Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Last week my parents visited the William Morris gallery, where something about Morris' writings on utopia and its relationship with other books in the same area prompted my mum to ask me about Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Not having read it in quite some time and with slightly hazy memories of it, I decided to take the opportunity to re-read it for the first time in a while. And as ever with Le Guin, I noticed a lot of things I'd not spotted before — principally connections to other books I'd read since my previous reading — and found new, thought-provoking ideas to take away with me.

The story, notoriously non-linear, follows Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the anarchic planet of Anarres, as he struggles to finish his Grand Temporal Theory. Unable to complete his work on his home world, the book opens with Shevek travelling to Urras, Anarres sister world, where he finds himself installed in an ancient university surrounded by colleagues who finally seem to appreciate his work.

As events unfold, both in the present on Urras and in alternating flashbacks on Anarres, Shevek realises that there are just as many walls and constraints on his freedom on capitalist Urras as there were on Anarres where everyone is supposed to be completely free to behave as they might wish. On Urras, the constraints are obvious: lack of money or property or class membership. On Anarres, the walls are more insidious: social pressure, growing bureaucracy, and internalised constraints which cause minorities — such as Shevek's clique of fellow creatives — to distort their own desires to bring them into line with the tyranny of the majority.

Shevek's research centres around the flow of time, something that stems from an early consideration of Zeno's paradox. When required to explain his idea in simple language, he compares it to a book where all the chapters are already written whose plot can only be understood by reading from start to finish. The irony being that The Dispossessed itself rejects this approach, emphasising Shevek's idea of Simultaneity over the notion of Sequency which dominates established thinking on Anarres.

At its core, The Dispossessed raises important questions about freedom, both positive and negative, and how people are to live. Philosophically, it feels like it is offering an anarchist answer to some of the questions raised in On Liberty, where Mill discusses how people of imagination and originality can be allowed to live free of the rule of the majority. Le Guin synthesises this notion with those of Rousseau, emphasising that no matter how much a person might believe in themselves and their own goals, they are still social beings who, although notionally free to reject specific work postings that might seem them separated from their partner for years on end, still feel sufficiently obliged to their internalised conception of societal goals to make decisions that are strongly against their own interests — and, in the case of Shevek's work, ultimately contrary to society's interests as a whole.

Despite sometimes being held up as a utopian novel, Le Guin scrupulously notes the problems present in her contrasting societies, declining to varnish over the cracks in either.

Anarres is a harsh world where everyone is required to take on part of the hard work needed to ensure survival. Shevek notes that this constant rotation of roles is inefficient because someone is always new to the task, but somehow the important work always gets done. The inefficiencies of the divisions of labour, which sometimes result in couples and families being split up, become painfully clear during the drought that separate Shevek and Takvar for a years. It's not quite clear whether this is malign — Bedap implies that it is deliberate — with troublemakers pushed out to the provinces or whether it's simply a feature of the uncaring and growing bureaucracy. It is also clear that, for all its supposed equality, there are those, like Shevek's supposed mentor Sabul, who use social capital and peer pressure to control the world around them to their advantage; thus does Sabul suppress the publication of works which threaten his own established reputation, only capitulating when offered co-credit for the new.

Urras, from the perspective of Shevek's gilded cage or from the viewpoint of the Terrestrial ambassador, appears far more utopian. Its climate and biosphere are pleasant, in stark contrast to both Anarres and Earth, while the poor of the state of A-Io, for all its vast inequality, have more than the completely possessionless people of Anarres. There are wars — the proxy conflict in Benbili between Thu and A-Io is obviously intended to mirror the Vietnam War — vast gulfs between the sexes, with women's intellectual abilities completely denied. There are secret police — even Shevek's university colleagues have been drafted to report back to their government — while the state's response to protest and demonstration is heavy-handed and violent. But at the same time, Shevek finds himself free to pursue the research paths denied to him on Anarres for ideological reasons.

Although obviously a product of its time — both politically, in its use of Cold War power blocs, and linguistically, in its application of the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis to explain how the Odonian anarchists of Anarres have been able to completely reject personal possessions — The Dispossessed is a masterpiece by one of the great writers of the last half-century that resonates just as strongly today as it did when it was written, and which has clearly influenced a vast swathe of writers since its first publication.