الفهرس 
Doris Lessing’s Background,Only 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This dissertation discusses the main dimensions during Doris Lessing’s life. She was acknowledged from the very beginning as a novelist in the tradition of classical realism after that her development towards mysticism and forms of science fiction which forms verge on myth and Oriental fables. Lessing’s life is commonly divided into three phases, starting with the Communism (1944-56), and then followed by the Psychological one (1956-69), after that comes the Sufi dimension which was explored in her science fiction series and some of her other novels.
The purpose of this study is to trace the intellectual development in Lessing’s literary career, Lessing’s way of perceiving the divided self and of transforming it in an authentic precognition of human and universal quality, and to consider the unifying motifs, which provide a coherent shape to Lessing’s artistic vision in her consistent search for identity, equilibrium and wholeness. It also shows the aesthetic theories as well as the ideological and philosophical influences that have contributed to Lessing’s development, in order to establish a theoretical framework for this study. This study will follow Lessing’s development from her early realistic writing to her science fiction series, a period of over thirty years which encompasses the most dramatic changes in her writing career, through the three phases focusing on the third one ”mysticism” or ”Sufism” as Lessing used to name it and most of the critics in that time.
The introductory section is the roadmap to this dissertation. It sets the main objectives of this study and specifies the novels that the researcher will tackle. The dissertation is divided into six chapters, tackling seven novels by Lessing; covering the period from 1950 to the year 1983, which marked the completion of her science fiction series. In order to reveal the development in the protagonists’ way of understanding the self and the world, the researcher decides to follow a chronological order in the study of Lessing’s works.
Chapter One focuses on two of Lessing’s great novels; The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook. This chapter is divided into three sections as follows; section one briefly discusses Doris Lessing biography, focusing on the main events in her life and the information that are relevant to this study. In addition to the way of her life canon moved from one phase to another smoothly, as well as her masterpieces that sparkled in each time. Section two discusses the idea of Communism and its political effect on individuals as well as societies in her first novel The Grass Is Singing and presents the author’s early traditionally realistic writing focusing on her protagonist Marry Turner’s life. The researcher’s analysis of this novel shows how far the preoccupations of Lessing’s later novels find expression in this early work to establish a point of reference for her later development. The third section approaches one of her most complex novels The Golden Notebook which marks a turning point in formal structure in Lessing’s canon and discusses an ex-colonial woman Anna Wulf with her psychological state and the fragmentation that appears clearly in her different notebooks and her search for wholeness. The researcher contends to shed light on the complexity of the structure in this novel which marks it as the shiniest crystal among other crystals. This chapter examines the main theories that affected Doris Lessing at these two main phases, not only Carl Marx in the first part of her life but also it reflects her acquaintance with Sigmund Freud and R. D. Laing further in her life.
Chapter Two deals with the third phase, ”Sufism”. This chapter analyses the term Sufism and shows how writers use it in literature, and also answers all the inquiries about this term. In addition, it reveals Lessing’s exposure to a particular aspect of tasawwuf, the classical Sufi Way that has shaped her work in certain time as well as it deals with the strain of Sufism popularized in the West by Idris Shah, because it was Shah’s work that provided the link to the Sufi influence on Lessing and her literary works. The five novels selected represent this significant stage in Lessing’s life.
Chapter Three tackles The Four-Gated City, where there is a significant change in Lessing’s fictive technique in her Sufi novels, her use of teaching stories. Sufi teaching stories were originally told orally and later written down for the main purpose of transmitting Sufi faith and practice to future generations. It is one of the many ways in which Sufi elements are transmitted, and it has been one of the main tools with which Idries Shah, the great Sufi master, has taught Sufism in the West. Lessing does not only directly employ Sufi teaching stories in the dedication to, The Four-Gated City, but she also attributes Sufi or Sufi-like anecdotes to her characters in this novel. She also structures many of her narratives in the form of long tales and fables which offer enigmatic lessons that make sense in the Sufi context.
Chapter Four deals with Lessing’s novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), where Doris Lessing dwells on the issue of Platonic idealism, and her interest in Sufi philosophy, which provides a template for the protagonist’s deconstructive journey. Lessing explores the vision of charles Watkins, who is a mental patient suffering from amnesia. Lessing moves away from realism in this novel into the didactic form of an ”apologue,” which emphasizes a rhetorical message rather than the representation of experience. Lessing’s ”inner space fiction” thus represents a new direction in her structure technique.
Chapter Five discusses Lessing’s novel The Summer before the Dark, which inaugurates Lessing’s subsequent literary new phase, inspired by psychological motifs and linked to the author’s interest in Sufism. In her novel, Lessing uses the circular structure again, but this time it is with a difference. Kate Brown the protagonist of the novel takes a journey and, as she makes her geographical circuit, she mentally revisits her past, evaluates her present, and struggles to determine the possibilities of her future. During this time she has a sequence of her dream which provide her with another means of self-examination.
Chapter Six is divided into two sections and is discussed Lessing’s science fiction series, ’Canopus In Argos’, with special reference to the first and the second volumes; Re: Colonized Planet 5 Shikasta (1979) and The Marriage between Zones Three, Four, And Five (1980). In this chapter, the relevance of the science fiction genre to the theme of wholeness, equilibrium and searching for identity is studied in the light of the tale-within-tale technique of the oriental fables, since the series drives its title from Bidpai’s fables The Lights of Canopus. In section one, the researcher concentrates on Shikasta, in order to illustrate how the theme of equilibrium develops in relation to the narrative technique.
As for the second section, it concentrates on The Marriage between Zones Three, Four, And Five, in order to illustrate how this novel shifts its format from the dry reports of an agent to a fable that is influenced by Sufi mysticism and evolving levels of consciousness.
Finally this study charts and discusses Doris Lessing’s development in the context of Eastern as well as Western modes that have influenced her work, since the interaction between the two modes contributes to the understanding of her work and helps to explain many areas of misunderstanding in her canon.