Analysis of The Dispossessed written by Ursula LeGuin - Book Report/Review Example

The Dispossessed The Dispossessed written by Ursula LeGuin charts the stops and starts, thestumbles, and the breakthroughs of the Anarrean physicist Shevek as he attempts to develop a general temporal theory, it is one of the few American novels that feature as a central plot line the intellectual endeavor of working out a scientific theory. When he finally succeeds in his intellectual mission, LeGuin describes his moment of ultimate fulfillment: And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears, as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one’s life has been fulfilled. (LeGuin, 281) The fulfillment that Shevek experiences—the ‘childish joy’ at solving the problem before him highlights LeGuin’s representation of people’s natural initiative to engage creatively in work/play that at once benefits society as a whole and also forwards the Contemporary Justice Review 309 free and full development of the individual. Here the term that can be use if ‘work/play’ because in the Anarrean society imagined in The Dispossessed , separate terms do not exist for work and play, as Anarreans are not required to do work they do not enjoy but instead freely choose of their own initiative, without external coercion, the work they want to do (Brennan, 25). The character of late philosopher and revolutionary Odo, whose teachings form the basis of culture and society on Anarres, articulates the theory informing this conception of human motivation. 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. (LeGuin, 247) What Odo’s words suggest here and what LeGuin ratifies throughout the novel is that the organizational forms of capitalism such as private property and competition do not enhance or optimize people’s capacity to realize their highest potential but rather deaden that capacity. They certainly mitigate the joy of labor by estranging people from their creative selves, from their life activity, or what is referred to in the novel as their ‘cellular function.’ This Odonian concept of the ‘cellular function,’ an analog of Marx’s concept of species-being, is the novel’s philosophical linchpin for theorizing the interdependence and complementarily of individual and social development or, in the terms of Marx and Engel, for underlining the idea that ‘the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all’ (Marx & Engels, 491). Throughout the novel Shevek must constantly affirm the value of his work to himself so that he can withstand the pressures of the growing bureaucracy on Anarres, the very bureaucracy the anarchic society of Anarres was created to avoid and which threatens to compromise the utopia and its founding principles, hence making it ‘ambiguous.’ In fact, Shevek’s commitment to the founding Odonian principles of Anarrean society constitutes an act of rebellion against this growing bureaucracy (Braverman, Press). Nonetheless this loyalty to his own will and talents most optimally serves the social interests, as LeGuin writes, ‘On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society’ (LeGuin, 272). Later we learn that [Shevek] recognized that need [to obey his will], in Odonian terms, as his ‘cellular function,’ the analogic term for the individual’s individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. (LeGuin, 333) The point to be stressed here is that LeGuin does not represent the pursuit and realization of individual will and desire as anti-social or as requiring a repressive discipline to harness them in the service of meeting social needs. In The Dispossessed, when Shevek travels to Urras, the capitalist planet his revolutionary forbears left to establish an anarchic society on Anarres, the fellow physicists he is visiting ask him many questions about Anarres and its social organization. One colleague asks how work gets done if no one has to do it except by choice, asking in particular ‘Why do people do the dirty work at all?’(LeGuin, 149). Shevek explains: Because they are done together and other reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn’t rich, as it is here. In the little communities there isn’t very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenth day it’s pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people. And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing they, they can egoist, and we call it show off? To the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing. But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. (LeGuin, 149–150) Shevek describes a world in which people want to work and do so willingly because it is the ‘lasting pleasure.’ The idea is simple yet absolutely compelling in its simplicity. To put it in the most common parlance: people are not by nature or does not desire by nature to be ‘couch potatoes’ who want to sit around and watch television. They prefer to be actively engaged and realizing happiness means externalizing their creative impulses. Shevek works both to satisfy himself and to benefit the social whole, which also serves his own interest by helping to improve society and helping society meet its and his needs. These students do not understand the incentive of working to contribute to the collective effort of meeting social needs as they are alienated from those who provide the very basis of their lives (Kropotkin, 2). This attitude mirrors that of the Urrasti physicist Atro who wants Shevek’s theories in order to assert superiority and establish dominance over other peoples. Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors. Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of this property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange. (MacPherson, 3) In LeGuin’s worldview as developed in The Dispossessed and elsewhere, these conceptions of the self as both property and proprietor and of freedom as ownership of oneself impede rather than enable the realization of genuine freedom and hence happiness. As Shevek witnesses on Urras, in a society organized centrally around property-ownership, some come to own property and others ‘the hands, the people who made’ find themselves effectively owned and thus deprived of freedom (Freud, 18). Thus, the apparent freedom of some, such as the Urrasti students, is premised upon the exploitation and deprivation of the freedom of others. Moreover, as people relate to each other indirectly primarily through market exchanges, through the mechanisms of profit and loss, the real relationships of mutual dependence are masked (Moylan, 70). As Macpherson points out, people imagine themselves in their alienated state as free from dependence on others because their possessions afford them the means to do as they please, that is, to purchase what they need and desire. Not recognizing their dependence on and exploitation of others an effect or Symptom of their alienation people similarly does not recognize their responsibility to one another. As LeGuin writes about Anarres, ‘with the myth of the state out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual becomes clear’ (LeGuin, 333). In The Dispossessed, LeGuin challenges the human and social effectiveness of the notion that the market can measure and index our needs and desires, regulate the use and availability of resources, and mediate our social relationships. Libretti such as price, cost, ownership (possession), and so forth. She suggests instead that these instrumentalities of capitalism’s market-driven society hinder the development of an economy designed to meet human need and free human creativity from subordination to economic constraints. She addresses this issue early in the novel when Shevek is making his pioneering journey to Urras as the first Anarrean to return since the founding of Anarres. Concepts such as ‘cost’ and ‘price’ do not adequately reference or comprehend our material reality but alienate us from it, distorting our comprehension of our world and fostering behaviors counterproductive to individual and collective interests and happiness (Marx, 70). Thus, in The Dispossessed LeGuin portrays competitive capitalist society and its very ideal of success and happiness, namely the accumulation of wealth, as in fact undermining rather than furthering our quest for happiness and the ‘good life.’ Indeed, in the novel’s view, a competitive society does not accommodate human nature but rather alienates us from our creative natures. Shevek’s understanding of the ethics of time leads us to question the effectiveness of our own behaviors for achieving the good life. Will polluting the environment further the survival and thriving of human life on this planet? Will a system designed to generate profit and protect private property meet the basic human needs of all and liberate their creativity? Indeed, when Shevek speaks with Keng, the ambassador from the planet Terra, Keng explains that her people destroyed themselves and their planet: We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence, we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, and it is always hot… We failed as a species, as a social species. (LeGuin, 1974a, pp. 347–348) Yet Keng envies Urrasti society, failing to recognize, as Shevek explains to her, that the Terran past is the Urrasti future, as the people on the planet Urras are behaving in the same irresponsible consumptive manner, much as the United States does. Here lies the novel’s fundamental challenge for achieving the good life: to live intentionally, which requires transforming the alienating socio-economic forms that structure our relationships to each other and the world and that distort our understanding of the world such that our actions and objectives do not align. Our ‘pursuit of happiness’ tends to lead to destruction of ourselves and the very ecological basis of human life. Works Cited Braverman, H. (1994). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brennan, J. P., & Downs, M. C. (1979). Anarchism and utopian tradition in Freud, S. (1998). Civilization and its discontents (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York: W.W. Norton and Company. (Original work published in 1930) pp. 14-19 Kropotkin, Peter (2002). Mutual aid: A factor of evolution. London: Heinemann. The Dispossessed. In J. Olander & M. Greenberg (Eds.), Ursula K. LeGuin. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, pp. 23-27. LeGuin, U. (1974a). The dispossessed: An ambiguous utopia. New York: Harper, pp. 2. MacPherson, C.B. (1992). The political theory of possessive individualism. London: Oxford University Press, pp.3. Marx, K. (1992). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. In R. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader (pp. 66–125). New York: Norton. (Original work published in 1827) Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1996). The communist manifesto. In R. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels reader. New York: Norton. (Original work published in 1848), pp.490-491 Moylan, T. (1996). Demand the impossible: Science fiction and the utopian imagination. New York: Methuen, pp. 70. Read More