ABSTRACT
Doris Lessing is a fascinating figure, perched, as she is, on the cusp of postmodernism and impossible to categorize as either traditionally modernist or postmodern avant la lettre. Lessing is such a successful mimic of the mimetic realism she satirizes that early critics were baffled by her playful stylistic dislocations of traditional narrative. The Golden Notebook, for instance, is disturbingly fractured and decentered, as it bounces among various incompatible narrative worlds and subtly slips from one diegetic level to another without ever revealing the repressed god-games that divert and dislocate its simulacrum of realist exposition.
