The Golden Notebook

Even more formless than the last iteration of the blue notebook, the golden notebook reads like Anna’s stream of consciousness, though the author does not do away with punctuation altogether. Everything that has been kept separate in her life—the Pauls and the Michaels, the Ella stand-in for Anna, the novels and the notebooks—come together. She sees some of the scenes in a film-like dream sequence that unsettles her:

The Mashopi film; the film about Paul and Ella; the film about Michael and Anna; the film about Ella and Julia; the film about Anna and Molly […] every scene glossy with untruth, false and stupid. I shouted at the projectionist: ‘But they aren’t mine, I didn’t make them’ (619).

Anna has failed, she thinks, in her attempts to become an authentic writer.

Anna leaves behind her own “sanity,” as she puts it, in order to shed her former self: “I knew I was moving down into a new dimension, further away from sanity than I had ever been” (613). Her entanglement with Saul, while quite painful, opens her to a radical form of empathy, to what it might feel like to experience the world through someone else’s identity, to inhabit another individual. This becomes the theme of her dreams: She assumes the identity of an Algerian soldier or a Hungarian student or a Chinese peasant in order to rid herself of her own identity, conventional, middle-class, white, and British (that is, privileged). Still, she is also able to identify what separates her from Saul. She calls herself a “boulder-pusher,” echoing what her character Paul Tanner calls himself: “There’s a great black mountain. It’s human stupidity. There are a group of people who push a boulder up the mountain. When they’ve got a few feet up, there’s a war, or the wrong sort of revolution, and the boulder rolls down” (627). Thus, the boulder-pushers nudge it ever onward, after each setback; their work is never done.

In contrast, Saul fancies himself one of the “great men” who sit atop the mountain, thinking their lofty thoughts and watching the boulder-pushers at work. His response to her explanation is to launch into a monologue wherein the first-person “I” stutters like the fire of a machine gun: “Then I I I I I I, I’m going to show you all with your morality and your love and your laws” (629). Here, Anna is the superego, providing the necessary corrective to the destructive nature of her times, while Saul is a bundle of self-centered id, placing himself above it all. He mockingly excoriates women for their emotional needs, which he sees as so much self-pity. Anna herself is not convinced that he is entirely wrong, but she becomes increasingly certain that she will detach herself from Saul and his state: “I would not always be sick Anna” (630).

The story that she imagines as she comes out of her irrational state is telling: A woman is determined to free herself from being attached to men, so she embarks on a loveless affair with two very different men. She remains detached and aloof, so much so that one of the men—the one she really cares for—falls in love with her. But she decides to preserve her independence and tell the men about each other, about her own emotional freedom; in telling them, she is behaving like a man with multiple, guiltless affairs. Thus, the man who loves her is so hurt he leaves. She is left passing the time in “intelligent psychological conversation” with a man she does not love (637). Anna does not want to live without love, but neither does she want to live without truth. She does not want to be a man, nor does she want to be a woman as the era defines it. She is seeking something new, something that expresses independence and dependence—or, more specifically, interdependence—all at once.