A Spanish Anarchist View on The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed found an appreciative reader in the Spanish anarchist Victor García (the pseudonym of Germinal Gracia). Here, we reproduce the brief summary of the novel he included in his untranslated 1977 work on utopias and anarchism. Gracia was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and the post-war clandestine anarchist movement in Spain who had subsequently spent decades exiled in Venezuela and France. A voracious reader, traveller and linguist, Gracia was concerned that the classic works of anarchism that had shaped his ideological development and that of his comrades were no longer appropriate for disseminating anarchist ideas. In Le Guin, Gracia perceived an imagination capable of translating their shared ideals for a contemporary audience.

Taken from: Victor García, Utopías y Anarquismo. Laguna de Mayrán: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1977, pp. 101-3 (my translation):

Because it doesn’t have established pre-requisites, science fiction offers its readership all kinds of fantastical situations.

Such is the case of Anarres, the utopian planet created by Ursula K. Le Guin, nine light years from Earth, where the Odonians – anarchists who wanted to found a regime without authority or government, with solidarity as the basic norm of behaviour – chose to live in voluntary exile.

The Dispossessed is the work of a writer with a deep understanding of and open sympathy for libertarian ideals. It is the first work of science fiction in which anarchism is brought into objective focus without avoiding, which is to be applauded, the recurrence of human problems that no social regime could ever eliminate.

Three space days’ travel from Anarres we find Urras, the planet the Odonians left one hundred and sixty years ago. Shevek, a great mathematical physicist, is working on an equation as transcendental as those of Einstein and Planck, and as such is the first inhabitant of Anarres to visit Urras, where he is feted by the great and good and universities fight for his services.

Urras conforms to a system of state regimes more or less like our own, where the powerful live in unimaginable luxury while those in poverty would envy the conditions endured by the poor in our society. Shevek discovers this gradually:

The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch.

When Shevek, evading the surveillance of the powerful, manages to visit the poor neighbourhoods where a general strike is being planned, the people let him know that they are aware of the existence of Anarres and long to emulate its system. The greatest wish they express for one another is ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’ ‘To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation…’ ‘I wonder’, the worker Maedda says to Shevek, ‘if you fully understand why they [the powerful] have kept you so well hidden… because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh. Walking amongst us.’

Shevek returns to Anarres disillusioned. He has not revealed his theory because the powers that be in Urras only wanted to understand it to make themselves still more powerful and to subjugate the nine planets of their universe, which includes Earth: ‘A planet spoiled by the human species’, as Keng, ambassador of earth on Urras, explains:

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 first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is still habitable, but not as this world is.

The work of Ursula K. Le Guin could successfully replace, for modern minds, venerable tomes like At the Café and Between Peasants by Malatesta, Sembrando flores by Federico Urales, and Jean Grave’s The Adventures of Nono. While it suffers the impact of environmental pessimism, it holds fast to a glimmer of salvation: Anarres, refuge of the anarchists.

Tributes to Ursula K. Le Guin

It was only a couple of months ago that The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin was featured on this blog - not for the first time - in my post about planetary physics and inter-world relations in SF. Le Guin's double planet system is rendered to brilliant effect in her exploration of power and freedom in the societies of capitalist Urras and anarchist Anarres, and this contrast provides the framework for the ambiguous utopian currents that run through the novel.

It is often these themes - of living and being otherwise - that have come to the fore in the tributes to Le Guin, following her death on the 22 January. Here, I'd like to give a round-up of those that struck me the most, alongside some interesting interviews and sources that I've come across during the last few years.

Among the more comprehensive and interesting obituaries of Le Guin are those published by the Guardian, the New Yorker and the New York Times. The novelist Julie Phillips, who's currently working on a biography of Le Guin, writes in the New Yorker, 'Le Guin never stopped insisting on the beauty and subversive power of the imagination. Fantasy and speculation weren’t only about invention; they were about challenging the established order'. Meanwhile, SF critics John Clute (Guardian) and Gerald Jonas (New York Times) draw attention to her distinctive narrative style. Jonas writes, 'the conflicts (her characters) face are typically rooted in a clash of cultures and resolved more by conciliation and self-sacrifice than by swordplay or space battles'.

Fellow writers have also paid tribute and, in some cases, shared their recollections of Le Guin; Indian SF writer Vandana Singh knew the author over a number of years and quotes the famous line from The Dispossessed, 'True journey is return', in the title to her blog post. She also recalls of their correspondence, 'our exchanges, though infrequent, were always interesting. We talked about writing, but also about our mutual interest in non-human others [...] We discussed the tendency of modern humans to succumb to the techno-fix, even for complex issues like climate change. I think it was clearer to her than to most people that technology by itself can never solve anything if the underlying paradigm remains unchanged'. In Neil Gaiman's piece, 'A Magic of True Speaking', he remembers reading The Left Hand of Darkness for the first time, and writes that the book 'opened my head and made me view gender differently - not as something fixed, nor even as something important, but as something mutable and less pertinent than what kind of person you are; the trilogy made me look at the world in a new way, imbued everything with a magic that was so much deeper than the magic I’d encountered before then'.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 - 2018)

What better way to end this post than to hear from the author herself. Some links to Le Guin's wonderful and thought-provoking public speeches and interviews include:

The BBC radio programme 'Ursula Le Guin at 85', featuring commentators including Neil Gaiman, in which Le Guin speaks about her upbringing and her early encounters with other worlds through her Father's anthropological work with Ishi, the last known member of the Native American Yahi people.

A clip from Arwen Curry's 2018 feature documentary film about Le Guin called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. In this clip, Le Guin talks about the creation of the Earthsea novels: 'I start pretty much with place, and then the people grow up in the place'.

Transcript of Le Guin's 'Left-handed commencement address' to the 1983 graduating class of Mills College (Liberal Arts women's college in Oakland, California): 'Women as women are largely excluded from, alien to, the self-declared male norms of this society, where human beings are called Man, the only respectable god is male, the only direction is up. So that’s their country; let’s explore our own [...] I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is'.

Le Guin's speech, upon receiving the National Book Awards' Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. She says, 'I rejoice in accepting (the award) for and sharing it with all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long - my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction'.

Le Guin writing on the competing forces - or the yin and yang - of utopia, published on the Electric Literature site. In this piece, she suggests, 'my guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival [...] involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth'.