Briefing for a Descent into Hell: An Inner Space Fiction

Briefing for a Descent into Hell:An Inner Space Fiction

Doris Lessing ‘s new novel,Briefing for a Descent into Hell, is an interior infinite fiction. It is an uncomparably tickle pinking journey into the fantastic, horrifying, undiscovered yet sometimes glimpsed district of the interior adult male. It was published in the twelvemonth 1971.

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Professor Charles Watkins ( Classics ) , meant to whirl continuously in the currents of the Atlantic, makes a landfall at last on a tropical shore. He determines a reined rock metropolis, take part – moon-dazed – in bloody rites in the paradisaical wood, witnesses the barbarous war of the Rat-dogs and is borne on the dorsum of the august White Bird across the sea of the dead. Finally, the Crystal claims him, twirling him out into infinite on a breathtaking cosmic journey.

Yet this most unusual of trips is as steadfastly rooted in the actuality of a mental dislocation as De Quincey’s phantasies were in the chemical science of opium. Watkins is a patient of Central Intake Hospital, a enigma to the physicians who try with of all time more powerful drugs to stamp down his heads geographic expedition a campaigner for electric daze intervention. In a series of extraordinary letters – brightly lighting both the authors and their capable – Watkins is restructured by those who have known him: the disregarded adult females who have loved him, or been aroused by him ; the pendent, incensed by his rational confusion ; the wartime co-worker around whose feats with the Yugoslav zealots. Watkins builds an amazing phantasy. This ambitious novel of lunacy and release was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

To get down with we know nil of this adult male, Charles Watkins, and nor can we cognize anything. He is an mystery, a adult male who has wholly lost his memory and who does non react to any medical intervention. We are taken into his head as he tries himself, to bring out the key to his being, but all is confusion. We are told a series of narratives, all apparently his ain reminiscences, all sensible, all refering this character, and yet this character is non the Charles Watkins the physicians think he is. Or possibly he is, but he is person or something else every bit good. This survey of lunacy and disaffection, takes up the first half of the novel. It examines the job of endurance which is in footings of dialectic between the split and integrity charting man’s interior universe of consciousness every bit good as the outside existence.

Charles Watkins is the supporter of this novel who is a professor of Classicss at Cambridge with a married woman and two boies. He undergoes a dislocation which is because of the force per unit area to retrieve the contents of the disregarded ‘brain print’ of the message of cosmic integrity, while life in outer world of the universe which is characterized by atomization, force, war and obliteration.

Watkins takes a Laingian journey into interior infinite in an attempt to retrieve something he has forgotten. In this manner he is purportedly conveying a Sufi truth. In the class of his journey we learn that the ‘gods’ had chosen him to be one of the ‘descents’ , that is one of the Sufis put on Earth “to maintain alive, in any manner possible, the cognition that humanity, with its fellow animals, the animate beings and workss, make up a whole, are a integrity, have a map in the whole system as an organ or organism.” ( 120 )

This cognition has been and will go on to be conveyed to the “Descents” non merely through any drawn-out “briefing” because they would bury in the words, but instead through “ encephalon printing” so that harmonizing to the Gods “you’ll find it at that place, when you need it” ( 125 )

Therefore Watkins is incognizant of the exact nature of his hunt and yet he knows he feels guilty because he has forgotten something. Later we find that he is urgently seeking to retrieve the Sufi cognition printed within his encephalon. He finally fails to recover this information because two insensitive head-shrinkers refuse to let him to make what he believes will let him to “remember” and so complete his journey. As representatives of the societal order, they see him as an amnesic who must be made to remember something rather different- his absurd functions as thankless hubby, male parent, lover and colleague the head-shrinkers recommended him for daze interventions which was the lone remedy for him. These dazes put him in touch non with the interior power but with the insane societal being with which he had many uncertainties in the yesteryear. Surely the head-shrinkers have hindered him in making his end while he was kept in the infirmary. For case, he recalls his mission:

It’s cognizing Harmony. God’s jurisprudence. That’s what it is. Let me cognize…

Let me… I must… allow me acquire up-the physician tells him, Now, now, Shhhhhh, don’t get excited, there’s a good fellow. ( 125 )

These physicians enforce obeisance and normalcy which is, in fact, lunacy, upon those who seem huffy and who are basically entirely in their attempts to re-establish contact with what is sane. Like others, these physicians are trained and socialized to defy and quash the lone cognition that can forestall what Lessing calls the onset “catastrophe.”

Watkins is Lessing’s most identifiably “schizophrenic” character. R.D Laing, an experiential phenomenologist, whose cardinal hypothesis is that the psychotic dislocation manifested in acute schizophrenic disorder is a natural procedure of mind-healing which is followed to run to its full class, will be curative instead than destructive. Following Bateson and others Laing depict the “inner infinite journey’ of the schizophrenic inThe Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradiseas follows:

The individual who has entered this interior kingdom will happen himself traveling or being conducted on a journey. The journey is experienced as traveling farther “in” as traveling back through one’s personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all world, of the cardinal adult male, of Adam, and possibly even further into the being of animate beings, veggies and minerals. In this journey there are many occasions to lose one’s ain manner, for confusion, partial failure, even concluding shipwreck: many panics, liquors, devils to be encountered that may or may non be overcome. ( 104 )

Charles Watkins chiefly finds himself at sea, metaphorically proposing the nature of his personal crisis every bit good as the constituent that symbolizes the beginning of single and corporate. Robert S. Ryf has likewise described the circle motive as both a structural and a thematic organisation within the work named “Beyond Ideology: Doris Lessings’ mature vision” inModern Fiction Surveies. It is explained as his “anti-clockwise” way and his demand to see a birth in contrary suggests the circulative nature of his journey backward both in clip and in the development of his ain consciousness as he tries to turn up the Centre of his being.

He is the typical mariner merely like Odysseus, Sindbad, Jason, Jonah, lost in a ship that is occupied temporarily by a unusual spiritual visible radiation called the Crystal that includes his shipmates but leaves him behind.

While the interior infinite ocean trip traces the narrator’s consecutive attempts to make the crystal once more, it symbolically summarizes the corporate history of life on Earth. The cardinal character is recognized as the first life beings emerging from the substance as they become land animals ; the psychological and religious analogue is the outgrowth of human consciousness and its growing towards enlightenment and completeness. In the novel, development is conceived as a double procedure, both religious and biological ; in each model growth summarizes evolution. Watkins accomplishes the evolutionary measure from sea to set down within his experiential world, with the aid of a mahimahi.

Once on land, he begins a self-generated communicating with two soft cat-like animals who guide him over an obvious draw in his upward ascent. It is organized in a circle/ square constellation proposing a sacred dimension. Subsequently the houses are perceptibly “turned inwards, to the Centre, ” and the metropolis itself seems to let the cardinal character’s presence as if besides possessed of consciousness.

At foremost the ancient Eden-like ambiance of the surrounding is emphasized on his landing:

As if this was the state where ill will or disfavor had non yet born free… it had good pure H2O, a clime in which grew every kind of flower and vegetable… I found a tree had aromatic foliage.I stripped off armfuls of foliages… with them I made a deep warm bed I could tunnel into in the dark turned cold. I picked some pink sweet fruit..I drank H2O — and understood that my demands as an animate being were met. I need do nil but choice fruit and gather fresh foliages when those that made my bed withered… And I need non be lone… as if this metropolis was itself a individual, or had a psyche, or being. It seemed to cognize me… I was rolling among the streets and avenues of rock as if I were among friends. ( 52-53 )

It is an image of the original harmoniousness which was disturbed by the acclivity of ego-consciousness on a higher degree. To sum up Neumann: it is the image of the heavenly Jerusalem, which corresponds to the Garden of Eden. Harmonizing to Jungian psychological science both these images are fluctuations of ‘mandala’ symbol which expresses completeness achieved through the merger of unconscious and witting. Thus the cardinal character experiences a sense of integrity and harmoniousness similar both to the province of uniform completeness in the familial individual’s personal development, and to the fanciful antediluvian pre-ego consciousness in the history of civilisation.

Androgyny is a extremist construct that would needfully revolutionise people’s lives as suggested by Lessing through her fiction. Peoples have to accept that all of us are independent and that each must be taken attention of and non regarded as ‘other’ or ‘alien.’ They have to see that human sort is dependent on nature and so people should non destruct it or foul it. Human existences would hold to comprehend themselves as portion of an organic integrity or cosmic harmoniousness, and as portion of that integrity, all barriers sing race, category or sex would hold to be eliminated. The above lines are taken from Doris Lessings’An Ancient Way to New Freedom.

During the ocean trip of interior infinite Watkins all of a sudden sees world as the Gods do: human existences, who believe themselves “normal” are in fact ‘mad’ for declining to go ‘we’ :

stating I, I, I, I, I, I, I, is their madness..for these bugs are a whole, they form a integrity, they have a individual head, a individual being, and ne’er can they state I, I, without doing the heavenly spectators roll with laughter or weep with commiseration. ( 103 )

Watkins portrays the present state of affairs and identifies that this divorce between ‘I’ and ‘we’ is quickly traveling us towards a catastrophe- the devastation of all life:

Some kind of divorce there has been someplace along the long way of this race of adult male between the ‘I’ and the ‘we, ’ some portion of awful falling off, and I ( who am non I, but portion of a whole composed of other human existences as they are of me ) vibrating here as if between the wings of a great white bird, experience as if I am whirling back… into a whirl of panic, like a birth in contrary, and it is towards a calamity. ( 103 )

Therefore to accomplish single, communal and heavenly integrity in order to turn away the nearing calamity provides the lone necessary manner of endurance.

Lessing’s subject is the consciousness which defines our world and, more significantly the narrow manner our civilized heads tend to understand both consciousness and world. In our society, mental unwellness is something to be feared, locked out of sight, and talked of merely in the passive. Lessing is demoing the reader that the visions and doctrines of the mentally sick are non – or at least, non basically or non wholly – senseless ramping or incoherent. They may, she argues, connect to another world, or another position of life: ‘If you have shaped in your head an eight-legged monster with saucer eyes, so if there is such a animal in the sea you will non see anything less, or more – that is what you are set to see.’ The proceedings of the initial subdivisions of the novel are clearly in some sense go oning to Charles Watkins, but they make no sense to the reader. They are equivocal, yet one feels, there may be a nucleus of truth – cognition – in at that place, which Watkins is fighting to make.

Lessing portrays society as a mental infirmary. She suggests how fouled up and stiffly autocratic most societal establishments are. The lone manner to get away the confines of a huffy society, she implies here, is to get away from world itself.

So the character of Charles Watkins, unable to accommodate his inner and outer infinites, is symbolic of, in Douglass Bolling’s description, ‘the loss ( possibly irreversible ) of psychic integrity by contemporary Western man.’ Peoples have, possibly, lost their traditions and, in so making, some portion of themselves. Rationalism has taken the function of mythology and Science is merely ‘the most recent religion’ . This is something with which spiritual anthropologists such as Karen Armstrong would hold. Lessing has explored the subject of endurance by charting dislocation inBriefing for a Descent intoHell.

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