Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

In spite of its compassionate and healing image, the institution of psychiatry acts directly on the body as well as the mind, often as brutally as any totalitarian regime, in order to recover and recuperate wayward subjects; it is a microcosm where the dialectic of master-subject is replaced by the poles of doctor-patient, wherein the patient is half criminal and half sick. Hannah Arendt reminds us that there are totalitarian elements in every ideology, even those that pretend to be utopian (470). Each subject thus recovered becomes part of the social myth, which helps to create approved knowledge and meaning within the culture. According to Elizabeth Grosz, a body thus recovered becomes a text and is transformed into a fiction, which takes its position within myths and belief systems which constitute the social models and the systems of auto-representation of a culture (119). Knowledge is not simply defined by culture, but literally created at the intersection of subjects with the dominant power. Like subjects, the knowledge thus created is fragmentary; those who seek a more coherent knowledge, an androgynous state according to Lessing, threaten the dominant ideology because they resist their classification as this or that kind of subject within a binary system. Those who oppose, who see the existing system for what it is, are able to expose the fictions which officially define “identity” or “reality,” just as in Charles’s case.

It is often difficult to separate the individual from the collective body in Lessing’s work; it seems that Charles, incarcerated and tortured, becomes emblematic of society in its entirety: “all regulated ordered and social and correct” (138). Although Charles resists the psychiatrists, he ends up by understanding, after his briefing during the war, that the heroism of resistance is a myth: “human beings cannot stand up to torture and psychological methods and should not be expected to” (225). Charles, perhaps like the majority of subjected people, is looking for a coherent, androgynous state; he wants to resist fragmentation, but finds himself nearly powerless against institutions of normalization.