SOURCE: “Gender and the ‘Simultaneity Principle’: Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed,” in Mosaic, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 107-21.

[In the following essay, Klarer examines the narrative structure, symbolism, and metafictional techniques employed in The Dispossessed in light of new feminist theory and literary criticism. According to Klarer, Le Guin's subversion of conventional gender divisions anticipated many later developments in contemporary feminist theory.]

For the last several decades, Ursula K. Le Guin has been acclaimed as a leading “female” writer of science fiction. The term “female” seems more appropriate than “feminist” because her work, very much as in the case of Doris Lessing, is usually not regarded as an integral part of the liberationist movement. Indeed, her novels have been accepted into the canon of male/mainstream science fiction, probably because her recourse to the concept of androgyny and concerns with simultaneity in her vision of an integration of the sexes has made her seem more amenable to dialogue than other feminist writers in the genre.

In keeping with her apparent neutral and muted stance, until recently much scholarship of Le Guin’s fiction has tended to touch only on surface issues, and to take one of two forms. On the one hand, there are studies which analyze the structural features of Le Guin’s fiction but with little attention to the fact that she is a female author or without linking her narrative innovations to contemporary feminist debates. On the other hand, there are gender-specific approaches, but which have been taking their bearings from a critique of the perceived limitations of her female characters and her inclination toward an overall “maleness” in her portrayal of androgynes in The Left Hand of Darkness （1969）.

Although Le Guin took such accusations seriously—and in her 1976 essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” apologized for not having explored “androgyny from a woman’s point of view as well as a man’s” （16）—it could also be said that she had fallen victim to an early brand of feminist criticism, one which was concerned mainly with “realism” in regard to the depiction of female characters and which focused on overt political content. Since the mid-seventies, however, the primary focus of feminists has been on “écriture féminine” as a more far-ranging and valid basis for evaluation. Specific analyses of this dimension of feminist science fiction have mainly converged in discussions of the work of Monique Wittig, where the emphasis is on syntax, language and structure and their relationship to sociocultural, physio-sexual, or genetic issues.

My purpose in the following essay is to examine Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed in the light of this new feminist poetics and related recent feminist literary criticism. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate not only that The Dispossessed provides a striking example of what could be called a gender- conscious structure but also that the metatheoretical credo which Le Guin encodes in this novel predates the very core of much current feminist thought and practice.

The narrative of The Dispossessed is situated on two planets: Anarres and Urras. The fertile Urras very much resembles our Western world where a “capitalist organization” results in striking oppositions between rich and poor social strata. About 150 years before the action of the book, a large group of Odonians, named after the woman anarchist Odo, left the oppressive Urras to found a communist settlement on the moon Anarres. The community has refrained from any contact with the proprietarian planet, apart from some trading of vital goods in exchange for Anarresti ore. Despite the barren soil and adverse nature of the planet, the Anarresti population has been able to maintain political and economical independence from Urras.

The novel focuses on Shevek, a male Anarresti physicist, whose theoretical works on simultaneity and Sequency are supposed to revolutionize traditional physics just as Relativity reshaped Newtonian mechanics. Conventional physics, described as Sequency, very much parallels our Western notions of linear temporality. Shevek’s interest in alternative models of time and space had been triggered by an encounter with a marginalized woman professor who is exploring theories of simultaneity. He soon outdoes her by finishing a “manuscript of the Physics of Simultaneity” （199）. Shevek’s study, however, is rejected by a very influential male physicist, who delays the work’s publication until he is able to edit the manuscript to conform to traditional Sequency standards and impose himself as co-author. As he argues. “Sequency Physics is the highroad of chronosophical thought in the Odonian Society [and] has been a mutually agreed principle since the Settlement of Anarres. Egoistic divagations from this solidarity principle can result only in sterile spinning of impractical hypotheses without social organic utility, or repetition of the superstitious-religious speculations” （200）. Shevek is thus faced with a form of “patriarchal suppression” which opposes everything that challenges linear sequentiality. Finally he submits and the book is published under the guise of a work on traditional physics.

Shevek’s study is therefore comparable to the twofold structure of women’s discourse described by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. On the one hand, female writing expresses women’s very own Weltanschauung; on the other, women have had to be conversant with the male tongue before being able to express female issues sufficiently. Accordingly, women’s writing has been “in some sense palimpsestic, works whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible （and less socially acceptable） levels of meaning”: such texts accomplish “the difficult task of achieving true female literary authority by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards” （73; emphasis mine）.

In “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Elaine Showalter makes the same point: “women’s fiction can be read as a double- voiced discourse, containing a ‘dominant’ and a ‘muted’ story…in which we must keep two alternative oscillating texts simultaneously in view” （265-66; emphasis mine）. Luce Irigaray also uses the term when she observes of women that “simultaneity would be her ‘property’” （24）. Derrida, too, relies on a similar metaphor several times, though without linking it to gender issues. In Margins of Philosophy he argues that there are in any text at least “two texts, two hands, two visions, two ways of listening. Together simultaneously and separately” （65; emphasis mine）; in Positions, he observes that “we must proceed using a double gesture…a double writing…which brings low what was high…a concept…that is, simultaneously either or…” （41-43）.

The double dealing that characterizes Shevek’s strategy for dealing with patriarchal oppression also parallels Le Guin’s publishing tactics. As James W. Bittner notes, the state of science fiction in the early 70s suggests certain parallels between Shevek and Le Guin; in a time in which the utopian novel was generally regarded as “dormant if not dying” （245）, the response of one character to Shevek’s work can easily be seen as the response of a 1972 publishing house to Le Guin: “You are like somebody from our own past, the old idealists, the visionaries of freedom” （289）. Le Guin’s strategy for rejuvenating the traditional utopian genre is to make it the vehicle for addressing （almost disguising） female issues. Her novels simultaneously accord with the traditional male conventions of science fiction and the utopian novel but at the same time subvert and revive these conventions through the “female voice.”

In the case of The Dispossessed, almost a decade after the publication of his book, Shevek the Anarresti is awarded the most prestigious Urrasti prize in physics for this work. After several years of extreme hardship, oppression and the final expulsion from the research institute, he accepts an invitation to the biggest university on the planet Urras. He is the first Anarresti to return to Urras in more than 150 years and is therefore regarded as a traitor by his own people. Shevek soon realizes that his new sheltered life on Urras is only a bribe in exchange for the equations of his revolutionary theory. As he is about to finish his calculations, he becomes cognizant of Urras’s military plans to abuse his results. In order to get his equations publicly announced, thus making them useless for the Urrasti plans, he takes refuge in the embassy of an alien people on Urras who finally bring him back to his home planet.

The overall structure of the novel directly reflects the protagonist’s philosophical ponderings over time and space. The narrative jumps back and forth in space, starting out with a chapter about Shevek’s departure from Anarres and his arrival on Urras, followed by an account of his earlier life on Anarres, then a chapter situated on Urras, etc. Equally jumbled is its handling of time: all narrative dealing with Anarres takes place before Shevek’s experiences as a visitor of Urras. The 13 chapters of the book are simply titled after either planet and follow a consistent pattern. All even-numbered chapters take place on Anarres; the uneven ones on Urras. The only exceptions are the first and the last chapters, which encompass both Anarres and Urras. Chapter 1 begins with Shevek’s departure from Anarres and ends with his arrival on Urras. Chapter 13 starts with Shevek leaving Urras and ends with his return home: “To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back” （52）. All uneven chapters （including 1 and 13） move from what the reader perceives as the present into the future. All even chapters narrate what has happened in the past up to the present, the point at which the novel begins.

To support this pattern “inside” the overall structure of the narrative, Le Guin introduces a number of motifs such as mobiles, planetary imagery, sexual intercourse, bisexuality, and music. These metatheoretical devices parallel her narrative practice, as well as the utopian poetics that stands behind it. The most striking and central metaphor of the book’s structure are the mobiles made by Takver, Shevek’s wife.

Complex concentric shapes made of wire, which moved and changed slowly and inwardly when suspended from the ceiling. She had made these with scrap wire…and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space.… The single mobile hanging in this room oscillated slightly. It was a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in complexly interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. Takver called it the Inhabitation of Time.

（156, 303; emphasis mine）

The pieces of wire, like the narratives in each chapter, connect the two glass bubbles, or planets respectively. The book is structured in concentric circles that oscillate between Urras and Anarres, i.e., time and space, which are also the two structural parameters of Takver’s mobiles. Inside each circular string of narrative, Le Guin follows a linear, sequential structure that starts in the past and leads into the future. The description of the mobile thus functions as a graphic rendering of the concentric format of the novel itself.

Shevek’s life-work, the co-ordination of linearity and simultaneity, which is also the metatheory behind Le Guin’s structural undertaking, is illustrated best in the metaphor Le Guin uses to describe eternal simultaneous presence: “It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers” （187）. In the central chapter the protagonist expounds his philosophy of science which at the same time is Le Guin’s theory of science fiction and of the science of fiction: the necessary fusion of sequentiality with a circular structural pattern.

Shevek’s or Le Guin’s notion of a non-objective time is rooted in a number of ethno-linguistic and comparative-anthropological studies which link various conceptions of time to specific linguistic prerequisites. Since Le Guin’s father was a well-known anthropologist, it is very likely that she was exposed to this line of thought and had it in mind when writing The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. One of the earliest and best known attempts, the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tries to show how language systems can determine temporal perception. The illuminating, though severely criticized, investigations that Sapir and Whorf conducted on the Hopi Indians suggested on the grounds of linguistic and syntactical data that the perception of time and space is a result of language patterns rather than any objectifiable parameters （82-88）. In this particular case, Sapir and Whorf set Western Indo-European linear temporality against the cyclic temporality of the Hopi Indians. In our linearistic terms, time seems to move like an arrow from the past via the present to the future, as Shevek explains: “Well, we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us; but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new?” （187）. Cyclic time, which is probably a more primitive （in the sense of older and original） form, stresses the recurrence of the same phenomena such as days, seasons, and years in a continuous present.

In her essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” Le Guin explains the cyclic time concepts found in The Left Hand of Darkness, placing them in a highly gendered context. As she states, the androgynes “have no myth of progress at all. Their calendar calls the current year always the Year One, and they count backward and forward from that. In this, it seems that what I was after again was a balance: the driving linearity of the ‘male’, the pushing forward to the limit…and the circularity of the ‘female’” （12）. In The Dispossessed, Le Guin elaborates on the inclusiveness of the linear and the cyclic and how these principles determine each other: “So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos.” Shevek is, of course, attacked since traditional logic does not permit “two contradictory statements about the same thing” and argues instead that “one of these aspects is real, the other’s simply an illusion” （188）. As proofs for her simultaneity hypothesis and questioning of Western notions of temporal perception, Le Guin presents dreams and early childhood as states of an inversion of time in which sequence and simultaneity fuse and blend into each other. “‘But we don’t experience the universe only successively,’ Shevek said. ‘Do you never dream…?…A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together” （187）. Le Guin also sees myth as a further example for the collapse of linear time: “In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says ‘Once upon a time?’ And so, when the mystic makes the reconstruction of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return” （187）.

Le Guin’s mysticism very much parallels Derrida’s concept of the “mythogram” in Of Grammatology:

We have seen that the traditional concept of time, an entire organization of the world and of language, was bound up with it [the linearity of the symbol]. Writing…is rooted in a past of nonlinear writing. It had to be defeated.…A war was declared, and a suppression of all that resisted linearization was installed. And first of what Leroi-Gourhan calls the “mythogram,” a writing that spells its symbols pluri-dimensionally; there the meaning is not subjected to successivity, to the order of logical time, or to the irreversible temporality of sound. This pluri-dimensionality does not paralyze history within simultaneity, it corresponds to another level of historical experience, and one may just as well consider, conversely, linear thought as a reduction of history.

（85）

To Derrida, simultaneity provides the utopian possibility of non-linear narrative spaces and thus offers an alternative to traditional discourse. He also associates the “poetics” of a classical utopian mode with a mythological “past of non- linear writing.”

The most famous example of “simultaneity” as a metafictional device in American literature is probably Kurt Vonnegut’s “science （of） fiction” in Slaughterhouse-Five. In his novel, Vonnegut envisions an alien people on the faraway planet Tralfamadore, who use simultaneity as a basis of literary production and reception.

Tralfamadorian…books were laid out—in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars…each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end.…What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen at one time.

（76）

Vonnegut’s post-modernist metatheoretical elaboration on simultaneity is a paracriticism of his own novel, which adopts a structure quite similar to that of these Tralfamadorian novels. Slaughterhouse-Five, with its multiperspectival narration as well as its jumbled order of narrative time and space, appears like an attempt to put Derrida’s utopian poetics into literary practice.

Shevek’s “Theory of Simultaneity” in The Dispossessed is very much the result of mystic ecstasy in which he experiences the fusion of linearity and circularity that leads to his revolutionary mathematical equations: “He dreamed vividly, and the dreams were part of his work. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity of two moments in his left and right hands: as he moved them apart he smiled to see the moment separate like dividing soap bubbles” （99）. The Dispossessed is built on an intrinsic network of symbols that reflect the simultaneity of line and circle. A major device in this interdependent structure is the use of planetary imagery. Like the two glass bubbles of the mobile, Urras and Anarres circle around a common center, each planet simultaneously representing the other planet’s moon: “‘Our Earth is their Moon, our Moon is their Earth’” （41）. The fusion of sequence and simultaneity in a cosmological imagery reappears throughout the novel in various forms. For example, when Shevek leaves Urras on the Anarresti space ship the flat surface of his home planet undergoes a mysterious metamorphosis from line to sphere.

For on the screen now a strange sight, a pallid plain of stone. It was the desert seen from the mountains above Grand Valley.…The stone plain was no longer plane but hollow, like a huge bowl full of sunlight.…All at once a line broke across it, abstract, geometric, the perfect section of a circle. Beyond the arc was blackness. This blackness reversed the whole picture, made it negative. The real, the stone part of it was no longer concave and full of light, but convex, reflecting light. It was not a plain or a bowl but a sphere, a ball of white stone.…

（12-13）

In her description of sexual intercourse, Le Guin again takes up the prior mobile metaphor, this time cloaked in an orgasmic cosmography: “they both liked making love … they were both half asleep, and circled about the center of infinite pleasure, about each other’s being, like planets circling blindly, in the flood of sunlight, about the common center of gravity, swinging, circling endlessly” （266）. The orgasmic unity of Shevek and his partner, combining what could be called “phallic linearity” and “vaginal circularity,” might be wishful thinking in regard to the jouissance or pleasure of the text, namely that the reader can re-enact that synthesis of linearity and circular narrative structure. It presents a utopian reception esthetics based on an orgasmic fusion of the book’s very structural principles. The implications of this simultaneity in regard to the sexes are even further elaborated in the bisexual inclinations of the Anarresti. Most of them are apparently heterosexual, although homosexual experimentation and bisexuality are quite common: “Like all children of Anarres he [Shevek] had sexual experience freely with boys and girls” （49-50; cf. 147）. In The Left Hand of Darkness this simultaneity of gender/sex reaches an ultimate extreme.

The metaphors that writers have employed to describe bisexuality and androgyny are manifold, and its myths are reflected not only in fantasy, utopia and science fiction but also in the premises of twentieth-century clinical psychology and physiology. In her analysis of Freud’s and Jones’s sexual psychology, for example, Michèle Montrelay’s strategy is to argue for simultaneous validity of both apparently contradictory theories. As she notes: “For Freud, libido is identical in the two sexes. Moreover it is always male in essence. For it is the clitoris, an external and erectile part of the body, homologous with the penis, which is the erotic organ of the little girl” （227）. In this respect female sexuality for Freud is always based on phallic references. Jones, on the other hand, together with the English school （Klein, Horney, Muller） regards female libido as something independent and specifically distinct from phallic analogies. As Montrelay observes, “From the start, the girl privileges the interior of the body and the vagina.…It is therefore not enough to give an account of feminine sexuality from a ‘phallocentric’ point of view” （227）. The Viennese school spoke of one libido, whereas Jones was eager to differentiate between two types of libidinal organization: male and female.

To support her reevaluation of the Freud/Jones positions, Montrelay refers to a specific study on female sexuality which was conducted by Janine Chassguet-Smirgel with a team of analysts. Montrelay concludes from their results that the two theoretical positions which had been considered incompatible are thus simultaneously present in feminine sexuality. Female sexuality, according to Montrelay, incorporates a “concentric character and at the same time the phallus”:

To simultaneously affirm the ‘concentric’ and the phallic character of feminine sexuality, is to declare both Freud and Jones are right…the verification of two incompatible propositions does not do away with the contradiction that links them. The fact that phallocentrism and concentricity may be equally constitutive of feminine sexuality does not prove that they make a harmonious unit…they coexist as incompatible and that it is this incompatibility which is specific to the feminine unconscious.… Phallocentrism and concentricity, both simultaneously constitutive of [female] unconscious.…

（230-31）

Irigaray too, according to Toril Moi, “posits femininity as plural and multiple: woman’s economy is not specular in the sense that it does not work on an either/or model. Her sexuality is inclusive: she doesn’t after all have to choose between clitoral and vaginal pleasures, as Freud assumed, but can have it both ways” （Politics 144）. Montrelay’s results, as well as the entire question about sexual pleasure, lead directly to literary issues, specifically to the question of how simultaneity operates as a gendered principle in the production of texts and pleasure respectively.

In The Dispossessed sexuality and procreation in particular stand for literary production, as Le Guin points out when Shevek and his wife Takver talk about the publication of his book. Shevek’s Theory of Simultaneity was held back from publication by Sabul, who wants to participate in Shevek’s fame by signing as co-author. “I’d as soon share you with him as that book,” Shevek says to his wife. In response, she explains: “It’s the book that’s important—the ideas. Listen. We want to keep this child to be born with us as a baby, we want to love it.…But if for some reason it would die if we kept it, it could only live in a nursery…if we had that choice, which would we choose? To keep the stillborn? or to give life?’…The Truth is the book” （201-02）. Procreation and literary production are paralleled as analogous acts. The fusion of the two principles of line and circle as well as the structure of the book itself engenders, so to speak, literary offspring. For Le Guin the procreational process incorporates two contradictory concepts; on the one hand, the renewal of life in the form of circular regeneration, on the other, death through teleological linearity. When Shevek’s first child is born, this coincidence of line and cycle is expressed in a striking image of life and death. “And she took the slimy but recognizably human creature that had appeared. A gush of blood followed, and an amorphous mass of something not human, not alive…it was death he saw” （204）.

Among the various metaphors of simultaneity that Le Guin employs, music is the most obvious symbol of her revolutionary poetics/physics. Her use of this motif parallels ancient cosmological visions such as the so-called Somnium Scipionis in which dream, planetary and musical imagery fuse into a description of the universe. A friend of Shevek and Takver, for example, is ostracized because of his simultaneous, cyclic compositions, which do not fit into the esthetic norm of “linear jouissance”: “I am writing a piece of chamber music. Though I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. Five instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationships of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony. But they don’t hear it. They can’t” （150）. The Ptolemaic cosmology also used musical harmony to sustain its physical theory. Le Guin’s fiction of an alternative Weltbild is supported by a poetics that also seeks its proofs in polyphonic harmony.

French feminists perform an analogous movement into a utopian female perception and reception theory that is directly linked to a supposedly female physis and thus based on simultaneity. Woman’s pancorporal sexuality is seen to contrast with male, focused, “phallocentric” desire, both resembling opposite Weltanschauungen based on physiological assumptions. According to Hélène Cixous, for example, woman is “body without end, without appendage, without principle ‘parts.’ If she is a whole, it’s a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simply partial objects but a moving limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space not organized around any one sun that’s more a star than the others”; female sexuality is polymorphous, decentered, regional, whereas “Masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering that centralized body （in political anatomy） under the dictatorship of its parts” （889）. Thus to Cixous and other French feminists, the female body is installed as an inversion of patriarchal sexuality and discourse respectively. To Toril Moi, a “woman’s sex and pleasure is not one: her sexual organs are composed of many different elements （lips, vagina, clitoris, cervix, uterus, breasts） and her jouissance is therefore multiple, non-unified, endless” （Politics 43）. This alternative esthetics is based on simultaneity—in the case of French feminism on the simultaneity of erogenous zones—that exceeds linear or punctual concepts. In an interview Irigaray, too, compares female orgasmic poetics with polyphony: “Her polyphony, her harmony…her lust has nothing to do with this punctual lust.…[Women] can remain long…in time and space of their lust” （24）.

The Dispossessed can easily be read along these lines. Through its innovative structure Le Guin’s novel almost invites a “French feminist reading.” When taking a closer look at certain other topoi in The Dispossessed, however, it is much harder to adhere to a strictly feminist interpretation. Traditional concerns of feminist science fiction such as alternative female language, the treatment and position of women in society and education, are handled ambivalently and are by no means entirely “eu- topian,” i.e., positive. The settlement on Anarres is, of course, the utopian vision, contrasting the “earthly” Urras, which shares most negative features of our world. Anarres, however, is an inverted, regressive kind of Arcadia, bearing hardly any resemblance to the classical idylls. It is an ideological utopia incorporating a number of stereotypes that until recently had been ascribed to East European communist countries. Anarres deliberately blocks any exchange with Urras under the pretence of keeping up an unspoiled Odonian ideology.

The constant references to walls, metaphorical and concrete ones, underline these analogies to former “East European conditions.” The airport on Anarres, for example, which is the only way in and out, is encircled: “There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared; an adult could look right over it and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real” （9）. The wall symbolism reappears in Shevek’s dreams, where it suggests not only political or intellectual confinement but also the inability to escape one’s own cultural patterns of thought: “He dreamed he was on a road through a bare land. Far ahead across the road he saw a line. As he approached it across the plain he saw that it was a wall. It went from horizon to horizon across the barren land. It was dense, dark, and very high. The road ran up to it and was stopped.…He had to go on or he could never come home again. A stone lay there…there was a number—…the primal number, that was both unity and plurality” （34）. By extending the wall symbolism in this way, Le Guin creates poly-dimensional layers of meaning. She is very cautious about idealizing this visionary community, and the reader is left with the sense of a utopian undertaking that includes corruption, hatred and proprietarian attitudes. Such a depiction is rather unusual in utopian fiction in general and even more rare in female works in this genre. Most women authors draw very distinct lines between good and bad, male and female. Le Guin’s novel does not reflect such clear cut demarcations, and for this reason it is even more challenging.

Le Guin’s ambivalence becomes most obvious in the description of Anarres. Although the life-style of this planet features a number of stereotypically “feminine” traits, these are never overtly praised by Le Guin, who remains quite critical. The Odonian movement, for example, derives its ideology from the writings of Odo, a woman anarchist on Urras. This female ideological basis engenders such features of Anarresti society as general peacefulness and a non-competitive attitude, and herein lie its limitations according to an Odonian scientist: “The trouble with Odonianism, you know, my dear fellow, is that it’s womanish. It simply doesn’t include the virile side of life. ‘Blood and steel’” （238）. To a certain extent, however, it does include this violent side, for Shevek is physically attacked by Odonians when he is preparing to leave his home planet.

Urras, in any case, is decidedly competitive and hierarchically organized. In Shevek’s encounter with Urrasti social stratification this difference from Anarres is emphasized in highly gendered metaphors: “Each took for granted certain relationships which the other could not even see. For instance, this curious matter of superiority, of relative height, was important to the Urrasti; they often used the word ‘higher’ as a synonym for ‘better’ in their writings, where an Anarresti would use ‘more central’” （20）. Anarres is an overtly egalitarian community in which women are regarded as equals in political and private matters, such as in the labor force or in partnerships, whereas on Urras, women are confined to their traditional roles as mothers and sexual objects. In particular they are barred from work as scientists on the grounds that women “can’t do the maths, no head for abstract thought…what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, there’s always a few exceptions, God—awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy” （67）. On bisexual Anarres, in contrast, occupations are not gender confined, just as partnership is less restrictive because marriage as an institution does not exist at all （205）. Not only partnership but sexuality in general is handled more liberally, so that “molestation was extremely rare in a society where complete fulfillment was the norm from puberty on” （188）.

All these descriptors of the utopian community have certain affinities with the feminine, but Le Guin’s novel by no means accords with the feminism of older works （e.g., Gilman, Herland 1915）, or other contemporary science fiction （e.g., Gearhart, The Wanderground 1979）. Le Guin’s characters and protagonists, although mostly men, incorporate feminine traits, and therefore escape stereotypical gender distinctions.

Le Guin’s rejection of black and white oppositions leads us back to the overall issue of simultaneity in The Dispossessed. The characters of this novel are no longer like the androgynes in The Left Hand of Darkness who encompassed the male and female simultaneously; The Dispossessed features distinctly gendered personae in whom traditional gender patterns are somehow blurred. Shevek as a man breaks with patriarchal concepts of linear physics traditionally ascribed to male authorities. Such rigid gender clichés are introduced, but also inverted; Takver, the woman, adheres to traditional sequentiality—which is commonly allied with the male—while Shevek embodies supposedly feminine concepts. As Shevek observes of his wife: “She saw time naively as a road laid out. You could walk ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky you got somewhere worth getting to” （156）. As he also observes, however, Takver evidences “ecofeminism,” or the close association of the feminine and nature: “Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern feebly called ‘love of nature’ seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love.…It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it: it of her” （158）. By alluding to these feminist topoi, Le Guin utilizes commonplace themes of the genre, but she subverts and relativizes them in the course of the narrative.

Another topos that brings us back to the metatheoretical aspect is Le Guin’s use of an invented utopian language. Pravic, the Anarresti language, is a “rationally invented language that has become the tongue of a great people” （280）. Basically Le Guin’s use of this artificial language is charged ethically and morally, but also shows strong gendered features. Later women utopists, such as Suzette Haden Elgin in Native Tongue, exploit linguistics as a powerful means of creating a counter-language to patriarchal discourse and for the purpose of demonstrating that social patterns need to be changed at the very roots of human understanding. Again, such thinking derives from a recourse to philosophers of language like Wittgenstein, Heidegger and ethnolinguists such as Wilhelm v. Humboldt, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, who—although very distinct in their goals—subscribe to a relativity theory of language. According to this approach language is not only a means of describing an objective reality, but rather the very determinant of perception per se, and is thus responsible for the constitution of a particular Weltbild. Although Le Guin touches upon this possibility for feminist utopias, she never exploits it in the extreme.

In her preoccupation with time and her subtle use of simultaneity to avoid black and white distinctions, Le Guin has much in common with Julia Kristeva. Indeed, Kristeva also plays with simultaneity as a structural device in her essay “Stabat Mater” （160-86）, in which two different narratives are printed in two columns on one page, each telling a different story although being related to one common topic. Similarly, Kristeva is highly conscious of female and feminist issues, but like Le Guin she never overgeneralizes them in a manner that one group could abuse them for essentialist purposes. For example, in “Women’s Time,” Kristeva notes the association of linear time and the patriarchal: “In its beginning, the women’s movement, as a struggle of suffragists and existential feminists, aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of project and history” （Reader 193）. According to Kristeva this phase of early feminism was replaced by “a second phase, linked…to the younger women who came to feminism after May 1968…in which linear temporality has been almost totally refused.… This feminism situates itself outside of the linear time.…Such feminism rejoins, on the one hand, the archaic （mythical） memory and, on the other, the cyclical or monumental temporality of the marginal movement” （Reader 194-95）. Kristeva then goes on to envision a third step in which these two concepts of temporality and attitudes are fused: “insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by history’s time…” （Reader 195）. In this third step, Kristeva posits a “mixture” of time concepts which obviously resembles Le Guin’s notions of simultaneity.

Le Guin’s fiction, especially The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, in many ways, therefore, predates recent theoretical developments in feminist scholarship, especially gender studies that counter traditional essentialist positions and argue for a literary criticism that leaves behind conventional boundaries of the male and the female. These new developments try to establish a general understanding of the importance of both genders for literary production and reception. Although most of these new studies are initiated by women, they look for a dialogue with male colleagues. As Elaine Showalter explains: “Gender theory began to develop during the early 1980s in feminist thought in the fields of history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and natural science, marking a shift from the women-centered investigations of the 1970s, such as women’s history, gynocriticism, and psychology of women, to the study of gender relations involving both men and women” （10）. This recent dialogic trend, in turn, can be found not only in Showalter’s anthology Speaking of Gender, but also in the collection of essays edited by Linda Kaufman, Gender & Theory, as well as in the journal Genders.

In arguing for Le Guin as a precursor of the new feminism, I am of course aware of the dangers of possibly superimposing on her work theories that were developed in a different and later historical context. Yet, a hesitancy about seeing the contemporaneity of an earlier writer’s concerns may also reflect a fixed linear view of time, as well as a progressivist condescension about the knowledge of the past. Le Guin, moreover, is also very much a writer of our time, and however one accounts for her insights, it is clear that The Dispossessed anticipates and evokes in its structure, symbolism and concern with simultaneity the thinking that informs a variety of schools in the late 70s and 80s, such as deconstruction, postmodernist metafiction, feminist literary theory and French feminist psychology. By reason of Le Guin’s ambivalent and ambiguous stance, furthermore, The Dispossessed may be described not only as a precursor but also as a reminder of the importance of keeping an open mind and of being continually self- critical.

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