Jerusalem Demsas: evaluation

Transcript context

…Swift himself was abandoned by his mother in his early childhood for a while. She went off to England, probably to work, and we don’t really know what happened to him during those years. But Shevek also — he’s upset throughout his life that he felt, and indeed was, partially abandoned by his parents for a lot of his early years. This sense of alienation in both cases, this obsession with the question, who are the “we”? For Shevek, “Is it both worlds? Is it just my world? Do I really belong in the other world?” For Swift, “How much should I identify with these strange beings, creatures, societies that are enslaving me? With whom should I identify?” He’s alienated from his family, for sure. He keeps on leaving them. But where exactly does he find his people? It’s pretty clear that he never does. I think maybe part of it is, in both of these novels, these men would not be happy anywhere in any context. Maybe that’s part of what’s going on here, is that there’s not a society that would make Shevek happy. When he’s amongst the communitarians, he’s frustrated by the strictures they put upon him, but also, he’s frustrated when his friend critiques them, and he’s angry at him, and they get into a big fight over it. Then Gulliver — everywhere he goes, he has some critique. At one place he doesn’t is a place where he’s treated terribly, and it’s unsustainable for him to stay there, and you can’t actually imagine him providing anything of use to that world. He’s literally just an oddity that gets pushed out every once in a while, like at these dinner parties. To me, it’s an indictment of this sort of traveling in order to find yourself or find something important or true because in many ways, Gulliver does not end up more enlightened by the end of the book. Shevek ends up right back where he was. His entire goals when he was moving there seemed naive in hindsight. I think that’s maybe slightly a little bit too much in The Dispossessed world because we know later on that his connections end up being the foundation for a really important technology that connects space, different planets. But at the same time, what was the point? [laughs] Still, Shevek and Gulliver — they’re the two people who know things that no one else knows. Even reading about it, you can’t really understand what it was like, and it’s raising the question: The ancient Greeks on “knowledge is everything” — how true is that really? What does it get you? What does it get anyone else? What does it get your spouse? Both come home empty-handed, as I think I mentioned before, and neither seems happy at the end. But they had to do it, perhaps.…

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