At the start of 2001, I was twenty years old, and beginning my second semester as a junior in college and a study-abroad student at the University of East Anglia (which was a wonderful place, but a terribly ugly campus — all terribly ugly modern concrete buildings built, I kid you not, in the shape of zuggarats).  I walked around most of the time in a kind of mixed-up haze, confused and aggravated and oddly adolescent about everything.  The semester wound slowly to its start until, in my Post-War Literature class, we began reading a novel I’d never heard of by an author I’d never heard of: The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing.  As I moved from page to page, what had once seemed blurry became clearly focused; through the lens of the novel, I was able, for once, to clearly see what had been nagging me — the roles we’re forced to take on, as women, as artists, as citizens, and the flaws in those roles, and how those roles can never truly fit who we are, because even the most outlandish role requires some degree of conformity, some degree of giving up — all of this, and so much more, I finally began to realize and, if not understand, begin to come to grips with, while reading the novel.

There are very few books on my bookshelf that I can honestly say have transformed my life in a complete and real way: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, for instance, was the first book that called me to poetry, and Martin Buber’s I and Thou changed the way I view the world and treat others for the better.  Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is, without a doubt, among this group of books, as it touched and transformed me at that very difficult, somehow unformed (that’s the only word I can think of to describe it, but why?) point in my life as no other book could.  The lines I underlined show both my state at the time and how I learned, through Lessing’s work, to come to grips with it:

“…the words we use have nothing to do with what I am seeing.”

“I’ve got to stop it, I simply must, though she could not say what it is she needed to stop.”

“Don’t let the terror of dissolution frighten you this time, hold on.”

“And what makes you think that the emphasis you have put on it is the correct emphasis?”

“Words.  Words.  I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”

“‘We’ve got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.”

“It doesn’t matter if you fail, why are you so arrogant?  Just begin.”

When I read the book, I knew that if I became a teacher, I had to teach it — and, when assembling my syllabus for my Confessional Literature class, I knew I’d finally found my chance, as Lessing herself has said that she finds the novel to be more “the truth,” more real, in a sense, than the facts found in her autobiographies.  This decision, however wonderful, came with a number of challenges — and teaching a 600-odd page book for the first time was the very least of it.  The question I asked myself was this: how does one teach a book that changed one’s life in such a way as to let it change one’s students lives?

Traditional classroom pedagogy is wonderful, and literary criticism is wonderful, but I realized that I would have to let them slide for the moment.  I realized that the best idea would be to look to Lessing herself as the authority on how to teach her text.  Lessing is undeniably brilliant — Nobel Prize winner that she is — but not educated in the traditional sense, as she left school at 13.  So there must be another way, besides traditional pedagogy, to get to the truth of the matter.  Lessing writes a letter to students in her 1971 preface to the novel which is too good — and, very sadly, too true — not to re-print here in full:

‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of

Predictably, Lessing also loved cats. Good for her.

indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’

I was also particularly influenced by this bit of the preface:

The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgement. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply.

I realized that I had to take Lessing’s advice — or warnings — and attempt to create an environment in which my students could develop their own ideas and responses to the text, and, hopefully, speak in complete freedom, without fear of what will happen if they do not comply.  I realized that I would have to do the most frightening thing I’ve ever had to do as a teacher: give over the reins.  I’m not sure if I’ve managed to do so completely, or enough, though I hope that I have, and I know that I leave every class in amazement, as my students are teaching me The Golden Notebook again.