In 1974, Ursula Le Guin published the fifth novel in what later became known as the Hainish Cycle, with an interesting main and sub titles: “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia.” The novel quickly won many awards, and became, after its publication, part of a literary movement that was taking shape between the sixties and the eighties of the last century, a movement that Tom Moylan later called critical utopia. Thus, a new concept was added to the other classic concepts of utopia and dystopia, a concept whose features were not completely clear. Rather, the question of the essence of critical utopia and whether the concept is fundamentally different from other concepts – dystopia in particular – is an issue that has been addressed by many studies. This article is an attempt to champion critical utopia by demonstrating the importance of the concept as an independent field of research, as research that transcends the boundaries of other concepts.
The first question that can be asked here: Why? What can be gained from separating critical utopian literature from other genres, even if the separation is only theoretical or at the level of approach?
There is a main point that needs to be raised here, and it is the point by which critical utopia works are distinguished from others: the essential dialectics. In general, it can be said that critical utopias move beyond traditional, rigid tags towards the processes that produce these tags. In other words, in the same context as the subtitle “Ambiguous Utopia,” these works subject the descriptions of utopia and dystopia, for example, to a question that attempts to answer questions such as: whose utopia? What makes a world dystopian? Rather, what is the reality for which a utopia has become the opposite?
I do not aim here to draw the boundaries of criticism and what does or does not fall under it. What concerns me here is that utopian literature stems from the process of change and production itself more than from the final product itself, so to speak. That is, it represents a critical discourse that targets the structure and processes existing within it.
In order to champion critical utopia, in this article I will attempt to compare the concepts of critical utopia and dystopia to prove that they constitute two different approaches even if they address similar themes. Here I present a reading of two literary works: Brave New World by the British novelist Aldous Huxley, and The Dispossessed by the American novelist Ursula Le Guin. Huxley’s novel is usually classified as a dystopian novel, while Ursula’s novel is classified as a critical utopia. I chose these two novels specifically because they represent their literary genre par excellence.
But before discussing all of that, it is necessary to provide a brief review of the assumptions involved in forming the body of the thesis and identify its shortcomings. The first assumption concerns the meaning of utopia, dystopia, and critical utopia. Since these three concepts form the basis for everything that follows, it is important to establish structural definitions that explain how the concepts relate to each other and are distinguished at the same time.
I begin first with utopia, the concept that I believe is the most widespread of the three. The concept of utopia itself can be defined as an imaginary place where life is perfect, where there is no injustice, no fear, no treachery, and no sorrows. Likewise, a utopian literary work becomes “a matter of attitude, as a kind of reaction to an undesirable present and an aspiration to overcome all difficulties by the imagination of possible alternatives.” Utopia, then, begins from a present towards the opposite of all its disadvantages, so to speak.
But the pursuit of utopia may not actually end in achieving it, it may instead lead to dystopia. Dystopia in this context is an inverted utopia, as it constitutes a defect in the integration of the whole. Although dystopia is the opposite of utopia, they both take place within the same frameworks. Both are imagined as entities that extend spatially and geographically, as collective ideals, as antitheses to a particular reality. This means that they are embodied in space and time, and that they are represented as a lived reality for those who live in them. In addition, they both revolve within a systemic orbit, so to speak, which means that they are related to the political, economic, and cultural dimensions and the consequences of their interaction on society.
What then remains for critical utopia? Is it a combination of both or just an intermediary concept? The truth is that it is difficult to determine what the concept is without delving even slightly into its historical origins. The concept of critical utopia began to emerge as a literary movement in the sixties, and it is rooted in the multiple social movements in America at that time. Because the movements are centered around issues of social democracy, feminism, sovereignty policies, and others, the concept crystallized within the horizon in which these conflicts and their effects are evident. As Moylan also points out, critical utopian works are distinguished from utopias and dystopias by their disclosure or expression of the process of social change in its occurrence, as it is “awareness of the limits of the utopian legacy” in confronting reality and reformulating the way things are. This means that critical utopian works are not a draft of what extends spatially and geographically (such as utopia and dystopia), and are not merely a subverted projection of reality as it is, but rather an attempt to “challenge and undermine the structures of dominant political forces,” an attempt to lay the foundations upon which the phenomena in question are based. In addition to all of this, critical utopian works do not address the processes of social change as a matter of history or documentation, but rather subject them to ideal conceptions of what is supposed to be or not be. That is, they derive their criticism from the utopian and dystopian heritage with the aim of demarcating awareness of the limits of ideals.
Here I quickly give an illustrative example. The theme Utopia derives its name from Thomas More’s novel published at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It tells what Raphael – one of the novel’s characters – narrates about the island of Utopia and the perfect life there. In Raphael’s description of Utopia, we see him referring to the political-economic system, slavery, religion, private property, and so on. Regardless of what Utopia includes, we see that the aforementioned themes are all related to a specific European reality, meaning that full life on the island depends on the opposite of some concerns and phenomena that were present in some regions of Western Europe in the sixteenth century. If the novel had been reformulated within a critical utopian framework, it might have been possible, for example, to shed light not on the contradiction between private property and public property, but on what property means to different groups of society and the effects of those perceptions. In other words, the novel in its new form will address relationships and processes without giving this or that outcome absolute value.
The only thing remaining before analyzing the two novels is to identify the shortcomings of the article. First, since the article deals with only two novels, the literary genres will be approached in light of their typicality. In other words, the article will analyze dystopia and critical utopia through their most prominent manifestations and typification in the two works. Secondly, because the approach is limited to some typical dimensions, the article is unfortunately forced to depict the two concepts at a single historical moment, that is, it analyzes them in a way that transcends their roots and direct historical developments.
As I mentioned above, the purpose of this article is to emphasize the importance of critical utopia as an independent field of research. In order to do this, I will compare its concept with dystopia by analyzing the two novels, Brave New World, first, and The Dispossessed, second. I focus the comparison on two main themes that the two works share: the nature of the political system, and the protagonist’s internal struggle. To facilitate the approach, I will discuss the manifestations of each point in both novels before moving on to the next point.
The state in Huxley’s novel is a global state that includes the entire planet, and its name is literally “the World State.” The World State is run by those who are characterized as observers or managers of the world, so to speak (or “The Controllers of the world,” if we want it to be a literal translation). The mission of the World Controllers is to maintain the stability of the status quo by regulating artificial generation, social predestination, and conditioning, as well as by promoting a kind of collective anesthesia through soma pills. The nature of the totalitarian world state is evident from the president’s first words while giving him a tour of the hatchery and conditioning center: “that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”
It is also possible to derive more information about the World State from its motto: “Community, Identity, and Stability.” The truth is that arranging priorities in the motto itself is a political act. In order to preserve community, people must be molded into obedience and harmony, that is, community must be harmonious. Because this harmony depends on the reconciliation of different groups with each other, it is necessary to create an identity that honors and glorifies this difference. This is what prompted the state of the world to create a genetic identity in hatchery centers, where embryos are modified (if they can be called that) and then psychologically conditioned in the stages of infancy and early childhood to perpetuate and normalize classism, and to establish the idea that climbing the social ladder – whether on the individual or group level – is a matter essentially outside of nature. As for stability, the president’s quote above is sufficient to clarify it. All three values in the slogan work in the interest of happiness and virtue, in the interest of the stability of the world state.
What does it all mean? First of all, it means the absence of any sense of one’s true uniqueness. The priority is society and the harmony of society, and all its members are shaped and determined by the social class to which they are admitted to live in. In addition, the absence of uniqueness means that everyone (or members of each class, rather) are equal. If it were not for the existence of the “Savage Reservation” in which “primitive” humans lived, there would not have been any concept of the other in the narrative. That is, all the characters in the novel would have been citizens of the World State, with selves absent from the larger collective.
The importance of these aspects becomes clear when they are compared to their counterparts in the novel The Dispossessed. Unlike the unified World State in Huxley’s novel, Ursula locates the events of her novel in an interplanetary system made up of several planets. The two main planets in the novel are Anarres and Urras. The relationship between these two planets is complex. The descendants of the Anarres people are descendants of anarchists who rejected the condition of life on Urras and came to the dry and uninhabitable planet of Anarres with the aim of establishing a new social order different from Urras. Coverley describes this society as “an anarchist society without government control or any form of authoritarian institution.” It is worth noting that the planet Urras is very much an analogue of Earth, as all descriptions throughout the novel indicate that it is. This means that Anarres is the utopian opposite of Urras, and that the relationship between them transcends spatial difference.
From the first chapters of the novel, regardless of the exhausting life on Anarres, the narration gives the reader the imagination that life on the planet Urras is worse than that. In fact, one of the propaganda films about life on Urras depicts it as if it were the greatest evil, as if misfortunes and tragedies were part of its nature. The film was being shown to a girl from Anarres, and the passage is worth quoting in full:
They had also seen the corpses of children, hairy like themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and lighting it. “A famine in Bachifoil Province in the Nation of Thu,” the commenter’s voice had said. “Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches.
In the context of the film, this heartbreaking image of children is set against the luxurious life of the landed class of Urras, the class that controls various Institutions. This comparison would frame the utopian and dystopian dimensions of the two planets.
A review of the state structure in the two novels above indicates many comparable themes. In contrast to the harmonious totalitarian state of Huxley’s novel, the world of The Dispossessed is essentially pluralistic, that is, it contains many possible social and political configurations. In other words, while there could be no other political system next to Huxley’s World State (even the Savage Reservation was administered by the state and could not be considered an independent system), Ursula constructed anarchist, democratic, and socialist societies and included them in her novel. These two points (inclusiveness and pluralism) are rooted in the socio-economic conditions in which the dystopian and critical utopian dimensions crystallized. The novel Brave New World was published in 1932 AD, in the period between the two world wars, the same period in which nationalist ideological tendencies emerged and the military arms race accelerated. In addition, for example, the wholesale theme in the novel (such as wholesale culture and wholesale control) can be read through Huxley’s strong views on the Americanization of Europe, on mass consumption, and on other similar ideas. This means that the institutions of the world state can be viewed as a projection of what the future resulting from these phenomena will become, resulting from what Huxley felt was a descent into dystopia.
On the other hand, the novel The Dispossessed was published in 1974 AD, during a period of political uprisings, civil rights movements, the Cold War, and changing global balances of power. The pluralistic dimensions of Ursula’s novel were formed, then, in light of these phenomena and under the influence of them. But what is happening in the novel The Dispossessed is very different from what is happening in Huxley’s novel, as in The Dispossessed there is a kind of evolutionary process, so to speak. The concepts here are nothing but social constructs, and the relativity of these concepts changes with the passage of the events and time of the novel. The clearest example of this idea relates to how different planets are depicted in the narrative. Neither Anarres nor Urras are absolute dystopias, but rather they alternate this role in the narrative, or at least from the point of view of its hero. In other words, the labels of utopia and dystopia shift from the structure of the narrative itself to an angle linked to the individual’s position within the system. This ambiguity in defining concepts and not giving them an absolute, fixed value is accompanied in the novel by expressing the process of social change that lies at the heart of the quest for utopia, and it is, as I mentioned, one of the characteristics of critical utopian works.
The proposal has so far been limited to the nature of the state in its institutions, or in the direct political system. Huxley’s novel contains a totalitarian state, and Le Guin’s novel contains two different systems that cannot be described in isolation from the position of individuals within them. But the relationship between different contexts and the individuals living within these contexts remains ambiguous until now. Can the viewpoints of characters in a novel be given real consideration, or do we have to place them within the framework that the narrative seeks to construct?
The truth is that answering this question is not easy. Individuals (and personalities as well) are sons and daughters of their environments to a greater extent than they imagine, as they are greatly shaped by the intellectual frameworks embedded in these environments. But the relationship between the individual and the environment in which he grows up is not a unilateral relationship, as awareness of alternatives or options motivates individuals to reshape their reality or change it. Therefore, the frameworks in which the characters of the two novels live affect the way they deal with reality and their perception of how things are supposed to be. This relationship between individuals and society, or rather its manifestations in the two novels, is the focus of the next point.
Bernard Marx, Huxley’s main protagonist, belongs to the highest social class: the alpha+ class. However, he is not satisfied with the way things are going. This state of dissatisfaction is not due to his “innate” physical defect compared to other Alpha+s, but rather to his belief that he deserves more than he already has. For example, in his critique of the common view of love, desire, and sex, he describes members of his class as “intellectually mature in times of work […], and infants in terms of feelings and desire,” a description linked to his jealousy of Lenina and her choice of sexual partners. Rather, Bernard’s comment on his inevitable “usefulness” to society is another example of his dissatisfaction:
“How I can? […] How is it that I can’t, or rather-because, after all, I know quite well why I can’t-what would it be like if I could, if I were free-not enslaved by my conditioning.”
Regardless of Bernard’s views on life in a World State, “free” in the context of his speech does not necessarily mean liberation to alternative systems. In fact, his attempt to use the John the Savage in the novel as a means to ascend the social ladder, in addition to his fear of being exiled to Iceland, are evidence that he aspired to possess power within the existing status quo. For him, the world is fixed, and the alternative or main choice is part of the world itself.
Through Bernard’s position towards the World State and the current situation in it, one can discern his helplessness, so to speak, as he knows full well that he, as an individual, is unable to change reality. There is another point worth mentioning in the same context. Warfield argues that John the Savage’s initiation into the world state” was actually intended to undermine the system, as a result of the introduction of an external actor. But I do not think this idea is entirely logical. When we take into account that the Savage Reservation itself is part of the World State, and that John’s initiation was administered by the regime itself, this initiation appears to be nothing more than an attempt by Bernard to ascend the social ladder and a means of strengthening the regime according to Mustapha Mond.
Shevek’s case in the novel The Dispossessed has similar and different characteristics at the same time. Like Bernard, Shevek is also dissatisfied with the current situation in his home planet of Anarres, as from the beginning he acted as if he were a savior aiming to achieve reconciliation, harmony and universal peace, and this despite those who opposed Anarres. In fact, his main goal on the day he left Anarres for Urras was from the beginning uniting the two worlds and ending the severe discord between them. However, as he began to realize the political dimensions of what seemed to be non-political (such as his research in physics), his ideas about social change began to mature more, as he began to realize that his ideal dreams of academic freedom in Urras, for example, were not independent of the evils existing in some regions of the planet. His joining the revolution in Benbili is only one of the pieces of evidence of this maturity.
Another piece of evidence of maturity, which chronologically precedes the first one, is related to Shevek’s awareness of the limits of Anarrasian utopia. Coverley believes that Shevek’s attempt to fulfill his scientific ambitions made him a social outcast on Anarres. This ostracism is self-evident in the context of challenging the status quo on Anarres, the status quo of fundamental anarchist rebellion against Urras in general. Because every society at any point in time contains ideals that individuals share in one way or another, it is possible to understand what made Shevek an outcast on his planet, since Urrasian science, as I mentioned before, is not an independent entity from the same system that produces misfortunes, and therefore Shevek’s pursuit of scientific development appears to be a pursuit of Urrasian ideals that is fundamentally at odds with the foundations on which the Anarres anarchist society was based.
But the situation in Anarres has a puzzling feature. It was founded in the beginning, as I said, as the result of an anarchist rebellion, that is, the result of a rebellion that aimed from the beginning to overthrow all ideals. The following quote from the novel supports the idea: “The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.” Shevek’s endeavor to surpass the existing limitations of scientific research on Anares can be regarded as an emergent “revolution”. This is because the principle of permanent revolution is predicated on the elimination of rigidity, which would in a way announce the conclusion of the revolution. In other words, the moment Shafiq collided with social boundaries was the moment he began searching for a revolution against the existing system, for a solution that would change the root of the existing situation. It was the moment Shevek sought to return to the authentic Odonian principles in response to the ossification of the permanent revolution.
It should now be clear that the role of individual consciousness in dystopian literature is fundamentally different from that of critical utopian literature. In dystopia, the individual acknowledges a fixed and inevitable system, and seeks to reduce its negative consequences or escape to its opposite. This opposite may be limited to [….], while critical utopian literature is characterized by the awareness that the balance of power is fluid, which enables the individual to express the mechanisms of social change.
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