Diego Lasarte’s book review. Posted from Stephen Boe’s account because I don’t have access to the blog.

Fidelity and the Concept of Nostos in The Dispossessed

“If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.” (334) This line is from, perhaps, the most moving passage of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. It takes place after Shevek returns home from work during the famine, seeing his partner Takver, and their child, for the first time in four years. He is filled with emotion—sadness at missing so much time with the woman he loves and pride at the important and difficult work he has accomplished—and is forced to reckon with the, often suffocating, march of time. But instead of feeling like the time he has missed has stifled him, he feels liberation in the very sacrifice he has made. 

“Fulfillment…is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a language inhabitable by human beings.” (334)

I choose this passage to center my review of this book, not only because of how much it moved me but because it gets to the kernel of what Le Guin has shown in her brilliant novel about an anarchist society living on a sparse, dusty moon. She has succeeded in a rare feat: creating an admirable, realistic utopia. She has shown that a truly anarchist, communitarian society could only exist in a world with minimal resources and no surplus of wealth. In other words, she creates a society that is rough and a way of life that is difficult and prone to suffering, and she shows that, contrary to the dominant negative views of suffering in our society, suffering is a necessity for building a strong and lasting family, community or society. 

This is principally because of two ideas: the importance of fidelity in finding freedom and a distrust in the virtue of pleasure. “The promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, [is] essential in the complexity of freedom.” Le Guin is arguing that imposing limits on one’s self is the only way a person can truly be free. It is a complex idea, difficult to grasp because of its seeming contradiction, but it makes more sense when you understand freedom as contingent on the freedom of others. This is where the mistrust of pleasure comes in. Basic market economics harness an individual’s desire and attempt to create a society out of everyone striving to make their life pleasurable as possible. This way of structuring society encourages shortcuts and devalues hard work. More than anything, it shrinks a life down to something that is only focused on the individual. 

This is why I find Shevek’s return to Takver so indicative of the beauty of this book. He has just spent years doing something difficult and not at all pleasurable, alone without the company of his family. But, in the process he has done something deeply human: he has taken care of others. By putting the needs of the collective ahead of his own needs, he has found a deeper satisfaction. This deep satisfaction has made the love he shares with Takver even better because their love does not stem from the search for pleasure of two individuals, it stems from a common commitment to fidelity and a loyalty to the world around them. Being with her is a homecoming, a Nostos, and the only reason he gets to feel the sweetness of returning to her, is because he left her out of loyalty to the world around him.      –Diego Lasarte