your heart, dispossessed

[metaphortunate]

THE TWENTY-YEAR-OLD AT THE SKETCHY CORNER PHONE REPAIR PLACE FIXED MY PHONE.

Yay!

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I've been thinking about Allison's iconic line from The Breakfast Club:

When you grow up, your heart dies.

I mean. There's some truth to it, isn't there?

One of the biggest parts of growing up, for me, has been slowly trying to grind it into my head that the world doesn't give a single solitary shit about my heart. The world cares about my hands. And what I do with them. That's the only thing that makes a difference to the world. My heart can contain oceans of feeling and it makes not a single difference to anyone outside my head unless I do the hard grinding work of doing something about it.

And I don't know about you, but my heart is kind of stupid? I find that if I care too much, it actually makes it harder to get up and do things. Also, I'm lazy. My heart wants to daydream. My heart wants things to just work out. My heart wants the Junebug to love it when I hug and kiss him as much as I love it; my heart doesn't want to do the hard work of figuring out how he likes to get attention and affection and express it that way instead. My heart doesn't want to do annoying repetitive research and organization at work, that over weeks and months and years accumulates into experience and understanding. The other day the Junebug was crying that he didn't WANT to do something and I told him I understood, I was going to do things I didn't want to do every single minute of the whole day. I tell my heart to shut up a lot. I tell it that I don't have to like the things I do, I just have to do them.

Do that for a few decades and yeah. Maybe your heart dies.

Because I think, all respect to Ms. Bujold, but I think Miles was wrong. I think that I am in fact buying my heart's desire with my heart. I spend all day ignoring my desires and doing things I don't want to do so that I can have the life I want - not, like, at some mythical point in the future, but right now - and that doesn't make any sense at all BUT IT'S TRUE. Moment to moment, my life is really annoying. On the occasion I get to take a step back and a deep breath, I love it. How - why - what?

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As part of the stupid week of stupidity I had fifteen minutes to kill in a bookstore and I accidentally bought a book we already own, because it was that kind of week. Having bought it, though, I went ahead and reread it. The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin, classic of the genre obviously. Really good book. But, two things I noticed, which I did not notice the previous time I had read it:

1) Though it's not explicitly about gender in the same way as The Left Hand of Darkness, or anything, there's a lot of gender in it. But just like Left Hand and its male pronouns, you can see the bits where LeGuin was explicitly thinking about gender, and you can also see where the patriarchy sneaks in around the corners. If you tell me that in your utopian society sex is totally egalitarian and free of weird fucked up power or ownership themes, but you show me that your sweet sympathetic hero tries to rape a woman the first time he gets drunk and never gives the slightest thought afterwards to how she might be feeling or tries to apologize or wonders about his actions or anything, you have depicted a different society that I think you meant to depict; one much more like our own.

2) Deliberately depicted, though, was the way that gender ties into the book's huge theme that survival depends on cooperation. LeGuin hammers it home that Shevek could not do his work without colleagues, people to bounce ideas off of, people to support him, people even to try to tear him down. He couldn't find them on Anarres so he had to go to Urras. And she also makes it very clear that a female physicist could not have found what Shevek found on Urras. A female physicist could not have developed the ansible because she might have been as bright and as motivated but she would have been stopped by the hard limits of what one person can do all alone.

Comments

[laurashapiro]

I wonder if that moment-to-moment ugh vs. whole life yay is something particularly likely in parents? It aligns with a lot of what I've read about the trade-offs of parenting and the relationship of parenting to happiness.

Cuz I hafta say, I am still letting my inner hedonist drive this bus a lot of the time, and if I've learned anything from mindfulness, it's that if I can't be happy in the moment, I probably can't be happy period. But I don't have kids.

Re The Dispossessed: my favorite novel, period. And the attempted rape scene has always bothered me, but I kind of wonder if it's meant to play out exactly as you say, on purpose. Because it doesn't happen in utopia, it happens on the decadent capitalist world, and I always felt she was trying to suggest that Shevek had been corrupted by the patriarchal culture there. Which in no way excuses it. Which is the point. Maybe? IDK, maybe I'm making excuses, but that's how I always read it.

[wordweaverlynn]

IIRC, there's a lot of "she was asking for it" in that scene. It's been 30 years since I read that book, but that scene has rubbed me the wrong way ever since.

[laurashapiro]

I've read the book every 1-2 years for the last two decades, and I don't recall any of that.

My interpretation of the scene -- of all of Shevek's scenes with Vea -- is that he cannot understand understand her. A good man of Vea's culture would understand that her body language does not mean she wants to have sex with him, but Shevek has no frame of reference for her behavior at all. He misunderstands Vea, not because she is doing anything wrong, but because his upbringing means he can only take her literally. I thought the scene was quite explicit in giving him responsibility for his behavior. Vea's culture may be warped, but Shevek's wrongdoing is his own. Indeed, Shevek's attempted rape of Vea is the catalyst for his realization of how warped Urras is and how it is warping him. This discovery propels the action in the final chapters of the book.

I agree with metaphortunate that the lack of follow-up with Vea, and the lack of consideration of her feelings, is a failing in the book. But I can't agree that there's victim-blaming going on.

[metaphortunate]

I disagree. I thought it was a remarkably clear portrayal of the everyday situation where a woman is interested in a man, flirting with him, even wanting to have sex with him in the future, and he decides that means he doesn't care that she doesn't want to have sex with him right then and rapes her. Some people would call that asking for it; I don't think the narrative did. I certainly wouldn't.

[metaphortunate]

I totally agree that she's showing that Shevek's been corrupted by the culture! But then, when he comes back to himself, when he sobers up the next morning, he straightens up and takes his work seriously and starts thinking seriously about how to deal with the MEN in his life. He never gives Vea or the fact that he tried to rape her another thought. And the narrative portrays that as him straightening out and flying right.

[laurashapiro]

You're right; in the aftermath, the narrative centers Shevek's trauma rather than Vea's. It's not a feminist choice, for sure. I wonder how Le Guin might write it differently today.

[metaphortunate]

Well the book is a very tight focus on Shevek, I don't complain about that; but my god, even in terms of his emotions I've done more beating myself up for saying something embarrassing the night before than he does over having tried to RAPE SOMEBODY. I mean. If that were you: wouldn't you be traumatized about it? Wouldn't you spend some time questioning your character, above & beyond your hangover I mean? WOULDN'T YOU CALL AND ASK IF THEY WERE OKAY. Shevek just takes it in stride.

[laurashapiro]

Now I need to reread it, because I think you're right, and yet I hadn't thought of it that way until now.

OTOH... [redacted because too personal for the Internet]. I will tell you about it when we hang out! Is everybody over their cold? Email me!

[futuransky]

I also reread The Dispossessed regularly (I could even say religiously... it's my favourite book too), and I tend to have to skip past that scene. I've actively avoided thinking about it because it messes up my love of the book, in many ways. I think that Le Guin is trying to show us that flirtation can only be read as invitation in a truly sexually open culture, and how much being inexplicably in a position of privilege can corrupt; but I don't think it works. Either that or I can't handle Shevek being suddenly such an unpleasant character... one or the other!

The ugh/yay thing made a lot of sense to me without being a parent but thinking in terms of work things and how difficult it is to make the time to do the things I actually want to do the most. Thank you for this post, metaphortunate!

[laurashapiro]

Agree with you about Le Guin's intentions; also agree that it doesn't work -- not fully, anyway. My guess? At the time of writing, she didn't see it as attempted rape. Our current framing about rape culture makes the whole thing read quite differently. And yeah, it upsets the hell out of me, too, particularly because I fucking LOVE Shevek. Argh.

[kore]

Shevek is great -- maybe one of Le Guin's best characters, ever, and one of my favourites, along with George Orr. But TD is spoiled for me because the female characters seem all wrong -- Takver is spirited but just disappears into pregnancy and family, Vea is a 'body profiteer,' and let's not even get started on Rulag the Cold Mommy Bitch. There's the brilliant and overlooked female physicist Shevek studies under, but she's minor and I think she dies. The book is so well-written and well-structured and Shevek's story is so engaging I can enjoy it while reading it, but it leaves a bad aftertaste in my brain, sort of.