Group Discussion - The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin

Quick side note: I don't know what the current protocols are. I'm launching a single thread for this. I would recommend either the use of spoiler tags or use of some other mechanism for indicating where you are in the text so as not to prevent others from enjoying their first reading of the novel.

A very few pertinent facts about the book itself.

--Originally published in 1974
--The subtitle of An Ambiguous Utopia was added after the book's initial publication. The phrase was initially part of a cover marketing blurb that read "The Magnificent Epic of an Ambiguous Utopia".
--Won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards

About the author

Ursula K. Le Guin was a Rhodes scholar.

There is a page with resources and commentary about this title at the author's official website (see https://www.ursulakleguin.com/dispossessed)

I'll try to add other pertinent items that come up as discussion flows along. I'm also aware that others here in the pub may be MUCH more conversant with her work and background than I am.

GO!!!

My book is on order, should be here soon! Separate thread for LHOD, or are we mixing the two for those that wanted to start there? If anyone, I think I may have lost track.

I was simply focusing this thread on The Dispossessed, primarily because I could reach for and read that volume easily and immediately. I'm three or four chapters into Dispossessed already and not ready yet for LHOD. That said however, I'll be happy start up a thread for LHOD if there are folks geared up to discuss that one.

Any additional input on this aspect?

I'm only going to do this for Chapter One, but I think an initial taste may whet readers' appetites for getting started. So here's what I noticed:

The reader isn’t sure why there’s so much tension visible between various people at the spaceport where the action begins. We just know that there is tension between the two worlds of Anarres and Urras.

There’s a continuing emphasis on language – specifically words like quarantine, weapon and bastard. Once Shevek lands on Urras, the word splendor comes up as something of a foreign (to him) concept. I think Le Guin intended or hoped that the reader would pause and consider what the issues with those words might be – what they convey and what is implied by their use. There’s also a language specifically established (Iotic) for basic transactional engagements between the two planets.

Quote: “To lock in. To lock out. The same act.” Shevek is shocked and enraged when he feels his personal freedoms have been violated by a medical door being fastened shut (for safety) during space travel without his awareness.

Shevek has a reaction to stepping off the spaceship onto the new planet. He has a recognition of the significance that step represents. (Not unlike the phrase used by Neil Armstrong when he first stepped on the moon in 1969. In fact, I think the parallel might have been deliberate.) This along with the author’s repetitive reference to the idea of the wall, the barrier existing between the two worlds, seems to me to be indicative of at least one of the book’s themes.

Stopping now and will await comments by others over the course of the next week or so...

Thanks for getting us started Jill! I'm looking forward to this reread and will be starting soon.

>1 jillmwo: Thank you!

I'm about 13% (50 pages) in. It's weird. I am sure it was considered wildly forward thinking in '74, but parts of it seem a bit dated. Especiallythe slide-rule instruction!

My copy arrived today, I'll start reading tonight.

>6 clamairy: I had something of the same reaction, but not due to the thing you point to. I'm a little further on than that. For me, concern over datedness had more to do with the positioning of how women were treated on the particular planet. Reminded me strongly of Babylon 5 and the way that the Centauri women were shown as being treated while also expected to fawn on Molari.. Not sure modern readers will realize where that was coming from in terms of attitudes prevalent in the late '60's and early '70's.

Life had other plans for us the last two days, I still haven't started.

I finished Chapter 8 last night. I went into 7 & 8 prepared for the worst because of Jill's words of warning in her own thread. The end of 7 was indeed rough, due mostly to sheer disappointment in Shevek. And 8 is rough for different reasons. Thankfully my worst fears didn't come to pass. I thought for sure the infant would pass due to the drought and subsequent famine.

I'm done! I want to digest for a day before I comment, but I ended up enjoying the end of this book a lot more than the first half. I gave it four stars. (I took into consideration that it was written 50 years ago.)

>11 clamairy: I'll look forward to your comments, but for what it is worth, I too felt that there was a fair bit of wrestling to be done with this book! I've been trying to write something about it all week and still haven't gotten my thoughts down in the right form. The Dispossessed is about work (at least in part), about working in cooperation, and how that fuels inequity at times. Given human nature, I'm not sure there are reliable answers for all of the issues.

Further follow-up to comment in >10 clamairy:. I know. I was sure that Takver had done something to end the suffering of her infant daughter and I was so glad I was wrong. SO GLAD. But I suspect that the discussion in chapter eight of the drought and starvation may have been Le Guin thinking about conditions in 1960s China and on-going worries re over-population.

>12 jillmwo: Shevek does mention that a woman had killed her own infant to keep it from starving to death.

As I mentioned above I did end up enjoying (not sure that is the right word... maybe appreciating would be better) the end of this book, and not just because I was finishing it. Ha! I do not think I can recommend this to anyone. I certainly would not give it to either of my children to read.

Several of the passages centered around work on the home world reminded me an awful lot of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Granted many of these workers are going where they are needed, but it was mainly grim and tedious once the drought hit. I did appreciate that almost everyone had to do the crappier (literally) jobs at some point. My biggest issue with this scenario is that there would be upper end jobs using technology, and there would be quite a few people incapable of being dropped into those jobs and doing them well. There had to have been quite a few 'specialists.' So Takver's fish and algae jobs made a lot more sense. She was a 'specialist' who seemed to only get assigned jobs in her own field of expertise. I was pretty upset about the brilliant friend who was sent to an institution, and ended up spending his life working as a janitor, while writing and rewriting the same play.

It did make me think about how unfair both the worlds seemed to be, though most of the people on Anarres were giving it their best shot, while many of the folks on Urras seemed mostly content to just maintain the status quo.

Also, I was a bit dumbfounded to realize this race of humanoids had furry faces. And I'm guessing fur most other places? We keep hearing about Shevek gazing at the soft down on Takver's face. I did notice this, but thought he was referring to just a wee bit of peach fuzz. Then when he meets his first Earthling he is astounded by her lack of hair anywhere but the top of her head. LOL

>13 clamairy: ...think about how unfair both the worlds seemed to be, though most of the people on Anarres were giving it their best shot, while many of the folks on Urras seemed mostly content to just maintain the status quo.

I think that was at least part of the point Le Guin wanted to make -- there is no system (whether capitalist, communist, or socialist) that eliminates the inherent unfairness of human existence.

But I'm kind of curious why you would hesitate to give this to your kids. Did you mean you'd not want them to read it as teens or did you think it too bleak for your kids to read at any point?

>14 jillmwo: I think the pacing is a bit slow by the standards of today's SciFi, and they would both be put off early. I'm not even sure if I could have finished it if we weren't doing a group discussion. I am very glad I did hang in there, but the going was rough in several spots.

>15 clamairy: This is not making me very enthusiastic! :)

>16 Karlstar: Sorry! You might have to change your rating system to STTD. There is a lot of dust on Annares.

(Comments copied from Jill's thread) . I've just started rereading this and find it more interesting each time I do so. The first time I read it was at my then-husband's urging (side note: it was the only book by a woman on his shelves until I moved in!) and I found it dry. I reread it a few years ago and liked it a lot more. I'm now more politically aware than I was then, so I expect this reading to be different again.

>15 clamairy: it is slow to start, but I love the scene-setting with the opening that focuses on the wall and then pans out. Brilliant writing.

>18 Sakerfalcon: Yes, I think if I read this right after it was published I would have been blown away. My attention span has shriveled in the interim. If I hadn't read other things of hers that I loved I would blame her writing style, but it seems as if she was aiming for utilitarian-esque prose.

>18 Sakerfalcon: and >19 clamairy: Perhaps that is one of the important factors! When you first encounter the book, I mean. It was written (in my view) with the intent to be a protest against so much of what was happening in the late sixties -- Vietnam, diminishing resources, commercial exploitation, etc. Granted I was in my very early twenties when I read it for the first time, but I found it very exciting and *relevant* at the time. Asking the right questions. Challenging the status quo.

Crossposted from my own reading thread and copied here, my thinking on The Dispossessed :

Shevek, a genius physicist leaves his own society on Anarres – an egalitarian collective operating by consensus, avoiding any form of individual ownership – to live in and interact with a society that operates on a purely capitalistic basis. On his own homeworld, a faculty mentor is asserting control over Shevek’s work, balking at a broader dissemination of the content. The mentor is deceitful in claiming the work as his own but at the same time can make a case for the restriction. To share the knowledge with those on Urras would be to allow those capitalists to exploit and dominate intergalactic exchange to an even greater extent than they already do. Asserting his own freedom, Shevek wants to learn from others wrestling with theories of time and space; he wants to publish as broadly as possible his own thinking with a universal audience. Overall, the novel concludes that it is the individual who holds the power for making those small changes that enable and redirect social growth.

Le Guin’s novel examines the ways in which human beings inadvertently build, come to acquiesce in and perpetuate systems of social inequity. The challenges of the flawed societies on Anarres and Urras are not unfamiliar to us now.

Answering some of the questions usually posed. I think this is a worthwhile read (albeit not a fun one). I think it deserves a place on college syllabi, whether one is discussing the use of genre fiction or actual political theory. I am not sure whether I'm ever going to reread this a fourth time, which means I may pass it on to a Little Free Library near me. (Or to one of my sons.)

>19 clamairy: >20 jillmwo: I did read it very soon after it was published, and I've re-read it a couple of times, once for a paper. The first time I read it I zipped right past the Wall. When I re-read it a few years later, I thought the Wall was wonderfully evocative (perhaps because I'd read the rest of the book). I also ended up reading all the lit-crit articles I could find on this and LHoD for an annotated bibliography assignment for a grad-school class, which helped me see what a lot of people thought about it. As Jill said, I'm not at all sure I'll read it again, but it's quite small, and looks nice among all the other UKL books on the shelf, so I don't think I'll dispose of it any time soon.

There are a ton of questions that the reader might chew on...What *ought* ought a society to do with regard to prioritization of job satisfaction? Are there categories of work that deserve more compensation, prestige, resources, or respect than other work? What is the novelist or playwright in comparison with the physicist or neurosurgeon?

I guess the irritating thing about The Dispossessed is that Le Guin doesn't clearly indicate whether the problem of individual vs communal well-being is one with a balanced, practical solution or outcome.

>4 jillmwo: I've just finished Chapter 1 and it looks like I won't catch up. But in addition to noticing the locked in/locked out theme, I also noticed that the Urras culture is apparently rule based, but also hierarchical, and that the rules are made to reinforce that hierarchy. I think that those two ideas are related.

>24 vwinsloe: There is no "catching up." Some people haven't even started yet.

And yes, I believe you're correct about that relationship. The Urras culture was fascinating to me.

>25 clamairy: Thanks. I have the feeling that it is much like US culture, but that's just my initial impression.

>26 vwinsloe: In some ways, yes. Thankfully not in others! You'll see.

>24 vwinsloe: What clamairy said. This is just an open discussion thread. Read at your own pace. And I certainly agree that the hierarchical organization of society on Urras is recognizable as mid-to-late 20th-century US culture.

>23 jillmwo: I would say that by not providing a workable solution, she might not be saying that it can't be done, but she's surely saying that it's a very difficult problem.

>23 jillmwo: & >29 Jim53: and that human nature clearly appears to be a large part of the problem.

I just finally remembered to pin this thread.

I'm in Chapter 7 on Urras, and I almost fell off my chair when I read this exclamation by the character Vea Doem Oiie:

"I don't care about hurting and not hurting. I don't care about other people, and nobody else does either. They pretend to. I don't want to pretend. I want to be free!"

This could easily have been a quote from an anti-masker two years ago.

In this, LeGuin proves herself to be a prescient as Octavia Butler was in her Parables duology.

>32 vwinsloe: Human nature doesn't change.

>33 clamairy: Sadly. But some humans have an unselfish nature, at least in part.

This is what Shevek had to say about the schools on Urras:

He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater deterrent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.

Perfect.

>32 vwinsloe: I've been in conversations with those who shrug and say that human beings consistently operate in their own self-interests and that pretending otherwise when building a workable society is unrealistic. Her partner nodded and pointed out that scientific studies back up the bit about self-interest. (Nobody seems to believe in altruism anymore...)

>36 jillmwo: And yet it still exists, thankfully! There just isn't as much of it as some of us would prefer.

>36 jillmwo: I agree that when building a society, that self-interest must be planned for. But I don't believe that most people insist on their freedom to hurt others.

>38 vwinsloe: I agree that there is a good bit of altruism in the world, but I fear that depending on it to make a society work would fail miserably. The overlap between altruists and power-seekers (who will end up affecting history quite a bit) seems to be rather low.

I've started, finally, and I'm wondering at her idea that children won't be raised by their parents. That idea came up in Left Hand of Darkness also.

>40 Karlstar: Well, as I recall, it had to do with the anarchists seeking to ensure that parents did not unthinkingly fall into the mindset that their children were theirs, that is a form of "property" rather than being independent beings. I'm not sure if I could find the line in the book that gave me that idea, but I do remember stopping and thinking about that as a par.t of the anarchist society. Women had to work as hard as men and be as free to work as the men in order to survive.

I think it's relevant as well to consider that communal child care (provided so that mothers could contribute to the work force) was seen as a viable model in certain societies back in the 70s. My (very vague) memory hearkens back to the models of a kibbutz in Israel and/or the communal day care that was part of Communist countries. (Am I remembering that correctly in any way?)

>41 jillmwo: I'm only about 50 pages in, so either I missed that part or haven't come to it yet. It fits the society she's describing.

>40 Karlstar: AFAIK the medieval aristocracy sent at least their sons away to be raised in other households at the age of 7 or so.

>43 hfglen: Sure, but is that really a model of child-rearing that we'd want the future to emulate?

>13 clamairy: I read Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets last year, and I was reminded of that book several times while reading The Dispossessed. I think that LeGuin might have been thinking of the Soviet Union while writing this book. I was surprised that in Second Hand Time, the author quoted many Russians who, despite going through all of the deprivations and the brutality of Stalin and the Soviet times, were nevertheless nostalgic about those days. The nostalgia arose from having a life full of meaning, and believing that the sacrifices that they were making were for the nation. There were a few cynics, who sounded a lot like Bedap! So it seems that, in LeGuin's view, an ideology of belonging and working toward the common good can help a nation's citizens to overcome much adversity, but that it only goes so far.

I loved how Shevek took the old Machiavellian saying that "the end justifies the means" and destroyed it, by pointing out that in life there is no end, there is only the process.

At the end with the return of Shevek and the Hainish crewmember / , I was reminded of Glasnost and perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union.

>44 Karlstar: Absolutely not. But it happened.

>41 jillmwo: Yes, the idea that children should stay with "the" parents was considered propertarian, and it was mentioned early in the book that women were natural propertarians because they naturally considered children to whom they give birth to be "theirs." It seems that Odo understood that to break up nuclear families and have them become part of the larger family of the community would be the way to get people to sacrifice for the community. Takver says that pregnant women have a biological preservation drive that contains a "primitive sacrifice-impulse" that can work against community, and that is how women on Urras became owned by men on Urras, because they were pregnant all the time.

The first mention of keeping children as "propertarian" in the plot was when the mother, Rulag, was discussed, and how she left Shevek and his father for her engineering posting. It was made obvious later on (when Shevek was hospitalized) that Rulag had strong regrets and guilty feelings about this, and that Shevek had no special feelings of kinship for her at all. When Rulag appears later as an important person at the PDC, she vehemently accuses Shevek of lacking social responsibility and being a traitor when he wants to open travel between Urras and Anarres. Freedom on Anarres was seen as the ability to choose to make sacrifices on behalf of the community, but Takver and Bedap expose this as untrue, because the choices are coerced by society and not freely made. /

Thanks for all of the references. I just started chapter 6. Chapters 4 and 5 were a bit slow, but there's a great quote about work I want to post later.

>48 Karlstar: I'll be interested in the quote! Please don't forget to post as promised?

Also remember that Chapters 7 and 8 come with some difficult elements to them.

Here you go. This is on page 150 in my version.

“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 them, they can – egoize, 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. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. “

Even with financial reward, I think this description of the nature of work is still true.

>50 Karlstar: Yes. And I hadn't noticed that question of the end justifying the means in that discussion of work. I commented on the issue above at >45 vwinsloe:, when I noticed that Shevek said that there is no end to justify through the means in life. There is just the process (means). Sounds like he is making the same point in your quote.

>51 vwinsloe: I thought that was a good perspective on why we work. I've often wondered about the common statement that you should love your job. How many people really get to do that? Maybe it isn't so much the category of job itself, or finding that one perfect job, but doing work that people should love, or perhaps as LeGuin said - like, or take pleasure in the doing.

I am finished with the book. Thanks for the warnings about chapters 7 and 8, people, those were jarring compared to the rest of the book.

>50 Karlstar: >51 vwinsloe: >52 Karlstar: I haven’t joined in the group read, but I think that that quotation has more than a smear of the truth. I wouldn’t presume to say that I know why anyone else works—clearly earning enough money to live is a lot of the reason—but I know something about why I work. Money is part of it; loving the work is a lot of it; but the best bit is the professional respect of people I respect. I have had the great good fortune to have chosen my own line of work, to have continued in it for a decent working life, and to have been able to make a reasonable living at it. How many others can say that?

I think what folks may tend to forget in these discussions is that there will always be quantities of a type of work that is necessary but which is unlikely to be fulfilling.

It is also true that we all want to feel useful, to make a contribution. But human talent being unfairly distributed, what someone might want to do might well be beyond their real capabilities. Shevek is a physicist. There is that line about when he arrives on Urras, that it's the first time he's ever had a real conversation with others who are his equals on an intellectual level.

And as I asked up there in #23, at what level should a society prioritize job satisfaction of a their workforce? I am reminded of a poster I saw back in the '70's that went something along the lines of "A society that prizes philosophy as an exalted activity but which devalues the work of a plumber as being a low-end activity will never be successful. Neither their pipes nor their theories will hold water." I think modern society has skated along those lines for a long time...

>54 jillmwo: The quotation is from John W Gardner, from his book Excellence. Wikiquote gives the text as:

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

I went googling because I had a vague memory of having seen it attributed to Alfred North Whitehead.

>23 jillmwo: >54 jillmwo: All good questions LeGuin doesn't answer. She assumes everyone in her society will do at least a decent job at all jobs, for each other or for society. She does document a few examples of shirkers or non-workers, though she assumes the problem will be manageable. I think she's way, way off.

We may get a chance to see this in action in our lifetimes. If Elon Musk manages to get people to Mars, what will be their policies? If you don't work, you don't stay? If you don't work, you don't eat? Will there be a cash economy at all?

>35 clamairy: just watched the three idiots. this exam system is still being criticized today. Nothing changes. I love LeGuin's writing and enjoyed the Disposed when I first read it. She always grew as an author and was quite willing to talk about the mistakes she made in her earlier books (ie the depiction of
women in the original Earthsea books)

>39 Jim53: I always wondered what happened to more altruistic societies. they seem to be swallowed by more aggressive societies. Look at the early church in Ireland, but the one in Rome ultimately became the Church of Europe for centuries. There were people who were against decimating the Native American population and we see how that went. Many philosophies say that doing good and taking care of each other is the way to peace and in my experience it seems true, but few governments follow through on this.

>52 Karlstar:, >53 haydninvienna:, >54 jillmwo: I am a long way away from my philosophical education, but I remember that Aristotle described happiness as "doing well." He did not mean that in the sense of success (fame, money, power) necessarily, but more in the sense that a person is fulfilled in their endeavors. It seems to me that people can be happy in their work for many reasons.

>56 Karlstar: I think that the problem of work shirkers is reduced by the extreme societal pressure that was exerted in Anarres culture. There was an ugly side of that, I think.

I would like to say that I thought this book was an excellent example of speculative fiction. I'm enjoying the discussion here, even if we're pointing out some flaws in the book; it doesn't take away from the thought provoking nature of the novel.

>59 vwinsloe: Agreed, I think more people should find one of those reasons to be satisfied, if they can't be happy, in their work.

As we saw in the later chapters, there was a lot of societal pressure.

>55 haydninvienna: You are amazing! I'd always wondered about the original source of the quote so thank you!!

>59 vwinsloe: That's an excellent perspective -- >fulfilled in their endeavors. It's the difference I imagine between me -- as a contractor -- writing up a brief article about a historical figure for a scholarly database provider and the effort (alternatively) in generating an invoice and following up with the provider about unpaid items. The first is enjoyable and the second is boring.

>60 Karlstar: So now the question becomes whether you would consider The Dispossessed to be a classic -- whether just in the context of speculative fiction or in a broader classification. This was your first time reading the book, I think; would you choose to read it again?

>62 jillmwo: Why, thank you! I endeavour to give satisfaction.

>56 Karlstar: I'd say yes & no - she shows there are plenty of flaws in Annares - it's a poor world - and not just because of being resource-poor. It's quite obvious that being highly productive and efficient is not particularly valued there. They trade with Urras, but at a fairly minimal level - just enough to obtain what they are unable to produce themselves.

>62 jillmwo: I would say it is a classic, yes. I don't think it is my favorite LeGuin, but there's a lot in this book to think about. I would definitely put it in the category of speculative fiction.

>64 ChrisG1: True, being too efficient would be 'egoizing'.

Absolutely a classic as we can see from this discussion that the issues are as relevant as they were almost 50 years ago when it was published.