Doris Lessing’s Boundary Crossings

In the novel Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999), Doris Lessing depicts the survival predicaments of humans and nonhumans tens of thousands of years after a climate catastrophe. This article illustrates the emergence and the main characteristics of climate change fiction and explores how climate change is represented in the novel using the theoretical framework of climate change criticism. In doing so, this study argues that Lessing narrates climate change through crossing boundaries of scales, species, and genres. Lessing transcends the scalar boundary between the short-term human scale and the long-term planetary scale to make climate change and its anthropogenic causes perceptible and visible; she transcends the boundary of species to render humans into another kind of species, threatened by extinction and animal attack, in order to dissolve the dichotomy between subject and object; and she transcends the doom scenarios depicted in fiction dealing with an environmental apocalypse to provide an alternative, better future with the purpose of evoking readers’ emotional response and ethical reflection. By examining the boundary crossings, this article sheds new light on Mara and Dann as an epitome of climate change fiction, suggesting Lessing’s intentions to deconstruct the age-old dichotomy between humans and nature and to criticise the ideology of anthropocentrism.