The Cycle of
Coming Home
by Phoebe Wagner
In 2018, the International Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) produced a new report with an ultimatum nearly beyond
comprehension let alone action: by 2030, a forty to fifty percent reduction in
global emissions. If global emissions continue to rise, as they currently are,
the report also describes what overshooting a 1.5 degree Celsius change means
for the humans and nonhumans (“Summary for Policymakers” 6). Of course, many
folks beyond scientists have imagined where a capitalist consumerist culture
would ultimately lead, such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, N. K.
Jemisin, Jeff Vandermeer, Rebecca Roanhorse and on. The speculative genre
(comprised of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and numerous sub-genres) has
always imagined where humanity might end up—whether on Mars or in Area X. While
inspiring, these writers do not always provide practical solutions to modern
issues such as the climate crisis. Rather, their work tolls a warning. At this
point, humanity is beyond warning, but as US society approaches what one might
describe as a dystopia, speculative fiction can provide a map to a new future,
if humanity chooses to follow the trails left by iconic characters, such as
Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist-physicists Shevek. In The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), Ursula K. Le Guin
describes the future foretold by the IPCC’s report. If humanity can acknowledge
the battle lost, perhaps there’s another path—anarchy. Rooted in environmental
thinking from Edward Abbey to Winona LaDuke, environmentalism has always
understood that humanity belongs to a greater system than government. If one
accepts the coming future, The
Dispossessed becomes a literary tool, a map, and a warning: Here’s how to
create anarchy and here’s how to keep creating it. This paper will argue for a
new environmental anarchy described by Le Guin’s novel, a theory of cyclical
anarchy which encompasses human and nonhuman.
Ultimately, The Dispossessed is about voyage—going out and returning home. The
alternating chapter structure follows Shevek as he grows up on the anarchist
planet Anarres and as he leaves Anarres to study physics on the lush,
capitalist planet, Urras. The book unites at the end as the final chapters
feature Shevek preparing to leave Anarres for Urras while the older counterpart
Shevek leaves Urras to return to Anarres. More episodic than plot driven, the
novel traces Shevek’s developing life and shifting views on anarchy, thus
adding the ambiguity to Le Guin’s utopia. While The Dispossessed has been explored for its circularity—particularly
by Darko Suvin—it is often tied to the physics of the novel rather than
anarchy. In two moments, the novel breaks the circularity through the
introduction of minor characters—a woman from Earth (the Terran Ambassador) and
a Hainish character who follows Shevek home to Anarres. While anomalies, their
presence at the end of the book suggests their importance. Indeed, the Terran
ambassador Keng fulfills the dictum of voyage and return by allowing the reader
who has voyaged to these planets to “return” home to earth. When Shevek calls
Urras in all its wealth a hell, Keng describes the current state of Earth:
“My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as [Urras] is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert.” (Le Guin 347-348)
Uncontrollable
appetite, war, grey skies, the heat, desertification—each element of Keng’s
description is already happening and now nearly unstoppable unless the
capitalist powers have a change of heart in the next twelve years. As Keng
says, the US multiplies and gobbles without true restriction. Today, humanity lives
in one hell, as described by Shevek, while heading for another hell described
by Keng—a circle surrounding the reader. Yet, Le Guin offers the reader a way
out by going home.
Yet, to go home in The Dispossessed means to return to a
new place. A locality never remains static, nor does the returning person. For
an anarchist, home goes beyond the definition of an owned structure or a place
that belongs to a person. Rather, the relationship to home becomes an
oscillation of going and coming—a cycle. In one of the earliest uses of river
imagery, and only the second philosophical river image, Shevek connects his
idea of voyage and return to rivers and the physics theories governing the
novel: “You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again.
[…] 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” (Le Guin 55). The idea of home and the ever-cycling
river become connected by their lack of sameness. Like Shevek’s physics
theories, this idea of not remaining the same can be invisible. A river and a
home may seem familiar or unchanged but transformation exists, even if beyond
human sight. Attempting to remain static pushes against the reality of rivers.
This definition of voyage-return as
home connects to the novel’s anarchist theories through Odo, the anarchist
thinker and revolutionary who founded the Anarresti way of life. When Shevek is
taken sightseeing on the capitalist planet Urras, where all the Anarresti
emigrated from, he visits Odo’s grave. While one might expect a revolutionary
thinker jailed for her writings might have something equally revolutionary
written on her gravestone, Odo’s marker simply states: “To be whole is to be
part; true voyage is return” (Le Guin 84). This sentiment is the only piece of
Odo’s writing the reader experiences without the lens of conversation or
interior monologue. In this moment, the reader can connect with Odo’s work on
her terms. In the following chapter, written from young Shevek’s point of view,
he realizes Odo never fulfilled the ultimate voyage-return. She never reached
Anarres: “[S]he had lived, and died, and was buried […] among people speaking
unknown languages, on another world. Odo was an alien: an exile” (Le Guin 101).
Because no other Anarresti has left the planet since they emigrated, Shevek’s
journey becomes a turn of the cycle started by Odo, who started the voyage, but
ultimately, Shevek brings the return. This cosmic cycle at the novel’s heart
becomes paramount to the anarchic thought. Even though the Anarrestis took the
desert moon as an anarchist experiment, their belief in the individual’s right
and will to act had become meaningless because they did not want Shevek to
return to Urras. It caused anarchy to the Anarresti way of life, to their
system, thus starting another cycle.
If The Dispossessed can become a lens for transforming the impact of
the climate crisis across the US, then voyage-return becomes central to
developing a cyclical anarchy. The American Dream leaves little room for coming
home. Indeed, when a millennial returns home, often that person is considered a
failure. Of course, reasons abound for why one might not return—abuse, sexism,
homophobia, racism—but home can be expanded to where a person feels at home or
to a locality that becomes home. As the millennial generation struggles to stay
in one place or stay in a single job, the idea of calling somewhere home seems
alien. While not the first to call for homecoming, Wendell Berry connects the
need for young people to return to their communities as a way of fighting the
climate crisis. In The Art of Loading
Brush: New Agrarian Writings, Wendell Berry describes homecoming as vital to
reconstructing sustainable community: “The primary vocation probably is the
call to go
home, to go where one’s gifts and one’s work can be offered to one’s family and
neighbors, to one’s home place—to ‘what is actually loved and known,’” (ch. 2).
Like Le Guin in The Dispossessed, he
links vocation and homecoming. From early in his life, Shevek is tasked by his
mentor to complete his work in physics (Le Guin 58). Only, Shevek discovers,
the Anarresti don’t want his theory because of the change it would bring, so he
must complete Odo’s journey and go home, to the planet of his people. Much like
the idea of home is not limited to possession, this cycle of return cannot be
limited only to ideas of journey. If to be applied to the climate crisis, the
cycle of return must include previous practices. Since the Industrial
Revolution especially, humankind have been on a racing arc of technological
development. While environmental thinkers argue over the legitimacy of a
wholesale return to primitivism or developing new environmentally friendly tech
(and every argument in between), a cyclical anarchy allows for such seasons of
development but requires a return to previous practices. Like Shevek—whose
physics theories create a piece of technology that can instantaneously
communicate through faster than light travel, thus reconnecting the whole of
the universe, including Anarres—technological development can become part of
the cycle as long as it returns home, granted, a home changed by such
technology. Wendell Berry writes: “As soon as I know that you and the other
predictors are securely stowed away in the future with your computers, computer
models, statistics, and projections, fearing now the fearfulness yet to come, I
light out for home, where everything I love is suffering a long-established,
still-continuing damage right now” (ch. 2). While there are seasons of waiting,
Wendell Berry and the IPCC claim it is a season of doing. As governmental
systems fail to transform capitalist consumerism, perhaps a cycle of anarchy
focused on the local, the home, could create a ripple of change.
In 1974, the need for change seemed
distant in regard to the climate. Indeed, the bleak descriptions of the
anarchist moon Anarres seemed too scarce, too dystopic. While there was chatter
in the scientific community, the first World Climate Conference was a few years
away in 1979. Yet, as the climate crisis continues to grow, rather than Le
Guin’s description of scarcity becoming a moot point, a large critique remains
regarding the scarcity-based anarchy on Anarres. In “Embodied Anarchy in Ursula
K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,”
Daniel P. Jaeckle sums up this repeated criticisms: “The fact that Le Guin
bases life on Anarres upon a level of scarcity even greater than that existing
on our planet today means that her vision of anarchy does not contemplate a
world in which society no longer has to fear material want” (93). While one
cannot assume Le Guin foretold the climate crisis, she joins ranks of other
authors (often women) who wrote distinct visions of the future that seem much too
near to actualization in the twenty-teens: notably Octavia Butler and Margaret
Atwood. Thus, Jaeckle’s argument stumbles: A post-industrial world is coming,
and the IPCC report suggests humanity will have many material wants. Le Guin’s
inclusion of Keng the Terran Ambassador and her description of Earth foreshadows
a future that Anarres offers a possible solution for, but only if implemented
early. Keng states: “‘We forfeited our chance for Anarres centuries ago, before
it ever came into being’” (Le Guin 349). To that end, Le Guin presents a
transitory vision of the jump between Urras and Anarres and how it might occur.
If the question of anarchy in a post-scarcity world is voided by agreeing Le
Guin does not intended (nor believe) anarchy as a possibility for a material-rich
world, then the novel becomes a proposition for what comes next when the rivers
run dry.
At the novel’s center, the wells do
dry up and a famine sweeps the desert moon. While part of Le Guin’s utopic
ambiguity questions if Anarresti society truly functions as an anarchic utopia,
the other major ambiguous moment revolves around the famine. Death, threats of
violence, making lists of who receives more rations—the famine tests the
anarchic society. Even while living close with the land, taking only what is
needed, the desert has its own cycle. Again, this section is criticized because
it makes anarchy appear unattainable, as Jaekle points out: “To the extent that
Le Guin envisions not merely deprivation but life-threatening scarcity, her
view of Anarres may become increasingly remote as material prosperity spreads”
(93). Yet, material prosperity represents another cycle, one which can only
return to scarcity. Indeed, materiality is part of the cycle, even on Anarres
where Odoism attempts to minimize excess. When Shevek first goes to the
university, he is given a single room rather than sharing a space (Le Guin
102). He also has the choice of desert at every meal, which is unusual in
Anarresti society (Le Guin 102). Finally, two new characters have possessions: Sabul, the physics
instructor who withholds certain books form the general public, and Desar,
Shevek’s neighbor and a hoarder (Le Guin 105, 155). While Sabul and Desar’s
materialism is not specifically linked to the famine a few years later, these
experiences create a sense of oscillation and balancing. During the famine, the
Anarresti acknowledge that the scarcity brought them back to the foundations of
Odo’s teachings. In the early stages of the famine, the atmosphere remained
positive: “There was an undercurrent of joy [….] The old tag of ‘solidarity’
had come alive again. There is exhalation in finding that the bond is stronger,
after all, than all that tries the bond” (Le Guin 247). The cycle of the land
prompted the return to solidarity, and the famine prompts Shevek to reexamine
his individual choices in regard to Odo’s anarchy, concluding that Anarres has
become too systematic and must be shaken up. After the famine, Shevek chooses
to recreate anarchy on Anarres.
How does one choose such an existence,
to join the cycle of anarchy? Le Guin’s other noncyclical moment presents one
option: intentionality, with an acknowledgement it will not be easy. In the
final chapter, Shevek’s homecoming to Anarres differs from his exit: he brings
someone with him. Ketho is Hainish, the namesake of the Hainish cycle that,
chronologically, starts with The
Dispossessed. When Ketho informally requests to land with Shevek, he says:
“‘My race is very old [….] We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We
have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything.
Anarchism, with the rest. But I have
not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is
not new, each single life, then why are we born” (385)? Here forms the central
argument for cyclical anarchy: each life is new, each river changed, each home
unfamiliar, each anarchy recreated. Recorded history might declare anarchy a
failure, but you have not tried it.
The cycle must start somewhere.
The
Dispossessed joins the cycle by opening a door for the reader to voyage
home but returned changed by imagining a possible future, a home never visited
on a desert moon. Cyclical anarchy is not a damnation or expectance of
apocalypse. One of the joys of speculative literature is the ability to rewrite
the future and tell a different narrative. A practical element of that separate
narrative is returning home and investing in local communities. Such investment
breaks a system that expects the next generation to leave, whether for jobs,
education, or exploration. This voyage cannot be complete without the return: a
call to making a sustainable home. While not obviously anarchic, it disrupts the
US cultural system that privileges the voyage without return. If we can
dispossess ourselves of horror, fear, and lies about the climate crisis then a
future of solidarity through plenty and famine, a future of seasons and cycles,
a future of (re)creation awaits.
Works Cited
Berry,
Wendell. The Art of Loading Brush: New
Agrarian Writings. Counterpoint, 2017.
Jaeckle, Daniel P.
“Embodied Anarchy in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.” Utopian
Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2009,
pp. 75–95.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. Harper Voyager, 1994.
“Summary for
Policymakers.” International Panel on Climate Change, 2018, PDF.
