Re-reading
Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed for
my Utopias half unit, I come again across Takver’s rousing statement late on in
the book that ‘we’ll go and make an Anarres beyond Anarres, a new beginning’. If the anarchist utopia she inhabits on the
barren planet Anarres has indeed given way to conformity and bureaucracy, then
she and her husband Shevek, together with their Syndicate of Initiative, will
have to reignite the revolutionary flame that gave birth to that Odonian-anarchist
society in the first place. They will
have to fight the actual Anarres in the name of the ideal Anarres it once
claimed to be (and perhaps genuinely was).
Takver’s
slogan – an Anarres beyond Anarres – has always seemed to me the best way to
think about Ellen in Morris’s News from
Nowhere. For we should see her as a
figure who could build a Nowhere beyond Nowhere. If Morris’s neighbourly Thames valley utopia
is indeed too pastoral, anti-intellectual and static, as many critics have
alleged, then the text invents the enigmatic figure of Ellen to potentially
remedy that situation. Unlike the other
younger Nowherians, immersed as they are in the sensory pleasures of the
present, Ellen shares the longer historical and political perspectives of old
Hammond in the British Museum. She knows
that if a utopia does not remember the bloody political struggles out of which
it was born, then it may slide unconsciously backwards towards the very
capitalism it thought it had left forever behind.
What Ellen
will actually do in Nowhere, once she is reintegrated with the other utopians
at Kelmscott, Morris’s text of course does not show us. I wager she’ll form some kind of Syndicate of
Initiative of her own and thereby reactivate the communist energies of Nowhere,
perhaps intervening politically in pre-revolutionary societies elsewhere, as
Shevek himself does in travelling back to Urras in The Dispossessed. Thank God
for Ellen, anyhow, without whom News from Nowhere would be a much lesser thing
than it actually is.
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1 comment:
In our discussion of 'The Dispossessed' my seminar group did not seem too impressed by my judgement that the original Odonians had made a major political mistake in not staying at home and fighting for Urras rather than accepting the offer of an enclave-utopia on the moon Anarres. And I note that Shevek in chapter 11 agrees with my students: "We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right". Certainly that's an important statement, given Shevek's centrality to the novel, but the book as a whole does not necessarily have to share its protagonist's political perspective.
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