English 67

Here are some half-formed thoughts:

Desire and Dystopia in Dick’s “Wholesale” and LeGuin Lathe of Heaven

If Utopia is largely political, then politics is about competing narratives. Competing narratives are different instantiations or competing outgrowths of desire.

How is desire expressed as possible existence(s) in PKD, “Wholesale”:

The desire or will to live (the narrative about the aliens = Abraham, and Sodom: if I can find one good man I will spare the city – Gen. 18) expressed as either a childish fantasy of self-aggrandizement or
The desire for non-alienated labor (his other life as a spy/assassin)
The desire for another place – any place but here (a utopian desire)
The desire for memory that constitutes identity – a truer memory than “history” with all its unreliable gaps and omissions. And “tangible” proof of that identity

Memory and desire are indistinguishable. Raises the question: if desire creates and shapes identity, and identity is made largely of memory, and our desires and memories are largely those implanted by others, where does that leave our individuality?

Desire in LeGuin

Epigram from Lafcadio Hearn: ” . . the eternal sorrow is but the eternal hunger of insatiable desire” (74)

Haberman wants George to Want it.
He cannot want, and sees no purpose. Passivity: “He never had any choice, he was only a dreamer” (83). “I don’t have enough desires” (87). George Orr as a natural Taoist: “The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything” (95).

LeGuin’s story is a metacritique of utopia and fiction on the whole.

Our society ” . . . seeking guidance, sometimes puts entirely mistaken trust in its artists, using them as prophets and futurologists. . . . The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. . . .The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words” (preface to Left Hand of Darkness).

We cannot create that which we cannot imagine, and we cannot imagine that which has never been:
“I can’t, or my subconscious can’t, even imagine a warless world” (86).

Ch 4: epigram, HG Wells: “perfection” as the repudiation of being.

“My own dreams have immoral effects. I have no right to change things. Nor has he to make me. . .” (48).

While Orr’s humility may be admirable, if you disclaim the right and responsibility for action, aren’t you just letting someone else make choices for you? Many people, if not most, want to buy into some sort of either utopian/dystopian/apocalyptic narrative (apocalypse as some kind of ‘unveiling’ or ‘revelation’). The utopian answers a need for alternatives, even if they are imagined alternatives which can never be fully expressed. The anti-utopian position seems to default to the status quo, and negate personal and collective responsibility for an impoverished notion of individual “liberty.”

The Dystopian World created by Haberman via Orr’s dreams: Ch. 9.
This chapter is a “classic” dystopia in the Huxely/Orwell mold.

A well-planned and administered global government, with Portland as the world capital.
Dystopian: eugenic orientation. Without war, but horrible bloodsport. No racism, but no color, and no difference. If Utopia is a desire for sameness as equality – dytopia theorizes equality as a kind of enforced sameness and mediocrity. See also: Vonnegut, “Harrison Bergeron.”
Haberman’s desire as will to power. Using Orr’s power to achieve his utopian desires. Belief in “perfectibility.” But what if utopian desire is a desire for rationally based choices, and equity; a society based on reason rather than desire?

“The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth” (128). What if the highest good were not growth, but reason, and the goal of making society more reasonable and rational? “The greatest good for the greatest number” (132). Haberman’s vision is not rational, but rather utilitarian, and cruel. Reason, like desire, must be tempered by compassion.

Taoism as a philosophical “regulation” of desire in LeGuin

Jameson notes in his essay on LHD in Archaeologies of the Future:

Essentially, Gethenian [bi/a-sexual] biology solves the problem of sex [by restricting it to only a few days a month], and that is surely something no human being of our type has every been able to do owing largely to the non-biological [and therefore non-Taoist?] nature of human desire as opposed to ‘natural’ or instinctual animal need. Desire is permanently scandalous precisely because it admits of no ’solution’ – promiscuity, repression, or the couple being equally intolerable (274).

To access the problem of good/evil as action/necessity, I really think a reading of More’s Utopia might be helpful. More’s somewhat static, ordered, non-materialistic society reminds me of both Karhide (in LHD) and Anarres [The Dispossessed]. Thomas More, I think has been dramatically and consistently mis-read as a blueprint for a perfect society, or as pure satire. It is neither – it is an argument for a better (not perfect) world, but leaves its possible fulfillment as a very open question inscribed in the very word coined by More (Utopia = a homophony of ‘eu’ [good] + topos [place], and ou [no] + place). A good place of stasis, order, and rational distribution of resources where agricultural and philosophical order rather than desire are the organizing principles. See also More’s imagination of Utopian marriage: prospective couples have to see each other naked first, which probably forecloses the possibility of marriage based on deferral of sexual desire, fueled by imagination.