The Cleft: A Novel - Hardcover

Lessing, Doris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060834862 ISBN 13: 9780060834869

Publisher: Harper, 2007

Synopsis

From Doris Lessing, "one of the most important writers of the past hundred years" (Times of London), comes a brilliant, darkly provocative alternative history of humankind's beginnings.

In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.

In the last years of his life, a Roman senator retells the history of human creation and reveals the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child—a boy—the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

About this title

About the Author

Winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, Doris Lessing was one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of our time, the recipient of a host of international awards. She wrote more than thirty books—among them the novels Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, and The Fifth Child. She died in 2013.

From the Back Cover

In the last years of his life, a contemplative Roman senator embarks on one last epic endeavor: to retell the history of human creation and reveal the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child—a boy—the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.

Reviews

Reviewed by Elizabeth Bear

Doris Lessing is a legend. The author of nearly 50 books, she has earned her reputation as a notable prose stylist and a writer whose work defies categorization. Several of her novels are numbered among the modern classics; she has reputedly been considered for the Nobel Prize in literature.

These facts only make The Cleft more mystifying. Because it is not merely a flawed novel or a failed novel. It is an actively bad novel.

The Cleft is a braided narrative, in which a Roman historian of Nero's time tells the story of an earlier, mythic period. Almost all narratives commence with a change; in this case, that inciting incident is the birth of a male baby into a species of parthenogenic, semi-aquatic women. The babe is presumed deformed and exposed upon a rock to die. But soon, more male infants follow (the males are referred to as "Squirts," the females "Clefts," for obvious reasons). After predictable phases of denial, anger, mutilation, murder and reconciliation, the human race as we know it is born.

This seems a promising setup for an exploration of the founding of society, even for a sly satire. I found myself comparing this novel to Kurt Vonnegut's superior Galapagos, to which it forms a sort of mirror-image, and hoping throughout that I was simply missing the point and that some justification would emerge "Rashomon"-like from the narrative's fragments. Instead, The Cleft delivered a moral message, an uncomplicated binary that reduces gender roles and relations to exactly the level of childishness implied by identifying most characters by the shape of their genitals.

Lessing appears to have drawn her background from Elaine Morgan's notorious pseudoscientific tome, The Descent of Woman (1972), which argues that human evolution was shaped by a seal-like return to the sea. Crackpot theories can make for great fiction, but in this case they have produced a novel as static and circular as the placid, bovine society that Lessing assigns to the Clefts. She portrays the denizens of her early matriarchy as Victorian caricatures: passive, incurious, interested in nothing except filling their wombs and maintaining the status quo -- except for occasional bouts of bloodlust. The males, on the other hand, are curious, inventive, exploratory, irresponsible.

Representatives of both sexes are equally thick, however. The exception is the Roman historian, a thoughtful older man married lovelessly to a younger woman. He could have been a finely drawn character, providing a needed counterpoint to the pseudo-history. But, alas, he too quickly descends to the level of parody.

Additionally, the historical sections of the book are told in an unconvincing manner. I suspect they were meant to have an air of fable, as of antique retold tales too misty to be recalled accurately. Instead, they seem thick and meandering, a kind of narrative oatmeal, and the societies constructed are so naive that they too lack energy. The women in their coastal caves expose the first male babies, mutilate the next few, expose a few more. Eventually, inexplicably, eagles begin to carry the male infants to a nearby valley, where an equally inexplicable friendly doe raises them.

For some reason, the females lose the ability to have babies without male assistance and begin making forays over the dividing mountain to get pregnant. There is a thematic and mystical cleft along the mountain pass, a volcanic vent of sorts, which seems intended to represent the female mysteries, the male attraction to and fear of them, and their eventual shattering as a result of random masculine violence. Unfortunately, since all of this occurs without emotional weight, it fails to provoke insight. Critic John Clute has said, tongue-in-cheek, that novels have a "real year," which is to say that no matter when a book purports to be set, there are always clues to when it's really set. And this novel is so firmly crystallized in post-WWII social roles of the Valium-housewife-and-unavailable-working-stiff variety that it feels more native to 1954 than to 2007.

The last third or so focuses on two characters, one male and one female, who have inscrutably Celtic or Anglo-Saxon names -- Maronna and Horsa -- for this ostensibly Roman narrative. These two may in fact represent several persons, lines of descent wherein a series of leaders bear the same name. (This is another one of those places where something that should have been brilliant and a bit unnerving wound up feeling pointless.) These two, and their tribes, come into conflict over the sort of things that couples would fight over in a stereotypical 1950s sitcom: The woman thinks the man does not take care with the children, the man can't see what all the fuss is about. The men are shortsighted and careless; the women are able to predict disaster but curiously unable to do anything more useful than lie about on rocks and catch fish.

In the end, these two great leaders come to an epiphany that boils down to "we have nothing in common, but we need each other." Which was not the poignant insight into human nature that this reader, at least, was hoping for.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Eminent novelist Lessing offers an alternative origin story for the human race, indirectly recalling the alternate world speculations of her Canopus in Argos SF novels. Positing that the primal human stock was female rather than male, Lessing invents a cult of ancient women called the Clefts, a name derived, in part, from that essential part of female anatomy. The story of the Clefts is bookended by the journal of a Roman historian, who interprets ancient documents stating that females were originally impregnated by a fertilizing wind or a wave, to give birth to female children. But one day a deformed baby is born, with a lumpy swelling never seen before. The first rape and the first murder follow soon enough, as do the first instances of consensual intercourse and the babies—the first of a new race, with a nature derived from both sexes—that are the result. Humor, which may or may not be intentional, is introduced into a generally lethargic text when women and men discover they can't live with or without each other, and the battle of the sexes commences. The novel has elements of a feminist tract, but the story it tells doesn't present a significant challenge to that of Adam and Eve. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Outspoken, prolific, and influential, Lessing has cycled through an array of literary genres in her quest to tell stories that protest prejudice, fathom consciousness, and chart the entrenched battle between the sexes. In her newest audacious, ludicrously titled novel yes, The Cleft does refer to the aspect of the female anatomy you suspect it might Lessing employs a classic framing device. During Nero's rule, a Roman senator with a much younger and more sexually adventurous wife is working through "a mass of material accumulated over ages," pertaining to a prehistoric all-woman tribe. The Clefts loll about in the surf and are mysteriously impregnated by the sea, until nature plays one of its tricks, and they suddenly give birth to what they call Monsters, but which we recognize as males. After the females' attempts to kill off the baby boys fail, thanks to the intervention of giant eagles, the two adversarial groups gradually discover that they need each other to reproduce, and that just as their bodies are different yet complementary, so, too, are their temperaments. As the good Roman chronicles, to the best of his ability, the way these early, contentious humans formed families and opened themselves to love, he marvels over the processes by which memories morph into myth, and history is assembled. As for Lessing, she overcomes initial narrative awkwardness to forge a mordantly entertaining fable rich in incident, discernment, and reflection. Seaman, Donna

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Cleft

A NovelBy Doris Lessing

978-0-06-083486-9

Copyright © 2007 Doris Lessing
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-083486-9

Chapter One

I saw this today.

When the carts come in from the estate farm as the summer ends, bringing the wine, the olives, the fruits, there is a festive air in the house, and I share in it. I watch from my windows like the house slaves, for the arrival of the oxen as they turn from the road, listen for the creak of the cart. Today the oxen were wild-eyed and anxious, because of the noisy overfull road to the west. Their whiteness was reddened, just like the slave Marcus's tunic, and his hair was full of dust. The watching girls ran out to the cart, not only because of all the delicious produce they would now put away into the storerooms, but because of Marcus, who had in the last year become a handsome youth. His throat was too full of dust to let him return their greetings, and he ran to the pump, snatched up the pitcher there, drank-and drank-poured water over his head, which emerged from this libation a mass of black curls-and dropped the pitcher, through haste, on the tile surround, where it shattered. At this, Lolla, whose mother my father had bought during a trip to Sicily, an excitable explosive girl, rushed at Marcus screaming reproaches and accusations. He shouted back, defending himself. The other servants were already lifting down the jars of wine and oil, and the grape harvest, black and gold, and it was a busy, loud scene. The oxen began lowing and now, and with an ostentatiously impatient air, Lolla took up a second pitcher, dipped it in the water and ran with it to the oxen, where she filled their troughs, which were nearly empty. It was Marcus's responsibility to make sure the oxen got their water as soon as they arrived. They lowered their great heads and drank, while Lolla again turned on Marcus, scolding and apparently angry. Marcus was the son of a house slave in the estate house and these two had known each other all their lives. Sometimes he had worked here in our town house, sometimes she had gone for the summer to the estate. Lolla was known for her quick temper, and if Marcus had not been hot and dusty after the long slow journey he would probably have laughed at her, teased her out of her fit of impatience. But these two were no longer children: it was enough only to see them together to know her crossness, his sullenness, were not the result only of a very hot afternoon.

He went to the oxen, avoiding their great tossing horns, and began soothing them. He freed them from their traces, and led them to the shade of the big fig tree, where he slipped the traces over a branch. For some reason Marcus's tenderness with the oxen annoyed Lolla even more. She stood, watching, while the other girls were carrying past her the produce from the cart, and her cheeks were scarlet and her eyes reproached and accused the boy. He took no notice of her. He walked past her as if she were not there, to the veranda, where he pulled out another tunic from his bundle and, stripping off the dusty tunic, he again sluiced himself with water, and without drying himself-the heat would do that in a moment-he slipped on the fresh one. Lolla seemed calmer. She stood with her hand on the veranda wall, and now she was penitent, or ready to be. Again he took no notice of her, but stood at the end of the veranda, staring at the oxen, his charges. She said, 'Marcus ...' in her normal voice, and he shrugged, repudiating her. By now the last of the jars and the fruit had gone inside. The two were alone on the veranda. 'Marcus,' said Lolla again, and this time coaxingly. He turned his head to look at her, and I would not have liked to earn that look. Contemptuous, angry-and very far from the complaisance she was hoping for. He went to the gate to shut it, and turned from it, and from her. The slaves' quarters were at the end of the garden. He took up his bundle and began walking-fast, to where he would lodge that night. 'Marcus,' she pleaded. She seemed ready to cry. He was about to go into the men's quarters and she ran across and reached him as he disappeared into the door.

I did not need to watch any longer. I knew she would find an excuse to hang about the courtyard-perhaps petting and patting the oxen, giving them figs, or pretend the well needed attention. She would be waiting for him. I knew that he would want to go off into the streets with the other boys, for an evening's fun-he was not often here in this house in Rome itself. But I knew too that these two would spend tonight together, no matter what he would have preferred.

This little scene seems to me to sum up a truth in the relations between men and women.

Often seeing something as revealing, when observing the life of the house, I was impelled to go into the room where it was kept, the great pack of material which I was supposed to be working on. I had had it now for years. Others before me had said they would try to make something of it.

What was it? A mass of material accumulated over ages, originating as oral history, some of it the same but written down later, all purporting to deal with the earliest record of us, the peoples of our earth.

It was a cumbersome, unwieldy mass and more than one hopeful historian had been defeated by it, and not only because of its difficulty, but because of its nature. Anyone working on it ...

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Cleftby Doris Lessing Copyright © 2007 by Doris Lessing. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060834862
• ISBN 13: 9780060834869
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272