In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911–1972
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
To embody it in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months. When it was done I felt lost exiled — a displaced person. I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of the shadows and across the gulf of Probability, and wanted a story written, not about the world she made, but about herself.
This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas--Ursula Le Guin (1974) "The Day Before The Revolution."
I think it was Joshua Miller, who recently mentioned Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution" in passing on social media. I am assuming it was Miller because he has been my mentor in guiding my reading in science fiction during the last few years after I renewed my interest in the genre. If it was not him, apologies to him (and the person denied credit, who UPDATE turns out to be Carl Sachs).
I don't know when Le Guin added the quoted dedication, but I will assume it's been there from the start. And before long I will use it as invitation to share with you my re-reading of Goodman, who was unfamiliar to me--even his fascinating Wikipedia page states: "despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life." Importantly Le Guin simultaneously describes The Dispossessed as an embodied and literary form of the spirit of (theoretical) anarchism, and simultaneously inscribes it -- not without a touch of merited immodesty ("not been done before")* -- in a carefully circumscribed tradition of the political theory of anarchism.
When I read this, I was ecstatic (in the manner of a pedantic scholar) when I read this because I felt vindicated inscribing The Dispossessed in a tradition of Socratic political philosophy (see here what I mean by this). Vindicated because she clearly implies -- again with a touch of hubris -- she has compared anarchism to "all" other traditions (which I claim is shown, but not said in The Dispossessed.) Since she is one of the few authors I would call 'wise', I don't mean the previous sentence as criticism.
The point is not pedantic. The Dispossessed is structured around a contrast between a naïve (the political status quo in Anarres) and sophisticated anarchism (the source of a new revolution within Anarres anarchism), which can both be traced to Odo's writing which take on the character of holy books in the society of exiles founded on her ideals. In The Dispossessed we are shown the effect of these writings alongside the statue of Odo that her successors have erected in her memory.
In "The Day Before the Revolution," Odo (Laia) is already a "monument" near the end of her life. (The point is repeated twice.) This despite her own practice of pissing "in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square that said HERE WAS FOUNDED THE SOVEREIGN NATION OF A-IO ETC ETC, pssssssssss to all that!" That is to say, Le Guin gives us a glimpse of the development of the naïve form of anarchism before the revolution in the life of Odo. I don't mean to deny that Le Guin also shows us how Odo resists this turn of events:
She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! — That’s not anarchism, that’s mere obscurantism. —You don’t think liberty and discipline are incompatible, do you? — They accepted their tonguelashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the Big Sheltering Womb.
Simultaneously, she fears that "favoritism, elitism, leader-worship," may be ineradicable, "they crept back and cropped out everywhere." (The story is ambiguous whether time and different social institutions can eliminate these political vices).
One might get the misleading impression from my post thus far, that "The Day Before the Revolution" is a meditation on the mysterious afterlife of one's writings and the institutionalization of memory in political and social practices (and the (ahh) dialectical relationship among them. But that's not quite right.
For, the short story is really about the nature of political leadership in the context of anarchism (which officially abhors the cult of the leader).** And unlike the great other studies of leadership (e.g., recall) Black Jacobins, this is not focused on the leader in action. But a kind of witness to action. The theme is announced in an important set-piece:
But it was hard to eat when everyone was talking so excitedly. There was news from Thu, real news. She was inclined to discount it at first, being wary of enthusiasms, but after she had read the between the lines of it, she thought, with a strange kind of certainty, deep but cold. Why, this is it: it has come. And in Thu, not here. Thu will break before this country does; the Revolution will first prevail there. As if that mattered! There will be no more nations. And yet it did matter somehow, it made her a little cold and sad-envious, in fact. Of all the infinite stupidities. She did not join in the talk much, and soon got up to go back to her room, feeling sorry for herself. She could not share their excitement. She was out of it, really out of it. It’s not easy, she said to herself in justification, laboriously climbing the stairs, to accept being out of it when you’ve been in it, in the center of it, for fifty years. Oh, for God’s love. Whining!
Odo has been the leader of a movement. Her writings have circulated widely. But the moment of decisive action is initiated elsewhere, and takes her by surprise. And in her reaction, we're shown at least four important qualities of good leadership: first, don't try to stand in the way of good actions originating outside one's control; second don't take credit for them. Third, and this gives the first two their possibility and meaning, one must be able to read situations, people, and events, even esoterically ("between the lines"), with good judgment.
And the fourth? That is, Odo's life is presented as a series of events that at at bottom express an inner necessity, a going on. The significance is not in the grounds of the action, but in one's choices, accepting "the responsibility of choice" (a quote from one of her writings). And this is presented as one of the characteristics of (true) anarchism. For taking such responsibility to oneself, and one's equals, is presupposed in a society where authority cannot be off-loaded onto a sovereign, on experts in living, or a bureaucracy.
The previous paragraph helps, I think, helps explain Le Guin's decision to evoke explicitly in her dedication and invoke "The Day Before to the Revolution" as a link between The Dispossessed (quite naturally, in fact) and her (1973) "The ones who walked away from Omelas."+ For, we're invited now to reflect on Odo's life in the Movement as at least one of the ways in which one does not remain complicit in a status quo from which one benefits (contrast this with my earlier analysis). And depending on the character of one's soul (recall) this is a joyful invitation or a damning indictment.++
* "many months" is not much time for mere mortals!
**This, and many other elements, invite the parallel between Odo and Moses.
+It is, thereby, pulled into the Hainish cycle.
++I hope to return to the role of gender in the story in light of The Dispossessed very soon.
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