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Chapter 18 - Doris Lessing

Espionage and Speculative Fiction

from Part III - 1945–1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2024

Rachel Potter
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew Taunton
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Summary

Doris Lessing was one of the most restless novelists of her generation. She toggled between realist bildungsromane, autofiction, postmodernist experimentation, and speculative fiction. Despite her restlessness, she remained committed to the novel of ideas, using these different subgenres to entertain philosophical debates about autonomy, group membership, racism, and social progress. Surprisingly, as this chapter demonstrates, Lessing’s swerve into speculative fiction was conditioned by her status as a target of MI5 surveillance. Although Lessing knew she was being watched, she did not turn to the paranoid style of George Orwell. Instead, she used her fiction to suggest that an imperialist intelligence network could be outwitted by individuals who harness the powers of intelligent perception, or ESP: reading minds, forecasting future events, even communicating across species. The way to beat a repressive police network was to mimic its capabilities, bringing the arts of surveillance into the fold of human consciousness itself.

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The British Novel of Ideas
George Eliot to Zadie Smith
, pp. 308 - 321
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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