The Collectivist Self and Character as Role

In her final novel, 2007's The Cleft, Doris Lessing problematises the identification of character with physically individual being. The novel imagines an exclusively female society thousands of years in the past as it is disturbed by the birth of its first male children. Among the features the society has developed is a binding of names to roles. For instance, whoever acts as recordkeeper has the name Maire. As the reader encounters Maire, she resists being perceived as a physical individual rather than the embodiment of a role. Pondering, in a record, that the reader might want to know more about her, she elects not to provide information about her appearance or personality, offering only that ‘my name is Maire’ and that ‘there is always someone called Maire’ (9). Though Maire suggests that it does not matter if multiple people have the same name because ‘you can always tell by looking at someone’ (11), this, of course, is not possible for the reader. As years pass, one embodiment of Maire can be assumed to replace another, though The Cleft does not mark these transitions. Presented as the reconstruction by Transit, a Roman historian, of a time patchily recorded, the novel provides absence of evidence as justification for its omissions. The historian admits to having ‘no means of knowing how long the Cleft's story took to evolve’ and also to having ‘no idea’ how long it took for Maire and other characters ‘to become more than themselves’ (102). As the historian smooths over gaps in the historical record, the reader has no choice but to accept Maire and other figures in The Cleft as characters whose extension is not delimited by a given physical body.

What The Cleft refuses is access to the particular: Maire, as a role, as a category, is a generalised entity. Denied witness to the specifics of particular Maires (and likewise of other roles), the reader is unable to invest in the development and well-being of the individual embodying Maire at any given time. Because of this, the way Maire can be read is not analogous to the way an individuated character is read. To be Maire means being the maker of records: that definitional fixity precludes the narrative of finding oneself or of making something of oneself.