Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

The literary tradition of an insane character who transmits an impor­tant message is not new. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are full of “mad” characters to whom we should listen⁷. What Lessing does, in Charles’s situation, facing the dominant ideology, is nevertheless different, because she places the insane person in a twentieth-century ideological system, a very powerful and insidious administrative network of social control. Before, those who criticized the authori­ties too vigorously were removed from society, or if their existence was allowed, they were exiled to the margins. More recently, those on the margins are recovered by a social-control regime which does not provide an ex-centric space, which could become a space of resistance; the center covers everything. Charles, though isolated, is neither incarcerated forever nor killed. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange or Winston Smith in 1984, Charles must be reconstituted as a subject, persuaded that he is insane, and then brought back into the fold after being normalized. Kathleen Kirby reminds us that opting out of the cultural system is generally impossible, since it is not up to individual subject to decide who will be granted an exception (120). The dominant ideology does not accept failure, neither does it wish to create martyrs. Those regimes that are most obviously totalitarian must employ physical force and overt violence to defend themselves and preserve their position, but the more “democratic” regimes must also defend themselves, although their institutions of normalization and repression seem more humane. However, as Arthur Redding explains, modern societies are not necessarily less violent: “institutional structures of containment will be perpetually frustrated in any efforts to isolate or eliminate the source of the contagion [of violence] and will, if they are wise, content themselves with manipulation and controlling its flow rather than excising it” (53 and 34). The institution of psychiatry is a medical-judicial organism which functions according to the idea that those who resist the norm are sick, thus extreme measures are justified to ensure that they be healed (measures as extreme as incarceration, mind-altering drugs, electric shocks, or even neurosurgery).