Ursula Le Guin and Time’s Dispossession

Abstract

The Dispossessed, like Eliot’s Four Quartets, problematically centres on the human meaning of time. Taking as its focal consciousness — and conscience — the point of view of a ‘temporal physicist’ and telling of his quest (as he finally regards it) to redeem his past and the future, the book is above all else a science-fictional Bildungsroman. But the uncertainties attending that quest make for a Bildungsroman whose Bildung remains in doubt almost to the very end. Oscillating meanwhile between seemingly antithetical worlds, The Dispossessed describes ‘the waste sad time / Stretching before and after’ Shevek leaves Anarres for Urras (T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, v. 174–5).

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, v. 26–9¹