the dispossessed
As I excitedly announced last month my favorite book won the Gazette’s book club poll.1 I reread it for this occasion to freshen up my memory of it and I enjoyed it all the more for it. As Kami said, it’s an astonishing book on a technical level that is not that easy to get into and takes time to pick up steam, but that doesn’t bother me personally at all. I went into it for the politics—it definitely changed my outlook on life—and knew it didn’t have the YA novel pacing that I was so used to expecting before starting my studies. Let’s say the kind of literature I have to read for my degree kind of hardened me into a more patient reader who doesn’t expect a climax and just relishes it when it comes. All this to say that political theory/philosophy is pretty dry unless you’re a nerd for it, which I am.
What I really liked in this book was the world-building. The author wrote the story as if Anarres existed in my world and just dropped information as the plot went on. It wasn’t descriptive in the sense that there were paragraphs simply describing the social organization of Anarres, its people’s clothing, their food, their customs, or their relationships. These things were introduced as they became relevant for the characters which stands in stark contrast to Utopia by Thomas More, the founding text of the utopia genre that I read recently, or even Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. You get to learn a lot about their culture through the missing words and phrases in their constructed language, Pravic, that makes using possessive pronouns awkward, contains no real cusswords, and makes sex a collaborative effort instead of something you do to someone. The Dispossessed is a utopian text that follows the „you’ll simply know when the right time comes“ recipe that older people tell us as kids when we ask questions they feel uncomfortable to answer.
For example, the role of the PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination) and how it’s formed is not explained outright in the book. You get to piece it together by bits and pieces as the characters continue to struggle against it. I learned the following when Bedap and Shevek were having a heated conversation about the alleged corruption and bureaucratization of that body: Anarres’ society is organized around syndicates for every field and niche which are federated, meaning every city has its own syndicate for physics, cooks, biologists, musicians and so on that organize matters for their community and in collaboration with other communities. Those selected for a PDC term are usually in a syndicate for their niche, undergo training for a while and then enter the job to coordinate matters for the whole of Anarres. The PDC is a coordination body which is neither a government nor a central or hierarchical body. It consists of syndicate members who are selected by lot for a limited term and can’t enter the position again. The PDC’s decisions are non-binding and mostly a suggestion/guidance because all it is is an arena for the different parts of Anarres and its syndicates to discuss what to do. However, the main conflict in the book is that people start treating it as a government and give up their self-initiative in favor of stability.
The novel follows Shevek, a physicist who is modeled after Oppenheimer and a close family friend of LeGuin’s parents, who struggles to do physics the way he intends in a revolutionary society that isn’t so revolutionary anymore, which struggles with an emerging bureaucracy in the shape of the PDC and an egocentric „superior“, Sabul, who wants a share in Shevek’s praise. He tarnishes his work and blocks its printing unless he’s allowed to put his name on Shevek’s publications. This is so antithetical to their society’s dogma—the teachings of Odo, an Ioti revolutionary thinker who was imprisoned multiple times for her resistance (reminds me of Kropotkin) and didn’t live to see Anarres—that Shevek and his partner, Takver, struggle to accept that their society is slowly becoming the one they escaped: one in which someone can hold power over another in the same way a bureaucrat or capitalist can gate-keep what you need just because it doesn’t play by his petty rules.
During a drought that hits their planet and causes a famine, lots of people have to sacrifice their jobs in secondary fields like the sciences and arts to work essential jobs like farming. Shevek gets assigned a posting by Divlab, the central computer that does the job assignments, and he has to leave his partner with their newborn. Then when he returns, he finds them both gone as Takver was assigned to a posting in a place where they need her expertise as a marine biologist and geneticist. What she would work on was hoped to alleviate the famine somewhat so it was pretty necessary in their situation. He thought he would stay in the same city and continue his research at the Institute of the Noble Sciences, just to find out that Sabul and his asshole „friend“ Desar, with his telegraphic communication style, had both advocated for his removal from his research posting. Naturally, they say that they defended him but it is evident that they did the exact opposite. Shevek decides to leave Abbenay, however, when he attempts to get an assignment where Takver and their daughter are, he learns that they don’t need him there, so he asks for another general labor pool assignment (unskilled labor).
Years go by before the family reunites and when they do, he decides with his partner and friend Bedap to challenge their society by breaking taboo after taboo. They start communicating with physicists in Urras, Anarres’ arch nemesis, even going as far as suggesting someone be sent there for cultural and scientific exchange. Shevek had been working on a General Theory of Time by then which he knew the Institute of Noble Sciences being headed by Sabul would not want to have it. So he decides to give it to Urras and humanity at large in the Known Worlds. Here LeGuin illustriously explained the General Theory of Time, that time is a continuum of the present, and one of the cornerstones of Odonianism, that every journey is a return, without explaining them.
The beginning and ending of the story have Shevek travel between planets and be excited for what’s to come, not knowing what he’ll find when he lands. Since the novel tells a story of the present, where Anarres and Urras coincide, and gives us blips of the past—Shevek’s time on Anarres from childhood to adulthood—and future—Shevek’s time on Urras from landing to revolution, we get to learn about how children are raised and introduced into an anarchist society while Shevek undergoes the same as an adult on Urras; every conflict that he had to overcome on Anarres, he struggles with under different circumstances on Urras. For instance, Shevek freaks out when he goes shopping. He learns that that the Urrasti swim in excrement, yet refuse to call bullshit what it is. He has to go out of his way to learn the truth behind what he’s being told and shown, to see how the majority of the Ioti people really live, which mirrors his experience realizing his society’s flaws. You get to see how this lofty idealist is quite the flawed person which is really beautiful because we’re all humans at the end of the day.
Telling such a grand story with so much attention to detail meant that side-character plots had to be sacrificed. Takver, Bedap, Tirin, Sabul, the Urrasti physicists, Vea, as well as Shevek and Takver’s children are only as present as they’re relevant to Shevek’s story. Their characters are only explored as they serve to advance Shevek’s character development and his awakening to his society’s stagnation. When Shevek goes to Urras, he has to go through the phases of awakening just the same; but this time around to see through Urras’ absurdity. Urras mimics our Earth in every way, even its politics. What Shevek means for all the oppressed on Urras is the proof of an idea, that it’s real, that it’s realized and realizable. Anarres may be a flawed topia,2 yet to the rebelling Iotis anything was better than A-Io’s Western liberal democracy and capitalism carrying the sick illusion of freedom, the Soviet-style „alternative” as portrayed by the Republic of Thu, or the tragic Benibili nation plagued by forever wars waged and supported by the global duopoly of A-Io and Thu.3
Shevek allows himself to be used by the rebels as a symbol of liberation, as an idea, and as a fellow comrade which leads to the revolt that the government of A-Io, Shevek’s hosts, crushes violently and bloodily, unleashing the full power of the State on defenseless civilians. When Shevek escapes with the help of those sacrificing themselves for his being as the idea of salvation, he seeks help from the Terran embassy which promise him safe travel back home in exchange for his General Theory of Time that would be shared with all the Known Worlds instead of just the government of A-Io. I picked out the following section of his conversation with the ambassador about the exchange of his theory (an idea) for his freedom (another idea) that stood out to me:
“… I don’t want to stay here. I am no altruist! If you would help me in this too, I might go home. Perhaps the Ioti would be willing to send me home, even. It would be consistent, I think: to make me disappear, to deny my existence. Of course, they might find it easier to do by killing me or putting me in jail for life. I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t want to die here in Hell at all. Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?” He laughed; he had regained all his gentleness of manner. “But if you could send me home, I think they would be relieved. Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.” “I thought I knew what ‘realism’ was,” Keng said. She smiled, but it was not an easy smile. “How can you, if you don’t know what hope is?” “Don’t judge us too hardly, Shevek.” “I don’t judge you at all. I only ask your help—for which I have nothing to give in return.” “Nothing? You call your Theory nothing?” “Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit,” he said, turning to her, “and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.”
As I hope this post made evident, I could talk about this book forever. I tried to keep it short and not get into too much detail so as to leave something for others to discuss (Aren’t I the nicest person ever?) and because I’m lowkey short on time anyway.