism, that
perturb Anna throughout the long, dark night of her political soul.
The Golden Notebook amply contains the above dynamics of the interweaving
of politics and affect. Indeed, Lessing’s novel exhaustively, immanently, and
structurally produces the gestalt ambivalence of left politics. This novel displays
how the “work” of left politics can both engender and proscribe progressive social
change, but also that such labor necessarily (and unfortunately) moves through
registers of “left melancholy,” “political depression,” and “cruel optimism.” How-
ever, the complex narrative structure of the novel, especially its bridging of per-
sonal, domestic micropolitics and collective, social macropolitics, performs some
measure of restorative amelioration for both the producer and consumer of the
novel, signposting the way to social change and ensuring at least some emotional
relief. Ultimately, in ranging through its complex narrative structure—the nested
and nestling notebooks presented to the reader as if one narrative (the titular
“golden” notebook)—the novel ramifies and validates the exhaustion in and of
left affect, while also demonstrating through its composition and coherence the
promise of progress.2

Left Melancholy
In spite of Lessing’s political ambivalence, the self-conscious reflexivity of her
novel’s narrative gambit—parceling out various registers of the political self into
interconnected “notebook” narratives—to the innate complexity of parsing the
political self. The novel’s lingering modernist techniques—its belief in subjectiv-
ity, its discontinuities, its often impressionistic composition—and its protopost-
modernist techniques—its personalization of History, its rejection of a singular
narrative—combine with an earnest tone that forecloses many of the politically
counterproductive modes of postmodernism (as identified by Jameson, Baudril-
lard, Barthes, and others). Lessing’s novel starts from the premise of Anna’s block-
age, creative and personal, that is persistently written in political terms: “The point
is,” she says to the bourgeois capitalist Richard, “that socialism is in the doldrums
in this country,” to which he dryly adds, “And everywhere else” (GN 22). Anna’s
increasingly fraught sense of being fractured works through several simultaneous
registers in which she navigates toward greater autonomy and self-realization. But
politics are always at the forefront, and Lessing’s novel is eminently concerned
with the tension between the macro- and micro-political.
Wendy Brown extends Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay on left melancholy,
arguing that “left melancholy represents not only a refusal to come to terms
with the particular character of the present” (21). It prefers instead, she notes,

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82 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

to preserve empty signifiers of revolutionary spirit than to engage pragmatically

with political organization and change (21). She continues, “We come to love our
left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the
existing world that we presumably seek to alter with these terms or the future that
would be aligned with them” (ibid.). Even if melancholy itself is “irrational,” it
nevertheless obeys a logic of neurotic compulsion that works to retard the subject’s
resolution of grief and sadness. This circuitry is writ large in Anna’s burgeoning
narrative of her waning idealism.
Adapting this figure of left melancholy by factoring in Raymond Williams’s
foundational work, Jonathan Flatley argues that “Structure of feeling would be
the term to describe the mediating structure—one just as socially produced as
ideology—that facilitates and shapes our affective attachment to different objects
in the social order,” he elaborates, locating structures of feeling as mediations in
themselves that work alongside and in the narrativizing work of ideology (26;
emphasis original). In this way, structures of feeling are “innocent” of direct dia-
logue with ideology; they remain a “naïve” way of processing affective response to
socio-political stimuli as delivered by culture and cultural objects.3
Lessing’s novel demonstrates that Brown’s and Flatley’s accounts of (left)
melancholy are complementary. The novel is rich with examples of retrogressive,
stuck, self-defeating leftists that confirm Brown’s intuition that left melancholy
is a perverse and familiarly miserable affect into which progressive subjects inev-
itably tumble. Anna encounters these predefeated subjects all the time in party
work. They wanted to be the next “Gorki, Mayakovski” (GN 16); they “seem to
live in an atmosphere of suspicious disgust” (152); they preface all of their war
stories with, “I’ve been around Party circles so long that . . . ” (148; ellipsis in
original). This persona also lives inside Anna: “when I talk to Molly about poli-
tics,” Anna reflects, “I never know what person is going to reply—the dry, wise,
ironical political woman, or the Party fanatic who sounds, literally, quite mani-
acal” (153). Both versions of left melancholy persist in this last self-appraising
split—creating a dialectic between two melancholies, one that is paralyzed and
one that is generative.4
The “cool, ironical” voice of Anna remarks “I have not yet met one Party
member anywhere, who has not written, half-written, or is planning to write
a novel, short stories, or a play. I find this an extraordinary fact, though I don’t
understand it” (160). Anna’s voice may begin as ironic, but resolves itself into a
seemingly guileless confession; although at this point in the novel, she cannot yet
singularly resolve the gulf between the cynical left melancholics and those who
still optimistically believe that (the ‘right’) “work” can engender resolution.
“For instance,” Anna reflects, “I became ‘a communist’ because the left people
were the only people in the town with any kind of moral energy, the only people
who took it for granted that the colour bar was monstrous” (66). Only the left
organizers captured her feeling of injustice and acted accordingly. “And yet there
were always two personalities in me, the ‘communist’ and Anna, and Anna judged
the communist all the time” (66). A naïve optimism is required for a middle-class

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 83

white subject to be able to believe in the inevitability of the destruction of the color
bar in 1940s Rhodesia; but without any such naïveté, no action or progress could
result, either. Structures of oppression do not evanesce of their own accord.
If left political subjects seem to invariably drift toward cynically self-defeating
melancholy, it is immanent in the very conditions of their allegiance to the cause
itself. To become involved in progressive politics is to belabor a feeling of opti-
mism about the imperative for change, something that supersedes simply recog-
nizing the existence of injustice. Anna remarks with some level of admiration,
“The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at
all, but have a powerful sense of service” (160), service Lessing already conceived
of as labor. Hence, real optimism requites naïveté, and this creates the conditions
by which productive, prefiguring melancholy can be put to work against the more
“realistic” left melancholy whose modus operandi is blockage.
Melancholy itself is not necessarily a dead end: “Melancholia forms the site
in which the social origins of our emotional lives can be mapped out and from
which we can see the other persons who share our losses and are subject to the
same social forces” (Flatley 3). Melancholia can produce, in other words, a shared,
collective identification, one that proceeds from individual subjectivity toward
collectivity.5 Flatley uncovers a space in the melancholic’s self-perception wherein
the subject can short-circuit the apparent necessity of failure by virtue of per-
ceiving it. In this way, the individual can come to understand his or her personal
experience of political disappointment as always-already shared with others. Ilit
Ferber reminds us, the work of melancholic self-alleviation is “heavy, [but at least]
lacking the libidinal-life energy, which makes melancholy so destructive” (¶ 15).
If one loses sight—as Anna never quite does, even as she feels estranged from her
past selves—of that spur to optimism required to participate in progressive poli-
tics, then one is defeated. Between one melancholic and the other is what George
(in the Rhodesian plot) describes as “the gap between what I believe in and what I
do” (124). This gap is the space of the dialectic tension between these two modes
of melancholy—the one that revels in the cynical paralysis of probable failure, and
the one that perversely works to manifest optimism vis-à-vis work. If Anna feels
most crystalline at the moments when she inhabits either pole of this melancholy,
then the feeling of transit through the experiential, affective spectrum immanent
within that dialectic is also fraught with its own depressive logic.

Political Depression
If for Brown, Flatley, and Ferber melancholy describes an affective state, it does
so in reference to “ideas” of politics. Obviously, humans have material, corporeal,
affective responses to ideas. Spinoza reminds us that our ideas of the world, if
they are adequate, encompass our embodied encounter with and knowledge
of the world, and that ideas themselves are material forces in the immanent
world. Therefore the experience of depression is not merely conceptual, but also
deeply symptomatic and somatic. Depression is by nature negative—an unhealthy,

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84 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

abnormal, exceptional, depleting, and disempowering state, but depression comes

in a wide range of intensities, and its precipitating causes are myriad. The expe-
rience of depression within The Golden Notebook in the oscillation between two
depressive poles, one melancholic and unproductive, the other melancholic and
productive, can be understood via Melanie Klein’s “depressive position.”
The blocked melancholic position corrals within its end of the dialectic the
wide range of failures, frustrations, and disappointments that inheres in pro-
gressive politics. This is embodied in the Blue notebook, where Anna collates all
relevant political headlines from the newspaper. The text is literally composed of
disjointed reflections on contemporary politics, fascinating metatextual notations
like, “[At this point the diary stopped, as a personal document. It continued
in the form of newspaper cuttings, carefully pasted in and dated]” (227). This
transition comes in the aside (inserted by whom? Anna? Lessing?) that divides
the “personal” diary from the (implicitly) impersonal diary. Preserved in this,
however, is the diary form itself. After March 15, 1950, it is no longer a “personal
document,” but it is no less a diary—accounts of a day’s events. The linguistic
ambiguity reminds us that the seeming objectivity of these newspaper clippings
is anything but impersonal.6 But the world-historical, cited in headlines, is also
a projective symptom of depression: history mirrors externally what Anna feels
inside; history’s terror and cruelty, like her own fracturing, is a quotidian vio-
lence. On the other hand, this daily violence engenders disciplined and mediated
self-reflection.
Anna only reaches this point after her creativity has ground to a halt. In trying
to explain her ambivalence about the Communist Party, she explains to Mother
Sugar that she “swing[s] from fear and hatred of it to a desperate clinging to it.
Out of a need to protect it and look after it—do you understand that?” (226). This
language of protection accords with Klein’s description of “the depressive position,”
wherein “the very experience of depressive feelings . . . has the effect of further inte-
grating the ego, because it makes for an increased understanding of psychic reality
and better perception of the outside world” (Mitchell 189). A person experiencing
depression seeks to protect and shelter within herself all that feels most besieged by
the external world. This compulsion to house and protect illuminates how Anna’s
oscillation between cynical left melancholic and mad, naively-optimistic commu-
nist is contained by the unity of the work of The Golden Notebook—it permits a wild
and fracturing affective dialectic to paradoxically remain whole, or closed.
In a novel that plays with its internally generative narrative of work alongside
its status as a work, there are two other registers of labor in the narrative. One is
grounded in material bodily work, in the performance of tasks—the kind of labor
attributed to the “work” of the Communist Party. It involves, as Anna specifies,
a wide range of activities:

We were all very tired. I don’t think people who have never been part of the left
movement understand how hard the dedicated socialists do work, day in and day
out; year in, year out. After all, we earned our livings, and the men in the camps . . .

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 85

were under continuous nervous stress. Every evening we were organizing meetings,
discussion groups, debates. We all read a great deal. More often than not, we were
up till four or five in the morning. In addition to this we were all curers of souls. (87)

This passage cuts across the various registers of meaning in political or

politicized work. There’s work-work, after all, which they all did to “earn [their]
livings,” inside of the traditional capitalist division of labor. More than that, we
might say the men were additionally “worked on,” subjected to “continuous ner-
vous stress” inherent to their labor. The work of politics itself is rendered explicit
and literal—“organizing meetings, discussion groups, debates,” to which we could
add canvasing, writing, and protesting that appear elsewhere in the novel as
the “work” of the Communist Party. There’s a lateral slide into what (at least in
neoliberal terms) we might consider “cognitive labor”: “read[ing] a great deal” to
maintain fluency with the discourse and discipline they are politically represent-
ing. The final variety of labor is invoked in “curing souls,” a kind of (feminine)
care-work. The exhaustion Anna feels is a result of doing political work, and the
political work she does is a result of her melancholy, which in turn produces the
depressive resolve to work to exhaustion.
Political work, then, crystallizes around depression via melancholy. It is
caught in a feedback loop: the work seeks to alleviate the political feelings of
depression, but the work’s failure neurotically reinforces the necessity of such
work. Depression is political labor, and political labor is depressing. Anna’s “pro-
tective” relationship to this labor bespeaks the depressive position’s latching onto
the threatened object. And all of this is performed structurally by the novel itself:
its anxious preservation of past and memory (in the black notebook, with the
story of her political life in Rhodesia); of quotidian, personal reflections (in the
blue notebook where Anna is enjoined to record her ongoing dreams, thoughts,
and feelings); of political experiences and feelings (in the red notebook); and of
generative futurity (in the yellow notebook, which contains the genesis of a new
crypto-autobiographical novel).
Lauren Berlant has theorized “impasse” as “a holding station that doesn’t
hold but opens out into anxiety, that dog-paddling around a space whose con-
tours remain obscure” (“Starved” 434). Berlant’s solution to such an impasse
is not to give over to anxiety, which she argues is unproductive in its frenetic
efforts to get past any such impediments to progress. “I do not have the aim,” she
explains, “of moving beyond x but the aim of setting there awhile, dedramatizing
the performance of critical and political judgment” (434). In this way, I think
we should see the text of the golden notebook7 as proof of Anna’s “setting there”
her political depression, a way of narrating around the paralysis that is so over-
determined by that work. It is the quotidian aspects of this work—demonstrated
inside the text in one mode, and demonstrated by the work in another—that
keep the experience of depression in focus, because “everyday life is lived on the
level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided” (GN 8), Kathleen
Stewart points out, and the politics of them “starts in the animated inhabitation

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86 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

of things, not way downstream in the various dreamboats and horror shows that
get going” (15–16). In other words, the daily experience of affects materializes a
politics, not a political horizon. So, Anna’s depression and the actions it begets—
palliative or otherwise—are markers of the low-intensity, quotidian success of
her self-care. However, because we cannot remain with Anna’s self-defeating
paralysis, we must reach before Uncle Joe, and revisit Lenin’s famous question,
“What is to be done?”

Cynicism and Cruel Optimism

If there is anything that consistently excites Anna’s fear and anger through the
novel, it is the dishonesty of cynicism, the beast against which the text arrays
itself. In the Rhodesian plot, cynicism creeps up on everyone before the war
is over. At one point, Paul marvels to Anna: “What really interests me is that
there are people, like you for instance, who genuinely believe that the world can
be changed.” (GN 136). Willi comes in for harsh criticism: he was “inhuman,”
“he had no sympathy for the emotionally weak or deprived or for the misfits. He
despised people who allowed their lives to be disturbed by personal emotion” (70),
and explains to Anna that “Sentimentalists can never believe in anything but
their own emotions” (141). Willi condemns emotion qua emotion as interfering
with the rational work of progressive politics. But Anna never fully accepts this
repression, even as she worries that she might, indeed, be a writer of “little novels
about the emotions.” Self-split, she points a finger back at herself: “If Marxism
means anything, it means that a little novel about the emotions should reflect
‘what’s real’ since the emotions are a function and a product of society” (41; emphasis
added). Lessing, in her 1993 introduction, invokes a materialist version of affect
when she argues that “Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you a flavor
of a time in a way formal history cannot” (viii).8
Toward the novel’s end, Saul Green, the narcissistic American character-
ized by his endless refrain of “I,” emerges as another red flag of political cynicism
in the novel: it is his defeated proclamation that “we’ve got to remember that
people with our kind of experience are bound to be depressed and unhopeful ”
(GN 542; emphasis added). Anna, by the penultimate section of the novel, has
grown enough to understand that while she may very well be depressed, she
has not been, however, unhopeful. Accordingly she rebuts him, pointing his
cynicism back at him, “Or perhaps it’s precisely people with our kind of experi-
ence who are most likely to know the truth, because we know what we’ve been
capable of ourselves?” (542), the truth, that is, in the possibility (even if not the
plausibility) of social change. Bifo [Franco Berardi], writing from the visionary
side of depression, remarks that “despair and joy are not incompatible. Despair
is a consequence of understanding. Joy is a condition of the emotional mind.
Despair is to acknowledge the truth of the present situation, but the skeptical
mind knows that the only truth is shared imagination and shared projection”
(Heroes 225–226).

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 87

Where cynics are wrong is in their refusal to acknowledge that material

conditions are responsible for material affects, and that these affects also can help
produce social and political change. Lessing buries in the opening section this
spur to the composition of the book, a signpost to the novel’s holistic circularity,
when Tommy accuses Anna, “You’re afraid of writing what you think of life,
because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself,
you might be alone” (GN 38), invoking a primal fear of exposure, of being naked
and fully intelligible to the other at great risk to ego. Politics qua politics has failed
to deliver her into wholeness, into coherence: “Yet joining the Party intensified
the split—not the business of belonging to an organization whose every tenet, on
paper, anyway, contradicts the ideas of the society we live in,” Anna reflects (154).
Joining the Party, taking on “political work,” has of course intensified her feeling
of fragmentation, but only inasmuch as it gives her access to the depression from
whence deliverance can occur in the act of self-aware documentation.
Collating all of this is a trope that Lessing embeds within the novel that
self-reflexively characterizes the work that the novel itself is doing. This trope—of
Sisyphus and his labor9—emerges first in a scene inside Anna’s novel of Ella and
Paul, in a monologue delivered by the latter:
You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly
more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known . . .
[we] are the boulder-pushers . . . we’ll put all our energies, all our talents, into pushing
a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by
instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind. We push the boulder. (199)

This “truth” that the “great men know by instinct” are the great ethical truths
that no man desires pain, hunger, oppression, persecution. Cynicism, believing
it protects itself from the truth of its imminent failure, also prevents itself from
insisting on the truth of these ethical failures of mankind. Paul uses the futility
of the Sisyphean image in order to persuade Ella that her idealism and optimism
is doomed to failure, only exhausting, always, ultimately, unproductive.
The Sisyphean image works because it dramatizes the labor of working
against resistance, stagnation, impossibility. This neurotic Sisyphean labor is like
what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism” when she explains how “the affective
structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to
the scene of the fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this
thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (Cruel 2).
But, Berlant is keen to stress, “optimism is not a map of pathology but a social
relation involving attachments that organize the present. It is an orientation
toward the pleasure that is bound up in world-making, which may be hooked on
futures, or not. . . . Even when it turns out to have a cruel relation . . . [it is] a scene
of negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable as it presents itself ambivalently,
unevenly, incoherently” (Cruel 14).
So while the Sisyphean image would seem to confine political work to a
repetitive, neurotic stagnation, the kernel of “cruel optimism” that animates

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88 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

the work of the novel is the straw that breaks the melancholy dialectic’s back.
“It seems to me something like this—every so often, perhaps once in a century,
there’s a sort of—act of faith. A well of faith fills up, and there’s an enormous
heave forward in one country or another, and that’s a forward movement for the
whole world. Because it’s an act of imagination—of what is possible for the whole
world” (263). What combats the cruelty of cruel optimism is the unpredictable
surge, the revolutionary moment of affective excess that wrings change out of
the labor of novel-writing. “A political analysis of depression might advocate
revolution and regime change over pills,” Cvetkovich argues. “[T]here are no
magic bullet solutions, whether medical or political, just the slow steady work of
resilient survival, utopian dreaming, and other affective tools for transforma-
tion” (263; emphasis added). This “slow steady work” is what Anna engages in
inside the novel, as well as in its performative meta-narrative construction. It is
also, suggestively, the work of analysis, as well as the work of writing the very
narrative itself that Mother Sugar had suggested as a means of working through
her writer’s block.
Cvetkovich calls any consistent, reparative work “a utopia of ordinary habit,”
as a means to capture the compulsion and repetitive nature of it, and to stress
its “cruel” (in Berlant’s terms) challenge to the depressive conditions of its own
origin (191). When Anna comes closest to articulating her block in analysis, she
begs: “I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring
history, the myth, from what is new, what I feel or think that might be new,”
in spite of her fear that writing it down—Mother Sugar’s suggestion—would
only “be a record of how I saw myself at a certain point” (GN 453). Here, Anna
invokes the dead weight that, in her worst moments, comes to represent the empty
“forms and formulations of another epoch” that Brown argues we fetishize in our
paralytic and cynical melancholy. This myth, figured elsewhere as unwavering
dogmatic acceptance of Party lines, is simultaneously also the myth of the impos-
sibility of affect—here in its secondary Spinozist sense, as the ability to enable or
preclude further productive action.
All of this is sewn up in Lessing’s pithy observation that “Literature is anal-
ysis after the event” (216). “Literature” is a vexed term throughout the novel: it
can, on the one hand, support blind and unthinking party politics, and on the
other, achieve nothing at all. Anna sees through it most clearly as propaganda
generated from the naiveté of political optimism untarnished by acknowledging
the complexity of the world outside. Anna, the fragmented, self-conscious and
self-critically fractured writer-character, previously worried: “Suppose that all
the Party people I know have similarly incommunicable private myths?” (152;
emphasis added). These narratives are dishonest because of their self-occluding,
earnest dedication to partisan dogma, which enlists literature in the propagation
of political ideology. Moreover, Lessing expresses a fear through Anna that
novels are “becom[ing] an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information
about areas of life we don’t know. . . . We read to find out what is going on,” Anna
explains; “Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 89

they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted
to the general literate consciousness” (59).
But literature—its composition, its consumption—does the work of
self-analysis both for the (fictional) consciousness crafting the novel (the novel
itself is evidence of the efficacy of Anna’s treatment) and for the reader of the text
(in a sustained encounter with the narrative consciousness of the text). Shannon
Maguire explains concisely, “A parallel is drawn between the reader’s progress
and Anna’s writing. Anna does not give up her search for sincerity in the act
of writing, even in the face of increasingly linguistic difficulty, nor should the
reader” (7).10 In Anna’s reading, honesty will manifest, even in others’ unselfcon-
sciously dishonest attempts:
During the last year, reading these stories, these novels, in which there might be an
occasional paragraph, a sentence, a phrase, of truth, I’ve been forced to acknowledge
that the flashes of genuine art are all out of deep, suddenly stark, undisguisable private
emotion. Even in translation there is no mistaking these lightning flashes of genuine
personal feeling. And I read this dead stuff praying that just once there may be a short
story, a novel, even an article, written wholly from genuine personal feeling. (GN 334)

These private emotions are “undisguisable,” and emerge through literature by virtue
of the honesty of the emotion that compels them. As Anna mercifully realizes,
there’s no hope in expecting a novel whose honesty would be defined by the truth of
what is expressed: on the contrary, there is only honesty in the work of composition,
which may also reflect singular “flashes of genuine personal feeling.”
This is reinforced when, at the end of the novel, the Sisyphean image recurs
inside a dream; the same speech is repeated nearly word-for-word. In the dream,
however, an amalgamated avatar of her more cynical self does the speaking. This
time, the narrative has become empowering, as it begins, “But my dear Anna, we
are not the failures we think we are” (589). In its previous incarnation, the “great
men” overseeing the labor of pushing boulders are the ones concerned with the
far horizon of progress; they are “already discovering how to colonise Venus and
irrigate the moon” (199). In this iteration of the Sisyphean fantasy, it is no longer
marked by its ambiguous failures, the boulder inevitably rolling back down; this
second time the fantasy is uttered, “we will use all our energies, all our talents,
into pushing that boulder another inch up the mountain” (590; emphasis added).
Progress is actually, although barely, realized in this second narration: “we” are
“not useless after all,” and are, in fact, depended upon by the great men who are
“already free.” This dream exorcises finally the (self-defeating) “cruelty” of Anna’s
optimism, providing reassurance that her work will, in fact, move politics forward,
even if only “another inch.”
Ultimately, the third recurrence of the Sisyphean image completes its evolu-
tion as well as its labor, thereby investing the larger structural, narrative work with
the ring of self-fulfilling “honesty.” In this last iteration, the image is no longer
relayed by one of Anna’s inhibiting, repressing men, but by Anna, to Saul, as an
indictment of his self-obsession.11

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90 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

There’s a great black mountain. It’s human stupidity. There are a group of people who
push the boulder up the mountain. When they’ve got a few feet up, there’s a war,
or the wrong sort of revolution, and the boulder rolls down—not to the bottom, it
always manages to end a few inches higher than when it started. (599)

In her final, empowering iteration of this political myth of Sisyphus, progress

is guaranteed. The boulder is pushed “a few feet up,” and “ends a few inches
higher” than where it begins progress, even small (a “few inches” against the
“inch”), is promised. The Sisyphean image merges, too, with the “act of faith”
that an “act of imagination” facilitates (263), joining the Sisyphean labor not
simply with the “work” of politics, but also with the act of creation as the ame-
liorative work of politics. Literature creates both the conditions for an intersub-
jective encounter with another (fictional) consciousness, and also the conditions
by which the sum total of those encounters can add up to collective cultural
understanding. Gregory Fenton remarks that the ethos of communism “was about
a shared affective response to the times, one that underscored a ‘common sense’
of political struggle” (10). Although he does not cite the Sisyphean trope, Fenton
also reflects that “By working failure into the act of reading, The Golden Note-
book becomes a site for a more ethical—and thus, a more loving—questioning
of political and social issues,” which “becomes the approach of a communist
narratology” (13). It is this “emancipatory politics of collectivity in a communist
narratology [] that allows for a return to the foundational ideas which can turn
critical reading practices into ideas for collective action against dominant modes
of power” (Fenton 13).
Anna’s bounded experience of a depressive dialectic between melancholies—
that is, her political depression—

produc[es] new infinities from a submersion in sensible finitude, infinities not only
charged with virtuality but with potentialities actualisable in given situations, cir-
cumventing or dissociating oneself from the Universals itemized by traditional arts,
philosophy, and psychoanalysis: all things that imply the permanent promotion of
different enunciative assemblages, different semiotic recourses, an alterity grasped at
the point of its emergence—non-xenophobic, non-racist, non-phallocratic—intensive
and processual becomings, a new love of the unknown. (Maguire 117)

Bifo suggests that, far from being a pathological condition that occludes
rational perception, “Depression allows us to see what we normally hide from
ourselves through the continuous circulation of a reassuring collective narrative.
Depression sees what public discourse hides.” (After 65). The notebook form
therefore serves to consolidate a repaired sense of self by containing the reality
of the external world in a bid to make order of it. Its coherence, marked by the
completion of the form of the text, supersedes in the completion of its labor
any incoherence unresolved by the narrative, provides integrative closure that
forestalls the damning interjection of cynicism. A revaluation of process as prog-
ress, Felix Guattari argues, has the effect of shifting the hegemony inherent in

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 91

contemporary capitalist ideological order, thereby begetting new forms of art that
can deliver its producers and consumers from the binds of capitalist interpellation
into failure (Chaosmosis).
Tommy, through the crypto-allegorical mechanism of his blinding, pre-
sciently sees through the depressing content of political labor to the internal
mechanism of progressive change: “Do you know what people really want?
Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just
one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d
be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth” (GN
498). This sage declaration validates Anna’s struggle to write literature, to com-
bat the kind of cynicism that isn’t just politically counterproductive (having the
capacity to prevent political action vis-à-vis its left melancholy) but personally
dangerous (spurring Tommy’s attempted suicide). Lessing recognizes that in
literature, the revolutionary commons is created not abstractly-and-universally
as the multitude of the reading public, but rather through the interpersonal
affective circuitry of the reader and the text (and the text and the writer; the
character and the writer).
Modifying Lenin’s question, Bifo wonders, “What Should We Do When
Nothing Can Be Done?” in the final chapter of his most recent volume (Heroes).12
His first answer is to write. In fact, like Anna, he wrote his own meditation
“almost in a state of rapture,” and later came to realize that his denunciations were
not particularly useful: what we needed, he learned, was a line of flight (199–200).
Bifo argues that the work of imagination makes it possible to “go beyond the
limits of language, the ability to recompose the imaginary fragments (and also
conceptual and linguistic fragments) that we collect from the experience of the
past” (207). In this way, literature works to organize history and experience in
intelligible forms, as opposed to the critical, cynical work of “denunciation” (200).
And, more to the point, the novel as a form of imagination permits the superses-
sion of apparent material political limits.13 Critique qua critique is no longer the
vein, he argues, that left political thought should pursue. José Esteban Muñoz
agrees that theorists and philosophers have too long distrusted hope and utopia
“as affective structures and approaches to challenges within the social,” and that
such distrust has manifested their own disappointment, but he reminds us that
“such disappointment needs to be risked if certain impasses are to be resisted” (9).
The Golden Notebook, in its “realistic” representation of political work as the tonic
to political depression enables the reader to push beyond the impasse generated
by the cruel certainty of defeat.
Citing a dialogue from her psychoanalysis, Anna notes that “the yeast
goes on working” long after the experience of analysis has finished (GN 239).
In this way, the work of literature exceeds the text, by continuing to ferment
and foment change.14 “In spite of everything,” we’re reminded, there will be
(hopefully) “a lurch forward . . . because every time the dream gets stronger”
(263). With every iteration, hope can grow so long as cynicism and melan-
choly are banished; literature provides a ground in which that seed of hope can

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92 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

grow. Mother Sugar provides us with a key to that reiterative labor, a labor of
composing and reading literature: “all self-knowledge is knowing, on deeper
and deeper levels, what one knew before” (227). In this way, the knowledge of
the necessity of political progress increases, as in the image of the yeast: it “goes
on working,” just as we do.

Notes
1. What is elided in this quote is the clause, “in the Americas at least,” a move that Cvetkovich
makes in order to establish that there are distinct cultural practices of diagnosing and treating what
we call “depression” in the West (115). To be sure, the United States has a specific history of depres-
sion diagnosis and treatment, one marked by aggressive psychopharmaceutical marketing, labor,
productivity, and an ideological compulsion to self-care.
2. Tracey Hargreaves considers the formal and historical liminality of The Golden Notebook, citing
Jed Esty’s claim that the novel slides into an aesthetic and historical “interregnum.” She cautiously
hazards “To risk an overly teleological view, it might be thought of as a transitional text, ones that
engages with the conventional realist novel, with the political consequences of anti-foundational
postmodernism in the disintegration of a grand narrative, and with postmodern self-referentiality,
gives its occasional metafictional interventions” (Hargreaves 206).
3. Flatley’s reframing of the Benjaminian/Brown concept moves us away from some of the
paralysis inherent in Brown’s account, countering our “mournful, conservative, backward-looking
attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in
the heart of the putative leftist” (22). His departure is clearer when he explains that his “sense of
the distinction between a depressive, depoliticized melancholia and a non-depressing, politicizing
melancholia probably owes more to Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ than to any
other text.” (8)
4. Soo Kim’s essay “‘But Let’s Preserve the Forms’: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962)
as a Hegelian Modernist Novel” specifically ties the dialectic of the novel to its historical
form. When she claims, however, “As an organic self-movement toward the disclosure of truth,
the dialectic method unifies and separates the self and other consistently through the power
of sublation” (16). This dialectic, she argues, “applies to the narrative structure of The Golden
Notebook as well” (ibid.).
5. Brown is quick to assert that overcoming left melancholy creates a space for collective identifi-
cation that is nevertheless militated against by neoliberalism.
We might say that the melancholic concern with loss creates the mediating structure that enables
the slogan—‘The personal is political’—to become a historical-aesthetic methodology. This
methodology’s questions are: Whence these losses to which I have become attached? What
social structures, discourses, institutions, processes have been at work in taking something
valuable away from me? With whom do I share these losses or others like them? What are the
historical processes in which this moment of loss participates—in other words: how long has
my misery been in preparation? (3)

6. It bears remarking that The Oxford English Dictionary defines “diary” first as “A daily record of
events or transactions, a journal; specifically, a daily record of matters affecting the writer personally,
or which come under his [sic] personal observation,” a definition that foregrounds the ‘personal’
nature of diaries, whereas the secondary definition describes the absence of the personal—but which
nevertheless emphasizes the collective—as “A book prepared for keeping a daily record, or having
spaces with printed dates for daily memoranda and jottings; also, applied to calendars containing
daily memoranda on matters of importance to people generally, or to members of a particular pro-
fession, occupation, or pursuit.”

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 93

7. I use the lowercase here as a distinction between the golden notebook contained within The
Golden Notebook and the novel as a whole.
8. At the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where many of Doris Lessing’s most
important papers are held, fragments from a 1963 journal—composed the year after The Golden
Notebook’s publication—demonstrate Lessing’s fixation on emotion. In a series of self-reproaches
from a fragment marked “August 1963,” she dashes off: “NEGATIVE EMOTIONS—DO NOT
IDENTIFY = SELF-PITY SELF-IMPORTANCE . . . Do not express negative emotions!” These
self-corrections are personal, and underscore that literature—as opposed to risking “irritation to
others” in interpersonal encounters structured around these dour, grandiose affects—is the space
that contains emotions safely, where they can be expressed without unnecessary risk to self.
9. Albert Camus’s 1942 The Myth of Sisyphus, considered an existentialist refutation of the appar-
ent defeated absurdism of the Sisyphean figure, is another clear interlocutor to Lessing’s novel,
and importantly one that refuses to admit the negativity of futility, but rather that points to the
possibility of contentment in the perpetual renewal of optimistic labor. Further exploration that
charts a path between the two canonical texts will likely yield additional important insights into
Lessing’s novel.
10. Tracy Hargreaves historicizes this relationship between writer and reader, arguing that the
novel’s “force lies in the interconnections [Anna] makes (and, of course, that we make too) so that
we are made to look again and again, not at the little narrative over the grand or at a shifting rela-
tivism that dissolves the ethical stance, but at the connections between the dissolving self and the
disintegrating world. Nor is this to be met with nihilism or irony, but with the affirmation of the
‘small personal voice’ that supports the intimacy of address that the writer and the novel still had
with the reader” (214).
11. Saul’s primary identification in the novel is his stuttered, self-important “I’s”—the self-reference
repeated at the start of his most damning declarations (“I I I I I I I”)—foregrounding the
extreme self-obsession that characterizes him and serves as a caution to Anna’s tendencies and
momentum. Her 1963 journal shows that Saul’s self-obsession mirrored Lessing’s own self-reflexive
critique; one page is titled: “I’s” and proceeds into a list of self-critiques that identify self-important
tendencies.
12. Berardi elsewhere elaborates on what he sees as the material conditions of the emergence of
contemporary cynicism:

Contemporary mass cynicism can be linked to two different sources: the failure of twentieth-
century utopian ideologies, and the perception that the exploitation of labor, competition,
and war are inevitable and irreversible. Mass cynicism results from the dissolution of social
solidarity. Globalization and the systemic precariousness of the labor market resulting
from neoliberal deregulation have imposed competition as the inescapable, generalized
mode of relation among social actors. Workers, once linked by a sense of social solidar-
ity and common political hope, are now forced to think in cynical terms: survival of the
fittest. (Uprising 162–163)

When Berardi here points out the failure of utopian thinking, he is doing so in a way that accords
with the other thinkers quoted in this essay: the project of twentieth-century utopian thinking has
been macropolitical, not micropolitical. Contemporary capitalism actively suppresses the possibility
of macropolitical and macroeconomic change.
13. It bears noting, however, that Bifo himself privileges poetry as opposed to novels or prose for its
ability to upset traditional concatenations or apparent cause and effect.
14. Indeed, Lessing’s 1963 journal demonstrates that these concerns in the novel persisted in the
realm of her analytical self-critique; on the journal page titled “I’s,” she engages in self-criticism,
identifying traits and habits that require correction: “#5: Desire to be witty, above all knowledgeable,
about friends—talk ‘stylized,’ garrulous. #6: Desire to be ‘good.’” These self-corrections serve to
remind her that authenticity, honesty, and honest application to purpose, rather than to appearance

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94 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 41, Number 2

or performance, and so continue to work toward real political efficacy. In the continuation of her
journals, wherein she chronicles a mescaline trip she took, she begins to wonder—and it strikes me
as important that this comes in the wake of the composition of The Golden Notebook: “Was I giving
birth to myself, the birth I should have had, to be the person I could be”? The yeast of self-reflection
continued after the Golden Notebook was “completed,” to be sure—her other 1960s novels bear the
indelible stamp of these investigations.

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Center Archives, University of Texas, Austin, TX.

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The Affective Labor of Politics in Lessing’s The Golden Notebook 95

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