In Lessing’s earlier novels, there is always a conflict between the individual and his or her milieu, between the microcosm and the macrocosm. One of the key ways for the individual to solve this conflict is to imagine ideal spatial images that always parallel his or her psychological developments. In Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, Martha Quest designs an ideal four-gated city that aims to incorporate human differences but ironically expels persons whom she detests, such as her parents. The spatial images reveal her psychological cartography. In Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor, Shadia S. Fahim considers the carpet episode, the four-walled garden, and the iron egg as mandalas that activate “[t]he process of contemplation by inducing certain mental states which
encourage the achievement of equilibrium between the levels of perception” (108). The various spatial images turn out to reflect the individual’s psychological cartography.
In Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell, however, the psychological cartography of the main character, Charles Watkins, is ambiguous: the milieu is both
89
psychological and “real.” On the one hand, Mandala3 Square in the ruined city reflects the protagonist’s spiritual explorations. On the other hand, the mandala city has its own physical reality. Although Watkins’ experiences in the mandala city might be brushed away as dreams or illusions in psychoanalytical discourse, his connection with the Canopean spaceship and the briefing that summons him to remember his mission as a galactic messenger reveal another dimension of reality: the cosmic dimension. Viewed from the cosmic scope, the spatial image of the mandala city has its physical reality and interacts with Watkins. No wonder Claire Sprague, in Rereading Doris Lessing, reminds us of the danger of tilting totally toward the inner psyche. She claims that while “the houses in The Four-Gated city are mirrors of psychological reality” (159), they still possess a physical reality of their own. Chien-chou Chen, in Quest for Integration: Space
and Psyche in Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, delineates the relationship between
the individual and his or her milieu in terms of “the dynamics between psyche and space”(4). The alignments of the spatial cartography mirror the configurations of the psychic topography. Chen claims that the purpose of analysis is twofold: “the one is to
psychologize the space and the other is to spatialize the psyche” (4). In my reading, the reflective relationship between the psyche and space presupposes the importance of the protagonist’s evolution of consciousness and triggers emergence of an important question:
3 Jung frequently saw mandalas in the artwork of clients experiencing individuation. He compiled a list of the designs he observed, including the following:
1. Circular, spherical, or egg-shaped formation.
2. The circle is elaborated into a flower (rose, lotus) or a wheel.
3. A center expressed by a sun, star, or cross, usually with four, eight, or twelve rays.
4. The circles, spheres, and cruciform figures are often represented in rotation (swastika).
5. The circle is represented by a snake coiled about a center, either ring-shaped (uroboros) or spiral (Orphic egg).
6. Squaring of the circle, taking the form of a circle in a square, or vice versa.
7. Castle, city, and courtyard (temenos) motifs, quadratic or circular.
8. Eye (pupil and iris).
9. Besides the tetradic figures (and multiples of four), there are also triadic and pentadic ones.
See C. G. Jung, Mandala Symbolism, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1973) 77.
Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 in the appendix are the pictures of pertinent mandalas.
90
is the framework of psycho-spatial correspondence in Lessing’s earlier works, as depicted above, an appropriate one for investigating the relationship between the Survivors and the cities in Shikasta?
The spatial images in Lessing’s earlier novels, whether they are embedded in the characters’ minds or have their own physical reality, can be said to be “subjective.” But the spatial images in Shikasta are different. They are not subjective, but are
trans-individual and have their own lives as living entities realized in the symbiosis of the Survivors, the cities, and SOWF. In Shikasta, the boundary between the psychological and the spatial are eradicated as the Survivors meld into the cities without conscious implementation of any pre-established plans, and the city develops as a living organism.
Here, the humans become inhuman and vice versa. The reconfigured relationship of the Survivors and the city is far from psycho-spatial in correspondence since the psyche no longer controls the spatial cartography and human consciousness is downplayed. In
Shikasta, the two contradictory images of the city comprise Lessing’s dual vision and
reconfigure the relationship between individuals and the cities. Building the ancientgeometric cities involves the relationship between the Shikastans (the Giants and Natives ) and the cities, a relationship dictated by the cosmic plan of the Canopeans. Building the post-catastrophic cities involves the symbiotic relationship of the Survivors and the evolving cities infused with the dynamic cosmic force and not conditioned by human consciousness. Lessing’s leap to outer space frees her from the confinement of psycho-spatial correspondence. Her leap expands our horizon beyond earthly confinement, reconfigures concepts of the individual and the cities, reconnects the Survivors with SOWF, and forms a new assemblage that transcends the boundary between human and nonhuman, explores a visionary relationship among the individual, space, and the cosmic force, and generates cosmic evolution.
91
Before analyzing the relationship of the survivors and the evolving cities, I examine in greater detail Lessing’s spatial images, as critics view them and as I view them. The motif of the imagined or ideal city recurs in Lessing’s works. As Claire Sprague posits, in
Rereading Doris Lessing, “[A]lthough all artists are architects in the larger metaphoric
sense, few have been builders of imagined cities. . . . Doris Lessing . . . has, ‘among other things,’ been building houses and cities throughout her long career” (154-155). Many of the imagined or ideal cities in Lessing’s novels are geometric. Betsy Draine observes, inSubstance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing, “The geometric town, with a fountain and circular plaza at its center, is Lessing’s
architectural ideal (present also in the utopian fantasies of The Four-Gated City, TheMemoir of a Survivor, and Briefing for a Descent into Hell)” (153). In addition to the
spatial image of the geometric city, Lessing portrays another spatial image, that of mud huts, which originates from her childhood memory in Rhodesia. Sprague points out that“[t]heir qualities of spontaneity and naturalness make these mud huts the antipodes of Lessing’s magical cities—the four-gated city, the inner city of Briefing, and the
geometrical city of Shikasta” (159); mud huts look “like natural growths from the ground, rather than man-made dwellings” (163). The harmonious relationship of the mud huts, the natural environment, and the individual pervades Lessing’s imagination.
There is a third kind of city image in Lessing’s works, which, according to Sprague, is “the Acropolis”: “Its existence destroys the binary opposition between the mud house and the geometrical city” (164). The Acropolis is neither totally organic nor over-ordered.
Unlike the natural mud house, the Acropolis is still framed by structures and thus can resist the wear of weather. It is not as ordered as the geometrical cities. Sprague provides a snapshot:
The Acropolis seems to follow the contour of the land rather than the imposed
92
order of geometrical shapes. Deliberately irregular, deliberately planned to accommodate to the curve of the land rather than to the mathematician’s instruments, these structures seem to be at once “natural” and mathematical.
(164)
The geometrical shapes are modified by the curvatures of the land so that the Acropolis is both spontaneous and geometrical, forming the prototype of the evolving city in Shikasta.
If the Acropolis metamorphoses owing to the curvature of the land, the evolving cities on Shikasta deviate from their original shapes for multiple reasons, including curvature of the land, stellar alignment, and the Survivors’ mutation. The Acropolis can help us understand the cosmos in Shikasta where the cities are evolving and expanding rather than following scrupulously the patterns of over-ordered shapes. Lessing re-imagines and reconfigures the relationship of the individuals, the cities, and the cosmic force.
Development of the spatial image from the geometric cities to the Acropolis finds its realization in Shikasta’s ancient geometric cities and the future expanding cities.
Oscillation between the two images of the city propels cosmic evolution. The rendering of various city images in Lessing’s earlier novels and the organic development of the cities in Shikasta enlightens my investigation of the reconfigured relationship between the Survivors and the cities after the catastrophe. The relationship of individuals (the
Survivors) and the city develop this new organic relationship from which is born the virtual chaosmos of cosmic evolution beyond earthly confinement and the correspondent psycho-spatial model. Both the Survivors and the city evolve with the virtual cosmic force. The Survivors lose their individualities in the act of rebuilding the cities, and human consciousness is downplayed, which, according to Colebrook, problematizes “the phenomenological idea of consciousness as the genesis of space” (The Sense of Space 190). Instead of serving as subjects representing homogeneous space, the Survivors,
93
driven by SOWF and the virtual force of cosmic evolution, become evolving participants in cosmic evolution itself. The replacement of human consciousness with intuition, in the Survivors’ determining the design of the city, and the choreography of the individuals, the cities, and the Substance-of-We-Feeling, in an interpenetrating dance, embody a change of focus from the individuals’ psychological cartography to a new assemblage of “We” in this new virtual chaosmos of cosmic evolution.
We see this profound transition in the relationship between the Survivors and the cities after the catastrophe. Kassim, a Survivor and Johor-George’s adopted son, inherits Johor-George’s mission as keeper of the galactic Archive, in which the spontaneous way of building the city is recorded. Betsy Draine argues that, when George and Rachel die, the Survivors are “in the consciousness of Kassim, one of the children rescued by George, from whose point of view we witness the rebuilding of the cities” (Substance Under
Pressure 165). Kassim says, “Take a simple thing like the shape of this town. There were
no plans. No architect” (Shikasta 237). After the catastrophe, the Survivors rebuild the city spontaneously, without discussing plans or materials or contours of the site. They proceed by intuition. They improvise. Nonetheless, when Kassim observes the city from above, he detects a telling pattern:…[y]et it grew up symmetrical and on the shape of a six-pointed star. I didn't realize it was a star until I walked up out of the town very early one morning, and when I looked down, trying to see if I could notice anything different, I was able to see the star-shape. But no matter who I ask, no one seems able to say anything about plans or a master plan or anything like that (Shikasta 237).
No one can explain to Kassim why or how the city develops in this star configuration. It just does, as a living organism It is not the product of human action but is a living being co-creating its own life with the Survivors and SOWF. There is no more cosmic Master
94
Plan or architect, just organic inter-relating parts of the virtual chaosmos of cosmic evolution.