The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed is a novel by Ursula K. Leguin. It tells the story of a scientist named Shevik and his search - for a grand unified theory of physics and for freedom for himself and his people. Shevik grows up on Annares - the large moon of a world named Urras. Annares was once a mining colony. 300 years before Shevik's birth there is a global general strike on the world of Urras. The anarchists make a deal with the world governments to leave Urras and to live apart from the rest of the people on the moon of Annares. In the following 300 years no-one is allowed to travel to either world. Annares trades precious minerals with the governments of Urras. However, no-one is allowed beyond the low wall that surrounds the landing pads. The novel deals with themes of freedom and responsibility.

The story is told in two timelines. In one, an adult Shevik leaves Annares for Urras - to finish his work in physics, encourage social reform on Annares, and to try to unify the peoples of the two worlds. In the other timeline, we follow Shevik's early life from childhood to the moment he decides to leave for Urras.

The novel bears the subtitle "an ambiguous utopia" and tries to engage realistically with the problems encountered by the people of both worlds. While Leguin clearly has great affection for anarchism, she refuses to glamorize the society of Annares or Urras. Instead, she conveys the problems and frailties of both societies with an anthropological eye. When Shevik is in Urras you see a society much like that of the UK or the US through the eyes of an outsider. When the story switches to Shevik's earlier timeline you see both the strength and weakness of Annares as Shevik ultimately tries to reform Annaran society to preserve its anarchy/freedom.

His journey to reform Annares explores a concept of freedom that is attained only through mutuality and solidarity. While Annaran society does not have laws, it does have powerful social expectations. The power of these social forces threatens to consolidate into an authoritarian bureaucracy. Shevik seeks to balance individual initiative with responsibility to the collective. Through use of metaphorical and physical walls, Leguin implies that while Annares shuts itself off from the outside, it has sealed itself in and created a prison. Freedom for Annares ultimately means breaking their isolation.

The novel has an ambiguous ending. We are uncertain of Shevik's fate as he returns to Annares. Will he be accepted by his people or killed by an angry mob? Will the Annaran experiment fail and collapse into bureaucracy or will its anarchy be renewed?

the wall

"Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine."

prisons

They had picked up the idea of “prisons” from episodes in the Life of Odo, which all of them who had elected to work on History were reading. There were many obscurities in the book, and Wide Plains had nobody who knew enough history to explain them; but by the time they got to Odo's years in the Fort in Drio, the concept “prison” had become self-explanatory. And when a circuit history teacher came through the town he expounded the subject, with the reluctance of a decent adult forced to explain an obscenity to children. Yes, he said, a prison was: a place where a State put people who disobeyed its Laws. But why didnt they just leave the place? They couldn't leave, the doors were locked. Locked? Like the doors on a moving truck, so you don't fall out, stupid! But what did they do inside one room all the time? Nothing. There was nothing to do. You've seen pictures of Odo in the prison cell in Drio, haven't you? Image of defiant patience, bowed grey head, clenched hands, motionless in encroaching shadows. Sometimes prisoners were sentenced to work. Sentenced? Well, that means a judge, a person given power by the Law, ordered them to do some kind of physical labor. Ordered them? What if they didn't want to do it? Well. they were forced to do it; if they didnt work, they were beaten. A thrill of tension went through the children listening, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, none of whom had ever been struck, or seen any person struck, except in immediate personal anger.

“I'm sorry. Dr. Shevek — a precaution — contagion — keeping the others out — ”

“To lock out, to lock in, the same act,” Shevek said looking down at the doctor with light, remote eyes.

capitalism

“The clothes are burned?”

“Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue — wear em and throwem away, it costs less than cleaning.”

“It costs less,” Shevek repeated meditatively. He said them words the way a paleontologist looks at a fossil, the fossil that dates a whole stratum.

natural authority

The senior physicist at the Institute was named Mitis. She was not at present directing the physics curriculum, as all administrative jobs rotated annually among the twenty permanent postings, but she had been at the place thirty years, and had the best mind among them. There was always a kind of psychological clear space around Mitis, like the lack of crowds around the peak of a mountain. The absence of all enhancements and enforcements of authority left the real thing plain. There are people of inherent authority; some emperors actually have new clothes.

bourgeois

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 leam than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it at demand. At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this upset the University administrators so badly that, not wishing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about questions, but to write down the answers they had learned. And some of them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished from the dull ones? What was the good in working hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one might as well do nothing.

“Well, of course,” Shevek said, troubled. “If you do not want to do the work, you should not do it.”

They went away unappeased, but polite. They were pleasant boys, with frank and civil manners. Shevek's readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way rounds the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to leu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.” He liked his polite, intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards any of them. They were planning careers as academic or industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he might have offered them.

He wondered why the government did not stop him from speaking. Chifoilisk must have exaggerated, for his own purposes, the extent of the control and censorship they could exert. He talked pure anarchism, and they did not stop him. But did they need to stop him? It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.”

He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations.

the frailty of freedom

Shevek turned around to face him. “But you can't seriously talk of a government, here!”

“Tomar's Definitions: Government: The legal use of power to maintain and extend power.' Replacelegal' with `customary,' and you've got Sabul, and the Syndicate of Instruction, and the PDC.”

“The PDC!”

“The PDC is, by now, basically an archistic bureaucracy.”

After a moment Shevek laughed, not quite naturally, and said, “Well, come on, Dap, this is amusing, but it's a bit diseased, isn't it?”

“Shev, did you ever think that what the analogic mode calls `disease,' social disaffection, discontent, alienation, that this might analogically also be called pain — what you meant when you talked about pain, suffering? And that, like pain, it serves a function in the organism?”

“No!” Shevek said, violently. “I was talking in personal, in spiritual terms.”

“But you spoke of physical suffering, of a man dying of bums. And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life — is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that? But nothing changes any more! Our society is sick. You know it. You're suffering its sickness. Its suicidal sickness!”

“That's enough. Dap. Drop it.”

“It's not the individuals posted to PDC, Shev. Most of them are like us. All too much like us. Well-meaning, naive. And it's not just PDC. It's anywhere on Anarrea. Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries, agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-product communities — anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody's born an Odonian any more than he's born civilized! But we've forgotten that. We don't educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. Kids leam to parrot Odo's words as if they were laws — the ultimate blasphemy!”

the power of neighbors

“Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors' approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can't 'break' a custom; it's the framework of your life with other people. We're only just beginning to feel what it's like to be revolutionaries, as Shev put it in the meeting today. And it isn't comfortable.”

the plight of salas

“But the Music syndics don't like my compositions. And nobody much else does, yet I can't be a syndicate all by myself, can I?”

Salas was a bony little man, already bald on the upper face and cranium; he wore what was left of his hair short, in a silky beige fringe around the back of his neck and chin. His smile was sweet, wrinkling his expressive face. “You see, I don't write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.” He smiled more sweetly than ever. “They want chorales. I hate chorales. They want wide-harmony pieces like Sessur wrote. I hate Sessur's music. I'm writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. Five instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony. But they don't hear it. They won't hear it. They can't.”

Shevek brooded a while. “If you called it The Joys of Solidarity,” he said, “would they hear it?”

“By damni” said Bedap, who was listening in. “That's the first cynical thing you ever said in your life, Shev. Welcome to the work crew!”

Salag laughed. `They'd give it a hearing, but they'd turn it down for taping or regional performance. It's not in the Organic Style.”

“No wonder I never heard any professional music while I lived in Northsetting. But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we're capable of. It's certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it's a sharing. The artist shares, it's the essence of his act. No matter what your syndics say, how can Divlab justify not giving you a posting in your own field?”

“They don't want to share it,” Salas said gleefully. “It scares `em.”

Bedap spoke more gravely; “They can Justify it because music isn't useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music's mere decoration. The circle has come right back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we've thrown it all away. We've gone right back to barbarism. If it's new, run away from it; if you cant eat it, throw it away!”

suffering

You couldnt touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he'd scream. You couldn't do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don't know. It didn't do him any good. You couldn't do anything for him. Then I saw ...you see ...I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't save each other. Or ourselves.”

“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You're denying brotherhood, Shevek!” the tall girl cried.

“No — no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins — it begins in shared pain.”

“Then where does it end?”

“I dont know. I don't know yet.”

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.