The DISS-possessed Is What I Would Call It If I Thought It Were Bad (But I Don't)

      I’ve read a lot of thoughtful writing about Ursula K. Le Guin recently (like here), so I figured it’s as good a time to jump into her work as any. I had read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (online here), and picked up and enjoyed the first Earthsea book, so I went for this lovely 50th anniversary edition of The Dispossessed:

      If you’re unfamiliar like I was, The Dispossessed concerns the scientist Shevek leaving his anarchist commune homeworld of Anarres to become a guest lecturer at a foreign university. The world of Anarres is typically completely cut off from foreign interaction, especially with the hyper-capitalist hellscape of A-Io that martyred Annares’s Marx-like philosophical progenitor named Odo, exiled its founders and first citizens, and hosts Shevek now. He has made a discovery about the simultaneous nature of time, on par with the theory of relativity, and he is determined to share it with other worlds. A-Io as right-libertarian-capitalist state and a left-authoritarian-socialist state, Thu, are locked in proxy conflict, in which Shevek with his theory is an important target and then player. It’s got the shape of a slick, cold war spy thriller but the depth of Le Guin’s world is what sticks with me enough to write about.
      Anarres unfolds in the periphery of Shevek’s life there, with chapters alternating between his life before leaving and his time on Urras. The book is subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia” because Anarres has all these weird little cracks in it: the phenomenon of violence is mostly contained to socially acceptable fistfights where winners win and losers lose, seemingly without the risk of long-term injury or death. The potential for individual-on-individual violence doesn’t occur in a more sinister or asocial valence to Shevek, for instance a gendered one, so it doesn’t get addressed at all. The privation of famine leads to violent robberies for food, which Shevek understands as a regrettable tragedy of circumstance. Before his personal experience with food insecurity, Shevek notes that enduring the rationing and additional corvée labor of the famine joyously reaffirms Odonian bonds of societal brotherhood. But Shevek’s boat-rocking departure engenders a newer, scarier form of violence, where a mob throwing rocks meant for Shevek unceremoniously kills some guy working at the port in the opening scene of the book. When Shevek returns with the intent of bringing an outsider, they discuss the risks to their safety.
      The novel is poking and prodding at Anarres in this thought-experiment way but always in ways that are immediately relevant to Shevek. He has commitments to Odonian thought that are clearly biased and shaped by his life, and those change as he does. A young Shevek debates with his friends whether Urras is really as bad as they’re taught by history class and the rumor mill folktales that have sprung up since their separation. He insists to his classmates that Urras can’t have stayed as bad as it was 200 years ago when Anarres was first created. He also meets and openly resents his mother, who chose not to raise him, which is nominally something everyone in Anarres is free to do because children are the responsibility of the community equally. But all Shevek can see is that his father chose to raise him and she did not. Shevek really does believe in Anarres more strongly after the famine and gives of himself gladly (though of course not without pain) to help. Even more punishing than famine to Shevek’s optimism about the better nature of those local and abroad, though, is the political stonewalling by the more senior (technically not “superior,” of course) scientists at his university, which is what eventually leads to his controversial visit to Urras. Shevek cannot disentangle his love for Anarres, his suffering at the hands of its machinations, and his vision for an Anarres that could and should be.
      Shevek posits near the end that “The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.” “Permanent Revolution” in this case doesn’t mean wiping away whatever has been built because it was built, or continuously firing small arms at whomever The Government is, or that whatever is done on revolutionary Anarres must be correct compared to what they do on Urras which is wrong; it means a continuous, thoughtful engagement with the project of human liberation. It needs protection, yes, but also to be nurtured and grow to overcome obstacles, even self-imposed ones. Shevek sees himself as essential to this project precisely because Anarres has failed in ways he can help amend. I had a band director in school who reminded us that “tuning is a process, not an event” all the time. Shevek experiences all the discord from the instrument of politics, a phenomenon he learns is not exclusive to the “archist” work of states, but it never stops him from loving music.