Many bestsellers or award-winning books or plays or movies or record albums tend to fade over the years, but a few manage to pass the test of time.
In that latter category is Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, inducted in 1993 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Recently honored on its 50th anniversary with a Harper’s 50th Anniversary Edition, Le Guin’s novel contrasts two alleged utopian worlds.
One human-settled planet is anarchist (but without property rights and with mob rule and group think); the other is mostly capitalist (but with recurrent wars and extremes of wealth and poverty.)
The central story focuses on Shevek, a brilliant Anarres physicist intent on challenging the calcified assumptions of both worlds and reuniting them after centuries of mistrust. Often taking immense risks to spark change, the ambitious scientist visits Urras to teach and learn.
LeGuin’s thought-provoking, wise and sober critique of assumptions by both Left and Right is freshly examined in Jonathan Bolton’s fascinating and illuminating review-essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Among political novelists, Le Guin stood out for her ability to blend different kinds of politics. She was fascinated by the grand politics of class and revolution—her novels are full of parliamentary factions, court intrigue, diplomats, spies, and rebels. As the Thuvian ambassador tells Shevek, “You have got to understand the powers behind the individuals,”’ Bolton writes.
“But as a feminist and skilled imaginer of everyday life, she also had a sensitive eye for the mundane power struggles of “the personal is political.” Nor did she ignore the cruel paradoxes and structural violence of imperialism, playing out in both colony and metropole. Through it all, she maintained a keen sense of the pure force of ideas to move back and forth among these three political worlds.”
“The Dispossessed is a running political conversation—full of intrigue and drama, to be sure— in which Shevek is forced to test and develop his anarchist ideals against a range of friendly and hostile interlocutors on both Anarres and Urras. These varied conversations leave no political idea unchallenged, even as Shevek preserves his ever-evolving anarchist ideals,” Bolton writes.
One interesting tidbit that I learned from Bolton’s intelligent and learned essay is the source of Le Guin’s title. Turns out Le Guin was creating a nice pun based on the English translation of the title of Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Bessy into The Possessed.
“Dostoevsky portrays his amoral Russian revolutionaries as “possessed” by the devils of revolution; they are willing to sacrifice any principle to further a supposedly higher end, one that grows foul and corrupt in their hands. By contrast, Le Guin respects her anarchists, who have been “dispossessed” of the demons of revolution; they are also (the real meaning of the title) frugal, ascetic, and often hungry. Poor, they inhabit a barren planet, but they are rich in the spirit of self-sacrifice and cooperation,” Bolton explains.
Bolton’s analysis of The Dispossessed is so good that it makes me want to reread Le Guin with the reasonable hope of appreciating her deeper meanings than I had grasped before.
“The Dispossessed abandons the idea of a “prison planet” and replaces it with a thought experiment: what would a world run on anarchist principles—with no government, army, laws, or police—look like? When a revolution nearly overthrows one of the countries on the prosperous planet of Urras, the Council of World Governments allows the revolutionaries—followers of an anarchist visionary named Odo—to settle on the moon, “buying them off with a world, before they fatally undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras.” Over the next 20 years, a million Odonians migrate to the dusty, arid moon, named Anarres, until “the port [i]s closed to immigration and left open only to the freight ships of the Trade Agreement.” Henceforth, Anarres exists in conditions of near-isolation, the Odonians striving to set up a new society without government or state,” Bolton writes.
“The novel proper begins some 150 years later, with the earnest and brilliant physicist Shevek preparing to journey to Urras to conduct, and possibly share, his research on instantaneous communication. A child of Anarres, Shevek is a sincere believer in anarchism—indeed, he knows no other system—but he is also a brilliant thinker who feels stifled by its social pressures. He thinks it is time to reopen communication with Urras.”
Le Guin interweaves her story in two threads told in alternating chapters – one following Shevek’s coming of age on Anarres, the other following his year-long stay on Urras conducting research as a visiting professor – roughly analogous as Bolton explains, to Shevek’s research on temporal sequentiality and simultaneity.
Through Shevek’s eyes, Le Guin herself wrestles with two alternate and partly conflicting visions of societies – one anarchist, one “archaist” but materially prosperous – in which human beings might flourish, amid ongoing problems and perennial human failings.
Bolton’s L.A. Review essay is worth reading in full because it offers many more insights in the complexities and subtleties of the novel and especially of Le Guin’s less-than-ideal portrait of anarchism.
Today, both The Dispossessed and Le Guin’s other anthropology-influenced science fiction (especially in her Hainish novels and stories, which includes The Dispossessed) are widely recognized and hailed as classics in the evolving genre.
Yet, The Dispossessed was one of the most controversial Prometheus Award picks during the first decade or so of the Libertarian Futurist Society, dividing opinion among members as it was nominated, renominated and considered for induction into the Hall of Fame.
Read the Prometheus Blog report on the controversy, as it revolved around Reason magazine and LFS Director Victoria Varga.
Read the Prometheus Blog Appreciation of The Dispossessed.
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I have to say, although I have no sympathy for Anarres’s communism, I find the chapters set there deeply moving whenever I reread The Dispossessed. In a strange way, I feel imaginatively at home there. On the other hand, I’m not satisfied with the chapters set on Urras: They feel like a collection of clichés from popular novels or television shows, as if Le Guin were writing about a place she had never lived and had no real knowledge of—whereas she writes about Anarres as if she had lived there for a long time. I do think The Dispossessed deserved its Hall of Fame award, but it’s specifically for its vision of an anarchist society and even more for its realization of the failure modes of this particular anarchist society.