Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

And of course, a subject’s memory(ies) can be modified by manipulations carried out by the gatekeepers of a society. Raw memory, like real history, does not exist; these are cultural creations, sometimes even deliberate lies, fed to subjects who will then in turn defend them with vigor. This “prescribed memory” is precisely the situation from which one must escape, as much as possible, to begin an objective social critique, or to lead a society toward the androgynous, liberating philosophy which Lessing has in mind. This remanufacturing of the subject must be understood, according to Elizabeth Grosz, in its literal sense: power is not simply employed as punishment, but as a means of constituting subjects in the first place: “there has been a kind of social sublimation, a desensualization, and a series of refinements to these processes of social engraving of the law on bodies, but it remains more or less a requirement of the social taming of the will to power” (134). Pain, according to Nietzsche, is the key to memory, and one might add that pain is even more important when establishing the prescribed memory discussed above (61)⁴. Even more astonishing, where Charles and his cultural conditioning are concerned, is how well this institutional system of torture works. With only a recovered wallet and a few letters from family and coworkers, the psychiatrists are capa-ble, in just a few weeks’ time, of forcing Charles to rediscover his identity. It is also interesting to note, within these details, that a large part of Charles’s identity is established in relation to a few simple documents, to which modern societies are extremely attached, as well as testimony from other people, all of which demonstrates that a subject’s identity is very much imposed from the outside, as a function of how s/he is regarded by others.

Lessing treats the “insane” person, in this case Charles, as a corporal text, which is trying to transmit a pertinent, urgent message: society as it exists is caught in a violent, repetitive cycle, and as a result its very survival is threatened. However, regimes of power distrust dissident voices, which question too deeply the current ideological system, because these regimes risk losing at least some of their influence, which they exercise at the level of social control.