[Ursula K. Le Guin was born on this day in 1929. She used science
fiction to explore the failures of capitalist society — and the
alternative worlds we could build in its place. ]
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URSULA LE GUIN’S RADICAL UTOPIAS STILL RESONATE TODAY  
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Nick Hubble
October 21, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Ursula K. Le Guin was born on this day in 1929. She used science
fiction to explore the failures of capitalist society — and the
alternative worlds we could build in its place. _

Ursula Le Guin, August 1995, Marian Wood Kolisch/Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 2-0Generic License

 

ou cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can
only be the revolution.” This is the core of the message that the
anarchist Shevek proclaims to a mass demonstration of syndicalist and
socialist workers gathered in Capitol Square in the city of Nio Esseia
on the planet of Urras in Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic 1974 utopian
novel _The Disposessed_.

In my opinion, rather than attempting to unpick the blend of
anarchism, Taoism, and feminism that permeates Le Guin’s worldview,
it’s best to start with this passage of direct address to the reader
if we want to think about Le Guin’s ongoing relevance to socialists.
The emphasis here is not just on personal moral responsibility,
although this is a constant feature of Le Guin’s philosophy, but on
the imperative need to integrate individual and collective values by
refusing easy binaries and hierarchies of thought.

Far from a celebration of Shevek’s anarchist homeworld of
Anarres, _The Dispossessed_ is what the critic Tom Moylan called a
“critical utopia,” which explores both the possibilities and the
limitations of such a society. One of the ways in which the novel is
able to expand its frame of reference beyond an internal investigation
of one possible model of anarchist society is through the parallel
plot of Shevek’s trip to Urras.

When Shevek asks the socialists of Nio Esseia what Anarres, which they
see as their “moon,” means to them, they respond that every time
they look up at the night sky, they are reminded that a society with
no government, no police, and no economic exploitation exists and
cannot be dismissed as merely a utopian fantasy. In other words, both
Shevek and Le Guin’s readers come to realize that politics does not
just revolve around adopting the correct practices but is also
dependent on symbolic meaning to others.

 

Le Guin had a long career, and all her work repays reading, but the
books that cemented her reputation were written between the late 1960s
and the mid-1970s, during a period of Cold War anxiety and acute
social and cultural crisis within Western societies. Within these
contexts, novels such as _The Dispossessed_ and _The Left Hand of
Darkness_ (1969) gained immediate recognition for the clarity of the
vision by which they diagnosed the ills of the age and offered up
visions of alternative values and societies that seemed achievable
through hard work and earnest self-examination. They were quickly
established as classics of the genre, but that is not necessarily an
advantage from today’s perspective.

In his introduction to a recent reissue of _The Left Hand of
Darkness_, China Miéville notes “The unluckiest books are those
ignored or forgotten. But spare a thought too for those fated to
become classics. A classic is too often a volume that everyone thinks
they know.” Is there any greater disincentive to read a book than
the knowledge that it is seen as a worthy and important,
groundbreaking work for the time? For Miéville, the novel’s
defamiliarization of gender makes it unquestionably a precursor of the
gender queerness and sexual fluidity of our twenty-first-century
present, but that still leaves open the thought that one might be
better off reading more recent books.

In any case, as he acknowledges, _The Left Hand of Darkness_ was not
always seen in such a radical light. Le Guin’s use of universal male
pronouns to denote a society without a permanent sexual divide and
therefore without a gender division led to Joanna Russ, among others,
criticizing the novel for only containing men in practice. For many
years, the idea persisted that Le Guin’s novels were earnest and
well-meaning, but not at the radical cutting edge of the field.

One way to challenge this residual perception of Le Guin as the writer
of worthy-but-dull classics is to consider a less celebrated novel of
hers from the same period, _The Lathe of Heaven _(1971). Rather than
the nuanced, measured approach for which she is generally known, this
book is structured in the unfettered madcap style of Philip K. Dick as
a wild ride through a sequence of collapsing realities.

The resonantly named protagonist of _The Lathe, _George Orr, has
unwanted dreams that change reality. His psychiatrist, William Haber,
doesn’t attempt to cure him, instead setting out to use this power
by proxy to transform the world for the benefit of humankind. Of
course, every attempted change for the good is always accompanied by
some unexpected monstrous consequence.

For example, when, in seeking to solve overpopulation, Haber instructs
Orr to dream about a world full of room to move around in, the latter
dreams of a pandemic and wakes up to find that he has “reduced”
the world population by six billion lives. As Haber comes to realize,
Orr can only dream “cheap utopian concepts, or cynical anti-utopian
concepts perhaps.”

On one level, this is a joke at the expense of Orr’s namesake,
George Orwell: In one of the book’s many alternate histories, the US
Constitution is rewritten in 1984 to form a police state. However,
there is also something valuable in Orr’s resistance to Haber’s
will to power. When the latter demands world peace, Orr dreams that
aliens have landed on the moon, thus uniting the people of Earth in
opposition. Then, when commanded to dream that the aliens leave the
moon, Orr dreams that they invade Earth.

The telepathic aliens teach Orr that “everything dreams,” even
rocks, and therefore that the only way to live in harmony with what
would otherwise be chaos is consciously to attune oneself with the
whole. The novel ends with a resolution worthy of Dick, in which Orr,
no longer plagued by effective dreams, is now happy working for an
alien designing kitchenware. It is difficult not to see this ending as
a play on the idea of “alienated labor”: It would be a kind of
“negation of the negation” if labor was conducted for mutual
benefit with aliens with whom the worker was telepathically in tune.

_The Lathe of Heaven_ illustrates the importance of thinking about
books aesthetically as well as judging them ideologically. As the
critic Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the novel might be read as
expressing liberal anxiety in the face of revolutionary
transformation, but, aesthetically, it is concerned with its own
process of production.

This is to say that Orr’s unsuccessful attempts to dream utopia
mirror Le Guin’s attempts to write utopia, a process that is thereby
acknowledged as impossible. However, in the very manner by which the
novel explores the contradictions of trying to produce a utopia, the
narrative gets written — and a version of utopia is somehow
nonetheless produced.

While neither _The Dispossessed_ nor _The Left Hand of
Darkness_ are intended simply as playful satires, comparing them
to _The Lathe of Heaven_ opens up some possibilities for thinking
about them as more than just classics of their time. For example, we
might see the seemingly incongruous use of universal male pronouns
in _The Left Hand of Darkness_ as a deliberate exposure of the
impossibility of narrating gender outside the binary to which our
language has often limited us.

In a similar way, _The Dispossessed_ specifically foregrounds the
temporal impossibility of thinking the future from within the mindset
of the present. In another key moment of second-person address that
speaks directly to the reader, Shevek tells the Terran ambassador to
Urras, “You don’t understand what time is.”

What we experience as the present is not real or stable: It is the
product of constant change. Only the reality of the past and the
future, held within human memory and intention, makes the present
real. Not only does Le Guin’s fiction symbolize the possibility of
change for socialist readers, then; it also gives some idea of the
sheer degree of the mental work required for us to comprehend the
radical difference that would be entailed by that change.

_NICK HUBBLE is a professor of modern and contemporary English at
Brunel University. His latest work, Growing Old with the Welfare
State, is published by Bloomsbury._

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