Doris Lessing Studies Vol.
33
---. A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Ed.
Paul Schlueter. New York: Knopf, 1974. Print.
---. “Victoria and the Staveneys.” The Grandmothers. New
York: HarperCollins, 2003. 57-129. Print.
---. Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of my Autobiography
1949 to 1962. New York: HarperCollins. 1997. Print.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1994. Print.
Pilgrim, Anita N. “Blackening My Characters: Race and
Characterisation in Lesbian Fiction.” Beyond Sex and
Romance? The Politics of Contemporary Lesbian Fiction.
Ed. Elaine Hutton. London: Women’s Press, 1998. 106-
123. Print.
Ridout, Alice. “Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin: the
Autobiography of a Cosmopolitan ‘Third Culture Kid.’”
Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Eds. Alice Ridout and
Susan Watkins. New York: Continuum International, 2009.
107-128. Print.
Solomos, John. Race and Racism in Britain. 3rd ed. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.
Tiger, Virginia. “Taking Hands and Dancing in (Dis)unity:
Story to Storied in Doris Lessing’s‘To Room Nineteen’ and
‘A Room.’” Modern Fiction Studies 36.3 (Autumn 1990):
421-33. Print.
Watkins, Susan. “‘Grande Dame’ or ‘New Woman’: Doris
Lessing and the Palimpsest.” Literature Interpretation
Theory 17 (2006): 243-262. Print.
---. “Writing in a Minor Key: Doris Lessing’s Late-Twentieth-
Century Fiction.” Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times.
Eds. Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis and
Sandra Singer. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2010. 149-161.
Print.
Young, Robert J.C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory,
Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Lacking a Story of Her Own: Susan Rawlings
and Narrative in Doris Lessing’s
“To Room Nineteen”
Kevin Brown
Lee University
Doris Lessing’s short story, “To Room Nineteen,” has been
widely anthologized since its original publication in A Man
and Two Women in 1963; however, it has not received as much
critical attention as many of her other works, especially The
Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence series. Those
who have written about the story mainly focus on the narrator’s
opening sentence—“This is a story, I suppose, about a failure
of intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was grounded in
intelligence” (150)—and let the ideas raised here become the
core of their argument. Alice Bradley Markow focuses on the
marital aspect of the story, calling it “Lessing’s most definitive
and telescoped statement about marital constriction” (95),
while other critics, such as Shirley Budhos and Virginia Tiger
discuss the “intelligence” part of the opening. Budhos argues
that “Lessing uses the story to demonstrate that intelligence
not balanced with emotion is always inadequate in human
relationships” (2), while Tiger points out that her undergraduate
students struggle with the story precisely because they use “the
same pragmatic ‘intelligence’ the story is intent on subverting”
(427). Lynn Sukenick tries to redeem Susan’s break from
“intelligence” by quoting an interview with Lessing where she
comments “Madness can be a form of rebellion” (115), a move
Rula Quawas takes even further when she argues that Susan
“confronts the fact that she has been virtually a non-person all
her life and comes to know that there is a core of genuine identity
which can only be confronted if she chooses to live outside
the cocoon of social approbation” (111), an overly optimistic
reading, at best. Janina Nordius and Linda Halisky move closer
to the core of the story, as Nordius argues that the discourse of
intelligence “effectively excludes speaking of any other, not-
so-rational experience,” while Halisky contends that Susan has
attempted to read her life, “to understand” (51). Halisky’s idea
of Susan’s reading her life is a step toward the true problem
Susan encounters in the story, which centers around the idea of
narrative, but should be focused on Susan’s lack of ability to tell
a story, not read one. “To Room Nineteen” is not about a failure
of intelligence, but a failure of imagination. Lessing creates
Susan, a character who has become so steeped in the dominant
narrative of women’s lives in her time she is unable to write a
different story for her future, leaving her to choose between the
only two narratives she knows: happy wife or suicide.
Lessing has been quite clear in speaking about the purpose
of her fiction, as she hopes to influence readers through what
she writes. In “The Small Personal Voice,” written around the
same time as “To Room Nineteen,” Lessing states,
Once a writer has a feeling of responsibility, as a human
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 Doris Lessing Studies Vol. 33
being, for the other human beings he influences, it seems
to me he must become a humanist, and must feel himself
as an instrument of change for good or for bad. . . . The act
of getting a story or novel published is an act of
communication, an attempt to impose one’s personality and
beliefs on other people. If a writer accepts this responsibility,
he must see himself, to use the socialist phrase, as an
architect of the soul . . . (10-11)
In “To Room Nineteen,” Lessing clearly questions the roles
society allowed women in the late 1950s in England by laying
out the dominant narrative that constrains Susan throughout the
story.
Despite changes in women’s roles that would come in the
1960s and that were beginning to occur in the 1950s, the norm
in Britain as in North America was still for women to find their
purpose in being wives and mothers. In Modern Motherhood:
Women and Family in England, c. 1945-2000, Angela Davis
lays out this situation clearly: “The belief that women should
contribute to society through marriage and motherhood was
entrenched within post-war thinking” (146). Davis goes on to
present the ideal that Susan Rawlings and her society would
have envisioned, even if subconsciously: “During the 1950s
femininity was viewed as intimately associated with domesticity,
both by contemporaries and in subsequent accounts. The ideal
mother figure at this time was a full-time homemaker dependent
on her breadwinner husband, with two, three or four children,
living within a nuclear family” (177). The Rawlings match this
ideal, at least on the surface, perfectly; their family is, after all,
the intelligent choice for the time. The problem, though, occurs
when women do not wish to follow this entrenched thinking.
Davis points out that “women could also be left disenchanted
if they did not find full-time motherhood to be the satisfying
experience celebrated by the contemporary ideal” (147). It is
this conflict that undergirds Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen,”
which she will exploit and explore by showing Susan’s inability
to imagine a different story for herself than the one society has
set in place.
Lessing uses the opening pages of her story to set out the
dominant narrative that Susan is both constrained by and an
active participant in creating, and it is this overarching story
that begins Susan’s move toward suicide. In “The Narrative
Construction of Reality,” Jerome Bruner argues individuals
construct their views of the world and themselves through
story and also discusses the idea of how institutions or societies
can create dominant narratives that limit people’s stories and
storytelling abilities. He argues that “Institutions, too, as we
know from the innovative work of Eric Hobsbawm, ‘invent’
traditions out of previously ordinary happenings and then
endow them with privileged status” (18), which is precisely
what has happened in Susan’s life. The narrator in the opening
pages mirrors the story society has produced and that Susan has
accepted. The narrator points out that Susan and Matthew “had
waited so long (but not too long)” to get married, while “[a]
good many of their friends had married young, and now (they
felt) probably regretted lost opportunities” (150). The idea that
there is an ideal age of marriage (or that marriage is, in fact, the
ideal end in and of itself) has been reified by Susan’s culture,
10
leading her to follow the prescribed path, unable to consider
any other alternative story. Bruner writes that “Narratives are
not, to use Roy Harris’s felicitous phrase, ‘unsponsored texts’
to be taken as existing unintentionally as if cast by fate on a
printed page” (10), but this is exactly what Susan does. Lessing
creates a character in a text unable to question who is sponsoring
this text she is following, even in the second paragraph of the
story.
The narrator reminds the reader that “not only they [the
Rawlings], but others, felt they were well-matched: their friends’
delight was an additional proof of their happiness” (150), as if
their friends’ approval somehow makes their decision to marry
more important. Reading this section as a reification of the
dominant narrative, though, means that their approval is not
simply important, but necessary, as it then makes their marriage
seem ordained in some way. Bruner comments, “Narratives,
then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by
convention and ‘narrative necessity’ rather than by empirical
verification and logical requiredness” (4). Their friends are the
“convention” that is required for the “narrative necessity” of
Susan’s life. The narrator adds later in the paragraph, “It was
one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves
whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably because
of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course!
How right! How was it we never thought of it before!” (150).
While this passage can seem as if their friends had little to do
with their marriage, they still represent the greater society who
has been unconsciously pushing Susan and Matthew to this
point. The narrator makes this decision seem inevitable, almost
predestined; their friends read and interpret the story of their
marriage as right and predestined, encouraging Susan to read it
as a “narrative necessity.”
As their lives quickly progress, more and more of their
decisions seem either prescribed by convention or foreordained
by a society that only allows them one story of their own.
Instead of buying a house immediately, they move into a flat,
“understanding that when their marriage had settled down (a
process they knew would not take long and was in fact more
humorous concession to popular wisdom than what was due
to themselves) they would buy a house and start a family”
(151). From the outset of the marriage, the dominant narrative
drives where they live and how they make decisions. It is this
constraint that leads Susan to live the story she ultimately does,
not a failure of intelligence.
When they do ultimately have children, they have “a son
first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter. Everything
right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they
could choose. But people did feel these two had chosen; this
balanced and sensible family was no more than what was due
to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right”
(151). This sense of foreordained family sounds idealistic, yet
it actually represents one more way Susan’s story is constrained
by the 1950s British ideal, not opened up by her own ability
to tell a story, as it limits her ability to see other stories.
Bruner draws on Émile Durkheim when he writes, “Once
shared culturally—distributed in the sense discussed earlier—
narrative accruals achieve, like Émile Durkheim’s collective

representation, ‘exteriority’ and the power of constraint. The
Dark Ages comes to exist, and we come to cluck with wonder at
the ‘exceptionality’ of any nontraditional philosopher or deviant
theologian who lived in its shadows” (19). As their friends and
(supposedly) fate shape the decisions Susan and Matthew make
and how their family develops, Susan’s story narrows further
and further until it comes to feel as if she has no choice in her
life, no ability to tell her own story. She is unable to be the
nontraditional philosopher or deviant theologian because she
does not see those alternative stories. Her society does not
provide her with or allow her to use imagination to craft a
different story; instead, it offers only the illusion of choice.
When problems begin to arise in their marriage, especially
after the first time Matthew has sex with another woman, Susan
sees that her story does not mirror the dominant narrative she
has accepted, but she is unable to revise her story to create
a new tale for herself; instead, she tries to force the story of
their relationship into the ideal the narrator laid out in the
opening pages of the story. She examines the words they use
immediately after Matthew tells her about the girl from the
party and attempts to reshape them to fit into the story she
thinks she should be telling: “Except that forgiveness is hardly
the word. Understanding, yes. But if you understand something,
you don’t forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for
what you don’t understand. Nor had he confessed—what sort
of word is that?” (153). Susan is trying to be the author of her
own story, but she lacks the skills a writer or storyteller needs
to do so. She believes words are empty of power, even thinking,
“(And there was the word ‘faithful’—stupid, all these words,
stupid, belonging to a savage old world)” (153). People who
tell stories need faith in words to shape those tales; Lessing
does believe in the power of words, yet she creates Susan, who
refuses to see that words do matter, that whether or not Matthew
was unfaithful or if he confessed matters greatly to one who is
attempting to shape the story of her life.
Instead, what she begins to do is alter their story to fit with
the story society has given her; rather than revising to create
a story that carries power and truth, she revises in a way that
makes the story more to the liking of an imagined audience, the
friends and society that have forced her story along this path. She
thinks through this first affair for several paragraphs in which
she continually tries to convince herself that what happened did
not matter. At one point, she tries to discount the entire event:
“The whole thing is absurd—for him to have come home and
told me was absurd. For him not to have told me was absurd.
For me to care or, for that matter, not to care, is absurd . . .
and who is Myra Jenkins? Why, no one at all” (154). In their
book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, Michael White
and David Epston talk about using narrative in counseling to
help people make meaning from their lives. In laying out their
theory, they discuss how the dominant narrative can shape one’s
story: “The structuring of a narrative requires recourse to a
selective process in which we prune, from our experience, those
events that do not fit with the dominant evolving stories that we
and others have about us” (11-12). Here, Susan is attempting to
prune the parts of the affair that do not fit with the narrative that
controls and constrains her life and thinking. She spends several
Doris Lessing Studies Vol. 33
pages trying her best to revise or discount the event because she
is unable to imagine a different story for her life, one that would
include the affair and allow her to act in an appropriate manner
to the affair.
Susan’s underlying problems match up with the two major
problems White and Epston discuss in their work:
We could assume that the person’s experience is problematic
to him because he is being situated in stories that others
have about him and his relationships, and that these stories
are dominant to the extent that they allow insufficient
space for the performance of the person’s preferred stories.
Or we could assume that the person is actively participating
in the performance of stories that she finds unhelpful,
unsatisfying, and dead-ended, and that these stories do
not sufficiently encapsulate the person’s lived experience
or are very significantly contradicted by important aspects
of the person’s lived experience. (14)
Susan is so dominated by the narrative she has been given,
she does not have the space to create her own story, no matter
how much she tries. She also participates in the creation of
that narrative at the outset of the story and in her marriage—as
an unwitting participant in the creation of that story—which
prevents her from finding a way out of that story.
Her first attempt to escape this story comes when she finds
a room at Miss Townsend’s hotel, but this encounter simply
reinforces the narrative she is trying to escape, further forcing
Susan to feel as if her story is invalid. When she thinks of
telling Miss Townsend how her family is making her feel, she
perceives what would be the likely result: “Yes, I can see from
the gleam of hysteria in your eyes that comes from loneliness
controlled but only just contained that I’ve got everything in
the world you’ve ever longed for. Well, Miss Townsend, I don’t
want any of it. You can have it, Miss Townsend. I wish I was
absolutely alone in the world, like you” (165). It is important
to note that Miss Townsend never says anything along these
lines, and we never see her thinking such thoughts. Instead,
Susan projects those thoughts onto Miss Townsend, believing
that everyone wants the life Susan has. She believes everyone
else’s story either follows the dominant narrative or wants to,
while Susan feels she is the only one whose story does not
match accordingly. Thus, when her story does not fit, she feels
completely alone and unable to make sense of her life.
Unconsciously, Susan realizes she does not fit into
the story of Matthew’s life any longer, either. When she is
proposing her holiday, she understands that Matthew sees
her as “unreasonable” (166). She admits to herself that “she
had become someone outside himself that he had to manage.
They were living side by side in this house like two tolerably
friendly strangers” (166), a set up that ultimately becomes
less friendly as the story progresses. What has ultimately
happened to their marriage is that Matthew continues to tell the
same story he always has, as his story matches with the ideal
much more closely than does Susan’s. He is not bothered by
his affairs or by her (imagined) affair later because the story
he follows allows for unfaithfulness. While such an approach
would be rather progressive for a man of the 1950s, his story at
least allows for this possibility. In fact, according to Lessing’s
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 Doris Lessing Studies Vol. 33
autobiography, Under My Skin, she and her husband Gottfried
both had affairs in the 1940s. Susan’s story, however, does not
allow for this possibility, so, when her unhappiness begins, she
sees the problem as coming from within herself.
The finding of room nineteen seems as if it should provide
a solution for Susan, but it ultimately leaves her as empty as any
of her other attempts. Though she is happy for a time there, she
is unable to use the space and time of the room to craft a new
story for herself. Even if Matthew would not have found her out
there, her life would have done no better than remain in stasis.
When she checks in as Mrs. Jones, she believes “she had no
past and no future,” adding “Yet there have been times I thought
that nothing existed of me except the roles that went with being
Mrs. Matthew Rawlings. Yes, here I am, and if I never saw any
of my family again, here I would still be . . . how very strange
that is!” (171). Her comment about having no past and no future
could open up a new future for her, as she seems to be shedding
the roles the dominant narrative has given her. She seems to
understand that she has been playing a part in someone else’s
story, which is why she never felt comfortable in those roles.
However, after looking out the window, she goes to the chair,
“empty, her mind a blank. Sometimes she talked aloud, saying
nothing—an exclamation, meaningless, followed by a comment
about the floral pattern on the thin rug, or a stain on the green
satin coverlet” (171-72). Instead of using this space and time
to create a new story—Woolf’s idea from A Room of One’s
Own, which is clearly echoed throughout Lessing’s story—she
empties herself instead and chooses to think of nothing or
nothing of importance. Her comments are meaningless, nothing
more than small talk to herself about her surroundings, not the
narrative she needs.
Ultimately, Susan lacks the imagination necessary to create
an alternative story, either because her culture does not allow
her the skills she needs to do so or because she so identifies with
society’s ideal for women, she cannot imagine an existence
without it. White and Epston argue, “Stories are full of gaps
which persons must fill in order for the story to be performed.
These gaps recruit the lived experience and the imagination of
persons. With every performance, persons are reauthoring their
lives. The evolution of lives is akin to the process of reauthoring,
the process of persons’ entering into stories, taking them over
and making them their own” (13). Susan has finally perceived
the gaps in her story and the ways in which her life does not
match the story she has been given, but she is still unable to
reauthor her life and write a future that does not lead her either
back to their house or to death.
While avoiding a biographical reading of this story, it is still
easy to see how Lessing’s experiences early in her life affect her
creation of Susan. When discussing her first marriage, she says,
“If I was part of the general delirium of excitement, I was also
quietly miserable. The undertow, a feeling of being dragged or
propelled, of not being myself, of long ago having lost control,
that was as strong an emotion as I have felt” (Under 206). Later,
in 1943, Doris Lessing gave in to the lack of an alternate story
herself when she married Gottfried Lessing. In Under My Skin,
she writes quite clearly, “I married Gottfried Lessing in 1943,
but only because in those days people could not have affairs,
12
let alone live together, without attracting unpleasant comment”
(293). There is a significant difference, though, between Lessing
and Susan, as she writes about coming of age in the 1930s and
1940s: “Here is the point, and if I am labouring it, then this is
because I believe it to be important: When I—my generation—
looked forward to our lives as females, we were not full of fear
and foreboding. We felt confident, we felt in control. We were
not bombarded with bleak information from television, radio,
newspapers, women’s magazines” (217). Susan, who comes of
age after the war, when women were encouraged to be mothers
above all else, as Davis describes, believes she is in control,
while she is actually unable to act outside of the narrative
society gives to her. While Lessing ends her autobiography by
stating, “I was not going home to my family, I was fleeing from
it” (419), Susan cannot conceive of ending her story that way.
When Matthew finds out about the room, she allows
herself to be reinserted into the dominant narrative she has seen
the flaws in. He sees her renting of the room as clear evidence
she has been having an affair, and she permits him to create
a narrative about her life, putting her in the role of adulterer,
which is how she will be remembered after her death. She even
uses Sophie as her replacement as the wife in the story that
once was hers, leaving her without a story of her own. Thus,
she allows others to tell her story for herself, even in the end.
The day before going to room nineteen for the final time, she
thinks, “So now she was saddled with a lover, and he had a
mistress! How ordinary, how reassuring, how jolly!” (178).
“Ordinary” makes sense in this passage, as does “jolly,” if one
reads it sarcastically, but “reassuring” is not a response readers
might expect from Susan. Of course, if one accepts the idea
that she is reassured by the fact that her story will now end in
congruence with the ideal story, it makes perfect sense. Susan
is more willing to let her story be coopted by Matthew, the
society, and inevitability than she is able or willing to write her
own story. Even the ending of the story fits with that story, as
she is not able to fit as housewife or mistress, so she becomes
the stereotypical suicide. She can see no other option.
It is this lack of imagination that ultimately leads Susan to
this decision. Lessing encourages readers to see Susan’s decision
as extreme, one they probably would not take themselves, but
the Woolfian echoes in her suicide remind readers that women do
take such actions. Such a combination forces readers to question
a society that gives women so little voice and choice. White and
Epston say that “an acceptable outcome [for patients] would be
the identification or generation of alternative stories that enable
them to perform new meanings, bringing with them desired
possibilities—new meanings that persons will experience as
more helpful, satisfying, and open-ended” (15), adding later,
“And in this process, as acknowledged by Victor Turner (1986),
‘imagining’ plays a very significant role” (16). Susan cannot
imagine a life that is “helpful,” “satisfying” or “open-ended,”
although Lessing’s readers might hope for such an ending for
her. The lack of imagination leads to the predictable ending of
her life, as she cannot escape the constraints of the story that
has both been forced upon her and that she has accepted. She
was able to find a room of her own, if only for a short time, but
could not find the creative and imaginative powers she needed

to write a story of her own. Susan is not only a character Doris
Lessing creates; she is a character in society’s story, following
the narrative necessity laid out for her in both.
WORKS CITED
Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.”
Critical Inquiry 18.1 (Autumn 1991): 1-21. JSTOR. Web. 8
October 2012.
Budhos, Shirley. The Theme of Enclosure in Selected Works of
Doris Lessing. Troy, NY: Whitson, 1987. Print.
Davis, Angela. Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in
England, c. 1945-2000. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP,
2012. Print.
Halisky, Linda H. “Redeeming the Irrational: The Inexplicable
Heroines of ‘A Sorrowful Woman’ and ‘To Room
Nineteen.’” Studies in Short Fiction 27.1 (Winter 1990):
45-54. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 October 2012.
Lessing, Doris. “The Small Personal Voice.” 1957. A Small
Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Ed. Paul
Schlueter. London: HarperCollins, 1974. 7-25. Print.
---. “To Room Nineteen.” The Penguin Book of Modern British
Short Stories. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. London: Penguin,
1988. 150-80. Print.
---. Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949.
New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Print.
Markow, Alice Bradley. “The Pathology of Feminine Failure
in the Fiction of Doris Lessing.” Critique 16.1 (1974): 88-
99. Print.
Nordius, Janina. “Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen.’” Explicator
57.3 (Spring 1999): 171-73. Academic Search Complete.
Web. 8 October 2012.
Quawas, Rula. “Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’: Susan’s Voyage
Into the Inner Space of ‘Elsewhere.’” Atlantis 29.1 (June
2007): 107-22. JSTOR. Web. 8 October 2012.
Sukenick, Lynn. “Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessing’s
Fiction.” Doris Lessing: Critical Studies. Eds. Annis Pratt
and L.S. Dembo. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1974. 98-
118. Print.
Tiger, Virginia. “‘Taking Hands and Dancing in (Dis)Unity’:
Story to Storied in Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’
and ‘A Room.’” Modern Fiction Studies 36.3 (Fall 1990):
421-33. Print.
White, Michael, and David Epston. Narrative Means to
Therapeutic Ends. New York: Norton, 1990. Print.
Doris Lessing Studies Vol. 33
Media and Subjectivity in Doris Lessing’s
The Golden Notebook
Laurel Harris
Rider University
In her 2007 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Doris Lessing,
even as she argues for the value of print literature, states that
“computers and the internet and TV” have “transformed our
minds and ways of thinking.” Lessing’s claim that media shape
subjectivity is by no means an unshared late-twentieth and
early-twenty-first century assumption. Her 1962 novel The
Golden Notebook explicitly evidences such an interconnection.
Breaking from interwar modernism and postwar realism, The
Golden Notebook stages the competition and intersection
of the representational media of the novel and film.1 In the
novel, the televisual film serves as a metonym for the mid-
century culture industry, while film as a recording medium
emphasizes the inadequacies of novelistic representation. In
passages throughout the novel that represent film as a recording
rather than a narrative medium, The Golden Notebook turns
subjectivity inside out, focusing on perceptions rather than
emotional depth. This article explores how this representation
of film as a recording medium transforms conceptions of
subjectivity in the novel.
In certain passages, film defines the representational limits
of novelistic subjectivity in The Golden Notebook through
what Russell Kilbourn calls film’s “post-subjective” memory
apparatus. The first section of this article considers the struggles
recounted in the black notebook between protagonist Anna Wulf
and television producers who want to adapt her first novel into
a made-for-television movie. Anna’s “nostalgic” memories,
politically and psychologically suspect, are positioned in the
black notebook within and against the parodies of adaptation.
As the second section of this article explores, the conception of
film as a “post-subjective” memory apparatus that starts to arise
in the black notebook becomes vital to the Golden Notebook
at the novel’s conclusion. Film in this notebook shirks the
narrative forms to which the other notebooks, although they are
unsynthesized, generically hybrid, and reflective of multiple
aspects of identity, return. In doing so, the moving images hail
a spectator-participant vacillating between passive and active
and expose the seams of memory and the work of identity. This
attempted escape into an alternative representational medium
renders film as more than a metaphor for dreams or memory
at the conclusion of the novel. It offers a conduit away from
the conceptions of subjectivity to which The Golden Notebook
continually returns. As I argue in conclusion, a focus on the
representation of film as an escape from novelistic form recasts
critical conceptions of postmodern subjectivity in The Golden
Notebook.
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