Shevek In the Time of Mass Media
I first read about the shields shortly after Ursula K. Le Guin’s death. I had spent several late nights on the internet, shuffling through interviews, thinking about her legacy: Le Guin is one of a handful of writers, long-known in science-fiction circles, recently discovered by pop-culture and academia. These authors’ prescience, our current political climate, and an information-hungry internet culture make this an opportune moment for fresh, contemporary analysis; but when a beloved artist is embraced by the mainstream, it is fraught with anxiety. Will neophytes arrive with literary enthusiasm? Will they appreciate slow, thoughtful cultural analysis? Or will these texts be another chicken-scratch in mass-media consumption? Worse, is this moment opportunistic, fetishizing the idea of the author rather than listening to what they have say? Then again, how subversive are books published by the Big Five?
For me, Ursula Le Guin--more so than even Philip Dick or Octavia Butler--strikes a personal reflex. Her radicalism is tinged with gentleness. She critiques without condemning. Her humanistic politics contrast deeply with the noisy cynicism that that dominates our public discourse. It’s easy to feel overly protective of how media culture might abuse her message. This is why the shields--the most pacifistic of war metaphors--were so intriguing.
I discovered them in a 2012 interview on Wired. Occupy Oakland demonstrators had recently marched carrying anti-riot shields adorned with with book covers, including my favorite of Le Guin’s novels, The Dispossessed. The San Francisco Gate coverage focused on the city’s attempt to ban the shields, but they specifically call out The Dispossessed (Kuruvila, par. 8). In her Wired interview, Le Guin expresses her pride about the demonstrators, the longevity of her 1974 novel and that it is still “making some waves.”
Neither publication includes photos of the shields, but they conjure a very specific image. The Dispossessed explores the political tension between twin planets in a binary system: Anarres is egalitarian but stifling and Urras is permissive but heirarcial. Since the first paperback edition, cover artists have repeatedly turned to a worlds-collide metaphor: Alex Ebel's 1975 Avon cover shows Anarres and Urras veering dangerously close to collision. In Anthony Robert’s 1975 cover for the British Panther edition, one planet dominates the horizon while Shevek, like a wanderer above the mist, beholds it in silhouette. Danilio Ducak's 1995 HarperPrism cover imitates this, but rotates Shevek around, his back now turned to the rising planet. Alex Merto’s 2009 HarperCollins edition flattens the image, separating two landscapes with a starscape. Milan Bozic’s 2015 Harper Perennial cover puts the reader in space, watching the Moon eclipse the Earth.
Good cover design is common, but cover art that deeply encapsulates a novel’s political space are rare. Those that do--the burning paper man, the bricked-in handmaid--usually come from perennial reuse of familiar art. The Dispossessed has seen a myriad of different editions with different artists who returned to the same simple, encapsulating image.
The danger of simplifying an idea is in trivializing it. When we reduce Whitman to witticisms, Emerson to inspirational quotes, and Twain to memes, we lose their complexity; complexity that is often comfortable with contradiction and ambiguity. Our too-earnest contemporary space is often anxious to be reductive, draining the potency out of symbols and withering them to trite allegory.
After the fervent thrill of imagining demonstrators marching under the banners of our favorite literature--the shields of the House of Kafka, placards bearing the visage of Baldwin, flags shaped like Vonnegut’s mustache--we must take care that we are not fetishizing the novel, reducing books to that part we shall not judge them by, and thereby distancing ourselves from the complexity that made us embrace them.
I never found a photograph of the Occupy shields. I’ll probably never know which vision of two planets inspired the demonstrators. Perhaps none of them. Perhaps it was the cover of the 1974 Gollancz edition: a plain black sleeve with the title and author enblazened in neon across the top, with no cover artist to speak of. But as long as they are the shields of my mind, I can dictate their meaning. In my late-night revries I favor imagining new contemplative, humanistic readers crouched with their books while Ursula K. Le Guin shields us from rubber-bullets and cynicism.
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Notes:
Image: “Ancient Fighter” by OpenClipart-Vectors is licensed under CC0 Creative Commons.
Kuruvila, Matthai. "Oakland panel weighs ban on protesters' 'tools.'" SFGate. SFGate.com. 20 May, 2012. Web.
Le Guin, Ursula K., “Ursula K. Le Guin: Still Battling the Powers That Be.” Interview. A Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, episode 65. Wired.com. July 25, 2012. Web.