However, there have been a number of concerns
expressed about the framework that arises out of this dialectical exploration,
concerns that ultimately can be linked to the dialectical format that the novel
engages in, but take their immediate form in the representation of women, and
of social reproductive. A number of
feminist critics have taken Le Guin to task for a lack of engagement with these
questions in the novel, most notably by Sarah Lefanu in her text, In The Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism
and Science Fiction, but similar arguments can be found in the work of Tom
Moylan along with the critical work of Samuel Delany. Lefanu frames her
critiques within the framework of Le Guin’s written works of the time, moving
from her early texts and ending with The
Dispossessed. Within this context,
she expresses a broad range of concerns, from the lack of women as protagonists
in her texts, to a lack of engagement with the questions of domesticity that
Lefanu sees as the central focus of the feminist science fictional project.
She notes,
“There is a simple anomaly, or contradiction, at the heart of Le Guin’s
work. It features very few women; these
are restricted either by biology—Rolery as childbearer in Planet of Exile—or by
stereotype—Takver the prop and support in The Dispossessed. This is not unusual in science fiction; what
is odd is that despite it, Ursula Le Guin should have such a feminist following
and that she should be so committed to the ‘character’ side of the debate
(‘What is science fiction?: scientific ideas explored in fictional form; or
character-based fiction with parameters expanded in a scientific/futuristic
setting?) rather than the ‘ideas side.
Lefanu begins by simply arguing that Le
Guin’s choices in gendered representation reflect rather than challenge many of
the conventions of the, at the time, largely male controlled subculture. She notes that Le Guin has primarily chosen
men as her protagonists, and that the women represented in those novels have
played largely conventional gendered roles, in the narrative structure if not
in their social functions of the novel. Despite Le Guin’s commitment to a
science fictional literature that places character development at the forefront
of her work, she still slips into the stock roles for women, represented by the
support role taken on by Takver, and the childbearing role of Rolery in the
earlier novel, Planet of Exile. For Lefanu, Le Guin’s continuation of these
practices is confusing, as is the continued dedicated feminist support for Le
Guin’s written work. However, the
question of representation is not the only criticism presented by Lefanu’s
engagement with the novel. She
additionally argues, “There is a lot of politics talked in this novel—more than in The Left Hand of Darkness (here at least the question of childcare
is discussed) but very little is shown.” (Lefanu 141) Along with the problem of how women are
represented, Lefanu argues that the protocols of social reproduction are not
sufficiently dealt with, that we are not given sufficient detail about the
practices of raising children, about schooling and other issues. To make that statement more clear, the novel
tells us that these practices occur, in Lefanu’s account, but doesn’t
incorporate those practices in the narrative structure of the book.
At an initial glance some of these
claims are extremely problematic. Le Guin uses the radically egalitarian
structures of the moon society to question and estrange us from a long series
of common sense assumptions about the sex/gender system found on the analog to
our society, the wealthy and authoritarian Urras. The narrative carefully and consciously
undermines a long series of patriarchal assumptions of the society of
Urras. The narrative explicitly
interlinks an analysis of gender with the different regimes of power that
define each of the societies. To turn to
the beginning of the narrative, again, a conversation between one of the
security force of the planet of Anarres and the ship captain from Urras.
“You mean they’re after this bastard we’re supposed to
take? Are they going to try to stop him,
or us?”
The word “bastard,” untranslatable in the foreman’s
language, meant nothing to her except some kind of foreign term for her people,
but she had never liked the sound of it, or the captain’s tone, or the
captain. “Can you look after you?” she
asked briefly.
“Hell, yes. You just
get the rest of this cargo unloaded, quick.
And get this passenger on board.
No mob of Oddies is going to give us any trouble.” He patted the thing
he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked
patronizingly at the unarmed woman.
She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a weapon, a
cold glance.” (Le Guin, 3)
The short passage marks off a set of
distinct differences between the female security officer from Anarres and the
male captain of the transport vessel from Urras. The text marks those differences through the
language systems of the two worlds as well as the behavior of each
individual. We are made aware of the
difference within kinship systems by reference to the word, ‘bastard’, which
holds on to its conventional meaning on the world of Urras, gesturing towards a
set of patriarchal and heteronormative kinship structures that still enforce
structures of legitimacy. While those
conventions in kinship structure have completely lost any meaning in the
society of Anarres, which has effectively done away with the legal institution
of marriage, and no longer depends on the nuclear family as the primary
institution for raising, educating, and disciplining children. The antagonistic dimension of this mutual
misunderstanding is marked by the implicit hostility felt by the security
officer whenever the term is utilized.
In addition to this linguistic register, the passage marks a series of
gendered differences between the two societies marked by the use of
weapons. The description of the weapon
as a ‘deformed penis’ and a ‘phallic object’ explicitly links the forms of
domination and violence implicit in the ship captain’s use of the weapon with
patriarchal power, which is rejected by the security officer, and held in
contempt by her, a contempt mirrored by the ship captain because of her
rejection of weapons in securing the area.
The captain also takes a role of command within the relationship, a
command he takes on due to his ability to deploy violence.
The misogyny of the society of Urras is
then mirrored in the early interaction between Shevek and the doctor who cares
for him on the ship, and helps him adjust to the changes in environment on the
world of Urras. The two develop a sort
of friendship, but the fragility of that friendship is revealed in a moment of
misunderstanding around each individual’s perception of women, that arises out
of a discussion about the comparative sex/gender systems produced on each of
the planets. When Shevek spells out the
structures of equality, the doctor explodes,
Kimoe stared at
him, shocked out of politeness. “But the
loss of—of everything feminine—of delicacy—and the loss of masculine
self-respect—You can’t pretend, surely, in your
work, that women are your equals?
In physics, in mathematics, in the intellect?
You can’t pretend to lower yourself constantly to their level?
Shevek sat in
the cushioned, comfortable chair and looked around the officers’ lounge. On the viewscreen the brilliant curve of
Urras hung still against the black space, like a blue-green opal. That lovely sight, and the lounge, had become
familiar to Shevek these last days, but now the bright colors, the curvilinear
chairs, the hidden lighting, the game tables and television screens and soft
carpeting, all of it seemed as alien as it had the first time he saw it.
“I don’t think I
pretend very much, Kimoe,” he said.
“Of course, I
have known highly intelligent women, women who could think like a man, “ the
doctor said, hurriedly, aware that he had been almost shouting—that he had,
Shevek thought, been pounding his hands against the locked door and shouting….
Shevek turned
the conversation, but he went on thinking about it. This matter of superiority and inferiority
must be a central one in Urrasti social life.
If to respect himself Kimoe had to consider half the human race as
inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they
consider men inferior? And how did that
all affect their sex lives? He knew from
Odo’s writings that two hundred years ago the main Urrasti sexual institutions
had been “marriage,” a partnership authorized and enforced by legal and
economic sanctions, and “prostitution,” which seemed merely to be a wider term,
copulation in the economic mode. Odo had
condemned them both, and yet Odo had been “married.” And anyhow the institutions
might have greatly changed in the two hundred years. If he was going to live on Urras and with the
Urrasti, he had better find out.” (Le
Guin 14)
Despite Le Guin’s aversion to
psychoanalysis, it’s difficult not to read this moment as a symptomatic one,
one that reveals the unconscious sexist and misogynist structures that still
drive the norms of daily life in Urras.
The doctor, who can recognize the limitations in both religious and
ethnic bigotry, cannot escape the affects of his general society’s views on
women, both in how gender is regulated, and in how those regulatory mechanisms
are valued. His narrative opens with an
expression of distress about the abandonment of the formal and informal
conventions of heteronormativity, but that distress immediately transforms into
a more basic rejection of sexual equality. The reaction to this misogyny by
Shevek is equally significant as the comments themselves. The text notes, “That lovely sight, and the
lounge, had become familiar to Shevek these last days, but now the bright
colors, the curvilinear chairs, the hidden lighting, the game tables and
television screens and soft carpeting, all of it seemed as alien as it had the
first time he saw it.” Just as the
doctor, Kimoe’s grounding concepts of himself and the world are challenged by
the sexual equality of Anarres, Shevek finds himself estranged from the earlier
familiar world of the ship. This double
act of estrangement marks a significant moment of anthropological difference, a
difference centered on the structures of sexual difference that in turn
construct a whole series of other institutions, ranging from who is capable of
intellectual work to how family structures operate.
Additionally, Shevek’s attempt to
understand the dispute, explicitly ties the dispute to the more abstract
question of systems of domination in general.
As he thinks over the conversation, and perhaps more significantly, the
doctor’s intense emotional reaction to the idea of sexual equality, he comes to
a very significant set of conclusions.
“Shevek turned the conversation, but he went on thinking about it. This matter of superiority and inferiority
must be a central one in Urrasti social life.”
Through Shevek’s musings, the text very distinctively places the
misogyny expressed by the doctor at the grounding for a system built on
inequality, built on systems of ‘superiority and inferiority.’ From there, he begins to wonder about how
sexual and intimate relations could even exist within such a structure, and how
does this shape the views of women in regards to men. Despite some of the weaknesses later
contained in the text, the text contains a significant thread dedicated to
undermining and provincializing the prevalent sexism of the text’s present, by
presenting an alternative social structure, one that makes the dominant
structures of the present look strange, and even exotic. Moreover, the text continually links the
question of sexism to the more abstract category of domination in general. The impulse to dominate always has a foot in
the impulse to dominate women. The text
then presents a set of questions that are taken on by aspects of the rest of
the narrative, including questions regarding marriage, prostitution, sexuality
and the family structure.
These questions do get significant
exploration in the novel, despite Lefanu’s arguments that they are merely
discussed. The narrative begins its
exploration of the society of Urras in the privileged space of the public
sphere, in its markets and educational institutions, but Shevek also sees the
conventions of married life through the enforced personal interactions with
colleagues, and his day out with the sister of his colleague, Demaere Oiie, Vea
Doem Oiie. The former occurs as Shevek
becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the narrow restrictions put on him by
the government of Urras. In response,
Shevek receives an invitation to dine at the home of his colleague, Pae. The latter experience introduces Shevek to
the concept of the division of the public and the private, to the bourgeois
conventions of the household, and to the conventions of marriage. Most notably, the narrative marks the
construction of an alternative Pae, one that is not that simply defined by the
Machiavellian intricacies of the confluence of academic and state structures
found at the university. On one hand,
the comfort of the home reveals a side to Urrasti life within A-Ios that
escapes the logic of propertarian bargaining, an aspect of social life based
around mutual care and respect, on the other hand, the home produces precisely
the kinds of consolation that allow for the structures of domination and
exploitation that define Pae’s public commitments to the state and academy to
continue.
Shevek’s encounters with Vea Doem Oiie
are considerably more ambiguous, and deserve some exploration, as well. Vea, the wife of a wealthy industrialist, is
initially introduced to Shevek at a cocktail party, one of the may initially
held to introduce Shevek to the limited registers of A-Ios that the government
wanted Shevek to experience. Within that
context, she is only one of many individuals who proposed to meet up with
Shevek in the round of parties that defined his early days of life in the
institutions of A-Ios. However, those
invitations take on a new meaning to him, as he struggles with his conscience
as privileged guest of an authoritarian and brutal government. “But where could he go? To someone… to someone, another person. A human being. Someone who would give help, not sell
it. Who?
Where?” (Le Guin 169) Vea is
almost chosen at random within the context of his desperation, marked by a set
of invitations that stood out from the others for no particular reason, other
than the fact that she represented an individual outside the political
structures he was trying to escape. Vea,
through her lack of official power seems to be an alternative to the social
world of the university, but as their interactions continue, it becomes clear
that Vea both benefits and contributes to the structures of prestige and
privilege that Shevek is attempting to escape, albeit in a form that also
structurally restrains her from engaging in the public life of the society. The
following passage captures this dynamic,
“A phrase Takver
used came into his mind as he looked at Vea’s slender feet, decorated with
little white shoes on very high heels.
“A body profiteer,” Takver called women who used their sexuality as a
weapon in a power struggle with men. To
look at her, Vea was the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cosmetics, jewels, gestures,
everything about her asserted provocation.
She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed
scarcely to be a human being. She
incarnated all the sexuality the Ioti repressed into their dreams, their novels
and poetry, their endless paintings of female nudes, their music, their
architecture with its curves and domes, their candies, their baths, their
mattresses. She was the woman in the
table.” (Le Guin 172)
Vea operates within the society of A-Ios
by accepting the categories of gender that drive the society tactically,
benefiting from the sexist expectations by utilizing them to her own ends. She accomplishes this end by effectively
transforming herself into a commodity form, equivalent to the forms of art, of
architecture, and of furniture that can be found in the upper echelons of the
society. Through that process, she
inhabits a gendered performance that separates her from a common ‘human’
experience, one that presumably escapes from the logic of the “power struggle”
that defines the logic of value itself, a mechanism that structures and
legitimates a regime of almost infinite accumulations. Her act of self-instrumentalization needs to
be understood simultaneously as a reflection of the dominant structures of instrumental
reason that define the society, and a utilization of the limited resources
offered by a society that can only be understood in patriarchal terms. The narrative does a good job of representing
the first side of that equation, as Vea successfully draws a large quantity of
cash out of Shevek’s wallet throughout their day together, spent on food,
clothing, and other luxuries. She similarly
benefits from the prestige gathered at the party that she holds in his honor,
one in which large sections of the upper echelons of the city attend. However, the sense of limitations put on Vea
is only occasionally gestured towards through offhand remarks, and general
sense of disbelief about the radically different social symbolic systems of
Anarres. The passages capture the
massive systems of privilege enjoyed within the upper echelons of the nation of
A-Ios more than the small violences that come with accepting that system.
To move from questions explicitly
focused on domesticity and sexist divisions of society, the narrative also puts
a great deal of emphasis on the process of education, a question often elided
by feminist theorists of the time, exploring both the educational system of Anarres,
as well as the higher educational system in the wealthy world of Urras. This aspect of the text gets very little
critical attention amongst critics, even amongst critics who are attempting to
examine the text’s engagement with the processes of social reproduction. Indeed, the question of pedagogy, a regular
concern of classical utopian texts is a relatively unique aspect of Le Guin’s
work within the sub-cultural framework of science fiction. Shevek defines himself in relationship to the
academic infrastructure of both Anarres and Urras, engaging with academic
structures and intellectual work of both societies. Indeed, the linkages represent one of the
most substantial engagements between the societies, aside from the economic
interaction produced by the mines on the colony that both connect it directly
to the world of Urras, and provide it a kind of protection due to the continued
economic value to the home world. Within
both contexts, Shevek is a teacher, a researcher, and a knowledge worker. He is productive in both circumstances, while
not fitting either system of academic production. Shevek’s discomfort with both systems
produces a useful way of understanding the broad structures of how schooling
work as ideological state apparatuses in their contexts.
The education system that Shevek
initially goes through on the moon colony of Anarres is defined by both its
eventual integration into the systems of social production found on the world,
and its commitment to a sort of communicative collectivism. One of the first descriptions of Shevek’s education
captures this dynamic. Early in the
second chapter of the novel, the narrative begins to describe Shevek’s
introduction to the broader society of Anarres.
The school is described as a series of rooms used for multiple purposes,
depending on the needs of the institution.
Because of the need for the Orchestra to practice, the early childhood
class was put into a workshop, with the children sitting on the floor, in an
informal and collective setting. In that
passage, Shevek spontaneously develops a version of Zeno’s paradox, gesturing
towards his unusual intelligence, but the response to the concept is perhaps
more revealing. As Shevek develops his
idea, the director of the classroom interrupts,
“Do you think
this is interesting? The director interrupted, speaking to the other
children.
“Why can’t it reach the tree” said a girl
of ten.
“Because it
always has to go half of the way that’s left to go, said Shevek, “and there’s
always half of the way left to go—see?”
“Shall we say
you aimed the rock badly?” the director said with a tight smile.
“It doesn’t
matter how you aim it. It can’t reach the tree.”
“Who told you
this idea?”
“Nobody. I sort of saw it. I think I see how the rock actually does—“
“That’s enough.”
Some of the
other children had been talking, but they stopped as if struck dumb. The little boy with the slate stood there in
the silence. He looked frightened, and
scowled.
“Speech is
sharing—a cooperative art. You’re not
sharing, merely egoizing.”
The thin,
vigorous harmonies of the orchestra sounded down the hall.
“You didn’t see
that for yourself, it wasn’t spontaneous.
I’ve read something very like it in a book.” (Le Guin 24)
The narrative immediately captures the
complex ambiguity of the pedagogical processes within the anarchist
colony. On one hand, the passage
gestures towards the collective openness contained in the educational process,
an openness that allows the students to express opinions and ask questions
without fear of retribution. The process
also operates in a sort of Socratic fashion, allowing the participants to frame
the conversation that occurs in the classroom.
All of this is framed in the collectivist communicative framework
expressed by the director of the classroom, when he states, “Speech is
sharing—a cooperative art.” However,
that statement reveals another side to the collectivist practices of the
society, a side that has difficulties with thoughts that exceed the pedagogical
expectations of the society, that gesture towards ideas not immediately
acceptable within the framework of the ideological horizons of the
society. This aspect of conformity
becomes a central focus of the text, as the concept of harmony becomes a way of
stultifying new forms of thought and of art.
The sound of the orchestra compounds this concept of harmony, by
entering into the narrative precisely at the moment when Shevek’s speech is
disrupted by the director. That
conformity is not one that is expressed by the children, who have yet to be
fully integrated into the society, but by the adult controlling the classroom,
gesturing to the limitations of open conversation and discourse within the
educational process, even as we are shown a classroom that is far more open
than the classrooms found in our society.
As already noted, the complexities and
ambiguities continue as Shevek moves from the elementary school to the spaces
of higher education. The work he engages
in allows him certain freedoms and luxury in the society, moving from the
dormitories to the privacy of one’s room, but they also isolate him from the
society at large, an isolation that at one side gestures towards the forms of
conformity that are later confronted in the text, but on the other side, puts
Shevek in a position in which he can reject the positive aspects of the
collectivist freedom in the society to take on a life that is defined by
secrecy, privacy, and privilege. As
previously noted, the conflicts that drive the novel are deeply linked into the
forms of knowledge permissible within the society. If the Anarresti system is marked by its deep
commitment to equality, it is also marked by a tendency to enforce a kind of
equality of mediocrity by refusing its members the full extent of intellectual
inquiry, to produce intellectual or cultural work that isn’t immediately
understandable to the majority of the system.
Even more than the act of stultifying talent, the conformity reinforces
a coagulating set of institutions that seek to reinforce the structures of the treaty
that separates Anarres from Urras. More
than the family, this extensive and highly contested set of ideological state
apparatuses play the central role in the social reproduction of the society,
and therefore become the prime location of political contestation. The family becomes a supplemental and
voluntary organization compared to this massive structure of human interaction.
On the contrary, the educational system
of Urras seems to be free of the ambiguities immediately evident within the
system of education of Anarres. The
students and professors are free to explore their intellectual projects without
the additional burden of the forms of labor put upon Anarresti students. The system also facilitates the intellectual
work of the researchers and professors within the system, particularly
intellectuals who have shown the kind of academic caliber seen in Shevek’s
work, work that was acknowledged by the planet in the form of the Seo Oen
prize, an official recognition bringing both prestige and financial reward, in
recognition of Shevek’s text, The
Principles of Simultaneity. At the
same time, the system lacks the political engagement that defines the
educational system of Anarres, and primarily exists to reproduce the structures
of inequality in that system as the text captures through a description of
Shevek’s students,
“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 round: the
university conferred superiority on the man.
They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu
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 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.
(Le Guin 104)
Unlike the Anarresti system, the
educational system is designed to reinforce and reproduce the structures of
inequality that define it. The text
marks that inequality through the use of the word, ‘aristocrat’, marking the
deep commitment to such systems of inequity, despite the dissolution of the
formal structures of feudalism. The term
also allows for a critique of the inequalities of capitalism that escape the
tainted and therefore dismissible ideological terrain of class analysis. If the system of education only allowed those
with privilege into its doors in the earlier period of feudalism, it now
structures the very limited access to the privileged structures of the society,
access that is becoming increasingly limited, and defined by competition. The students, who made it past these barricades,
are almost inevitably already part of the very wealthy, or the select few who
made it through the arbitrary hurdles to enter those ranks, have no interest in
challenging precisely the system that they have so profoundly benefited
from. Education in that context then
becomes valued for its instrumentality, its ability to produce access to high
paying professional positions, rather than an engagement with knowledge on its
own terms, or as a way of challenging previously held assumptions
Additionally, the educational structures
of the nation of Urras are defined by the same misogynist structures that
define the rest of the society. Women
are systemically marginalized from the institutions, only occasionally playing
roles in the pedagogical structures, and almost inevitably in marginal roles. In this sense, educational system produces a
richly gradated structure of hierarchy, both separating the very wealthy from
the vast majority of the society who live in abject poverty, and restricting
women to limited positions in that hierarchy, regardless of class
position. The latter position reinforces
the division between public and private that shores up the instrumental
rationality of the workplace by offering the consolation of the home. In effect, the society of A-Ios directly maps
the kinds of structural divisions of public and private, of political and
personal that defines bourgeois society in both the United States and the UK
from the 19th century onwards.[1] At the same time, the text only alludes to
the effects that this has on the women of the society, through a series of
traces found in the depiction of Vea, and through Shevek’s limited interactions
with a female student. Despite those
limitations, the narrative makes the reader aware of the deep structures of
inequality in the society.
But when we turn to the particular ways
that Le Guin conceives of sexuality, we find something a bit more troubling,
and aspect of Le Guin's work that reveals that the feminist critics that I
previously mentioned are perhaps more perceptive than is revealed in a cursory
glance at the novel. However, this is
not to say that the narrative has its weaknesses, particularly in its tendency
to replicate structures of conventional sexuality and family structures, rather
than to question them. To turn to the
theoretical framework of the society of Anarres, the philosophy of Odo
emphasizes both the voluntary heteronormative sexual contract and the concept
of privacy as central tenets of the anarchist society. The text frames the tenets of Odo’s
philosophy in the following terms.
“An Odonian
undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production,
a ballet or a soap works. Partnership
was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it
didn’t work it stopped being. It was not
an institution but a function. It had no
sanction but that of private conscience.
This was fully
in accord with Odonian social theory.
The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep
in the grain of Odo’s thinking; through it might seem that her insistence on
freedom to change would indicate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the
freedom made the promise meaningful. A
promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken,
if one goes nowhere, no change will occur.
One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one
were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is
better than any other. So Odo came to
see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the
complexity of freedom. (Le Guin 197)
Odo’s philosophy simultaneously offers
the promise of freedom, while holding on the regulatory mechanism of the monogamous
couple, a couple implicitly coded as heterosexual throughout the narrative,
despite the problematic introduction of Bedap as a gay man. Odo’s theoretical framework begins with what
might seem like a fairly open premise, sexual relationship need to be built
upon the concept of an open ended contract, a contract that can be severed at
any point by the parties when it no longer worked. Additionally, the openness of the contract is
dependent on a number of other institutions that reduce and even potentially
eliminate the responsibilities of raising children from the nuclear
family. At the same time, the act of
entering into a monogamous social contract becomes a defining element of the
society, in fact becoming the guarantor of the forms of freedom that the
society is meant to facilitate. For Odo,
making such a choice simultaneously constitutes the entrance into the telos of
the society, of committing one’s self to the collective project of escaping the
meaninglessness that evidently defines the refusal of making such a
choice. The narrative takes this
implicit structure further in its censure of Shevek’s mother, Rulag. Her choice not to commit to the raising of
Shevek, of abandoning him to the collective processes of the society and the
care of Shevek’s father, Palat continues to be implicitly censured throughout
the narrative.
Delany’s lengthy engagement with the
novel brings up a number of substantial issues, particularly focusing on her
representations of sexuality, beginning with a number of common sense
assumption about how men and women engage, and continues on to examine the
problematic representation of the homosexual character, Bedap. In each case, Delany reveals how the novel
slips back into what might be called common sense assumptions about structures
of social relations, unthinkingly reflecting the present, rather than exploring
its historical contingency, and therefore its political context. Delany begins this analysis by looking at a
small set of adolescent interactions the mark the childhood of Shevek, moments
that gesture towards the very ambiguity of the utopian project of Anarres. His first example is the aversion to girls
expressed by Shevek and the other boys of the society. Through a set of personal experiences, Delany
argues that the structure of engagements between boys and girls is deeply
shaped by the institutional circumstances that they are formed by, that is, by
the implicit and explicit expectations but on those individuals by those
institutions. However, Le Guin, instead
of explaining why the ostensibly egalitarian society of Anarres has these
antagonistic differences, simply reflects the conventional expectations of her
milieu. In effect, the narrative makes
no effort to explain why the gendered conventions of boys ignoring girls or
denigrating them continues in the society ostensibly so committed to equality,
effectively naturalizing them.
The representation of Bedap, however,
becomes one of the central points of reception within Delany’s lengthy
engagement with the text, a point that is drawn on by both Tom Moylan and Sarah
Lefanu in their critical analyses of the text.
Delany centers on a number of issues in his representation, and in turn
in the representation of homosexuality in the novel. The most immediate issue is Bedap’s isolation
in the narrative structures of the novel, representing the only gay character
in the novel. Aside from the brief
affair with Shevek, Bedap is never shown to be in any other romantic or sexual
relationships, effectively leaving him alone in the world. Delany also notes each representation of
Bedap focuses on a set of bad personal habits, taking the form of fingernail
biting and fidgeting. (Delany The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 147-151) However, the more significant moment is the
narrative’s ‘didactic’ use of Bedap to establish the intimacy and closeness of
the bond between Shevek and his child, the moment that Bedap exits the
narrative. Delany narrows in on a
specific moment of the passage, occurring after the moment that Bedap contrasts
his “meddling” and lack of formal commitments to any relationship with the
strength produced through Shevek’s commitments. To turn to the text, “Yet he felt that he
understood it very clearly, that all his hope was in this understanding, and if
he would be saved he must change his life.” (Le Guin, 298)
Delany’s engagement with this last claim
is complex and ambiguous. He begins by
showing that the claim could not be understood within political terms, given
the pair’s political affinity, nor a simple issue of personal habit, so the
remaining issue is Bedap’s homosexuality, which evidently must be changed. Delany then goes on to distinguish the
complexities and ambiguities of what might have been the intentions of Le
Guin’s inclusion of the passage in the text from the manner that the text draws
on a series of clichéd conventions that produce the effect that rejects Bedap’s
sexuality. Delany goes on to argue,
“What Le Guin says does—precisely because one can sense the idea itself
mystified in the paragraph that presents it so that no open disagreement is
possible.” (Delany 152) The homophobia
is, in effect, contained in the very conventionality of the statement, rather
than in political discourse, rendering a political opposition, difficult if not
impossible. He goes on to make a larger
argument about the production of science fiction that goes beyond his particular
engagement with Le Guin’s text.
But what should
be brought home here is far more important than any personal offense: In so
conventionalized a discourse as fiction (and science fiction has almost all the
conventions of mundane fiction as well as a panoply of its own), we have the
choice of saying precisely what we want to say (which requires a massively
clear vision and intense analytical energy), or saying what everyone else has
said (which is what happens either when vision fades, analysis errs, or energy
fails). There is no middle ground. The
concert of the three—vision, analysis, and energy—a work within the field of a
given language is what we recognize as language skill/talent/craft. But the cliché, at almost any level, always
signals one of the three’s failure; the cliché indicates this because language
is as structurally stable as it is: indeed, the cliché—at almost any level save
the ironic—is the stability of language asserting itself without referent.”
(Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 153)
The error in Le Guin’s text arises,
then, not from the sort of active homophobic project that he identifies in an
earlier passage, but with something more insidious, a kind of unthought that he
argues constitutes a failure in the craft of fiction. The craft of fiction contains a kind of
critical and destabilizing effect on the object that is engaged with, produced
through “the choice of saying precisely what we want to say (which requires a
massively clear vision and intense analytical energy)”, rather than, “or saying
what everyone else has said.” To say
that the craft of fiction has to say something through its narratives and
structures of description that has not been said before does not immediately
translate into a radical political project, but it does involve a challenging
of the conventions and categories of daily life that has been a central feature
of the project of critical theory. The failure of the project produces a set of
clichés that both stabilizes language, and therefore the social structures that
structure and are structured by that language. Delany places this argument in
distinctively polemical terms, refusing any middle ground between the qualities
of good writing that allow for critical investigation, and the sorts of cliché
that shore up ideological mystification through the clichés of familiarity. At best, fictional narratives can partially
escape the forms of cliché that shore up the symbolic and ideological systems
that shore up any dominant set of social structures, or to put it differently,
explore the cracks, gaps and tensions within those structures.
The larger questions of how this shapes
the formal writing processes of science fiction as it tries to engage in
radical political projects will be taken up later in the text. What needs to be discussed at this moment is
the way that the use of cliché is used to reproduce the expectations of
monogamous heteronormativity. In this
case, the passage that produces Delany’s lengthy response is the set of clichéd
conventions in the description of Bedap’s exit from the narrative, conventions
that ground and legitimate a series of homophobic discourses, and naturalize
the ideological structures of the monogamous and heteronormative family. We might say that the passage implicitly
strips the ability of anyone who is not a part of those conventional structures
from having a meaningful social role in any society. As we have previously seen, these
observations translate well into the framework of Lee Edelman’s work in No Future, a work that opposes queer
sensibility to the reproductive futurity of the child. However, Delany takes a substantially
different tact in his engagement with the passage, gesturing towards the forms
of collective childcare that he participates in with a group of other gay men
who also have children. Despite some
overlap in the two projects, Delany does not lodge his complaints with the form
of the child, even the idealized for that Edelman opposes to the actuality of
children, but to the notion that the only way of raising children is through
the conventions of monogamous heteronormativity.
Despite its length, Delany’s critical
engagement with the text doesn’t fully engage within the problematic dimensions
introduced by the text’s heteronormativity.
I want to turn to the novel's representation of the relationship between
Shevak and Takver, and how the particular mixture of romantic convention and
mysticism allows for a reinscription of the heterosexual couple as the central
institution of the society, undoing, in many ways, the forms of collective
living found in the rest of the novel. A
problem compounded by the fact that so many of those institutions become coded
as conformist and stultifying as the novel goes along, in opposition to the
heterosexual and monogamous bond produced by Shevek and Takver. We can see this in operation through an early
description of their romance, which occurs early in their relationship, and is
linked with Shevek's involvement with a small group of dissidents within the
anarchist society of Arras. The
relationship, in effect, overwhelms the narrative, pushing its explicitly
political dimensions to the background.
"They would
talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then to dinner at the Institute
commons. after dinner there were meetings, or a concert, or they saw
their friends, Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from the
Institute, Desar and others from the Institute, Taker's colleagues and
friends. But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them.
Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their
partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact. It did not seem
to offend the others. Rather the reverse. Bedap, Salas, Desar, and
the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others
were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others. They did
nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant
talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing
them presents--the small offerings that circulated among these people who
possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded
with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters' Federation workshop, a
poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the
Sorruba sea. They gave the present to Takher, saying "Here, Shev
might like this for a paperweight," or to Shevek, saying, "Here, Tak
might like this color." In giving they sought to share in what
Shevek and Takver shared, and to celebrate and to praise." (Le Guin
152-153)
Breaking away from the concepts of
mutual aid that ostensibly define the society of Anarres, the text informs us that
the love of Takver and Shevek "was enough, and they could not hide the
fact." The social structures of the society become 'peripheral' to
the story, and the political questions that drive the various small dissident
groups are also placed in the background. Indeed those social formations
begin to draw sustenance from that bond, rather than the reverse, treating the
relationship as a combination of a religious shrine and a perpetual wedding,
continuingly granted the couple gifts, and attempting to strengthen the
relationship through a peculiar reversal of the description of the exchange of
women that Levi-Strauss posits as the central tenet of human civilization.
The relationship of Shevek and Takver takes this position because it reveals
the secret essence of the potential of the society as a whole, a kind of
social symbiosis that is produced through this heteronormative bond.
Additionally, this notion is reinforced through the repetitive insistence on the
notion of sexual privacy contained in the text, a notion that allows for a
reinscription of the public and the private, a conservation of the space of the
personal without politics, while ostensibly challenging these structures. At the same time, as Sarah Lefanu and Tom
Moylan note, the shift from the economy of the public to the intimate space of
the private allows for the moment of dialectical synthesis to occur within the
narrative structure, a moment that is created by the release of a scientific formula
that allows for transformations in space travel, rather than focusing on the
potentially far messier terrain of political conflict and transformation.
One can go further by opposing the
idealized relationship between the two with the failures on the part of
Shevek’s implicit parental figures, first in the form of his mother, Rulag, who
refuses to raise him, then in the form of his academic advisor, Sabul, who
steals his intellectual work, while stultifying the intellectual innovation
contained within it. Each plays a
substantial role in his formation as a subject within the society of Anarres,
and each becomes a central figure in the opposition to the political project
advocated by Shevek and his friends, a return to open communication with the
world of Urras. The representation of
Rulag is perhaps the more problematic of the two characters, presented as the
absent mother; Delany turns to this representation as one of the most
problematic in the text. He notes, “Le
Guin goes to great lengths to reduce Rulag’s “motherhood” to pure symbol, for
as Rulag herself declares, the real relation of mother and son she and Shevek
share is practically biological accident.
Le Guin then places her in the position so frequently filled by the
Father.” (Delany 153) Through this
process, Le Guin offers a path towards denaturalizing the biological grounding
of the Oedipal triangle, and the textual placement of Shevek’s rejection of
both figures in a short period, empties out the biological content from the
position of authority held by the father.
However, Delany notes that Le Guin does
not escape the effects of cliché by attempting to subvert the figure of the
father, by placing Rulag in that position, arguing, “There already exists a
symbolic category to receive the cold, tradition-bound mother (the Great Bitch
Mother, which encompasses both Cinderella’s Wicked Stepmother and Cuckoo’s
Nest’s Big Nurse) which informs our reading of all such fictive characters.”
(Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, 153) If effect, the effort to challenge one
particular cliché of narrative structure falls into another cliché, one that is
perhaps even more problematically sexist. That interpretation, rather than the
one initially suggested is the one that is more readily available to the
readership of the narrative, due to the sexist structures that continue to
define the ideological horizons of the present.
Delany goes on to argue that the representations of Rulag rarely move beyond
presenting her as symbol, noting that the narrative never explains what her
role is in the society beyond playing a significant role in a number of
engineering projects. The narrative
explains what those projects are or whether she succeeded in completing them or
not. Instead, she is represented as an
absent figure, as the cause of Shevek’s isolation. Through this lack of depth or complexity, the
narrative drives the reader precisely to the sexist conventions that it
initially attempted to subvert.(Delany 154)
We need to turn to Le Guin’s engagement
with the psychoanalytical thinker, Carl Jung to understand her commitment to
the monogamous heteronormative couple that not only can be found in the
relationship between Shevek and Takver, but also structures much of the
philosophic thought of Odo, whose ideas constitute the ideological infrastructure
of the society of Anarres. Rather than reading this as an aberrant moment in Le
Guin's text, I want to argue that it directly connects to the Jungian theory of
anima and animus that she acknowledges as a central influence on her work at
the time. This
issue plays a central role in the contention between Le Guin and Delany in the
Khatru debates. Ursula Le Guin first
brings up the topic in response to the question, asking each of the authors if
they felt they were capable of representing women. Le Guin went against the general trend of the
responses, which tended to argue that women had a stronger ability to represent
men, due to the expectations place on them, to provide emotional labor, and the
need for women to understand the reasoning of men due to their subaltern
status. Instead, Le Guin turned to
Jung’s theory of the anima and the animus to argue that men and women have the
ability to represent each other because all individuals contain a masculine and
feminine side of their souls. She argues,
“OK, from here on Jung is my guide, since I must look
inward. Jung suggests that the psyche
comes in several sexes, at least two, whatever the individual’s physiological
sex and conscious theories concerning it.
Male artists have been aware enough of the essential role in
their work of their anima (female element of man’s psyche) that they have
recognized and honored it as the Muse, the Creator Spirit in the feminine gender.
The animus (male element of woman’s psyche) is an obscurer
figure (Jung shows it all too often as a dogmatic authoritarian, Logos with a
pince-nez, though he knew there was more to it than that). This obscurity is an advantage; there are no
sentimental stereotypes (“The Eternal Masculine”?—“Behind every great woman
there stands a brave little man?”) to degrade our perception of it. But because anything said of the animus is
new, it tends to be strange and awkward, and tends to be tentative.
In my own experience the Creator Spirit is more masculine
than feminine, but on the deeper levels, is both at once.” (Le Guin 10)
Le
Guin begins her statement by offering the possibility of the psyche taking the
form of “several sexes”, but she quickly shifts to two sexes that evidently
make up the Jungian framework. For Le
Guin, the production of art must depend on an engagement with a dialectical
other, the contradictory half that makes one whole. She argues that this aspect of subjectivity
has played a substantial role in the way that men understand their artistic
production, an understanding that is expressed through the metonymic figure of
“the Muse, the Creator Spirit in the feminine gender.” She goes on to argue that Jung’s conceptualization
of the animus is much murkier in its figuration, one that is only hazily
understood in simple, stereotypical terms, despite Jung’s recognition of a
greater complexity. That ambiguity
offers an incredible opportunity in Le Guin’s eyes, because there are no
problematic or ‘sentimental stereotypes’ that get in the way of this form of
artistic engagement, an engagement that allows for the sort of synthesis that
drives artistic work “on the deeper levels.”
For Le Guin, at least at the individual level, producing that synthesis
means engaging with her animus at greater depth, an engagement she hypothesizes
as coming out of the conventional limitations produced by sexist gendered
conventions. For her, the masculine
focus obscurely gestures towards the need for some sort of balance between the
two sides of the soul, one that contains both sides of the soul in synthetic
balance.
In
response, Delany rejects Le Guin’s framework, pointing out the racism that is
explicitly contained in Jung’s analytical framework, and earlier challenging Le
Guin’s interpretation of Jung. He argues,
“I find the labels that Jung puts on the various “parts” of
it particularly pernicious: The anima is good and evil, and is part of the
“male” soul; and men have to come to terms with it to grow up. The animus is wholly evil and is an unhappily
necessary part of your soul—unhappy, because it contains all your aggression
(it is what allows you to scream if raped; without “male” animus, presumably,
you would just submit without a whimper every time.) Your creativity must be in your life. If the animus gets too strong, you may even
try to be an artist, or worse, a suffragette.” (Delany, Khatru, 40)
At
an immediate level, the rejection of Jung and his acceptance by Le Guin is driven
by a difference interpretation. Le Guin
offers a far more generous reading of the basic framework offered by Jung,
later pointing out that Delany ignored the other more positive explanations for
Jung’s framework, while Delany, operating out a more Lacanian perspective,
focuses on the problematic aspects of Jung’s conceptual framework. Through that engagement, Delany argues that
the synthesis that Jung offers does not produce the kind of deeper unity that
Le Guin focuses on. Instead, the
synthesis of anima and animus produces a concept two distinctively sexed and
gendered subjects, with a distinctively hierarchical structure of value
contained in them. The animus in women
allows them to act on one hand, and on the other hand, produces the possibility
for the pathological direction of women producing art or even demanding
political emancipation. Just as
significantly, Delany marks the deeply racist aspects of Jung’s works, aspects
that argue that “the darker races” don’t have a psychology, ejecting a large
portion of humanity from the status of full humanity. Beyond these significant critiques of the
ideological framework of Jung’s understanding of the psyche is a critique of
the concept of synthetic unity itself.
Delany points to the political effects of such claims of synthesis,
claims that implicitly exclude enormous populations of the Earth and legitimate
structures of hierarchy in the name of a synthetic unity. It’s difficult not to link those concerns
with the forms of exclusion that facilitate the abstract structures of
synthesis that inform Jung’s concept with the very real acts of white supremacy
that are embedded in the construction of a post-war labor piece, structures
that work to incorporate the new European immigrants into the political
structures and patterns of consumption of the Fordist regime of capital, while
systemically producing barriers to those same resources for Black workers.
In
effect, the desire on the part of Le Guin to represent the moments of
synthesis, a desire driven by Le Guin’s mystical and Jungian influences,
constantly produces a shift from representations of collectivity to the
intimate representation of any number of sets of couples, whether in the form
of romances, antagonisms or friendships.
It also continually holds in abeyance the forms of antagonism that drive
the plot from the conflicts between the informal institutional power on the
moon colony of Anarres and the new forms of collectivity that arise to resist
that process, in the name of the same philosophy that the older forms of
institution claim as their inspiration, creating an obvious analogy between the
conflict between the structures of the old left and the new left, as set up by
the analytical work of Immanuel Wallerstein.
Furthermore, it creates the need for the false sense of synthesis
displayed at the end of the narrative through Shevek’s act of sharing the
information on how to facilitate simultaneous communication, occluding the
forms of strife that are rocking the both societies, due to the political
organizing occurring on both planets, organizing that expresses cross-boundary
structures of antagonism, rather than any form of reconciliation. The ‘ambiguity’ in Le Guin’s utopia reflects
the contradiction between the critical antagonisms that defined the social
struggles the narrative attempts to engage with and the neutrality of
antagonism that defines the horizon of the utopian form.
[1]
For a longer conversation of this please see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and
Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987)
