Another reference work by Ursula Le Guin, “The Dispossessed” has just been released in France in a new edition.
Ursula Le Guin is a major figure in imaginary literature. She has distinguished herself in both fantasy and science fiction, with an anthropological perspective on “elsewhere” and “otherwise”. His name generally echoes his major work: The Left Hand of Night. This SF masterpiece was recently released in a beautiful hardcover edition by Robert Laffont.
The same publishing house has just published, this month of March 2022, a collector’s edition of another book by this author: The Dispossessedoriginally published in 1974. This new edition is enhanced by a revised translation by Sébastien Guillot, a preface by David Meulemans and an afterword by Élisabeth Vonarburg.
Rarely has a book benefited from such a magnificent container: this collector’s edition, hardcover, makes you want to be read as much as to be kept preciously in our library like a little treasure.
A planet called Anarres
As often, with Ursula Le Guin, the work is based on a journey from one culture to another, very different from each other. The Dispossessed presents us with a duality of this type: two twin but deeply opposed planets. There is first of all Anarres, whose name is a good indication: it is an anarchist utopia, but above all an ambiguous utopia, because total freedom there is counterbalanced by severe poverty and harshness of the life in community. Opposite, Urras, which is none other than a temple of capitalism under the aegis of a centralizing state where the cult of profit oppresses all individuality.
On Anarres, Dr. Shevek, a brilliant physicist, develops high-level scientific theories, combining both mathematics and social disciplines such as ethics. But although freedom reigns in Anarres, some of Shevek’s projects are disturbing, contrast with majority opinions, confront a gradual revival of bureaucratic constraints. He then decided to undertake a trip to Urras, to create bridges between lifestyles, reopen dialogue, and disseminate his scientific hypotheses more widely.
Ursula Le Guin’s anthropological approach has rarely been as palpable as in this novel. The author explores, in particular, the role of language in mental representations – the use of the possessive being prohibited in the anarchist society of Anarres, for example.
There is in The Dispossessed, an underlying questioning of the very notion of utopia. Although the planet Anarres is ruled by a functioning anarchy, it is not perfect. Despite her strong coherence between her ideas and her reality, she is subjected to the test of time, and as soon as she freezes just a little, she tenses up, fractures. Without the winds of change, even a functional utopia becomes dysfunctional.