The Dispossessed and Invisible Man :: Invisible Man Essays

The Dispossessed and Invisible Man      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Darko Suvin defines science fiction as "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device" (Suvin 7-8) is a fictional "novum . . . a totalizing phenomenon or relationship" (Suvin 64), "locus and/or dramatis personae . . . radically or at least significantly" alternative to the author's empirical environment "simultaneously perceived as not impossible within the cognitive (cosmological and anthropological) norms of the author's epoch" (Suvin viii). Unlike fantasy, science fiction is set in a realistic world, but one strange, alien. Only there are limits to how alien another world, another culture, can be, and it is the interface between those two realms that can give science fiction its power, by making us look back at ourselves from its skewed perspective.    The Dispossessed takes as its novum a general theory of time, illustrated by the paradox of a rock thrown at a tree, a rock that can never reach its target because "there's always half of the way left to go" (Le Guin 26). Shevek, Le Guin's protagonist and formulator of the general temporal theory, sees himself as one who "'unbuilds walls'" (Le Guin 289), as the "primal number, that [is] both unity and plurality" (Le Guin 30) crossing interfaces. Walls abound in The Dispossessed: the wall between Anarres and Urras (Le Guin 1-2), the wall that separates one individual from every other (Le Guin 6), the wall of social conscience (Le Guin 287), the wall between men and women (Le Guin 14-16), the wall of time--Zeno's paradox--the limit that prevents the rock from striking the tree (Le Guin 26).    But as Shevek knows, the rock does strike the tree; that is the joke (Le Guin 27). The wall can be crossed. He crosses it when he leaves Anarres; he crosses it in his love for Takver and Sadik; he crosses it with the Syndic of Iniative, and he crosses it with the Terrans and the Hainish. This need to "unbuild walls" is his "'cellular function,'" his "moral choice," but it is "process" and not "end," a "journey and return" and not merely a "repetitive, atemporal" cycle (Le Guin 290-291). The paradox of sequence and simultaneity is that nothing stays the same; it is not the same river going past the bank, or the same wind blowing through the same tree as last spring.