Later, Le Guin began to worry that by using the grave certainties of these old kinds of storytelling, she had bought into a hierarchic, male-centred view of the world indissolubly associated with them. The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969. Genly Ai’s phobic idea of femininity, ‘all charm and … lack of substance’ and his fear of being attracted to the woman in Estraven in case he found himself fancying the man in him too, were pretty much commonplaces when she first gave them to him, but they dated fast. Feminist critics of Le Guin’s work in the seventies pointed out some more systematic skews in it. She always, they said, picked a lonely, noble male character – a diplomat, a scientist – whenever she wanted to represent the I who got to deal with alien Otherness, as if normal, ordinary humanity had to be male. And because she had decided to refer to everyone on her planet of androgynes as ‘he’, when you read The Left Hand of Darkness you effectively thought of Gethen as a world populated exclusively by men, with a few extra characteristics that are presented as their disturbing, alien aspect; in the yin-yang unity of the sexes on Gethen, the female half of Gethenians always figures as the darkness (intuitive, indirect, hidden, mysterious) and their male half as the light (rational, open, active, public). She’d set out to write a fable of gender unity, but she’d written it within a framework that took male primacy for granted.
Le Guin accepted these criticisms. For a time, starting in the late 1970s, she treated the power of her storytelling voice to say this is so, that is so, as an implicit surrender to a patriarchal agenda, and tried to purge it by writing deliberately de-centred books, without the shapes of strong story in them. The result was probably the weakest period of her career since her early apprenticeship. Lately, thank heavens, she has decided that the power she tried to do without is more of a neutral tool than she had feared, and also a less dispensable part of her gifts as a writer. In her most recent books, the old voice is back, doing new things, the worry at its power conquered. But I never worried when I read The Left Hand of Darkness. I was male, and I took a romantic vision with male selfhood at its centre straight to heart, as a beautiful fit with my own romantic wishes. I had been at single-sex schools for five years. Girls were just as alien to me by now as a hermaphroditic Prime Minister on skis. My encounters with them were clumsy and blurted. I would have liked it if they could have been complete and mythically resonant, like Genly Ai’s reconciliation with Estraven, and I was grateful to Ursula Le Guin for creating me a model of the gender divide with such lucid, ideal architecture. By the time I finished The Left Hand I had a new favourite writer.
And after I had read The Dispossessed, the other great book from her pre-doubting period, I positively venerated her. The Left Hand of Darkness might offer a world whose symbolism was ideally clear, but this book brought me something altogether more sweeping: the lure of utopia. It was set on a dusty, desert moon two centuries into an experiment in communist anarchy. The hero, Shevek, was a great physicist who had some trouble, growing up, with the social conformity his society used instead of laws. People weren’t supposed to resent the individuality of his mind, but they did. I responded to this: the clever person misunderstood was a theme I always had time for. But The Dispossessed seemed to offer a cure as well. On Anarres, no one owned anything, or wanted to. They worked for love at the jobs they could do best, or at the tasks their consciences told them were most urgent. When they needed a new jacket or an eiderdown they went to the public depot and picked one up. There was no money, and no government, just a committee anyone could sit on that co-ordinated the society’s conversation with itself. But against all these negatives – and an environment whose sparseness and harshness was lovingly evoked – there was one great shining positive – solidarity. The people of Anarres had empty hands but open hearts. On Anarres, everyone belonged, even Shevek, who visited the world his ancestors had exiled themselves from and discovered that Anarres’ bareness was fuller, for him, than any amount of comfort or plenty that depended on the division of people, one from another, by greater and lesser amounts of authority, or greater and lesser amounts of property. People did not always like each other, where Shevek came from, but they recognised each other, and gave without measure in order to receive without stint. They displayed an aristocratic disdain for the idea of grubbing around to balance the gifts they had given against the ones they had received. ‘We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners …’ Recitations like this could move me nearly to tears, when I was sixteen, and even transcribing these words now my eyes prickle at the memory of feeling that there was an ideal life next door, terribly close, kept from us all only by a few things we needed to discard; that the world could be radiant, if only we let it.
It is not an accident that Shevek’s roll-call of things that did not exist on his planet sounds so much like Henry James’s list of the things absent on the American scene, and glows with the same confidence in the secret, or the joke, that makes apparent emptiness brim over with possibility. It’s not an accident, any more than it is accidental that the towns of Anarres, on the map that I pored over, named Wide Plains and Elbow and Northsetting and Round Valley, lay alone on dusty prairies. They came from the same impulse that founded real American towns, the same specifically American perception about what may be built in a new place where the past’s rules can all be abandoned. Only here, ought reigned completely, transmogrifying the white houses of De Smet into dormitories, the restaurants into public dining rooms, the motel into a communal bathhouse, and abolishing the shops altogether, as grotesque offences to the human spirit. The Dispossessed returned me to the question that the stories of the town had posed, as I started to look around in the wider world, and gave a new, absolute answer, one that abolished the question. How shall I be fed by strangers? Simple: there are no strangers. Everyone is a brother or sister, everyone is as unconditionally committed to each other as family. Oh, how I wanted this! There are other themes in the novel, which meant much less to me at the time: it is also, for example, a book written in praise of committing yourself to passing time, and proudly allowing the strains of loyalty to a partner or a child to weather you, so that you wear time unashamedly on your face. At sixteen I could hardly imagine the first phase of adulthood, let alone the later ones, and I had no idea how provocative it was in American terms – in its own way, an equally utopian proposition – to describe Shevek’s partner, in her thirties, cheerfully losing teeth and collecting wrinkles. I ached to sit on golden grass on a day of celebration, eating little cakes prepared by the syndicate of cooks. I wanted to wander through a city without a single locked door. I wanted, as I had not wanted since I wanted Narnia, to be there; not because there was beautiful, this time – in fact it was aggressively unbeautiful – but because there my solitude could end. There, the walls that guarded it would all fall down. I longed for Anarres.
And this was strange, on the face of it, because I already lived in a dormitory, and I hated it. I hated having no privacy. I avoided washing on weekdays so that I wouldn’t have to strip in the grim, carbolic-smelling basement bathroom of my boarding house at school, where three metal bathtubs stood in a row without any partitions between them. Brotherhood, schmotherhood: other people scattered used football socks and wanked at night when you had to listen to them. I spent most of my time clenching my pores closed so that the collective life couldn’t get in. Undisturbed solitude, with a lockable door, was the greatest luxury I could imagine. The difference about Anarres was that there I could imagine a world beyond my solitude that I could open up to in the confidence that it would match how I felt inside. It would be a warmed world, and my wishes would flow out to join millions of other wishes, all aimed at obtaining the specific set of joyous sensations that The Dispossessed described, in the unanimity that only fiction makes possible.
I decided that I was an ana
rchist. Maybe absolute politics of all kinds call most seductively to you when you’re this age. Of all things, it would be hardest then to be a pragmatist, comfortably aware that the street is full of people pretty much, though not exactly, like you, whose lives are just as important to them as yours is to you. Remember how unbearable the adults you knew best had become, just then? How repetitive and mechanical and maddening they seemed, stuck in a loop of behavioural tics and unvarying sayings, like Talking Action Man after the string in his back was pulled? When the subjectivities of other people jostle you so oppressively, it’s hard to accept that what you see is, essentially, what you’re going to get. You welcome systems and causes that can hold off this knowledge, especially those that give ideas priority over observation. If ideas take precedence, you can reconceptualise that mass of strangers as a humanity which demands that you take bold, radical action on its behalf. Several causes worked. I could have declared that I was an orthodox Communist, and let Marxist-Leninism abstract the crowd of other people for me into dialectically struggling classes, or maybe I could have taken Ayn Rand to heart, and seen the world through her eyes, split between heroic titans and conformist ants. I couldn’t have been a fascist or a White Power advocate: those systems ooze unmistakable hate, and you have to be able to tell yourself, at sixteen, that your utopian urge is generous.
I certainly didn’t find much to confirm my particular choice of utopia when I went out looking for corollaries to Anarres among real anarchists, in London, in 1980. British anarchism was going through a quiet patch. Punk’s burst of enthusiasm for anarchist ideas and images was fading away; the age of road protests and illegal raves had not begun. Crusties had not yet been invented. So there was no real air of confrontation about anarchism just then; the movement was in the hands of elderly, transparently nice people who were activists for community gardening, and had once had a refugee from the Spanish Civil War to stay in their spare bedroom in Hemel Hempstead. Every two weeks, the anarchist newspaper Freedom would come out, with a front-page story that started from an item of current news, and always proved within three paragraphs that the solution to whatever-it-was lay in the complete abolition of government and private property. Freedom was published from the Freedom Bookshop, a venerable place up an alley in Whitechapel, where Peter Kropotkin himself, in exile from the Tsar, had walked and talked. Kropotkin’s pamphlets were still on sale in their original 1890s editions, now priced at 10p. His face twinkled down from a poster, saying, ‘Don’t forget mutual aid, comrades!’ I would bunk off sports, and go to Whitechapel in my school uniform. ‘D’you think there’ll be a revolution soon?’ I asked the volunteer behind the till. ‘I certainly hope so,’ he said. ‘I’m eighty-one.’
But anarchism had a couple of points in its favour that were very important to me. In the first place, it uttered a great big, non-negotiable, rejectionist Fuck You to authority, as manifested in my life by school rules and housemasters. Punk gave me the soundtrack; my copy of the Fontana Anarchist Reader, edited by George Woodcock, equipped me with a whole set of grandly refusing words from history. ‘Whoever puts his hand on me to make me obey, is a tyrant,’ wrote Enrico Malatesta. ‘No God or master!’ went the anarchist battle-cry in the Spanish Civil War, even more concisely. This almost autistic view that any law would be oppression, any touch would be a violation, certainly matched my sense of myself at fifteen and sixteen, which was brittle, and melodramatic because brittle. I could believe that being told what to do might scatter me into atoms. It seemed quite possible that a dreadful dissolution would follow if I once let myself get claimed by any hand that had the power to join me into anything larger than myself. I might be carried over a brink into darkness, a darkness like the darkness inside Wally’s mouth. I did not think about what other things, besides authority, depend on you allowing the touch of another person’s hand to have power. I welcomed anarchism’s perpetual shout of Hands Off.
Secondly, anarchism was secretly reassuring. It let you claim a wicked reputation as an enemy of humanity, an acolyte of destruction, while all the while being virtuous within its rind of apparent menace. It was like the anarchist flag. The true banner of anarchy, carried through the streets of Moscow in 1921 at the funeral of Kropotkin, is plain black. It is a deliberately blank square in the traditional colour of evil, as lightless as a sample of the air in a cellar. It symbolises pure negation. It doesn’t care that it looks devilish, it knowingly sops up all the fear it may inspire as a conscious rejection of morality. But its devotees fly it in the confidence that it only negates the illusory and oppressive definitions of virtue put about by church and capital; that it is in fact a loud assertion of human goodness. The whole theory of anarchism actually depends upon a very innocent belief in the natural goodness of human beings. It wants to throw all laws away because it assumes that people do not have any innate drives toward dominance or cruelty. Those things, it says, are only effects of a cruel superstructure laid down over our kind biology. Far from being nasty and brutal and in need of restraint, people are fundamentally co-operative and altruistic, and if you just took away their chains, they would organise themselves spontaneously into a society as rich and intricate as the furled petals of a rose. I liked this. It suited my lingering anxiety about what might be concealed beneath my conscious thoughts to deny that anything was, at all: that I even had an unconscious, or any dark recess of my mind whose darkness could not be blamed on the effects of capitalism. Three cheers for the lovely black flag!
*
After a while the thrill began to wear off the sentences in Ursula Le Guin that had seemed most meaningful to me, and given me the most concentrated pleasure. I started to think that when she flew to the heights of patterning metaphor, perhaps the intensity she got was not completely earned. I went through one of her short stories in Orsinian Tales, a book set in an imaginary Eastern European country, attempting to snip off the most excessive phrases, in the hope that something to which I could give credence again would be left afterwards. ‘Under their voices, the deep, weak singing voice of Kasimir’s fiddle went on wordless,’ I read; I crossed out ‘like a cry from the depths of the forest’. But the story just kept getting smaller.
Never mind; a lot of books can be read in a utopian way, if you put your mind to it. The coherence of story itself can offer a geography in which you can imagine yourself belonging more than you do in the mundane, disappointing world. In story, you can imagine being understood as a character is understood by a reader. There was an urban legend going round about that time, about a fanatical fan of Watership Down who took acid and jumped to his death off a multi-storey carpark, in the hope that he’d be reincarnated as a rabbit. If such a person had actually existed, what he would have wanted would presumably have been access to the ordered story-world invented by Richard Adams, rather than life on all fours with a twitching, sensitive nose. In the same way, Trekkies who crave an existence in the Star Fleet future are proposing a life whose grammar is as firm and decisive as an interchange between Commander Ryker and Counsellor Troi as they walk down a corridor of the Enterprise, a camera on a dolly retreating in step with them, and the corridor roofless, so that studio lamps subtly aligned can paint the actors’ uniforms in ideal, even colours. The idea of living like a story is utopian in itself, when you’re waiting for life to begin.
The waiting, the waiting. ‘Maybe tomorrow/ Maybe some day …’ sang Chrissie Hynde on the radio, in ‘Talk of the Town’. I loved that single; I coveted its world-weariness, because to sound so rueful about love, you had to have had it, and lost it, and maybe found it again, and every phase of the history the song looked back on, happy or sad, implied living fully in the world, being fully committed. My life seemed like limbo in comparison. The trembling sense I’d felt at thirteen, that huge feelings were imminent, was now a constant companion, a yearning buzz you wouldn’t have known I felt if you’d seen me awkwardly hunched in my oversize overcoat. Sometimes I got impatient with it. I wanted something more immediate th
an a perpetual, wavering awareness of possibility. This was where cult books came in usefully. The Doors of Perception, The Glass Bead Game, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction, Philip K. Dick, some books by Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, the entire works of Jack Kerouac: they let you abort waiting, and take immediate delivery of some potent, if perhaps trashy, image of a counter-life, a freer and stranger existence, whether it was an imaginary, austere far-future monastery (Herman Hesse), or in the Beats’ 1950s America, where driving furiously to Pittsburgh in an old Buick accelerated your soul. ‘Don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?’ it said on the last page of On the Road – a sentence that, even when I was reading it with great satisfaction, stoned, in a friend’s father’s post-divorce bachelor pad in Cadogan Square, with Captain Beefheart playing on the stereo, I knew meant absolutely nothing.
One thing I never did was to fix my wishes on a single book. I never performed the kind of obsessive reading that lone gunmen seem so fond of, with their uncanny, consensual choice of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye for their One Book. Reading is no longer an exploratory act when it settles, in this way, on one text that no other can rival, or approximate, or even be allowed to resemble. It declares: this is the Truth, this is Me, astonishingly anticipated to the extent that this book has actually been waiting for me to come along and gaze into it and discern a complete, authoritative, quasi-scriptural reflection of myself. Both Mark Chapman, assassin of John Lennon, and John Hinckley, who tried to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan, felt that J. D. Salinger’s first-person narration by Holden Caulfield expressed their natures better than any of the thoughts in their own heads did. His stream of consciousness was more theirs than theirs was. So, because their own central sense of self was weak, they borrowed his, which, though fictional, seemed to have as definite an existence as the well-thumbed paperback in their windcheater pocket, and made Holden an armature round which they could wind their obsessions.
The Child that Books Built Page 19