Critical Theory and Science Fiction by Freedman Carl;

Author:Freedman, Carl;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2013-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

The Dispossessed: Ursula Le Guin and the Ambiguities of Utopia

The epistemological concerns that dominate Solaris are also very much present in The Dispossessed (1974),10 which, in one of its aspects, is, like Lem’s text, a novel about the practice of science and hence about cognition itself. The protagonist is the physicist Shevek (based, evidently, on Robert Oppenheimer, one of the most genuinely heroic figures in the history of physics since Galileo).11 And the scientific problem that occupies him throughout most of the novel is his attempt to resolve an immensely difficult dichotomy between the opposed physical theories of simultaneity and sequency. What is at stake here—though translated into the cosmological physics of a no-place in the far future—is a quite actual theoretical problem, notably in modern linguistic and historiographic discourse: namely, the problem of reconciling synchrony and diachrony, of formulating a theory capable of describing existing structures in all their determinant force while also accounting for the processes of historical change. In one of the climactic scenes of the novel, Shevek solves his problem after extensively pondering the ancient Terran physics of “Ainsetain” and of the quantum physicists whom Ainsetain, with his search for a unified field theory, had opposed. Shevek decides that both sides in that old earthly controversy had been right in the long run, though in ways that can be grasped only with much more recent (for us, of course, nonexistent) mathematical tools. In this way, he is inspired to resolve the most daunting scientific conundrum of his own era and (more fortunate than Einstein) successfully to produce his own unified theory of the cosmos as a rationally accountable totality: “The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe” (225).

Though a nonexistent mathematical physics is (at least in detail) perhaps the one concept even more resistant to literary representation than a nonexistent musical composition, the fundamental point here is clear enough: Shevek succeeds in moving beyond the impasse constituted by the binary dichotomy of synchrony and diachrony by recasting the entire problem in specifically dialectical terms. There ought to be no question of choosing between simultaneity and sequency. Each is true in the sense of yielding genuine insights; equally, however, each becomes a reified dogmatism to the degree that it is abstracted from the other. A properly unified approach critically engages both viewpoints, sublating them in the classically Hegelian sense of canceling them on one level while, on another, preserving them in a higher and more complex synthesis. And, as with all authentic dialectics—including, as we have seen, science as understood by the Lem of Solaris—the cognitive project must be an ever-provisional and radically interpretive one that abjures the dogmatic certainties of positivism. Shevek attains knowledge of “the foundations of the universe” (226) only when

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