Book Review by Michael Isenberg.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed was first published in 1974, but it continues to have relevance in the twenty-first century. In fact, the Occupy Oakland demonstrators were so inspired by its vision of an anarcho-communist utopia, that they chose it as one of the book covers they used to decorate their “shields” during a 2013 protest.
But when Ms. Le Guin first conceived the story that became The Dispossessed, it was not intended as a utopia. It was a character study. She recounts its birth in her essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” which appears in her 1979 collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like her book The Left Hand of Darkness, she says,
the origin of my book The Dispossessed was equally clear, but it got very muddled before it ever became clear again. It too began with a person, seen much closer to, this time, and with intense vividness: a man, this time, a scientist, a physicist in fact I saw the face more clearly than usual, a thin face, large clear eyes, and large ears—these, I think, may have come from a childhood memory of Robert Oppenheimer as a young man. But more vivid than any visual detail was the personality, which was more attractive—attractive, I mean, as a flame to a moth. There, there he is, I have got to get there this time… My first effort to catch him was a short story. I should have known he was much too big for a short story. It’s a writer’s business to develop an infallible sense for the proper size and length of a work; the beauty of the novella and the novel is essentially architectural, the beauty of proportion. It was a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice. This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly. Nobly but feeblemindedly. Oh, it was a stupid story. All the metaphors were mixed. I hadn’t got anywhere near him. I’d missed him by so far, in fact, that I hadn’t damaged him at all. There he stood, quite untouched. Catch me if you can!”
All right. All right, what’s-your-name. What is your name, by the way? Shevek, he told me promptly. All right, Shevek. So who are you? His answer was less certain this time. I think, he said, that I am a citizen of Utopia.
Very well. That sounded reasonable. There was something so decent about him, he was so intelligent and yet so disarmingly naïve, the he might well come from a better place than this.
Thus Ms. Le Guin put the usual historical process in reverse. Real life communism begins with promises of utopia and ends with a Gulag. Ursula Le Guin began with a Gulag, and ends with promises of utopia. Such as it is.
The utopia is the planet of Anarres. Several hundred years earlier, a group of idealists had left its sister planet, Urras, to found a colony there. Since then, contact between the two planets was limited to a semi-annual supply ship and some radio contact reserved for the elite that wasn’t supposed to exist. Ms. Le Guin wanted to show how her utopia would unfold without outside interference.
The opening paragraphs are a rather ingenious depiction of a wall, which are well worth reading in their entirety:
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks and roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important that that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
We then meet Shevek. As in the original short story, he is “escaping,” boarding the supply ship to return to Urras, the first person ever to do so.
From here the book alternates between chapters about Shevek’s experiences on Urras, where he’s lionized as a celebrity, and chapters recounting his life story up to his momentous decision to leave Anarres and return to the mother planet.
Frankly I found it slow going. Ms. Le Guin was so focused on her character, that she didn’t give us much by way of plot. For most of the book, there just wasn’t any conflict with sufficiently high stakes to have me wondering what was going to happen next. Yes, there were hints that Shevek’s hosts on Urras had some hidden agenda, but these were only passing mentions. It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through, when Shevek set out to make his second escape, this time from Urras back to Anarres, that the pace picked up and I finally found myself drawn into the story.
On top of that, IMHO, Ms. Le Guin didn’t even succeed at what she set out to do in the first place, create a vivid character who was “attractive, I mean as a flame to a moth…too big for a short story.” I found Shevek to be a bit of a sad sack, a little boring, often passive, with an air of hopelessness about him. There was no flamey attraction at all.
But there is one aspect of the book that intrigued me (besides the opening passage), in a negative sort of way: the utopian aspect. Anarres is a society where all are equal, at least in theory. There is no private property—the absence of possessions gives the book its title. The needs of every citizen are met (sparsely) without requiring money or work. And yet they do work. “The ideal is people can work freely together, can choose to work together,” Ms. Le Guin explains in a 2015 interview. “That’s the anarchist ideal, such a lovely ideal…Make the work good enough and people will want to do it and do it together.”
Ms. Le Guin worked very hard on the utopian aspect of the book. “It took me years,” she wrote in the “Mrs. Brown” essay. “Reading and pondering and muddling, and much assistance from Engels, Marx, Godwin, Goldman, Goodman, and above all Shelley and Kropotkin, before I could begin to see where [Shevek] came from, and could see the landscape about him.” In an interview with Euan Monaghan, available on lithub.com she added, “I got fascinated. Portland used to have a hundred independent bookstores, and one of them was rather political, and in the back room, if he knew you, he would take you in to see his anarchist stuff.”
And yet, despite her hard work and schmoozing of bookstore owners, the Anarres utopia is a terrible place. The people barely survive at a subsistence level. Artificial heat and light are forbidden. Even on those rare occasions when there are resources available for them, it’s felt that such luxuries would undermine the virtue of poverty.
The so-called anarchy is not really without government. There’s a central agency that matches workers to available jobs. And when a road needs to be built, or a forest cleared, citizens are drafted, much like the corvée that reduced the medieval serf to slavery. The more perceptive Anarrans are well aware that their claim to have no government is a pretense, as Shevek’s friend Bedap admits at one point.
And yet the real power on Anarres is the amorphous pressure of public opinion. Those who are seen as not pulling their weight are ostracized, which is occasionally enforced by a barrage of rock-throwing. A similar fate awaits anyone with the effrontery to think for themselves. They’re cut off from the work that was supposed to be so fulfilling that they would do it without pay. Another of Shevek’s friends, Tirin, wrote an unpopular play and finds himself assigned to road work. As with dissenters in the Soviet Union, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Even Shevek, working at a university, is barred from teaching until he gives up the original research the powers-that-be find threatening. I cringed every time an Anarran described himself as "free."
Anarcho-communism is not freedom. Like all forms of communism, it is fundamentally flawed. To take material goods away from people who produced them, in order to redistribute them to people who didn't, is morally wrong. Without the need to work in order to survive, not to mention the delightful possibility of growing rich, there is little incentive for anyone to put in effort. Without the price mechanism of the market, even the most well-intentioned bureaucrats lack the information they need to balance supply and demand. The result is chronic shortages. And when there are no checks and balances on the power of the collective, the pressure to conform is a tyranny as soul-crushing as anything government can impose.
In The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin set out to create an ideal society, a utopian utopia, and judging from her various public statements, she was sincere about that. But the logic of anarcho-communism led her to its natural, grim conclusion instead. To her credit, Ms. Le Guin was too honest a writer to evade that logic. She never could escape from the Gulag that was the setting of her original short story.
Even Ms. Le Guin conceded, in her "Mrs. Brown essay" that Anarres was a utopia "of sorts." Some editions of The Dispossessed are subtitled “An Ambiguous Utopia.” I don’t know if that was Ms. Le Guin’s decision or her publishers’. But I would go beyond that. Anarres is an unambiguous dystopia.
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His dystopian novel, Full Asylum, shows what America will look like if it continues down the path of socialism. But since George Orwell and Ayn Rand already wrote the grim version of that story, Dr. Isenberg wrote a comedy. It is available on Amazon.com
Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Photo credit(s): Domingoyu.com. |
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