Militant dysphoria (i): A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else
Owen Griffiths and Natalie Field, the teenage lovers in Ursula le Guin’s A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, are united in part by a shared inability to take pleasure in the procedures of heterosexual conformity. Far from being a set of routines that they must master in order to accomplish an “adult” relationship, compulsory heterosexuality is an external temptation that threatens the real bond between them. It is not that their real bond is non-sexual, and must remain so in order to survive: on the contrary, it is on the basis of that bond that the entire question of sexuality is to be decided for each of them (this is what Natalie insists, that it is for them to “decide” on the place of sex in their relationship: “[p]eople make the real choices together”). Normative heterosexuality represents a pre-empting of this decision, a social prejudice in favour of the teleological inevitability of sex; as Owen says:
The thing is, the way a lot of people talk, and the way a lot of movies and books and advertising and all the various sexual engineers, whether they’re scientists or salesmen, tell you the way it is, is all the same. Man Plus Woman Equals Sex. Nothing else. No unknowns in the equation. Who needs unknowns?
Especially when you haven’t had any sex yet at all, and so it is the unknown, and everybody seems to be telling you that it’s the only thing that matters, nothing else counts, and if you don’t have sex all the time, you’re either impotent or frigid and you’ll probably get cancer within the year too.
So I began thinking, what am I doing. I mean, I see this girl all the time and spend a whole day at the beach with her and somebody says, Hey man, so what happened? and I say: She gave me a black rock, and I gave her an agate. Hey, yeah? Wow!
The equation “Man Plus Woman Equals Sex”, ubiquitously asserted as a timeless truth, cannot express the disjuncture of “Man” and “Woman”, the fact that – as Owen and Natalie discover, “it is different” for each of them. What does a black rock plus an agate equal?
The other thing that Owen and Natalie share is an aristocratic distaste for “levelling” culture, the conformist mentality of their peers (or, rather, of those who are not their peers, but are each others’ peers):
I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups – clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It’s a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes of your jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you’re not with it. You have to be with it. That’s a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what?
[...]
Some kids really don’t have much Me at all. They truly are part of the group. But a lot of them just act – pretend – the way I tried to. Their heart isn’t really in the groups, but still they get along, they get by. I wish I could. I honestly wish I could be a good hypocrite. It doesn’t hurt anybody, and it sure makes life easier. But I never could fool anybody. They knew I wasn’t interested in what interested them, and they despised me for it, and I despised them for despising me…[a]nd then I despised myself for despising everybody else. Oh, it’s a really neat situation to be in. You know what I mean, if you’ve been there.
It is possible that not everybody will know what Owen means: not everybody will have “been there”. But it is also significant that the difference between Owen and the others is not that he refuses to be “a good hypocrite”, but that he finds himself unable to be one. The sticking point is his interests, his dedication to – which is equally his captivation by – such recherché topics as the relationship between subatomic physics and human consciousness (one of le Guin’s recurring preoccupations).
When Natalie says, “I hate easy classes, and I haven’t got time to work for good teachers”, Owen reports that “my ears were really standing up on end. In twelve years of school I had never heard any human being say they hated easy classes”. Owen is going to be a scientist; the work to which he will give himself requires patience, discipline and rigour. Natalie is a musician and a composer, whose long hours of practice are equally a form of experimental investigation:
I had a very good bio teacher last year, Miss Capswell, and she and I did some lab work after school in spring term. We were working with bacteria. It was exactly the same thing Natalie was doing with the viola. Everything had to be right. You didn’t know for sure what was going to happen when you finally did get it all right: you had to get it right to find out. Miss Capswell and I were trying to confirm an experiment reported in Science magazine last year. Natalie was trying to confirm what Bach had reported to some church congregation in Germany 250 years ago. If she did it absolutely right, it might turn out to be true. To be the truth.
Owen and Natalie are both people who require from themselves a kind of fidelity, not to their own “best selves” but to the truths without which they cannot be themselves at all, the truths to which they are subject. Again, an incapacity rather than a refusal: Natalie says, “[i]f I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don’t think I can. I can’t take anything lightly”. The lightening, the levity, of euphoric absorption in social and erotic play-acting is not available to her. Both she and Owen exemplify a kind of militant dysphoria, militant because of their counter-factual commitment to what “might turn out to be true” over against the equations of “the various sexual engineers”.