Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Title: The Dispossessed
Year of publication: 1974
Page count: 256
Rating: ★★★★
Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness has been on my to-be-read-pile for a long while, and after she passed away last week, I decided that the time has come to finally take the plunge into her highly acclaimed works. Because I am the way that I am, I couldn’t start in the middle of a series, no matter how loosely the single novels are connected—I’m just not wired that way. So I opted for The Dispossessed, the first book in the Hainish Cycle chronology.
Sub-titled “an ambiguous utopia”, the sci-fi aspects of The Dispossessed are really just a front for a strikingly intelligent philosophical and cultural dissection of modern day society, and maybe because of the many themes addressed, it’s succeeded in garnering an unusual amount of literary recognition for a novel of its genre (and won the prestigious genre-specific Nebula, Hugo and Locust Awards).
As one of the few modern utopian novels, it departs from the genre’s tradition of portraying a perfect society, and rather explores the short-comings of capitalism, socialism, and anarchy, and that’s what makes it hold up so well—there are some minor details that date it (like communication via telefax), but the ideas are as relevant today as they were in 1974, maybe even more so—we still struggle with the same (cultural? human?) issues of polarity and inequality that will eventually make it into any society, regardless how well-meaning it started out. Over 40 years after the novel’s publication, we are still building walls rather than tearing them down, and the book begins and ends at the wall on the planet Anarres: the anarchist Anarresti believe that the wall protects them from their capitalist neighbor Urras’ corrupting influence… but our protagonist Shevek wonders whether it is not really a prison wall, keeping his people isolated from the outside world.
“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks 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 boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than 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.”
The wall as a literal and figurative representation of the constrictions imposed by society and personal barriers keeps cropping up throughout the novel: Shevek is a bit of a solitary character on his world, and, even as a child, dreams of a wall symbolizing his segregation; in his chosen field of physics, he can’t seem to work out the final kink to the Theory of Simultaneity, which would allow instantaneous communication and revolutionize civilization; because his work on the theory was stifled on his home planet, he travels to the sister-planet Urras in hopes to get his break-through; once on Urras, he hits his hosts’ “wall of charm” and they “build a wall around him” to keep him from seeing the lower classes, becoming a pawn in their political intrigue; he eventually comes to suggest that the capitalist Urrasti aren’t really free because of all their possessions and the walls they build around themselves to protect them. Freedom, and what it means to be free, is really the central theme that the novel keeps circling back to, until Shevek realizes that all the walls he can’t overcome are perhaps one and the same, and that to be truly free you have to be willing to allow for change, which is risky, but a price worth paying.
Le Guin appears to specialize in the kind of sci-fi that deeply concerns itself with the exploration of universal human truths—all the sci-fi I’ve ever read has dabbled in them to an extent, but always in the context of speculative fiction, while this was a rather abstract exercise in political philosophy, and I loved it more than I thought I would. The way she interwove her themes in all of the story’s layered plotlines was really clever, and made for a sophisticated novel that challenged some of my notions about society and human kinship. I especially loved her study of freedom within a romantic partnership, and chapter ten was my favorite—the book really blossomed towards the end, and it definitely won’t be my last of hers!
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