Obsessed with The Dispossessed

As always, there are spoilers ahead.

The Dispossessed was published in 1974, the fifth book published in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle.  It is thematically tied to the other Hainish novels in that it deals with the soft collision of drastically different cultures as seen through the interactions of individuals from those cultures.  The Dispossessed differs from the previous novels insofar as neither of the two cultures are Terran or Hainish or alien at all.  The two cultures at issue are from twin planets that circle each other, each acting as the other’s moon.  Urras is the parent planet, where all the people originated.  170 years before our story begins, a group of anarchists fled Urras for the moon, Anarres, where they could establish their anarchical utopia.  For the past 7 generations, the two cultures have not mixed or interacted more than some radio communications.  The people on Anarres, the Odonians, have an entirely original language and have divorced themselves entirely from the Urras way of life.  In the opening chapter, one lone Anarresti boards a freighter rocket that irregularly transports goods between the planets to travel to Urras.

Shevek, our main character, is a temporal physicist who has worked out a unified theory of space and time, called simultaneity.  His work has gone as far as it can among the Anarresti, and he hopes to make progress among the minds and technology on Urras.  The Urrasti want him to complete his work so that they can build the ansible, which is only a theoretical concept on Urras.  We have encountered the ansible in all the other Hainish novels: it is the device that allows simultaneous communication across any distance of space.  With it, the Urras hope to have an edge on the interstellar communities—the Terrans and Hainish—who have been in recent contact with them. 

Thematically, the novel, like all Le Guin’s other works in the Hainish cycle, is about the space between the cultures that are mid-clash.  She calls that synthesis “marriage” in her introduction to Planet of Exiles, and I talk about it in my posts about that book as well as City of Illusions. The metaphor in The Dispossessed is the wall, the things we build in an effort to protect ourselves but that have the added effect of imprisoning ourselves.  There is but one wall on all of Anarres, because there is no property or boundaries in the anarchical society.  That wall is what the book opens on:

 There was a wall.  It did not look important.  It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it.  Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary.  But the idea was real.  It was important.  For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
 Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced.  What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
 Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. . . . The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe.  It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
 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.

Near the end of the book, a dozen or so paragraphs from the end of chapter 10, Shevek (in a scene that takes place before the opening of the book) decides that he needs to start a printing syndicate to print all the things the other syndicates on Anarres refuse to print.  Among the things he will print is the play written by his childhood friend, Tirin, the performance of which resulted in Anarresti society shunning Tirin. “I owe him that,” Shevek says in explaining why he’ll print Tirin’s play. “He taught me what prisons are, and who builds them.  Those who build walls are their own prisoners.  I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism.  I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

Walls are boundaries, ways we imprison others, and ways we isolate ourselves in the name of protection.  Walls say “this is mine, not yours.”  Walls are rules without words, telling other where they can and cannot go and be.  The Anarresti have one wall, and one written law, and not coincidentally, they are the same thing: no one from Urras may come onto Anarresti soil. On Urras, Shevek doesn’t encounter literal walls, but they are everywhere around him.  They structure the way people talk to each other; they structure what he can see and what he cannot; they channel his movements and his experiences without his even knowing it.  Urras is a capitalist society with all the social ills that accompany it.  There are hierarchies at work in every interaction.  As an Anarresti in this strange land, Shevek has to find a way to square up these social inequities with the beauty of the world he’s shown. 

This is a great book, and it is a very Le Guin book.  Like all her Hainish novels, there is no immediate “plot” that gives the reader a sense of where the story is going.  We are meeting characters and watching their interactions, and through them we are discovering the world of the novel.  Tension within situations develop not through characters butting heads, but through the general clash of expectations and world views.  There are no villains and no heroes, and the journey is not one of personal development.  Shevek’s understanding of how the worlds and cultures are related goes through a major shift, but nothing about Shevek’s character changes.  I was talking with my wife the other day (with whom I am reading these novels) and we described “plot” in Le Guin’s book like hand-beating cream into whipped cream.  For a long time, things are spinning and spattering, and then, just when you think it will never become whipped cream, it transitions from a liquid to a solid seemingly all at once.  The Dispossessed is no different in this—it hums along as an interesting story, and then, wham, there is suddenly a plot and the story arrives it one big bang.  You can then look back and see all the strands and connections, but nothing seems forced or inevitable.  In so many ways her novels seem like anthropological studies, in which she creates situations, molds some representative characters, and then watches them bounce off one another.  It is only through the power of her art that those characters and the worlds they inhabit take on full independent life.  It’s amazing to behold.

One of Le Guin’s greatest gifts is communicating genuine tenderness, love, and affection between two characters.  In The Dispossessed, we see this most in Shevek and Takver’s relationship, and in each novel before it, there are equally moving relationships, the most affecting for me being Genly Ai and Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness.  Normally for Le Guin, this kind of description and connection is its own reward, but in the case of The Dispossessed, I feel like Shevek and Takver’s relationship is given a foil in the relationship between Shevek and Vea, the Urrasti woman.  Vea is witty and urbane in an almost classic Hollywood sense.  She’s flirty with sharp retorts and interested in defending her decadent culture by revealing the repression and hidden decadence of Anarresti culture.  The back-and-forth between Shevek and Vea is the kind of interpersonal relationship that is common in a lot of novels, and its presence here draws attention to the fact that it is not anywhere else in the novel.  It is hollow and disturbing, and not a delight the way it is in classic films.  It’s one of the more troublesome chapters in the book since we see Shevek ready to practically rape Vea, Shevek who up to this point has been the voice of feminism in the novel.  There is much to be made of this chapter, and I look forward to reading the thoughts of a much smarter literary critic, but I’ll limit my observations to this one thing.  Shevek’s premature orgasm that puts his semen on Vea’s leg seems to me the crucial symbol of the scene.  When the sexes are not established as equals, and the only power granted women is sexual power, then the arena of conflict between a man and a woman will necessarily become sexual.  And the fruits of that encounter will be as wasteful and disturbing as Vea’s stained dress.  Shevek’s and Takver’s relationship is only possible between equals, and the sexism in the Urrasti system destroys that possibility, and it makes monsters out of men and women alike.

One of the greatest aspects of The Dispossessed is its ability to present an “ambiguous Utopia.”  In the end, Anarres is a true Utopia, a vision of what humankind could have, but it is not an unproblematic vision.  It is simultaneously admiring and critical of the civilization, knowing that any group will always fall short of their ideals.  Le Guin is unflinching in her vision and analysis.  As she says through Shevek when he thinks about the complicated reality of Urras: “The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native.  To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect.  It was not an easy job” (about a third of the way into chapter 9).  Include and connect.  That could be the motto of Le Guin’s writing.  She never denies one reality at the expense of the other, but holds them both up and draws lines to connect them.  It’s what those of us who love Le Guin’s works keep coming back for.

I have talked in other reviews (mostly in my look at City of Illusions) about the important of synthesis in the Hainish novels, of two different cultures coming together to make a third thing, unique and superior.  That idea is given a unique twist in The Dispossessed, in that synthesis is rejected.  The difference here is that Anarres and Urras are not two alien cultures, but a splintering of one culture.  To re-synthesize would be to recreate the imbalances and troubles that caused the separation in the first place.  No, Shevek rejects the synthesis in chapter 11 when he is talking to Keng, the Terran ambassador:

It was for that idea that I came here too.  For Anarres.  Since my people refuse to look outward, I thought I might make others look at us.  I thought it would be better not to hold apart behind a wall, but to be a society among the others, a world among the others, giving and taking.  But there I was wrong—I was absolutely wrong . . .
 'Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need!  We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right.  We took nothing.  Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery.  There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras.  There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power.  You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is “superior” to the other, or trying to prove it. . . . I have been to Hell at last.

Keng offers a counterpoint, that Urras, in spite of its flaws is as close as she’s ever come to paradise.  He asks what she would think of Anarres, and Keng responds that the Terrans “forfeited our chance for Anarres centuries ago.”  Shevek responds:

You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres.  You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment. . . .  My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you.  You will not let us.  You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution.  You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope!  We cannot come to you.  We can only wait for you to come to us.

For all its faults, Anarres is a utopia, a dream of equality and communal support.  It is not a culture to be synthesized and absorbed; that would destroy it and not improve the other culture at all.  It is rather a kind of goal post, a place to push for.  And we see this at the end of the novel when the Hainish citizen requests to visit Anarres.  You have to come to Anarres; it cannot come to you, and it cannot meet you half way.  It is outside of the League of Worlds where synthesis between cultures takes place.

The Dispossessed didn’t knock my socks off when I read it.  None of Le Guin’s novels have done that.  They are wonderfully written, but they are not poetry in prose seldom breathtaking in their presentation.  But they have a power that grows as you read them, and that sits with you (or I should say me) once I’ve finished them.  They are intelligent, quiet, meaningful, heartfelt, and thoughtful.  They are like ancient structures built to last and be revisited, learned from, studied, explored, and admired.  And I love them for that.