The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in English literature, Africa, history, political science, sociology, gender studies, and related subjects.

African Stories is by Doris Lessing, a British-Zimbabwean novelist who was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was born to British parents in Iran. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving to London, England.

The TU Library collection includes a number of books by and about Doris Lessing.

As the website of the Doris Lessing Society notes,

Winner of many international literary awards, often compared to the likes of George Eliot and Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing, an imposing yet reflective woman who changes, sets examples and breaks them, had a full, emotional, complex life.

She also had, to the dismay of her readers, the courage to change her thinking, and do so radically: “I hold some very old-fashioned views, very different from what I thought any age up to forty. I think that we are here for a purpose–to learn and that there is a God: I don’t think we are purposeless. Forgive me for that old-fashioned and ridiculous view.” […]

Lessing was ever true to Samuel Johnson’s intention “to survey mankind with extensive view” to which she added the very twentieth century imperative to be faithful to her life. When asked by Christopher Bigsby, “That is the function of art then, is it, to change reality or to change the way people perceive reality?”

Lessing replied, “I think the function of real art, which I don’t aspire to, is to change how people see themselves. I wonder if we do. If we do it is very temporary”. Accepting of that temporariness, freed from having to influence other people’s behavior, she can focus more immediately on the problem of human learning which is, in her judgment, the central question.

Here are some thoughts by Doris Lessing from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

• Index on Censorship (1999)

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: “You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture.

The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements.

Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” […] There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

• Introduction to The Golden Notebook (1962)

It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

• The Grass Is Singing (1950)

In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

• Martha Quest (1952)

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

• Particularly Cats (1967)

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.

• The Four-Gated City (1969)

Literature is analysis after the event.

• Quoted in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969)

Laughter is by definition healthy.

• The Summer Before the Dark (1973)

You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around.

They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

• quoted in “A Talk With Doris Lessing; Lessing Author’s Query” (1980), New York Times Book Review

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

• The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983)

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

• Interview in The New York Times (1984)

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

• The Sunday Times, London (1992)

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.

• from Our Country, Our Culture – The Politics of Political Correctness (1994)

Parents should leave books lying around marked “forbidden” if they want their children to read.

• Interview in The Times, London (2003)

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)