Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor follows an unnamed female protagonist and a young child Emily in a chaotic city ridden with poverty. The city is dirty, filled with roaming gangs and the authorities are powerless and reluctant to restore order. As Memoirs is set in the future, the protagonist’s suffering and city’s horrible state of events lead us to read it as a dystopia. Bernard Duyfhuizen notes that the novel’s narrative is shaped both proleptically and analeptically (Duyfhuizen 5). While the novel is set in the future, the reader is simultaneously made aware that the narration is in the past tense, causing the novel to be a future-history. By doing so, Lessing creates a deterministic effect where this dystopian future cannot be avoided because it is already past. Lessing draws attention to the consequences of ignoring ecological sustainability concerns: a complete breakdown of order, anarchy, chaos, and suffering.
Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed similarly addresses ecological sustainability concerns, but through a critical utopia instead of a dystopia like Lessing’s. The Dispossessed follows the twin planets Urras and Anarres. Anarres is a wealthy and advanced planet, while Anarres developed a communitarian, anarchist society because of its dry and harsh environment. We learn that both societies consider themselves utopias, but the protagonist Shevek’s journeys tell us otherwise. Urras and Anarres are flawed, critical utopias. Urras’ capitalistic system creates class conflict and suffering, while Annares’ anarchistic society has created a system for governors to abuse their power. Le Guin’s critical utopias “offer a rich blending of creative fantasy, critical thinking, and oppositional activism” (Barnhill 214). Le Guin uses the critical utopias of Urras and Anarres to draw a parallel to current societal trends and highlight ecological sustainability concerns.
Both texts depict anarchy, but while Memoirs depicts anarchy during a dystopia, The Dispossessed uses anarchy as a core philosophy in building a utopian society. Anarchy is defined as the philosophy that “the putative authority of the State is illegitimate, and therefore may be, or ought to be, ignored, resisted, or undermined” (Krieger 1). Many characters in Memoirs, including the protagonist, hold the view that the government is incompetent and ignore it as a result. In a scene where armed gangs enter the city and start fires on the street:
The police were not to be seen; the authorities could not cope with this problem and did not want to: they were happy to be rid of these gangs who were in the process of taking elsewhere the problems they raised.
(Lessing 68)
The police force represent the power of the State. It is their duty to maintain civil order in the city. Their inability or apathy towards armed, violent gangs hint at their incompetence. We observe two forms of anarchist thought: first, the narrator protagonist, who believes that the government is incompetent. The characters of Memoirs go about their daily lives without any help or intervention by the State, highlighting its ineffectiveness. Second, the gangs of young people who roam through the city are a force of anarchy which actively undermines the authority of the State. Gerald’s gang, for example, conforms to communitarian anarchism as he takes in children and elderly people “literally living on the pavement” (177). As the State fails to take care of its subjects, communitarian anarchists like Gerald step in to provide aid instead. The gangs hence undermine the State by taking its place. Furthermore, Lessing hints at an ambiguous, disastrous ecological chain of events which plagued the city prior to the start of the novel. The State’s apathy towards sustainability in the past have caused its problems to compound resulting in the consequences of lawlessness and chaotic anarchy. Ironically, sustainability is the least of their worries as all social systems have collapsed.
Lessing uses her portrayal of anarchism to create an image of dystopia. As Timothy Clark writes in The Value of Ecocriticism:
Images of flooding, social collapse, drought, water wars and so on are clearly the expression of an acknowledged, and growing social anxiety, and yet also contradictorily, of its denial through its transformation into forms of spectacle and thriller it tends to be evaded or displaced from being an object of serious conversation into a source of quips and jokes, or uneasy, sensationalist entertainment.
(Clark 98)
In this regard, Lessing avoids the use of large narrative events in Memoirs to prevent the novel from becoming a spectacle or “entertainment”. Instead, the novel’s events are depicted through the daily lives of the narrator and Emily. In describing her home, the narrator states that her flat has “walls scribbled with graffiti, the lifts stained with urine, the walls of lobbies smeared with excrement” (Lessing 14). The abject imagery of human faeces lining one’s living quarters is terrible, but not wholly unimaginable in lesser developed countries. Lessing’s choice to use imagery that is believable and not spectacular forces the reader to read the novel in a realistic way, avoiding the “quips and jokes” that spectacular imagery would provoke. Gillian Dooley claims that the falling of the city into anarchy and lawlessness in Memoirs can be interpreted as a metaphor for the events that happened in the twentieth century (Dooley 5). Memoirs, then, is unique in its analeptic nature. While being set in a dystopian future, the novel simultaneously functions as autobiography and metaphor for the mistakes of the past.
Lessing’s future setting also creates a deterministic nature that is alluded to within the text:
s she swept, as she made her piles, the leaves gathered again around her feet. She swept faster, faster, her face scarlet, desperate The world was being submerged in dead leaves, smothered in them.
(Lessing 255)
The scene takes place beyond “the wall”, a look into the past. While Emily hopelessly struggles to remove the leaves, they nevertheless pile up around her feet until they bury her. Lessing alludes to the analeptic nature of the novel: no matter how much she tries, she cannot change her fate as what happens beyond “the wall” is history. Similarly, the inhabitants of the city cannot change their fate as it has already happened and must now bear the consequences. Lessing posits that the people of the present must not ignore environmental issues. They must adopt sustainable practices to avoid the circumstances depicted in Memoirs. The imagery of a ruined and lawless city both serves as a cautionary warning of the consequences of ecological unsustainability and grounds itself in the imagery of the destruction caused in the twentieth century.
While Lessing uses a dystopia to show the consequences of ecological unsustainability, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed uses the form of a utopia to portray ecological sustainability. The planet Annares is governed by a communitarian anarchist society. The Anarresti people are taught to have no sense of self. Their duty is to their community before the self, where the “collective good, rather than one’s own individual interest, is the primary motivating concern” (Krieger 2). The Anarresti’s communitarian mindset is caused in part by Anarres’ harsh climate. Jaeckle posits that when the “sustainability of human life is genuinely threatened” (Jaeckle 3), the Anarresti adopt communitarian anarchism for survival. Indeed, it is this harsh climate that motivates the Anarresti to create an ecologically sustainable utopia.
On land, the plants got on well enough, in their sparse and spiny fashion, but those animals that had tried air-breathing had mostly given up the project as the planet’s climate entered a millennial era of dust and dryness. Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cultivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he could fit in.
(Le Guin 324)
It is evident that Anarres has an unforgiving climate, as evidenced by dusty and arid weather. In Le Guin’s imagined world, the Anarresti create an ecologically sustainable utopia out of necessity. The Anarresti adopt sustainable methods of procuring food by fishing “not too greedily”, preventing overfishing. They grow crops using “organic wastes” to avoid damaging the soil. To prevent wastage, the Anarresti filter toilet water at “manure plants” to reclaim waste for farming crops (115). Although they do not have possessions or individualism, the Anarresti achieve a form of utopia based on egalitarianism and rejection of the self.
Utopianism “asserts that there are alternatives utopianism is a form of ‘social dreaming’ that enables us to imagine radically different positive alternatives” (Barnhill 214). Le Guin’s Anarres is an experimental fiction, an exploration of another way of living. Her utopia is a counterpoint to the capitalist, wasteful American society that she lived in. In that sense, Anarres is a thought experiment about anarchism that imagines possibilities for ecological sustainability. While Lessing’s Memoirs depicts anarchism as a force of chaos and lawlessness, the Anarresti people’s particular brand of communitarian anarchism show that an anarchistic community can create a utopia as their duty is to the community. In Memoirs, we see the consequences of unsustainable actions which cannot be changed. On the other hand, The Dispossessed offers an alternative course of action that is successful because it is sustainable.
Anarres’ twin planet, Urras, is the political and ecological antithesis of Anarres. Its climate, which gives its people far more available access to water and food, allow its inhabitants to live luxuriously. Shevek, disillusioned by Anarres’ frugal lifestyle, initially believes Urras to be a utopian paradise. However, as the novel progresses, we learn that Urras’ wealthy society has caused class divide, oppression, and exploitation. The wealthy Urrasti lead a lifestyle of abundance and decadence, but it is built on the exploitation of the lower classes. When Shevek visits the low-income neighbourhoods of A-lo, he sees that unlike the wealthy upper-class Urrasti, the people there are anxious and apprehensive faces of “a certain sameness” (361). The poorer Urrasti are condemned to a life of servitude towards the upper class. Shevek notes that they will always be anxious over monetary concerns. Le Guin’s Urras alludes to the American society that she lived in. Like Urras, capitalist societies are built on the exploitation of labour. Like Lessing, Le Guin creates a familiar society for readers to compare against. While Lessing uses the metaphor of the twentieth century, Le Guin alludes to twentieth century America to create a frame of reference for the utopian Anarres.
However, Anarres is not a perfect utopia. The Dispossessed is “self-reflexive and multivocal” in that it provides multiple perspectives. The protagonist’s childhood friend, Bedap, claims that Anarresti society is not as equal as it seems:
The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules Odonian society by stifling the individual mind… Government the legal use of power to maintain and extend power. Replace ‘legal’ with ‘customary,’ and you’ve got Sabul, and the Syndicate of Instruction, and the PDC.”
(Le Guin 204)
The Production and Distribution Coordination (PDC) and Division of Labor office control the work postings for Anarresti. According to Bedap, the PDC violates the anarchistic oath of Odo, the dismantling of the state and its governing bodies. By coordinating development and work assignments on Anarres, the PDC is actually the governing body of Anarres. Later in the novel, Bedap reveals that their mutual friend Tirin was driven insane by the PDC. After staging an anti-Odonian play, the PDC repeatedly assigned him hard labour roles until he was driven insane and sent to the Asylum (Le Guin 297). The council in charge of the PDC are an effective oligarchy which oppresses the Anarresti. Hence, we understand Anarres to be Le Guin’s portrayal of a critical utopia. While Anarres solves the problem of ecological sustainability, its anarchist philosophy eventually leads to the creation of an oppressive force which is hypocritical to its creation. The critical utopia of Anarres is flawed: the process of transforming it into a utopia is ongoing. Le Guin’s depiction of anarchism as a possible solution for achieving ecological sustainability is certainly more favourable than Lessing’s, but it is imperfect.
In conclusion, we see that both Lessing and Le Guin address ecological sustainability concerns in their novels. In Memoirs, Lessing creates a dystopian future-history which shows the consequences of ecologically unsustainable actions. The city falls into lawlessness, chaos and anarchism due to the incompetence of the State. Lessing draws a parallel with imagery of poverty and war in twentieth century Europe, avoiding spectacular imagery. Lessing situates the reader realistically, creating a cautionary tale of a deterministic future if ecologically unsustainable practices are continued. In The Dispossessed, Le Guin uses the critical utopias of Anarres and Urras as a form of “social dreaming”. Anarres is an ecologically sustainable utopia, while Urras is a closer allusion to current society which is ecologically unsustainable. In doing so, Le Guin encourages the reader to compare Anarres’ ecologically sustainable society to their own, questioning if such a reality is possible. However, its status as a critical utopia ensures that it is a work in progress. Both texts depict anarchy, but while Lessing depicts it as a force of chaos, Le Guin’s Anarresti anarchy is a force of good, allowing people to forgo their egos for the good of the community. Where Lessing’s dystopia is a cautionary tale, Le Guin’s utopia Anarres is a thought experiment of what could go right if ecologically sustainable practices are adopted.
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Works Cited
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Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “ON THE WRITING OF FUTURE-HISTORY: BEGINNING THE ENDING IN DORIS LESSING’S ‘THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1980, pp. 147–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26280564. Accessed 13 Nov. 2022.
“Individual & Community in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.” In The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Ed. D. Laurence & P. Stillman. New York:
Jaeckle, Daniel P. “Embodied Anarchy in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.” Utopian Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2009, pp. 75–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719930. Accessed 13 Nov. 2022.
Krieger, Joel. The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World. : Oxford University Press, . Oxford Reference. Date Accessed 13 Nov. 2022 Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. . New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Timothy Clark. From Chp 4: The Challenge for Prose Narrative, in The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge UP, 2019.Lessing, Doris. The memoirs of a survivor / Doris Lessing. Octagon Press London 1974
Published 17 November 2023