When in Ursula
Le Guin’s utopia The Dispossessed the
hero Shevek embarks on a sexual partnership with the marine biologist Takver,
the two of them take a room together at the northern end of the city of
Abbenay: ‘The move was not complicated … Shevek brought a box of papers, his
winter boots, and the orange blanket.
Takver had to make three trips.
One was to the district clothing depositary to get them both a new suit,
an act which she felt obscurely but strongly was essential to them beginning
their partnership’.
A similar
sartorial moment befalls William Guest in News
from Nowhere, on the morning after his return from old Hammond’s long
lectures to him in the British Museum: ‘I dressed speedily, in a suit of blue
laid ready for me, so handsome that I quite blushed when I had got into it,
feeling as I did so that excited pleasure of anticipation of a holiday’. Guest’s new clothes don’t have the happy
sexual meaning of Takver and Shevek’s, but they too mark a significant new
phase for him: departure from London and travel up the Thames.
In both
these instances we are surely in the presence of what narratologist Vladimir
Propp, in his pathbreaking book Morphology
of the Folk Tale (1928), describes as Function XXIX: ‘THE HERO IS GIVEN A
NEW APPEARANCE (Definition: transfiguration. Designation: T)’. Of the four variants there listed, we are in
Morris and Le Guin dealing with number three: ‘The hero puts on new garments’. That both utopias thus deliver function XXIX
so neatly prompts a more general question: how useful would Proppian
narratology be for the analysis both of particular utopias and of the genre of
utopia itself? Has anyone tried out a
Proppian study of either The Dispossessed
or News from Nowhere; and if not, why
not?
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