Whilst Cavendish chastised the mechanist scientific mode, and Lane sought to work against it from within, Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg in the 20th century paved the way for a mode of thought which theoretically delegitimises mechanist reductionism. These scientists ‘demonstrated the relativism and situatedness of knowledge, the dynamism, reciprocity, and indeterminism of physical entities and forces.’[1] This alternate mode of thought is integral to the plot, form and language of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. This chapter focuses on Le Guin’s formal and linguistic challenges to mechanism and its involvement in the gender inscribed politics of the mid to late 20th century in The Dispossessed. As with the texts discussed in chapters one and two, The Dispossessed begins in an ecotone, that of a spaceship caught between two worlds. As the narrative progresses, the role of ecotone under observation transfers from this liminal space to the protagonist who occupies it both literally at the opening of the novel, and figuratively throughout.
Central to this text is Le Guin’s Anarcho-Taoist beliefs which she has stated, influence every aspect of her writing.[2] Taoist thought ‘creates a consciousness of the world {[encompassing] every distinct thing and being into an unsegmented whole.’[3] This has elsewhere been identified as the ’all changing changeless’, or ‘being in itself.’[4] Taoism fits for Le Guin with Anarchism as conceived by Emma Goldman. Anarchy is ‘the theory that all forms of governments rest on violence’ and are therefore wrong. It is ‘the teacher of the unity of life, not merely in nature, but in man’[5]. The unity of life, or interconnectivity is the principle of vitalism and eco-feminist thought. Le Guin’s Taoism seeks to present a version of the Tao te Ching which does not limit wisdom to men, and she understands Lau Tzu’s wisdom to be effeminate. Her translation of Tzu’s No. 61 sees her reconfigure a traditionally masculine definition of the poem as concerned with conquest or hierarchy as something feminine, and interconnected – the inverse of conflict: ‘the polity of greatness/runs downhill like a river (…) joining everything/woman to everything’[6]. The unity of life that is central to these ideas is figured in the structure of Anarres itself, a unified whole within which each individual is also a whole and their coexistence is co-contingent, and the river appears as a motif in Shevek’s theories.
Shevek bridges the twin planets of Anarres and Urras. Anarres and Urras are two oppositional ‘utopias’, the latter being the capitalist home-world from which Shevek’s ancestors fled to found an anarcho-communist state based on the vision of a woman named Odo. ‘Odonianism’ on Anarres has achieved the elimination of property and the creation of a language which reflects its tenets of anarchic-communism, in which the only governing principle is mutual aid. There are no laws on Anarres, no government and no property – there are only communal facilities and resources which are available for any who need them, whilst work continues out of necessity – Anarres is analogous to a beehive. Customs and moral consensus are enforced only by the power of communal consensus – in short following Goldman’s vision.
Whilst most science fiction stories achieve ‘cognitive estrangement’ through the differentiation of the protagonist’s destination or circumstances from that of the reader, the protagonist remains a relatable, average character; yet in The Dispossessed, it is Shevek who is estranged, and his destination, Urras, disturbingly familiar. [7] The majority of countries on Urras are patriarchal capitalist states, where men hold all power; women are relegated to domesticity or reduced to sex-objects. The familiarity of A-Io, Shevek’s host state, is made uncanny by the dual narrative in which the reader experiences Shevek’s past and present simultaneously – as alternating chapters switch between the two. Though the text third person, it is adopts the perspective of Shevek who thinks and speaks in ‘Pravic’ which has no words to indicate ownership, excess is figured as ‘excrement’, and ‘profiteer’ is the worst insult imaginable.
Though Urras most closely resembles earth, aesthetically and structurally, it is also estranged and distasteful. The Pravic use of ‘excrement’ for ’excess’ ensures this disgust towards a planet which is excessive even as it faces extreme poverty. Thus for the reader, the bejewelled bodies of Urrasti women become grotesque through their association with waste. This linguistic re-organising of thought verifies the Sapir-Whorf theory that language structures thought.[8] Becoming immersed in the Anarresti narrative at the same time as the one taking place on Urras means that the reader is encountering Urras from the Anarresti mindset, bringing to the text the distaste for conspicuous consumption of wealth. As the most conspicuous consumption of wealth is the lavish bejewelling of female bodies, this becomes symbolic of the women’s objectification – from the Anarresti perspective they are being further demeaned by the jewels, by their association with ‘waste’. This perspective captures their true position on Urras as the oppressed gender, even as the Urrasti use of wealth attempts to conceal it.
Yet it is Urras which most closely resembles our own planet both aesthetically and structurally. For this reason, though each planet views the other as moon, from the reader’s perspective, it is Anarres which appears most like ‘moon’. It’s physical and aesthetic qualities accentuate the similarity, as Anarres is a barren, desert-like planet in which there is very little organic life, making it the planet out of the two which most resembles the moon for the reader. These associations between moon and femininity mark the planet as the feminine other to its patriarchal twin. That it was settled by a society founded by a woman compounds the sense of the Anarresti’s innate femininity as it is the product of the female imagination. Yet it engenders what Cixous termed Bisexuality, in that it is not predominantly feminine, but combines with the masculine. This is evidenced in the characters themselves. Shevek and his partner Takver demonstrate the acceptance of both masculine and feminine within each individual, as the following discussion of Simultaneity and sexuality shows.
Shevek’s work on the Simultaneity principle and his solution to the problem engages in dialectical thinking. His dual narratives of past and present are formal representations of this dialectical mode of thought, a physical representation of his theory which encourages dialectical thought in the reader. The text uses ‘dialogic’ language, exploiting what Bakhtin referred to as ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin, 277), or, ‘the primacy of linguistic polyvalency, of the irreducible multiaccentuality of meaning’ (Freedman, 58). This linguistic polyvalency is demonstrable in the difficulties expressed in Shevek’s bilingual status. Not only is the reader linguistically estranged from the Pravic in which he thinks, but the more familiar grammar of Iotic becomes estranged so as to make English and its use of possessive pronouns alien and excessive.
The necessity of Shevek working and later communicating in Iotic makes visible the difficulties faced by women writers for whom the only linguistic tool is fundamentally phallocentric. When making a quip, he finds that ‘his fluency in Iotic was not sufficient to permit him the word-flight this might have been in his own language’ (Dispossessed, 179) (my italics). ‘Word-flight’ conjures Cixous’ call to women to ‘steal into language and make it fly’ (‘Sorties’, 196). Iotic makes Shevek heavy, his meaning cannot be effectively conveyed, it is constrictive, whilst he longs to ‘fly’. There is a part of Shevek then that is undeniably feminine. The ecotone that is Shevek is not just a bridge between cultures but genders.
It is this which enables Shevek to theorise time not as linear or ‘sequential’, but cyclic, whilst he recognises that his partner Takver, a woman, views time as a ‘road’, that is to say linear. In Le Guin’s own thought, linearity is associated with masculine, circularity with the feminine[9] so that the couple each contains both masculinity and femininity within themselves. Shevek is shown to have absorbed, perhaps unconsciously, the feminine view of non-linear time from the women in his life. His initial Simultaneity theory is actually something he first encountered from a woman physicist early in his career, and whilst Takver is at one point said to see time as road, she is also the creator of the mobiles, the influence of which becomes linguistically evident in both the sex scene to be discussed in the next paragraph, and in the theory itself.
The language Shevek uses to describe the two modes of temporality embody the universally recognised imagery of sex/gender. Linear time is an ‘arrow’ whilst cyclic time, or the simultaneity principle is circular. The language of intimacy between Shevek and Takver is mirrored in the language of Shevek’s theories.
They circled about the centre of infinite pleasure, about each other’s being, like planets circling blindly, quietly, in the flood of sunlight, about the common centre of gravity, swinging, circling, endlessly. (Dispossessed, 265)
Only within each of the great cycles is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects, there is the arrow, the running river (…) without which there is no change (…) And there is the circle (…) without which there is chaos. (Dispossessed, 185 – 6)
The ‘flood of sunlight’, natural, non-penetrative, radiant light signals the light of knowledge outside of the gender binary, like the ‘blazing’ light of Cavendish’s imagination and the soft glow of Mizora. The repetition of ‘circle’ brings the description of Simultaneity back to the fore. Sexuality and perception of time become interwoven. The ‘sensuous and erotic’ have been posited as ‘non-appropriative ways of knowing the world, a form of knowledge that is not at once also a kind of power but is open to the agency of others.’[10] Though symbolically Shevek may be the ‘arrow’ and Takver the ‘circle’, the language does not figure them as two separate halves of a whole, but rather two independent ‘wholes’ which are nonetheless together, part of a greater whole. Takver’s mobiles, ‘Occupations of Uninhabited Space’ are also ever present in the physics of simultaneity, and intimacy. The ‘complex concentric shapes (…) moved with the introverted precision, silence, mystery of the organs of the body or the processes of the reasoning of the mind.’ (Dispossessed, 152, 156). Thought, space time perception, the body and intimacy between bodies are all linked as movements within each other, concentric and co-dependant.
This is the imagery of a vitalist view of the universe as seen in the language of Cavendish and expressed as an essential Cixous argument in ‘Sorties’: ‘woman’s libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide’ likewise, écriture feminine ‘can only go on and on, without ever inscribing or distinguishing contours’. The cycle is essential to life, or, renewal, which is figured as feminine, whilst meaningful change is dependent upon the linear progress of time. Although the arrow and circle are used to simplify the theory and would seem to divide it into two aspects of a gender binary in which oppositions are couples (Sorties, 64) the use of the ‘river’ metaphor is genderless, fluid, representing acceptance of two contradictory yet co-dependant realities. Likewise, in the sex scene above, there is no gender distinction, yet both ‘planets’ are kept in existence by each other – the loss of one would disrupt the ‘centre of gravity’. According to Russ, it is in the scenes of domesticity and intimacy that a writer’s true level of emancipation from patriarchal norms is most discernible.[11] Whilst the argument has been made that this relationship does not deviate from heteronormativity, the balance of power implied by the planetary imagery is overlooked in these accusations – if both lovers are planets then they are two distinct and independent powers; they are equals which deviates from heteronormativity in terms of how heterosexual partners are conceived as each completing the other. Yet here they are each occupying space time and their jouissance is at their centre, circular, shared and bringing them together as ‘gravity’ rather than being given or taken.
This scene contrasts with the attitudes towards sexuality on Urras, which stem from capitalism, in which sex/uality and bodies themselves are commodified. This is in turn linked with the anthropocentric world view sustained by the human progress narrative, an inherently mechanistic understanding of the world. The climax to the romance narrative of Shevek and Takver on Anarres parallels the ‘climax’ to the relationship between Shevek and an Urrasti woman. On Urras, Shevek encounters Vea, a woman who ‘incarnated all the sexuality the Ioti repressed into their dreams, their novels and poetry, their endless paintings of female nudes, their architecture with its curves and domes’ (177).
Shevek attempts to engage in sexual relations with Vea who declines, but ‘he couldn’t stop, her resistance excited him further.’ (Dispossessed, 191). The text makes clear that Shevek is at fault, as Vea’s fear is as evident as her refusal and yet Vea does not scream, cause a scene, report the incident nor even make much complaint. Shevek having ejaculated onto her evening dress, she simply chastises him with the same tone one might adopt towards a tipsy houseguest who has spilt his wine: ‘Really! Now I’ll have to change my dress!’, though moments before she was frantically repeating ‘Let me go! Let me go’ in ‘the same high whisper’ (Dispossessed, 191). Her ‘whisper’ as opposed to a yell implies that there is a sense of shame attached to rape to the degree that rather than seek help, she risks assault, fearing that the blame will fall on herself and her reputation, which she mentions when suggesting that they find another time to consummate their flirtations. The scene is grotesque and alarming, the repetition ignored and responded to with a repetition of ‘force’. The presence of a rape seems disruptive to the female-empowerment potential of science-fiction, but silence on a crime that is the consequence of the social conditions and hegemony critiqued by this text would signal complicity. This scene presents a truthful image of the misogyny at the heart of capitalism based on hierarchy and domination of discursively ‘othered’ bodies so as to make visible its innate violence.
Conditions on Urras have made this crime possible, even likely. Women are not equals on Urras, but sex objects – their formal dress when not in public is a skirt that hangs from the hips, leaving the entire torso uncovered. Their heads are shaved, and their bodies encrusted with jewels, they are walking commodities. Shevek has spent much time prior to the incident considering whether Vea might be a prostitute, and is conscious that on Anarres, she would be regarded as a ‘body-profiteer’, a woman who uses her body and sexuality to curry favour, gifts or other things from men. Though none of this excuses Shevek, it makes visible the conditions in which incidents like this have become mundane. Precisely because women are primarily sex-objects, this is a matter not of violation of another human being as it would be on Anarres, but mere indecorum that is swept under the carpet, despite it being obvious in Vea’s repetition and high voice that she is distressed by the incident. Earlier in the day, Shevek has chastised himself for thinking like ‘a damned profiteer’, and here it is implied, his actions are those of a man who once again is thinking like a ‘profiteer’. He has lavished money on Vea, she is dressed alluringly, and her protests, rather than putting him off, have signalled her value as a commodity in high demand and low supply. Thus it is capitalist society which creates the conditions in which these incidents abound. However, the fact that it is Shevek who commits the gross violation indicates that societal change alone is not enough to prevent the sexual exploitation and abuse of women. Instead it shows that fundamental restructuring of thought itself is required – that represented by the realisation of the unification theory which would bring about instant communication. Symbolically this communication would represent the knowability of the universe and the rejection of gendered binaries altogether, as it is contingent upon their unification theorised in unification of sequency and simultaneity, contingent upon the eradication of difference between the gendered symbolism of arrow and circle. The unification theory, with its multiplicity and contradictions may be read here as écriture feminine put to use in restructuring thought itself.
The scene with Takver uses natural imagery which grounds this depiction of sexuality as the ‘natural’ in opposition to the commodification of sexualised female bodies to be possessed or seized by men on Urras, and its connection with the Simultaneity theory places it at the heart of the universe as the most natural, because the most central – the free interplay of whole beings about a centre as opposed to an exchange. This is possible partly due to the ‘bisexuality’ or gender non-conformity of Anarresti – their inclusion and acceptance of both masculine and feminine traits, again, opposed to the strict observance of gendered roles and aesthetics on Urras: The shaven heads of the Urrasti women, marking them as female, signifies a ‘lack’ – there is no compulsory head shaving for the men. Their visible sign of womanhood then, is the assumption of their incompleteness, their lack of the phallus, that is power, whilst on Anarres the women ‘do not shave at all’, making them aesthetically on par with men as a visualisation of their extant social equality, their absence of gendered aesthetics. The Anarresti women and their sexuality embodied in the intimate moments between Takver and Shevek are Le Guin’s feminist re-imagining of human sexuality that is not phallocentric but centred on the jouissance of the French feminists. It is a re-imagination that allows for the vitalism of early eco-feminism without accepting hierarchic difference, the centre of both man and woman irrespective of gender.
The commodification of female bodies and sex is tied in with the commodification of life itself. Ecofeminist thought views the problem of women’s oppression as contingent upon the wider commodification of the planet, the anthropocentric view of life as mechanistic, thus, tools for human use that can be commodified. Shevek’s encounter with the landscapes of Urras pitted against his estrangement from them as a native to the barren Anarres makes visible humanity’s roots in the natural world and simultaneous estrangement from it. Simultaneously, his upbringing as Odonian makes him closer to non-human life and thus, the natural than Urrasti, since he is able to view them not as property or tools but as brothers: Meeting an otter for the first time he is ‘caught by that gaze across the gulf of being’, ‘Ammar’ he calls the otter, which Le Guin translates: ‘brother’. (Dispossessed, 127) Though there is a ‘gulf of being’, his response to the otter is instinctual, he speaks without any prior thought, that one word. This is contrasted with his host’s explanation that otters had been domesticated first for use as ‘fish retrievers, then as pets’ (127). For Shevek who has never had contact with any species besides humans, the otter is recognised immediately as brother, whilst Urrasti can conceive as it only as a commodity. This speaks to the mechanist world view that appears to be absence from Shevek’s mode of thought, in which all life is mechanical in the sense that is driven by force, hence, the easy step from this to the view of other living creatures as tools to be moved and used for the benefit of humanity. As pets they serve an aesthetic function and exist to please humans, much the same as Urrasti women serve the aesthetic function as ostentatious displays of their husband’s or family’s wealth.
Living beings are commodified as much as the earth itself which resembles a living organism in Shevek’s imagination, in which ‘the dark lines of lanes, hedgerows, or trees could be made out, a network as fine as the nervous system of a living body’ (Dispossessed, 56), yet this too is subject to ownership, which from the perspective of the anarchist protagonist, seems strange, and is almost grotesque in light of the ‘fine nervous system’ he sees laid out across the landscape. His anarchist perspective allows him to view the landscape as an extension of his own values of cooperation and mutual aid, as he sees ‘the mixture of rectilinear human design and powerful profligate natural contours, the variety and harmony of the elements, gave an impression of complex wholeness’ (56 – 7). The linearity of human design here solidifies the implication that temporal perception affects world view and hence structures whether social or physical – language is linear, buildings are ‘rectilinear’, patriarchy and capitalism work on a linear hierarchy. Meanwhile the ‘natural contours’ of the planet assert a ‘natural mode’. But for Shevek they are not oppositional but complimentary, and create ‘harmony’. He envisions the human re-integrating with the natural world.
This
vision is dependent upon his unique perception of simultaneity. That the world
begins to look different to him later in the narrative is an indication of the
impact of language and culture upon human perception of the natural world. The
fact that this relationship of culture to nature is explored through a male
character negates accusations of biological determinism that may be levelled at
Le Guin. Though she advocates a return to cooperation with nature predicated on
anarchist principle, and though the circle and arrow symbols run throughout the
dual narratives, the men and women of Anarres do not conform to gender
stereotypes. Shevek as much as Takver, feels the pull to nature and his
estrangement from it, and the solution to Shevek’s scientific and existential
conundrum is the acceptance of contradiction, or Cixous’ bisexuality.
The
threads of eco-feminism indicative in Cavendish’s vitalism are interwoven into
this twentieth century narrative in a complex appraisal of the relationship of
culture to nature, with culture being contingent on the patriarchal perception
of time as linear and nature being cyclical. Sexuality reimagined as naturally
cyclical, reciprocal and without gender is the standard from which capitalism
inscribed heteronormativity deviates. This deviation is figured as unnatural
consequence of anthropocentric commodification of life, in which genders are
seen a hierarchical and sex as violation of a fragmented feminine self
‘lacking’ the phallus (hence power). This is made strange by the anarchist
perspective of the protagonist. The issue of the unnatural status of gender
hierarchies is bound by the network of language shared by intimacy with Takver
and Shevek’s theories so as to make evident the necessity of re-imagining the
relationship of humanity to space time, and thus the natural world itself, in
order to erase hierarchic inscriptions on sex and gender. It is this
re-thinking that will allow for the closeness with nature that Shevek, and by
extension, humanity, craves as a result of our culturally imposed estrangement
from the natural world which figures humanity and the masculine as superior to
nature and the feminine respectively.
[1] Louise Westling, ‘Literature, the environment, and the question of the post-human’, Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies, Transatlantic Conversations on Eco-criticism, Catrin Gersdorf, Sylvia Mayer eds. (New York, Rodopi, 2006), pp. 25 – 48, p. 35.
[2] Brenda Peterson, ‘The Feminine and the Tao: An Interview with Ursula K. LeGuin’, <https://embracethemoon.com/ursula-k-leguin> [accessed 10/09/2018]
[3] Samar Habib, ‘Revisiting Ursula Le Guin’s the dispossessed: Anarcho-Taoism and World Resource Management’, Nebula Vol. 4.2 2007 pp.334 – 348, p. 336
[4] Chung Yang, Creativity and Taoism (New York: The Julian Press, 1963) p. 9, p. 126 – 7
[5] Emma Goldman, ‘Anarchism’, Anarchism and Other Essays (London: Kennikrat Press, 1910) pp. 56 – 8
[6] Ursula Le Guin, Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way (Boston: Shambala, 1998) p. 79
[7] Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2000) p. 135
[8] Paul Kay, Willet Kempton, ‘What is the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis?’ American Anthropologist, vol 86 (1984) pp. 65 – 80
[9] Ursula Le Guin, ‘Is Gender Necessary? Redux.’, Dreams Must Explain Themselves (London: Gollancz, 2018) pp. 36 – 45
[10]Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 116
[11] Joanna Russ, ‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Criticism, an Anthology of Essential Writings, Robert Latham, ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) pp. 200 – 210, p. 206
The Haphazard Writer's Journal 