Ursula K. Le Guin is Rewiring My Brain
A Wizard of Earthsea and The Dispossessed
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed, the physicist Shevek travels from the anarchist moon of Anarres to the capitalist, statist planet of Urras. The academics who receive him eventually ask, with embarrassment, if he’s come with the approval of his government, a contradiction in terms for a society that rejects hierarchy and authority in all forms. Shevek notes that what administration they do have—solely charged with overseeing production—had no power either to support or oppose his decision. So, his interlocutor clarifies with some irony, he came entirely of his own initiative? “‘It is the only initiative I acknowledge,’ Shevek said, smiling, in dead earnest.”
In A Wizard of Earthsea, a boy named Ged travels from his backwoods mountain village to be trained in magic on Roke, the Isle of the Wise. He arrives there bearing a letter from his first teacher that says only that he “will be greatest of the wizards of Gont, if the wind blows true.” He presents the note to the Archmage, who asks a couple questions about his voyage followed by the more searching query “Whose will brought you here?” Ged replies simply, “My own.”
I read both of these books recently, my first experience with Le Guin, and it felt like coming home. The two differ in setting, reading level, and intended audience (there’s a lot of sex in The Dispossessed) but they’re united by certain ideals, namely a fierce commitment to self-determination and mutual aid—whose apparent cross-purposes Le Guin synthesizes wonderfully—and an understated style breakthaking in its plainspoken lyricism. They are each amazing and became even better when read in close succession.
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I knew A Wizard of Earthsea was going to be a revelatory experience by the second chapter. Before Ged goes to Roke, he’s trained by Ogion, the senior wizard of his home island, Gont. Ged and Ogion are together for six months or so, Ged studying runes—not magic but a baseline for it—and Ogion speaking little and only of mundane, domestic affairs. At the taunting of a girl he meets picking herbs, Ged reads one of Ogion’s spellbooks, nearly unleashing a dark presence. Ogion intervenes, saving him, and chides Ged for his foolishness dabbling with magic beyond his limits. Ged responds petulantly, asking how he should know these things when Ogion has “taught him nothing, shown him nothing”. There follows an interaction of incredible subtlety and feeling. “Now you have seen something,” Ogion says, alluding to the shadow. He reminds Ged that he has taken no oath to serve him and is free to leave, to go instead to Roke; though he would prefer Ged stay with him he will not keep him against his will.
Le Guin describes Ged’s reaction:
Ged stood dumb, his heart bewildered. He had come to love this man Ogion who had healed him with a touch, and who had no anger: he loved him, and had not known it until now. He looked at the oaken staff leaning in the chimney-corner, remembering the radiance of it that had burned out evil from the dark, and he yearned to stay with Ogion, to go wandering through the forests with him, long and far, learning how to be silent. Yet other cravings were in him that would not be stilled, the wish for glory, the will to act. Ogion’s seemed a long road towards mastery, a slow bypath to follow, when he might go sailing before the seawinds straight to the Inmost Sea, to the Isle of the Wise, where the air was bright with enchantments and the Archmage walked amidst wonders.
“Master,” he said, “I will go to Roke.”
This is a passage of piercing emotion and devastating perceptiveness. Ged’s lack of awareness of his own feelings before they flood him is both central to his character and painfully familiar to me. The way Le Guin gives us the richness of his thoughts, the competing visions of companionship and adventure, coupled with his terse answer that betrays none of his inner conflict or love is a punch in the gut that captures something unfortunately true about being a 13-year-old boy. It’s left unclear if Ged can’t express his thoughts more fully because he lacks the capacity at that age or if his emotions threaten to overwhelm him if he lets them out or if he’s learned to suppress that sort of thing. The book only gets better from there.
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Le Guin has a gift for crafting her characters’ inner worlds and bringing out the shifts both minute and seismic that constitute growing up and awakening to the world around us. In The Dispossessed, she puts this ability to use to show how our economic systems and power structures disfigure every part of us, including our thinking. In Shevek she finds the freedom to show the mind of a man that has never been shackled.
The most immediately striking thing about Shevek is the simplicity and honesty of everything he says. He’s not rude but he does not hesitate to speak his mind, often to the intense discomfort of his Urrasti hosts. Why do we lie? In my experience the answer is almost always authority, in one form or another. Dishonesty breeds in the rungs of hierarchy, wherever speaking freely is liable to bring down the wrath of a superior, either because true candor makes them feel stupid or because honesty itself comes to be seen as inherently disrespectful. This becomes insidious when power conquers our thoughts and we stop noticing we’re lying to ourselves. Shevek’s first encounter with an alien mind is the doctor, Kimoe, aboard the rocket that takes him from Anarres to Urras. Le Guin writes, from Shevek’s point of view: “Kimoe’s ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a wall. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them.”
Shevek’s ability to speak truly unencumbered by considerations of status is what I’m talking about when I say Le Guin is rewiring my brain. We are so burdened by the weight of the collective bullshit we’re forced to carry into every interaction, the dances we do to spare people’s sense of themselves, always so tied up in placing themselves above others. Shevek, to put it more bluntly, refuses time and again throughout the book to eat shit. Ambassadors, dignitaries, fellow physicists over and over try to impress him with their place in social order, and to remind him of his. Shevek looks back at each of them, approaches them with brotherly love and total equality, and refuses to grovel. For just a moment, a better world seems possible.
It’s from the clear difference in Shevek’s thinking that Le Guin is able to get readers to take his ideas seriously. His society on Anarres employs no money, no property, and no hierarchical organization of any kind. People rotate jobs at will. All housing is composed of communal dorms and meals are taken in large refectories. “Profiteer” and “propertarian” are the most cutting of insults. There is no advertising.
If this sounds naively utopian, don’t worry, Le Guin knows it. The novel employs a back and forth structure, alternating chapters about Shevek’s time on Urras with his life on Anarres prior. When Shevek tells of a world of total autonomy and equality, its intoxicating; as we see his life before his journey, full of small frustrations and petty fellow academics wielding their seniority and previous accomplishments for status and authority, we realize that Shevek is describing Anarres as it should be rather than as it is. Rather than undercutting Le Guin’s anarchist vision, this dichotomy is what keeps it honest and clear-eyed about the contradictions and pitfalls such a project would be prone to.
Anarresti society, founded by revolutionaries, is conceived as a permanent revolution. In practice, after 200 years, things are quite settled and power is constantly re-concentrating itself. Shevek and his wife, Takver, are separated by a series of work assignments on different parts of the moon; they are free to decline these postings but instead always sigh and accept them as necessary. When Shevek forms a syndicate to share information with Urras, the public opinion is nearly enough to put their project on ice. Despite his society’s origins, Shevek comes to realize that most people prefer stability and a firm hand at the controls than the radical self-determination he ends up seeking. There’s a heavy dose of Tocqueville’s Tyranny of the Majority in these sections, obviously.
But Shevek’s mind, inspiringly uninhibited, has no ability to envision the tyranny of the economy (and state). His stay on Urras is luxurious and he finds himself among intellectual equals for the first time in his life. But he is constantly surveilled by these same people and the poor are kept strictly out of his view. When he does try to speak openly with his butler, Efor—the only lower-class person he ever encounters—he’s met with derision. Shevek is one of the aristocrats and that dynamic precludes honesty. The walls build themselves, in the end.
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Shevek’s story is ultimately about where the rubber meets the road. Mutual aid and solidarity are the core of his ethics. That’s one thing on Anarres where everyone else is practicing them as well—at least in theory—but it’s a very different one on Urras when mutual aggression is the basic societal assumption. He never abandons his principles, but he does have to learn the limits of his abilities, to determine who is beyond his power to aid. Late in the book he finally has found someone who can help him, and whom he wants to help in turn, by sharing his unified theory of physics (It’s for this promised breakthrough that Urras has hosted him and tolerated his heterodox ideology at all). But his helper is oddly blasé, unable to imagine the better future Shevek’s work heralds. Shevek realizes their resignation is absolute:
“You don’t understand what time is,” he said. “You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable, present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it’s something you would like to have. [...] You will not achieve or even understand Urras until you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres. You are right, we are the key. But when you said that, you did not really believe it. You don’t believe in Anarres. You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment… My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you. You will not let us. You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to you. We can only wait for you to come to us.”
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Ged’s journey in Earthsea takes a similar trajectory. He makes a terrible mistake while at wizard school, loosing the shadow he previously encountered in Ogion’s hut, and is wracked by guilt afterward, both for his foolishness and for the petty envy and spite that led him to it. He takes a posting defending a fishing community from a dragon, a practically suicidal mission that he justifies to himself basically on the grounds that he deserves to get burned to a crisp. When a villager’s young son is dying of fever, Ged follows the boy’s spirit into the afterlife, nearly losing himself when the shadow ambushes him at the border of life and death.
His situation grows more abject as he feels farther and farther from help of any kind. He sails and sails, and the shadow follows. After the shadow nearly bests him a second time, Ged finds himself in a castle in the far north where everything is just a bit off. Turns out the lord of the house and all his servants are thralls to an ageless malevolence trapped in the keystone in the fortress’s deepest depth. When Ged realizes his peril, he flees. What looks like another defeat is a turning point however; in recognizing a situation he cannot hope to set right, he also begins the process of acknowledging that he’s deserving of aid, both from himself and others. He later encounters an old couple who have been marooned on a sandbar their entire lives. It’s a marvelous little sequence that asks the reader to fill in the immensity of time these poor souls have spent on their little strip of sand. Ged could take them to civilization but he seems to understand they’ve been alone too long and could never make the transition.
Ged eventually travels to the far reaches of Earthsea, to the last island before the vast and endless Open Sea. The inhabitants of this rock have nothing. Le Guin notes that merchant ships rarely make the journey out because the islanders have nothing to trade. In a book otherwise uninterested in critique or economic systems, a glimmer still shines. The despotism of the market exists even in the fantasy realm. Without some coin to buy in, you can never get a seat at the table.
Both books also culminate in journeys home. In both cases, little tangible has been accomplished. Far more important is how their travels have changed them. Ged is finally at peace with himself after years of self-reproach and regret. Shevek has seen what he needed to see and completed his work. This passage is from The Dispossessed but note the language—take out the references to Shevek’s physics and it could just as easily be about Ged sailing across Earthsea.
He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.
