Thursday, July 08, 2021

A reference to "Finnegans Wake" in Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook"

The second excerpt from Anna Wulf's "red notebook" in Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook" includes a diary entry from 11 November 1952 in which she mentions "novels about the breakdown of language, like 'Finnegans Wake'." Anna may distance herself from James Joyce's novel, but in Lessing's novel, she is the author of a novel called "Frontiers of War" and the main character of "Free Women", the "conventional short novel" (as Lessing puts it in her preface) that runs through "The Golden Notebook", interrupted by excerpts from Anna's four color-coded notebooks (black, red, yellow, and blue) and finally by the titular "golden notebook". So Anna's novels share the initials of Joyce's: FW. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 July 2021)

 

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce — Reviews, Discussion ...The Golden Notebook Buch jetzt bei Weltbild.ch online ...

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