Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

Charles is capable of seeing more clearly the coming catastrophe because he is a stranger to the current ideological climate, and he questions the fictions which underpin a system where violence and insanity have become normal. Normal human beings are insane, according to Lessing, because they are fragmented, insisting that they are “I” rather than “we” (109), and Charles discovers that in fact the institution of psychiatry helps to maintain that rupture. As Charles realizes, the psychiatrists are not the only demons who participate in the reproduction of a violent society; each member of society must admit his or her share of the guilt: everyone participates in the war … “We were all there” (154–155). Charles does not fit into the psychiatrists’s world (and by extension, the dominant power’s) because, as Margaret Rowe suggests, he has had the experience of other dimensions and other cultures which are distinct from the society he faces (60). Charles’s conviction, that knowledge and reality are determined by culture, thus subject to change, is a source of worry for the defenders of the ruling ideology. The dominant power never tolerates the possibility that its subjects may be different; if one accepts the definition of humanness as a being who has the capacity to be different, we see that an oppressive political regime treats its subjects as subhuman, a means of devaluing subjects in order to more easily justify their brutal treatment. According to the dominant group, certain subjects are only fit to be governed by those in a position of authority.

Charles, even at the hands of the psychiatrists, understands that his insanity has a sense: “They say, ‘an anxiety state,’ as they say, paranoia, but all these things, they have a meaning, they are reflections from that other part of ourselves, and that part of ourselves knows things we don’t know” (272). Charles is thinking of the other aspects of his knowledge, his androgynous state which he needs in order to criticize an ideology objectively, to see more clearly the contradictions and the lies inherent in any system of binary opposition. He also understands that, to deliver his message, he must first challenge the system from the interior before subverting it; he must continue his performance. As a consequence, Charles has no real choice—he must undergo the electric shock treatments prescribed by the psychiatrists.