SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)
Soren Baggesen
Excerpts from “Utopian and Dystopian Pessimism:
Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest and Tiptree's ‘We Who Stole the Dream’"
By the same token, SF is basically a utopian mode of story-telling. The genre qualifies as "utopian" in the
broad sense by reason of its fictional constructions of a future social order. But historically considered, it
has also been "utopian" in the stricter and more limited meaning of the word, according to which the
future society envisioned must in some way(s) be better than the one in which the utopist actually lives.
Frankenstein, to be sure, offers itself as a pessimistic warning against modern science; and therefore it
does not partake of this optimism. Yet in that regard it is perhaps significant that what is arguably the
first SF novel was written by a woman. For up until recently, the pessimists in the history of SF have
been marginal, exceptions to the general rule of SF writers siding with the expansionist trend of Western
culture and regarding science and technology as means for conquering nature and the universe (34-35).
...
This movement went hand-in-hand with a development not confined to SF: the growing unease in our
culture about science and technology. It is this unease—the awakening awareness that the forces we
have called to our aid may be forces of destruction, that we are as sorcerer's apprentices who are
victimizing ourselves with the uncontrollable results of our own devices—that has taken over in SF. This
hasn't changed SF's character of fictional futurology, but it has made the mood of the genre decidedly
pessimistic. In other words, it has turned SF into a dystopian mode (35).
By now this tendency has become so pervasive that it begins to appear that the simple opposition of
optimistic (read "utopian") versus pessimistic (read "dystopian") fictional futurology is too simplistic.
After all, there isn't just one brand of pessimism; there are pessimisms. Thus within the general
pessimistic mood distinctions need to be made correlative to what may be termed "oppositions of
attitude." It is one such opposition—and one that I find fundamental—which I wish to explore by
comparing The Word for World is Forest and "We Who Stole the Dream."
I take the starting point for my distinction from Ernst Bloch. In the chapter on "Tendenz, Latenz,
Wesenhaftes in Transmission" in his Experimentum Mundi, Bloch develops his notion of "latency"
(Latenz)—i.e., his insight that human history contains not only what it has actualized, but also all the
possibilities that have been hidden by actualized history. It is from these hidden possibilities—from the
"Latenz," or rather from its dialectical opposition to the "tendency," or actual direction of history
(Tendenz)—that we derive our "concrete utopian" notions, our "Hope Principle," that a better, even a
good, human society is possible and our shared ideas of the concrete conditions that a good human
society must satisfy.
By the way of deliberating on these notions, Bloch remarks on human attitudes in the historical process
as follows (35):
Far from being divorced from reality, latency is, in the final `Not-yet' [Nochnicht] of concrete Utopia,
itself concerned usque ad finem, in the articulating [meinen] of the reality of tomorrow. Or more
precisely, of the human will. Human labor and effort encourage from the start [auf der Spriinge] the
latency of goals not yet existent [noch nicht seienden] in tendency, and encourage it as inevitably as
does the tension of tendency itself. Likewise the other way round: history would not work without the
space of possibilities generated by the whole dialectics [Wechselverhaltnisses] of tendency and latency
in the world—a space of possibilities [Moglichkeitsraum] at once refracted [gebrochenen] and objective
and object-like [objekt-objekthaften]. In all of which, it is as possibility, not as actuality, that latency is to
be valued: just as in it there is no decided, hence resigned [resignierenden] pessimism, but only a
militant one, with world-changing humanity in the front line of the historical process. (Bloch: 148)3
Here, then, we have an opposition of pessimistic attitudes: Bloch contrasts a "militant" to a "resigned"
pessimism. The opposition, to be sure, may seem rather empty inasmuch as his distinction is not entirely
clear: the cue that he offers as to what he has in mind lies in his speaking of "resigned pessimism" as
"already decided"—from which we may infer that he regards "militant pessimism" as being "as yet
undecided." Yet his distinction is, I think, suggestive in its very (would-be) emptiness. That, at least, is
one of the things I hope to show as I use it to elucidate my comparison between Tiptree and Le Guin—in
the course of which I trust that my idea of what Bloch is thinking of will become apparent (35-36).
Let us turn, then, to The Word for World is Forest and "We Who Stole the Dream," and do so, first of all,
with a view to establishing that these two tales of victorious slave-rebellions are indeed deeply
pessimistic stories. We might start by observing that both Le GuM's Athsheans and Tiptree's Joilani can
be seen as embodying one of the fundamental aspects of utopia, its peacefulness. From that perception,
however, the pessimistic mood permeating both stories becomes apparent. After all, it is precisely the
aliens' peaceableness, emergent from the outset as the submissiveness into which the greedy
aggression of their oppressors has perverted it, that makes them so easy for the Terran conquerors to
enslave. This carries with it a further pessimistic implication: peace may be a hope, but it is an
impossible hope, because it cannot sustain itself against conquest.
In this similarity, however, the first difference between the stories already appears. The implication in
"The Dream" is that the Joilani are the only manual workers in the slave-colony, so that we must
suppose them to be efficient. Word, by contrast, very explicitly points to the Athsheans' uselessness as
slaves. Nor is this an idea about them arising from their physical weakness alone: the story itself makes
it clear that their inefficiency as a labor force derives from their total inability to understand the Terran's
concept of work as a destructive conquest of nature.
. . .
This difference is so fundamental in my opinion that it demands a corresponding distinction in regard to
the "pessimism" that the two stories share. Following Bloch's lead, I would call the kind of metaphysical
pessimism embedded in "The Dream" "bereits entschieden," "already decided"; for if evil exists of
metaphysical (or, again, ontological) necessity, there is nothing more to deliberate (at least apropos of
any course for avoiding it). Yet by reason of the suitableness of the concept of "already decided"
pessimism to Tiptree's story, I find Bloch's characterization of his other kind of pessimism unsatisfactory:
"militant," after all, not only applies to "The Dream"; it describes it more aptly, I think, than it does the
Le Guin story. At this point, then, it would be appropriate to resume our search for the term and
concept that will permit us to articulate our differentiation of Tiptree's pessimism from Le Guin's.
I have already suggested the term of distinction when I defined Bloch's "militant" pessimism by simple
negation: if the metaphysical pessimism of Tiptree's story is "already decided," then the historical
pessimism of Le Guin's must be "as yet undecided." But what does the latter term import? Indeed, what
do "already decided" and "as yet undecided" really mean? These are questions properly addressed, as it
were, to our two stories (40).
The meaningful difference between these two kinds of pessimism begins to become clear when we
consider that in "The Dream" evil-as-cruelty is ubiquitous. On the slave planet, all of the Terrans torture
and abuse the Joilani (there are degrees perhaps, but no real exceptions). And this pervasive cruelty the
Joilani transport to their homeworld, where it symbolically resumes the form of "Stars Tears," the
cruelly extorted intoxicant offered as a special token of honor at the official welcome banquet for the
long-lost sons.
In The Word there is a lot of cruelty, too; but it is not as pervasive as in "The Dream." Among the Terran
specialists in the conquering force, for instance, Lyubov has a real compassion for the Athsheans, and in
the end tries so desperately to stop their mistreatment that he turns a traitor to his compatriots.'
Perhaps more tellingly, the person who most embodies the cruelty of conquest, Captain Davidson, is
only an officer of middle rank. His superior, Colonel Dongh, is not willfully cruel; he is simply a military
bureaucrat who wants to carry out his orders and make operations as efficient as possible. Indeed, what
actually epitomizes evil in The Word is the nature of these operations, which consist in the deforesting
of a forest-world in order to satisfy the demands of the Terrans back home, people who in their greed
have (de)spoiled their own planet (40-41).'
This difference is not only a matter of degree. In "The Dream" evil is an absolute; in The Word it is a
historical complex. This doesn't mean that the latter is any less an evil than what Tiptree envisions. But it
means that in Tiptree's story we meet the necessity of evil as a fact that ends discussion, while in Le
Guin's we meet it as a fact to be discussed.
This dialogical way of telling the story in no way negates the pessimism of it. On the contrary, it may be
said to enhance it. Faced with "The Dream," the reader may simply discard its pessimism by mentally
stepping out of the range of its narrator's authority. But with The Word there is no such way out: its
dialogical manner predetermines any position on the dialogue as a position in it, so that the reader must
participate in the ongoing discussion of evil that arises from it.
But this is also to say that the dialogical character of The Word qualifies the pessimism of the story in a
very significant way. It puts evil inside the range of what it is humanly possible to relate to. That is why I
would call Le Guin's pessimism "utopian," in contrast to the "dystopian" pessimism of "We Who Stole
the Dream." Tiptree's story gives evil the kind of ontological status that would put a stop to history, so to
speak. The Word for World is Forest, by contrast, leaves history open to discussion and—to a limited
extent—to decision. Of course, it might seem a meagre consolation to suggest that we can deliberate
about evil, but never finally abolish it.9 Yet I would point out that that nadir of historical aspiration is still
"utopian": that such deliberation holds out a "utopian" hope—slim though it be—for B lochi an
Moglichkeitsraum (41).