Hello all! I just have one review for you today but it’s “a doozie”!
Doris Lessing, Shikasta (1979) - Doris Lessing has been a favorite writer of mine for a while. She exists now in a reputational category a few of the twentieth century greats live in: literate people often know her name and have the vague idea she’s supposed to be cool/great, you can find her stuff in used bookstores, every now and again someone mentions getting into The Golden Notebook, but I don’t think she gets a lot of sustained attention, now. This seems, roughly, to be the fate of the big time white women writers from her era who didn’t become TERFs or some other way attract obloquy, and weren’t easily-marketable enough to become cheaply iconic ala Plath. Making a biopic of her would be like making a biopic of Van Morrison, except maybe inverted. The Van Morrison biopic would consist of however Hollywood can try to dramatize making music, sometimes transcendent, sometimes schlock in Morrison’s case, and then long stretches of Van being a mean, alienating, prematurely-old guy in a non-cinematic way. Lessing had a bit more incident in her life – life in a late stage settler colony (Rhodesia), leaving multiple husbands and sometimes children, involvement with Communism, disenchantment from Communism – but mostly, the story is of people and institutions disappointing her until she’s just this self-contained old lady, the kind who becomes lightly YouTube famous in her eighties for reacting with casual derision when told she won the Nobel prize. I mean, I’d watch either movie, but I’m not the main audience for these things.
Hell, I came across Lessing’s name by coincidence, from two sources I read a lot around the time I was in college: Tony Judt, and more importantly, John Dolan. For Judt, Lessing was one of his “travelers in the century,” which usually meant, “ex-communists who criticized the left but didn’t become such screaming reactionaries that their prose suffered for it.” If Judt wrote extensively about her, though, I missed it- maybe the strain of putting Lessing in the same conceptual room as Arthur “just the one confirmed date rape” Koestler would have been too much for the old guy to pull off in long form. Dolan didn’t write extensively about Lessing, either, but referred to her positively a few times, at a time when I was basically running down any author he recommended. I’m lucky- lucky he’s one of the people, along with Tom Frank, I really attached myself to as a fledgling nerd and so got a lot of good book recommendations, and lucky this happened either before the technologies of parasocial fandom had advanced to the point where I really could have embarrassed myself with a substantial public by aping his style, or (ironically) before I had the social ability to use the technologies that were present for that kind of thing (forums like SA or 4chan, twitter, etc). Lucky me! I got a copy of The Golden Notebook and have been steadily working my way through Lessing’s work ever since.
Shikasta, published in that year of years 1979, marks Lessing’s turn towards science fiction. This was both a bold move, as her somewhat defensive introduction makes clear, and something that was in the offing, culturally. It’s not quite right to say that late twentieth century literature accepted science fiction. There was always a good amount of resistance, even if it was increasingly, if you will, passive resistance. Let’s put it this way: the attempted rapprochement between speculative and literary fiction undertaken by figures as various as Doris Lessing, Kurt Vonnegut, and Kathy Acker took place under the basic assumption that literature, in the broadest sense of the word, matters, and that science fiction dealt with things that matter, and, therefore, should be incorporated into literature. To the extent we have such a rapprochement now, it is mostly on the idea that literature doesn’t really matter, and neither does science fiction, so why not just throw some scifi dystopian tropes or time travel or whatever into your fiction, if you’re otherwise in the marketing category called “literary fiction”? Or, why not get some cheap heat by denouncing that kind of move? As Mark Corrigan put it, “Who knows what these things were once used for? Who the hell even cares?” For the late century writers, embracing speculative fiction was a leap. For writers today, it’s an insouciant shrug. There’s benefits to that – you shouldn’t have to leap! – but…
Well… if Lessing treated the Nobel with something like an insouciant shrug, it wasn’t because nothing mattered to her. The whole goddamned planet and human condition mattered to her, for the entirety of her long life. And there lay the problem. She seemed to be born with the conviction that things were just… off, that there had to be something more than what was on offer. It didn’t help she was raised to be, at best, a decorative item for some settler psycho to keep in his house, but even when she escaped that, even when she seriously undertook efforts to fix things in herself and her world, she kept running across the same stumbling blocks: greed, lust for power, small-mindedness. She combined this sense of wrongness with an almost unmatched capacity to express these things in writing, and the courage and determination to do so throughout her life, no matter what the cost.
“What if there was a whole space civilization of Doris Lessings doing ancient aliens shit on Earth, but always getting foiled?” would be the rude version of describing Shikasta. In writing it, Lessing followed in the tradition of other British writers who placed human existence in a vast galactic evolutionary time frame, such as H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon (and which I’d say includes such figures who came after Lessing as Iain Banks). We get the story of the whole damn thing, of the existence of Earth aka Shikasta, from the point of view of a series of bureaucrats, agents of the Canopean Empire. Canopus, it seems, has things more or less figured out, how to exist in celestial harmony. They learned the proper way to arrange everything from their geographic arrangements to personal behavior into a kind of feng shui, where they could channel the ineffable spiritual emanantions of the stars into positive energy flows that ensure a constant upward evolution into peace and understanding.
This sounds like hippie bullshit. Whatever Doris Lessing was, she was no hippie. Narrow is the gate and strait is the way, to use the sort of biblical language she might not like. Not only must the individual live right, but so must the society, and even the planet, and even if the planet does everything right – arranges itself in such a way as to take on the energy of the stars and also the positive energy Canopus channels – if the stars don’t align right, you are shit out of luck. And this is basically what happens to Earth. Canopus did a whoopsie. They started a colony there, transplanting members of a species of friendly giants who had already basked in the glow of good Canopus vibes for thousands of years to shepherd the local critters into developing intelligence, on the idea it could become a full member of Canopus, in due time. The Canopeans did this before realizing that some celestial event they didn’t predict would, much sooner than anticipated, block their vibes from getting here. Moreover, it would put Earth/Shikasta right in the zone to receive vibes from a mean planet, Shammat. Shammat is a parasite planet, as dedicated to setting planets to give off bad vibes for themselves to feed off as Canopus is to good vibes.
There’s a lot of affecting moments in this book, but some of the most wrenching were the descriptions relayed by Canopean agents of what it was like explaining to the giants and their human wards what was happening, that, more or less, they were going to lose much of their intelligence and moral sense and there was nothing to do about it, and then seeing this happen. The great stone cities, arranged in such a way to channel the celestial vibrations, fall to ruin, the humans forget everything they were taught and scatter about the Earth, those giants who don’t evacuate when the Canopeans send ships (I’m not sure why the humans couldn’t also evacuate? I guess something about not being ready, or something?) go insane. Everyone becomes physically smaller and lives shorten drastically- Lessing has prelapsarian humans at about eight feet tall and living for five hundred years. Moreover, they become dumber, meaner. They take on Shammat vibes, and human history as we know it begins.
Lessing structured this novel as extracts from the archives of the Canopean colonial service: reports, and sometimes materials gathered from Earth. The Canopeans keep trying over the long millennia of human history to keep Earth/Shikasta from completely destroying itself. Canopean agents incarnate themselves into human bodies, often enough forgetting who they are, where they came from, and why they’re there. We got a lot of scenes from “Zone 6,” a kind of bardo where Canopean agents go before incarnating, and where the souls of giants (and maybe humans?) ready themselves to go back down and try to ascend again, past Zone 6 and to some other higher spiritual plane (seems a bit rough to make them do it that way, but that’s reincarnation schemes for you). Enough Canopean agents retain enough capacity to nurture goodness, intelligence, and SWOF (“substance-of-we-feeling,” the ability to perceive and act on higher good than self-interest)... only to find most of their efforts destroyed or curdled. Civilizations full of SWOF get felled by competitors full of Shammat-esque will to power. Canopeans start scores of religious and philosophical movements, only to come back again for another shift on the jumping dirt and see those self-same religions among the most savagely regressive institutions a mere generation or two later. Many of the reports back to Canopus include requests by the agent who wrote them not to be sent back to Earth/Shikasta. For them, our planet was basically Hell.
Matters come to a head in the twentieth century. Lessing, by this time in her life (she would have been nearing sixty when writing this), did not like pretty much anything about this century. Her father was a maimed WWI veteran, and she lived through WWII. She experienced the Cold War, and the disappointments of “actual existing Communism” and trying to support it from abroad. She disdains the waste of the postwar years for good reasons (environmental degradation) and bad (British intellectual disdain for consumer culture, especially as enjoyed by the lower orders). Technological advance and intellectual stultification seem to go hand in hand. Pretty much the only thing Lessing seems to like about the century is that a few people take the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence more seriously, but even that gets mocked by the “bigoted” scientific establishment.
The back half of the book is mostly about a family where some Canopean agents get incarnated into in the late twentieth century. Lessing’s prognostications are… interesting. A lot of it is the logic of the early Cold War extended ad infinitum. Everything escalates: wars, ecological damage, ideological ferocity. Things just get shittier and shittier, the way a society constantly under the threat of WWII-style (but worse) war would- rationing, surveillance, casual brutality are the order of the day even in the societies not undergoing open war. Lessing would not have been the type fooled by the seeming thaw of the 1960s, or she’d have reason to think that way, with the Cold War heating up again as she wrote. Among other things, with the distrust of ideological groupings she inherited from her bad time with Rhodesian and British Communists, she had little but contempt for the New Left, and clearly groups like Baader Meinhof left an impression on her. Their violence was bad enough, but the groupthink (to borrow a term from another, in my opinion somewhat lesser, light of the twentieth century array of ideology-critics), the sloganeering, the restless pursuit of meaningless victory… that really got Lessing’s goat. She sees a late twentieth century dominated by “Youth Armies,” where youth movements around the world coalesce into armies that intimidate the states into channeling their welfare monies through them. They all claim one or another ideology, and all of them are bunk, opportunities for posturing as they pilfer. Everyone knows things are going to come to a head, likely a world-ending one, and no one seems able to do anything about it.
The Sherbans, the family Lessing’s Canopeans incarnate into, are a classic Lessing family- brilliant oddballs who love and hate each other, getting into massive fights over nebulous expressions of value. The most Canopean of the three, middle brother George, gets involved in Youth Army politics. This alienates the main perspective-Sherban, younger sister Rachel. Even with everything they have, the Canopean way they were raised by caring and intelligent parents and whatever juice the mother planet can send, the Sherbans hit on tragedy upon atrocity, all so George can be there to help arrange a show trial that goes better for earth than expected, and to try to find a genetically-diverse range of people with a sense of SWOF to find a good place to hide out when WWIII hits… just before whichever celestial activity Canopus didn’t account for, all those millennia ago, ceases, and the beam of good Canopus energy hits again.
Let’s talk about the show trial. It was a weird and risky move on Lessing’s part, having this set piece towards the end of her big move into scifi (less risky than it would be thirty years later), and I think it pays off. The closest Lessing comes to respecting any of the late twentieth century’s political actor is the grudging respect she gives Red China, post-Cultural-Revolution. She despises America, has no time for the USSR, thinks Europe and Britain are pretentious dead ends, and sees the decolonial movements as right to overthrow the colonizers but as otherwise a dead end… but China, at least, seems able to play the game somewhat competently. They’re sinister, but smart and relatively reasonable, in prime position to take over most of Eurasia after feckless left-leaning governments and the “Youth Armies” who bully them break down. But even the new Maoist masters of the continent get bullied, this time by the rest of the third world bloc, into forcing the confederated Youth Armies into doing a show trial for the white race. Thanks to arrangements by the Sherbans, the show trial is a mess… but it doesn’t result in the people of color in the world killing off the whities while Europe is down (where white Americans are in all this is hard to say- I think Lessing only talks about America when absolutely pressed).
Lessing and racial politics! What to make of it? Here we run into the difficulties related to memetics in the early twenty-first century, something Lessing could have made a meal if she were born fifty years later and could avoid throwing her hand in in disgust. Someone who wrote this plot anytime after 2008 or so would be assumed to be a white nationalist. “White genocide” is arguably the monomyth of the contemporary white nationalist/supremacist movement- the idea that all everyone non-white (and the Jews, and their allies the supposedly self-hating whites) want to do is just kill the Boer all day long. And it’s in the process of swallowing conservatism whole… maybe taking on some conservative characteristics to pretty it up when it comes out the other side, but still. We also can’t get around Canopus’ resemblance to an idealized version of the British Empire, in the twilight of which Lessing was reared. They’ve got the standard – something called The Signature is literally a life-saver, a symbol of Canopus’ universal validity that its agents can sometimes wield to get out of trouble – and everyone had better meet it, especially when Canopus extends its friendly, civilizing hand.
We reduce ideas to memes for a lot of reasons, one of which is that people have such information overload that they need quick heuristics with which to sort things and make decisions. In this case, a memetic reading – “Doris Lessing wrote a novel about space imperialists based vaguely on the British Colonial Office using galactic vibe magic to stop white genocide from happening” – isn’t even a lie, as many memes are… but it’s also a misrepresentation of the whole artifact. For one thing, the way the show trial fixes the situation is by George Sherban, representing the people of color (he has an Indian grandparent), letting the case go forward, getting out all of the bad shit the whites did… and which not only the defense, another Canopean agent, absolutely refuses to argue against, but Lessing doesn’t either. The whites did it- they’re guilty. But Lessing (and the defense attorney, and by implication the surviving Sherbans) says… now what? Well, it turns out, the PoC of the world don’t actually really want to kill off the whites. They don’t want to do the same stuff that the whites did to them. Shammat, the mean planet, is trying to get them to do it, and given the collapsing ecosystem, they have more of an argument than they might otherwise… but still. Especially given that WWIII is looming, it’s not worth it, if it ever was.
For another thing, Lessing doesn’t want the white saved because they’re good, let alone better than anyone else. She, and the Canopeans, want them saved for two reasons: one, general avoidance of human suffering; two, they want as broad a sample of human genes (modifying which had been a long-term project for the Canopeans, their giant pals, and a friendly rival space civilization we see on the edges and which later novels in this series get into) to survive so they can rebuild once the stars align right. One thing Lessing does not do is sentimentality, and certainly not sentimentality about whiteness, which she was immersed in from birth and which she ran away from as soon, fast, and far as she could. Her take on whiteness does not partake of the breakdown of the concept of race that came to prominence in critical circles in the years after this book came out. She is altogether more on the “nature” side of these things than is currently popular. But, she shows that being on that side (which I am generally not) does not always mean you’re an idiot and a bigot.
As for a potential softness towards the British imperial model… well, again, it’s complicated, but clearly, Lessing has some real loathing for the empire, even if she does not dismiss what looks to us like imperialist paternalism. Shikasta includes some of the better depictions of how awful imperialism is, specifically British imperialism (and specifically including Ireland, the biggest blind spot for many British leftists and critics of empire), that I’ve read anywhere. The short memoirs of one Irish sergeant… oof. One of the speeches at the show trial is from a Matabele inhabitant of Lessing’s home country, Zimbabwe, who related both the history of how the settlers destroyed the Matabele way of life, and how the “mother country,” Britain, had it within its powers – within its statutory obligations, supposedly – to protect the Matabele and other black Africans from the settlers, and just… didn’t. They forgot.
Now, this is an interesting claim. It’s one of the hooks for the global refusal to degenerate into race war- that forgetfulness is such a pathetic, and universally human, vice, that race war wasn’t worth it. It’s also, shall we say, highly debatable, in real life, this attribution of Britain’s neglect of its “responsibility to protect,” to borrow a phrase, to forgetfulness. Why would Lessing, by no means someone who likes imperialism or loves the British as a people, go in for this claim?
Well, maybe I’m being an overly-forgiving “fan,” but I think it’s pretty clearly meant to be a metaphor for what happens for when people are out of phase with the universal sense of good Lessing sees as both motivating the universe and as being in tragically short supply on her and our home planet… and maybe for Canopus, too. Maybe these self-described ultimate avatars of harmony, peace, and intelligence, for all that they’re demonstrably better than Shammat-dominated Earth, aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Maybe they should have done their celestial math better! Maybe they could have come up with another plan to save Shikasta/Earth its misery! Maybe they slipped. Maybe they forgot, like the British Empire (as depicted by a Zimbabwean “youth army” chieftainess, and part of the point of the youth armies is they don’t respect the past or history so maybe she’s not as informed as she might be). They’re certainly rather stiff-necked and humorless. Lessing’s work in general isn’t exactly laff-a-minute stuff, whatever else is good about it, but this one is grimmer than usual, and she could usually find a little more humor in the blackness in earlier works. I wonder if this is her, or Canopus? I guess we’ll find out when other space civilizations come up in the sequels.
In any event, the idea here isn’t that Lessing meets all of our ideas of the good, in this novel about the good trying to preserve itself. Among other things, while Lessing displays clear disgust for the hierarchies that govern our world, she is not so egalitarian as to reject the idea of a hierarchy of intelligence and culture. It’s just that human culture is so backwards and violent that human hierarchies aren’t worth taking seriously. There is a galactic hierarchy, and we are close to the bottom. It’s not entirely our fault, but then, on this kind of a scale, with such overweening powers as Canopus and Shammat that can warp minds and time over interstellar distances… well, maybe the later books will complicate the picture, but yes, Virginia, we can come closer or further from the universal good, as far as Canopus/Lessing is concerned. We can learn, or regress, from the universal way. These books, along with being Lessing’s turn to scifi, also, I’m told, reflect her interest in Sufism. I don’t know enough about Sufism to say much about it, but I do know a little about perennialism and I think Lessing at least flirts with a soft version of that. Like I said, it’s not that she’s especially woke, or especially un-woke. She’s just good, even when she’s wrong about stuff. A good writer, a thoughtful person, a whole person, worth reading.
One last thing I found myself thinking while reading this… you can argue that the powers that be of our world have dedicated most of their power to avoiding the on-Earth situation Lessing projects into the end of the twentieth century, whilst retaining their power. They did a lot to keep things from feeling as small, itchy, harassed, and overheated between 1979 and the end of the millennium as Lessing’s world feels. It probably helps that the Soviet elite was considerably more cautious than everyone thought they were, to the point where they let their empire fall about fifteen years after this without firing a shot. The Chinese elite also turned out to be more interested in developing their country than they were in ideological fervor, and Lessing was also right about the developing world generally being more into living than into revenge (even as the white countries continue to give them reason for the latter!). The capitalist elite came up with enough boondoggles and toys to keep everybody distracted and the money flowing, had enough cops to sequester the inconvenient, and got enough cooperation from everyone else, to buy a few precariously stable decades.
It was enough so that the final crisis of Shikasta feels like our time emotionally – an endless churn of horrible bullshit we can’t seem to do anything about, and Lessing really nailed the enervating feeling that comes with this state of affairs – even while its individual features are obviously dated. Like a lot of people who experienced the world wars, Lessing can only see information technology as a tool of war, and of war as all-out, total war, so she couldn’t see the promise and the damage that the internet (as presently construed) delivers. Lessing has the old all but literally eaten by the young, where we’re seeing something like the reverse, now. Those decades of fake “peace” really did a number on our way of fighting and surviving, from Lessing’s perspective. But some of the fundamental dynamics…
Well. It’s not great! Though I will say, I part from Lessing- unless and until some higher power can plainly explain why it’s so great, why we should model ourselves after them, and why if all that’s the case they let us suffer so long, I will take human flourishing, on our silly little planet, as the measure. My idea of this flourishing is reasonably close to Lessing’s, and if… intergalactic Sufi Imperialist psychic aliens… want to help out, great! Maybe I just haven’t had Lessing’s disillusionment happen to me yet… and maybe I’m not a mean Brit and can play better with others. Definitely, I can’t write like Lessing, though, so she’s got me there. I loved this book, and look forward to the sequel, maybe chowing down on all five in reasonably quick succession.
Doris also loved cats! A woman of good taste.