" She had not realized how very different people were"
October 26, 2015 12:01 PM   Subscribe

Ursula LeGuin's Anarchist Aesthetics
To that vision of mobilized might, Le Guin offered a subterranean alternative. President Nixon was the country’s master plotter; Le Guin stood off to one side and instead told its stories. It’s not that we would have been better off with her as president, it’s that her books remind us how little of our world belongs to those who think they rule it. There is no more significant moment in a Le Guin novel than the instant when a character suddenly discovers the larger fabric into which her own thread is woven—that others around her also have names, views, and quests all their own.
- John Plotz

THE STORY’S WHERE I GO: AN INTERVIEW WITH URSULA K. LE GUIN, John Plotz
JP: The Dispossessed works through its political ideas very openly.

UL: It’s my political book: anarchy, socialist anarchy, pacifist anarchism. The ideal is people can work freely together, can choose to work together. That’s the anarchist ideal, such a lovely ideal. I know William Morris had it. Make the work good enough and people will want to do it and do it together.
Ursula K. Le Guin talks to Michael Cunningham about genres, gender, and broadening fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin interviewed by Scott Simon

previously: “He’s got a dragon in his book,” she said. “A very limp one."
posted by the man of twists and turns (26 comments total) 73 users marked this as a favorite
 
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats.... No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank white Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.

That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn't their story. It's his.
From Le Guin's essay, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." Read the whole thing.
posted by straight at 1:02 PM on October 26, 2015 [15 favorites]


I read that as Ursula LeGuin's Anarchist Athletics, which I pictured as an Olympic-type event (of the top of my head, I'm imagining a leather-booted 100 yard dash, a Haymarket bomb-toss, and a 50-meter McKinley Pistol Shoot).
posted by leotrotsky at 1:05 PM on October 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


so although The Dispossessed is labeled as an "ambiguous utopia," I thought Le Guin had done a little too good a job at showing how the anarchist moon was wonderful and how the bourgeois main planet was horrible for the book to really merit that "ambiguous utopia" subtitle. At least, I thought that until I met someone who honestly believed that Urras, the book's main planet, seemed like a better place to live than Anarres, the anarchist moon. I think I may have stared at her exactly like a tiny wooden bird on a spring had leapt out of her forehead and announced the hour.

not to say that Anarres doesn't have problems, but good lord, at the very least it's a way better place to live than Urras.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:15 PM on October 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


I loved this.

What Le Guin reduces she immediately builds up again. She fines things down precisely in order to show readers how even the simplest world is fractured and multifarious.

We read LeGuin's short story "She Unnames Them" in my graduate course on Taxonomy and Systematics; me, the only woman in the class and the only one with a grounding in humanities trying to insist that there was a lot more going on here than LeGuin just wanting a simpler time where things didn't have all these names, and we could just be a part of nature. She rather keenly describes what would be lost by not having the names, too -- that really having no names would mean that distinguishing things would be very difficult, maybe impossible, and there are so many times when you really need to be able to discriminate between two living beings, like when one is a hunter and one is food. It's also such a funny story! But they didn't get it the joke, I think, and were mostly irritated by this author acting like we even *could* unname things, like that would be at all useful ever.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 1:18 PM on October 26, 2015 [5 favorites]


so although The Dispossessed is labeled as an "ambiguous utopia," I thought Le Guin had done a little too good a job at showing how the anarchist moon was wonderful and how the bourgeois main planet was horrible for the book to really merit that "ambiguous utopia" subtitle. At least, I thought that until I met someone who honestly believed that Urras, the book's main planet, seemed like a better place to live than Anarres, the anarchist moon. I think I may have stared at her exactly like a tiny wooden bird on a spring had leapt out of her forehead and announced the hour.

I don't know. Anarres appealed to me a lot more when I was twenty than it does now, even leaving aside some of the gender and sexuality stuff that has become more apparent as I've gotten older. Le Guin writes what to me is quite a lot of ambiguity: The smuggery and glad provincialism of so many Anarresti! The coldness of Rulag, which is her freedom but pretty hard on Shevek. The way that you basically can't choose or cook your own food; the way that there's relatively little room for self-expression in clothing or any of the arts. There's no subcultures; there's little variety. The world itself is harsh and hostile. And of course, Le Guin shows very clearly how groupthink and orthodoxy still have power in matters large and small.

It would be neat to read another long story set on Anarres at another time, to sort of set the incidents of the Dispossessed in context.

"A fragile utopia" might almost have been a better way to put it, when you think of the many, many things that could so easily shatter Anarresti society - including increased contact with Urras. I always wonder what happens after the story.

Actually, the place that calls to me more strongly now is the big country that has the revolution late in the book. Although I think we're more likely to end up like as the Earth ambassador describes her world to Shevek.
posted by Frowner at 1:26 PM on October 26, 2015 [10 favorites]


I should probably devote some of my wasting-my-life-on-metafilter time to rereading Dispossessed instead. I've definitely been psychologically regressing into a 20 year old lately, and perhaps I could counteract that by putting as much smart/nuanced literature into my head as possible.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:31 PM on October 26, 2015


...FanFare re-read?
posted by brennen at 1:34 PM on October 26, 2015 [10 favorites]


yessssss
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:35 PM on October 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Well, that would give me an incentive to start unpacking my damn books. I know it's in there somewhere.
posted by emjaybee at 1:37 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh, you should read Always Coming Home instead. Or wait, why not read Cecelia Holland's very odd Floating Worlds, or L Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan series? Both are about anarchists and much more movement-y (I mean, people have meetings) than the Dispossessed.
posted by Frowner at 1:37 PM on October 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


Also, you can either read or not read Samuel Delany's deeply critical review of The Dispossessed, but I warn you - you will never be able to un-read it, and it does take the gloss off, even though I think Delany is such an unLeGuinian writer that he really misses what she's doing. (It's one of the few instances, actually, where I think that Delany is kind of being a dude and as a result misses a bunch of things.)
posted by Frowner at 1:38 PM on October 26, 2015 [4 favorites]


basically I've been having a lot of fantasies about starting/joining a metafilter leftist book club and totes think that The Dispossessed might be a good way to get people into that sort of thing.

that aside, I have added Always Coming Home, Floating Worlds, and L. Timmel Duchamp to my personal reading list.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:50 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I never did quite manage to finish Always Coming Home. I suppose I should pick it back up at some point. The others - well, why not...
posted by brennen at 1:57 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think a left book read-along where I had already read the book about a squillion times would be great.

I think that The Dispossessed would provoke an amazing and hilarious amount of fights, especially if it were read by a pan-left group.

It's such a weird book. Actually, we could do it - if we did, we should read some critical material - the Delany, maybe an excerpt from Murray Bookchin's boring whatever-it-is that she was responding to (I just can't be having with Bookchin; he was all the go around 2002 at the bookstore where I volunteered and I got a bellyful of him then), some other stuff. We could read part of Jameson's chapter about her work in Archaeologies of the Future!!!!
posted by Frowner at 2:29 PM on October 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I don't even know what the hell my politics are any more, besides somewhere "pan-left". On the other hand, I am much less into fighting about SF on the internet than I was when I self-described as an anarchist in an uncomplicated way, so I guess I would personally promise not to get too, uh, agitated.
posted by brennen at 2:36 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, The Dispossessed is short and has a coherent plot, Always Coming Home not so much (I love it! But it's not an easy book to do in a discussion format).
posted by emjaybee at 2:49 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


You Can't Tip a Buick, I think if I started in a position of privilege in Urras, at the university, and was offered the chance to live on Anarres - I'd be hard pressed to say I'd go, if I were truthful to myself.

I mean I can recognize that it is a more just society. But to me it sounded very small and brutal in its own way. And people are still people, which means there still is pettiness and cruelty, and when you need other people so much, it seems a lot harder to get away from that. Things like wealth and prestige can buy a lot of not dealing with people you don't like.

And maybe part of it is that, while I don't particularly like the narrative of The Hero, I still buy the notion of Heroism. Maybe with a 'we' rather than a 'him' and engaged in creation more than destruction, but for me like the endless, unceasing struggle against the environment, the moon, things that cannot really be changed just seems so depressing. With a government made of people doing wanton and cruel things, at least there is hope. That things might change for the better, there is glory in trying. War can in theory be prevented. Drought and famine is far more implacable and inhuman.

Then again if I got to take any of my friends who seem to be trapped in shitty jobs with shitty pay and total uncertainty about their future, I'd be a lot more interested in going. Which I suppose is quite selfish of me.
posted by Zalzidrax at 2:51 PM on October 26, 2015


Zalzidrax: I'm pretty sure I'd take the ticket to Anarres, but I'd respect the decision to stay. My reason for saying I'd go is hella selfish: I'd go because free time is far and away my favorite luxury good.

probably on a reread, though, I'd notice the constraints on use of free time on Anarres more than I did the first time I read the book...
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 3:06 PM on October 26, 2015


I like LeGuin's stuff but Always Coming Home felt like work.
posted by um at 4:58 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Is Delany's essay online?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:19 PM on October 26, 2015


Count me in the "Always Coming Home" camp. I wanted to live there.
posted by Mogur at 5:22 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Seems like as good a place as any to leave my thoughts re: The Dispossesed.

Annares is like one of those actually functioning communes that got started by hippies 50 years ago and are still kicking along. A group of people willing to actually do the backbreaking physical labor of running the place, compromise with the outside world by taking no real part in its culture and politics, and the luck to have the right personalities together at the right times to deal with crises as they come are all necessary, without any of these it falls apart. 20 years after the events of the novel Annares will most likely either be North Korea, a museum fremen-style protectorate of the ekumen, or overrun with Nioti kids selling jeans out of their backpacks to fund their super authentic post-graduation walkabout. Best case (by Odoist standards) A-Io starts getting their mercury and lead from the ekumen and Annares pisses them off enough to be embargoed a la Cuba.

Le Guin has a somewhat convincing sketch of how an industrial anarchist culture might work, but it's disappointing how much she leans on their computer system to neatly make societal decisions in the background. I also wish she'd gone more into the differences between Annares and Thu but I guess her thoughts on Soviet-style society are shown with the nation of Orgoreyn in The Left Hand of Darkness.

The riot at the climax was surreal to read post-Occupy. Time will tell but yeah we're ending up like Earth does in the novel, blasted dust hardpan with bits of plastic floating in the wind and a top-down authoritarian government.
posted by 3urypteris at 7:23 PM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


The riot at the climax was surreal to read post-Occupy.

I think about this scene basically every time I hear a helicopter.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 7:35 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I mean I can recognize that it is a more just society. But to me it sounded very small and brutal in its own way. And people are still people, which means there still is pettiness and cruelty, and when you need other people so much, it seems a lot harder to get away from that. Things like wealth and prestige can buy a lot of not dealing with people you don't like.

This is how I've always felt about anarchism generally, at least in the "wouldn't it be great to live in small self-sufficient communities of consensus" I encountered it first in. It was really appealing in high school to a couple good friends of mine, and I could never see it.

He's a very different writer, but I've always found Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy to be the most hopeful and, for me at least, most appealing representation of building and living in a progressive future society. He's got some anarchist groups in there, but they exist in a broader context of different groups trying to build different things, and no one group seems to be there to show the reader "how things should be". But perhaps I just enjoy imagining the process more than the result.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:38 PM on October 26, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think the Delany essay in question is "To Read The Dispossessed," in The Jewel Hinged Jaw. I do not think it is freely available online in its entirety.
posted by willF at 8:53 PM on October 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Re the last link, Le Guin already seems to have backtracked on her apparent criticism of Kazuo Ishiguro over "The Buried Giant".
Indeed I wish I hadn’t flown off the handle at what I took for a sneer at the literature of fantasy, offending him so that I suppose he and I will never be able to discuss such issues as his remarks make me long to ask him about...

Many sites on the Internet were quick to pick up my blog post, describing it as an “attack”, a “slam”, etc. They were hot on the scent for blood, hoping for a feud. I wonder how many will pick up this one?
posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:16 PM on October 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


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