Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Together we went over and over the period immediately preceding the first stammering fit of over ten years ago. It was the work in Greece, which resulted in a book called, I believe, New Light on Homer —or something like that. But it turned out that was not the beginning. Before Greece, he had been travelling in Africa. He had visited a tribe whose life is based on the movements of a river. The river floods every year, and a large plain disappears under water. In the plain are mounds where villages are built. When the flood rises to a certain height, the people of the villages get on to boats and go to live on the shores, until the waters subside again. Now — and this is the point — Frederick had this thought: Suppose the flood rose twenty feet higher than usual one year and inundated the villages, and the people then decided not to return to the villages, but to live somewhere else, then in a very short time indeed, probably no more than two or three years, it would be impossible to know that human beings had lived there. The huts were of wood and earth. The roofs of thatch. Most of the vessels were of wood. The earthenware was not fired, but sun-dried and made to be used and thrown away easily. The tribe had been peaceable for some time — the weapons, spears, were of iron and ritualistic. Water and ants could destroy all these things in months. The only objects in these villages that would survive were modern tinware and plastic things. But this society could have existed a thousand times over, on these mounds, with floods between, and nothing, but nothing would have remained.

Yet, Frederick said, if you judge a society by harmony, responsibility towards its members, and lack of aggression towards neighbours it was a society on a high level indeed. And — and this was the place where Frederick was hit — it was a society more integrated with Nature than any he could remember, and for Africa that is saying a great deal. Not only did this tribe’s life centre on the flooding and subsidence of the river, but it was very highly ritualised around the seasons, the winds, the sun, the moon, the earth. But in conventional anthropology it is tantamount to saying that a society is barbaric, backward, to say that it is animistic, or bound with nature.

Frederick left this place deeply perturbed. Visiting this tribe, and the thoughts he had had as a result, struck at his confidence as an archeologist — that was how he experienced it. That he had the equivalent of a religious person’s “doubts,” and it was necessary to dismiss them before going on. The chief thought was that our society was dominated by things, artefacts, possessions, machines, objects, and that we judged previous societies by artefacts — things. There was no way of knowing an ancient society’s ideas except through the barrier of our own.

This experience’s effect on him he decided was “unhealthy” and “morbid.”

I am sure you will have gathered by now that Frederick is and always was a man of great vitality, assurance, and has never been one to be afraid to voice opinions, take sides — assert himself.

If he had been less self-confident, probably the effect of that visit in Africa would have been much less.

However, he overcame his temporary loss of spirits, and started his lectures on Greece, which he had to abandon because of his first attack of stammering.

To come to the period just before he and I met outside the gates of London University.

There was a small, apparently minor incident … he was visiting an old colleague, who was engaged in an excavation in Wiltshire. He had stayed the night in a local inn, and had walked over next morning to visit his old friend. It was mid-morning and the work was in full swing. The professor himself, half a dozen amateurs there for the love of it, and two archeological students. A trench loosely filled with rubble had been exposed. The professor was unaware that Frederick was there. He was saying that the type of trench indicated that the foundations were for a stone building — the stones that had been keyed in to the stony rubble having been taken away for other later building. At which one of the students timidly piped up that he had recently been in Africa and had observed that in a village he was visiting, the people were making a hut of poles, mud plaster and thatch. The first stage of this was to dig a trench, the second being to stand the poles of the future walls in the trench, the third being to pack stony rubble around the poles. The professor did not comment on this. He walked away and Frederick followed him and announced himself. The professor took Frederick around the site and when he came to the trench filled with the rubble he said: “In my opinion this is the foundation of a wood and not a stone building, after all, certain primitive people did start wood huts by …” and etc. and so on. But if there had been no student back from a jaunt to Africa, the professorial voice would have announced with total authority that this building must have been of stone. And this was how the emphatic pronouncements of archeology are arrived at. It was this minor incident that made Frederick remember certain disquiets he had suffered last summer in Turkey. If “disquiet” is the right word for it.

All through the summer in Turkey he was thinking of his visit to the river-dominated society in Africa more than ten years before. He could not shake off the memory of it, although the two places had so little in common, one being under water for months of the year, the other being so high, dry and exposed. He could not shake off thoughts about the bases of modern archeology, which usually he just accepts as not more than nuisances no one can do anything about. Particularly about finance — that the financing of an excavation was always the key to it, and particularly whether it took place at all. Certain people got money easier than others. Some people couldn’t get money at all, or only with great difficulty. Some countries were easy money-extractors, others not. Countries had runs of popularity, were in vogue for a while, then went “out,” like styles in dress. He, Frederick, had been working on that particular site and not one he wanted to work on, because he had been able to get money for that site from an American source — a museum short of a certain kind of artefact which was known to be freely available on that site.

Certain ideas were accepted, sometimes for decades or centuries, dominating archeology; suddenly they were doubted. That “Greece was the mother of Western civilization and Rome its daddy” directed archeology and excavation for a long time — yet he, Frederick, would be able to make out a case that the Arabs, Moors and Saracens were parents to “Western” civilisation, sources of its ideas, its literature, its science, a case based on the same kind of evidence that made us legitimate heirs to Greece and Rome … this case wouldn’t necessarily be more true, but its bases would be as powerful.

Throughout the summer he amused himself by concocting, one after another, papers describing the civilisation he was unearthing from the point of view of civilisations not ours — Roman, Greek, Aztec, etc., and so on. With his tongue in his cheek he framed various versions of the paper that he would probably publish about his work of the summer.

This paper would begin, or end, with the ritual sentence that of course the conclusions drawn were tentative due to lack of knowledge, lack of money, lack of time, and because only a fraction of this level of the site had been excavated, let alone all the levels beneath. But this bone having been tossed to the dogs of doubt, all else would be assertion and statement. The paper would draw the fire of opposing professors schools and theories. Textbooks for universities and schools would result. These would contain statements like: Writing was not discovered in the Middle East until 2,000 B.C. The Sumerians believed so and so. The astronomers of the Akkadians believed such and such. The Egyptians mummified their priest-kings because they wanted the corpses to last a long time. The world was created by God 4000 years ago. That African civilisations prior to the coming of the white man were nonexistent/barbaric/plentiful/backward/sparse/or whatever was the current notion. And so on. Frederick left Turkey in a disturbed frame of mind which he associated with his previous state of mind after his African visit. It so happened that he chanced on a book describing a Victorian clergyman’s crisis of Doubt over the existence of God. The clergyman’s character struck Frederick as being similar to his own: energetic, and confident. The man had been upset by Doubts about the exact date of the creation of the world by God. His state of mind was very like Frederick’s as he read. He was on the point of deciding that it was his moral duty to leave the Church, as he could not with honesty remain in it, when his tenth child, a girl, became engaged to a clergyman. This was a very good and by then despaired-of match, as the girl was an old maid, being nearly thirty. The father knew the girl would not keep this man, if he, the father, aired his Doubts and left the Church. For if he left the Church there would be a family-engulfing scandal and the daughter’s fiancé was a conventional man with a future to guard. The father’s crisis now became a nice exercise in balancing responsibilities: his conscience, or his daughter’s future. With much anguish, he put off his leaving the Church until his daughter was wed. This meant he had to go through marrying (personally officiating) his daughter to the clergyman son-in-law with his mind full of Doubts. But when he examined his conscience after the ceremony he found his Doubts much less. As if the act of going through the ceremony had relieved them. “It was my love for my poor Daughter; my fears for her comfortless future; my anguish of mind that my own misery and confusion should poison Others — it was these that had caused me to act, as I then believed, Dishonestly. Thanks be to God in His Great Mercy that he led me, through my Valley of the Shadow, back to Himself …”