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If you feel certain that society is heading for nuclear war, as Doris Lessing felt in the 1960s, what are you supposed to do with that knowledge? How do you act ethically and responsibly in the face of such a depressing conviction about the future? Or, more radically: to what action might the depression itself call you? Pursuing the social and discursive implications of foreknowledge leads eventually to the question of prophecy-to the role and responsibility of the prophet. Lessing explores precisely this question in The Golden Notebook (1962), a multi-layered, multi-voiced novel in which the lament for a threatened future weaves its way through character, plot, dialogue, and narrative structure. Reading this novel as an inquiry into prophecy and its consequences unearths some of the interactions between the many thematic preoccupations of The Golden Notebook and the socio-political crisis with which it was attempting-in many ways unsuccessfully, Lessingfelt-to engage. The author was frustrated by the precedence "the sex war" took over political and social issues in reviews of the novel. That she considered the imminence of world-wide nuclear destruction more important than other themes is evidenced by her impatience with the "sexual revolution" in the 1960s: "I say we should all go to bed, shut up about sexual liberation, and go on with important matters. We must prevent another major war. We're already in a time of total chaos, but we're so corrupted that we can't see it" (Raskin 175). What society cannot see is exactly what the prophet-narrator in Lessing's novel feels compelled to tell.
Christa Wolfs novel Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays (1983), although written twenty years later, originally in German, and from the other side of the Cold War divide, serves here as a powerful intertext for my reading of The Golden Notebook, insofar as Wolfs novelization of the fall of Troy is also inflected with its author's sense of impending nuclear disaster.1 Wolf explains why she finds the prophet(ess)'s role particularly relevant in the nuclear age: "I try to trace the roots of the contradictions in which our civilization is now entrapped. This is what I was doing in the Cassandra book. That work is very much a product of its time [1984]" (Fourth Dimension 128). Wolfs comments in...