by Ursula K. Le Guin

Discussion Prompt by Bryan White

     First published in 1974, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed can be read as simply speaking to the anxieties and experiences of that moment in American history. Was the shooting at Kent State University in 1970, in which police killed four student protestors and injured nine others fresh in Le Guin’s mind when she wrote about Urrestian police brutally cracking down on protestors after Shevek’s speech? It certainly seems like the decentralized government and culture of Anarres is the experiment of a hippie commune writ large. And, the character of Odo is presented as something of a type of Karl Marx, and with that comes the implicit comparison of the Marxist u(dys)topia of Anarres with the capitalist u(dys)topia of Urras—and the critiques of each society are expounded upon in each chapter. Like a lot of science fiction, readers of The Dispossessed are alienated from a world with which they are familiar and forced to experience and consider current issues with new eyes.

              But also like a lot of good science fiction, there are a number of other ideas explored. The book seems in conversation with 1972’s Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari which suggests that people are not set, always reacting to an early trauma, but are instead forever growing, changing, learning for the better so long as they keep experiencing and moving—Shevek’s years of work outside of his field re-energize him to become a person who could make the voyage to Urras, and the trip home. I do not claim to fully understand all that is at stake with thinking of time as either sequential of spontaneous (or both), but I admit, I have spent time gazing in the middle distance trying to understand how a rock thrown at a tree can never hit the tree if mathematically it only ever keeps continually halving the distance between itself and tree, especially since I know that, unless one is a bad shot, a rock thrown at a tree will hit that tree. It seems that mathematics cannot fully answer this, or perhaps, as Shevek might say, mathematics is only a part of the bigger question.

              In chapter 10, before he decides to make the trip to Urras, an idealistic Shevek says, “those who build walls are their own prisoners … I’m going to go unbuild walls,” and Takver replies, “it might get pretty drafty.” By the end of his time in Urras, however, this idea that he could tear down walls for other people and cultures has been, well, dispossessed from him, and he realizes that he can not take change, others can only come when they want change. Just as the book tries to mirror the function of time travel with the form of each chapter jumping between a past on Anarres with a future on Urras, but where the final chapter concludes with coming to what seems a present as he returns home to Anarres with an alien guest but doesn’t tell the reader how they are received, we are about to move into the present and our own discussion or our reception of this work.

Shevek believes that home is a place he can always return to so long as he accepts that home is a place he has never been. Or in other words, one never crosses the same river twice. As we wall ourselves into this discussion, and wall out those who are not a part of it, we are left with our own questions. Namely, should we have left this book at the river? Or have we grown and changed for the better through our reading of it? What walls are worth building up? What walls should be torn down? Are there things and ideas of which we ourselves might be dispossessed, or do those things make us stronger for having them? One thing is for sure: this introduction has now passed, and we are now thrown kicking and screaming into what remains an ambiguous present.