A planet named Urras is host to a habitable moon known as Anarres. Some seven generations ago, a group of anarchist settlers left Urras to build a colony on the moon, after which communication between the colonists and the planet all but ceased. The novel begins as one of the colonists, a young physicist, is about to return to the planet—the first colonist to do so. In the ideological battle that follows, Le Guin unequivocally favors the settlers, but not without also leaving them open to criticism. The book’s subtitle refers to it as “an ambiguous utopia”—but of course, all utopias are ambiguous.
Reading notes
Here’s Le Guin, responding to criticism of The Dispossessed:
So The Dispossessed, a science-fiction novel not only concerned with politics, society, and ethics but approaching them via a definite political theory, has given me a lot of grief. It is generally, not always but often, been discussed as a treatise, not as a novel. This is its own damn fault, of course—what did it expect, announcing itself as a utopia, even if an ambiguous one? Everybody knows utopias are to be read not as novels but as blueprints for social theory or practice.
But the fact is that, starting with Plato’s Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper. I think Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction. So when I came to write a utopia of course I wrote a novel.
I wasn’t surprised that it was treated as a treatise, but I wondered if the people who read it as a treatise ever wondered why I had written it as a novel. Were they as indifferent as they seemed to be to what made it a novel—the inherent self-contradictions of novelistic narrative that prevent simplistic, single-theme interpretation, the novelistic “thickness of description” (Geertz’s term) that resists reduction to abstracts and binaries, the embodiment of ethical dilemma in a drama of character that evades allegorical interpretation, the presence of symbolic elements that are not fully accessible to rational thought?
Le Guin, Words Are My Matter, page 22
It occurs to me that to read everything, including the news, like a novel—to be cognizant and accepting of discontinuities and conflicts, of multiple interpretations, of symbol that sits alongside more objective truths—is maybe the skill we most need to employ in navigating the world of news today, when there is so much news, and so few ways of making it all cohere.
In The Dispossessed, the people of Annares—a moon colony founded by exiled anarchists—speak a language called Pravic. It is an invented language, created by the first settlers, who one imagines were interested in the ways in which language both circumscribed and made possible different ways of being with one another.
In Pravic, ammar (plural ammari) means “brother” or “sister.” It is genderless, and used to refer to anyone regardless of familial relation; someone related by blood may be ammari, as may a roommate, partner, or stranger. Among the Annarasti, ammari communicates a solidarity, and often a deeply felt one. When Shevek boards the spaceship that will take him to Urras—the first of his people to return to the planet—he meets a doctor who prepares him for the trip:
Just before they strapped in for descent the doctor came to his cabin to check the progress of the various immunizations, the last of which, a plague inoculation, had made Shevek sick and groggy. Kimoe gave him a new pill. “That’ll pep you up for the landing,” he said. Stoic, Shevek swallowed the thing. The doctor fussed with his medical kit and suddenly began to speak very fast “Dr. Shevek, I don’t expect I’ll be allowed to attend you again, though perhaps, but if not I wanted to tell you that it, that I, that it has been a great privilege to me. Not because—but because I have come to respect—to appreciate-that simply as a human being, your kindness, real kindness—”
No more adequate response occurring to Shevek through his headache, he reached out and took Kimoe’s hand, saying, “Then let’s meet again, brother!” Kimoe gave his hand a nervous shake, Urrasti style, and hurried out. After he was gone Shevek realized he had spoken to him in Pravic, called him ammar, brother, in a language Kimoe did not understand.
Le Guin, The Dispossessed, page 17
But the reason the Urrasti doctor cannot understand Shevek is not only because he speaks a different language. It is because the kindness that Kimoe perceives is a consequence of Shevek’s anarchism, of his upbringing in a culture that sees everyone as equals. The doctor’s respect for Shevek—extending to the unnecessary “Dr.” salutation—is still too entangled within his own understanding of hierarchy for him to truly grasp what Shevek means by ammar.
The word ammari contains within it that assertion of equality, of solidarity. It is a lovely word. And perhaps we can learn what Kimoe could not: perhaps we can learn to be ammari to each other.
One of the things that happens during moments of crisis is that people look to existing institutions—whether governments, nonprofits, churches, or the like—for guidance on what to do. Some of these institutions do good work, at least some of the time; but often the expectation that for every challenge there exists some group ready to step in and make things right only serves to disempower people from acting to make change themselves. That is, we see the work to attend to the crisis as an add-on, an extracurricular, something that doesn’t seep into the day to day but often competes with it. It is necessary to counter that narrative, to weave instead a story that shows how everything we do in every part of our lives is an act of tearing down the old world and building a new one among the ruins. Here’s Dean Spade:
The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit. Robust social movements offer an opposing view. We argue that all aspects of our lives—where and how we live and work, eat, entertain ourselves, get around, and get by are sites of injustice and potential resistance. At our best, social movements create vibrant social networks in which we not only do work in a group, but also have friendships, make art, have sex, mentor and parent kids, feed ourselves and each other, build radical land and housing experiments, and inspire each other about how we can cultivate liberation in all aspects of our lives. Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us.
Spade, Mutual Aid, page 27
This is among the reasons why I try to use the word “work” expansively, referring not only to waged work but also to creative work, care work, work in our homes and in our neighborhoods and in our hearts. Not because everything should be work (it should not), but because work in all its many forms is the means by which we weave and cultivate and nurture a different world. It is liberating, in that respect, even when—perhaps especially when—it’s difficult.
In Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, the leader of the anarchist movement writes:
A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.
Le Guin, The Dispossessed, page 216
It is useless work that darkens the heart. But good work? Work that serves the living, that brings us into alignment with ourselves and with each other and with the earth? Good work lights us right up.
In The Dream and the Underworld, James Hillman sees dreams as the psyche’s work of soul-making and asks us to respect them as such:
First, we should dissociate “work” from the Herculean labor and return the idea of work to the example of the dream, where work is an imaginative activity, a work of the imagination such as takes place in painters and writers. Not all work is done by the ego in terms of its reality principles. There is work done by the imagination in terms of its reality, where joy and fantasy also take part….Then the psyche is always at work, churning and fermenting, without forethought of its product, and there is no profit from our dreams. As long as we approach the dream to exploit it for our consciousness, to gain information from it, we are turning its workings into the economics of work. This is capitalism by the ego, now acting as a captain of industry, who by increasing his information flow is at the same time estranging himself both from the source of his raw material (nature) and his workers (imagination). Result: the usual illnesses of those at the top. Simply ‘working’ on your dreams to get information from them is no life insurance.
Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, page 118
I think here of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, where in the language of the people of Anarres there is but one word for both work and play: in a society without capitalism, all work is the work of the imagination, soul-work, the work of art and creativity that is an effort as well as a kind of joy. This is work not labor, not something to be exploited or that can be expected to deliver; it is the work of living, of making change, of being present to the world.
Hillman is here arguing for a kind of work without working, a work without output or measure or profit, a work that is its own sake in the sense of something that exists both within and outside itself, as of the dreamer and the dream. And, I think, he is letting us know that this is a work that is already within us, that we already know how to do—if only we get out of our own way.
