Reading: The Dispossessed
Sep. 28th, 2018 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI first read Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed when I was in my early teens, though I can't remember exactly when; my copy is a 1987 reprinting, but I think I remember reading it on the bus back from swimming lessons at the Aldershot pool which were a PE option in the spring term of my fourth year of secondary school, which would have been early 1989 (although that might have been a re-read). Whatever the exact date was, it made a deep and lasting impression on me; the utopian-anarchist ideology of Odonianism, harnessing community and mutual aid for survival in a harsh environment, helped to shape my own political beliefs, and the novel also depicts a fluidity of attraction that I think was actually more fundamental than the possibly more obvious The Left Hand of Darkness in showing me that monosexuality wasn't actually the only option.
It may be 30 years since I first read it, and approaching half a century since the book was first published, but re-reading it now some of the social commentary (and the mention of dead, polluted Earth, still littered with the indestructible plastic waste of previous generations) felt more relevant to the world of 2018 than it did to me in the late 80s. Some of the language has dated; there's a lot of generic "he" where I think "they" would be used in a book published now, and "mankind" instead of "humanity", but I can forgive Le Guin that when it's in a context of a novel that tries to depict a society without gender roles, and then to set it against a patriarchy so extreme women are all but invisible. It's a slow, thoughtful, philosophical book, with lots of digressions from the plot to explain the structure of Anarresti society and the ideas of Odonianism which underpin it. In less skillful hands, this might seem clunky but Le Guin's writing is as beautiful as always and the philosopy and plot complement each other perfectly.
Things which particularly struck me on this re-read: the description of the academic communities Shevek is part of, which suggest that academia is basically the same everywhere in the universe, never mind the ideology of the wider society it inhabits. The link Le Guin between creating and disrupting, furthering the revolution which has to keep moving to avoid becoming another system to revolt against. Cetian temporal physics, described by a character as a hybrid of maths, physics and philosophy but which I'd never realised before is basically the scientific proof of the truth of Four Quartets. Now I'm older, I find the philosophy of the novel, and the idea of suffering as the true constant in life and the source of all community, much easier to understand than I did as a teenager. (We are watching The Good Place at the moment and the two resonate interestingly together.) And I love the characters, especially Shevek, Takver and Bedap, as much as I always did, so re-reading felt like revisiting very old friends.
It may be 30 years since I first read it, and approaching half a century since the book was first published, but re-reading it now some of the social commentary (and the mention of dead, polluted Earth, still littered with the indestructible plastic waste of previous generations) felt more relevant to the world of 2018 than it did to me in the late 80s. Some of the language has dated; there's a lot of generic "he" where I think "they" would be used in a book published now, and "mankind" instead of "humanity", but I can forgive Le Guin that when it's in a context of a novel that tries to depict a society without gender roles, and then to set it against a patriarchy so extreme women are all but invisible. It's a slow, thoughtful, philosophical book, with lots of digressions from the plot to explain the structure of Anarresti society and the ideas of Odonianism which underpin it. In less skillful hands, this might seem clunky but Le Guin's writing is as beautiful as always and the philosopy and plot complement each other perfectly.
Things which particularly struck me on this re-read: the description of the academic communities Shevek is part of, which suggest that academia is basically the same everywhere in the universe, never mind the ideology of the wider society it inhabits. The link Le Guin between creating and disrupting, furthering the revolution which has to keep moving to avoid becoming another system to revolt against. Cetian temporal physics, described by a character as a hybrid of maths, physics and philosophy but which I'd never realised before is basically the scientific proof of the truth of Four Quartets. Now I'm older, I find the philosophy of the novel, and the idea of suffering as the true constant in life and the source of all community, much easier to understand than I did as a teenager. (We are watching The Good Place at the moment and the two resonate interestingly together.) And I love the characters, especially Shevek, Takver and Bedap, as much as I always did, so re-reading felt like revisiting very old friends.
