The basic myth articulated [in Shikasta], and underlying all Doris Lessing's work since The Four-Gated City, is a very old one, which can be traced back through Jewish and Christian apocalyptic thought for two millennia: the myth of the consuming destruction of a corrupt and fallen world from which a brave new world will be born. As Frank Kermode has ably demonstrated, its most potent source, after the book of Revelation, has been the 12th-century monk Joachim of Flora, whose ideas turn up in the most surprising places, including such major figures of the modern literary imagination as Lawrence and Yeats. Doris Lessing quotes Yeats in Shikasta and her affinity with Lawrence has always been clear. She also draws for imagery and allusion on the Old Testament, on Virgil and Dante, Milton and Blake. But what will dismay many of her admirers is that the basic fable and machinery of Shikasta … seem to derive from much shoddier sources, like Erich Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods, the kitsch religion of Ufology, and space operas like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars….
Undoubtedly there are passages in Shikasta where Doris Lessing achieves [the] feat of surprising the reader into viewing his world as if from 'outside', and feeling a real grief and outrage at the evils, atrocities, disasters, and hideous dangers which merely numb us when we encounter them on TV or in the newspapers.
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