Different Worlds Coming Together: A Phenomenology of Relationship as Portrayed in Doris Lessing’s Diaries of Jane Somers
David Seamon
This article presents a phenomenology of relationship, which refers to the process whereby two worlds are drawn together in a lasting way. World relates to a person's sphere of action, recognition and experience, both firsthand and vicarious. Relationship involves the way that two people's separate worlds come together in a widening sphere of interaction, understanding and concern. Two worlds literally become one.
The real-world context for exploring relationship phenomenologically is British-African novelist Doris Lessing's Diaries of Jane Somers (Lessing, 1984). Set in present-day London and written in the form of a diary, this novel describes the growing friendship between a stylish, middle-aged fashion editor, Jane Somers, and a proud, indigent ninety-year-old woman, Maudie Fowler, who eventually dies from stomach cancer. Lessing's presentation of these characters' radically different worlds and the way they gradually come together in friendship provides an empirical base for exploring the more general phenomena of relationships and separate worlds becoming one. Lessing's novel is the ground from which to identify steps in the process where two people of contrasting backgrounds and lifestyles come to care for each other and participate in each other's world.1
The pattern suggested by a phenomenological explication of Somers and Maudie's growing friendship in Diaries is the seven-stage relationship cycle of figure 1: dissatisfaction, asking, searching, trying to accept, accepting, understanding, and caring. These seven stages describe the experience that Somers and Maudie pass through as they become each other's friend; these stages happen largely within the women. At the same time, however, there are two other dimensions of the relationship--encountering the other and symphysis--that serve as spurs to move the relationship ahead and that require qualities outside the two women for the cycle to continue. In "encounter," this spur involves a right person that Somers feels comfortable with helping; in "symphysis," which literally means "growing together," this spur involves the gradual creation of a bond between the two women that eventually becomes as real as the two women themselves. Both encounter and symphysis involve a link in which what was unrelated before is now joined.
The nature of encounter and symphysis becomes more clear as the stages of the relationship cycle are explicated in detail below. This explication comprises the first section of the essay and is organized around the order of figure 1. Next, the essay considers the significance of the relationship cycle for social policy and environmental design. Particularly important in this discussion is the difference between relationship and what can be called connection--an arbitrary linkage between worlds that is susceptible to breakage when stressed or changed in any way. The argument is made that one reason social policy and environmental design often fail today is because they are founded in connection rather than relationship. With this recognition in mind, the essay last considers how the cycle of figure 1 might be used to explore other kinds of relationships, including those between student and teacher and client and architect. The essay concludes that a thorough understanding of the relationship process might be of value for thinking through situations where different worlds have the potential for coming together, be they in terms of planning and living, teaching and learning, or helping and being helped.
1. Dissatisfaction
For a relationship to form, there must first be the dissatisfaction of figure 1. The person feels a sense of confusion and incompleteness. One experiences a genuine need to reach out and become more, either in terms of seeing, understanding, doing, or helping. If one feels no need for change, extending one's world is not possible. For Jane Somers, this need to change comes gradually and painfully as she sees her weaknesses as a human being. She comes to realize that she is not as kind and good as she once thought.
Raised in a conventional middle-class London family that she describes as "heavy suburban respectable" (p. 7), Somers joins the staff of Lilith, a fashionable women's magazine, immediately after World War II upon graduating from high school. She eventually becomes assistant editor and then editor. As Diaries opens, Somers describes the preceding four years of her life. Her husband Freddie and her mother have both died of cancer within three years of each other. The shock of personal loss painfully confronts Somers with the awareness that her world may not be as successful or complete as she once thought. She has a strong need to find a fuller purpose in her life.
Somers realizes that for some twenty years both her marriage and work lacked commitment and depth. In regard to Freddie, she says that "We did not have the sort of marriage where we talked about real things, I see that now. We were not really married. It was the marriage most people have these days, both sides trying for advantage. I always saw Freddie as one up" (p. 5). Until his death, she always thought of herself as a "nice person" (p. 5), but the shock of his passing makes her realize that "I know now that I did not ask myself what I was really like, but thought only about how other people judged me" (p. 5).
Freddie's death shakes Somers because she realizes that she acted selfishly and was not present to his suffering. Her mother becomes ill and Somers must care for her. Though she feels remorse in her behavior towards Freddie, she finds she can act little differently toward her mother:
While mother was dying, I was doing my best, but not like Freddie where I simply didn't want to know.... But I couldn't do it... I used to feel sick and panicky all the time... She used to look at me so straight and open. And I could hardly make myself meet her eyes. It wasn't that her look asked anything. But I was so ashamed of what I was feeling, in a panic for myself. No, I wasn't awful, as I was with Freddie. But it must have seemed to her that there was nothing much there‑-I mean, as if I was nothing much (p. 8).
After her mother dies, Somers realizes "how flimsy, I was, how dependent" (p. 10). This shock is the confusion and incompleteness of stage 1. This experience of inadequacy provides a powerful impulse that undermines Somers's former world. She realizes who she is and can no longer be satisfied. She makes a decision that triggers the rest of the relationship cycle: "I decided to learn something else" (p. 11). It is the shock of what the old world is and a need for something else that provides the underlying motivation that extends Jane Somers's strength as a person and eventually draws her to the loneliness and helplessness of Maudie Fowler.
2. Asking
Her dissatisfaction leads Somers to a second stage in the relationship cycle‑-what figure 1 calls asking. Here, the person wonders how he or she can become different. This stage happens only because of the vacuum created by the shock of stage 1. Lessing's novel suggests that a person cannot begin real change in his or her life if there is no dissatisfaction. This stage refers to a new kind of awareness, which Somers calls thinking: "This way of thinking... it is not so much thinking as holding things in your mind and letting them sort themselves out. If you really do that, slowly, surprising results emerge. For instance, that your ideas are different from what you had believed they were" (p. 10).
This second stage involves asking who one is and what one wants. Through this process, Somers discovers things about her life that she had not realized before‑-that she has no home life, for example, and that the center of her world is her workplace: "I soon saw that my life was entirely in the office. I had no life at home. Home. What a word! It was the place I prepared myself for the office, or rested after work. One of the things I am thinking is that if I lost my job, there wouldn't be much left of me" (p. 11).
Through this process of asking and thinking, Somers realizes that she had failed with Freddie and her mother because of a shallowness that awareness alone cannot change. She is who she is, and it is her lack of being‑-her inability to bear more difficult parts of life‑-that blocks her from acting in a way other than she does. She explains:
What I was thinking most of all was that I had let Freddie down and had let my mother down and that was what I was like. If something else should turn up, something I had to cope with, like illness or death, if I had to say to myself, Now, you will behave like a human being and not a little girl‑-then I couldn't do it. It is not a question of will, but of what you are (p. 11).
This lack of being is crucial in understanding the relationship cycle because it says that people can only do what they are. A widely held assumption about human action today is that people make a decision and then carry it out in behavior. Somers's illumination here suggests that this assumption is sometimes an illusion‑-that the ability to change and act is intimately related to the strength of one's being, which here means the amount that one can bear. After Freddie's death and her sense of guilt, Somers tries to be more caring with her mother. She cannot really be different than she was with Freddie, however, because she is who she is--a limited, self-centered person. She phrases her dilemma as a question: "How did we get like this, so soft, so silly, so babyish? How?" (p. 82).
3. Searching
The thinking and realization of stage 2 leads Somers to a next stage‑-what figure 1 calls searching. This stage marks a shift from shock and confusion to active attempts at constructive change, some of which fail because they are poorly considered and superficial. For Somers, these attempts involve the effort to find someone whom she might help and thereby face the difficulties that she shunned with Freddie and her mother. Somers reads a newspaper advertisement that asks for volunteers to befriend old people. She answers the notice and through a social worker, Miss Snow, meets an old woman, Mrs. York, for tea. The meeting seemed "false and awful" (p. 11). Mrs. York didn't like Miss Snow, who was condescending but didn't know it: "I sat there and thought, what the hell am I doing here? What good does this do Mrs. York?"(p. 11). At the same time, Somers realizes that she might help her elderly nextdoor neighbor, Mrs. Penny, who is alone and "longing for me to befriend her" (ibid.). But Somers cannot help Mrs. Penny either because she is domineering: "She would take over my life. I feel smothered and panicky at the idea of being at her beck and call" (ibid.).
The key point here is that not just anyone will do in Somers's search for the right person to help. Somers cannot help Mrs. York and Mrs. Penny because in a sense they are just anyone. She becomes involved with them out of connection--an arbitrary linkage that is imposed from without so that the situation has little chance to develop in its own way and time. In Somers's meeting with Mrs. York, this connection involves an impersonal agency that randomly links up availabilities; in Somers's link with Mrs. Penny, connection involves the older woman's just happening to be Somers's neighbor. Not just anyone will do in the establishment of a relationship. If it is to be genuine, the two people must fit. In time they become a part of each other, and this togetherness can arise only when each is right for the other. Otherwise, there is nothing but connection, and connection cannot last because the two parts cannot hold. They fall back into separateness as soon as the artificial bond changes in some way.
Encountering the Other
At this stage in the cycle, the right person for a relationship must appear if the cycle is to continue. Without the right person, Somers's efforts cannot move ahead to stages 4 and 5. How do Somers and Maudie Fowler find each other? They meet coincidentally in the local pharmacy as they stand together in line. With her "fierce blue eyes... but something wonderfully sweet in them" (p. 12), Maudie asks Somers to get a prescription for her because Maudie cannot read the druggist's handwriting. In the moment that Somers takes the prescription, she realizes something else: "I liked her, for some reason, from that moment. I took the paper and knew I was taking much more than that" (p. 12).
Phenomenologically, there are two important aspects of this meeting. First, it is unplanned, happening by chance as the women carry out their everyday affairs‑-Maudie, getting medicine; Somers, buying cosmetics. Like so many events that truly matter in a person's life‑-for instance, finding a profession, making a friend, or meeting one's life partner‑-the first encounter is coincidental. Because Maudie and Somers just happen to patronize the same local pharmacy, they meet.
A second aspect of the encounter is the sense for both women that this meeting has a greater significance. In the moment of helping Maudie, Somers intuits that Maudie may somehow enter her life in a greater way. As she says, "I took the paper and knew I was taking much more than that." Somers also suggests that there is an equivalent sense of importance for Maudie: As they leave the shop and walk down the street, Somers notes that "she did not look at me, but there was an appeal there" (p. 13). "Appeal" is crucial because it suggests that Somers's sense of liking is answered by Maudie's sense of need. In a moment, there is a mutual bond of feeling: Somers's need to help someone; Maudie Fowler's need to be helped.
In one sense, it might be said that the two women choose each other in their moment of meeting, though "choose" is a poor word because neither woman wills the event or liking. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that because of need on both sides, the women come together, though it is important to emphasize that Maudie has no role in the process until Somers has already moved through stages 1-3. Like Somers, Maudie also has a strong need for change in her life because she is alone and longs for human companionship. By herself, however, she cannot initiate change because she is overwhelmed by her world. In this sense, Somers can be called the active force in the relationship because she initiates the cycle through her need to become a better person. On the other hand, Maudie can be called the passive force, since she receives Somer's help and in that sense reflects qualities of receptivity.
In a broader sense, however, both women are active and passive, depending on the situation. Maudie helps Somers become a better person just as Somers helps Maudie restore her sense of self-worth. Throughout the cycle, their efforts complement each other and together provide the force that eventually leads to friendship and love. Still, in her desire to grow as a human being, Somers activates the cycle and describes the experience in her diaries. Because the novel is written through Somers's eyes, her experience of the cycle is described more comprehensively. At the same time, however, Somers's diary entries say much about Maudie's experience of the relationship, and these descriptions are used to elucidate Maudie's sense of stages 4-7.
Ultimately, it can be said that both women work in different but complementary ways to make the relationship cycle successful. A relationship is possible between the two women because Somers has already moved past stages 1-3 that only involved herself. In her meeting Maudie, Somers's situation becomes radically different in that the wish for a person to help is now a reality. If Somers did not find the right person in Maudie, the cycle could not continue, since there would not be the other person with whom to attempt a relationship. In this sense, "encountering the other" is not just another stage in the relationship cycle but an essential outside spur that moves the cycle ahead. In the next two stages of the cycle, the women face a hazardous testing phase in which they work to accept each other.
4. & 5. Trying to Accept and Accepting
Stages 4 and 5 of the relationship cycle involve struggle and results. In trying to accept each other, Somers and Maudie Fowler eventually succeed, though they first face many obstacles, setbacks and denials. These two stages of the relationship cycle are not separate in time but swing back and forth in widening spheres of recognition and trust. Because of these intimate links, stages 4 and 5 are here discussed together. In the relationship cycle, however, it is important to identify them separately, since it is out of the effort to accept that acceptance is eventually possible. Without the attempt, there could be no result.
In these two stages of the cycle, there is no guarantee that a relationship will be forged. In trying to accept, there is hazard because misunderstanding or error may break bonds that are tentative and fragile. Somers's main effort in these two stages is to recognize the integrity of Maudie's world and, eventually through this awareness, to appreciate that world for what it is and not try to change it. Maudie's effort is to hold her pride in check and to accept Somers's growing liking for her. In this process, there is no one revelatory moment of acceptance but, rather, many small, incremental recognitions that give Somers and Maudie the will to keep trying with each other. Often, their efforts end in failure, but at other times they are successful and lead to moments of heartfelt contact. Three aspects of stages 4 and 5 are realization, accepting responsibility, and dealing with physical difference.
Realization
A first aspect of Somers's trying to accept is realization that worlds like Maudie's exist. As the two women walk toward Maudie's apartment after meeting in the pharmacy, Somers notices aspects of the world to which she was oblivious a moment before. She must walk slowly because of Maudie's infirmness and suddenly sees that "usually I fly along, but did not know it till then" (p. 13). Somers also realizes that she never before noticed the old people of her neighborhood: "Suddenly, I looked up and down the streets and saw‑-old women. Old men too, but mostly old women" (p. l3). And she realizes why she has not noticed them: "I had not seen them. That was because I was afraid of being like them. I was afraid, walking along there beside her. It was the smell of her, a sweet, sour, dusty sort of smell" (p. 13).
For Maudie, the effort to realize the nature of Somers's world is also difficult because it is in many ways so different from her lower-class London experience. As Somers buys her cosmetics in the pharmacy, Maudie stands by "watching, with a look I know now is so characteristic, a fierce pondering look that really wants to understand. Trying to grasp it all" (p. 13). Later, Somers describes her work with Lilith and Maudie responds "in that way of hers, as if she is trying to make things fit, make sense. 'Do you? And what do you...' But she did not know what questions to ask" (p. 18).
After Somers visits her three times, Maudie asks if she is a good neighbor. Somers does not understand, and Maudie sees that she does not. Somers eventually learns that Good Neighbors are local people paid by the London social services to keep company with elderly people. Knowing that Somers is not such a person is crucial for Maudie's trying to accept her because "she wanted to believe I was not an official, paid person, but just a human being who likes her" (p. 20).
Accepting Responsibility
If one effort for both women in stages 4 and 5 is recognizing and accepting each other's differences, another effort is overcoming the fear that the other person might somehow interfere with her life. Throughout their getting to know each other, an attraction-avoidance tension exists: For Somers, the burden of responsibility; for Maudie, the blow to her pride of having to be helped.
For Somers, this distress begins after her first visit with Maudie: "When I got home that evening I was in a panic. I had committed myself. I was full of revulsion" (p. 15). For almost a year, Somers faces a struggle between helping and avoiding Maudie. Much of Somers's denial involves the potential impact that caring for Maudie might have on her work: "I am sitting here, feeling quite wild, trapped is what I'm feeling... My life, my real life, is in the office, is at work.... And I am not going to jeopardize what I really care about for the sake of Maudie Fowler" (p. 42).
At the same time, Maudie faces a struggle, though for her the effort is setting her pride aside and allowing Somers to enter her life. When they first meet, Somers explains that it is a difficult effort for Maudie to invite Somers into her unkept apartment: "She was ashamed, but wasn't going to apologize. She said in an offhand but appealing way, 'You go into my room, and find yourself a seat'" (p. 15). Somers's leaving at the end of this first visit is also difficult for Maudie because her pride will not allow her to say that she has enjoyed Somers's company and would like her to come again:
And when I left she said, in her way of not looking at me, "I suppose I won't be seeing you again?" And I said, "Yes, if you'll ask me." Then she did look at me, and there was a small smile.... "Oh, I would like, yes, I would." And there was a moment between us of intimacy: that is the word. And yet she was so full of pride and did not want to ask, and she turned away from me and began petting the cat (p. l4).
The moment of intimacy here is crucial because it is this kind of small reward arising out of the two women's efforts that provides the impetus to keep stages 4 and 5 alive. In the first several months that Somers visits Maudie, there is considerable confusion and tension as the relationship shifts back and forth between liking and disliking and other positive and negative feelings. Somers describes the fluctuations of a typical visit: "I could say, She was cross to begin with, then got her temper back, and we had a nice time drinking tea, and she told me about... But what about all the shifts of liking, anger, irritation‑-oh, so much anger, in both of us?" (p. 31).
Eventually, Somers sets herself to visit Maudie frequently. She does Maudie's shopping and nurses her in her bad times. In return, Maudie tells stories about her life: "She... entertains me. I did not realize it was that. Not until one day when she said, 'You do so much for me, and all I can do for you is to tell you my little stories, because you like that, don't you? Yes, I know you do'. And of course I do" (p. 87). Somers enjoys these stories because they give her a personal picture of London's everyday life in earlier times. Eventually, Somers uses Maudie's accounts as a basis for a romantic novel depicting the life of a London milliner‑-Maudie's work as a young woman.
Dealing with Physical Difference
Part of Somers's discomfort and fear in trying to accept Maudie's world relates to physical infirmness. Before meeting her, Somers took cleanliness, order, and style for granted: "For years of my life I cared so much about what I looked like that I was conscious if there was a strand or two less of thread on one button than on its neighbour" (p. 284). Her greatest daily pleasure is her bathroom and baths: "My bathroom is where I live... I bathe every morning, every night. I lie in the bath and soak for hours" (p. 23).
Maudie's world is infirm and decrepit, and an important effort for Somers in stages 4 and 5 is accepting this unpleasantness and recognizing that Maudie is no less a person because of it. When Somers enters Maudie's apartment for the first time, she is physically overwhelmed: "I went in with her, my heart quite sick, and my stomach sick too because of the smell.... It was all so dirty and dingy and grim and awful" (p. 13, 14). In drinking the tea that Maudie offers her, Somers explains that "It was the hardest thing I ever did, to drink out of the dirty cup" (p. 14).
This simple act of drinking is crucial in Somer's movement from stage 4 to 5 because it is in this gesture that Somers pulls away from her old world and first touches the otherness of Maudie's world physically. A large part of the struggle in stages 4 and 5 is Somers's letting go of her compulsion for order and cleanliness. By her fifth visit to Maudie's apartment, Somers can separate from her physical queasiness and set herself not to criticize: " ...why do I go on about dirt like this? Why do we judge people like this? She was no worse off for the grime and the dust, and even the smells. I decided not to notice, if I could help it, not to keep judging her, which I was doing, by the sordidness" (p. 18).
In stages 4 and 5, Maudie must also make an effort in regard to this disorder. She must overcome her embarrassment and allow Somers into her apartment, no matter how unpleasant it may be physically. During one visit, Somers explains that Maudie does not want Somers in her bedroom, filled with "piles of rubbish, what looked like rags, bundles of newspapers, everything you can think of: this was what she did not want me to see" (p. 15). In getting beyond her shame and pride, Maudie makes a crucial effort for stages 4 and 5, since this effort allows Somers to enter her world and make her own effort to accept and help Maudie.
Symphysis
Out of the struggle in stages 4 and 5, the two women eventually begin to relate to each other in a more honest, deeper way. Whereas in the beginning the two women's worlds were distinctly different, there is a gradual coming together so that in time these two worlds draw close and what was two is now one.
After considering such words as "union," "bond," "commitment," "blending," and "fusion," I call this situation of coming together symphysis, a word originally used as a medical term and meaning in Greek, "the state of growing together."2 I choose this unusual word to emphasize that at this point in the women's relationship something happens that is not just another stage in the process. Rather, symphysis represents an entity that is as real as the two women themselves. In this sense, symphysis refers to the birth of a genuine bond between the two women. Once it is formed, the two women know without a doubt that they will be a part of each other's world until Maudie's death. The relationship is now secure and real.
Diaries provides no definitive single moment at which the women come together as one. As with trying to accept and accepting, there are a series of struggles and successes that draw the worlds more closely together. One of the first indications of symphysis is Somers's growing acceptance of Maudie's physical world. Over time, for example, she notes that "I have become used to drinking out of grimy cups" (p. 50). Somers also comes to realize that Maudie's dilapidated apartment is an integral part of her world.
This recognition is crucial to Maudie because it means that Somers will support her wish to stay in her own apartment if the authorities insist that she move to housing that they consider better. When they first met, Somers assumes that Maudie would gladly change apartments, since hers seems so squalid to Somers. Over time, however, she realizes that the apartment is the central anchor of Maudie's life. As she tells Somers, "With your own place, you've got everything. Without it you're a dog. You are nothing. Have you got your own place?‑-and when I said yes, she said, nodding fiercely, angrily, 'That's right, and you hold on to it, then nothing can touch you'" (p. 19).
As Somers becomes more familiar with Maudie's situation, she realizes that the old woman is bound to her apartment and to move her to other housing would severely damage her sense of self. Though modern architectural and social criteria might argue that Maudie should be rehoused, Somers recognizes that material conditions are in the end irrelevant to Maudie, for whom physical difficulty has long been taken for granted: "By any current housing standard, [her apartment] should be condemned. By any human standard, she should stay where she is" (p. 103).3 Somers understands that Maudie is immersed in her world and improvement in that world cannot be had by physical intervention alone:
I've given up even thinking that she ought to agree to be 'rehoused;' I said it just once, and it took her three days to stop seeing me as an enemy.... I am housed, says she, cough, cough, cough from having to go out at the back all weathers into the freezing lavatory, from standing to wash in the unheated kitchen. But why do I say that? Women of ninety who live in luxury cough and are frail (p. 86).
Perhaps the most decisive event for establishing the women's togetherness occurs several months after they first meet and involves intimate physical acceptance. Somers agrees to bathe Maudie when Maudie indirectly asks her. In touching and caring for Maudie in this direct way, Somers fully accepts Maudie for who and what she is: "So I see her now, I no longer see the old witch" (p. 56). As Somers bathes Maudie, she experiences two revelations. First, she realizes that Maudie's strength to live is coupled with her pride and anger, which Somers must not attack or undermine. Second, she understands the struggle and suffering of her mother and Freddie as they faced death:
I slowly washed her top half, in plenty of soap and hot water, but the grime on her neck was thick, and to get that off would have meant rubbing at it, and it was too much. She was trembling with weakness. I was comparing this frail old body with my mother: but I had only caught glimpses of her sick body. she had washed herself--and only now was I wondering at what cost.... Now I washed Maudie Fowler, and thought of Freddie, how his bones had seemed to sort of flatten and go thin under flesh that clung to them. Maudie might be only skin and bones.... She was chilly, she was sick, she was weak--but I could feel the vitality beating there: life. How strong it is, life. I had never thought that before, never felt life in that way, as I did then, washing Maudie Fowler, a fierce, angry old woman. Oh, how angry: it occurred to me that all her vitality is in her anger, I must not resent it or want to hit back (pp. 51-52).
6. & 7. Understanding and Caring
Somers's bathing Maudie marks a turning point in the women's relationship. After this event, Maudie enters Somers's life for good, and their two worlds are now bound together. Somers will take care of her until she dies a few years later. Practically, the relationship maintains itself through Somers's visiting Maudie regularly: "Nearly every evening after work I've been in to Maudie.... It is a routine now. I go in about seven, eight, after work, and bring in what she has said she needs the night before.... While I shop she makes us tea" (p. 86). The relationship is now taken for granted and as much an entity as Somers and Maudie themselves. The period of trial and doubt is past.
With the establishment of the relationship's taken-for-grantedness, the cycle of figure 1 moves into stages 6 and 7, which are founded in love--"the delicate but total acknowledgement of what is" (Lessing, 1969, p. 10). Love brings an important change in the women's relationship‑-Somers moves from outside to inside Maudie's world. She now realizes that Maudie's world is as it is. She understands Maudie's need to be herself, regardless of how impoverished or unpleasant her life might seem to outsiders. At the same time, Maudie allows Somers full entrance into her world. Somers becomes the friend for whom she had hoped.
Like trying to accept and accepting, stages 6 and 7 are complementary, resonating in mutual meaning. Understanding leads to deeper caring, which in turn supports deeper understanding. Like trying to accept and accepting, however, these reciprocal stages incorporate important differences in that understanding involves awareness whereas caring involves commitment. Ultimately, the relationship is successful because the two women commit themselves to each other emotionally. This feeling of love draws two separate worlds together, and the two women are now kin, at least in a figurative sense. As Somers explains several years after Maudie's death when she reflects back on their experience: "she was in need of help, I offered it, got in deeper than I had meant, and had ended by being something not far off a daughter to her..." (p. 407).
6. Understanding
A major part of Somers's understanding in stage 6 involves Maudie's physical deterioration, which makes her life so difficult: "I have realized how heavy everything is for her" (p. 104). "What makes poor Maudie labour and groan all through her day [is] the drudge and drag of maintenance" (p. 127). Somers gains one important insight about Maudie's physical situation shortly after she bathes her for the first time. She understands that the bodily unpleasantness is not really Maudie, who is "still there, alert, very much all there, on guard inside that old witch's appearance. She is still there, and everything has collapsed around her, it's too difficult, too much" (p. 55). Somers realizes how physical infirmness can impede a person's actions toward the world, and understanding replaces blame:
I am thinking how Maudie Fowler one day could not trouble herself to clean out her front room, because there was so much junk in it, and then she left it and left it; going in sometimes, thinking, well, it's not so bad. Meanwhile, she was keeping the back room and the kitchen spotless. Even now she does her own chimney once a week, and then scraps the grate, brushes up the dust and cinders‑-though less and less thoroughly. She wasn't feeling well, and didn't bother, once, twice‑-and then her room was not really cleaned, only the floor in the middle of the room sometimes, and she learned not to look around the edges or under the bed. Her kitchen was last. She scrubbed it and washed shelves, but then things began to slide. But through it all she washed herself, standing at the kitchen table.... Then she left longer and longer between washing her hair... and then she did not wash her clothes, only took out the cleanest ones there were, putting them back grubby, till they were the cleanest; and so it went on. And at last she was upright in her thick shell of black, her knickers not entirely clean, but not so bad, her neck dirty, but she did not think about it, her scalp unwashed (p. 55).
In time, Somers feels a need to learn about Maudie's world as thoroughly as possible. She writes that "I want to understand. I do understand a lot more about her, but is it true? I can only observe what I have experienced myself, heard her say, observed... But what else is there I cannot know about?" (p. 127). Out of her observations she eventually writes a diary entry entitled "Maudie's day" (pp. 113-123). This entry includes a picture of Maudie's typical morning and illustrates how Maudie's physical heaviness translates into problems with movement and toilet routines:
Morning... oh, the difficulties of morning, of facing the day... each task such a weight to it... She sits there, thinking, I have to feed the cat... I have to... At last, she drags herself up, anxious, because her bowels are threatening again, and, holding on to door handles, chair backs, she gets herself into the kitchen. There is a tin of cat food, half empty. she tries to turn it on to a saucer, it won't come out. It means she has to get a spoon. A long way off, in the sink, are her spoons and forks, she hasn't washed up for days...
...she has to let the cat out. She toils to the door, lets out the cat and stands with her back to the door, thinking. A general planning a campaign could not use more cleverness than Maudie does, as she outwits her weakness and her terrible tiredness. She is already at the back door: the toilet is five steps away; if she goes now it will save a journey later (pp. 116-117).
Maudie Fowler's understanding in stage 6 is considerably different than Somers's. Maudie never fully makes sense of Somers's world. In "Maudie's Day," Somers surmises that Maudie may in fact suspect Somers of certain falsehoods: "All her stories about her office, she is probably making it up, after all, how can she, a poor old woman, know better, if [Jane] chooses to embellish it all a little?" (p. 117). At the same time, Somers surmises that in some ways Maudie interprets the women's relationship unrealistically. Somers guesses that Maudie's most fervent wish is that Somers come live in Maudie's apartment: "She sits there, sometimes dozing, thinking of how [Jane] is living there, looking after her, and of how, when she wakes in the night, alone and frightened that she's in the grave, she can call out, and hear [Jane's] reply" (p. 117).
In considering the difference in understanding between the two women, the theme of active and passive forces is useful. For Somers, understanding is active in the sense that it leads to her acting more in harmony with Maudie, including acceptance of her unrealistic hopes. Maudie's understanding, in contrast, is passive in that it involves no deepening knowledge of Somers that could be had by looking actively. Instead, Maudie's understanding evolves within her world as it is; this understanding involves a growing trust founded on the recognition that Somers is a faithful friend who understands who she is.
Ultimately for Maudie, understanding requires the conveyance to Somers of her importance in Maudie's life. In "Maudie's Day," Somers has Maudie think that "it was impossible the way that [Jane] should fly into her life the way she did, who would ever have thought of it?" (p. 116). Somers's presence is a godsend, and one day Maudie expresses her gratitude aloud:
She tells me about all the times in her life she was happy. She says she is happy now, because of me (and that is hard to accept, it makes me feel angry, that so little can change a life), and therefore she likes to think of happy times (p. 88).
7. Caring
In the last few years of their relationship, Somers takes full responsibility for Maudie. The relationship is unquestioned and now solidly in stage 7. Somers washes Maudie regularly and does her shopping. She takes Maudie to the doctor and to the park. Before her final illness and stay in the hospital, Somers takes Maudie to Sunday dinner with her sister and family, who think of Maudie as "an eccentric, gone-to-nothing relation whom they wish they could forget" (p. 208). They ask Somers if she is Maudie's Good Neighbor, and she--determined that Maudie not be cheated out of a real friend of her own--says, "No, I am not, I am Maudie's friend. We have known each other for some time now" (p. 208).
The obvious irony here is that the very people who should tend to Maudie's care have ignored her. Maudie is deeply hurt. She deteriorates rapidly afterwards and goes into the hospital. Somers is confused and overwhelmed by the visit to Maudie's relatives. On one hand, she realizes their callousness, but on the other hand, she realizes that life offers no guarantees. In her care and concern, she has brightened Maudie's life. In her own life, she has moved beyond the child-woman whose selfishness motivated her toward change at the start of the relationship cycle. Her commentary on Maudie's situation reflects the maturity she has gained through becoming involved in the old woman's life:
What I think when I sit there [in the hospital], holding Maudie's hand, that she ought to be in a large loving family like a rubber net that could stretch a little here and there to fit her in, is of course, nonsense. I am saying, as well, that she should have been an intelligently loved child of sensible parents, and that her mother should not have died when she was fifteen, and that she ought, by right, to have been happy healthy wealthy and wise her whole long life through. When I say what she, what an old woman, ought to have by right as she dies, forbids hardship, suffering, injustice, pain‑-denies, in short, the human condition (pp. 222-223).
Nearness, Connection, and Relationship
In Somers's suggestion that one's sense of human dignity is not necessarily guaranteed, what are we to conclude? That material and economic inequity is an inescapable characteristic of human life? That people will always be unequal? Are concerned people to throw up their hands and say that social policy and environmental design can do nothing?
Lessing's conclusion in Diaries is more optimistic, but it intimates the significant difference between connection and relationship. In the past, Diaries suggests, human relationship came about largely through physical and familial nearness--that is, living as an integral member of a place-based community that included blood relatives.
In Diaries, this traditional style of place and community is symbolized by an Indian shopkeeper, Mr. Patel, who sells Maudie her groceries. He cannot understand how Maudie's family would not take care of her, yet he also tells Somers one evening as she shops for Maudie that his own Indian traditions have begun to erode in the same way: "Once, with us, we would not let one of our old people come to such a life. But now‑-things are changing with us" (p. 107). Somers replies that there can't be many Maudie Fowlers left in the London neighborhood where they live, but he replies, "I have six, seven, every day in my shop. All like her, with no one to care for them. And I am only one shop" (p. 107). He looks at Somers, who explains, "We are appalled, we are frightened, it is all too much for us" (p. 107).
In the fact that it eases physical hardship and provides material convenience to large numbers of people, Western modernity is a blessing. At the same time, however, modern transportation and communication have weakened the significance of physical nearness as people with means live practically anywhere; they are no longer necessarily bound to particular people and places.
For less fortunate individuals like Maudie Fowler, this loss of physical nearness has in some ways been a curse because it undermines one crucial aspect of their identity as human beings: that they are part of a larger human community just in the fact that other people are physically near. Maudie can no longer trouble herself because there is nothing to trouble herself for. In the past, her family would be there, at least physically, because they would not have the technological means to be far away from her in the London suburbs. Through the taken-for-grantedness of nearness, she would have familiar people around her. She might not feel the painful loneliness she feels otherwise.
In this sense, nearness helps preserve human identity. Nearness joins people with a larger world, supporting relationship through kinship and shared location. In part because of nearness, people know their place, and this knowledge is unself-conscious because it is founded on blood ties and physical proximity. People automatically belong in their world because they arose in that world and are generally accepted without question, even in spite of idiosyncracies.
Today, in contrast, weak and poor people often suffer because their identity is all they have, yet this identity is eroded as kinship and place diminish in importance. People like Maudie Fowler cannot buy identity as Jane Somers can through her lucrative job, fashionable clothes, and comfortable apartment. Nearness is crucial for people like Maudie because it automatically provides a world that includes other people and relationships.
How does modernity attempt to repair the loss of human identity due to the erosion of nearness? Modern solutions are founded on connection‑-the assumption that outside injections of monies, personnel and other resources will improve a person or group's well-being. In Maudie's case, the suggested cure was better housing, a larger pension, nursing, a home help, and so forth. In some ways, of course, these benefits might help Maudie, but in the end they are founded in connection rather than relationship and miss Maudie's central need‑-the wish to be part of a larger human whole.
The significant point for policy and planning is that efforts to improve society today are too frequently grounded in connection rather than relationship. Relationship cannot readily happen because professional and client, politician and constituency, policy-maker and people planned for‑-rarely do these people and groups have a real stake in each other.
The result is that there can be no genuine change because these mutual parties never reach a sense of togetherness. In fact, much of the time, these connections never reach beyond encountering the other, since the other is not really seen or understood but force-fitted to meet the stereotype or convenience of the party in charge. If the outside injection of resources or personnel ends, the receiver's world falls back to the poverty or alienation that the external policy or plan was designed to change. In short, lasting change involves first of all a shift in human worlds rather than a redistribution of material resources.
Somers's extraordinary contribution to Maudie's world is that she returns to it a certain kind of nearness--the friendship of a person who likes Maudie for just being who she is. Somers becomes close to Maudie, and Maudie is no longer an isolated individual. Somers says, "Maudie, I like you as a person, I like knowing you," and through this respect restores Maudie's dignity as a human being. Maudie's family is doubly guilty because they not only ignore her presence but cut her presence down. From one perspective, Lessing's novel is a scathing indictment of all people who ignore their families and loved ones.
In terms of social policy and environmental design, therefore, Lessing's Diaries indirectly suggests at least two important points. The first point relates to connection versus relationship: that external injections of monies and other resources will not necessarily lead to societal improvement because they change material conditions but do not readily address deeper human needs of nearness and relationship.
The significance of nearness points to a crucial value of environmental design: that it can provide a physical grounding for interpersonal relationships. Jane Somers meets Maudie Fowler because at least a portion of an older, humanly-scaled London neighborhood still survives and both women live there. Maudie's situation suggests that a diverse neighborhood providing a taken-for-granted mixture of different people and activities offers a better context for nearness and relationship to arise. Why? Because people of similar needs are more likely to come together if they are in spatial proximity and frequent the same places. A key design concern becomes the thorough understanding of ways in which the built environment can contribute to a sense of nearness, place and human togetherness.
This essay cannot suggest ways through which physical design can enhance nearness and relationship, since Lessing's Diaries offers no exact picture of the women's neighborhood or the kinds of human actions and activities it supports. The key point is that Diaries suggests that the physical neighborhood had a significant role in the possibility of Somers and Maudie's relationship. Future phenomenologies of place and relationship need to consider the links among physical nearness, diversity and people's coming together (Seamon, 1987).
Toward A Phenomenology of Relationship
The major question I have asked in this essay is how different worlds are drawn together in a lasting way. I have called this process of coming together relationship, and I have argued that a phenomenological explication of Lessing's Diaries suggests that the process unfolds in terms of the relationship cycle of figure 1.
In summary form, this cycle includes three progressive phases that might be called a beginning, middle and end. In the beginning phase of the relationship (stages 1-3 in figure 1), the common thread is search--a sense that there is something more beyond who and what one is. In time, a situation in the world outside the person offers itself, which in Somers's case is the encounter with Maudie Fowler. The relationship then moves into a middle phase that might be called trial because it involves efforts of mutual acceptance (stages 4 and 5).
The trial stage holds the greatest danger of failure because the two parties may not bond. If they do, a relationship results that is founded in the fact that two have become one. The third phase of the relationship (stages 6 and 7) might be called fruition. The relationship is now secure and as much an entity as the two participants, who feel mutual understanding and responsibility.
This phenomenology of relationship is based on only one descriptive text and is therefore tentative. The presentation in figure 1 needs confirmation and correction grounded in other contexts and situations. One potential avenue would be groups of interested individuals who share and explore relationships that they have known personally. The aim would be the description of underlying patterns, phases, and commonalities that identify relationship as a general process.
Even in its preliminary form, however, the relationship cycle of figure 1 may offer some clues as to how other relationships unfold. Here, I examine two such possibilities with the hope that my interpretation might provide insights for future phenomenologies of relationship. I choose two relationship experiences with which I am familiar: the first, that of student and teacher; the second, that of client and architect. I examine both in terms of the relationship cycle of figure 1.
Learning and the Relationship Cycle
Figure 2 describes the student-teacher relationship, which I consider in terms of graduate education. Immediately notice that the graduate student takes the active position of Somers in the cycle. Sometime earlier in his or her life, the student realized a personal interest and aim related to intellectual ability, the pleasure of knowledge, the need to understand, and so forth (stage 1). Before finding "the right teacher," he or she has gone through a process that included mastery of intellectual and writing skills, choice of discipline, and sense of career direction (stages 2 and 3).
Eventually, the student finds a professor who seems the right guide for the student's scholarly interests and aims (encountering the other). Once this "right person" appears, there is a testing period in which the student must demonstrate that he or she is worthy of the teacher's assistance (stages 4 and 5). The teacher is also on trial in the sense that the student determines whether the professor can or cannot provide the support or direction that he or she needs. Events of this trial stage include the mastery of the teacher's research tradition, the participation in his or her classes, assisting him or her with research, and so forth.
If student and teacher work well together, they eventually join in a kind of partnership (symphysis). This tie gives the student the force to conceptualize a dissertation topic and work toward its completion (stages 6 and 7). In this part of the cycle, there is fruition in the sense that the mutual understanding and love for the subject cements a bond between student and teacher that will carry over into the student's professional career.
In exploring the graduate student's experience in this way, one gains clues as to why graduate education so often goes awry today: students may not have a sincere wish to know, they may have chosen a field of study that is out of harmony with their personal intellectual needs, they may choose the wrong teacher, they may never establish a genuine bond with their teacher--so many problems like these touch graduate education today.
At the same time, many professors have little sense of the student-teacher relationship and accept students they should not or reject students they should accept. In addition, graduate education is seen as a commodity and a means rather than as a quest and an ends. Many students are like sleepwalkers who move through the graduate experience physically but gain little intellectually or experientially. They experience connectedness with teacher and discipline but no relationship. In its recognition of search, trial and fruition, the relationship cycle gives insight into why there are these problems and failures. It also suggests ways in which a self-conscious understanding of relationship might help teachers and students to better carry out their mutual aims.
Designing and the Relationship Cycle
The client-architect relationship is illustrated in figure 3. Note that the client takes on a role similar to the student or Somers. There is a need for a house, office, or some other building (stage 1), and the client begins a search, first, in terms of a rough vision of what he or she needs; later, in terms of considering architects who can provide a satisfactory building (stages 2 and 3). In time, the client finds "the right architect," who must honestly judge whether he or she can provide the building the client needs (encountering the other).
Working together, client and architect move into a trial period (stages 4 and 5), which includes an exchange of understanding: the client must work to provide the architect with a clear picture of his or her needs; the architect must listen to these needs and translate them into design possibilities. At the same time, the architect must help the client become more sensitive to his or her needs and the way the built environment can support or stymie them.
Over time and if properly done, this trial stage will lead to a "right design" (symphysis), which is then refined and finalized in the fruition part of the relationship (stages 6 and 7). At this stage, a series of new relationships begin--the architect's dealings with the contractor, the contractor's relationship with client, the client's relationship with the building, and so forth. Each of these relationships could be explored through figure 1.
Too often in architecture today, the relationship cycle is severely distorted, and figure 3 suggests possibilities as to why. One problem is that clients often have little sense of how important the built environment is to human livability. The result is that the client does not take the design process seriously. One way in which this lack of interest occurs is that the client supposes that the architect is the expert and holds all the answers. Alternately, the client supposes that any designer will do and carelessly chooses an architect whose abilities or design philosophy may be out of touch with the client's needs.
At the same time, the trial stage of the relationship is often dispensed with entirely as the client decides that he or she does not understand design and cannot, therefore, contribute to the design process. On the other hand, many architects have the dubious belief that they are creators and know what the clients need better than the clients themselves. The result is that the client-architect relationship is treated superficially, or there is no relationship at all. Another problem is that many clients today are anonymous bureaucrats, committees, or corporate boards that have no direct interest or participation in the design process. The frequent result is buildings that display the architect's ego rather than satisfy the need of the building's users.
Ideally, a phenomenology of the client-architect relationship might help clients understand that architecture is more than simple building. Phenomenological insights might also sensitize the architect to the client's world that the building is meant to sustain. A self-conscious understanding of the relationship cycle might help both client and architect to move toward a more successful architecture.
Directions
These two examples of the relationship cycle are sketchy and incomplete, but they intimate a specific kind of coming-together process underlying particular relationships like friendship, learning and designing. An explicit awareness of how a relationship comes to happen (or does not) might be useful in understanding particular situations where different worlds must meet and work together.
The above examples point to several dimensions of the relationship experience that need further exploration phenomenologically. One important question is whether relationship can involve partnerships other than two people. For example, can relationship involve two groups, an individual and group, an individual and thing, an individual and idea, a group and thing, and so forth? The significance of wish and need in the relationship cycle suggests that at least one of the members in the would-be relationship must be an individual or group, since only people can have a sense of aim and purpose. More than likely, the stronger this sense of aim and purpose is, the greater the chances that the relationship will be successful.
From this perspective, large institutions are less able to involve themselves in relationship, since their direction is too often determined by anonymous individuals, committees, or boards. Without individual commitment, no amount of technology, economic advantage, or political program can make lasting relationships happen because in the end relationship is much more than material change and improvement. The lack of human commitment is particularly a problem for the client-architect relationship today, since both clients and designers are often employed by large firms that cannot provide the time and intimacy required for genuine cooperation.
Another intriguing aspect of the relationship cycle is its miraculous quality: How extraordinary that contrasting experiences and sensibilities can find each other and join in partnership! A more thorough understanding of the role of coincidence and seeming impossibility could be useful in that there might be indirect ways for creating a supportive context for their more likely occurrence. Conventional psychological and sociological conceptions of human action generally ignore events and situations that cannot be controlled directly. Yet our own personal experience as well as Somers and Maudie's situation illustrates that unexpected events are crucial in human life. Somers and Maudie's experience suggests that people cannot plan for such events directly because they are unpredictable. At the same time, however, Somers's determination, struggle and hope suggest that one can work with these coincidental happenings indirectly, through positive attitudinal qualities like wish, effort, and commitment. The indication is that need attracts results, though often these results are unpredictable and unexpected in their particular form.
In most general terms, a phenomenology of relationship is valuable because it helps people to understand more clearly the nature of everyday life, especially the forces of interaction and change. A central charge for policy and design is to make the world a better place in which to live. How can genuine improvement happen if there is no clear understanding of how worlds touch and change each other? Because we do not have a clear understanding of human experience and relationship, we often implement policies and designs that work against life rather than in harmony with it. A phenomenology of relationship provides a better understanding of how real change might be possible for individuals, groups, and society as a whole. In this sense, it is a tool for both personal and societal improvement.
Notes
1. Diaries has an intriguing publishing history. As an experiment to demonstrate the fickleness of critics, Lessing originally published Diaries as two separate novels, The Diary of a Good Neighbour (New York: Knopf, 1983) and If the Old Could ... (New York: Knopf, 1984), both under the pseudonym of Jane Somers. Lessing's ruse gradually became known publicly, and in 1984 she republished the two novels as The Diaries of Jane Somers, using her own name. For Lessing's story of these events, see her "Preface" in Diaries. Also see Lessing, 1987, pp. 52-54.
The relationship between Somers and Maudie Fowler is described in The Diary of a Good Neighbour, and this essay draws most of its descriptive evidence from that novel. If the Old Could..., however, is also used since it mentions Maudie Fowler in passing and describes Somers's efforts at helping another elderly woman, Annie Reeves. Useful introductions to Lessing's work include Draine, 1983; Fishburn, 1985; Rubenstein, 1979; Seligman, 1981; and Taylor, 1982. On phenomenology and imaginative literature, see Margolis, 1977; Pocock, 1988; Seamon, 1981, 1987. On the theory of quest, journey, and self-development in imaginative literature, see Stout, 1983.
2. I am grateful to Margaret Boschetti for suggesting this word.
3. An article in the New York Times (April 17, 1988, p. 11) explains that some 100 relocated Russians, many of them elderly, have illegally returned to their former homes near Chernobyl, the site of the nuclear reactor explosion of April, 1986: "most of those who returned are elderly and... many never adjusted to relocation." The human sciences are only beginning to understand the profound bonds that link people to their worlds, to such a degree in the case of Chernobyl, that these elderly Russians would risk the threat of radiation to be back in their former homes.
References
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