Macromemetic Index
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Introduction
I read the book through once and listened to it another couple of times. It's the story of a man who is something of a fish out of water, a brilliant physicist, living on a planet, Annares, in an orbital dance with another planet, Urras. Annares is an anarchy, controlling the whole very poor planet. Urras is rather like Earth, full of different cultures, capitalist, communist, military dictatorship, and wars and exploitation.
It's one of the best books I've read, definitely my "top shelf." It's a wonderful example of the science fiction oeuvre, using a futuristic or alternate reality premise as a launching pad for a eloquent allegory for exploring social issues, in this case weighty ones.
Names & Places
I wonder how Le Guin cooked up her names. I wonder if "Urras" and "Annares" were somehow "Earth" and "Anti-Earth" in some way. I like the way she "Japanified" Einstein's name, for one. Annaresti names are cooked up by computer. I wonder if names throughout the book were full of deep and interesting hidden meanings. "Hain" means "hate" in French, for example--perhaps a long shot, that. I liked her neologisms, such as kleggage and nuchnebi. I felt they carried a lot of narrative load for her.
Storycraft
I thought her use of interleaved narrative exquisitely done. I reread the story a number of times, and I picked up on more and more of the foreshadowing, and it seemed that she "spread the load" with how she structured the story, giving us details and then switching to how that fit into the story on the other planet. It made things more dynamic, and I think if it had been Part I: Annares and Part II: Urras, for instance, there would've been a bunch of foreshadowing at the start, straining the memory of the reader, and making the payoff at the end less impactful.
Linguistics & Physics
Le Guin's expositions into the Pravic language and the General Temporal Theory were lengthy when compared to many "soft science fiction" authors who tend to put actual enabling scientific concepts on as a kind of "band-aid" or which with much briefer expositions revealing a profound lack of understanding of their subject matter. Everybody's got faster-than-light travel, subspace communications, teleporters, laser-blasters, in-ship gravity, light sabers, Babel-17 languages, universal translators, telepathy, empathy, and on and on and on (sorry to pick on Star Trek so much). Le Guin makes no such slip-ups. She never misses a step. I didn't catch anything to suggest that she was anything other than a polyglot linguist and a physicist conversant in special & general relativity as well as quantum physics. She somehow skirted the landmines, quicksands, and pitfalls one could easily fall prey to in trying to fold such topics into a fictional narrative, including the ones I specifically had my ear out for. For example, she set me at ease by making the point that while months passed on the near-lightspeed Hainish interstellar ships, decades passed on the home world. Typical of her extra dollop of scientific detail, which would require some scientific training to recognize, to anchor her point, smear on another thick brushstroke rather than leave an irritating swath of naked gesso.
Pravic shares characteristics with Japanese and Spanish, for instance, in which it's rude to employ the genitive case for parts of one's own body, or lack of curse words except for very specific descriptions, lack of superstitious, religious references, or convoluted ways of expressing ideas which would otherwise cut against the grain of social harmony, e.g., "that's mine" or "give me that" or "would it bother anybody if I were to partake of this one" or "I've come to bother you" or "the way of doing this might be the suggested one" and so forth, or just simply dispensing with grammatical gender or other such forms which gobble up linguistic resources, often leaving room for discord in the process.
Socio-Politics and Economics
One began to get the impression that the story was to be a straightforward analogical contrast between communism and capitalism, but things got more muddled and interesting as they went on. First, when the ambassador from Thu, Chifoilisk, makes his frothy protestations to Shevek about how different his "communist" society is to A-Io, the propretarians, the unbridled laissez-faire capitalists, it becomes clear that from the perspective of Shevek's homeland of Annares, the two are at best superficially different, at worst virtually indistinguishable.
The Battle of the Sexes
I was glad that the book is penned by a woman, as it lent weight to Le Guin's comments about female power and the relationship between men and women, the power dynamics, etc.
The women on A-Io go around topless (at least in the company of those who "own their nudity"), bejeweled, hair shaven, have no responsibilities or jobs or academic or intellectual standing, and yet Vea claims that the women control everything because they in fact control the men. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, which sounds like Voltaire, but apparently isn't:
"The business of society consists in men pretending that they themselves are in charge and women pretending that they themselves are not."
So there is some substance to Vea's assertion, à la "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rules the World," and so on.
Meanwhile, while great material and political egalitarianism reigns on Annares, statements are made that "men may learn Odonism, but women are fundamentally propertarians" because they own men, are able to take possession of men (rather like on Urras), and as Shevek's partner Takver admitted, a pregnant woman is constitutionally unethical, having no other loyalty than to the fetus.
One contrast was Shevek's talk with Takver and others about how infidelity in a partnered relationship was about trust, while Vea's protestations when Shevek was coming on to her were to do with her reputation and keeping secrets from her husband and her maid. I liked Takver's term, "body profiteer." Matter-of-fact and free of loaded expressions.
I was gratified at how deeply and thoroughly Le Guin dove into and elaborated this subject, more so than a male author might have dared to, or even had the insight to attempt.
Freedom and Dictatorship
We have the planet Annares, a planet-wide anarchist commune, and Urras, home to multiple languages and cultures and countries, notably A-Io, Thu, and Benbilli.
The Ioti are propertarians, with some super-rich enjoying luxury amidst starvation, want, and squalor. We don't get to see the interior of Thu, but we learn that it is a kind of communist country run by a presidium, by which one of the main characters, Chifoilisk is "called back."
The Annarasti make the assertion that the Urrasti are slaves to their possessions.
On Annares, we see the dictatorship and problems of government represented by Sabul, the physicist mentor, and by Tirin, the playwright. By contrast to Urras, specifically A-Io, Annaresti culture shows itself to be egalitarian, anarchist, caring, coping with and trying to survive and thrive in a world of scarcity, but then we see the ugly underbelly of power plays in committees, creeping bureaucracy in the face of repeated crisis, and the helplessness of individuals when things don't go their way.
Law versus Custom
Takver, Shevek, and Bedap discuss the fate of their friend, the playwright Tirin. He was criticized for his art, for his parody play about Urras, and he wound up in an institution. They said how "customs" have even more power than "laws" which they abhorred in the Urrasti. Shevek observes that while both scientists and artists are creatives, the scientist can appeal to "objective truth" to defend his work while the artist has no comparable defense.
I was deeply intrigued by this contrast. It's a deeply memetic question. Customs are "stronger" and more efficient, laws are more easily configured, downloaded if you will. Customs are hard to fix when they go wrong, as they tend to do.
Shevek observes how military "discipline" is nothing of the sort, but merely a way of spreading responsibility for decision around so horrors may be committed, effectively on command. It's not actually stated, but it also means that new hands may take hold of the levers of power and nothing changes--just put somebody new's picture up behind the front desk. It's clean, efficient, and effective, and easy to change as needed. It's also great for consistent commission of cruelty and horror on a mass scale.
We see Sabul's self-serving, Machiavellian machinations, keeping his place despite lack of merit, controlling others, we see Rulag's dictatorship through controlling committees, envious neighbor Binub's whinging about being mistreated by committees.
We could fault the manipulativeness of Sabul's power-grabbing, Rulag's dogmatic grandstanding, and Binub's whining, but what choice do they have? Binub has no power to petition, to vote, to lodge a complaint, or so we are led to understand. Rulag has no court to plead to, no petition, no vote to get out, and also nobody has any course to resist her. And her cronies have no other resort than to violence. Sabul has no title, no chairmanship, no desk, no office, ostensibly in an anarchy, but it's really a meritocracy with no measuring sticks. He has to struggle to cobble together his own, and guard it at all times against all comers, especially up-and-coming physicists with real talent.
One wonders if Annaresti society would function as well as it does in a less spartan environment. What if there were more resources to squabble over, more room for people to slack off in either protest or apathy, less impending doom at every turn, less threat of Urrasti invasion? I can only imagine that's why Le Guin painted the Planet Annares as she did.
Can an anarchist society function without singleness of purpose?
Checks but no Balances
Karel van Wolferen wrote in The Enigma of Japanese Power that Japan is a system of balances but no checks. One might say something like "a deep keel but no rudder." Annaresti society might be quite like this.
Rulag makes the point that Shevek and his Committe of Initiative are behaving just as the propertarians said anarchists would eventually devolve into, i.e., taking selfish decisions without considering the welfare and traditions of the society as a whole.
We may have a scaling problem, and a centralization problem. What is Le Guin showing us about dictatorship and democracy, their practical aspects, their fatal flaws? Is it possible to run a government without offices, votes, petitions, courts, and are there substitutes? Is it possible to run a society without certifications, official conveying of responsibility, that sort of thing?
Final Remarks
I was intrigued by Le Guin's depiction of the role of women in society. I think she gave us a lot to chew on and can't ignore in terms of Realpolitik vis-à-vis the Women's Liberation Movement.
Her analogy of the two worlds supported well the political and economic contrasts she showed us. The setting is so richly drawn as to give us a lot to talk about and speculate on on our own.
I felt we were left largely to draw our own conclusions.
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