Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

And like humans in a fragmentary society, the rat-dogs are bloodthirsty, their pointed muzzles dripping with blood (82), like the faces of the frenetic women, extremely agitated after their banquet of raw meat, a frightening image of a society devouring itself (63–65). Charles, who was present at the bloody banquet, recognizes in these women something in himself, a fading memory of past experience: “Three women, all intimately connected with me, alike, sisters perhaps, bound to me by experience I could not remember at all” (64). He concludes that there is no longer any hope for the humans or the animals of the Earth, especially since humans continue to behave as beasts, following a selfish and predatory law of the jungle (89). This law is accepted as natural, as though the human race were not composed of a unique species, but composed of groups which distinguish themselves by skin color or socioeconomic class, and as though that difference justified violence. Those who think otherwise, like Charles, are considered mad. Redding speaks of such “violence of difference” in our supposedly evolved, advanced society: “…whether the violence of difference … as distinct from the violence of domination, will be capable of opening the vast potentials it has from time to time promised to reveal or whether we are capable of encountering an “otherness” without that encounter assuming the dimensions of violence” (17). A society wherein difference is synonymous with violence is exactly the status quo which Lessing condemns, a situation which will never improve unless subjects are awakened and recognize their conditioning as predefined subjects, which fulfill their role as perfect specimens who will guarantee support for the dominant ideology.

In order to resist a dominant ideology intent on destruction, and to encourage others to resist, indirect means of expression must be used to avoid being labeled insane. According to Julian Rice, Lessing understands that frontal assaults in social change are often doomed, because of their extreme, radical, and “insane” character (71). A disguise is necessary so that the individual who would resist becomes a guerilla fighter who does not seem rebellious, but who is nevertheless discreetly subversive.