Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

Institutions are always more important and more powerful than individuals, and in the end the psychiatrists succeed in reinscribing Charles with his approved identity: “Your attitude to [Charles] is this. I’ve got to make him remember what I know to be true about him,” to which Doctor Y responds, “Yes it is. Of course” (154). Therapeutic neutrality is exposed as a myth; the psychiatrists, like judges or high-ranking civil servants, also represent the dominant power. Charles is not insane, but disoriented and amnesic after his “awakening” following his descent—he is literally a messenger of the gods, come to assist Earth’s inhabitants during the approaching catastrophe, “the Planetary Emergency in which all life may be lost” (132). Charles task, as explained by Mercury during the briefing, is to recruit the best-suited messengers to warn their fellow residents of the coming catastrophe if the population on Earth does not return to an androgynous state; their task is comparable to that of a doctor in a psychiatric hospital, who finds himself going against majority opinion:

Thus appears the irony of the novel: Charles has been sent to heal the insanity of Earth’s inhabitants, but in a society where insanity has become normal, the doctor has become the patient. Even a messenger of the gods cannot resist the dominant power in its drive to reorient marginal individuals toward the norm.

While Charles is being held in the psychiatric hospital, his captivity and the oppression he undergoes are emblematic of the appalling treatment endured by the collective bodies and minds of the people, who suffer constantly from unsuspected sources, “manipulated from above (or below) by physical forces that they did not even as yet suspect” (104). England itself is alluded to as a society which is a prisoner of itself, condemned to discover, and then forget, androgyny, not because of an inherently defective memory, but because of a constructed cultural history which requires a certain amount of amnesia from its subjects.