Finding Yourself: Multiversal Identity Crisis in Ted Chiang’s Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

Coles, Amy (2024) Finding Yourself: Multiversal Identity Crisis in Ted Chiang’s Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom. In: Entering the Multiverse: Perspectives on Alternate Universes and Parallel Worlds. Routledge, New York and Oxford. ISBN Print: 9781032770116 / eBook: 9781003480846

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Abstract

We live in a time when theories of the multiverse are everywhere, penetrating our daily lives: be it in film, television, literature, comic books, video games, the idea of alternate universes is both popular and inescapable. But what effect does the existence of multiple—and potentially superior—variants of ourselves have on our conceptions of identity? In a society seemingly obsessed with multiverse theories, the question of nature versus nurture becomes ever more prevalent: is our nature inherent, or is it our circumstances which define us? If exposed to different scenarios, would we still be us? By examining Ted Chiang’s novella, Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom (2019), this essay seeks to highlight the dangers of the multiverse on a psychological level, and the damage it can have on an individual’s psyche. The novella’s title is taken from Soren Kierekgaard’s definition of anxiety as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ (1844), and the existential crisis arising from having endless possibilities. Considering the frail nature of identity, the existence of multiple, and more successful, versions of oneself develops an identity crisis which seeks to understand what events may have prevented themselves from becoming this ultimate version; furthermore, if there are never-ending versions of a person, it stands to reason that there is a worst version, and that could very well be you. It is this anxiety of selfhood which Chiang’s novella closely examines. Taking the idea of the double to an infinite degree, the idea of the multiverse simultaneously destroys all certainty of a unique identity while paradoxically suggesting that we are products of experience, and that our identity is subject to change dependent on the life lived. By reading multiversal fiction as a contemporary and science fictional form of double literature, we can examine the concept psychoanalytically to gain further understanding of the insecurity and interchangeability of identity, the battle of nature versus nurture, and the persistent anxiety surrounding ideas of selfhood. If you are in fact everything and everyone, then each one of your multiple selves must come to terms with being nothing and no-one.

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