Androgyny or Catastrophe: Doris Lessing\u27s Vision in the Early 1970s

Doris Lessing\u27s novels of the early 1970s offer readers a rare kind of wisdom one which has been nourished by Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, which she admires. Unlike Lessing\u27s earlier fiction which was simply influenced by the ideas of Sufism, three of her novels-Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)-are literally Sufi fables-that is, symbolic stories, each of which illuminates truth (qtd. in Shah, The Sufis 14). The Sufi truth illuminated by these novels is that life is One, and that because we have long ignored that truth, we now have an urgent choice to make between oneness and catastrophe. In these novels Lessing insists that unless we consciously and actively choose that personal wholeness and recognition of our inherent oneness with others and with nature, which I term androgyny, we shall destroy all, or almost all, of the life on this planet