Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

The psychiatric institution, which normalizes individuals in the name of the dominant power, labels Charles as crazy, thus assuring that no one will take his message seriously. At the same time that a society allows dissident voices to exist, it ensures that these voices will be denigrated and disregarded. Charles is admitted to the Central Intake Hospital like a blank page; he has no identity except that of “male” (3)⁵. In our current way of thinking, an identity does not exist in the absence of memory, in the absence of a history and a cultural investment; not having his own identity (at least an identity accepted and understood by the population in question), Charles is named/classified by the psychiatrists, with the notions of possession and caretaking which underlie this procedure⁶. The hospital personnel are assigned the task of separating him from the rest of society and literally reinscribing his mind and his body, using incarceration, mind-altering drugs and electric shocks, all techniques, which constitute the arsenal of institutional torture. The reader understands, however, that Charles is not at all crazy, but simply qualified as such by the dominant power which fears him. The insane, according to Lessing, are lights which try to illuminate the ideological fissures and contradictions of a violent culture: “In mental hospitals where the millions who have cracked, making cracks where the light could shine through at last” (140). These visionaries try to transmit information, to illuminate facts, which have been obscured; their mission is difficult, as theirs is a marginal position, maligned by the dominant power which only allows transmission of information filtered through its own ideological position, and defended by its institutions. An oppressive ideological system tries to cover the cracks by denying that any knowledge whatsoever can be transmitted outside of a dominant stance.