Abstract
Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974) is the first literary treatment of anarchic utopianism, presenting the society on the moon Anarres as operating on social principles lacking any sort of State or governmental oversight (known in the novel as Odonianism). Scholarship on Le Guin’s novel has focused primarily on the overt political and philosophical aspects of the text, while the scant linguistic scholarship goes no further than uncovering fairly superficial aspects of Le Guin’s invented language of Anarres, Pravic. This article investigates exactly how Le Guin presents a richly detailed conceptualisation of an anarchic society to readers on a planet full of states. This is generally achieved through the technique of estrangement (defamiliarisation), and more precisely, by various means of schema disruption.
1. Introduction
Half a century ago, in 1974, Ursula K. Le Guin provided us with the first literary treatment of an anarchist utopia in her novel The Dispossessed. The story focuses on the plight of Shevek, a physicist who is forced to reconcile his commitment to the idea of anarchism – living in a world absent of the State – with living in a society that has fallen short of its purported ideals. 1 The novel progresses chronologically along two parallel plot lines: Shevek’s birth and growth into a renowned physicist and committed anarchist, or Odonian, 2 on his home world Anarres (which is actually a moon), and his journey to the planet Urras – a world of states which looks very much like Earth – in an attempt to further his research into developing a General Temporal Theory. 3 And while on Urras, he inadvertently becomes the catalyst of a major uprising against the State; his life is saved only when the Terran and Hainish emissaries evacuate him off the planet. 4 The novel ends with Shevek’s return journey to Anarres, his own future as well as the future of the two planets remaining an open-ended question. Because Le Guin’s novel confronts the many faults of Anarresti society in falling short of anarchist ideals (de facto centralised control by the Division of Labour (DivLab) and the Production and Distribution Committee (PDC), censorship exerted by several of the syndicates, undue collective pressure exerted on individuals to conform to social norms (which often leads to self-censorship), etc.), as opposed to simply presenting idealised models of society as one finds in more conventional utopian works like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), The Dispossessed has been labelled a novel depicting a ‘critical utopia’ (Moylan, 1986: 35ff.) or a ‘heterotopia’ (Stockwell, 2000: 208–210; see also Delany, 1976: 345) because the focus is not necessarily on presenting a blueprint for an alternative society, but rather on highlighting the challenges encountered on the way to establishing – or in the case of Anarres, maintaining – such a society. Indeed, Le Guin’s own subtitle to her novel is “an ambiguous utopia”.
Le Guin’s literary treatment of anarchism has received a fair amount of critical attention, especially from those interested in the novel’s more overt political angles (see, for example, Burns, 2008; Davis and Stillman, 2005; Jaeckle, 2009), and the novel is often mentioned in passing as a significant contribution to the genre of science fiction (Mandala, 2010; Stockwell, 2000; Suvin, 1979). Detailed stylistic treatments of The Dispossessed, or even Le Guin’s writings in general, are unfortunately few and far between. Myers (1983) was an early attempt at such an endeavour, featuring a speech-act analysis of certain scenes in Le Guin’s 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Meyers (1980: 193–226) appears to be the most comprehensive stylistic treatment of The Dispossessed to date, but the focus here is exclusively on the invented Anarresti language of Pravic and its coercive role in maintaining the deeply flawed social order on Anarres (with a clear nod towards the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). No attention has been paid to less overt linguistic features of The Dispossessed, particularly in how Le Guin constructs her worlds in the first place. The novel is quite interesting insofar as it first provides the reader with a glimpse into the anarchic world of Anarres (something quite familiar to the protagonist Shevek, yet very unfamiliar to Earthling readers, to whom the idea of an anarchic society is an intellectual abstraction at best). Not until chapter 3 do we encounter the planet of Urras, a statist world quite familiar to us as readers, yet deeply unfamiliar and overwhelming to our protagonist. How Le Guin achieves these multiple layers of estrangement, also known as defamiliarisation, is the focus of this essay.
2. The theory of estrangement (defamiliarisation)
2.1. Overview
The idea of a literary or stylistic technique of ‘estranging’ the reader goes back to the early twentieth-century Russian Formalists, most notably Viktor Shklovsky, whose notion of ostranenie (‘estrangement, defamiliarisation’) is fundamental to the success of any art form.
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Shklovsky (1993) argues that “by ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form” (6), art draws attention to the ideas, objects and concepts the viewer or reader should be focusing on. In doing so, it succeeds – in the words of another Russian Formalist, Roman Jakobson – in preventing such art from “referring indifferently to reality” (1987: 378). It can draw attention to even the most mundane or commonplace things because it “changes its form without changing its essence” (Shklovsky, 1993: 6); that is, it can make the most familiar things seem unfamiliar, as well as unfamiliar things appear quite familiar (hence the terms ‘estrangement’ and ‘defamiliarisation’). Shklovsky continues: The purpose of the image is not to draw our understanding closer to that which this image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive the object in a special way, in short, to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere ‘recognition’. (1993, 10)
More recently, Van Peer (1986, 3) clarifies that this can refer to two processes in written texts: (1) the use of specific literary devices in an effort to (2) achieve a certain effect on the reader and the reading experience. So there are both textual and readerly aspects to the process of estrangement/defamiliarisation. Gavins (2014) takes things a step further and integrates this dualistic angle into Text World Theory (TWT), a framework that attempts to model the cognitive effects that texts evoke on their readers in the creation of richly layered “text worlds” (Gavins, 2007; see also Werth, 1999). That is, by drawing the reader’s attention to specific objects or concepts, the process of estrangement evokes various ‘world-building elements’ that assist the reader in mentally construing the worlds of the texts they are reading (Gavins, 2014; see also Giovanelli and Mason, 2015; Scott, 2016; Norledge, 2019). This does not so much add to Shklovsky’s idea of estrangement but rather augments the way it can be modelled to reflect the cognitive processes at work in the reader during the reading process (through the use, for example, of diagrams that reflect sub-worlds and world switches). 6 Although the current study of Le Guin does not take TWT as central to the analysis, it acknowledges the notion of world-building elements as key in the early chapters of The Dispossessed, presenting an anarchist society unfamiliar to the reader, as well as a statist society unfamiliar to the protagonist Shevek. In a similar vein, Herman’s (2009a, 2009b) criterion of ‘worldmaking/world disruption’, which features “violated expectations” (2009a: 21; cf. Bruner, 1990) as an essential component of narrative, points directly to the process of estrangement without labelling it as such.
2.2. Estrangement and science fiction
Although the technique of estrangement is not exclusive to the genre of science fiction, it has long been acknowledged that this particular genre is by its very nature an estranging genre of literature, whereas others are not (Adams, 2017; Mandala, 2010; Stockwell, 2000; Suvin, 1979). One of the earliest works on the subject, Darko Suvin’s seminal 1979 monograph, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, remains the most comprehensive theoretical treatment of estrangement in science fiction literature to date. Science fiction is, by its very nature, the literature of “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin, 1979: 4) because its “necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and its main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (7–8). Unlike realist fiction, science fiction illuminates the “textures” of our world – textures simply reproduced in naturalistic fiction – by presenting them in different, alternative frameworks in the hope that readers will critically reflect upon them (10, 18). Regarding utopian literature in particular, subversive rhetoric employed with an eye towards “sociopolitical revaluation” (42–43) is at the heart of this subgenre of science fiction, as it “endeavors to illuminate men’s relationship to other men and to their surroundings by the basic device of radically different location” (53). Estrangement arises through the depiction of alternative, ostensibly more positive forms of social organisation, institutions and individual relationships in an effort of drawing attention to the here-and-now of our reality through sociopolitical critique (61). The hallmark of science fiction, utopian literature included, is the presence of a novum – some sort of novelty or innovation that, through its inherently estranging effects, serves the narrative logic of conceptually vacillating between the “alternate reality” of the story world and our own world as “an analogy to empirical reality” (63–64, 70–75; see also Moylan, 1986: 15–28). This cognitivist orientation reflects a departure from Shklovsky’s original conceptualisation of estrangement, for the novum requires the introduction of new material, whereas – as stated above – the original formalist notion could and did involve the ‘strange’ presentation of commonplace, everyday objects. In addition, Suvin’s notion is content-based, whereas Shklovsky’s focuses on the use of language in the presentation of the (un)familiar. That said, both orientations to estrangement provide insight into Le Guin’s modelling of familiar and unfamiliar sociopolitical structures in The Dispossessed.
And as useful as Suvin’s theoretical position may be, however, next to no attention was devoted to the actual linguistic realisations of estrangement in science fiction texts. This has been done more recently in works by Stockwell (2000, 2003), Mandala (2010) and Adams (2017). But even here, the focus has been limited, with a heavy interest in invented languages, neologisms and alien-sounding names. Stockwell (2003) is perhaps one exception to this, whereby schema theory is employed in a study of the speculative cosmology of Greg Egan’s writings. And it is in fact schema theory which provides a suitable framework to better understand Le Guin’s techniques of estrangement – both in a formalist and a cognitivist sense – in her creation of an anarchist heterotopia in The Dispossessed.
3. Schema theory
3.1. Overview
The idea of schema (plural schemata) is generally dated back to Bartlett’s (1932) psychological research on memory, although it is not really until the cognitive turn in fields such as linguistics and psychology during the 1960s and 1970s that the idea of schema theory really gained traction (see, for example, Minsky’s 1975 conception of ‘frames’ or Schank and Abelson’s 1977 discussion of ‘scripts’). In short, schemata are “packets of knowledge” and “active computational devices capable of evaluating quality of their own fit to the available data” (Rumelhart, 1984: 163–167). They are in essence how we store information about the world and process new information as it comes our way. The quintessential example of a schema is that of the
3.2. Schema theory and literature
It was not until de Beaugrande (1987) that any in-depth attempt at connecting schema theory to discourse processing, literary discourse in particular, was taken. For his part, de Beaugrande gave some regard to the idea of ‘deviance’ in literary texts and the subsequent effects on schemata (57ff.), as well as the connection between schemata and textual coherence (74ff.); however, no systematic framework was conceived or established, so it is unclear how exactly de Beaugrande’s comments can be taken forward in any substantial way. It is not until Cook’s foundational Discourse and Literature (1994) that we are provided with a robust model of applying schema theory to textual analysis. Cook (189ff.) notes that literary discourse 7 can either be schema reinforcing (cf. Rumelhart’s notion of schema accretion), schema preserving (which includes the adding of additional information to schema, cf. Rumelhart’s tuning), and most importantly to literature, schema disruption, also known as schema refreshment (restructuring in Rumelhart’s terms). Within the process of schema refreshment, schemata can either be destroyed entirely, newly constructed, or conceptual links between previously unconnected schemata can be established (‘schema connecting’) (see also Semino, 1997: 251). Cook (197ff.) notes that such schema disruption can occur at three levels: at the level of our knowledge about the world (world schemata), our knowledge about text layouts and structures (text schemata), and finally our knowledge about language structure and usage (language schemata). Semino (1997) and Culpeper (2001) follow Cook’s work with detailed applications of schema theory to the processes of world creation in poetic texts and characterisation, respectively. They adopt Cook’s framework for the most part, although Culpeper (75-83) introduces the idea of ‘social schemata’, which includes assumed (readerly) expectations surrounding individuals, groups, social roles, etc. Both also provide some well-placed critiques of schema theory, although these will be saved until the concluding remarks of the current discussion as a way of suggesting avenues of future research. Beyond Semino (1997) and Culpeper (2001), Jeffries (2001) offers a stark critique of both Cook’s and Semino’s approaches, noting problems with defining ‘literariness’ in the first place, as well as the problem with assuming a lack of diversity among readers, which can entail any number of schemata being either reinforced or refreshed (depending on the background of the reader). Semino (2001) counters many of Jeffries’ claims, and notes that some degree of speculative interpretation is inherent in applications of schema theory. More recently, Stockwell (2020: 102–118) provides a state-of-the-art overview of schema theory’s place in the field of cognitive poetics and its potential applications.
4. Estrangement and schemata in The Dispossessed
The remainder of this paper will focus on applying the principles of estrangement and schema theory to Le Guin’s novel, in an attempt to pinpoint how she introduces her readers to the concrete possibilities of living in an anarchic society. This is achieved in two principal ways: through overt tie-ins to language usage on Anarres, and in more indirect ways through interactions between characters and simple descriptions of characters or scenes. And although the former has received some attention in the scholarship on Le Guin (Meyers, 1980: 193ff.; Noletto and Lopes, 2019), no attention appears to have been devoted – either in work on Le Guin or even on science fiction in general (Stockwell, 2000; Mandala, 2010; Adams, 2017) – to how the literary representation of alien languages preserves and/or disrupts readers’ schemata, nor how seemingly mundane plot and setting descriptions can play a pivotal role in schema disruption. Even Stockwell’s, 2003 application of schema theory to science fiction focused on extraordinary, fictional scientific concepts related to cosmology and astrophysics, i.e. a cognitivist rather than a Shklovskyan form of estrangement.
4.1. Renditions of Pravic
Pravic is an invented language developed by the anarchist (Odonian) revolutionaries who settled Anarres, and now used as the first language of the Anarresti (just under two centuries after the revolution). Its lexicon and grammar were designed explicitly to reflect anarchic ideology in a hope to purge the settlers’ minds of any residual thought processes related to living under a State, particularly within a capitalist economic system (this is a clear nod towards the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as it speaks to how language both construes and is construed by thought, see Meyers 1980: 193ff.). However, there is actually precious little of the Pravic language to be found in the novel. Rather, most information about Pravic comes to us through translations into Anglicised neologisms or metalinguistic commentary provided by the narrator. Even so, all of these techniques serve a cognitivist estranging function by orienting the reader into an anarchic social order and often causing schema disruption (see Adams, 2017: 337–342), both in terms of world and language schemata (Cook, 1994: 197), and they will be examined in turn.
4.1.1. The Pravic lexicon
I was able to find only five Pravic words in the entire novel. The most salient Pravic word to recur throughout the novel is kleggich ‘drudgery’ (Le Guin, 2002: 79), which refers to the expectation that everyone – regardless of their chosen profession – periodically engages in basic menial (usually manual) work that is required to keep society functional (e.g. ditch digging to install irrigation systems, waste and refuse processing, etc.).
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In this way, no particular person would be needed to engage in seemingly undesirable labour on a permanent basis. This echoes the anarchic call for the abolition of pointless or unfulfilling labour (Black, 1985; Graeber, 2013; Parsons, 1905), yet maintains the realisation that some work required to keep society functioning may not be all that appealing. Le Guin thus disrupts the readers’
The other three Pravic words that appear in the novel, mamme, tadde, and ammar, relate to an MOP (Schank, 1982) of ‘Pap’a [<tadde]. A small child may call any adult mamme or tadde. Gimar’s tadde may have been her father, an uncle, or an unrelated adult who showed her parental or grandparental responsibility and affection. She may have called several people tadde or mamme, but the word has a more specific use than ammar (brother/sister), which may be used to anybody. (Le Guin, 2002: 42)
The terms relating to the
4.1.2. Anglicised neologisms
Sometimes Pravic words appear not in their original, but rather as translated, Anglicised neologisms in the text (a common technique of rendering alien languages in science fiction, see Stockwell, 2000: 123–131). One of the earliest cases of this (coming, in fact, before any words are rendered in Pravic) is the term egoising, a derivation of ego plus the verbalising -ise plus the progressive aspectual -ing suffixes. In response to a young Shevek vigorously defending his musings on the space-time continuum, the director of the Speaking-and-Listening session rebukes: “‘Speech is sharing – a co-operative act. You’re not sharing, merely egoising’” (Le Guin, 2002: 28). In this construction of an egalitarian
4.1.3. The Narrator’s metalinguistic commentary
There is ample linguistic commentary on the nature of Pravic throughout the novel, oftentimes in the form of a narratorial intervention. For example, once Shevek learns he has received a posting to study with the renowned physicist Sabul (who we later learn is a serial plagiarist) in Abbenay, his mentor Mitis warns, “‘. . . you will be his man’”, and this follows: The singular forms of the possessive pronoun in Pravic were used mostly for emphasis; idiom avoided them. Little children might say, “My mother”, but very soon they learned to say “the mother”. Instead of “My hand hurts”, it was “The hand hurts me”, and so on; to say “This one is mine and that’s yours” in Pravic one said, “I use this one and you use that”. Mitis’ statement, “You will be his man”, had a strange sound to it. Shevek looked at her blankly. (Le Guin, 2002: 50–51)
None of this kind of language is rendered in Pravic anywhere in the novel, but such commentary makes clear that the schema of The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had ‘had’ a woman; the word which came closest in meaning to ‘fuck’, and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. (Le Guin, 2002: 47)
As there is no regular use of possessive pronouns in Pravic, there is also no mapping between the
There are also a few cases in the novel where it is stated that distinct words in English are synonymous in Pravic, namely work and play (Le Guin, 2002: 79) and healthy and sick (101). As the anarchic social ideal is for individuals to pursue endeavours focused on their own interests and talents, and relating with others through acts of free association, thus resulting in the greatest and most beneficial social order to all (see, for example, Goldman, 1940), there is no need to distinguish between the (waged) labour one does necessary for survival and time away from such labour meant for the pursual of personal interests and pleasures. The essential work needed for survival and infrastructure maintenance is relegated to kleggich (see 4.1.1. above). More problematic is the latter levelling of the linguistic distinction between health and sickness: Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be ill: a result of their society’s very successful phrophylaxy, and also perhaps a confusion arising from the analogic use of the words “healthy” and “sick”. They felt illness to be a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal impulse, to pander to it by taking pain-relievers, was immoral . . . as middle age and old age came on, most of them changed their view. (Le Guin, 2002: 100–101)
Here we see a problem arise when two very distinct schemata in our world,
Finally, we also find that the language associated with the
4.2. Estranging text passages
Up to now the focus has been on the various ways in which the Pravic language – oftentimes ‘translated’ into English – serves an estranging function by orienting the readers into an anarchic social order. It thus constitutes the novum of the novel, and the estrangement discussed thus far is of the cognitivist kind due to the presentation of radically different or even fundamentally new concepts. The remainder of this paper will focus on how the narrative itself of The Dispossessed continues this reader estrangement by further orientation into anarchism, also making use of schema disruption as its primary conceptual mechanism. All of the following passages come from early in the novel (i.e. the first three chapters), as this is when both Shevek first experiences the non-anarchic, capitalist system on Urras while we are simultaneously (de)familiarised with the anarchic society on Anarres. They therefore concern world rather than text or language schemata (Cook, 1994: 197), and often involve some sort of social expectations or attitudes surrounding people or ideas, i.e. social schemata (Culpeper, 2001: 75–83; see also Van Dijk, 1987, 1988). Hence the estrangement is more of the Shklovskyan/formalist kind, as seemingly known or familiar concepts to us readers are presented in a new light – mainly through Shevek’s eyes – forcing us to take a new, anarchist-oriented look at concepts and objects we are readily accustomed to. The following is by no means an exhaustive discussion of every schema disruption that occurs within the early parts of the novel, but it should provide a reasonable overview of how Le Guin presents her anarchic world to readers living under the State.
The novel opens with Shevek’s crossing to Urras aboard the Mindful, an interplanetary freight transport vessel. In a conversation with the ship’s medical officer Kimoe, the topic of religion is broached: “The Second Officer,” he said, “seems to be afraid of me.” “Oh, with him it’s religious bigotry. He’s a strict-interpretation Epiphanist. Recites the Primes every night. A totally rigid mind.” “So he sees me – how?” “As a dangerous atheist.” “An atheist! Why?” “Why, because you’re an Odonian from Anarres – there’s no religion on Anarres.” “No religion? Are we stones, on Anarres?” “I mean established religion – churches, creeds –” Kimoe flustered easily . . . “The vocabulary makes it difficult,” Shevek said, pursuing his discovery. “In Pravic the word religion is seldom. No, what do you say – rare. Not often used. Of course, it is one of the Categories: the Fourth Mode. Few people learn to practice all the Modes. But the Modes are built of the natural capacities of the mind, you could not seriously believe that we had to religious capacity? That we could do physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship man has with the cosmos?” (Le Guin, 2002: 15–16)
In a way, this passage gets to the heart of the
Later in the same exchange, Kimoe raises the issue of sex difference and social status in Anarres, consequently finding himself mentally estranged and almost unable to comprehend what Shevek tells him: But the doctor asked a question in return, a question about Anarres. “Is it true, Dr Shevek, that women in your society are treated exactly like men?” “That would be a waste of good equipment,” said Shevek with a laugh, and then a second laugh as the full ridiculousness of the idea grew upon him. The doctor hesitated, evidently picking his way around one of the obstacles of his mind, then looked flustered, and said, “Oh, no, I didn’t mean sexually – obviously you – they . . . I meant in the matter of their social status.” “Status is the same as class?” Kimoe tried to explain status, failed, and went back to the first topic. “Is there really no distinction between men’s work and women’s work?” “Well, no, it seems a very mechanical basis for the division of labour, doesn’t it? A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength – what has sex to do with that?” “Men are physically stronger,” the doctor asserted with professional finality. “Yes, often, and larger; but what does that matter when we have machines? And even when we don’t have machines, when we must dig with the shovel or carry on the back, the men maybe work faster – the big ones – but the women work longer . . . Often I have wished I was as tough as a woman.” Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. (Le Guin, 2002: 17–18)
This passage illustrates that, while both the Anarresti and Urrasti have some sort of conceptual social schema associated with
The He waited till his father came to take him for a dom-visit. It was a long wait: six decads [=60 days]. Palat had taken a short posting in maintenance in the Water Reclamation Plant in Drum Mountain, and after that he was going to take a decad at the beach in Malennin, where he would swim, and rest, and copulate with a woman named Pipar. He had explained all this to his son. (Le Guin, 2002: 29)
Although mores surrounding sexual relations are seemingly absent from the writings of notable anarchist philosophers such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, the perennial theme of individual liberty implies that the A natural law is that factor in man which asserts itself freely and spontaneously without any external force, in harmony with the requirements of nature. For instance, the demand for nutrition, for sex gratification, for light, air, and exercise, is a natural law. But its expression needs not the machinery of government, needs not the club, the gun, the handcuff, or the prison. To obey such laws, if we may call it obedience, requires only spontaneity and free opportunity. (1910)
And it is this “spontaneity and free opportunity” Palat pursues with Pipar while on holiday. But perhaps the most estranging aspect here is not so much related to the
The final scene I will discuss is perhaps the most seemingly mundane, as it only involves a depiction of home furnishings on Urras (‘world-building elements’ par excellence, see Gavins, 2007: 35ff.); however, Shevek’s bewildered response to this environment allows us to envision a fundamentally different socioeconomic order, simultaneously from the protagonist’s anarchic point-of-view, as well as from our own more materialist (statist, possibly capitalist) experience in envisioning a world free of the State and private property. When Shevek is first ushered into his dwellings upon arriving on Urras, this is his response: The bed, the massive bed on four legs, with a mattress far softer than that of the bunk on the Mindful, and complex bedclothes, some silky and some warm and thick, and a lot of pillows like cumulus clouds, had a room all to itself. The floor was covered with springy carpeting; there was a chest of drawers of beautifully carved and polished wood, and a closet big enough to hold the clothing of a ten-man dormitory. Then there was the great common-room with the fireplace, which he had seen last night; and a third room, which contained a bathtub, a washstand, and an elaborate shit-stool. This room was evidently for his sole use, as it opened off the bedroom, and contained only one of each kind of fixture, though each was of a sensuous luxury that far surpassed mere eroticism and partook, in Shevek’s view, of a kind of ultimate apotheosis of the excremental. He spent nearly an hour in this third room, employing all the fixtures in turn, and getting very clean in the process. (Le Guin, 2002: 55–56)
There is not merely a list of furnishings, but rather, these objects are often pre- or post-modified using adjectives and similes linked to a schema of
5. Concluding remarks
I hope to have shown how Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is able to successfully depict a complex and multifaceted, albeit flawed and imperfect, anarchic heterotopia quite distinct from anything most of us have seen or experienced on Earth. Through either overt references to the Anarresti language Pravic or mere narrative descriptions, the world and social schemata we take for granted are often thrown into stark relief via the presentation of a radical alternative; this is the essence of estrangement and ‘discourse disruption’ (Cook 1994). Schema theory has shown itself to be adaptable to both the cognitivist notion of estrangement, through its presentation of fundamentally new concepts, as well as the presentation of seemingly common or familiar concepts in defamiliarising, Shklovskyan terms. But it is also in this application of schema theory where the current analysis faces its most significant limitation. Ultimately any schema exists in the mind of the reader (Bartlett, 1932; Cook, 1994; Schank, 1982), and I as a reader hail from a background quite similar to Le Guin’s (American-born, middle-class, white) and have only lived in Western-style capitalist economies (the USA, UK and Germany); I therefore experientially mirror your average Urrasti and can experience the anarchic-statist/capitalist contrasts in a manner quite similar to the contrast established within the novel. However, a reader from a notably different background (e.g. a non-white minority background, non-conventional or communal upbringing, non-Western or non-capitalist economic experience, etc.) may well read the novel differently and a number of different schema disruptions not experienced by me may or may not occur. So to some degree, my analysis here is reflective and partial. And such imprecision is also claimed to be at the heart of schema theory itself (Semino, 1997: 149ff., 254; Culpeper, 2001: 69–70; Jeffries, 2001; cf. Stockwell, 2003): schemata are virtually unconstrained as to what they can contain or what even constitutes them in the first place, so again, how I have elaborated on a schema here is – to some degree – driven by textual features I have found particularly salient. A flip side to this is that schema theory allows interpretive possibilities to be flexible and amenable to a diverse array of readers and texts (Stockwell, 2003, 2020; see also Jeffries, 2001), but perhaps a happy medium can be found in Culpeper’s recommendation to conduct reader studies in order to quantitatively gauge how multiple readers might or might not respond to the same text (2001: 146ff.). This has recently been done by Norledge (2019, 2021), who applied Text World Theory to examine readers’ responses to mindstyle and world-building elements in various works of dystopian fiction. A similar study focusing on reader schemata in response to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed could either confirm or expand what has been discussed here, and pedagogical implications to such reader responses could also be explored (Giovanelli and Mason, 2015). What I hope to have shown is how schemata are fundamental to Le Guin’s style of presenting a radically alternative anarchic social order to a non-anarchic world, or to put things in Anarresti terms, how schemata serve part of the novel’s organic function.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor and peer reviewers, as well as Jessica Norledge and Violeta Sotirova, for their helpful feedback on this paper. Thanks are also due to my undergraduate students here at The University of Nottingham who have provided stimulating and thought-provoking discussions of this novel throughout the years. Any mistakes here are, of course, of my own doing.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
