Critical discussions of the novel of ideas have often asked us to take seriously the ideas articulated by fictional characters, and assumed that these ideas are sincerely held by those characters. This is in fact a good description of the serious novel of ideas, whose formal dynamics can be mapped onto theories of tragedy by Hegel, Lukács, and David Scott. But often, comedy and hypocrisy disrupt the presumed continuity between public utterances and private convictions or behaviours. This also often involves disrupting essentialist conceptions of identity and group belonging. Through readings of novels by Rose Macaulay, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson, this chapter argues that comic novels of ideas thrive on such discontinuities, diffusing and deflating identity categories as well as tragic collisions, and offering a distinctive orientation towards discursive liberalism as the primary medium of politics.

Doris Lessing was one of the most restless novelists of her generation. She toggled between realist bildungsromane, autofiction, postmodernist experimentation, and speculative fiction. Despite her restlessness, she remained committed to the novel of ideas, using these different subgenres to entertain philosophical debates about autonomy, group membership, racism, and social progress. Surprisingly, as this chapter demonstrates, Lessing’s swerve into speculative fiction was conditioned by her status as a target of MI5 surveillance. Although Lessing knew she was being watched, she did not turn to the paranoid style of George Orwell. Instead, she used her fiction to suggest that an imperialist intelligence network could be outwitted by individuals who harness the powers of intelligent perception, or ESP: reading minds, forecasting future events, even communicating across species. The way to beat a repressive police network was to mimic its capabilities, bringing the arts of surveillance into the fold of human consciousness itself.

This chapter explores the politicisation of literature during the period of the Cold War. It argues that literature became a key coin in the cultural cold war, invested with the power to represent working-class subjectivity and class struggle by the Soviets, and construed as embodying and igniting individual liberty by the US. Literary writers and literature, during the cultural cold war, were both censored and funded as never before. While the Soviets took control of book production by both censoring and funding writers, the US pumped enormous sums of money into funding global literature deemed representative of individual freedoms. The literary dissident, stifled by the East and lionised by the West, was a key figure in cultural cold war politics. The chapter focuses on two very different kinds of writers, Stephen Spender and Doris Lessing, who were shaped by the conditions of the cultural cold war. Both writers viewed their literary writing in the light of the politics of the Cold War, and used their writing to explore the political issues of censorship, freedom, and dissidence.

Chapter 7, “Lessing on Generations and Freedom,” notes that while other English novelists – Lawrence, Woolf – wrote about characters mired in uncertainty about having children, none produced anything like the sequences of protracted vexation in Doris Lessing’s “Children of Violence” novels. This chapter takes in Lessing’s long career, from her first novel (The Grass Is Singing) to her last (Alfred and Emily), but it focuses on those 1950s and 1960s masterpieces, which track the heroine Martha Quest from adolescence to old age. Martha is riven by incompatible attitudes: a curiosity about motherhood is stymied by her antipathy toward becoming a mother. She cannot shake the conviction that in giving life to a new being she is shackling that being to a state of unfreedom. Martha, like her creator Lessing, is forced to ask whether only abandonment of one’s children can provide some small liberty to that next generation. In Lessing’s novels it is not only the mother who, encumbered by a baby, loses her freedom: it is also the child, beholden to the parent, who enters existence as an already subjected being.