The full title of Le Guin's 1974 novel reads "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia," and it turns out to be just what the title suggests. This science fiction novel is also a utopia, but not as “a recipe of hope for an almost perfect future” but as a “critique of the inadequacies of all ideals and forms of life” (Sabia 1). As Sabia points out, “the most thoughtful utopias of recent decades have moved from recommending to questioning the good, from planning to rejecting an end to history” (Sabia 1). In his work “Demand the Impossible,” Tom Moylan calls this type of utopia “critical utopia” and elaborates: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay“A central concern in critical utopia is an awareness of the limits of the utopian tradition, such that these texts reject utopia as a model while preserving it as a dream. Furthermore, the novels focus on the conflict between the original world and the utopian society opposed to it so that the process of social change is articulated more directly. Ultimately, the novels focus on the continued presence of differences and imperfections within the utopian society itself and thus make alternatives more recognizable and dynamic.” (qtd. in science.jrank.org)This proves perfectly applicable to “The Dispossessed,” in which the utopian society of Anarres is examined in opposition to the homeworld of Urras. The author herself has stated that her goal in writing the novel was the examination of what she considers the most idealistic and interesting theory of government, namely anarchy (qtd. in Benfield 1). Le Guin does this by comparing two imaginary worlds, Urras and Anarres. The main character, Shevek, a citizen of Anarres, travels to the so-called “old world” of Urras, and through his experiences the reader is provided not only with an in-depth understanding of the two planets but also the exploration of two very different worlds. political regimes. Without being biased, Le Guin vividly describes two contrasting worlds: Urras, a planet that resembles present-day Earth with different levels of government, and Anarres, an experimental separatist society that is the embodiment of communist anarchism. Both of these worlds are described realistically and in great detail, which is, as Le Guin herself says, what makes them plausible (ursulaleguin.com). On her official website, Le Guin writes: “The touchstone for plausibility in imaginative fiction is probably coherence. Realistic fiction can be, perhaps must be, inconsistent in imitating our perceptions of reality. Fantasy, which creates a world, must be strictly consistent with its own terms, otherwise it loses all plausibility. The rules that govern how things work in the imagined world cannot be changed in the course of history” (ursulaleguin.com). Le Guin really kept the worlds in her novel consistent and true to their own laws of existence and functioning. Such an intricate presentation of fictional worlds as the one he offers in his novel allows both readers and critics to analyze the novel's content with the seriousness of interpreting the real world. The plausibility of the novel also allows for serious consideration of the ideas and philosophies presented in the book, transforming this piece of fiction from entertainment to a more philosophical work. In this short essay, I will attempt to provide a basic overview of both Urras and Anarres, while shedding light on the utopian critique that lies at the heart of the novel. The most obvious difference between Urras and Anarres is the political and subsequently social organization. on the two planets. We already find out in the first chapterthat the Anarresti, as the inhabitants of Anarres are called, are originally from Urras and that they moved to the Moon, their current home planet, about 200 years before the action of the novel takes place. Urras is a planet that resembles both geographically and politically the Earth we live on. There are many different countries on the planet, people have a developed sense of nationality, each country has its own language and laws, and they often have open conflicts. What all countries have in common is what the Anarresti call “propertarianism,” meaning they developed the concept of money which in turn prescribes value to all worldly goods. Society functions with the idea of ​​owning property, which has led to the existence of classes and therefore the social stratification of the population. In the past, a great revolutionary named Odo preached anarchy as the only way to achieve true freedom. His philosophy was based on the idea that all men and women were equal; he professed solidarity, decentralization of power and stated that the perfect society is one without laws, based on mutual respect, guided by people's inner idea of ​​what is moral. As Sabia says, the true social morality that Odo speaks of might presuppose a small number of crucial principles: “Always value particularity and autonomy, and respect the freedom of others. Understand that all people are morally equal. Help those in need. Never intentionally harm or take advantage of others. And contribute to society by doing “the work you do best” and cooperating, equally, when it is mutually beneficial to do so” (3). Odo's basic theory was founded on the humanist principle that "once freed from the oppression of the state, religion and capitalism, human nature would show its essential goodness in forms of cooperation and mutual aid" (Jaeckle 17) . The second main point he makes is the renunciation of the concept of ownership: everyone should work voluntarily and therefore everyone should be free to take as much as they need of any good produced because they have contributed equally and are therefore equally deserving. The Council of World Governments gave the moon, previously used for mining, to the International Society of the Odonisi “to buy” after they became too powerful to control or subjugate (Le Guin 77). The revolutionaries were subsequently evacuated and transported to the moon which would then take the name of the aforementioned town and become a free world. The colonists began to create the society Odo envisioned, however without her, as she, held in prison for her ideas and later deceased, never got to see her vision come to life (Le Guin 77). Le Guin writes, “Decentralization had been an essential element in Odo's plans for the society he did not live to see established” (Le Guin 77). Although communication and the exchange of both material and intellectual goods were crucial in Odo's idea, "there were to be no centers of control, no capital, no structures for the self-perpetuating bureaucratic machine and the drive for domination of individuals seeking to become captains, leaders. , heads of state” (Le Guin 78). “Rotating positions of authority within organizations, for example, protects against the abuse and corruption of power. So does the absence of a state” (Sabia 3). Two centuries later, we see that Anarres has indeed carried out Odo's vision, maintaining order and peace by following his logic: “To make a thief, make a landlord; to create crime, create laws” (Le Guin 113). As Shevek explains to his Urrastian acquaintance, no one robs anyone because there is no one torob and if one needs something, he takes it from the warehouse; no one kills anyone because no one is given a reason to kill and people are kept in order by “private conscience” and “social conscience”; the opinion of the neighbors” (Le Guin 121). “There is no other reward on Anarres,” explains Shevek, “no other law. One's pleasure and the respect of one's fellow men” (Le Guin 121). As was previously mentioned, the Urrasti are a consumerist culture. This is a concept that some people like. Shevek struggles to understand: “He tried to read a basic economics text; it bored him beyond endurance, it was like listening to someone endlessly recount a long, stupid dream. He could not try to understand how banks and so on worked, because all the operations of capitalism were to him as meaningless as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate and as useless. (Le Guin 106)This passage, complemented by his comment that "in the rites of the money changers, where greed, laziness, and envy were supposed to move all men's actions, even the terrible became banal," provides a unique critique of consumer society, as the reader is offered a view of consumerism from a radical point of view – the point of view of someone who has never before been exposed to the idea of ​​buying and selling (Le Guin 106). The anecdote during which Shevek is taken shopping is particularly funny as he goes on to call the mall a “nightmare street” and the shopping experience “disconcerting” (Le Guin 106). It is important to note that he states that the strangest thing about Nightmare Street was that "none of the millions of things that were sold there were made there" and that all the people in the mall were buyers or sellers and had "no relation to things except that of possession" (Le Guin 106). In contrast, on Anarres "nothing was hidden", which not only meant that people kept their doors open and had private rooms only when they had a sexual partner, but that all production was also carried out in the open. (Le Guin79). “The workshops and factories opened onto open squares or courtyards, and their doors were open” (Le Guin 80). “None of the doors were locked, very few were locked. There were no disguises or advertising. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, before my eyes and hands” (Le Guin 81). However, as idyllic as it may seem, Anarres has one major flaw in its economy, and that is the fact that the land is not perfectly suited to human life. “The Eden of Anarres turned out to be dry, cold and windy, and the rest of the planet worse. Life there had evolved no further than fish and flowerless plants. The air was thin, like the air of Urras at very high altitude. The sun burned, the wind froze, the dust filled with dust” (Le Guin 76). This made life on Anarres full of difficulties and the work that had to be done to obtain essential items very difficult. The best summary of their living conditions is the fact that when there is drought they don't drink water. The inhabitants of Anarres spend much of their lives struggling for survival and taking hard jobs. The general difficulty of life on Anarres forces every citizen to have multiple obligations within and to society. Shevek becomes fully aware of this only when he compares himself with the scientists of A-Io, whose lives are dedicated only to science and when they are not working, they rest, while Shevek was “not only a physicist but also a partner, a father, a Odonian and ultimately a social reformer” (Le Guin 103). But while the Urrasti consider themselves privileged due to the university life during which their onlywork is mental work in a specific chosen field, Shevek does not share their opinion. He complains that there, at the University, he has nothing to do except his intellectual work, literally nothing because even the beds are made for them, while on Anarres he feels freer because “he had not been freed from anything; but free to do anything” (Le Guin 105). This is a nice example of the difference between the Urrasti and Anarresti vision of work. This argument is further developed through Shevek's conversations with the Oiie, during which both reveal culturally conditioned views on work: the Oiie makes a distinction between "dirty work" and other more pleasant professions, while Shevek is accustomed that everyone does the same part of the "dirty work" dirty work". Shevek explains that they all participate, because no one wants to do it for too long and therefore everyone volunteers for a shorter period of time. The Oiie fails to understand voluntary work and the absence of notions such as orders and obligations, while for Shevek it is obvious: people do jobs willingly because they are aware that they have to be done. “After all, work is done for the love of work,” explains Shevek. “It is the lasting pleasure of life.” In contrast, for Oiie, work is directly linked to profit and money is the only motivation behind work. However, due to the poor conditions of Arranes, the moon never became fully self-sustaining. The only communication between Anarres and Urras remaining for the last 200 years is that of the Urrasti freighters who came to Anarres eight times a year to bring fossil oils, petroleum products and some delicate machine parts that the Anarresti manufacturing is unable to supply, in return taking supplies of uranium, copper, mercury, tin, gold and copper. The Anarresti, however, considers this “a perpetually renewed humiliation” (Le Guin 75). The Urrasti and the Anarresti have never reconciled, both harbor prejudices regarding their respective cultures and maintain a negative image of the opposing culture, even going so far as to consider themselves aliens to each other despite belonging to the same species. Another important referent in culture is language. “Modern sociolinguists advocate the idea that a true understanding of language use cannot be achieved if abstracted from its social context” (Bruhn 1). The same can be said vice versa: no society can be truly understood if considered separately from its language. Guided by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Anarres is a settlement that acquired a new language as soon as its first walls were built. Pravic, the invented language, “intentionally embodies the principles of the new society” (qtd. in Bruhn 1). One of the most significant characteristics of the language is the aversion to possessive pronouns (Bruhn 1). Since there is no ownership, possessive pronouns are replaced with the phrase “that I use” (i.e. Sadik offers his father “the handkerchief that I use” (Le Guin 251)). At the same time, possessive pronouns exist and can be used but they are used to mean something offensive since their entire meaning is against Odonianism. For example, Rulag denotes Shevek and Bedap's group as “your union” to express his disgust at what he sees as Urrastian propertyism. Furthermore, Pravic has no forms of address: there are no words like “sir” or “madam”; if one is inclined to use a title other than a person's name, the word ammar is used which strengthens solidarity, indicating both brother and sister (Bruhn 4). As for people's names, they are generated by a computer: the computer keeps a database of all existing names and chooses the name for a newborn, and the name is unique. The database includes all namessupported by the Pravic language and takes into account only those names that no one else has at the time of the child's birth, returning as an option the name of a deceased person only after the death of the bearer of the name. In this way each person has only one name but is completely identifiable by it. Pravic lacks any other titles or surnames. Overall, the absence of words for concepts that Odonianism does not condone is another indicator of the intentional nature of the language's construction. “To the Anarresti, the iotic words “prison,” “slave,” “gamble,” “morals,” and “business” are as foreign as the ideas themselves” (Bruhn 5). Furthermore, Pravic is designed in such a way that the same word is used to mean both “work” and “play”. “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applies here in full force: without a linguistic distinction, the Anarresti will likely fail to form a conceptual distinction between “work” and “play,” a convenient and perhaps necessary arrangement for a community economy whose existence depends on the compliant diligence of its constituents” (Bruhn 6). Furthermore, Pravic lacks all taboo forms and borrows iotic expletives, since "it is difficult to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist" (Le Guin 206). This directly reflects the attitude Odonians have towards sex: it is a natural occurrence, an act practiced by all consenting adults without restrictions or rules when it comes to gender or age. In comparison, “the natural language of Iotic displays styles, sociolects, regional dialects, linguistic gender issues, and taboo words” (Bruhn 7). Iotic includes titles that show varying levels of respect, uses possessive pronouns extensively, and has a lower dialect called Niotic. Niotic is spoken by the lower class and is phonologically and syntactically different from the standard Iotic of the upper class. Efor is an example of a lower class character who code switches depending on who and what he is talking to. “Through the inclusion of these forms, Le Guin illustrates the consistent power structure in A-Io society, as demonstrated by their need to show deference to certain people. Shevek even notes that “you can't say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it (p. 364)” (Bruhn 8). The dystopian element of the novel is highlighted by the fact that both cultures are essentially flawed and that neither version of society manages to be perfectly just. This brings us to the conclusion that corruption is actually a part of human nature. The alternating chapters which are a sort of short buildungsroman implemented on Shevek reveal the flaws of Odonianism. The criticism begins with the questionable education system which strives to indoctrinate change rather than encourage students to think for themselves – ironically, independent thinking is berated as the worst of all crimes an Odonian can be accused of: l 'selfishness. As Bedap then underlined: “We do not educate about freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. The children learn to parrot Odo's words as if they were laws: the utmost blasphemy!” (Le Guin 135). The system's flaw is further explored when Shevek meets Sabul, a master scientist who manages to sabotage Shevek's career. Bedap says that just because they don't have a government or laws doesn't make them free because laws didn't control ideas in the first place. It is not any kind of formal, centralized power that allows Sabul to be oppressive. "Public opinion! This is the power structure he is part of and knows how to use. The unacknowledged, inadmissible power that governsOdonian society by stifling the individual mind” (Le Guin 133). Therefore, although corruption on Anarres is not as blatant as its manifestations in a proprietary society, it still exists. To continue the work he wants to do, Shevek must enter into a mutually exploitative relationship with Sabul, which violates the most basic Odonian beliefs about morality (Benfield 5). Cooperation on Anarres is conditional: “This happens partly because interests are not always compatible, also because the Anarresti are not always ethical” (Sabia 3). Sabia argues that Anarres was flawed from the beginning, threatened by centralization and eventually becoming “fundamentally an anarchic bureaucracy” (qtd. in Sabia 5). To ensure economic efficiency, solidarity has been exaggerated and demands for community and equity have become demands for conformity and conformity (Sabia 5). “Social conscience, the opinion of others, [became] the most powerful moral force” (qtd. in Sabia 5). Even in a theoretically ideal society, people are still human, therefore imperfect, which will continue to resonate throughout the entire society and make it imperfect as well. The character of Vea is introduced to further question the entire concept of freedom. Vea is the representation of the modern Urrasti woman: with her exaggerated sexuality and her sharp wit, she is a character who reveals a lot about the male-female dynamic of the Urrasti. However, he reveals much more as he goes on to talk about his ideas of freedom. He considers all forms of morality to be false as they are imposed on people and defines freedom as the absence of any type of external or internal constraint. He therefore accuses the Anarresti of being slaves to morality who simply “shove it in” (Benfield 3). Despite having an extreme point of view, Vea “raises the important question of internal versus external restrictions on freedom” (Benfield 3). This issue is linked to the idea that public opinion can be easily manipulated and that the Anarresti are indirectly controlled and oppressed: they have maximum freedom of choice, but those who choose opinions or lifestyles different from the opinion of the masses are excluded from society and judged by others. Much of the drama of the novel centers on the fact that Shevek and his family are aggressively excluded from society due to Shevek's pursuit of his own beliefs when these do not coincide with those of the majority (Sabia 6). On the other hand, as already mentioned, the corruption of Urrastian society is visible on a more superficial level. The great flaws of their society lie in the fact that it is driven by money and the values ​​are external and materialized rather than internal, spiritual or intellectual. Moreover, everything is seen from the point of view of profit, even science, which Shevek gradually realizes: they want scientific development not for the sake of understanding the universe or to make a radical, mutually beneficial change in communication with the other worlds, but because of profit and potential supremacy. The media's manipulation of reality, misogyny, violence as a response to rebellion, and ongoing wars between countries are very open and direct examples of the dysfunctional nature of the Urrastian worldview. It is important to note that the novel was written in 1974 – during the Cold War. If we try to draw a parallel between the political state of the world in which Le Guin wrote and the world she wrote about, it is easy to spot the similarities of the conflict: in the novel, A-Io can be treated as an analogy with the United States while Thu can be seen as the Soviet Union. However, it is also possible to broaden the analogy and see the whole of Urras as the Western Bloc,with Thu representing the emerging opposition parties in this case while Anarres would be seen as the communist Soviet Union. The novel is inspired by another real-life event: the student protests against the Vietnam War. In chapter 9, the Odonians of A-Io begin a protest that ends in violence but reaches its climax with Shevek's speech on freedom and revolution. “The revolution is our obligation: our hope for evolution. The revolution is in the individual spirit, otherwise it is nowhere” (Le Guin 359). Shevek further states: “You cannot buy the Revolution. You can't make a revolution. Only you can be the Revolution” (301). Like the protests against the Vietnam War, the protest on Urras focuses on several issues, such as human rights and freedom of speech. The Anarres Wall can also be considered reminiscent of the Berlin Wall. At the beginning of the novel, Le Guin presents the reader with a large wall that can be seen from two different sides: on one side, it “enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free” but “watched from the other side.” , the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine” (Le Guin 3). The wall proves to be a recurring motif in the novel, representing both the boundaries between societies and Shevek's own boundaries when present in his dreams (Benfield 2). Shevek's entire journey proves to be about breaking down walls. “Those who build walls are prisoners of themselves. I will go and carry out my rightful function in the social organism. I intend to tear down the walls” (Le Guin 331). Thus, Shevek acts as a missionary who wants to bring people together on both sides of the wall. The idea of ​​connection and creating a full circle is emphasized in the novel's ending: Shevek returns to Anarres, reporting his experience. The dawn that greets him creates an image of hope for the future. However, the reader is left without a proper conclusion. Even though we last saw Shevek optimistic, we don't know what awaits him. Shevek will dismount on another foreign world, for the Anarres he left behind no longer exists: “Shevek and the syndicate have succeeded in their goal of raising the waters. Shevek's journey and return obviously captured the imagination of many people” (Benfield 7). Benfield warns that although bringing in an outsider, Ketho, “suggests the possibility of further change and greater contact with other societies,” it is very likely that opposition to the change has hardened and become more organized (Benfield 7). Considering the chaos and violence that the revolutionaries encountered on Urras, one can expect a similar reaction on Anarres. Shevek was greeted on the merchant ship as a traitor with a violent uproar – it is expected that he will be greeted similarly upon his return. Le Guin leaves her readers with much speculation about the future of the two worlds and of Shevek himself, but leaves us on an entirely optimistic note, with Shevek feeling that he has, in fact, succeeded in breaking down the wall. However, the consequences are yet to be seen. It is up to the readers themselves to reflect on the possible consequences of such radical changes and great revolutions. By drawing analogies to real-world problems, as science fiction tends to do, Le Guin pushes readers to consider the political and ideological issues of the world around them. This brief overview was written with the intention of providing the reader with a basic understanding of the concepts of Urras and Anarres. Le Guin chooses a brilliant way to present these worlds to her readers, forcing them to see them with eyes different from their own. Shevek, an idealist and true Odonian, and his