Jerusalem Demsas: belief

Transcript context

…I view Shevek, the protagonist, the scientist, as pretty selfish. He’s quite a bit like Gulliver. What he really wants to do is travel. One theme of this novel is that there are some things you can only learn by traveling, and he learns those things. He wants to learn them. He leaves his family. The very last sentences of the novel make it clear he comes back empty-handed. For all the talk about the scientific breakthrough, I think he never has anything. There’s never a part of the novel where it’s useful or even revealed or published. When you read throughout how the breakthrough is discussed, it sounds like nonsense. I think there’s a bit of underlying, maybe satire. Does he have anything anyway? Yes, chronologically, this is the first of a larger series of works that take place in the same universe, and his breakthrough ends up being extremely important later on for future communications, the ansible idea later on. I do think it’s interesting that the thing that he takes back is that it’s important to have free flow of information. He’s obviously very frustrated by that throughout his time at university. Even back on the capitalist planet, there wasn’t free flow of information going on. They describe all the newspapers as just lying and making things up. The other professor at the university can’t even really talk about. He feels uncomfortable sharing that he’s dissatisfied with his home planet. I think there’s this current here which is trying to really undermine the idea that there are these ideals in the capitalist society that are actually . . . It’s his rival, Sabul, who more or less makes him leave because he can’t publish the idea on the communal planet, and they all think he’s a traitor for leaving. They throw rocks at him. One of the rocks hurts his shoulder, even. He wonders, when he’s coming back, if they’ll even let him back in or put him in prison or maybe even kill him. It sounds quite fraught to me. We’re hearing about that planet, or moon rather, from the vantage point of people who believe in it. But once you see through their descriptions, to me it sounds much worse than even the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, you could keep your kids, right? That was just understood.…

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