Very recently I have criticized Le Guin's _The Dispossessed_ for being
in stasis and lacking social control. My argument was weak and wrongly
directed: I failed to explain myself in talking about "social control"
(in fact there is not the lack but misuse of it) and could not form a
concrete position in the novel's being in *stasis*.
What I had in mind was some article written by Gregory Benford,
"Reactionary Utopias" in a book (if I remember right) called _Storm
Warnings_. I think his point is quite interesting:
"_The Dispossessed_ reeks with Old Testament themes and images, using
guilt as the principal social control. The founder, Odo, is the central
saint of a communal society. Her pain and suffering during nine years'
imprisonment _make possible_ the virtue of the later Anarres society ...
The impiled lesson is that utopia will not arrive until man comes to grip
with his own nature, which means in turn that a citizen is _born guilty_,
must repay Odo's pain with his submission to the general will and
society's precepts..." (p. 76)
So a child in Anarres cannot become a citizen until he/she undergoes an
implicit rite, I refer to the imprisonment game, symbolizing Odo's own
pains; it was described in extreme detail in the book. This religious
"first sin" theme seems to imply that Le Guin, as Benford claims, "avoids
the problems of a real utopia".
Following Terry Eagleton, questioning about a literary text's (in fact,
writer's) "silences" would help us read the text deeper. And Benford says:
"The principal ignored problem of Anarres is the problem of evil and
thus violence... Guilt (social conscience) simply overcomes such
discordant elements. In the middle of a drought in which people starve, no
matter how evenly shared, somehow no one thinks of taking up arms with
some friends and seizing, say, the grain reserves." (p. 77)
So no criminals, no insane people, no naturally violent types. And I
remember a prison camp in Anarres for unwanted people. Le Guin's silence,
along with the ambiguity.
Yet I do not mean to _blame_ her, I am not qualified to, for her
ideological silences about violence (which, as Benford claims, continue in
_The Eye of the Heron_). She is a science _fiction_ writer, for me one of
the best, and the real world does not have to matter for her. Still,
literary silences is a good point of discussing utopian literature.
Best Wishes,
EMRAH
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