I bought The Dispossessed at an airport store on the way back from my younger sister’s college graduation. This broke my moving-induced book-buying moratorium, but I felt a pull toward the title. My apartment is in a state of messy, increasing emptiness as I prepare to move out of the Upper Valley after five years of building a home here. My goodbyes have been long and drawn out, and, after weeks of purging my belongings, saying goodbyes, and blasting “Supercut” by Lorde and the new Noah Kahan album on repeat, “dispossessed” resonated.
Ursula K. Le Guin published The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia in 1974. The novel is science fiction and follows Shevek, a man of the anarchist collectivist society called Annares. Annares, a desert planet, was settled and built by revolutionaries from neighboring planet Urras who rejected its autocratic and consumption-driven society and had a vision of a world devoid of individual power and rich in shared responsibility. Shevek is a theoretical physicist whose life work has been building to the creation of a technology that would enable instantaneous intergalactic communication. As his models develop, the government of Urras takes note and invites Shevek to visit and work further on his theory, an opportunity he takes.
The Dispossessed depicts a functioning anarchist society with detail and measure. There is famine, there is discontent, there is beauty, there is striving toward collective betterment. Le Guin uses the theoretical underpinnings of anarchy and collectivism to build a world in Annares so rich and complex it feels tangible. Freedom is a central driver for anarchism, and freedom of thought, freedom of exploration and critique, is part of that. Shevek, our protagonist, wrestles with his own critiques of the society he was born into and investigates the tension he feels between his ideals, his questions, and the reality of his life throughout the book.
World building is important in all science fiction, and acclimating to the world presented before you necessitates paying attention to what you are reading. I confess there were parts I skimmed over when Shevek and his philosopher counterparts got in the weeds about the theories they were developing. There were also parts I read two, three times because they challenged me or moved me or both, like this one:
We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know there is no hope for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are and what you give.
When I arrived in the Upper Valley as a hyper-independent 22-year-old, I came with no attachments, determined to chart a course that was mine and mine alone. I leave this place just shy of 28 with molecular-level gratitude for the ways I have been, and will continue to be, shaped by the people and places that have witnessed me Growing Up. I am taking with me nothing but a profound understanding of our connectedness (and whatever else fits in my car). Thank you for holding my empty hands in your own. It has been the joy of my life.
Michaela Lavelle loves people, books, and spaces where those things can come together. She recently stepped down as the director of the Quechee/Wilder Libraries in Hartford to take up work for a nonprofit in Cleveland.
