Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (the Nobel Prize winner’s best-known novel) is about Multiple Personality, as Indicated by “the shape of the novel” and Different Handwritings

The Golden Notebook [1962] (Perennial Classics, 1999) is six hundred pages of complex literary fiction, but Doris Lessing, herself, gave us the key to what it is about. In her 1971 commentary, now included as an introduction to the novel, she draws our attention, first and foremost, to “the shape of the novel.”

The novel is divided into five sections, separated by four Notebooks (Black, Red, Yellow, and Blue) kept by the central character, Anna Wulf, a novelist. This highly divided structure represents, Lessing says, the “fragmentation” and “compartmentalisation” of identity. Toward the end of the novel, this dividedness reaches a climax of blatant multiple personality in Anna Wulf and Saul Green. But Anna’s “breakdown” remits—and she appears to heal and achieve a greater degree of “unity”—in the “Golden Notebook” and end of the novel.

Lessing says that “the essence of the book, the organization of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalise.”

“This theme of ‘breakdown,’” says Lessing, “that sometimes when people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions, has of course been written about by other people, as well as by me since then. But this is where…I first wrote about it. Here it is rougher, more close to experience…But nobody so much as noticed this central theme, because the book was instantly belittled, by friendly reviewers as well as hostile ones, as being about the sex war…”

However, Lessing, herself, does not fully understand her novel. She makes it sound as though, 1. most of the book does not describe multiple personality, per se, but only a bad habit of compartmentalization, that 2. if you compartmentalize, you run the risk of developing a temporary bout of multiple personality, but that 3. if you realize and decide that you must not compartmentalize, then your split personality may heal, and you can put all that behind you.

But the central character, Anna, who kept the Notebooks, had full-blown multiple personality all along and did not get over it.

The simplest proof that Anna had multiple personality all along is that, according to the novel, her four Notebooks were written in different handwritings. In my post of October 13, 2013, I give a link to a psychiatric journal article that provides objective documentation of 12 cases of multiple personality. One kind of objective documentation was to go back in the person’s life, to years before they ever saw a psychiatrist and before anyone had ever raised the idea of multiple personality, and find things like old diaries in which the person had used several, distinctly different handwritings.

Moreover, as readers of this blog know, multiple personality starts in childhood and it is usually hidden and camouflaged. So, if an adult who was never thought to have multiple personality has an emotional crisis that looks like blatant multiple personality, but then recovers from the crisis and no longer has any obvious alternate personalities, what has really happened is that a person with multiple personality since childhood has had a crisis in which their usually hidden personalities became temporarily overt, but then, after the crisis, the personalities reverted to their usual hiddenness and camouflage.

I recommend The Golden Notebook to readers of this blog, because it has some very realistic descriptions of multiple personality from the perspective of a person who has experienced it. (I don’t know how else Lessing would have known what she knew about it.) And it shows that multiple personality may be present in persons like Lessing who are not mentally ill and who are very high-functioning.