The Nobel Novelist [Doris Lessing], In an Interview, Describes Multiple Personalities Located at Different “Levels” In Her Mind

On page 60 of the Nobel novelist’s best-known novel (see post of January 1, 2014), the main character, a novelist, says, “I know very well from what level in myself that novel [the novel the character had written] came from.”

The reason I took notice of the above is that the novelist also referred to “level” in an interview conducted two years after her Nobel novel was published, but which did not happen to mention that particular novel.

The interview did describe the one time in the novelist’s life that she had tried mescaline (peyote). What she described about that experience is very relevant to this blog, but only if what she described had general relevance to her thinking, and was not just unique to the drug experience.

Her use of the word “level,” not only in her discussion of the drug experience, but also in her non-drug writing (her novel, quoted above) shows that what she said in the interview revealed something generally true about her mind. To quote from the interview:

“I took one dose [of mescaline] out of curiosity…There were several different people, or ‘I’s’ taking part…Several people were talking and in different voices throughout the process—it took three or four hours—…[including the voice of a] philosophic baby, a creature who argued steadily with God…”

“Yes, but who created all this? Who made it up?”

“It wasn’t me, the normal ‘I' who conducts her life.”

“And of course, this question of I, who am I, what different levels there are inside of us, is very relevant to writing, to the process of creative writing about which we know nothing whatsoever. Every writer feels when he, she, hits a different level. A certain kind of writing or emotion comes from it. But you don’t know who it is who lives there…That is a literary question, a problem to interest writers…”