SOURCE: Sceats, Sarah. “Flesh and Bones: Eating, Not Eating and the Social Vision of Doris Lessing.” In Theme Parks, Rainforests and Sprouting Wastelands: European Essays on Theory and Performance in Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Richard Todd, pp. 139-49. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

[In the following essay, Sceats examines the representation of eating and food in Lessing's writing, particularly in terms of their role in interpersonal or social relationships.]

[…] there is a terrible gap between the public and the private conscience […]¹

‘Dis-moi ce que tu manges,’ wrote Antoine Brillat-Savarin in 1825, ‘[et] je te dirai ce que tu es …’.² The potent suggestiveness of food is one of a writer's richest resources, and has been drawn upon and exploited ever since Homer. Literary food and eating, often enticingly (or revoltingly) evocative, are of great mimetic power and significance. It is fascinating and intriguing to read about what people eat, who they cook for, how dinner—if it is—is served. Of still greater interest and significance, I think, are the aspects of food and eating which might be considered figurative: what is suggestive, speculative, intangible. Eating practices are in effect a currency, something ‘understood’, broadly accepted, interpretable indeed, as Brillat-Savarin suggests. Encoded in appetite, taste, rituals and eating behaviours are all manner of apparent givens by which people are categorized and judged, and which disclose much about—to take a fairly random selection—class, generosity, rigidity, deprivation, power.

The revelatory use of eating in fiction is not simply a question of the elegance of metaphor, for eating and nourishment are at our core, essential in terms of survival, psychic development and primary social activities. (Hence the comparative rarity of novels without any mention of food or eating.) Their essential quality imbues food and eating with value, and this is one reason, in view of what I take to be her profound seriousness, for my focusing the discussion in this essay on the novels of Doris Lessing. Food and eating in Lessing's writing lie at the heart of a purposeful realism in which questions of psychological and political consequence are central. Here representation is rooted in the material and yet invades and embraces the metaphysical, the psychic, the mythical and the fantastic. And in all these spheres people hunger, provide, consume.

I want to look, briefly, at three aspects of food and eating in Lessing's writing, particularly as they relate to interpersonal or social connection. I will consider her representation of eating as a means of celebration and communication; focus on ways in which social eating might be problematic; and finally examine a pervasive trope in her work, that of not eating, of physical and mental breakdown and of some kind of ensuing enlightenment.

CELEBRATION AND COMMUNICATION

At its most basic level, eating is, of course, a necessity, a simple manifestation of the survival instinct, an expression of our essential physicality. This fundamental stoking is abundantly evident in Lessing's writing, from the hedonistic dinners and sundowner parties of the young whites in the African stories to the ‘I want cake’, ‘I want milk’ of Ben, the uncompromising Fifth Child.³ Lessing's apprehension of the significance of feeding and nurturing to psychic development is (equally) widely evident, for example in the restless ‘unappeasable mouth’ of maternally-deprived Paul, again in The Fifth Child, or the compensatory cooking and caring behaviour of Alice Mellings in The Good Terrorist. In The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five much is made of the infant's need for ‘feeding’ in all senses by both physical and spiritual parents. The fact that Lessing repeatedly portrays maternal deprivation and abuse detracts not a bit from the perceived need; it is precisely because Martha Quest, for example, is half starved by her mother (albeit accidentally) that she in turn deprives her own child.

Lessing is, without doubt, a deeply committed writer, with a strong sense of political, ethical and aesthetic responsibility. She writes:

The act of getting a story or a 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, and it is a phrase which none of the old nineteenth-century novelists would have shied away from.

(A Small Personal Voice, pp. 10-11.)

The responsibility Lessing assumes is weighty. But she neither sees this as a restriction nor allows it to cramp her style. Like her esteemed nineteenth-century novelists (think, for example, of the jam-making scene in Anna Karenina), Lessing includes food and eating as part of her social and meta-physical vision. She has a relish, even a reverence, for the pleasures and sensuous materiality of food. Here is a sumptuous scene from The Golden Notebook:

‘With strawberries, wine, obviously,’ said Anna greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft sliding resistance, and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallized beside each glass on the white paint in quivering lozenges of crimson and yellow light, and the two women sat in the sunlight, sighing with pleasure and stretching their legs in the thin warmth, looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine.⁴

There is a lively appreciation of mutuality in the shared enjoyment of eating here and elsewhere in the novel, in instances such as when, in the Blue Notebook, Anna shares her fellow Communist worker Jack's sandwich lunch or when, in the almost palpably evocative anticipation of shape, colour, touch and smell, she shops and cooks for a lover:

It is a great pleasure, buying food I will cook for Michael; a sensuous pleasure, like the act of cooking itself. I imagine the meat in its coat of crumbs and egg; the mushrooms, simmering in sour cream and onions, the clear strong, amber-coloured soup […] I unroll the veal that I remembered to batter out flat this morning; and I roll the pieces in the yellow egg, and the crumbs. I baked crumbs yesterday, and they still smell fresh and dry, in spite of the dampness in the air […] All the kitchen is full of good cooking smells; and all at once I am happy, so happy I can feel the warmth of it through my whole body.

(The Golden Notebook, pp. 303, 323f.)

There is even an elegiac reprise, later on, when Anna shops for Saul Green.⁵ The potentially communicative importance of food is reinforced by inversion in the Yellow Notebook (Anna's draft fiction) by the healthy but limiting simplicity of her heroine Ella's dining and sexual relations with the boyish American she meets on the aeroplane. He eagerly orders ‘the biggest steak they ha[ve] in the place’, swiftly drinks only Coca Cola or fruit juice, and happily completes sexual intercourse within seconds of getting into bed (The Golden Notebook, p. 288).

The sharing of eating, food provision or cooking, like sex to a small extent and talk to a greater, is itself a connection, and may indeed be regarded as more intimate than either. The extraordinary intimacy of eating together is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five, when the so-to-speak queen of Zone Three is brought to marry the ruler of Zone Four. Much suspicious and hostile circling, verbal sparring, discussion, rape, sleep, mountain-gazing and wary comradeship precede the betrothed couple's sitting to eat their—as yet—separate foods. It is only much later, when they have already reached a degree of intimacy figured in almost perpetual mutual nakedness, that they find they can no longer conjure separate foods, and are supplied with stewed beans and bread from the officers' mess, which they eat together with hungry relish.

PROBLEMATIC EATING

Communicative or social eating can, however, be problematic in a number of ways. Power relations of all kinds operate in and around the kitchen, and, as Foucault might suggest, acts (or discourses) of apparent communion mask the exercise of power. Dominance and subservience—whatever the ostensible positions of authority—are tenuous and slippery and interactions are subtle and frequently complex.⁶ That this is so much in evidence in Lessing's fiction is a measure of what Kate Fullbrook identifies as her being ‘attuned to the position of the individual’ as well as ‘convinced of the power of collective decisions and potentialities …’.⁷ To take a couple of obvious examples: racist oppression and persecution are manifest in the world of the African novels and stories, yet the persecutors—Mary Turner in Lessing's first novel, The Grass Is Singing, Mrs Quest and the colonial matrons of Zambesia in the Martha Quest novels, Mrs Boothby in the Mashopi story of The Golden Notebook may be mentioned as examples—perpetually feel themselves to be not quite in total control of the kitchen. In The Good Terrorist Alice Mellings strives to convert the group's anarchy to familial collectivity, battling to supplant their extravagant (though egalitarian) ‘take-aways’ with economical nourishing soups and stews. Functioning, according to Elizabeth Maslen, as ‘both threat and victim’, Alice surrenders her will to her psychotic companion and devotes her considerable skills and energies to the physical good of the squat.⁸ Yet she attains a status and authority by means of this very submission, generating her acclaimed soups with maternal—and thus ambiguously powerful—bounty.

As these examples suggest, power relations in Lessing's writing always nudge from the simply private towards the public and the representative, and wider historical, political and social implications are invariably part of the picture, especially since her characters are frequently framed as ‘representative’. But social eating can be problematic, too, in other ways. What happens, for example, when a group is invaded by the unsocialized? The arrival of Ben, in The Fifth Child, shatters Harriet and David's romantic idyll of family, setting child against adult, father against mother. Variously described as ‘neanderthal’, a ‘throwback’, an ‘alien’, the infant Ben empties his mother's breast in seconds, always roars for more, and bites (literally) the hand that feeds him. As he grows he learns by imitation not to talk with his mouth full or eat with his mouth open, but this is mere semblance—‘the energetic animal movements of his jaws confined behind closed lips’ (The Fifth Child, p. 115)—and his eating is never less than a subdued version of what is revealed when his mother finds him squatting on the kitchen table, grunting over an uncooked chicken he has torn apart. His response to her scolding on this occasion, in an echo from King Lear, is merely ‘Poor Ben hungry’ (The Fifth Child, p. 117).

Ben is incapable of eating socially, communicatively. His devouring, single-minded satisfaction of appetite relates to a more primitive, empathy-free, non-communicative order of being. While his siblings patiently instruct him in what is expected, in reality they progressively withdraw, at first in looks and conversation and finally by physical removal, until the family unit simply disintegrates. The great smooth table, with its palpable history of feasts and family, is scarred and darkened by the atavistic shadow of the unassimilable predatory individual. Not surprisingly, perhaps, Ben is especially associated with the ‘barbarous eighties’.

I want now to recall my point about eating as positive intimate communication, and to suggest that the uniting effects of sharing food might themselves be expressly experienced as problematic, especially by men. On the two occasions quoted above, when Anna Wulf cooks so expectantly for her lover, he is about to leave her. What the men in both instances find threatening is precisely the intensity of mutuality, the shared body experience that dissolves some of the rigid boundaries of the individual. For Lessing's ‘free women’ food is part of the idyll, a means of conversation; by the men it is perceived as a trap.

On one level—that of the straightforward realist text—we could take such incidents as illustrating a male reluctance to take a subservient or passive role in female territory. Power relations and questions of dominance or subservience are crucial even to situations of ‘shared’ food, for the provider is almost inevitably in a dominant position, whether this is a man taking a woman to a restaurant or a woman cooking for her lover.⁹ In other words, Lessing's men's withdrawal from eating intimacy says as much about (gendered) power relations as about individual psyches.

This said, however, if men manifest fear of entrapment or commitment then the psyche clearly is relevant. On a less than conscious level a man may withdraw from a sensation of infantilization, of being mothered, as though convinced he must struggle to make the separation all over again. Maggie Kilgour suggests that the question of boundaries is inextricable from psychic gendering:

While male sexual identity is achieved through the discovery of sexual difference and the need to turn from the mother to the absent father who represents separation, female development and discovery of sexual identity involves a continuing identification with the first love object because both are female. As a result of this, women tend to develop a less rigid sense of ego boundaries than men, and a more fluid sense of the relation between the self and the world outside.¹⁰

This more fluid self, accessible to the contingent, has a natural inclination towards communication which endorses women's food sharing and offers an explanation, at least in part, for the almost exclusively female gender of the fasting communicants I am about to examine. Here, beyond the individual connection which may occur through shared eating or sexual congress, a wider communication, a more significant breaching of the immured body of individualism, is what Lessing suggests is possible and indeed desirable. For this to happen, however, all kinds of fear and resistance have to be breached.

PLEASURABLE EATING OPPOSED TO DIFFICULT KNOWLEDGE

I want to suggest a pattern of not-eating, breakdown, fragmentation and enlightenment. In Lessing's first novel, The Grass Is Singing, the protagonist Mary Turner is fascinated and repelled by the natives. Her obsession becomes focused on the servant Moses, her horror of his status and his physicality being slowly transformed, as an intimate and compelling personal relationship develops. Mary's fear, yearning, desire and inability to understand enact the release of her repressed unconscious as she discovers herself, albeit without wishing it, to be sensuous, physically aware and communicative. At the same time, however, her body becomes thinner, more stringy, more yellow, more bony, as her personality breaks down and she forgets about food, forgets to eat, cannot eat.

The outlines of a pattern are here, even at this early stage in Lessing's writing. I should stress, however, that what I am suggesting is not something schematic, for self-starvation arises most plausibly within the realist content of the novels. In the early volumes of her ‘Children of Violence’ series (the Martha Quest novels), for example, Lessing creates a dense fictional world filled with narrative detail in which a preoccupation with body image and slimming are embedded, almost incidentally, as part of a woman's life, and it is not until later that the extra-ordinary benefits of not eating become apparent. Thus a commonplace if excessive teenage dieting pattern is established as realist ‘fact’, and the young and isolated Martha Quest sets out to starve herself ‘into a fashionable thinness’ even before she leaves her parents' farm.¹¹

Her conforming to a socially endorsed slim body ideal (every bit as potent in 1930s Rhodesia as 1990s Britain) is only part of the story, however. Martha is ardent, idealistic and politically alert, and while she initially participates in the banal and hedonistic activities of the white ruling classes of the colony, she deplores what she perceived to be a conformist ‘nightmare of repetition’.¹² She is also particularly, if embryonically, receptive to external stimulus: during an emancipating walk home through the bush she has an ecstatic visionary episode which foreshadows the telepathic communication finally achieved in The Four-Gated City. Overwhelmed by a ‘confused and painful delirium’ inseparable from the veld, Martha resists her usual tendency to conceptualize and analyze, and surrenders to the experience, opening herself to some kind of understanding. Significantly—though this is as yet a tenuous link—she rejects the possibility of a ‘wonderful Scotch tea’ with neighbours. ‘Difficult knowledge’, it seems, is opposed to pleasurable eating.

There is a clear indication that the reverse is also true, that eating may be an escape from knowledge, as the young white population indulges in a frenzied excess of eating, drinking and dancing on the brink of the Second World War. The ‘most expensive meal the colony could offer’, in both its hollow ritualistic quality and its unappetizing content, suggests a frantic displacement activity:

[…] it did not matter what food was actually brought, for they would not notice. They did not care about food, or even about wine. If they ordered wine, they might spend five minutes debating about a title on the wine list, and forget what they had ordered when the bottle arrived […]. They ate a thick white soup, which tasted of flour and pepper; round cheese puffs, the size of cricket balls and tasting of nothing in particular; boiled fish with gluey white sauce; roast chicken, hard white shreds of meat, with boiled stringbeans and boiled potatoes; stewed plums and fresh cream; and sardines on toast. They were all drinking brandy mixed with ginger beer.

(Martha Quest, p. 208)

Similarly, when Martha's husband returns from his military service, he rejects her omelette and stewed fruit in favour of another such anodyne meal.

Much of the following three novels in the series is given over to the development of Martha's ‘ideological’ self. Though she has bouts of not eating, while seeking in communism an orthodox political direction she inhabits a wholly rational sphere and her lack of food produces simply a pleasurable sense of self-deprivation and a rather irritable lightheadedness. It is not until The Four-Gated City that self-starvation and the isolated visionary and fragmentary episodes of the earlier novels come together and are worked into an unmistakable pattern.

By the time we reach this, the fifth and final novel of the series, not eating, breakdown and psychic communication are all overt, and explicitly linked. The novel traces Martha's progress from her arrival in England to her death in the years after a chemical/nuclear catastrophe. From an initial perception of the rigid stratification of English society and of political, social and personal fragmentation, Martha begins to focus on physical integrity and supra-individual communication as a good; the process, difficult and not achievable by simple act of will, requires a calling up of the non-rational self, figured in Martha's friend Lynda, a sort of madwoman in the basement.

Food, as always, is indicative. The highly sensitive Jack, whose body can somehow catch and sense what Martha says even though he cannot accept her words, ultimately reveals an inner corruption through his crazy hunger. The dubious scientific ethics of Jimmy Woods are similarly reflected in his round pinkness and his over-concentration on food, as, for example, when he sits imperturbably uncommunicative, avidly drinking tea, eating lots of cake and ‘energetically dott[ing] up loose currants on the end of a wetted forefinger’.¹³ Physical indulgence and sluggishness are repeatedly suggested as the enemy of insight.

If food dulls, then Martha learns that lack of food sharpens the senses and quickens the emotions. The lightness and clarity she experiences walking through London she regards as a ‘reward of not-eating, not-sleeping, using her body as an engine to get her out of the small dim prison of every day’ (Four-Gated City, p. 519). The step from such heightened awareness to madness is both a small and a large one; it is through her foodless, sleepless experience that Martha's non-rational and communicating self is confirmed. Indeed, following Lynda's example, she carefully prepares for her ‘breakdown’, a solitary psychic exploration for which she knows she must not eat or sleep, so as to make herself acute and on edge. She is aware that this is dangerous, but takes the risk in order to examine her unknown states of mind. Reinforcing the food/body/‘breakdown’/communication nexus, an intervening visit to a restaurant is shown to set her back; she calculates that it will take her twenty four hours to return to a ‘sensitive’ state, after all she has eaten and drunk.

Productive not-eating along the same lines also features in The Golden Notebook, with its exploration of integrity and communication, as Anna Wulf struggles with the breakdown of language, the uncertainty of knowledge and the fragmentation of her personality.¹⁴ During the period of her breakdown, though Anna uses the artificial stimulation of whisky and coffee, she eats very little, and sometimes loses her food through (unintentional) vomiting. At a further stage of enlightenment, in The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five, Al.Ith and the Zone Three people live on a light vegetarian diet, and communicate extensively, among themselves and with the natural world, by thought and feeling. Here, however, we are given a sense of the limitations of this way of being, and a hint that there may be something to be said for the gross flesh and passions of the masculine Zone Four, since union between the Zones (later expanded to include the extremes of the immoderate Zone Five and incorporeal Zone Two) is deemed to be necessary and healing.

In neglecting the flesh Lessing is pursuing an ideal of enlightenment, which reaches its apotheosis in the ultimate transcendence of both the physical and the individual when the surviving characters of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 finally merge into a composite spiritual being, leaving their bodies behind on a frozen hillside. I do not want to end on this conveniently tidy note, however, for it suggests something reductive, a simplistic spirituality. Though there is clearly a recurring pattern in Lessing's work, it is not as schematic as it seems here in the absence of everything else (and there is much) that Lessing packs into the novels. We should not either, I think, lose sight of the fact that her writing is grounded in a solid materialism which embraces the realities of embodiment with all its fears and insecurities.

I want therefore to finish by suggesting that in two books at least Lessing offers an alternative enlightenment to the incorporeal, an enlightenment which is deeply rooted in physical awareness, and achieved through ministering to the body's needs and hungers. The novels I have in mind are The Diaries of Jane Somers, which confront the unavoidable future underlying all our fears about embodiment, that of deterioration and debility; indeed, few novelists dwell so directly or so movingly on the physical details of old age.

The Diaries are concerned with the breakdown of Jane Somers' distaste, fear and separation from the realities of other people's physicality. Jane, or Janna as she is called, unwillingly becomes involved with a poverty-stricken sick old woman, Maudie Fowler. Janna is gradually drawn in to care for her, developing a sense of responsibility and achieving a real friendship. The breakthrough comes with Maudie's asking to be washed, when Janna is confronted by the inescapable facts of physical decline and must cope with the smell, the mess, the pitiful sight of Maudie's incontinent body, and Maudie's suffering at the invasion of her privacy. Maudie's body is disturbing because it holds an explicit promise of the future. In an extraordinarily evocative passage, Lessing gives a detailed account of the old woman's day, dominated by her own weight, stiffness, effort, panic, weariness, numbness, emptiness and the small pleasures of cake, bread and butter and cups of tea.

Janna looks after, visits and buys food for first Maudie, and then other old ladies. She shares their tea and cake. Unintentionally but inevitably she is drawn into dealing with the Social Services on their behalf. The arrival of ‘Meals on Wheels’ is an event for all the old women, often eagerly awaited, partly because it offers a moment of minimal social contact, but also because eating is almost their only physical pleasure. There is frequent disappointment when the food arrives, but there is pleasure too, both in present indulgence and sporadic nostalgia. Indeed, the old women's almost obsessive interest in what they have to eat is a means of keeping mortality at bay. The hunger, the pleasure, the nostalgia are manifestations of an appetite for life itself.

Janna's enlightenment, growing alongside her intimacy with Maudie, comes from her gradual apprehension of the importance not only of caring, but of the passion revealed in an old woman's appetite. Familiar elements of Lessing's food writing are in evidence. Janna's eating with Maudie is communicative, even celebratory on occasion, though there are complicating inequalities in their relationship. Opposed to the pleasures of their conversations over tea or a nice piece of fish or a glass of Scotch is the most difficult knowledge: that of death. Far from sailing serenely into a spiritual existence like the Representatives of Planet 8, Maudie clings fiercely to life in its most physical form, a tenacity which, given that she is 92, is ultimately baffling to Janna. Like Lessing's fasting communicants, however, Janna achieves her most valuable perceptions not intellectually but through what she senses and feels, through physical connection with Maudie and in relation to food and eating. The vivid scene in which she takes Maudie out to tea at a café in the park captures the sensuous quality of Janna's perception, and offers a reading of eating as the most powerful and moving assertion of being alive:

I find her a table out of the way of people, with rose bushes beside her, and I pile a tray with cream cakes, and we sit there all afternoon. She ate and ate, in her slow, consuming way, which says, I'm going to get this inside me while it is here!—and then she sat, she simply sat and looked […]. I could see she was beside herself with a fierce, almost angry delight, this hot brightly coloured sunlit world was like a gorgeous present.¹⁵

Notes

1. Doris Lessing, The Small Personal Voice (1957; London: Flamingo, 1994), p. 14. After initial footnoted references, all subsequent page references to this and other works by Doris Lessing will be given parenthetically in the text.

2. ‘Tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are’, in Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, with an Introduction by Arthur Machen (New York: Dover, 1960), p. 3 (Physiologie du Goût, 1825).

3. [Doris Lessing,] The Fifth Child (1988; London, Paladin, 1989), pp. 83, 86.

4. [Doris Lessing,] The Golden Notebook (1962; London, Flamingo, 1993), pp. 33-4.

5. Interestingly, in both cases, the pleasure is soured and the cooking spoiled by Anna's intuitive knowledge that her man is on the way out.

6. See Foucault's discussion of power relations in: Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1979).

7. Kate Fullbrook, Free Women: Ethics and Aesthetics in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 142.

8. See Elizabeth Maslen, Doris Lessing, Writers and their Work (Plymouth: Northcote House for the British Council, 1994), p. 47.

9. The first is so common as almost to have become a cliché. Lessing often demonstrates more complicated exertions of power than simple seductions however, from the convoluted discomforts of the club social life in Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage to the sexual put-downs of Robert Brun, Ella's potential French editor in The Golden Notebook.

10. Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), p. 244.

11. Doris Lessing, Martha Quest (1952; London: Paladin 1990), p. 51.

12. Several critics note the existence of a ‘divided self’ in Martha, encompassing both the conformist and the visionary. See, for example, Jeanette King, Doris Lessing (London: Arnold 1989); Lorna Sage, Doris Lessing, Contemporary Writers series (London: Methuen, 1983); the ‘Critical Studies’ collection edited by Annis Pratt and L. S. Dembo, Doris Lessing (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1974) and in that volume particularly Dagmar Barnouw, ‘Disorderly Company: From The Golden Notebook to The Four-Gated City’, pp. 74-97. The ‘division’ is not a simple polar opposition, however, since both conforming and visionary selves are powered by a desire for community and belonging, reflecting Lessing's interest in the individual and the collective and her reference to politics and psychology.

13. Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City (1969; London: Paladin, 1990), p. 183.

14. Anna's experience in this might well be taken as a dry run for Martha's, since The Golden Notebook (1962) was published some time before The Four-Gated City (1969).

15. [Doris Lessing,] The Diaries of Jane Somers (1983 & 1984; London: Michael Joseph, 1984), p. 120.