Early Lessing, Commitment, the World

This chapter begins by looking at the notions of writerly commitment formulated in Lessing’s essay ‘The Small Personal Voice’ (1957). Lessing’s ideas on commitment are then compared to those emerging from Jean-Paul Sartre’s post-1945 writing, which became an important frame not only for Sartre’s actions as a public figure, but also for the work of contemporaries such as Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon. Despite Lessing’s critique of Sartre in ‘The Small Personal Voice’, she is shown to share an emphasis on the place of the committed writer within a broad and unfolding world-system; she also shares with Sartre the same rhetorical means to establish such an emphasis. Lessing’s 1963 short story, ‘A Letter from Home’, is then read against the background of her notions of commitment and their Sartrean resonances. Tracking Lessing’s ideas about commitment from her non-fictional to her fictional writing, a consistent problematic is detected, of the manner in which a global location for the writer might be conveyed. In particular, Lessing addresses this problematic through frequent use of number. For Lessing (as for Sartre), number is less a means of enabling measurement and accuracy, than a gestural means to convey enormous scale.