Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

The overall structure of The Cleft uses the well known frame of “the discovered document.” An elderly former civil servant, living in the time of Nero, has inherited (from a society to which he belongs) a packet of historical documents concerning the secret origin of the human race. Like many before him, he has set himself the task of editing and collating these texts into some humanly readable and comprehensible form. The novel alternates his comments about the texts and about his life with the texts themselves.

These texts tell of a time when women and men lived in entirely separate communities. By historical accident, the surviving stories are related primarily from the women’s point of view, but the Roman narrator describes the process by which the tales were investigated and corrected, by groups including both sexes. Basically, the men live barbarically in a clearing in the woods, while the women live by the sea. The women give birth only to girl children -- most of the time. Occasionally, for reasons unknown, a monster is produced: a male. When that happens, the women take the child to a mountaintop and leave it there to be rescued by enormous eagles.

Inevitably, one day a young female follows the eagles and finds the men. Inevitably, she bears a child. Inevitably, although the older females disapprove to the point of eventually exiling them from the community, other young females do the same. And inevitably, the old way of life is destroyed; the new society that has come to take its place is difficult and frightening, and if a more acceptable equilibrium is ever going to arise, it is not obvious how this might ever occur.

The reviewers described The Cleft as a feminist science fiction novel. On that basis, I did not expect to like it -- not because I don’t like science fiction (though I don’t read it much these days), and certainly not because I object to feminism -- although Lessing has been attacked for both those reasons. Rather, I assumed that Lessing’s novel would end up belonging to a category of British novels that the critics often term “science fiction novels” but that in reality are nothing of the kind. My prediction turned out to be correct, yet I did like the novel, so I spent some time thinking about why -- about what made the novel worth reading despite its being a kind of novel I most frequently don‘t like. I didn’t find a good answer to this question, but I did, I think, come up with an explanation of why I’m still ambivalent.

The usual complaint about fiction like this would be, Lessing is not “telling a story.” She is illustrating a philosophical theory. It is true that Aristotle described literature as philosophical, because like philosophy it treats of universals. However, we expect a writer to have accomplished the hard work of turning a philosophical idea into something appropriately concrete: an image, perhaps, in the case of a poem, and a story with characters in the case of a novel. Moreover, we expect a novel to have a certain kind of characters and story, something we can recognize, something everyday and ordinary. This is a reasonable objection, if it fits.

This requirement does not necessarily shut out all possible science fiction novels as possible (good) novels. Science fiction novels may have plots and stories that we can recognize easily as such. Caves of Steel, for example, is a detective novel. “I Sing the Body Electric” is simply a story about children and the process of mourning. That both stories are “about” androids or robots means only that the authors decided to imagine a society in which robots were commonplace, and to see how an ordinary sort of story might play out in this kind of world.

And Lessing’s science fiction novels certainly do tell stories. The plots are complex and the characters are roundly and sensitively drawn. Thus, the complaint that her novels are “philosophical” or “polemical” seems to express a preference for novels that lack any discernable trace of any idea whatsoever. It is felt that in science fiction novels -- among others -- the ideas do not remain sufficiently safely submerged in the depths of the author’s mind, but rather bob close enough to the surface that they can be seen from above. It seems, to me, that that is no more than a preference, held by critics and readers who just like other kinds of novels better and don’t wish to pick up the other kind by mistake. Those readers are wrong to describe novels they don’t like as little better than propaganda, just because they are the kind of novels they don’t like.

But Lessing -- like some other English novelists, including P.D. James and Kazuo Ishiguro -- does seem confused about what science fiction is. Lessing does not imagine a world, the general parameters of which are different from our own, and place an ordinary human story in this world, the better to illustrate the effects of those parameters on human action. She does exactly the opposite. She imagines a world exactly like our own, with one single exception: the sacred texts describe the origin of humanity as a singular event that merged two separate species into one society.

There are many things to admire about The Cleft. It has -- in my opinion -- all the merits of a good novel of the usual type. In addition to this, it makes you think. My question is, does Lessing make the reader think too much? After all, what is the reader supposed to be thinking about? We expect the writer to have done the hard work of making her ideas concrete and comprehensible: this applies, as well, to her science fiction world inventions, which ought not to seem entirely arbitrary. Science fiction does not comprise every possible literary means of getting around societal constraints concerning what may and may not be said, and it is not simply a lesser form of fiction that may permit the novelist to skip steps and cut corners whenever this is desired. By allowing her book to be labeled “science fiction,” but leaving out some of the essential elements of a science fiction story, the novelist avoids having to indicate how her imagined world might relate to the real one, while actually preventing the reader from raising questions about this in the usual way.