The Golden Notebook: The Notebooks: 2 Summary & Analysis

As with Anna’s own past, the reader only gets an indirect view of Frontiers of War, as the black notebook is itself divided between the inputs and outputs of Anna’s work; not only did Frontiers of War reinterpret and (in Anna’s mind) twist the truth of her experience, but the “Money” column shows how her novel was in turn reinterpreted by those who sought to profit from her story. “Reggie” both professes to understand Anna’s complaints about television and proves their accuracy by trying to sanitize her novel, removing its main theme and turning it into a love story that idolizes rather than condemns the violence of war and racist violence of British colonialism.

While Reggie apparently understands that Anna is trying to mock him, he does not understand the full weight of her “comedic” proposal: that there is something unseemly about a nation honoring those it has condemned to death; that war is not honorable or truly tragic, but farcical. Of course, her new main theme is what she claimed the novel’s impetus to be in the previous iteration of the black notebook: the thrill of dissolution, whether in war, death, or love. However, in phrasing it as “nostalgia for death,” Anna also points to her own dissatisfaction with her novel, her sense that she is celebrating something horrible.

The American brochure again exposes the contradiction between popular media’s insistence that it provides “authentic” truth and refusal to confront the obvious injustices of the time. Wright, clearly successful in her profession, nevertheless also sacrifices her own individuality in order to pursue it; Anna’s image of Wright’s “coupling” with the American man suggests that she sees Wright as also unable to express any individuality or emotion in her most intimate moments.

Wright’s job puts her in a strange position: she wants Anna, as an artist, to insist on the integrity of her work but also knows that she must sacrifice it in order to create palatable television. Despite Wright’s declaration that Anna is too invested in the integrity of her work, Anna is actually less interested in preserving her own story than in presenting a plausible truth—but, again, Wright’s proposal ends up evacuating Frontiers of War of its central political content and trying to tell the exact same story as Tarbucke’s.

Mrs Wright’s inability to “understand” how someone might be a communist reflects not only the political biases of the 1950s but also the enormous gap between Anna’s view of art and the one growing in popular media. Anna sees how people’s political commitments—the roles they choose—seem to determine their beliefs, rather than vice versa, and shows that her own independence from dogma is part of her feeling of isolation.

Anna is just as suspicious of the Communist Party’s dogmatism as she is of Western anti-Communism’s; Molly and Anna both recognize that the Party has more interest in protecting its reputation than in actually affecting political change but wonder if they can pursue change independent of its infrastructure.

Anna’s dream represents the Soviet Union’s attempts to spread Communism throughout the world—while she first feels sick when she sees the rest of the world apparently taking other paths, strangely enough she is delighted to see the Soviets’ redness invaded by the rest of the world. This suggests that she has already unconsciously broken with the Communist Party and can also be seen as a metaphor for her desire for her red notebook to lose its strict division from the other notebooks—her desire for unity.

The Soviet writers feel forced to defend something they do not believe in because of their roles in the Communist Party, even though they chose those roles because of their initial political beliefs—when belief translates into action, it seems to betray itself. Anna’s interest in language’s breakdown—the deterioration of the relationship between form and content—also points to the process of mental breakdown and the seeming futility of writing in a world that recycles fiction for its own ends: to the rest of the world, Anna’s own writing and political beliefs no longer mean what she originally wanted them to.

This story partakes in a number of communist clichés: the valorization of “workers,” a vague category often defined flexibly by those in power; Party members’ blind orthodoxy and reverence for political leaders like Stalin, who seem to represent the everyday “worker” despite their inflated power; and the notion that Communist politics will be radically democratic, involving input from everyone.

The man who first sees the story as “good honest basic stuff” and later insists he saw it as a farce shows how beliefs can be so flexible to social pressures that they completely lose their meaning—the story’s multiple interpretations both recall Anna’s own novel, which now seems like a farce to her and is being turned into a farce by producers, and point to the reader’s difficult task in making sense of The Golden Notebook’s layers of meaning and contradiction.

The yellow notebook, which ended its first iteration by jumping abruptly from the peak to the disintegration of Ella’s relationship with Paul, resumes a year after it left off; Ella’s life remains defined by her relationship with Paul, which suggests that Anna is still trying to make sense of the way she feels defined by her relationship with Michael for years after their breakup. Ella’s conscious and unconscious minds fight for her independence: she creates living space for Paul without realizing it, and her sleep is bookended by her thoughts of him (which, according to Mrs Marks’s analysis of sleep and dreams in the blue notebook, indicates even more strongly her emotional fixation on him).

Anna seems to rewrite her own experiences meeting with television executives from the opposite perspective: Ella asks Robert Brun to distort his story by removing its taboo elements and, understandably, he refuses. This story mirrors Anna and Ella’s patterns of unfulfilling relationships with men who take advantage of them, but also their self-defeating faith that men will save them from the misery men cause them. Indeed, the French magazine’s story replaces the traditional faith in salvation through God’s love with a secular faith in salvation through romance—which might also be one of the religious elements Ella hopes to remove from it.

Robert Brun, much like Dr West, exemplifies male chauvinism despite his prominent position at a women’s magazine: he clearly objectifies women and values his fiancée for her money rather than her love or character, which is all the more ironic because he is trying to sell Ella a love story. Ella sees Elise—whose name is perhaps a play on her own—as slated for the same kind of tragedy that befell her with Paul and Marion with Richard.

Ella sees a connection between the men’s mistreatment of women and the tragedy of modern capitalism: in a society that only values material wealth and external appearances, emotional sophistication and “moral energy” become meaningless to most people. She realizes that, by refusing to feel the pain Michael has caused her, she only further represses and extends that pain; instead, she decides to try and overcome that pain by embracing it.

Ella begins to see that her novel about suicide was more a reflection of her own intentions than she was originally willing to admit; like her protagonist, she only realizes in the moment that she seems to have been planning to die all along, and she enjoys the same thrill of death and dissolution that Anna explored in the black notebook; this is the first thing besides Paul that can get her to sleep.

Although Ella is perhaps disappointed to survive, her psychological near-death experience truly does redirect her attention away from Paul. Cy Maitland is completely unlike Ella: proudly unsophisticated and childish, full of energy but deeply boring, professionally successful but personally unremarkable. Curiously, whereas Paul was a psychiatrist, Cy is a brain surgeon, which perhaps makes him an appropriate next step for Ella: his work is still to fix broken minds, but in a much more intrusive way that requires a much less sophisticated picture of human psychology than Paul’s.

Ella seems totally comfortable with Cy because his “savagery” makes him emotionally unthreatening; she is even tempted to read a nonexistent subtlety into his actions in order to give him the benefit of the doubt. Her inability to reduce herself to “a simple succession of statements” (whereas Cy happily describes himself in a few sentences) reflects her sense of complex and fluid identity, her insistence on discovering herself and progressing rather than defining herself as one thing (like Richard in Free Women).

Ella is clearly experimenting with Cy, trying to remain as anonymous as possible and invest as little emotionally as possible; Cy’s lack of subtlety and sexual clumsiness border on the absurd, which makes this easy. He has the naivety Ella has lost—but it now looks ridiculous to her, especially in light of his supposedly happy marriage. Ella’s realization that she is “giving pleasure,” taking an active rather than receptive role in sex, offers her a sense of power and control with Cy that she always lacked with other men. Even if she has no future with Cy, her affair with him can still be a means to her independence. They both “use” each other to meet their needs, but without injuring one another—which, so far, is a rarity in this novel.

Ella finds Cy’s wife unfathomable not only because she is satisfied with his brutishness but, more importantly, because he declares that her happiness is simply about the things she has in life—and not at all about what she feels, accomplishes, is, or loves. To Ella, this reeks of inauthenticity: Cy and his wife appear to be living out someone else’s checklist rather than pursuing authentic happiness, which always depends on a person’s specific interests, needs, and character.

Even though Cy declares that he wants to become a senator, he is scarcely able to explain his political beliefs or express what he disdains about communism. He appears interested in politics because it offers him power, rather than because it would allow him to improve the world, and represents the mindset that turns so many political leaders (communists as well as capitalists) into impotent, droning bureaucrats.

Leucotomies, or lobotomies, are a surgical process that separates the frontal lobe from the rest of the brain and destroys patients’ complex functions and personality, effectively reducing them to the mental function of a child. Cy’s job ironically points to his own childishness and inability to think for himself, but also suggests that he is complicit in the social repression of women: a sizable majority of lobotomy patients were women deemed “hysterical” by their families and husbands, often because they sought to defy traditional gender roles.

While Ella enjoys her time with Cy, his childishness and sexual clumsiness still mostly remind her of the satisfying relationship she used to have with Paul.

Michael’s indifference frightens Anna: he seems to feel nothing after asking whether their relationship might be over and appears to value Anna only for the “great love affair” she gave him, not at all as an individual. They both see her identity as defined in terms of him, and when she tries to break free from him by thinking for herself, he insists that she cannot access the truth—this implies that Anna’s relentless search for the truth of her identity and experience in the blue notebook is in large part driven by her need to prove him wrong, to learn to trust her own judgment above Paul’s.

Anna’s quest to capture an entire day in fine detail is both a new attempt to capture the real truth and a direct homage to James Joyce, who used a version of this format for his epic novel, Ulysses.

Anna has trouble reconciling not only her knowledge that her relationship with Michael is collapsing with her feelings of intimacy and affection, but also the pain he has endured with the man she knows so well. She runs up against the limits of her empathy, but Michael also clearly has little empathy for Anna’s competing obligations to care for him and Janet.

Anna’s silent frustration at her position and hope that Janet will never have to live like her reflect how women’s daily work to sustain and care for those around them gets taken for granted and ignored in a society that primarily values men’s economic labor—which, after World War II, relies on the support of myriad unappreciated women in the workplace. Michael is so accustomed to being served by women that he does not consider their efforts or perspectives. Anna sees how her varying obligations lead to the split in her personality, but prefers this split to the chaos of trying to incorporate the different parts of herself. Sex is mechanical and impersonal, with Michael seemingly using Anna’s body (and her not much enjoying it), the precise opposite of Ella’s sex with Cy Maitland. The crying baby through the wall—like the ones Anna and Max encountered in Africa—represents the ostensibly healthy, functional families that nameless others seem to enjoy—but no character in this book can.

Michael acknowledges Anna’s labor only because she performs it expertly, but does not question whether it is right for her to cater to his every need. He at once expects this labor from her and admonishes her for becoming nothing other than his support—it is increasingly unclear what, if anything, Anna gets out of their relationship.

Anna even dresses and shops for Michael, rather than for herself, despite realizing how little he values her. Notably, she experiences fatigue and irritation only when she notices her bloodstain, as though out of obligation—similarly, the “practical treadmill” of the daily grind blocks her off from feeling by structuring her time around obligations to others.

Anna’s reference to James Joyce’s Ulysses comments not only on the transgressive nature of expressing the inelegant parts of human life through the medium of literature but also on the form she has extended from Joyce, which forces everything (including crudeness) into the frame of a story: the attempt to capture the totality of a day, a prototypical day that in turn stands for the totality of human experience.

Anna is torn between the sense in which the Party is one of the only social spaces where ideas have power and people like John’s blind commitment to particular ideas, at the expense of questioning and improving those ideas. Whereas the Mashopi Hotel group (besides Willi) was so flexible in its ideology that it never took political action, the Party’s rigid ideology prevents John from even taking new ideas seriously. Jack is the closest foil to Anna’s own perspective on the relationship between ideas and politics—his optimism about the Party’s future does not seem like the product of ideological difference, but rather a difference in basic faith.

Anna’s work at the Party is unpaid, much like women’s work in the home. Furthermore, despite getting her labor for free, the Party does not seem to appreciate her contributions. The Party not only absorbs critics by, say, turning John from a freethinking revolutionary into a dogmatic bureaucrat—it is also in the process of doing this to her, and she recognizes the arbitrariness of who ends up in which “role,” defending or attacking an institution one nevertheless believes in. Of course, Anna is already anxiously trying to efface a part of herself—her period, the unseemly baggage of her femininity—in order to fit into the Party.

In the Party, as in Michael’s life, Anna is called to faithfully play a role and never step out of line, rather than genuinely expressing her individual feelings and personality; again, she becomes a pawn in men’s symbolic struggles for power, usually with themselves. It is unclear whether John disdains Anna’s success or her class status, but his indifference to her critiques—even though her job was to critique the books—recalls the television writers’ indifference to the intent and themes of Anna’s art, which they value only for its potential success as a cultural commodity.

The “myth” seems to be just like the one Anna earlier realized she needed to believe in to stay in the Party, or the ones that appeared in her dreams about the Soviet Union as a giant red fabric: a faith in the absolute truth and future potency of one’s ideas, which is tied to the sometimes dangerous (but often politically necessary) desire to dissolve the current order of things. Anna’s search for genuine feeling is what drives her attempts to capture her truth in the notebooks. While Frontiers of War was borne of Anna’s strong feelings about love, war, and dissolution, she used the novel to displace her feelings through a completely imagined story rather than expressing and confronting them directly in the book—which is what she seems to believe good art must do.

Years after publishing her novel, unable to write anything else, Anna is much more a critic and theorist of art than an artist; but she recognizes that criticism, too, requires the creative energy that she has lost (as represented by her stammer). Her desire for communal art represents her search for communion with others in a world increasingly fragmented and dominated by individual self-interest. Yet it also seems to contrast with her search for art borne of “genuine personal feeling.”

Just as Anna recognizes the arbitrariness in the roles of revolutionary and bureaucrat (as Michael and Jack) she sees an arbitrariness in her own split between the reluctant loyalist who needs the Party for intellectual sustenance and political hope and the cynic who loses all faith in the Party’s potential. She is capable of considering the two opposite dimensions of herself together but recognizes that the emotional strength in this self-awareness also prevents her from acting. Her sense that language is inadequate to represent the horrors of authoritarian repression, of course, reflects her loss of faith in art and writing—but also the increasingly unbridgeable gap between thought and action, ideas and reality.

Ironically enough, Anna feels a severe sense of alienation from her work—which is the classic Marxist critique of labor under capitalism—even though she is working for the Communist Party. Anna’s letter-writing work is clearly the basis for her character Ella’s job at the Women at Home magazine in the yellow notebook; most of the terrible manuscripts she receives reflects people’s blind faith in the communist myth—a faith, it seems, that they use in order to cope with the misery of their daily lives, which resembles the misery of the housewives whom Ella advises. However, these manuscripts are also borne of people’s true convictions, which calls into question what Anna means when she calls for art borne out of “genuine feeling.” Rose Latimer, who notably shares a name with Mr and Mrs Lattimer from the black notebook, appears to share this naïve faith.

Jack’s scholarship—which is unpublishable because it conflicts with the communist myth—can only express a truth in private, precisely as Anna feels unable for most of the book to express her true experiences outside her hidden notebooks. Having a historically appropriate consciousness—a key belief in communism, which thinks that revolutionaries must combine a transhistorical understanding of power with a sensitivity to the present time’s best routes to revolution—means being split, and so Rose Latimer’s wholeness seems to reflect her narrow-mindedness. Science’s success seems to make wholeness impossible not only because it gives people knowledge about themselves that seems to conflict with normal intuitions about identity based on the division between body and mind—people are at once bundles of molecules and conscious, moral beings—but also because of the global catastrophe it promises through the development of nuclear weapons and events of global war.

While Anna pursues her political beliefs and fight for women’s liberation at the office, as soon as she gets home, she returns to a stereotyped woman’s role, organizing her life around Michael and Janet. Anna ends Janet’s day by turning her life into a story, much like she packages her own experiences into fiction—with a clear beginning, end, plotline, and message—in order to cope with her actual uncertainty and frustrations. Of course, this novel’s break with that usual form reflects Lessing’s attempt to create unity without blocking out a dimension of the self—just as Anna seeks to do in her conversation with Jack.

Anna’s final job of the day is her first labor of feeling, although it requires her to explain away her other feelings as learned, mechanical reactions to the world rather than genuine responses to her particular situation. 

While Molly’s pessimism gives her clear insight into Anna’s life, she is distraught to hear the same cynical perspective from Tommy’s girlfriend. Whereas Tommy worked in the mines temporarily and takes pride among his bourgeois family and acquaintances in his momentary status as a worker, the true working class never wins the same recognition, which suggests that, as a leftist, he is using them instrumentally rather than truly fighting on their behalf (much like his academic girlfriend or, of course, Anna and Molly themselves). Molly’s question about “purity”—in other words, whether anyone can ever exclusively act for the common good and not for self-interest—is clearly also a question about her and Anna’s participation in politics.

The only part of her day that Anna enjoyed—cooking for Michael—proves fruitless; he knows that she would have cooked for him but refuses to recognize the emotional significance of their dinner to her or imagine the energy that Anna must have invested into it. She sees Michael standing her up in this instance as proof of the entire relationship’s failure, both because she is writing retrospectively and because the gap between them is so profound.

Not only have Anna’s dinner and relationship with Michael failed; she also sees her attempt at writing the precise truth of her internal monologue as a failure, somehow too subjective to capture the truth of experience. So she replaces it with a dry, objective account of just the facts, which clearly seems to miss the subjective truth of fiction.