Aristotle, the gauntlet has been thrown

currently: Doris Lessing

Right now I’m reading The Golden Notebook. A tragedy has occurred. The chapter title promised one, very matter-of-factly (“Two visits, some telephone calls and a tragedy”), and it has occurred, yet I don’t feel upset or torn-up, and I think that, at least as regards this novel, that’s a good thing.

I’m thinking about Children of Men, which I immensely enjoyed watching, was entirely wrapped up in, but by the end of the film I felt very manipulated. Of course, all narrative is manipulation. Or at least attempted manipulation, and bathos frequently stems from failed manipulation. When the audience says, you keep telling me it’s sad, but I don’t think it’s sad, it’s just maudlin. It leads to laughter, to mockery, kitsch (dreamy curiosity: I wonder if Lessing and Milan Kundera have ever gotten together and discussed Communist kitsch?). But. With this film, I felt that my emotions had been manipulated – successfully – just for the sake of it. Or perhaps so that I would take the film more seriously, somehow. That I was some kind of cinematic guinea pig. Obviously, some kinds of films are known for trafficking in this. The sharp intake of breath, the squeaks, squeals and screams, jumping in your seat, clutching the arm of the startled movie-goer beside you. That’s their trademark. And their ideal audience expects and enjoys the manipulation. Unsurprisingly, I tend to not fall into that category. It’s wearying for me to be scared over and over in this fashion. I invest too much in the experience and I get exhausted. But Children of Men was purportedly a more serious sort of film. Dystopia, afterall, has been established as a genre of social criticism. So I was disappointed when I felt that I was being jerked around needlessly.

All this is just to say that when a tragedy occurs in The Golden Notebook, I feel it. But it doesn’t make me cry. It makes me think. Which I am so bold as to imagine might be what Doris Lessing would like her readers to do. Earlier in the book, Anna the sometime-narrator reflects that “One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel – the quality of philosophy.”

Because perhaps catharsis is not enough. Perhaps art should not only release and refresh and restore, but also awaken. Also challenge.