I recently reread The Dispossessed in connection with writing both an article, ‘The Radical Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin’, for Tribune on what would have been her 92nd birthday and the guest editorial for the special “SFF & Class” issue of Vector, the Journal of the BSFA. The piece below hasn’t appeared anywhere else but can be seen as a part of an occasional series in which I reread/review/think about classic feminist/utopian SF (understood in a very loose sense). At some point I will create an index for these; so far I’ve written about Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting (1975) and Dreamsnake (1977).
The Dispossessed has been considered a classic pretty much since its publication, when it won the treble of Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards for Best Novel but my impression is that it is more respected in the abstract than it is influential in practice. This really might just be my perspective. I have always been more drawn to texts focusing on gender, such as The Left Hand of Darkness or Russ’s The Female Man. In contrast, The Dispossessed has always seemed to me to be less paradigm-shifting and more of a hangover from the 60s/70s counterculture. Returning to it for the first time since the 1980s, I could only really remember two things about the novel: that the story is somehow bound up with the invention of the ansible and the scene in which Shevek takes a double helping at the refectory and feels no obligation to explain why:
Ravenous still from the journey, he took a double helping of both porridge and bread. The boy behind the serving tables looked at him, frowning. These days nobody took double helpings. Shevek stared frowning back and said nothing. He had gone eighty-odd hours now on two bowls of soup and one kilo of bread, and he had a right to make up for what he had missed; but he was damned if he would explain. Existence is its own justification, need is right, He was an Odonian, he left guilt to profiteers. (218)
I think this stuck in my mind because I was simultaneously impressed and appalled. The idea that one doesn’t always have to justify one’s behaviour in the light of social norms was eye-openingly refreshing and it’s a principle I’ve remembered and acted on occasionally (that’s why the passage has stayed with me). On the other hand, I was not an Odonian and therefore in that situation I would have spoken to the boy and explained my actions. In retrospect, reading the novel in 2021, Shevek often comes across as a self-righteous prick – he is sanctimonius, makes bad decisions and mishandles his relationships with women; he even commits a drunken sexual assault at one point in the novel. Clearly, readers are not supposed simply to identify with him and approve his actions. In part, I suppose that male readers (of the 70s) might have been expected to learn from his mistakes with him and thus mature into more rounded persons but I don’t think it would (or even could) be written in this way now.
The issue with Shevek is that he doesn’t really understand the difference between punching up and punching down. However, he has the excuse that there isn’t supposed to be an up and down in the anarchist society he comes from. Over the course of the novel, he learns the truth about that society, which is that it isn’t a ‘permanent revolution’ whose ‘validity and strength’ can be maintained by acting ‘without fear of punishment and without hope of reward’ from ‘the centre of one’s soul’ (151). Instead, he realises that the reality of his anarchist society is that ‘We’ve made laws of conventional behaviour, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking’ (273).
In particular, the very idea that there are no hierarchies of power on Anarres, is what makes it so difficult for Shevek and others to see how those hierarchies are controlling their lives and to understand how they might move beyond them; a process which involves more than just an individual sense of righteousness. Even on the very opening page of the novel, the point is made that walls are ‘ambiguous, two-faced’ (9). Is something being shut out or shut in? The wall round the spaceport on Anarres is supposed to ‘[enclose] the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free’ (9) but how often does that kind of arrangement actually work? From the beginning, Le Guin points out the problem: ‘Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine’ (9). Hence, Shevek’s invention of the ansible (or rather his derivation of the equations of simultaneity that make its manufacture possible) provides the solution to the social crisis of Anarres by connecting it to other worlds and peoples, thus breaking through the walls.
Le Guin’s point is not simply that technological process is the answer to social problems. Indeed, the logic of the novel is that only a physicist from Anarres, free from the invisible walls of a capitalist, property-bound mindset and with the self-belief made possible by a society that is based on the principles of freedom and agency, could make this conceptual breakthrough. In this respect, the novel shows that it is thought which is utopian rather than social structure itself. The idea of Anarres might act as a utopian goal for the oppressed working class of the capitalist world Urras – hence the symbolic power of the scenes in which Shevek eventually addresses them during the course of his long visit to Urras – but in reality the social orders of both planets are structured around scarcity. Anarres is not a blueprint for utopian living; it is a demonstration of how any society based on allocation of scarce resources will be unjust, even if rooted in equal rationing. In the other conceptual breakthough of the novel, Shevek comes to realise that the people of both Urras and Anarres are dispossessed but it requires a number of complex mental leaps for him to reach this understanding and to see that the answer lies in greater connection to the rest of the universe.
In conclusion, therefore, I see The Dispossessed as a text marking the end point of the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Anarres is like one of those communes that has devolved into some form of domestic tyranny; only the ideas behind it, redeem it and enable a solution to be conceived. The novel ends, like McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting, with the imperative sense that we need to escape the planet’s gravity and engage with the universe as a whole. The next step logically, as followed by someone like Iain Banks influenced by this type of ‘utopian’ SF as he came of age during this late 60s/early 70s period, would be to write post-scarcity ‘utopian’ SF set in that wider universe.
In 2022, I want to write about Banks’s Culture novels as following on from 70s fiction such as that of Le Guin (watch this space!). However, that is not to say that Le Guin’s relevance stops in 1975. Apart from the huge volume of fiction, she wrote in the succeeding years and decades, I think even The Dispossessed has regained a new immediacy in a world where it is now much easier to imagine industrial capitalism breaking down in the face of climate change and associated factors. It is not an immediately viable option to leave the planet en masse! We do need to think about different ways of organising society in the changed environmental contexts that are developing. But above all, we need to tear down all the walls we can in order to enable the types of thinking and conceptual breakthroughs that are necessary for us to move on beyond the old closed social orders which still dominate so much of human life. Existence and need don’t trump all other concerns but they are nonetheless justifications for freeing ourselves from mental chains.
Prospective Cultures 