Books of the Times; Books Of The Times
Published: January 29, 1982
By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt THE MAKING OF THE REPRESENTA- TIVE FOR PLANET 8. By Doris Less- ing. 144 pages. Knopf. $11.95.
IS there a dot of playfulness in the title of Doris Lessing's fourth volume of ''space fiction'' - an echo of Theodore H. White's ''The Making of the President'' series? One has to doubt it, for ''The Making of the Representative for Planet 8'' is the least witty, most somber of novels -more elegiac than political, more about dying than living.
It is also the least ''spacey'' or gimmicky of the books that so far have constituted the author's visionary ''Canopus in Argos: Archives,'' the first three of which have been ''Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta,'' ''The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five'' and ''The Sirian Experiments.'' (According to the list in this fourth and latest volume, the fifth will be called ''The Sentimental Agents.'')
We find ourselves from the opening page of ''Representative'' on the once-lovely Planet 8, where everything that has ''been planned, built, made -everything that was not natural - was according'' to ''the specifications'' of the godlike Canopeans. ''The presence of our kind on the planet was because of them: because of Canopus. They brought us here, a species created by them from stock originating on several planets.''
We are listening to the voice, or reading the words, of Doeg, which seems to be both a proper name and the condition of any representative of the planet's people whose role is ''to remember and to reproduce in words experiences that we all needed to have fixed and set so that our annals would be in order.'' He or she is recounting ''how the Canopean agents seemed to us in the times of The Ice.''
It seems that for reasons beyond the calculations of even the Canopeans, the weather is turning colder in the once-temperate zone occupied by the Edenic Planet 8. Snow has begun to fall and to stick. But the Canopeans seem to be looking out for their creations. They have directed them to build a mighty barrier to wall out encroaching glaciers. And they have promised that in time the planet's inhabitants will be transferred by spaceships to the even more paradisiacal planet of Rohonda.
So the people of Planet 8 have reason for hope in the future, even as conditions grow more dire. Vegetation may be dying out so that the hated practice of eating meat must be indulged. The living creatures of the planet's sacred ocean may need to be killed for food. Wars may be breaking out for the first time in the planet's history, and even the peaceful may be growing weak and despondent. But still, ''we peered through the dim skies and searched for Canopus, for the wonderful spaceships of our Savior and Maker Canopus.''
''But we were not saved, not being rescued; and everywhere our peoples degenerated and became thieves and sometimes murderers, and there seemed no end to it all.''
What is really going on here? Myth? Parable? Allegory? Folk tale? Is it about the very beginning of the planet Earth, when we fell into evil? Or is it the answer to Robert Frost's question - a vision of the world ending in ice? Is it an evocation of the death of God and at the same time a meditation on what the world must have been like when God's presence still seemed imminent?
Whatever it is, the effect of the story is powerful and immediate - with all the drama of good polar-exploration literature, and the eloquence, at its best, of the King James Bible. In time, Canopus does arrive, in the person of Johor, who will be remembered from the first book of the series, ''Shikasta.'' Ominously, his spacecraft leaves him behind on Planet 8. Doeg asks him what this means, but he has already intuited that the freeze has struck Rohonda, too. There is no place to transplant the people of Planet 8. The Canopean experiment seems doomed to extinction.
Now ''The Making of the Representative'' resolves itself into a meditation on death. What will become of us? Doeg asks Johor. How can we die, if, according to the laws of the conservation of matter and energy, no particle of our being can be destroyed, and if part of our being must be our consciousness and sense of ourselves? How can we die, if ''I am the wind that blows through the immense spaces thatlie between e lectron and electron, proton and its attendants, spaces that cannot b e filled with nothing, since nothing is nothing''?
If you take little comfort from this brand of mystical physics, then the resolution of ''Representative'' may leave you as cold as Miss Lessing's dying planet. All the same, the language and drama of the story never cease to be powerful. And we can believe in the myth, if not in its substance.
Incidentally, the author tacks on a chatty afterword, in which she exercises some of her dissatisfactions with human history and identifies her inspiration for both the present novel and its predecessor, ''The Sirian Experiments,'' in the disastrous 1910-13 Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott. I'm sorry she felt compelled to include this essay. While it brings some of her story into sharper focus, its overall effect is reductive. She ought to have left well enough alone, for well enough, despite its now-familiar Lessing excesses, is very good indeed.
Illustrations: photo of Doris Lessing