Talk:The Dispossessed

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[edit] Anarchist?

I should re-read the book. IMHO Shevek is not an anachist. But is project is socially unacceptable. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ericd (talk • contribs) 23:00, 7 September 2002 (UTC)

Shevek is an anarchist worthy of Kropotkin. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.123.252.69 (talk) 20:45, 2 June 2004 (UTC)
Shevek repeatedly views himself as a Odonian revolutionary, and the writings of Odo are repeatedly called anarchist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.103.172.9 (talk) 18:52, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

(spoiler) Shevek is a scholar. The book is about academic freedom, and the impossibility thereof where there is classified and/or proprietary research. —Preceding unsigned comment added by N8chz (talk • contribs) 18:37, 28 January 2005 (UTC)

Le Guin herself stated in her own foreword that she herself is an anarchist along the style of Pyotr Kropotkin, and that this work was an exploration of anarchism. Yes, it is also about academic freedom; academic freedom is the means by which Le Guin explores how power structures accumulate and grow over time -- a central anarchist critique. --lquilter 14:37, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Possessive language?

" the possessive case is strongly discouraged. " I thought the point was that their constructed language had no possessives. - Omegatron June 30, 2005 02:31 (UTC)

[edit] Reptile or human?

If I understood correctly, the main characters are kind of reptilian, right? Yet the book cover shows a human. — Omegatron 17:13, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Really? But as mentioned in stroy: in Uranus, women of fashion are bareheaded (that is, they do have hair to be barbered). Since reptilian have no hair... :p Caiyu(采豫) 02:38, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm.. It definitely said they were very hairy. Maybe I'm imagining the rest. I remember when they met the humans they thought the humans were very small and hairless and had different colored skin and too much fat on their faces, implying that the main characters were bony and hairy and tall and... non-pink. I'll have to re-read that section. — Omegatron 13:45, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
I found a searchable version and searched for "hair":

The few women there were bald even on their heads; he realized at last that they must shave off all their hair, the very fine, soft, short body hair of his race, and the head hair as well. But they replaced it with marvelous clothing, gorgeous in cut and color,

The physicist glared, the veins on his temples bulging under the coarse, short hair.

"You are in the Embassy of Terra, Dr. Shevek. You are on Terran soil here. You are perfectly safe. You can stay here as long as you want"

The [human] woman's skin was yellow-brown, like ferrous earth, and hairless, except on the scalp; not shaven, but hairless. The features were strange and childlike, small mouth, low-bridged nose, eyes with long full lids, cheeks and chin rounded, fat-padded. The whole figure was rounded, supple, childlike.

"Hairy reptilian" isn't the best way to say it, but I was remembering correctly. — Omegatron 02:19, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Definitely not reptilian. I've read at least two other Ekumen novels that reference Cetians, the hairy bit is well-supported, everyone else is almost certainly mammalian. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.103.172.9 (talk) 18:58, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

Both in this book and elsewhere in the series, it is made clear that all sentient lifeforms in the known universe are descended from the Hainish, who explored the galaxy and established colonies many millennia before these stories take place. So they're all basically human, although with adaptations to the planets on which they live. Briankharvey 05:50, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Impersonal reference?

"An example is given where a little girl says to Shevek ...", is it ok that this example is made to be impersonal? The little girl referenced is Sadik, Shevek's daughter. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.103.172.9 (talk) 18:58, 10 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Radio play adaptation

In the late 1980s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation presented a radio play version lasting approx. 6 half-hour segments. If I can dig up the details, I will add to the article. -- Slowmover 16:13, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Utopian Anarchism?

In the Fourth paragraph of the summary the last two words mention Utopian anarchism. That sounds to me like a shot at anarchism. Most anarchists do not consider anarchism utopian in the least. In fact, this book I believe shows that no society can be utopian. —Preceding unsigned comment added by FionMacCumhail (talk • contribs) 22:46, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

In interviews, the story has been referred to as anti-utopian, or has been subtitled, an "ambiguous utopia." This can be mentioned in a section on the themes of the story, but should not be used as a label without context.Cast 04:14, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Quotations

Should quotes be linked/wikiquote? --Wyrlss 07:34, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reading The Dispossessed: The view from Switzerland

Re THEORIES. The meaning of the theories in the book weaves nicely into the plot..., the article tells us. Now, as Ms Le Guin would be the first to point out (as a matter of fact she's doing it at every occasion), trying to reduce fiction to ideas is foolishness. But it is also true that in our case the elephant in the room cannot be overlooked. The Dispossessed is all about linear time vs cyclical time, or, in the more poetical language of Eddington, time's arrow vs the circle. Ms Le Guin's defense (J'aime Shevek mais je ne le suis pas, etc etc) is fun to read but will not convince anyone who has read the book. Shevek's theories about time are (or were at least in 1974) Ms Le Guin's. To be more precise: they are the theories that Ms Le Guin distilled from articles by von Franz, Capek, and Schlegel in Fraser's anthology The Voices of Time. Everyone who knows this volume will immediately recognize the ideas that Shevek is trying to work into his unified theory. Ms Le Guin has, of course, never made a secret out of this. In 1975 she said in an interview for the Portland Scribe: It's called "The Voices of Time" ... Sequency and Simultaneity seem to be the basic question. As well as I understood it I tried to work it into the book.--BZ(Bruno Zollinger) 09:38, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Re CIRCLES. An oft-quoted saying in the book is "True journey is return", the article informs us. Well maybe, but in order to know what the saying is supposed to express in its context, we have to be sure that we understand the meaning that the author gives to the terms "journey" and "return".
The title of the book might just as well have been "Shevek's Travels". But unlike Gulliver, Shevek does not observe anything with detachment. He is always involved. Not only his purely emotional and intellectual journeys, but also his physical travels are travels of the mind. And they are always movements within movements, which makes it often difficult (for both the reader and the protagonist) to know the direction that the journey is taking at a given moment. When Shevek travels from Anarres to Urras e.g., is he leaving home, or is he heading for home? The point is it doesn't matter all that much, because return, at least in the way the word is commonly interpreted, is not possible anyhow. In Chapter 2, Shevek, speaking clearly for the author, tries to explain what is only at first glance a paradox: You can't go home again, or, if you prefer, you can, but then home won't be there. You can, as Shevek puts it, ...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been (p.55). In other words, what looks like a circle in x dimensions, might well turn out to be something quite different in x+1 dimensions.--BZ(Bruno Zollinger) 13:50, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Re ARROW. In the course of the novel Shevek, whose ideas about the circle of time are at first rather fuzzy, develops, with the help of Takver a better understanding of the concept. Cyclical time includes in his words biotemporality (roughly biological time) and eotemporality (roughly the temporal reality of the universe). But at a party in Urras, Shevek is badly shaken by a guest who holds that his Simultaneity theory, which he developed from cyclical time, ...denies the most obvious fact about time, the fact that time passes (p.221). The arrow of time (noetic time, or nootemporality in Shevek's words) cannot be denied. And to get to his unified theory, Shevek realizes that there is also an ethical aspect in the way human beings perceive time, and this aspect, which he calls sociotemporality will also have to be worked in.
So far, so good. Shevek has not achieved his goal as the novel ends, but we have to ask ourselves: How could he ever? There seems to be a factor tnat he (and the author) just haven't payed enough attention to: ENTROPY. Entropy increase gives us the direction of time's arrow. That is what the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches us.--BZ(Bruno Zollinger) 09:35, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] LGBT relevance

Re the box saying "LGBT relevance has been questioned": One major character, Bedap, a political ally of Shevek on Anarres, is gay. Everyone on Anarres is relaxed about sexual orientation, willing to pair up with people of the same or the opposite sex, but everyone does seem to have a preference. At one point Shevek and Bedap shack up together, but the context makes it clear that Shevek is doing Bedap a favor. There is almost no explicit focus on sexual preference as a theme in the book, but the one exception is (imho -- this is the talk page :-) rather unfortunate; there's a moment when Shevek and Bedap and Shevek's daughter Sadik are walking together, and suddenly Sadik talks about something that's distressing her, and Shevek comforts her in a way that he can do only because he's her father, and Bedap feels superfluous, and

There was nothing for Bedap to do but leave them there, the man and the child, in that one intimacy which he could not share, the hardest and deepest, the intimacy of pain.It gave him no sense of relief of escape to go; rather he felt useless, diminished. "I am thirty-nine years old," he thought as he walked on towards his domicile, the five-man room where he lived in perfect independence. "Forty in a few decads. What have I done? What have I been doing? Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people's lives because I don't have one. I never took the time. And the time's going to run out on me, all at once, and I will never have had... that." [Ellipsis in original.] He looked back, down the long, quiet street, where the corner lamps made soft pools of light in the windy darkness, but he had gone too far to see the father and daughter, or they had gone. And what he meant by "that" he could not have said, good as he was with words; yet he felt that he understood it clearly, that all his hope was in the understanding, and that if he would be saved he must change his life.

So, it doesn't exactly say that gays can't have families or feel family bonds, and yet if that wasn't LeGuin's intent, it's a remarkable coincidence that the bachelor is the gay character. Briankharvey 06:16, 10 August 2007 (UTC)


In fact, this treatment of Bedap can be interpreted as rather paternalistic / patronizing (the straight character 'helps' the gay character). It is easy to hide behind the argumentation that this is an individual case, because this relationship comes very close to very prevalently used stereotypes that are maintained as a silent devaluation and and consequent re-affirmation of heterosexual over homosexual ways of living.

Add to this that Shevek is hinted as being top / active / "male" in their sexual relationship and Bedap being bottom / passive / "female".

I would leave the relevance to LGBT box very intact, while once again referring to the context of the time the book was written, as I'd suggest it did make a move towards more progressive understanding in relation to most mainstream science-fiction or more mainstream-accessible literature at all. Thomas Körtvélyessy 19:00, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

IMO this novel is very minor, almost passing, in the history of LGBT fiction and even LGBT science fiction, and the LGBT aspect was minor within the book, as well. It will be fine to have some reference to it in the article, but as a member of (I think) just about every relevant project I think this work will be pretty low on the LGBT project priority list. I doubt, for instance, that we'll be able to find much cited scholarship that discusses the LGBT aspect of this work at all (which is what we'll need to have discussion in the article). --lquilter 14:52, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
  • I added some cites dscussing gender issues; it's mostly gender and some discussions of heteronormativity. I'm going to remove the LGBT literature because LGBT is certainly not a defining quality of The Dispossessed; readers who pick up The Dispossessed b/c it's in the same category as Rubyfruit Jungle are going to be mighty disappointed. <g> However, I think it's fine to leave the LGBT interest tags on here; the scholarship can & should be documented, even if it's relatively minor & non-defining in a "category" sense. --Lquilter 17:40, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Improving the article

It would be great to start this article on a path of improvement and eventually FA status. It's quite notable among SF books; it's one of the foremost examples of anarchist literature and of modern political fiction generally; and it's one of the most recognized works of a writer who has achieved substantial literary recognition. Here's a start-list of what I think is needed:

  • references & cites, including to the substantial critical discussion about this article
  • good organization for a literary work -- Skimming through the dozen or so novels with "FA" status, I would suggest (not in order): (a) plot, general universe & conventions, relationship to Le Guin's other Hainish cycle novels; (b) literary style discussion, characterization, worldbuilding; (c) history and influences on TDP; (d) themes; (e) recognition, legacy, and influence of TDP; (f) adaptations, translations, any publishing history (any bannings, difficulties in translating, criticism of abridgements, etc.).
  • good discussions of each of those sections.

Thoughts? --lquilter 15:04, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

  • I added a set of references broken broadly down by topic and started marking specific assertions that need referenced support. The references were generated from a MLA Bibliography search and I basically just included those with which I had some familiarity. However, there's other scholarship that didn't get picked up in MLABib -- specifically Delany, and other very important stuff. That has yet to be added for the most part. --Lquilter 17:42, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Antarian?

"An Antarian appears in the short story The Shobies' Story." I think that's a different star. Someone from Anarres is called an Anarresti. Briankharvey (talk) 07:55, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I've removed the 't', which is clearly an error. Beyond that, it is unclear. Consider the rules for people from Poland, Ireland, Holland, Spain, France etc. English rules are inconsistent. --GwydionM (talk) 18:03, 7 January 2008 (UTC)