This dissertation attempts to read Doris Lessing''s The Golden Notebook as a literary production ofpostmodemity. The novel provides a particularly rich field for exploring the unhappy laughter of the postmoderm subject. It treats laughter not only as a theme but as an object of continual inquiry. It asks, first, why such laughter has achieved its ascendancy. How have social conditions altered the kind of comic transaction that takes place in the literary text? Second, it pursues the pragmatic consequences of this laughter of "our new disquiet." Psychologically and above all politically, what are its uses and effects? Finally, the novel asks how alternative modes of comic communication might lead us out of the postmodem condition that constitutes the laughter of disquiet. What possibilities remain for a genuinely "happy" laughter?
In this study, I read The Golden Notebook in view of these larger questions. The Introduction brings out the problem of identity and solidarity encountered by the fragmented and hopelessly disorganized political subject. The first chapter situates the novel in the context ofpostmodemism by reviewing some of its postmodem features. The second chapter is concerned with the changes that have occurred in specifically literary comic practices as a consequence of post-war culture. The third chapter explores the uses and effects of similar comic practices in the realm of political action. The fourth chapter turns to contemporary feminism and the laughter of "women-among-themselves"@seeking in that context some basis for the hope expressed by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil that "our laughter may yet have a future." I conclude this dissertation by looking at women''s laughter as strategic transgression and tactic of resistance, however local and limited that transgression may be. I then draw our attention to the inadequacy of the analytic frames of reference and suggest that we cast a suspicious doubt about any grand narratives of emancipation and liberation by taking into account a concrete set of questions that The Golden Notebook has intricately and eloquently posed.