#shevek

[saltshroud]

the dispossessed is kind of funny

[evelasco-art]

Rereading The Dispossessed and I’m more convinced than ever that yes, it is a political work, but ALSO a psychogical novel about an autistic man struggling to connect with other humans.

The sheer amount of walls that appear in it. Shevek’s obsession with them. His disconnect, his naïveté, his difficulties to understand social norms and be understood by peers. His iron-clad personal principles. Him being overwhelmed by crowds and social interactions, to the point of shutting down and not processing anything that’s happening around him. Him taking refuge in physics because at least that has rules he can understand.

This sentence. I don’t know how I didn’t took more notice of this sentence the first time I read it:

And he had been fool enough to think that he might serve to bring together two worlds to which he did not belong.

Also, the way he is inspired by Odo’s teachings and life. He’s in many ways her successor. The parallels are everywhere. Just a couple pages earlier, we find Odo’s epitaph:

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

This is literally the story of his life! His biggest dream (to be part of a whole), the essence of his work and the novel as a whole!

In this book about big ideas and politics, an autistic person is the one trying to bridge the gap between two societies. Which I find really interesting.

So it’s driving me nuts that I can’t find virtually any discussions on the psychological side of it!!!! Where is the discourse on Shevek’s character!!! Why is it that in one of Le Guin’s psychologically richest novels, the discussions are never about him!!! Just the politics!!!

But politics! Is! Personal!

Anyways, if you know any resources around this topic, please let me know! I’m thirsty.

[heyitsrink]

All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?

-

Shevek and Takver from The Dispossessed

[zookja]

"We've made laws, laws of conventional behaviour, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. (...) Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go and unbuild walls."

For my little wall-obsessed scientist Shevek

[coralkitt]

ursula le guin sitting down to write the next great scifi masterpiece that would go on to win both the hugo and nebula award for the second time in her career: waaaait what if the protagonist was like extremely fucking autistic

[putall]

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed, Swedish edition (Shevek) with cover by Per Åhlin.

[littlenimart]

just finished up Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. the way she describes the Annaresti is so intriguingly just-slightly-alien and my imagination conjured this slightly muppet- esque image of Shevek early in reading that it refused to let go of.

I’ve read a few books recently that have me compelled to illustrate them a bit- I just finished TP’s The Monstrous Regiment and am of course dying to draw them, and on the Le Guin subject I want to pick back up my sketches from when I read TLHOD back in 2021

[mutantoftomorrow]

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

- Ursula K Leguin, The Dispossessed