The structure of The Golden Notebook is perhaps its most important feature and the most overlooked aspect of the novel when it was first released. Critics immediately pronounced the novel to be simply about the “sex war,” a notion which provoked Lessing into adding a preface directing the reader’s attention to the shape of the novel and the theme of “breakdown” which is reflected in the shape. Anna Wulf cannot write about her world as a whole, because it no longer fits together for her, so she breaks it down into parts in hopes that she can discover an underlying meaning which will bring a new order. Anna understands that she is herself internally divided when she examines the discrepancies in her belief system or sense of self and her actual behavior. By allowing herself to move into these contradictions and to live them rather than suppress them, Anna is eventually able to break through into a new paradigm.

A large part of this novel considers the function of language as ideology, and therefore a way to stop or to control the thinking process. Each section adds to this theme in its own way. The Black Notebook interrogates literature, the relationship between Anna’s memories and the novel that she wrote out of them, and how literature is coopted by cultural ideology. The Red Notebook separates out and examines the ideology of political life. Anna discovers how she is manipulated, how her identity is shaped, by the surrounding cultural belief systems. She knows that the Communist Party has become corrupt, that members (including herself) will say one thing when alone or with one another and adopt or be taken over by another “viewpoint” while functioning in an official Party capacity. Yet this does not stop Anna from participating in all this activity even while she is ironically aware of its irrationality. The Red Notebook ends with clippings and a story about a man whose whole life was built on the delusion that the Russians would one day send for him to set the history of the Party straight.

The Yellow Notebook separates out sexual politics and examines the “woman in love” figure who emerges in the psyche of Ella. She is dismayed at her own conventional responses to her lover and realizes that she cannot stop herself from acting out cultural ideas and formulas. Paul, however, is as internally divided as Ella is, and he acts the parts of the irresponsible husband and the jealous lover seemingly against his will as well. Both genders are permeated by social ideology. Ella escapes these social formulas by writing out plot summaries in which she discovers preplanned scenarios encapsulated in her head, thus purging herself of their influence.

In the Blue Notebook, Anna experiences “the thinning of language against the density of our experience.” Language becomes inadequate to reflect reality. Try as she might, she cannot stop social ideology from contaminating her attempts to capture “pure reality” in her diary. Anna comes to understand slogans and ideology as substitutes for self-knowledge and independent action. The notebook ends with the purchase of the Golden Notebook, which contains the dreams that bring Anna out of the group of the cultural image of woman and the mind-containing slogans of politics and psychoanalysis.

Anna escapes the disintegration of her personality, which is intricately related to the social disintegration around her, by playing out all the possibilities of the male-female role with Saul Green, a man whose personality is as fractured as Paul’s. By exploring each other’s psychosis, by having both sides of the formula of gender available, Anna...