Talk:The Dispossessed
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I should re-read the book. IMHO Shevek is not an anachist. But is project is socially unacceptable.
- Shevek repeatedly views himself as a Odonian revolutionary, and the writings of Odo are repeatedly called anarchist.
Shevek is an anarchist worthy of Kropotkin.
(spoiler) Shevek is a scholar. The book is about academic freedom, and the impossibility thereof where there is classified and/or proprietary research.
" the possessive case is strongly discouraged. "
- I thought the point was that their constructed language had no possessives. - Omegatron June 30, 2005 02:31 (UTC)
If I understood correctly, the main characters are kind of reptilian, right? Yet the book cover shows a human. — Omegatron 17:13, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
Really? But as mentioned in stroy: in Uranus, women of fashion are bareheaded (that is, they do have hair to be barbered). Since reptilian have no hair... :p Caiyu(采豫) 02:38, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
- Hmmm.. It definitely said they were very hairy. Maybe I'm imagining the rest. I remember when they met the humans they thought the humans were very small and hairless and had different colored skin and too much fat on their faces, implying that the main characters were bony and hairy and tall and... non-pink. I'll have to re-read that section. — Omegatron 13:45, 19 October 2005 (UTC)
- I found a searchable version and searched for "hair":
The few women there were bald even on their heads; he realized at last that they must shave off all their hair, the very fine, soft, short body hair of his race, and the head hair as well. But they replaced it with marvelous clothing, gorgeous in cut and color,
The physicist glared, the veins on his temples bulging under the coarse, short hair.
"You are in the Embassy of Terra, Dr. Shevek. You are on Terran soil here. You are perfectly safe. You can stay here as long as you want"
The [human] woman's skin was yellow-brown, like ferrous earth, and hairless, except on the scalp; not shaven, but hairless. The features were strange and childlike, small mouth, low-bridged nose, eyes with long full lids, cheeks and chin rounded, fat-padded. The whole figure was rounded, supple, childlike.
- "Hairy reptilian" isn't the best way to say it, but I was remembering correctly. — Omegatron 02:19, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
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- Definitely not reptilian. I've read at least two other Ekumen novels that reference Cetians, the hairy bit is well-supported, everyone else is almost certainly mammalian.
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"An example is given where a little girl says to Shevek ...", is it ok that this example is made to be impersonal? The little girl referenced is Sadik, Shevek's daughter.
Contents |
[edit] Radio play adaptation
In the late 1980s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation presented a radio play version lasting approx. 6 half-hour segments. If I can dig up the details, I will add to the article. -- Slowmover 16:13, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Utopian Anarhism?
In the Fourth paragraph of the summary the last two words mention Utopian anarchism. That sounds to me like a shot at anarchism. Most anarchists do not consider anarchism utopian in the least. In fact, this book I believe shows that no society can be utopian.
[edit] Quotations
Should quotes be linked/wikiquote? --Wyrlss 07:34, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Reading The Dispossessed: The view from Switzerland
Re THEORIES. The meaning of the theories in the book weaves nicely into the plot..., the article tells us. Now, as Ms Le Guin would be the first to point out (as a matter of fact she's doing it at every occasion), trying to reduce fiction to ideas is foolishness. But it is also true that in our case the elephant in the room cannot be overlooked. The Dispossessed is all about linear time vs cyclical time, or, in the more poetical language of Eddington, time's arrow vs the circle. Ms Le Guin's defense (J'aime Shevek mais je ne le suis pas, etc etc) is fun to read but will not convince anyone who has read the book. Shevek's theories about time are (or were at least in 1974) Ms Le Guin's. To be more precise: they are the theories that Ms Le Guin distilled from articles by von Franz, Capek, and Schlegel in Fraser's anthology The Voices of Time. Everyone who knows this volume will immediately recognize the ideas that Shevek is trying to work into his unified theory. Ms Le Guin has, of course, never made a secret out of this. In 1975 she said in an interview for the Portland Scribe: It's called "The Voices of Time" ... Sequency and Simultaneity seem to be the basic question. As well as I understood it I tried to work it into the book.--BZ(Bruno Zollinger) 09:38, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
Re CIRCLES. An oft-quoted saying in the book is "True journey is return", the article informs us. Well maybe, but in order to know what the saying is supposed to express in its context, we have to be sure that we understand the meaning that the author gives to the terms "journey" and "return".
The title of the book might just as well have been "Shevek's Travels". But unlike Gulliver, Shevek does not observe anything with detachment. He is always involved. Not only his purely emotional and intellectual journeys, but also his physical travels are travels of the mind. And they are always movements within movements, which makes it often difficult (for both the reader and the protagonist) to know the direction that the journey is taking at a given moment. When Shevek travels from Anarres to Urras e.g., is he leaving home, or is he heading for home? The point is it doesn't matter all that much, because return, at least in the way the word is commonly interpreted, is not possible anyhow. In Chapter 2, Shevek, speaking clearly for the author, tries to explain what is only at first glance a paradox: You can't go home again, or, if you prefer, you can, but then home won't be there. You can, as Shevek puts it, ...so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been (p.55). In other words, what looks like a circle in x dimensions, might well turn out to be something quite different in x+1 dimensions.--BZ(Bruno Zollinger) 13:50, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Re ARROW. In the course of the novel Shevek, whose ideas about the circle of time are at first rather fuzzy, develops, with the help of Takver a better understanding of the concept. Cyclical time includes in his words biotemporality (roughly biological time) and eotemporality (roughly the temporal reality of the universe). But at a party in Urras, Shevek is badly shaken by a guest who holds that his Simultaneity theory, which he developed from cyclical time, ...denies the most obvious fact about time, the fact that time passes (p.221). The arrow of time (noetic time, or nootemporality in Shevek's words) cannot be denied. And to get to his unified theory, Shevek realizes that there is also an ethical aspect in the way human beings perceive time, and this aspect, which he calls sociotemporality will also have to be worked in.
So far, so good. Shevek has not achieved his goal as the novel ends, but we have to ask ourselves: How could he ever? There seems to be a factor tnat he (and the author) just haven't payed enough attention to: ENTROPY. Entropy increase gives us the direction of time's arrow. That is what the Second Law of Thermodynamics teaches us.--BZ(Bruno Zollinger) 09:35, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
