The Dispossessed

The cover blurb for The Dispossessed makes it sound like a thrilling exciting narrative, filled with tension and action:

Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life—Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

But that's not what it is, and it's certainly not Le Guin's focus. This is clear in the way she avoids what might be the more dramatic elements of the story, or distances us from them in how they are portrayed. The story is bookended by two examples of that. The opening sees Shevek - although we don't know it's him at this stage - leaving his homeworld and causing quite a bit of upset, seen from the viewpoint of a minor character who never reappears. And the book ends abruptly with no certainty of an outcome.

The capitalist society on the planet Urras that Shevek travels to felt too much like 1950s America rather than some far flung society thousands of years in the future. Other elements of the novel such as Shevek's unfortunate sexual dalliance, the possibility of defecting from the capitalist society to a nearby communist society, and getting caught up in a riot really don't amount to much and the plot as a whole is quite thin.

What I did like about the book was Le Guin's vivid portrayal of a functioning anarchist society on Shevek's homeworld Anarres. And Shevek himself was a likeable character.

The book is more concerned with the question of whether a truly anarchist society can survive, given the generally acquisitive nature of humanity, and during the story there is an indication that even this utopia will fall foul of the general tendency for all systems of government to move towards a hierarchy of control. Shevek struggles against this tendency: "We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive."

We never know if Shevek achieves what the cover blurb says. There's not much indication that the capitalist society will change because of him, though the anarchist society may survive if they take the example of his life to heart. But with no certainty about how the story ends, all we are left with is a political thought experiment.

Shevek's purity fascinates me. The main character, Shevek, lives in an austere, nominally anarchistic society on a barren yet habitable planet. Prodigious in theoretical physics, Shevek pursues a kind of unified theorem of space-time that will, among other things, make possible the "ansible" -- an instantaneous communication device invented by Le Guin and common throughout science fiction universes.

The Dispossessed escapes science fiction as do so many great imaginative novels. Anarres, Shevek's home planet, has a twin, Urras, flush with diverse ecologies and aggressively competitive political factions. Yet we readers see surprisingly little of the political strife on Urras -- save one harrowing chapter -- just as we examine very little of Shevek's physics. Le Guin entrances us readers with this subtle slight of the writer's hand: what's hidden on Urras must be all too familiar to us, all too real; what's slowly, impossibly being revealed on Anarres must be wholly unfamiliar to us, a multi-chambered dream deferred by our "real" world's physics, ecology, politics, and supposed values.

What I am trying to say is that the society on Anarres -- most especially in 1974 when the hellish humanitarian disasters in the USSR, People's Republic of China, People's Republic of Korea, Argentina, Chile, Afganistan, and among many other nations I regretfully omit -- the anarchistic, utilitarian society of Anarres feels truly impossible to readers, especially in the present day United States of America, who accumulate their precious free-time for reading via the "propertarian" activities universally shunned by Shevek and his compatriots. I challenge the reader to imagine which is more likely: a theoretical discovery in physics that leads to faster-than-light communication, or a lasting society based exclusively on shared goods and labor that manages to survive on a desert planet with just a dozen or so native species of plants and animals?

Le Guin's genius pairs both seemingly impossible premises in the life-story, in media res, of Shevek. He invents the impossible physics through a lifetime of musing on a version of Zeno's paradox; he believes and practices fully the anarchistic values of his world. Shevek has definite flaws. Intoxicated at a party on Urras and confused by his host's flirtatious behavior, he sexually assaults her. Apparently this does not bother his patrons on Urras; they're more interested in Shevek's unfinished theorems and one's left unclear whether the men on Urras -- who hold all the nominal power in the planet's society -- even consider sexual assault a crime. (Another trick by Le Guin. I suspect you'd miss the omission of justice if you are, knowingly or not, complicit in rape culture as it's called today.) At the same time, Shevek's most significant virtue lay not in his theories but in his ethics. He visits Urras and returns to Anarres with the explicit goal of reforming both societies. If his physics frees matter from temporal constraints, his ethics attempts to free individuals from egoistic competition.

At which point, we readers must again ask ourselves which is more likely: divorcing physical substance from temporal conditions, or extricating the individual from a social order that she herself does not consent?

In raising these questions, Shevek challenges the reader in subtle ways. Le Guin truly shows us how to seek purity in our own thinking -- timelessly, without silly assumptions about, in 1974, whether the American-controlled nationalists or the Soviet-controlled nationalists are right in their respective nationalism. We do good to consider this questions today, in the revolutionary year of 2016.