Doris Lessing

Everybody's talking about Doris Lessing and the Nobel. Or at least all the litblogs like here y aquí. This from an interview with Lessing reprinted in Paper Cuts (Lessing is defining political correctness.) :

A need to oversimplify. To control. And an enormous distrust of the innovative, of new ideas. All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There’s oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. This characterizes political correctness.

Right now, at 3:23pm Central Time, my thoughts on PCness float somewhere between this quote and the one from Goytisolo in the previous post. But I retain my ability to change this opinion constantly. Sorry.

* I may be changing my opinion. The inimitable Harold Bloom has lashed out at Lessing's Nobel win as "pure political correctness." But Lessing is virulently anti-PC (See this Op-Ed from 1992.) A lot to digest. In my mind, Harold Bloom is clearly the one afflicted with an "absolute conviction of [his] own moral superiority" and given to gross "oversimplification in everything."

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