Novel-Worlds: Tracing the Ripples in Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City

ABSTRACT A persistent tension between the physical limits of the novel form and the expansive scope of its representative possibilities is present in much of Doris Lessing’s fiction, and made explicit in The Four-Gated City, the concluding volume of her five-part series The Children of Violence. Lessing tests the imaginative parameters of her novel in a succession of different ways: introducing the trope of telepathy into the final volume of a formerly realist series; allowing the text to break down in its final section into a series of fragmentary appendices; extending the narrative some three decades into the future; and finally moving entirely beyond the frame of her central protagonist’s perspective. The Four-Gated City both depicts and bears out through its structure a foundational conflict between the novel’s capacity to conjure worlds and its physical boundaries: paper, ink, binder’s glue; words on a page. Its significance as the first step in Lessing’s wide-ranging experimentation with science fiction has been extensively discussed in scholarly literature on her work; less studied is the way in which it functions as a commentary not only on the imaginative limits of realism but also on the material limits of the novel as a portable object.