SOURCE: Rowland, Susan. “‘Transformed and Translated’: The Colonized Reader of Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos Space Fiction.” In British Women Writing Fiction, edited by Abby H. P. Werlock, pp. 42-55. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Rowland contrasts Lessing's early political and artistic conceptions of “representation” with the thematic implications of Canopus in Argos.]

Doris Lessing's fiction has always regarded artistic representation as a political act. From the very first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), which sets a Mary who failed to bear a redemptive child on the regressive white colonial road until a black Moses leads her to the promised land of death, she has tested the extent to which any particular society can bear to be represented. The “Children of Violence” series (1952-69) interposed a female bildungsroman to contest a colonial and patriarchal culture (Martha Quest [1952], A Proper Marriage [1954]), and used the resources of the realist novel, lauded in The Small Personal Voice (1957) as “the highest form of prose writing” (8), to fragment the impersonal claims of Communist theory in A Ripple from the Storm (1958). Lessing then turned to reexamine the realist novel's own representational capacities as she moved toward Sufi beliefs concerning the interconnected potentialities of higher consciousness in The Four-Gated City (1969). Her most acclaimed novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), challenged the representability of experience under pressure of breakdown, both mental and political, by fracturing the traditional form and thus providing a devastating analysis of Western women's social, economic, and psychic frictions. This novel, above all of Lessing's others, has generated profound feminist readings.

Thereafter Lessing mediated between the appeal of realism and metafictional or metaphysical needs until the writing of the Canopus in Argos space fiction (1979-83), which seemed to produce a deterministic and alienated universe. Canopus in Argos has provoked diverse critical reactions,¹ and it is worth considering the distance it has strayed from Lessing's political and artistic conceptions of “representation” described in “A Small Personal Voice.” The most urgent political message of this essay (first published in 1957) is the universal threat of nuclear war, “the kinship of possible destruction” (13) that might be sparked by a “Chairman [who] will say: ‘I represent the people.’ And the people is the brown man sitting under the tree … the people is me” (14). Interestingly, the collective threat appears to be figured in a metaphor of white colonization, culminating in Lessing's necessary identification with the colonized (since nuclear war is not local). I say “appears” because we are not given the race of the “Chairman,” though the implication in 1957 is surely white and male. At the end of the same essay, Lessing makes a claim for the artist to “represent” the people, arguing that literary form has a political extension: “one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible” (24). One could argue that Lessing uses nuclear terror to submerge her position as a white colonizer (as a British subject but also one who grew up in the then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, however opposed to the regime) and allow her identification with “the people” in a politicized artistic role. I contend that the galactic empires of Canopus in Argos constitute precise examinations of political, psychic, and artistic colonization literally going “beyond” but expressing Lessing's persistent theme of Empire.

The Small Personal Voice lacks the territories of the psyche first explored in The Golden Notebook, particularly in the role of the Jungian analyst, Mrs. Marks, and the mental record of the Blue Notebook. Lessing, an interested but not uncritical reader of Jung, considers him “limited. But useful as far as he went,”² and Jungian studies have been the route of much successful critical analysis of Lessing's work³ in tracing archetypes and individuation patterns (whereby consciousness is deconstructed by the active unconscious into a continuing “marriage” or relationship). Such criticism tends to be apolitical, since Jung's theory of archetypes as inherited psychic potentials appears to discount cultural differences. So far, few critics have paid attention to Jungian ideas in Canopus in Argos.

However, even a cursory reading of the first volume, Shikasta, can reveal resemblances between Lessing's Canopeans, who have been “crystallized, into forms as different as snowflakes” (17), and Jung's archetypes, which “are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. … Its form … might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own.”⁴ Canopeans are, like archetypes, “androgynous” (142), and they use “crystalline” (43) spacecraft. Shikasta's chief Canopean representative is Johor, which means “pearl” in Arabic (Caracciolo 15), a frequent Jungian sign for the archetype of the “self,”⁵ an unconscious structure to which the ego becomes a subject in individuation. Yet the Canopeans cannot be “represented” as archetypes because, as Jung's definition suggests, archetypes themselves are irrepresentable and can be posited only from their derivatives, archetypal images. The crystalline archetype or Canopean can be represented only as incarnated or imaged: such images will be colored or animated by local cultural conditions. Thus Canopeans visit as members of local species as Johor manifests himself as a native on Shikasta, or are born into a particular culture stripped of other identity and memory except for the crystalline imprint of the Signature from Canopus that they must discover within. Therefore Taufiq becomes John Brent-Oxford and Johor becomes George Sherban. Canopeans enter Shikasta and realist fiction as “characters” bearing traces of a psychic colonization that they can choose to ignore as Taufiq/John does and Johor/George does not. Johor's selected documents tell us that the main cause of fruitful Rohanda's change to broken Shikasta was a “disaster” (35), a fault in the stars recalling the frequent depiction of archetypes as a star-filled heaven.⁶

This deterministic universe displeases many critics. Lorna Sage, in her powerful essay “The Available Space,” calls the Canopeans “remarkably pure figures of power” and states that she, as a reader, feels “‘colonized’ by a benevolent … authority” (31). To a certain extent, this is an inevitable reaction to novels based on ideological premises not shared by the critic. Lessing's Jungian, alchemical, Sufi, and mystical ideas of the essential oneness of created reality are explored in terms of physics in The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. All is “a unity … patterns of matter, matter of a kind, since everything is—webs of matter … intermingling” (158). A reader unwilling to transfer ideas current in physics, such as chaos theory, to psychic and social structures, as Lessing does in Canopus in Argos, will likely view Canopus as yet another imperial trope aiming solely at literal domination or, as Johor puts it, ensuring “the creation of ever-evolving Sons and Daughters of the Purpose” (52). Canopus, in this sense, is an exaggerated version of the Jungian principle that privileges unconscious meaningful potential over a selfish, limited ego, a structure now dangerously hardened into literal domination by an alien Other. This harsh stance is not softened by the Canopean method of activating unconscious paradigms within, thereby apparently offering choice. Johor tries to recall John Brent-Oxford to his superior but unconscious knowledge, through messages from his unconscious, including dreams (106-7), but real choice is circumscribed in a dis-asterous universe.

The colonized reader is a dispirited one, but Canopus in Argos colonizes the reader in two senses: first, as Sage observes, by the Canopean ideology itself, and second, by the way Lessing positions the reader within the texts. The reader of Shikasta is a translator. Opening with a partial and nonchronological selection of documents, mainly authored by Johor, and followed by the diary of Rachel Sherban (sister to George/Johor) and other documents, the novel through its structure and Shikastan perspective defamiliarizes Earth history and its “alien” reality. The name “Earth” is never used, and virtually no terrestrial terms appear in the “Canopean” part of Shikasta, but because Lessing saturates readers with tropes and structures from Earth history and sacred literature, she forces us into a continual translation of this outrageously fragmented text (e.g., “SEE History of Shikasta, VOLS. 2955-3015” [100]). Part two does employ Earth names while eschewing the word “Earth” itself, yet the unfamiliar future setting and the charismatic presence of George, whom we know to be Johor, forces a continual retranslation into the imperial Canopean ideology of part one, especially as, through the sympathetic Rachel, the reader feels constantly challenged to read beyond the realist novel to the extra-terrestrial, extra-representational elements of Shikasta. In this novel, reading as translation is completely inescapable and highly problematic. Through the difficulties Lessing introduces—such as the paucity of clues in part one, the requirement to remember the geographical schemes of “North West Fringes” (Europe) and “Isolated Northern Continent” (United States)—the reader must constantly translate between two separate ideological perceptions of reality, the science fictional Canopean empire of psyche and matter, versus the reader's own supported by Rachel, who prefers personal relationships and writes from the domain of traditional realism. Thus Lessing builds into the reading experience of Shikasta the difficulty and impossibility of “pure” translation between different cultural perceptions. The novel encodes competing discourses, so by translating Shikasta into Earth, the reader endorses a power relationship within the text, appropriating Earth history in Shikastan terms: the reader is colonizing the novel.

This manipulation into the Canopean position is further compromised by the implications of reading Shikasta as Earth. Such a reading transports the reader from simply seeing with the crystalline clarity of the Canopean perspective to actually becoming a citizen of Shikasta, a polluted degraded planet: Shikastan citizens are utterly incapable of clear thinking, for their world has been hopelessly colonized by aliens, both biologically and psychically. We learn that pure natives, themselves reshaped by Canopus, die out in favor of the extra-terrestrial Giant-native “cross” (127), and that genes from the space empires of Shammat, Sirius, and Canopus have contributed to the heterogeneous stock.

Consequently, because readers cannot find secure positions either as colonizers/translators of the text or as colonized citizens, we therefore view ourselves as mentally inadequate captives. We read that Canopean colonization “raises” natives, whereas the evil empire, Shammat, causes minds to degrade, but we have yet to explore whether Lessing can convincingly distinguish between the imperial discourses of the two empires. What is apparent so far is Lessing's depiction of the inescapability of the imperial trope for her readers (expected to be mainly white Western?) represented here in the reading experience. Shikasta reproduces this dynamic of the colonizing/colonized reader in the description of the Trial of the White Races (374-419) conveyed in the reports of the Chinese, the latest colonial rulers of a future “Europe.”

At a time of mass starvation and overpopulation, anger at the historic cruelty of the white races reaches genocidal proportions and focuses on the drama of the Mock Trial. Typically, George Sherban acquires a key role as chief prosecutor for the dark races, but because he has only an Indian grandmother and in fact looks entirely white, his position becomes a joke during the trial (379). In fact, we realize that someone, presumably George, has avoided the appearance of black/white polarization by mixing the races on both sides of the room and by complicating the lighting at this trial, which, notably, takes place at night. Throughout Shikasta, Lessing's techniques, characters, and incidents invite the reader to develop other perspectives of events. In addition to the broad invitation to guess George's Canopean agency, Lessing here provides the problematic situation of the narrator, a Chinese colonial official whose summaries of reports gradually force him to read unmentionable analysis of the new Chinese empire with its unstated policy of population reduction through starvation and through its encouragement of racial hostility. The trial describes the reality behind the British policy of “benevolence” (403) in Africa, but ironically, the Chinese use the term “Benevolent Rule” to justify their empire. When Chen Lui tries to direct the dangerous word (and the reader) to other meanings, his superiors decide that he has translated enough to secure “beneficent correction” (419) until his death. Although Chen Lui ostensibly writes for a reader within the novel, Ku Yuang, he essentially encourages the external reader to question the term “benevolent rule,” for it is that concept, though differently expressed, that the Canopeans claim. If Chen Lui can translate his empire into an-other culture, then the reader can translate the difference in the Canopean way. But the difference, the untranslatable residue between British and Chinese cruelty and Canopean nurture, in fact proves unstable. We also see a similarity in language, in roles, while unavoidably remembering that we perceive the Canopean imperial trope from the positions of degraded, muddled, colonized, and colonizing Shikastans. The novel allows the reading of the Canopeans as the literal, dominant empire while insisting that the reader recognize this as an act of translation made not from a neutral position, a crystalline clear vision, but from a culturally contaminated perspective. The reader must recognize such a reading as a translation into the literal or the “proper,” the term preceding the literal which, as Eric Cheyfitz argues in The Poetics of Imperialism, is related to seizing property, and is a trope of aggressive colonization: “The notion of the proper, I argue, must be understood in relation to European notions of property and identity. As for the literal … its figurative use for the notion of the proper has historically taken on a metaphysical force that naturalises writing, concealing it as technology—that is, as a form of politics” (xviii). Colonizing the text in the terms of our own fictions of cultural identity, the reader translates Canopeans into a literal empire. Lessing does not argue that this is an incorrect reading, but she makes us realize that it is a political reading.

Yet just as Lessing invites and problematizes translation, she spreads it into modes other than the literal. This methodology suggests itself particularly in the use of fictions in imperial discourses with the Canopeans who have Sufi, a superior system of teaching stories to develop the desired cosmic consciousness. In fact, fictions and metaphors provide most of our information about Canopus: we learn about the androgynous archetypal Canopeans only through their incarnations as culturally specific archetypal images, and through the use of stories and metaphors in developing civilizations. Once Shikasta has fallen into individualistic Shammat, Johor tries to maintain some ghost of Canopus with his metaphor of SOWF, “Substance Of We Feeling” (96), which, we are told, he has devised because damaged Shikastan brains can hope to retain nothing else. The sheer difficulty of literal translation into Earth concepts, its politicization, and the persistence of Canopean fictions rather than Canopean facts encourage the reader to maintain also a sense of the fictionality of the Canopean empire within the experience of reading in this explicitly science fiction novel. The structure of the text, and the constant demands that characters within the narrative strive for other readings, fosters and encourages external readers to perceive the Canopeans as also fictions (residing in incompleteness of translation, for if Shikasta is also not Earth, then we are aware of Shikasta as fiction), to perceive them as Other voices as well as imperial agents.

If the Canopeans are also read metaphorically, then Shikasta adopts an air of postmodernity, interrogating its own fictional ideology. Reinforcing this postmodern role is the perception of Shikasta as a fictional macrocosm of Lessing's entire oeuvre, a metatext, that not only reexamines old themes of racial oppression, female subordination, and class conflict but also discerns future fictions, as in Johor's “case histories,” which function as seeds for novels. The enumeration of terrorist types anticipates The Good Terrorist (1985), problem children, The Fifth Child (1988). In addition, early Lessing characters reappear, redefined in science fiction, most notably Lynda Coldridge from The Four-Gated City as a Canopean agent (226, 230-39, 431). The entire Canopus in Argos series develops this role as not only a fictional space of ideological empires, to form a canopy over Lessing's work, but also as textual space, reprising and extending her thematical concerns.

The encoded sense of the fictionality of the Canopeans receives still further support through continued readings of envoys such as Johor as archetypal images of unrepresentable crystalline archetypes. Shikasta operates two poles of an unstable reading process: first, a reading that translates the reader into a Shikastan so under the literal authority of the Canopeans/archetypal images, and second, a reading aware of the resistance to translation with the Canopeans as fictional metaphors of Otherness. These readings together reproduce the Jungian structure of individuation whereby the ego makes meaning or “reads reality” by a continual dialogue with archetypal images. The Jungian ego is conceived as imperious: it desires to translate unconscious material into its own terms, the literal, or in Cheyfitz's words, to make “proper” the unassimilable realm of the unconscious, to translate it into the ego's property.⁷ Therefore the reader of Shikasta as a colonizer, appropriating Earth's political and sacred history and situating him- or herself as a Shikastan who confronts a literal Canopean empire, experiences one Jungian mode of understanding—but one always in tension with, and inseparable from, the unconscious reshaping of the ego by revealing the literal translation as inadequate, as an inauthentic fantasy of dominance. In Jungian individuation, deconstruction of the ego occurs by also reading archetypal images as fictional, metaphorical, provisional, culturally colored manifestations of a plural psyche not open to conquest. Shikasta's situating of the reader reproduces Jungian individuation as a way of politicizing reading experience, thus revealing the inescapability of the imperial trope for readers within Western culture. It also engenders a re-cognition using the Jungian structure of encounter with the Other that aims to develop the reader's consciousness in the manner of a Sufi teaching story.

Jung's typical narrative of individuation is one of “sacred marriage,” union with an-other that remains untranslatable into the same.⁸ The second volume of Canopus in Argos, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), seizes upon this structure and attempts to move beyond the duality of the marriage plot and to explore issues of psychic and physical colonizing of Other realms. The zones start in mutual hostility, declining in fertility. The order from the “Providers” (12), presumed to be Canopeans, decrees that Al.Ith, the queen of agrarian, utopian Zone Three, must marry Ben Ata, the king of patriarchal, militaristic Zone Four. This union initiates beneficial movements between zones, renewing cultures and stimulating personal individuation. However this positive cultural exchange eludes “pure” translation, again revealed as a myth. Although Al.Ith asks for a dictionary to define the Zone Four use of the word “love” (117), she can never completely express her Zone Three self in her husband's land. Equally, she realizes that she perceives Zone Two through the filter of her Zone Three culture: what she sees as blue may in fact be “an iridescence of flames” (236). Encountering the Other in this Jungian “marriage” structure results in process, but resists a hierarchical discourse of colonial dominance. It is Zone Five, apparently the “lowest” culture, that produces the key to the movement into the highest, Zone Two (280).

Like Al.Ith, exposing the impossibility of pure translation, the narrator Lusik claims the impossibility of pure representation because artists of Zones Three and Four produce different images for different cultural resonances. Lusik and Al.Ith are almost split Canopeans from Shikasta, with Al.Ith taking the incarnated role and Lusik the role of one who makes meanings for a specific culture. Like the Canopeans, Lusik draws fictionality, here the constructed quality of this fable, into the reading experience. He also forces the reader to address the darker side of authorship, the use of fiction in oppressive power structures, just as Jungian individuation contains the concept of the shadow, the destructive side. To represent violent impulses is not to control them: “Describing, we become. We even—and I've seen it and have shuddered—summon” (243).

Although The Marriages contains comparatively little to shudder at, issues of representation, first articulated in The Small Personal Voice (the male dictator claiming to represent the people in the political sphere and the author representing the silent in the artistic), do cast a long shadow. As embodiments of their realms, Al.Ith and Ben Ata are extensions of Lusik—the artist as shaper—into the text, thereby dispersing the autocratic functions of rule to the Providers whose very non-appearance contributes to the fictive feel of the text. As female head of a cooperative society, Al.Ith appears the antithesis of the male dictator, but, interestingly, these ideal “representative” rulers have been contaminated by the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Zone Four's “death ray fortresses,” suggested by “strangers” (122), promote antagonism between zones. The very language of “death ray fortresses” plunges us into “science fiction,” and Lessing simultaneously reveals them as fictions, designed to intimidate, thus demonstrating that even ideal ruler-authors cannot entirely divest themselves of the shadow side of their authority.

Similarly, in Shikasta, the archetypal Canopeans attempt to disperse Lessing's own authorship, her authority, but they find themselves in continual battle with Shammat, clearly the hideous progeny of the white male dictator in The Small Personal Voice. Shammat is different from Canopus: the two types of representatives are different but, in their imperial discourse, not entirely separate, just as the representative author never remains wholly free of the colonizing, imperial shadow. Lessing's two types of representation in the early essay become two imperial discourses, the metaphorical authorial Canopeans and the literal dictatorship of Shammat: different but not separable, as demonstrated by the persistence of the literal mode of understanding the Canopean empire, which draws it close to Shammat in its appearance of power. The empires exist in a Jungian trope of deconstruction between ego translation (colonizing the novel into literal empires that simultaneously and ideologically colonize the reader) and archetypal representation (metaphorical, recognizing the inauthenticity of translation). It is not possible to have one way of representing without a shadow of the Other. In addition to the Canopeans' roles as authors of teaching stories, as fictional archetypal images, a literal reading of the Canopeans inescapably establishes their role as an empire of control and authority. The Shammat empire, functioning both to resemble and to differ enormously from Canopus, simultaneously offers and problematizes analogy.

The reproduction of Jungian individuation in the reading process politicizes this literal dictator/fictional author dialectic by making the reader conscious of the shadow of colonial history structuring her perceptions. Eric Cheyfitz argues that metaphor, being inseparable from the literal, also constitutes a colonial mode of reading: “I do not agree that metaphor is a privileged place, located ‘outside’ of or ‘beyond’ or ‘above’ the colonial and imperial politics of language” (108).

Lessing's use of Jung here apparently endorses such a conclusion while asserting the difference encoded within metaphor. If we remember that Sufi teachers, like archetypal images, work with cultural material rather than outside it, then Lessing's Sufi ideology clearly desires the difference of metaphor to provide an alternative reading of empire, while not pretending to be outside or to escape colonial culture and structures of thinking.

Significantly, Lessing depicts Al.Ith's final destination, Zone Two, as a place of “crystalline yet liquid” (237) earth, where her thoughts are “the creatures of this unfamiliar place” (238). It is a place of image where she can almost see people “as if flames trembled into being,” and where she feels most strongly “at home” (238). Zone Two appears to be the realm of the archetypal imagination that recalls the crystalline Canopeans. Another designation of it, however, could be death. From the perspective of Zone Three it is blue, the color of mourning in that zone,⁹ and Al.Ith hopes to find her dead horse Yori “there, but a transformed and translated version of him … so dreamed Al.Ith” (242). Virtually the only use of the word “translated” in Canopus in Argos, it here returns to an earlier sense of “translated to heaven.” Only in the realm of the plural archetypal psyche can translation occur differently to the political appropriation reproduced elsewhere. Nevertheless, this difference does not take it outside the topos of colonization explored in the whole novel series. Al.Ith's move to Zone Two is part of the cultural exchanges contained within the individuation narratives figured elsewhere in this text as “marriage.”

Lessing has dispersed her authority behind the archetypal Canopeans in order to colonize Earth history for Canopus in Argos. As with any imperial discourse, she gives back to the colonized (the readers) a mistranslated, ideologically biased history. Her envoys, or archetypal images, are culturally colored by her mode of debunking religious and political myths. For example, Johor/George's early encounter with a Miriam (278) reminds us that, by the end of Shikasta, he is a Moses leading survivors to a promised land of new sacred cities; moreover, in his incarnation he suggests Jesus. At the same time, established religions receive criticism as perversions of Canopean truths. In The Sirian Experiments we learn that Canopeans employ “subtle technology” (62), and as Lessing's subtle empire they embody their author's technology in individuating the readers, reshaping interpretations. Lessing uses such Jungian ideas as archetypes, individuation, and sacred marriage to illuminate the tropes of empire and colonization that dominate not only our history but also our structures of understanding. We cannot escape reading the crystalline Canopeans as a literal empire, not securely distant from the dictator of The Small Personal Voice, but we remain conscious that this reading is filtered by our translating ourselves into Shikastans, so entering the colonizing process by occupying the text. By becoming Shikastan, we are told that we pollute our vision. Thus Lessing's technique, inviting readers to Other readings, endeavors to raise our consciousness as we view Canopeans as also fictive, and listen to storytelling Sufi teachers who warn that Shikasta can use their words against them, hardening them “into dogma” (145). Lessing thus enables our recognition of Shikasta as the author's fictional macrocosm and of the possibility of reading empire differently, but not separately, from the political.

In Jung's view, an unsophisticated mind perceives the psyche as “removed from and alien to the ego” (p. 13); and Lessing's subtle empire explores the political potential of Jungian ideas just as it uses Jung to demonstrate the psychic persistence of politics. If Shammat is the shadow of Canopus as literal/political empire, it is part of a continual displacement of authority (from Lessing to Canopeans, Canopeans to Shammat) that aims to offer a textual space to empire as metaphor, using Jungian paradigms that allow the reader to be colonized also by Otherness, to participate through the author's fictional use of the teaching story.

Stars signify the deterministic universe, sign of the Canopean empire as literal or “proper.” Ultimately all becomes the stars' property as Al.Ith muses: “stars are what we are made of, what we are subject to” (Canopus in Argos 14); so, fittingly, “Canopus” and “Sirius” are terrestrial names for stars, and as such an obvious projection, another trace of science fiction in the texts. Not for nothing did Jung, quoting an alchemical text,¹⁰ call the imagination the star in man. The Canopeans are messengers from the stars and images from the archetypal imagination. By powerfully demonstrating the way we make fictions within political and colonial tropes, Lessing's Canopus in Argos bids us beware how we trespass in our imaginative space (Canopus in Argos 14).

Notes

1. Diverse critical reactions to Canopus in Argos include Kaplan and Rose, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival, especially Carey Kaplan's “Britain's Imperialist Past in Doris Lessing's Futuristic Fiction”; Ward Jouve, “Of Mud and Other Matter,” in White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue; and Fishburn, The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing.

2. Lessing in a letter to Roberta Rubenstein, quoted in Rubenstein 230-31.

3. Notable studies of Lessing using Jungian ideas include Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing; Singleton, The City and the Veld; and Cederstrom, Fine-Tuning the Feminine Psyche.

4. C. G. Jung, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9, pt. 1, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), 79. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, M.D., M.R.C.P., and Gerhard Adler, Ph.D., trans. R. F. C. Hull, 19 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953-77).

5. Jung, Collected Works 9 i, p. 160.

6. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 437-38.

7. Lessing, “If You Knew Sufi …” 12.

8. Jung, Collected Works 14: 469.

9. Jung, Collected Works 14: 300.

10. Jung, Collected Works 12: 277.

Selected Works about Doris Lessing

Caracciolo, Peter. “What's in a Canopean Name?” Doris Lessing Newsletter 8.1 (1984): 15.

Cederstrom, Lorelei. Fine-Tuning the Feminine Psyche: Jungian Patterns in the Novels of Doris Lessing. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

Cheyfitz, Eric. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan.” New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Fishburn, Katherine. The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in Narrative Technique. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Galin, Muge. Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997.

Kaplan, Carey, and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds. Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival. Athens: Ohio UP, 1988.

Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979.

Sage, Lorna. “The Available Space.” Women's Writing: A Challenge to Theory. Ed. Moira Monteith. London: Harvester Press, 1986. 15-33.

Singleton, Mary Ann. The City and the Veld: The Fictions of Doris Lessing. London: Associated University Presses, 1977.

Ward Jouve, Nicole. White Woman Speaks with Forked Tongue: Criticism as Autobiography. London: Routledge, 1991.