In keeping with discussing my uni class on utopias, i wanted to express some ideas I’ve been thinking about for a while in preparation for my essay.
More’s Utopia sets the precedent for le Guin’s The Dispossesed, establishing traits of the utopian genre for le Guin’s inversion of these established conventions.
Etymologically established as a ‘no place’, utopias are a projection of an alternate reality, less defined with fuzzy edges that cannot endure intense scrutiny. This is because they are not offering naive, wholistic solutions to societal ills, but rather inviting critique on established structures to instigate change. More was reacting to widespread exploits of colonization, enslavement, and the birth of capitalism when he imagined this island that had forgotten both time and history, seeking to undermine societal forces that already dominated. The Dispossessed, largely a reaction to the Cold War/Space Race and even more entrenched capitalism, also has this sense of timelessness, this immunity to the wear of time. As it holds more true to our current version of reality and is more richly imagined, le Guin’s utopia is more convincing in its subversion of hegemonic structures than More’s.
Another trope of the utopian genre is that of the voyager. As mentioned, More was inspired by the constant ‘discovering’ of new land forms, and so based his imagined society on an island similarly ‘found’ by ‘explorers’. Interestingly, le Guin dismantles such colonist traditions through the inversion of the ‘explorer’; Sheveck is a figure from utopia who discovers ‘reality’. This inversion reveals a crux of the utopian genre, in that it is dependent on, and in fact limited by perspective. Jameson states that “All utopias spring from a specific class position [… and] reflect a specific class-historical standpoint or perspective.” As such, utopias engage with the concept of complementarity, a “double negation” wherein “the genuine political and philosophic content is to be located”.
This struggle to apply aspects of utopian projections to our current experiences of existence is therefore integral to the utopian genre.
