“’Excess is excrement,’ Odo wrote in the Analogy. ‘Excrement retained in the body is a poison.’
Abbenay was poisonless: a bare city, bright, the colors light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet. You could see it all, laid out as plain as spilt salt.
Nothing was hidden.” (Le Guin 98)
Shevek’s time in Abbenay constitutes the most formative period of his life, acts as a kind of college experience for him. Here, doing work for Sabul, Shevek really is forced to finally grow up. Though always enjoying solitude, Shevek from Chapter 2 shows a kind of optimism that simply is no longer present in Shevek from Chapter 4. Whereas an 18 year old Shevek feels thwarted in being held back from pursuing physics, a 20 year old Shevek is now realizing that what really is holding him back is himself, as well as his society. Shevek realizes that Sabul’s career is built off of dominating others and then profiting off of their successes, and in meeting his mother, Rulag, a doctor at the clinic he goes to when he falls ill, realizes that she, too, is trying to profit off of him. She left parental affection to Palat, Shevek’s father, who died when he was only 12. Left alone to think in his own room for the first time ever, Shevek realizes a truth that he is truly dangerous to the security of a society built on interdependency: he doesn’t need anyone else. He is happiest alone with his room working on physics because no one around him is his intellectual equal; his equals are far away, in a place forbidden and forsaken, only accessible through servitude to Sabul. In a society built upon the throwing off of rank and hierarchy, Shevek comes to realize that disparity, whether it be of intelligence or of emotion,is integral to human nature, and hierarchy always forms, even if unspoken. He realizes that Abbenay isn’t “poisonless” at all; Abbenay makes him physically ill, and for the first time in his life since the prison experiment of his childhood, truly questioning the validity of the society he has been led to believe is the epitome of what one could hope for. Shevek realizes, in the city which forms the central cog in the machine of Annares, that maybe no machine can be perfect. Quite a lot, in fact, is hidden in Abbenay, and perhaps Shevek will only be able to truly think that through if he steps back from it.
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For this blog post, I want you to draw on the SF theory that we have read in order to discuss how Le Guin’s novel uses the possibilities of SF or utopian literature in order to offer a social critique.
Science fiction, at its core, is always engaging with one central question: what does it mean to be human? Often, this is accomplished through the estrangement of our own society (cognitive estrangement, as Suvin calls it) so as to view it more critically, and/or the use of the extraterrestrial to compare or contrast with humanity. Le Guin approaches this critical, existential question of what we owe to each other and to ourselves through the framework of a world of twin utopias, anarchy and archy, different in every way, both viewing themselves as perfect, both deeply flawed. Though it has been posited by numerous SF scholars that traditional literary criticism cannot effectively be applied to science fiction, as it developed outside of the Western literary tradition, I personally feel there is one thing that reinforces what hopeful alternative is offered amongst the criticism of the status quo in The Dispossessed; classic literary theory posits that there are only two kinds of stories: a hero goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town – and that they are, in fact, the same story, only differing in perspective. In building a story centered around the building and unbuilding of walls, a world where the grass is greener on both sides depending on your point of view, Le Guin has engaged this theory. In the world of Le Guin’s dueling utopias and in our reality, while there appears to be only black and white, there is always gray. Where there is evil, there are always good; unfortunately, the inverse is also true. Shevek, through leaving Anarres and coming to Urras, learns that history is always cyclical – again, a group of revolutionaries, his brothers and sisters, dare to question the order of things, to dream of a world where all are equal – Shevek’s own world. And yet, Shevek came to this world to seek clarity regarding the flaws of his own world: how on a world organized around justice and equality, around the grounding principle of mutual aid, the human wickedness of injustice and power remains. Le Guin offers us the idea that utopia is both impossible and possible, past and present, and masterfully frames this through the lens of science in the way of Shevek’s theoretical physics, sequency and simultaneity, time and space. There is no universal truth, no objectivity; there is only what there is. And that’s okay. In a world that demands purpose, knowledge for the sake of its acquisition is still worthy.
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Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a novel firmly rooted in the question of what we as individuals owe to both ourselves and to each other, so it felt natural to include my classmate Vinh Nguyen’s ideas about the text alongside my own. I really like Vinh’s application of some of Samuel Delany’s, another giant of the genre, ideas about writing to Le Guin’s text; Vinh’s analysis of the implication of the diction of the novel’s opening is lovely.
“Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is an excellent example of Samuel Delany’s theory of writing being a constant reimagining of an image caused by every proceeding word. Science fiction is when the author forces the reader beyond our personal experience with “violent leaps of imagery” (Delany 12). The subjunctivity of the novel is defined by the images created by the words used. The beginning of the novel encapsulates this idea perfectly. It starts with “THERE was a wall. It did not look important” (Le Guin 1). The most basic of explanations given for our entry to the novel. Not much of an attention grabbing image, but Le Guin continues to build on it. She explains how this wall can be easily climbed over. The power of the wall comes from the mental boundary. This still doesn’t sound out of this world yet. We have borders of nations and property lines that are similar enough to this. The sentence is what brings us into the realm of science fiction. “For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall” (Le Guin 1). There hasn’t been anything in human history that is similar to a border defining a society’s existence. The closest comparison is West Berlin and the Berlin Wall, however this was forced upon the people of Germany as a result of the Cold War. Later on in the novel, we will learn that the people of Urras adore the wall and the isolation it brings them. This wall allows Le Guin to explore the idea of humanity embracing isolationism as its core tenant on a planetary scale, and how they would interact with humans from different planets. The image of a small wall being a defining characteristic of an entire planet of humans makes the reader question why is the wall so important, why was it built, how has it affected human society, etc. The imagery and the importance of the image that Le Guin starts the novel with forces us to explore the possibilities of this image. The second paragraph also explains that “all walls [are] ambiguous, two-faced” and are defined by “which side of it you were on” (Le Guin 1). This now brings the images of what is outside and questions of how the wall affects both sides.”