The Cleft - Doris Lessing

The Cleft was published only some months before the 88 year old woman author, Doris Lessing was announced as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. Being the 11^th woman and the oldest person to win the prize, Lessing’s book was a disappointment to most, and an asset to many. It is The Golden Notebook (1962), her second book that remains to be her most acclaimed piece of literary work. In an interview only sometime after she received the news of the award, the outspoken writer, who has won many prizes in Europe responded by saying, “I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise, I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.” After getting my hands on her much glorified novel The Cleft, I can’t help but think, she just might be right.

For The Cleft, Lessing was inspired by a scientific report claiming that women were the first human species, and that men came along much later. In a story where she depicts our early ancestors, she draws a lazy picture of the first females, the “Clefts” who idle around the seashore, swim through the waves and loll about the rocks living languid days doing nothing. These women expand their race getting impregnated by what they believed to be the fertilizing wind - the cycles of the moon and waves that carried fertility in its substance. Their days pass by dull and uninterrupted, as the women doze by the rocks in boring euphoria. Fat, slow, and sluggish the women would simply watch when the sun dropped into the sea every night, and watch when the moon turned pale at dawn. Their lives are perfectly harmonious, until the day the boy children began to be born.

The abnormal occurrences left them frightened – The males were looked at as monstrous with their bodies so different from those of the females. The females called their boy babies, “the deformed ones; the freaks; the cripples.” They tortured the boys and left their monster children out for the eagles to eat. But these mighty eagles, instead of thriving on them, saved the boys. They took them over the mountains and dropped them in the valley, where the true children of the eagles found a way to survive. The “monsters” were not mother deprived, they were licked and nuzzled and fed by the kindly deer in the valley. Thus the two communities - that of the monster males and that of the first females - blossomed side by side. The males lived in the adventurous and risky valley, while the women still lingered in their “soft and babyish” shore. Both communities lived on a stretch of land that was geographically close but disconnected by sight. The “monsters” were far too fearful to come close to the Clefts – those who killed them, mutilated them and treated them as their play things, while the Clefts dawdled about on their still shores, far too unthinking to imagine what was occurring on the other side of the mountains.

But bravely and unpredictably, it was a Cleft who finally did something. One by one they began to go into the mountains, forced by a new inner nature (something they didn’t much bother delving into). And those were the first steps towards the necessary unison of the two communities, one which they were then a great deal unaware of.

Lessing’s novel shows a period of human development - their progression from emptiness, to a stage where they came to feel, well very few feelings! Ideas, emotions, words, thoughts, that have occupied the minds of us so comfortably, were presenting themselves for the first time to our age old ancestors. Change was hurtling down on them, bearing down on them. The Shes, who could until sometime back, get easily impregnated by the blessing winds and waves, were now relinquished of that ability. They did not get pregnant at all, except by the males. Both the communities crossed the mountains to visit each other often: but lived apart. The men were far too messy and uncaring for the women; and the women – too discouraging and needy.

The novel puts forth many other human traits and behaviors that were only beginning to develop within both the communities. The young men were always seen doing dangerous things in the need to develop their self reliance and physical skills. They invented for themselves daring feasts and challenges. When a boy fell and injured himself, he was sent to the female’s shore to be mended. The females accused the males of carelessness and did not trust the boys to remember their responsibilities. When they confronted the men about their concerns in anger, it struck the men as undoubtedly irrelevant. They frequently hounded the men with questions such as “Don’t you care about us?” and the men only wondered about them in probing confusion, “What did she mean by us?” So the women would go back wistfully wondering what was wrong with the men. They finally assumed that the men, if not mad, were eerily deficient in understanding. It is interesting to note however, that although it was the population of women who taught the men the consistency of care, it was the race of men who first felt unquestioned feelings of compassion. They generously rescue even a hateful Old Cleft, who was fiercely out to destroy them; when their Cleft mates prod and question them in return, what we read is something to this effect:

“They seemed surprised when they were asked.

‘But she was crying they explained at last.’ …‘She was making such a noise…’ said the boys. Then, ‘she was upsetting the baby eagles.’ ‘Yes the baby eagles were frightened.’ These explanations came first, then came what seemed to be the real reason. ‘Those Clefts they were just stupid, letting the Old One cry. It was so easy: we just pulled her on the branch and pulled her down and that was that. The Clefts never thought of it.’

The fact that the Old She reached the rock bruised and even bloodied did not concern the boys. What mattered was their achievement and one that showed up the stupidity of the Clefts.”

These carefree, strong men would seek their peace by going away to far off places in adventure, so the women – always ready to criticize didn’t come after them; and the women - they fretted about the fewness of children. They waited for the men to come – as without them their wombs were empty. As a result the females were observed to become fundamentally dependent on the males. And then, after plenty many pages of unenthusiastic reading, comes the point that Lessing really wants to make - the men and women eventually start living along side each other, in the natural and customary fashion that we live in today.

This book for a Nobel laureate came across as somewhat disappointing. For a first-time reader of Lessing, it is probably a wrong starter. Its draws you with a potentially great idea – but falls flat with its unimpressive flow. A book without main characters (well there are a few, but none worth mentioning) or a significant plot ought to have a propelling tone, which is something that the book lacks. It’s faintly elegant in bringing out some details that you already know – the nonchalance of men, the compassion of women, the mysterious need for one another; but it under provides in good ways to tell the rest of it. The entire novel is narrated by a Roman historian, one who has come to the possession of these revealing, ancient manuscripts. And Lessing lends him a dull voice at that. We shift to his present time frame, with glimpses of the narrator’s real life events that pull along quite insipidly; with his reflections too being pretty unintuitive and repetitive. I could search the novel for reasons that could justify Lessing’s victory of the high prize for literature, and be quite sure I’d be left without a clue. The innovative idea was only after all inspired; Lessing’s language is terse, but in an unaffecting manner, and the book for most of its part (especially the latter) progresses without much exhilaration.

Lessing’s latest novel, which she claims might be her last and which she has just delivered to her agent is called Alfred and Emily, after her parents - who she describes as “crippled by war” (her father physically, as he lost a leg; and her mother emotionally). In the first part of the novel Lessing has abolished World War One for them, so she could give them fairly decent, deserving lives; and the second part tells what happened after they moved to Southern Rhodesia. “Basically, it is an anti-war book, which is not what I set out to write.” Perhaps her final task may push her to raise the bar for Alfred and Emily, because The Cleft surely falls below expectations.