The Dissolution of Walls: Trauma, Healing, and the Sufi Way in Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor

Lessing's novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974; Memoirs) has been interpreted in a variety of contexts as science fiction, as feminist fiction, and as autobiography (Park 6). Other critics tend to see the novel as signifying Lessing's transition from realistic narrative to mystic narrative. Shadia S. Fahim, for example, devoted a substantial chapter to discussing the connection between Memoirs and Sufism in her book Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium, which offers a ground-breaking early study of Lessing's debt to Sufism. Fahim argues that the novel is informed by the Sufi idea of "balance of our faculties" to achieve the "equilibrium" (85) or inner peace. While Fahim's chapter on the novel provides an insightful and informative analysis from this Sufi perspective, it is somewhat diluted by her frequent analysis of Lessing's other novels. As a result her interpretation of Memoirs is somewhat scattered and not focused.¹ I want to supplement Fahim's otherwise excellent chapter by presenting a focused analysis of Lessing's use of Sufism as a source of healing for traumas, which she continues to explore consciously after completing The Golden Notebook (1962).

Set in an unnamed city and in a period of chaos and decay brought about by an unnamed catastrophe, the characters in the novel go through trials of all kinds, and life becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible. When the novel opens, the city is almost empty with only a few residents still struggling to survive in the north side of town while others have moved out. Narrated by an unnamed woman within an ambiguous framework in which specific details such as location, time, and the background of the narrator, are omitted, the memoirs become more than a personal story. Rather, it can be seen to illustrate a Sufi allegory through the narrator's mystic and visionary excursions into "the other world," one that exhibits the healing potential of the Sufi Way through a multitude of textual symbols. Lessing's familiarity with Sufism began when she became a student of the Sufi master Idries Shah, following her completion of The Golden Notebook. It was an important period in Lessing's life, during which she felt disappointed with her earlier involvement in communism and with other western ideology like materialism.² Lessing then set out to look for a new path to salvation. She started reading books borrowed from libraries on Eastern religions and Christian mysticism and made two important discoveries: 1) "all religions and types of mysticism say the same thing in different words;" 2) "in this area one should have a guide, otherwise the journey can be dangerous" (The Doris Lessing Reader 460). The guide Lessing found is the Sufi master Idries Shah, whom Lessing sought out several times before Shah agreed to be her mentor. Shah was writing a book titled The Sufis at the time, now known as one of the seminal works on Sufism. Lessing acquired much knowledge of Sufism from Shah's book, as well as from her correspondences with Shah. Shah presents the teachings of Sufism in this book in an accessible way, touching upon many aspects of Sufism. In the chapter "The Background: The Elephant in the Dark" Shah begins with a quote from a Sufi teacher Rumi: "A man, never having seen water, is thrown blindfolded into it, and feels it. When the bondage is removed, he knows what it is. Until then he only knew it by its effect" (38). The bondage Rumi speaks about is what the Sufis see as one great obstacle to achieving the Sufi goal of "fulfillment, completion, {and} destiny" (56). In order to break that bondage, Shah says one needs "a new point of view … to overcome the conditioning which materialistic, one-sided society has imposed" (52). This new point of view will help "free the thinking from the adhesions of rigid thinking" such as the rigid thinking inherent in all kinds of "truisms" (52).

The idea of bondage and the idea of breaking free of this bondage are symbolically illustrated...