ABSTRACT
Doris Lessing was initially more interested in writing plays than literary fiction, but like many preceding theatre-novelists from James to Carter she did not triumph on the boards, later blaming theatre’s dependence on collaboration for her repudiation of it. But her 1996 theatre-novel Love, Again, written in her seventies, is a vivid testimony to the wonders and powers of collaborative creation. My eighth chapter examines the book as a complex engagement with what Laura Cull refers to as “transcendent” and “immanent” modes of theatrical creation (25), and it draws on Alenka Zupančič’s theoretical analysis of love, desire, and their structural correspondences with tragedy and comedy in order to reassess the place of this novel within Lessing’s complex oeuvre. If the former member of the British Communist Party has often be charged with a pessimistic repudiation of utopian visions and a resistance to prospects of radical change, to consider Love, Again’s intersecting of theatre and love is to reveal each as sites of potential miracles. The novel confronts us with the challenge of responding to them.
