"a hundred years ago it would never have crossed most people's minds to be artists"

 

So, so, so: four images instead of one, my apologies. This picture-finding prompt inspired me much more than I knew it would, although I will admit that the first three are old acquaintances from my high-school interest in European expatriate artists of the twentieth century. From top-left to bottom-right:

 (1) painting by Alberto Giacometti, a Swiss artist primarily known for his sculptures, often considered a Surrealist (a dubious title though, if you ask me--fell between Surrealism and Expressionism);(2) painting by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-Mexican female artist, painting style a sort of mystical surrealism;  (3) "Nazi Suicide" by Lee Miller, an  American war and avante garde photographer (notable mistress of Man Ray)--this being a photograph of the body of a daughter of a Nazi official after her suicide; (4) an image I found when I typed in "feminazi" on Google Images.

While I do feel that my choices of these pictures could be better explained in person, I will provide brief commentary about the connections I see between these pictures and The Golden Notebook: 

(1) Giacometti is renowned for his unforgiving style, and his portraits which are said to speak more to the process of drawing the human figure than an end result. In drawing and in painting especially he refused to erase or cover-up, but rather worked continually and uncompromisingly on a single canvas, on a single model, for days, weeks, months, etc., building up the raw material and medium. Something similar seems to be going on in The Golden Notebook, as Anna's experiences and troubles overlap and build upon each other--however, to deviate from the pictorial analogy, Anna's experiences do not bring her to expression but to a lacking: she describes how expressions now demonstrate "the fragmentation of everything, the painful disintegration of something that is linked with what I feel to be true about language, the thinning of language against the density of our experience"(288, my emphasis). 

(2) The general body of Remedios Varo's work reminds me of the Golden Notebook (she is worth looking up), but I chose this painting because it most reminded me of Anna, sitting in her apartment, the animated chair perhaps representing her hysteria, doubt, depresssion, etc. 

(3) Lee Miller's depictions of WWII were largely focused on women working within the cause, and I believe, like Varo, many of her photographs could be tied to Lessing's book; but this explicit picture of death I attempt here to liken to Anna's suffocating awareness (fear?) of death and how it pervades the four notebooks--with the third we even get Ella writing a book on suicide while Paul calls him and Anna "boulder-pushers"(199), a seemingly apparent reference to the Myth of Sisyphus...In both this picture and this book we find a harrowing depiction of women, death, and self-destruction. 

(4) "feminism is communism in drag": there is a strained, complicated relationship between Anna's commitment to/problems with communism and her feminine identity, which is often dominated by her womanly desire to marry, to love, to have a man in her life (??). And what is that terrible quote of Paul's in the yellow notebook? "'My dear Ella, don't you know what the great revolution of our time is? The Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution--they're nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.'"(202) 

(Other images considered but not posted, perhaps worth looking up: Lee Miller's "Hitler's Bathtub," Art Shay's naked portrait of Simone de Beauvoir, and Andrew Matusik's Magritte-inspired "Castle in the Pyrenees")

Hmph. That took longer than I had planned, so best move on to my term. 

The allusion I looked up was "the War in Quemoy," as I was struck by what Anna says to the Amalgamated Vision rep: "This is going to be another of the places we know about only because there's a war in it"(275). The allusion refers to what Wikipedia now titles the "First Taiwan Strait Crisis" of 1954-1955. You can get more historical background of the years preceding from this link: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis 

During the central years of the crisis, the time in which Anna is writing, the PRC (People's Republic of China) forced the ROC (Republic of China) to abandon the Tachen Islands, of which Quemoy was a member and a primary site of heavy shelling and warfare. This event renewed and fed Cold War fears of communist expansion in and across Asia.