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Craig White's text-guide |
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Ursula K. Le Guin (21 October 1929 – 22 January 2018) The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1968) |
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Other Le Guin texts with utopian / dystopian themes
The Word for World Is Forest (1972, 1976)
"The Ones who walk away from Omelas" (1973)
Always Coming Home (1985)
Le Guin bibliography on Wikipedia
Terms (or names).
Ainsetain: Einstein
ammar = brother; ammari = brothers (Pravic language)
ansible (276) 344 "a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space." . . . cf. telephone.
apocopation < apocope: omission of the last letter or sound of a word
archist (not in Oxford English Dictionary): opposite of anarchist: one who admits of no ruling power; an advocate or promoter of anarchy
anarchy: 1.a. Absense of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence
or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder.
compare archical (adj.) Of the nature of rule; governmental
chronon (248): A fundamental or indivisible interval of time; spec. a hypothetical quantum of time, postulated in various physical and philosophical theories
Divlab = Division of Labor
kleggich = physical labor (184)
levy (246) OED 1.b. The action of enrolling or collecting men for war or other purposes [e.g. labor draft on Anarres]
Nuchnibi: Anaressti who keep moving
portative: musical instrument (174)
Pravic (96) 339 "the only rationally invented language that has become the tongue of a great people"
syndic = unionized worker (from syndicate, syndicalism)
Terrans + people from Earth
transilience: OED A leaping from one thing to another, an abrupt transition: spec. in Min. abrupt transition of one mineral or rock into another.
343 Transilience: "instantaneious transferral of matter across space. Space
travel . . . without traversal of space of lapse of time."
Notes for course:
weakness of course: 1. no pc-based utopias; Whole Earth Catalog? 2. no domestic middle-class suburban utopia?
re #1: outside view of computers; cf. change of railroads telescoping time and space
humans as social creatures
utopia as mimesis of whole world, society
child-rearing
one essential feature as key to all mysteries?
irony; UKLG proverbs, aphoristic style
report / discussion on TV Handmaid's Tale
absence of personal computers indicates profundity of change
opening class: 2 strains of Western Civilization > Genesis-Revelation & Republic
Le Guin style
aphorism
380 Anarres timelessly circling, creating time [crasis, paradox?]
Characters
Notes
Ch. 1
1 a wall, boundry, two faced [paradox]
no gardens, children
2 quarantine
only boundary wall in their world
woman, foreman: "brothers"
3 real crowd, 100 or more
Oddies
metal phallic object
4 members of community, not elements of collectivity
no firearms > knives
5 The Minful
holum
moonthorn
6 foreign language: Iotic
7 Dr. Shevek > Shevek
the one law held
8 first Urrasti
Takver and children, Peace and Plenty
unbuild walls
9 given up birthright of decision
He was time: river, arrow, storm
10 non-automatic water valve
locked door > rage, violence
11 lock in, lock out, same thing [paradox]
pajamas?
12 burn paper?
same grandmother, 200 years ago
13 costs less to burn than clean
I cannot buy
14 Odo: other as pseudo-species
religious bigot, Epiphanist recites Primes
15 relationships the other could not see
15 Urras: no religion outside churches, no morality outside laws
15 Pravic: religion = "freedom"
Categories, Modes
16 lavish, stylish, inventive
no women on ship, not woman's work
17 Anarres: person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength. What does sex have to do with it?
men stronger, but machines?
feminine delicacy, masculine self-respect
highly intelligent women, think just like a man
18 superiority, inferiority essential to Urrasti live
Odo's time: marriage or prostitution; sanctions or copulation in economic mode
softness of the bed, erotic
19 a woman in every table top [sexualization of commodities]
ammar, brother
20 cool damp many-scented mild
First Man from the Moon
21 grief and recognition [pity and terror?] [catharsis]
towers, glass, electric light, no faces
Nio Esseia
forest
22 donkey face, no large animals
23 Nation A-Io
the Twin Planets
long titles and honorifics
a room, "his"
25 You have your anarchist
Ch. 2
26 11 babies in room, communal nursery
Palat
27 Rulag
27 Mine sun! Not yours . . . to use, share
27-8 can't have things. What's wrong with you
29-30 intellectual form or figure, cf. Plotinus, Platonic idea
31 decads
32 book green, Circle of Life
32 adolescent couple, room
33 primal number = unity and plurality
33 dream, line, wall, stone
cornerstone, voice of dear familiarity [sf] [lit of ideas]
34 "prisons" Life of Odo
35 Orderered them? What if?
lure of perversity
girls eliminated
Tirin
37 Tirin's satirical, play acting
38 profiteer
role was playing them [paradox, inversion]
39 lie, secret power
altruistic > respect myself
41 earth = moon
42 propertied class [want more]
unpropertied
how would we know it
43 fear of infection . . . analogy
only know what we're told
44 Hate not functional
Go to Urras?
45 We are Anarres
false option of obedience to law
46 the improbability of the real
46 afforestation--geologic era--Causative Reversibility (Auroville)
danger of utopian details, but preview of labor
47 scripture? < Odo? < miner song
tadde, mamme
48 immoral to do work you didn't enjoy [> News from Nowhere]
49 proud of work done together
parntered
50 life partnership x Odonian ethic
50 Having's wrong, sharing's right [aphorism, inversion]
Gimar
rejection
Shevet: profiteer
51 meither offended nor attracted by simple violence
accepted the gift
sexual experience freely with boys and girls
Beshun
52 women x-Odonian, want to own you
52 man wants freedom, woman wants property
copulate: something two people did
54 women + babies = propertarians
54 exploration / journey (+ return)
55 General Temporal Theory
55 Can go home again, place never been
56 Mitis,s he
57 light from the window [cf. childhood scene]
58 false egalitarianism
59-60 spatial representation of time as rhythm
60 suffering is misunderstanding
A society can only relieve social suffering . . . the rest remains, the root, the reality
61 the self that suffers
reality: love, solidarity, Pain never misses
62 brotherhood begins in shared pain [aphorism
Chapter 3
64 plumbing!
66-7 servant
70 Terra, Einstein
72 realm of inequity, equals
idea, nature of
73 where are women?
76 no government on Anarres
77 pile of newspapers (no e-media)
79 Cetians < Terrans (Cetus?): Cetus = constellation Cetus, named for Greek sea monster; source of "cetacean": of or having to do with whales
80 telefax
the wall [conversational]
81 manners as morals
82 ecological control x excesses of Ninth Millennium
82 initiative to work: external (profit) x internal
85 computers
86 transilience; faster than light
89 Paradise for those who make Paradise
84 Odo's grant: To be whole is to be part; / true voyage is return [aphorism]
Chapter 4 [back on Anarres > Abbenay via dirigible]
91 great walled field, the Port
92 Anarres = mining colony (cf. 1st and 3rd World trade; neo-Colonialism)
93 Defense work, lure of romance: loneliness . . . danger . . . spaceships
93 Ang Hos, Garden of Mind, Eden of Anarres < astro-priests
94 Ninth Millennium, self-plundring
94 Thu colony
95 Odo's plans based on generous grounds of Urras
x-pre-urban, pre-industrial
anarchism product of high civilization
95 ideal of complex organicism
96 computers
Pravic, new language
97 parabolic mirrors, solar heat for refineries
wind turbines
cellular texture
98 "Excess is excrement."
99 children around + learning center
101 The Social Organism
102 closed door of his own room
104 chronotopology; simultaneity principles > profiteering crap
physics, not religion
105 knowledge x share
106-7 "tenth day" rotational labor + 107 janitorial (decad)
108 Frequency, Cycle
108 Gvarab
109 equality x dominate
110 solitude = disgrace
110-11 solitaries & hermits
111 single room right kind of place for his kiind of work
111 organic-socieital conscience
112 responsibility justifies privilege
112 unified theory of Time
114 Reversibility
117 bargained like profiteers,x-battle, > sale
unadmitted profit contract
120 Rulag!
121 metacosmology
121 working 8 hours a day!
123 first year, individual contact
123 he was parental, as I am not. The work comes first.
123 proud of you . . . Unreasonable Propertarian
124 biologically mother and son > brother and sister [hierarchy > egalitarian]
125 incoherence of time
dark at the foot of the wall
Chapter5
126 open class, anarchist young
127 libertarian
freedom from want, but free trade?
128 grades = competitive distinctions
aristocrats
129 not free fromanything, only free to do anything [cf Aunt Lydia in Handmaid's Tale: freedom from, not freedom to
no wives, no families. No women at all
130-1 greed, laziness, envy assumed to move all man's acts
131 Urrasti clothes and shoes
132 no relation but possession
133 resemblance to Rulag
135 capitalist economy, plutocratic-oligarchic state
social cooperation, mutual aid > survive (Anarres)
138 Chifoilisk: scientific disinterest, brotherly love x profit economy
139 Odo, Social Organism: "To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws."
142 mankind overinclusive
Hainish interstellar colonists
143 Atro: law of existence is struggle, best survive
transilience
144 the means are the ends to us Odonians
144 pain brings men together
145 private houses?
Oiie's house, characteristic Ioti double arches
conspicuous expense > 146 grace through restraint
146 Principle of Superiority
147 chivalry
147 a very small range of freedom
148 typo
149 dirty work? > community management or block committee
150 work for the work's sake--done together > lasting pleasure of life [work as pleasure]
Chapter 6
154 decad = ten-day week
154 Desar
155 rigid Odonianism: UKLG simultaneously represents, criticizes
156 music done, not listened to
arts = crafts = basic techniques of life [Morris]
157 drama = "the Art"
158 born to be alone
161 the wall
163 Bedap as the Promised Man, true and native Odonian
164 You've come up against the wall.
four decads = 40 days
165 public opinion = power structure
166 archistic bureaucracy
167 Anarres too poor to support civilization
cooperation becomes obedience
169 Tirin, asylum, public reprimand (cf. 176)
172 Bedap and Shevek bed
174 typo?
174 Salas, composer, instrument: the portative
175 dysfunctional music
175-6 cicle comes back to profiteering utilitarianism
176 Crticism Session (cf. 169)
176 typo
177 Takver
178 moonthorn
180 Takver: I need the bond
182 new clothes > partnership
183 Occupations of Uninhabited Space
they became expeerts in each other
184 Divlab computers
184 kleggich = physical labor
185 three oceans, isolated, full of life, insular evolution
exuberance as essential quality of life
186 lithopophagous bacteria
marine biology a real web
187 work week, decad: 5-7 hours daily, 2-4 days off
188 Odo's husband Asieo
Chapter 7
Sister World
193 let a wall be built around her
Efor
apocopation < apocope: omission of the last letter or sound of a word
Nioti (working people?)
197 Pravic names from computer
201 radio > 202 ads for sale
202 telefax
204 property as bargaining power
General Temporal Theory
211 a humorous and sympathetic complicity (candy clerk)
212-13 a body profiteer . . . the woman in the table
216 you're funny, too
219 hurt another, hurt myself
220 law of human evolution, strongest = social, ethical
222 eternal return
223 arrow, circle of time
225 chronosophy
226 neither pure sequency or pure unity
Our model fo the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos
229 the wall, the wall
229 "You are too much." [70s talk]
231 the Chief . . . the Forerunner, before the Millennium
232 peasant from Utopia?
Chapter 8
233 Abbenay, Park (cf. Urras no parks, land too valuable)
Insurrection Day
The Settler
234 "bet you"--Iotic verb; damn x-Pravic > Iotic (cf. Hebrew?)
235 single language
236 drought
Great Drought, desalinization plants
20 million on Anarres; holum: leaf, seed, fiber, root (cf bison?)
237 Takver pregnant
238 egoistic divagation
239 no hierarchy: solidarity with syndic x alone
240 propaganda value
241 complete manuscript handwritten
242 [labor scene]
244 Odonian partnership
freedom to change made promise meaningful
245 Odo's femininity, refusal of real sexual freedom
molestation rare, complete fulfillment the norm
246 levies separate partners
years 163-4 drought
247 hardship > labor > solidarity
mutual trust allays depression, anxiety; "We'll see each other through."
249 Bedap aphorism
251 Abbenay "blocks"--cf. More's Utopia neighborhoods
telephone calls, letters unsealed--public and private economies the same
252-3 letters [epostolary novel]
254 Separate narrator: "Shevek never got this letter"
255 town refuses to share food with train
256 easy to share when enough
"their" walls and property
258 up against the wall
He could go no further , yet he must move
262 veerbal or moral stammer
drought > priorities?
265 gear physics to practicality
267 an atlas
268 human / computer network of files in Divlab
269 work / play no difference in Pravic
Chapter 9
273 locked in jail, how act as a free man
276 ansible
278 Terrans intellectual, imperialists, jealous, wall builders
Ainsetain
279 "Number the Indisputable"
unifying field theory > quantum theory brings high technological yields
280 . . . was not of which all the elements were, provably true
a simple tautology?
improvability of hypothesis of real co-existence
unity of sequency and simultaneity
the wall was down
281 the moment was gone . . . he was in its keeping
no more walls
285 Efor: "the owners"
285 Nobody goes hungry while another eats.
287 Atro: Odonianism womanish
microphone, spy eye
289 Tuio Maedda
295 Tonight's tonight
295 Odonians? Partly syndicalists, libertarians . . . Thuvianists, Socialist Workers Union, anti-centralist
295 Not just b/c of your idea, but you are anidea
anarchism made flesh
297 write what you like--we'll get it printed
298 green Circle of Life (Anarres no flag)
The Hymn of the Insurrection
300 Our suffering, not love, brings us together [aphorism]
All you have is what you are, and what you give
300-01 sharers, not owners
helicopters, machine guns [assault weapons]
303 all doors locked. Property was private.
303 a Socialist worker
305 sergeants give privates orders, coercive mechanism
Chapter 10
308 Southwest Anarres x-water; rockmoss
311 aphorism
the famine years in the Dust
312 people x numbers
313 carog dirigible
319 learning-center, dormitory
319 spoil Sadik, being propertarian
320 uneasy splendor
321 ammari
compassion, the charity of equals
323 drought broke winter 167
324 connection between aesthetic and acquisitive
325 "Oh, beauty!"
Occupation of Uninhabited Space
327 Tirin's play (utopian art)
329 every crisis > increment of bureaucratic machinery
the way it was, is, has to be done
330 nuchnibi? lies, fortunetelling
social conscience dominates individual conscience
created crime of propertarians
331 built walls around ourselves . . . laws / walls [pun]
pregnant women no ethics--biological, not social
> 332 women as property
332 flexility and precision of Pravic > unforeseen metaphors
I learn slowly, but I learn.
332 printing syndicate
Those who build walls are their own prisoners . . . unbuild walls
333, 311 Getting time on your side, working with it, not against it
333 cellular function
individual: poweer of moral choice, change = essential life function
permanent revolution
334 work engages with others, x-isolated
process was all, x-stopping anywhere, therefore substance and duration
evade suffering = evade sense of joy
Chapter 11 [extended dialogue]
336 Urrasti Council of World Governments in Rodarreal, old capital, one hour from Nio Esseia
337 Terran Embassy, 1400 years
338 Terran, alien, black face, "Mai-god"
Terran woman > ambassador, Keng (339)
339 Pravic: "the only rationally invented language that has become the tongue of a great people"
Keng 60, not 30
340 "eleven light years from my Earth"
341 (sf) a transmitter, relay through Hainish ship
Hain and Terra
342 Anarres "an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism"
343 threaten . . . with the annihilation of space
343 Transilience: "instantaneious transferral of matter across space. Space travel . . . without traversal of space of lapse of time."
344 Ansible: Men cannot leap the great gaps, but ideas can
344 "a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space." . . . cf. telephone.
simultaneity is identity
the Nine Known Worlds
"And what will you say?"
345 Anarres "cut ourselves off" [utopia as separation, isolation]
alternatives to selling? . . . the gift?
private profit > common good
346 x-behind a wall
346 nothing on Urras that we need
347 Hell is Urras.
Keng: as close as any to Paradise
full of evils, full of good > alive . . . with hope
Earth (Terra) a ruin . . . did not adapt
348 You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert
9 billion > 1/2 billion
plastics don't adapt
we failed as a social species
charity of the Hainish . . . altruits . . . moved by a guilt
total centralizaation, control, rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into labor force
349 forfeited our chance for Anarres centuries ago
"You don't understand what time is."
Urras not real, not stable or solid. Things change, change
cannot have present unless accept with past and future . . . only their reality makes the present real.
we are the key
Chapter 12
352 Syndicate of Initiative
PDC: no parliamenary procedure
352 Benbili Odonian Society
353 Rulag
354 uncontrollable chain of events
359 free individual responsible for own acts > society lives, changes, adapts, survives
revolution our obligation, hope of evolution
364 basic societal bond: fear of the stranger
366 print . . . the walls are down
367 the walls behind the walls
commons coordinated city-wide by a computer
374 individual love > risk of pain
374 Here I'm walled in.
379 We'll make a new community, an Anarres beyond Anarres
Chapter 13
380 Anarres timelessly circling, creating time [crasis, paradox?]
381 near-lightspeed ship (Davenant)
381 balance between opulence of Arras, austerity of Anarres < grace of long practice
a meditative people, the Hainish . . . little spontaneity
384 building more walls
walk through the wall with me
335 civilized for a thousand millennia
sunlights differ; only one darkness [aphorism]
386 walk through this wall with me?
