(this post contains spoilers for Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, and references to the American election)
A couple of weeks ago I was in a pub toilet in Brighton when I noticed a sticker on the mirror. Well, there were lots of stickers, mostly about tattoo artists, or indie bands, club nights. But this one stood out to me
The full quote, when unobscured reads:
We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom… If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands... You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
I’ve read several books by Le Guin, and I’ve had the audiobook of The Dispossessed downloaded on my phone for years, but never quite got round to listening to it. I took this sticker as a sign it was time to start, so on the train home from Brighton, I did.
The Dispossessed takes place on two worlds: Urras, a world similar to our own, capitalist and patriarchal; and Anarres, an anarcho-syndicalist offshoot of Urras formed two centuries prior to the novel when revolutionaries became such a problem to the Urrasti governments that they were granted the right to move to the moon and form their own colony. The moon has a harsh climate, not truly fit for habitation, but all the people of the society work together to survive, and consider each other brothers.
The subtitle of the novel, ‘An Ambiguous Dystopia’ hints that this setup is more complicated than it first seems. Life on Urras can be hard, and the assumed trust that acts as the basis of their society is vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors. Unofficial power structures can and do form, and some of the founding principles of freedom have been eroded over time.
Our protagonist, Shevek, is a physicist from Urras who decides he needs to go to Anarres to share ideas with the physicists there, against the wishes of many of his own world. His experience in Anarres is a massive culture shock, and he does eventually join the working class revolution there, eventually forced to seek asylum at an alien embassy due to state violence and suppression.
But whilst it is all kicking off in the Anarres chapters in the book, it is Shevek’s time in Urras that I was most drawn to in the novel. As everyone else does, he takes part in manual labour when it is assigned to him, without complaint. But he is compelled by his physics research, even when others in his society do not believe it is socially useful. Shevek grapples with his desire throughout the novel, the (apparent) friction between individual liberty and the will of a collective.
Whilst listening to the book, I noticed that whilst there are references to theatre and ballet on Urras, there are no mentions of literature, outside textbooks and anarchist texts. I couldn’t help but wonder where a fiction writer might fit into the world of Anarres, until I realised that perhaps, Shevek’s role as a physicist is a metaphor for creatives anywhere. Indeed, the ‘general temporal theory’ he comes up with is described at one point as a book.
Well, we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.
The Dispossessed itself is structured non-linearly, chapters alternating between past and present, Anarres and Urras. Anarres is the past of Urras, where Urras is the future of Anarres. The book allows us to travel time in the fictional world—and perhaps also in our world. In the anarchism of Anarres, Le Guin writes a possible future for us, an alternative to the systems we have grown accustomed to.
If Shevek’s role in his society is to blur the linearity of time, so too is the writer’s. Our job is important because we want to do it, and humans should be free to choose what to do with our lives. But our job is also socially important, an exercise in imagining alternative futures, taking thoughts to their logical conclusion, running experiments we cannot run in the real world—and this is found no more in any genre than in Sci-Fi and Fantasy. What if we tried a fully anarchistic society (The Dispossessed)? What if men could create another man like God (Frankenstein)? What if you burned down Oxford University (Babel)?
I was about halfway through The Dispossessed on November 5th, when Trump was elected for his second term. I’m based in England, but I have loved ones in America. It scares me, as does the rising tide of fascism across the world. As I was listening to the book on the bus to work, a news website informing me that Pennsylvania had just turned red, one quote made me pause. Shevek, arguing with an Urrasti who calls anarchists ‘starving idealists’, points out:
What is idealistic about social cooperation, mutual aid, when it is the only means of staying alive?
My desire to find community, to organise in my union, to engage in mutual aid is not naive or idealistic. It is the only way we can survive the world we live in. It is the only way forward. It is a future I want to write into existence, and a future I need to live if I want to live at all.
