Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

Cultures employs an ideological network of binary opposition to provide its subjects with a sense of social and historical grounding, as well as a means of limiting their choices and movements, and if a subject intends to question the validity of this exclusive framework, s/he must first expose its fictitious origins. Born in Persia (now Iran) and having lived in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) between the ages of five and thirty, Doris Lessing is divided between dominant and nondominant groups, a division which gives her what Katherine Fishburn calls an “inside-outside” vantage point from which to critique the existing system (57), and from where she can call for the transformation of a society which does not tolerate people who resist their classification as subjects whose identity has already been determined in advance. Much of her work, influenced by Marxism and then Sufiphilosophy², suggests that any real social transformation must be linked to our capacity to heal fractures caused by this system of classification and exclusion, especially by considering ourselves and our position in society as “we” in the largest sense rather than “I,” what Peter Malekin refers to as “planetary consciousness and nonseparative cosmic individuality” (78). This integrity between the individual and the collective, what Nancy Topping Bazin calls androgyny (10), is a means to put an end to the limits and fallacious logic of binary opposition and to highlight the possibilities for a positive transformation, in other words to achieve what Malekin calls a “divorce between role and identity” (73).

The principal obstacle to this social evolution through androgyny, which Lessing endorses lies, according to Bazin, in the fact that people are incapable of acknowledging the necessity of androgyny, understood by Lessing always in its widest sense (Bazin, 11). Even though this metaphysical blindness is obvious in practice, it seems that there is nothing natural in human beings, which would provoke such a resistance to androgynous unity.