Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

The Triumphalism that greeted the end of the Cold War has led to the triumphalisms of hot conflicts in skyscrapers, subways, and sandy battlefields. The one has given way to the many—and with a vengeance.

Hartley emphasizes a poignant disconnect between the past and the present, an emphasis that is tempting to many in our “age of anxiety.” Doris Lessing, however, would look at the same ending and beginning and offer a very different interpretation. Rather than stressing differences, Lessing would underscore continuities and connections. Rather than describing borders, Lessing would raise questions about those borders. Like Robert Frost in “Mending Wall,” Lessing is keen on wondering: “What I was walling in and walling out.” That wondering and questioning of the given is particularly evident in her “space fiction” (her term for what is commonly called science fiction) concerned as it is with the destructive historical patterns and cycles that imprison humanity and keep it from intellectual and spiritual evolution.

In The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing (1985), Katherine Fishburn was the first critic to give Lessing’s “space fiction” a fully focused reading; she rightly regards the “space fiction” as a concerted attempt “to critique modern social and political structures” (3). Fishburn approaches the texts through narrative structure and offers a fairly traditional analysis of Lessing’s quite untraditional fiction. Some twenty years later in Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction, David Waterman utilizes diverse scholarly approaches to examine the complicated issue of identity in the seven novels and one novella that make up Lessing’s “space fiction.” Like Fishburn, Waterman includes Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) along with the five novels that comprise Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–1983). Waterman adds the novella The Reason for It, published in 2003 and shows that Lessing’s interest in identity has not waned.

But interest in identity predates the “space fiction” and its cosmic scope. Lessing wrote seven novels before Briefing for a Descent into Hell, most in what can be described as the realistic mode, which she championed in “The Small Personal Voice” (originally published in 1957).