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Full text of "Approaches To The Fiction Of Ursula K. Le Guin
"
See other formats
Microfilmed by Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison
Memorial Library. Collection Maintenance Office 79-22108
BITTNER, James Warren, 1945-
APPROACHES TO THE F ICTION OF URSULA K. LE GUIN
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ph.D., 1979,
Literature-Modern
Xerox University Microfilms, ann Arvor, Michigan 48108
©, James Warr 945.
(This title card prepared by the University of Wisconsin)
PLEASE NOTE:
The negative microfilm copy of this dissertation
Was prepared and inspected by the school granting
the degree. We are using this film without further
inspection or change. If there are any questions
eae film content, please write directly to the
school.
UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS
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APPROACHES TO THE FICTION OF URSULA K. LE GUIN
A thesis submitted to the Graduate School of the
University of Wisconsin-Madison in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
BY
JAMES WARREN BITTNER
Degree to be awarded: December 19 May 19 79 August 19
Approved by Thesis Reading Committee:
2 `~
ec Onar May 5, 1978 oo
Major Professor John 0% Lyons Date of Examination
. te
Ce. \. ick}
Annis V. Pratt
Barton R. Pts ks Graduate School
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APPROACHES TO THE FICTION OF URSULA K. LE GUIN
BY
JAMES WARREN BITTNER
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
at the
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
1979
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Copyright (©) 1979 by James Warren Bittner
All Rights Reserved
ii
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APPROACHES TO THE FICTION OF URSULA K. LE GUIN
JAMES WARREN BITTNER
Under the supervision of Professor John 0. Lyons
As the first full-length exploration of the fiction of
Ursula K. Le Guin, this study does not erect a rigid inter-
pretive structure to explain her individual works, nor does
it set up an over-arching theory to account for the stages
of her development as an artist. Rather, it is a trying-out
of critical perspectives, a set of approaches to what Le Guin
calls "the central, consistent theme of my work, marriage."
Understood not only in a literal sense, but also in terms of
the complementarity of yin~yang in Taoist philosophy and in
terms of Niels Bohr's complementarity principle in quantum
theory, the idea of marriage is the common ground each of
the approaches shares with the others.
Chapter one, a theoretical discussion of the poetics and
rhetoric of the romance genre, argues that the characteristic
narrative form of Le Guin's fiction has as its purpose or
final cause a moment of vision from enchanted ground. It is
Le Guin's principal tool for marrying opposites by transforming
dualisms into complements and contradictions into correlates.
The complementarity of realistic and fantastic literary
modes is the focus of chapter two, an analysis of the marriage
of historical fact and romantic vision in Orsinian Tales (1976).
Two Orsinian tales, "Imaginary Countries" and "An die Musik,"
antedate Le Guin's science fiction and fantasy and contain
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
the germs of many of her later techniques and themes.
Chapter three explores the complementarity of myth and
science in Le Guin's juvenile fantasy and in her science
fiction. Generally taken to be mutually exclusive modes of
understanding, myth and science are married in the institu-
tion of magic in the Earthsea trilogy (1968-72) and in
science fiction stories like "Semley's Necklace" (1964) and
"Schrédinger's Cat" (1974).
The subject of chapter four is the dialectic of beginnings
ana endings in the six novels and four stories that make up
Le Guin's science fictional future history saga. The Hainish
cycle has grown from the interplay of pulp science fiction
conventions and anthropological ideas and attitudes. The nar-
rative time in Le Guin's science fiction marries history and
myth to illuminate the present moment. Utopian possibilities
immanent in actuality emerge when it is understood as a
Marriage of the past and future.
The final chapter, a philosophical approach to Le Guin's
world-view, explores the elective affinities between Taoism
and the romance genre. Le Guin's utopianism, a marriage of
the yin-yang complementarity and the dialectic of her romance
plots, is perhaps the inevitable result of the conjunction of
Taoist beliefs, an interest in history, and the dynamic of
the romance.
A bibliographical orientation to Taoism and an exhaustive
bibliographical checklist of Le Guin's works in English are
added. oR. OBa
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In memoriam L. B., who, having traveled
the way over eight other mountains,
has reached, finally, the ninth.
iii
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ńueľs 6€, tives 6& fuet
And we, who are we, anyhow?
--Plotinus, Enneads
"Hard and cruel as it may seem," said the Cardinal, "yet
we, who hold our high office as keepers and watchmen to the
story, may tell you, verily, that to its human characters
there is salvation in nothing else in the universe. ...
For within our whole universe the story only has authority
to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry
of heart of each of them: ‘Who am I?'"
--Isak Dinesen, Last Tales
iv
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PREFACE
Critical evaluations of Ursula K, Le Guin's individual novels and
Stories and formulations about the direction of her development and
about the shape of the whole body of her fiction must, at this time,
be exploratory and provisional, If she is productive into her
seventies and eighties as both her father (anthropologist A. L,
Kroeber) and her mother (author Theodora Kroeber) have been, then she
has not even reached the mid-point of her literary career, She is,
after all, still “pushing out toward the limits--my own and those of
the medium," as she once said, Each new work she creates will
affect the meanings of those that preceded it; each new publication
will alter, subtly perhaps, perhaps dramatically, the configuration
of her litcrary achievement.,
The appearance of Orsinian Tales in 1976 is a case in point. Be-
fore Le Guin published this collection of tales, she was known, on the
one hand, as the author of a superb fantasy trilogy for adolescents,
and, on the other, as one of the best science fiction writers at work
today, Until 1976, almost all of her fiction seemed to fall into one
of two imaginary realms, either the Earthsea Archipelago (her "Inner
Lands," as she calls them), or the Ekumenical Scope of the Hainish
worlds (her "Outer Space"), Critical comment usually focussed on one
of these Secondary Worlds to the exclusion of the other, perhaps -
because of the critics! taste (many readers of science fiction simply
v
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do not care for fantasy, and vice versa), or perhaps because of what
Le Guin calls "adult chauvinist piggery": readers of fiction written
for adults rarely consider stories written for juveniles, relegating
them to the children's librarians or to teachers of the elementary
grades. ` Thus, when an entire issue of Science-Fiction Studies was
devoted to Le Guin's work in 1975, all the essays dealt exclusively
with her science fiction, referring to her fantasy in brief asides, if
at all. Moreover, some of the essays proposed schemes or patterns to
explain her development, taking Rocannon's World (1966) as a starting
point and passing over the Earthsea trilogy. But now that we have
Orsinian Tales, a collection of short fiction set in an imaginary
Central European country that Le Guin invented more than a decade be-
fore she wrote Rocannon's World, it is obvious that criticism that
concentrates on her science fiction alone can give us only a partial
account of her development. It is now clear, in fact, that Le Guin's
major fiction divides itself not into two, but into three different
imaginary worlds, and that her growth as a writer begins not with Ro-
cannon's World and the science fiction she published in the sixties,
but with the Orsinian tales and novels she started writing in the
early fifties,
Because parts have meaning only when their relations with a whole
are clearly perceived, we need a sense of the configurations and pat-
terns in the whole body of Le Guin's writing in order to understand
her individual works. Therefore, a complete account of her fiction
Vi
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and her progress as an artist will have to include Orsinian Tales
along with the fantasy trilogy and the science fiction (novels and
short stories), as well as taking into account her lyric poetry and
her criticial and theoretical essays." A good deal of work needs to
be done before we can achieve an overview that is at once comprehen-
Sive and penetrating. It would probably be wise to forego, for the
present, the attempt to create such an overview. Le Guin's art is
Still changing and growing and developing; what has until now appeared
to be central and significant may turn out to be marginal and of only
secondary importance,
The following chapters, then, do not propose a single, coherent
picture of the whole range of Le Guin's work, This is not an intro-
duction to the fiction of Le Guin, nor is it a collection of detailed
readings of her major novels. Rather than emphasizing the separate-
ness of her individual works by concentrating attention on them one
by one, instead of drawing boundaries around her fantasy and science
fiction (as much of the criticism has done), I will be making explora-
tory approaches toward an understanding of the relationships within
and among her novels and short stories, My goal is to see some of
the connections between part and part and between part and whole, not
to identify those qualities that divide and separate one thing from
another.
Making connections, or, better yet, understanding and appreciating
the relationships and connections that already exist, is the abiding
vii
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theme of all of Le Guin's work, a theme she identifies as marriage:
the ‘person' I tend to write about is often not exactly or
not totally, either a man or a woman. On the superficial level,
this means that there is little sexual stereotyping . . . and the
sex itself is seen as a relationship rather than an act. ...
Once, as I began to be awakened, I closed the relationship into
one person, an androgyne. But more often it appears convention-
ally and overtly, as a couple. Both in one: or two making a
whole. Yin does not occur without yang, nor yang without yin.
Once I was asked what I thought the central, consistent theme of
my work was, and I said spontaneously, 'Marriage.'
Le Guin is here discussing only one aspect of her fiction, character-
ization, and concentrating on but one aspect of that, relations between
male and female. Her reference to yin and yang, however, gives the
word "marriage" the widest possible range of meanings, for yin and
yang symbolize much more than just male and female. They play a major
role in Chinese theories of cosmogony and cosmology; they are the
two complementary forces, or principles, that make up all aspects
and phenomena of life. ..., [They] proceed from a Supreme Ulti-
mate (T'ai Chi), their interplay on one another (as one increases
the other decreases) being a description of the actual process of
the universe and all that is init. .., [They] lend substance
viii
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to the characteristically Chinese belief in a cyclical theory cf
becoming and dissolution and an interdependence between the world
of nature and the events of man.
On another occasion, Le Guin said that the t'ai chi, symbolized by
the yin-yang circle er is not only "a central theme in my work.
It's a central theme, period. "7 So when she says that marriage is
"the central, consistent theme" of her work, we can understand her to
be referring to any complementary, correlative, or interdependent re-
lationship between what we may perceive as opposites or dualisms, but
which are in reality aspects of a whole, or moments in a continuous
process. Because the idea of complementarity, represented by the yin-
yang circle, encompasses Le Guin's theme of Marriage, being both more
general and abstract than the idea of marriage, yet also more specific
and concrete, I will use it to define not only Le Guin's central theme,
but also her fictional techniques, her modes of thought, and ultimate-
ly, her world view.
The idea of complementarity has been, in one form or another, an
element of Western and Eastern thought for twenty-five centuries, from
Anaximander and Heraclitus in Ionia (sixth century B.C.) and Lao Tzu
and Chuang Tzu in China (sixth and fourth centuries B.C.), down to
Niels Bohr, C. G. Jung, and Robert Ornstein in our own century, As
J. Robert Oppenheimer said in his 1953 Reith Lectures on the BBC,
complementary modes of thought and complementary descriptions of
ix
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reality are an old, long-enduring part of our tradition. ...
the experience of atomic physics gives us a reminder, and a cer-
tain reassurance, that these ways of thinking and talking can be
factual, appropriate, precise, and free of obscurantism.°
Thus in the twentieth century, an essentially mythical or mystical
idea--even an occult idea--has found a place in fields as different as
quantum mechanics and analytical psychology, and has touched virtually
every problem in philosophy. Bohr argued that a complete description
of the wave-particle duality in quantum phenomena must be complemen-
tary, and then, in lectures to various audiences from 1930 to 1960,
extended the idea of complementarity into biology, psychology, ethics,
and anthropology, hoping to establish it as a major philosophical con-
cept.” As Jung explored the structures and operations of the psyche,
he developed concepts and models which turned out to be remarkably
similar to those developed by Bohr, Heisenberg, and other physicists;
and then after Jung discovered the correspondences between psychology
and physics, he often pointed to the analogies between what he was
discovering about the psyche and what the physicists were discovering
about the fundamental units of matter-energy. 1? It is no accident
that both Bohr and Jung were deeply interested in the complementary
modes of Oriental thought. +} Robert Ornstein is no less deeply in-
volved with Oriental thought, and has made the idea of complementarity
a guiding concept in his studies of the psychology of consciousness
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and the physiology of the ban”
For Erwin Schrëdinger, atomic physics is "part of our endeavor
to answer the great philosophical question which embraces all others,
the one Plotinus expresses by his brief tives ôè fuets ;--who are
wer? Another part of that endeavor is Jung's analytical psychology;
and it is surely significant that physics, which has penetrated far
into the external world of matter, and psychotozy, which has penetrat-
ed far into the internal world of spirit, should have arrived at the
same concept: complementarity (thereby calling into question the very
divisions between matter and spirit, external and internal, object and
aen Still another part of the endeavor is the art of story-
telling. Le Guin knows as well as Cardinal Salviati, the narrator of
Isak Dinesen's "The Cardinal's First Tale," that the story is a tool
for answering the question "Who am I?" Like the Cardinal, who has
been "schooled in the art of equipoise," and who generates a "recon-
cililing synthesis" not only in his family but also in his complementary
(and even identical) roles as priest and artist, > Le Guin has learned
that the artist's aesthetic modes and the scientist's rational modes
are complementary means to the same end, By themselves, art and
science are of limited value; together, they offer answers. As
Schrödinger says in Science and Humanism,
the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of scientists in a
narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its
xi
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Synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it
really contributes in this synthesis something toward the demand
` a 16
tives ôè fucts; who are we?
It is with the intent of contributing something toward answering that
demand that Le Guin writes science fiction. In the same ways that
physicists use mathematics, in the same ways that psychologists use
dreams and myths, in the same ways that anthropologists use a culture's
artifacts, Le Guin uses the story: as a tool for discovery and explor-
ation, for describing reality and for synthesizing answers to "the
great philosophical question which embraces all others." Along with
Bohr, Jung, and Dinesen's Cardinal, Le Guin has found that the ques-
tion must be formulated and answered in complementary ways. Because
Le Guin also has been "schooled in the art of equipoise," her fiction
offers a reconciling Synthesis: science, dreams, myth, and religion
(in the form of Taoist philosophy and mysticism) are integral parts
of her stories and novels,
Each of the following chapters offers one way toward understand-
ing complementarity in Le Guin's fiction. Chapter one approaches the
idea through a theoretical discussion of the poetics and rhetoric of
the romance genre, the characteristic fictional form of most of Le
Guin's work, The romance, a literary form whose purpose or final
cause is a moment of vision from enchanted ground, a moment of syn-
thesis in which contradictions are aufgehoben (annuled by each other,
xii
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absorbed into each other, and transcended), is Le Guin's principal
narrative tool for marrying opposites and thus for creating an image
of the world and of ourselves that transcends by synthesizing the op-
position and conflict immanent in all reality. The romance answers
the question "who are we?" by transforming dualisms into complements
and contradictions into correlates.
The complementarity of realistic and fantastic literary modes is
the primary focus of chapter two, an analysis of Orsinian Tales and
its relation to Le Guin's other works. As Le Guin weaves together
historical fact and romantic vision in Orsinian Tales, she marries
history and art to create an imaginative reality that is and at the
same time is not like our familiar world. Just as the complementarity
of yin and yang entails a cyclical theory of becoming and dissolution,
the complementarity of realism and fantasy in Orsinian Tales entails
circularity; I show how this circularity operates in the last tale in
Orsinian Tales, "Imaginary Countries." The chapter concludes with a
look at "An die Musik," a tale in which Le Guin suggests that the
function of art is celebration, the spontaneous burst of joy that
comes when opposites and tensions are resolved and transcended.
After opening with a brief discussion of the interrelationships
between Le Guin's fantasy and science fiction, chapter three explores
the complementarity of myth and science in Le Guin's fiction, approach-
ing her work through a study of sources. Myth and science are general-
ly taken to be mutually exclusive modes of understanding, but Le Guin
xiii
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marries them in both her juvenile fantasy and in her adult science
fictions Norse myth and relativity physics are complementary in "Sem-
ley's Necklace," and Celtic-Teutonic myth and modern anthropology are
married in the Earthsea trilogy to produce the institution of magic,
itself a metaphor for Le Guin's art, which connects complements.
Chapter four is an account of the development of Le Guin's
science fictional future history from its origins in "Dowry of the
Angyar" (1964) through "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974); my
approach here will be to study the internal dynamic that has generat-
ed the major portion of Le Guin's work so far, her science fiction.
Le Guin's Hainish future history, a meta-romance and meta-history
spanning over a million years, springs from a dialectical interplay
between the conventions of pulp science fiction on the one hand, and
myth and anthropology on the other. This interplay is the surface
manifestation of a deeper dialectic: the dynamic marriage of myths of
beginning and ending, a synthesis of the social contract and the
utopia. The complementarity of etiology and teleology is thus the
root of Le Guin's mode of experiencing time aid her historical
vision, and this vision, embodied in a narrative time that is a mar-
riage of historical time (chronos) and mythic time (mythos), illumi-
nates the present moment, actuality,’ The recovery of the past and
the projection of a future ideal (the efficient causes of the romance),
are complementary and interdependent acts that create the present;
utopian possibilities latent in the present emerge when we understand
xiv
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it as a marriage of the past and the future.
In the final chapter, a philosophical approach to Le Guin's
fiction, I return to some of the issues raised in chapter one on the
romance genre as I examine the relationships between Le Guin's world
view and her fictional forms. I concentrate on the elective affinities
between Le Guin's Taoisn, specifically the complementarity of yin and
yang, and her romance forms, Suggesting that Le Guin's utopianism is a
natural, perhaps even inevitable, result of the interplay of the
dynamic of the romance, her Taoist beliefs, and her interest in history.
It is, finally, a Pleasure to acknowledge the help and encourage-
ment of many people. First things first: I am deeply grateful to my
wife Carolyn and son Ross for graciously accommodating what became a
guest that was with us long after it had worn out its welcome. Their
Support has been indispensible. Michael Bemis shared his experience,
strength, and hope at crucial times. Professors John 0. Lyons, Annis
Pratt, and Barton R. Friedman read and commented on the Manuscript at
various stages; I thank them for their suggestions both on matters of
detail and on the larger design of the whole project. Numerous people
provided information, shared materials, answered queries, and offered
suggestions: Rosemarie Arbur, John Bangsund, Eddy C. Bertin, Martin
Bickman, C. H. Blanchard, Jan Bogstad, Thomas D. Clareson, Elizabeth
Cogell, Herrlee G. Creel, Joe De Bolt, Robert C. Elliott, Richard D.
XV
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Erlich, John P. Fleming, Lawrence Flescher, Jeffrey Frayne, Robert Gal-
breath, Chuck Garvin, Betsy Harfst, Denys Howard, Naomi Lewis, Lesleigh
and Hank Luttrell, Ugo Malaguti, Robert H. March, J. Wesley Miller III,
Joseph Needham, Henry-Luc Planchat, Eric S. Rabkin, B. R. Raina,
Catherine Rasmussen, Thomas J. Remington, Joanna Russ, Roger C. Schlo-
bin, Robert Scholes, Kathleen Spencer, Darko Suvin, Grant Stone, Pierre
Versins, Ricardo Valla, and Susan Wood. I owe a special debt to Jef-
frey H. Levin, Le Guin's bibliographer, who shared graciously his in-
comparable resources and knowledge. And I am most grateful to Ursula
K. Le Guin herself for her wit and candor and door-opening; her
answers to queries have made of this dissertation not a dry and tedious
exercise submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a
degree, but at moments a pleasure, and, at rare and unexpected times,
a joy.
xvi
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NOTES TO THE PREFACE
l. Le Guin, "A Citizen of Mondath," Foundation 4 (July, 1973),
24,
2. Ibid.
3. Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," Algol 21 (Novem-
ber, 1975), 12.
4. Most of Le Guin's lyric poetry is collected in Wild Angels
(Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1975). A collection of her non-
fiction has been assembled by Susan Wood, The Language of the Night:
Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction (New York: Berk ley/Putnam,
1979).
5. Le Guin, "Introduction to the 1978 Edition," Planet of
Exile (New York: Harper § Row, 1978), Pp. Xii-xiii. That Le Guin's
central theme is marriage is but one instance of her affinities with
the Romantics, many of whom worked with the idea of marriage. See
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), passim.
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1974), s.v., "yin-yang."
7. Le Guin, "A Response to the Le Guin Issue," Science-Fiction
Studies, 3 (March, 1976), 45.
8. Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1954), po 76.
9. For some reason, Bohr's complementarity principle has not had
xvii
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the exposure that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle has; perhaps the
intellectual climate in the second third of the twentieth century was
more hospitable to uncertainty than to complementarity. The situation
may be changing in the last third of the century. Heisenberg himself
Says that his uncertainty principle is "just a special case of the
more general complementarity principle" ("Quantum Theory and its In-
and Colleagues, ed. S. Rozental [New York: John Wiley, 1967], p. 106).
Bohr proposed the complementarity principle in a lecture in 1927;
it has since become a cornerstone in the Copenhagen interpretation of
quantum mechanics, accepted by most physicists (with some notable ex-
ceptions like Einstein and Schridinger). Bohr's attempts to extend
the idea into other scientific disciplines and into philosophy are
collected in his three volumes of essays: Atomic Theory and the
Description of Nature (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1934),
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: John Wiley, 1958), and
Essays 1958-1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York:
Interscience, 1963). See also two essays by Leon Rosenfeld, "Niels
Bohr in the Thirties: Consolidation and Extension of the Conception of
Co enera Niels Bohr, ed. Rozental, pp. 114-36, and "Founda-
tions of Quantum Theory and Complementarity," Nature, 190 (April 29,
1961), 384-88, For a full treatment of the biographical and philoso-
phical backgrounds of Bohr's ideas, see Gerald Holton, "The Roots of
Complementarity," Daedalus, 99 (Fall, 1970), 1015-55. Those who have
xviii
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little experience with the ideas of twentieth-century physics should
probably start with Oppenheimer's Science and the Common Understand-
ing. For a fuller and more detailed understanding of the epistemolog-
ical implications of complementarity, see the special issue of Dialec-
tica edited by Wolfgang Pauli (vol. 2, no. 3/4 [1948]), which contains
essays by Einstein, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Reichenbach, and others.
10. See Jung's "On the Nature of the Psyche," The Structure and
Dynamics of the Psyche (vol. 8 of the Collected Works) (New York: Pan-
theon, 1960), pp. 226-34; and "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting
Principle," The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, pp. 477, 489.
Jung and Pauli knew each other and together explored the elective af-
finities between physics and psychology. See Pauli, "Naturwissen-
schaftliche und erkenntnistheoretische Aspekte der Ideen vom Un-
bewussten," Dialectica, 8 (1954), 285-301.
ll. When Bohr designed a coat of arms in 1947, he placed the
yin-yang symbol under the motto contraria sunt complementa (Niels
Bohr, ed. Rozental, p. 305). See also Fritjof Capra, The Tao of
Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and
Eastern Mysticism (Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1975), esp. chapter 11,
"Beyond the World of Opposites," a discussion of the wave-particle
duality in quantum theory, complementarity, and the yin-yang symbol.
Capra reports that Bohr visited the Orient in 1937 and "from that time
maintained an interest in Eastern culture" (p. 160).
Jung's references to Oriental modes of thought in general and to
xix
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Chinese thought in particular are too numerous to list. See, for one
example, his "Foreword" in The I Ching, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1967), pp. xxi-xxxix. Part II of Jung's Psyche &
Symbol: A Selection from the Writings of C. G. Jung, ed. Violet S. de
Laszlo (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1958), contains most of
Jung's major essays on Oriental thought.
12. Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (1972; rpt., New
York: Penguin, 1975).
13. Schrödinger, Science and Humanism: Physics in Our Time
(Cambridge: At the University Press, 1951), p. Sl.
14, The blurring of the division between subject and object in
the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was the part of it
that most disturbed Einstein and Schrbdinger,
For an attempt to connect physics and psychology, see Marie-
Louise von Franz, Number and Time: Reflections Leading Toward a Unifi-
cation of Depth Psychology and Physics, trans. Andrea Dykes (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974).
15. Dinesen, "The Cardinal's First Tale," Last Tales (New York:
Random House, 1957), p. 19.
16. Science and Humanism, p. 5. The realiy great twentieth-
century scientists like Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger
all tried to relate their specialized knowledge with the rest of
knowledge.
17. See Cornelia Church, "Myth and History as Complementary
XX
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Modes of Consciousness," Myth and the Crisis of Historical Conscious-
ness, ed. Lee W. Gibbs and W. Taylor Stevenson (Missoula, Mont.:
Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 35-55, which draws on Ornstein's work to
buttress a theory about the interplay between myth and history,
XXi
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CONTENTS
PECPACG -se es Mi ed. Se or Ss E owi e So dao ga a o woi V
Chapter 1. Of Jewels, Stories, Patterns, Visions, and Worlds:
The Dialectical Plots of Le Guin's Romances . . . . 1
Notes to Chapter 1 ep) to ee ae ee ee ap A 5S
Chapter 2. Persuading Us to Rejoice and Teaching Us How to
Praise: History, Fiction, and Ethics in Orsinian
Tales in og oes ah vos” tae ky Oo ge ae on ee 370
Notes to Chapter 2 a ee ee er e e a adn Ng 122
Chapter 3. The Complementarity of Myth, Magic, and Science
in Le Guin's Fantasy and Science Fiction . . sey 147
Notes to Chapter 3. . . . . . . . a . 206
Chapter 4. Le Guin's Hainish Future History: The Dialectic
of Beginnings and Endings . . . ... . so y 226
Notes to Chapter 4 . a aoa a a aa , D ox 313
Chapter 5. Le Guin's Taoism, the Romance, and Utopia . . . . 363
Notes to Chapter5 . . . .. a a . 403
Appendix A Bibliographical Orientation to Taoism . . . s 416
Bibliography Egres WE EALAR TE ca e a o a ee a a A a 8 435
xxii
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CHAPTER ONE
OF JEWELS, STORIES, PATTERNS, VISIONS, AND WORLDS:
THE DIALECTICAL PLOTS OF LE GUIN'S ROMANCES
The concept, which some would see as the sign-
unit for whatever is comprised under it, has
from the beginning been instead the product
of dialectical thinking in which everything is
always that which it is, only because it becomes
that which it is not.
--Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno
While European philosophy tended to find reality
in substance, Chinese philosophy tended to find it
in relation. .. o Behind the metaphysical idea of
"substance" . . . lies the logical idea of "identity,"
and Western philosophers laid down as a basic prin-
ciple of thought that a thing cannot both be and not
be at the same time. Chinese philosophers, on the
other hand, laid down that a thing is always "becom-
ing" or "de-becoming," all the time on the way to
something else.
--Joseph Needham
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2
The best entry into Le Guin's fiction is not her apprentice work,
nor is it her first published story; it comes in medias res, in her
third novel, Midway through City of Illusions, Falk reaches Es Toch,
the goal of the quest he began at Zove's House, among the Forest
People. Drawn by a faint hunch or hope, Falk has believed that Es
Toch would hold the key to his lost identity and past. He discovers
that his hunch is true, but this discovery immediately uncovers a
larger truth: while the Shing do, in fact, hold the key to his identi-
ty, he, in turn, is the key to their efforts to locate and subdue his
home planet, which had until then escaped their domination. So he
is not merely Falk, a strange-looking alien who six years previously
had wandered into a forest clearing, fully grown physically, yet men-
tally a tabula rasa; he is also Ramarren, the greatest mathematician-
astronomer from his home country Kelshey on Werel, the navigator of
the spaceship Alterra. He is a "two-minded nan." His quest, he dis-
covers, began not 2,000 miles away at Zove's House, but 142 light
years away on another planet; and of those who made the journey with
him, only one, the boy Orry, has survived the Shing attack on the
Alterra as it neared Earth. But Falk does not have the faintest idea
-of any cf this until after he hears the story told by Orry, the
other survivor from the Alterra.
After Estrel had delivered Falk to the Shing, and after they have
tried to get the information they want with mind-altering drugs, they
introduce Orry to him. Falk is baffled and confused by Orry's
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3
recognition of him as Ramarren, but because Zove and All-Alonio have
taught him the "Old Canon of Man" (i.e., Taoism), he remains open to
the possibility that Orry can help him toward the truth about him-
self, In response to Falk's questions "'Will you tell me who...
who we are?!" and "Why did we come here?!" (pp. 306, 307), Orry an-
swers with a long "childish narrative" (p. 310). As he listens, Falk
begins to comprehend who he is: he recovers the 1,200 year-long his-
tory of the Terran colony on Werel, their home planet in the Gamma
Draconis solar system, and he learns their reasons for traveling the
142 light years to Earth, After Orry has finished, "Falk kept gazing
in his mind at the jewel that might be false, and might be priceless,
the story, the pattern--true vision or not--of the world he had lost"
(p. 307).
This scene from Le Guin's third novel may very well be the locus
classicus of her central formal and thematic concerns. Just as Shakes-
peare often staged plays within his plays in self-conscious commentary
on his own art, Le Guin includes here a story within a Story, and pro-
vides us with some clear indications of what she is about.” What is
significant in this situation in Es Toch, not only in terms of the re-
lationship between the characters in the text, but also in terms of
the relationship between us as readers and the text is this: Falk re-
cognizes who he is, and begins to reconstitute his identity as he
listens to a story, a "childish narrative," the protagonist of which
is none other than himself. At the same time, our reading of City of
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Illusions is analogous with Falk's listening to Orry's story: in a
sense we are the protagonist of Le Guin's narrative, "The message of
all romance," says Northrop Frye, "is de te fabula: the story is about
you," And as Le Guin herself has written, "we read books to find out
who we are . . . the story--from Rumplestiltskin to War and Peace--
is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose
of gaining understanding." She goes on to say that no human society
has lacked stories, while some great ones have lacked the wheel, hint-
ing that we are not merely homo faber, or even homo sapiens, but we
are, perhaps most importantly, homo narrans,” "Stories have been told
as long as speech has existed," says Dinesen's Cardinal, "and sans
stories the human race would have perished, as it would have perished
sans water,"°
What we experience as we read City of Illusions is the story of
Falk's quest for his origins and identity; the story Falk hears Orry
tell is the story of the quest--guided by Ramarren--of nineteen de-
scendants of Terran colonists of Werel for their origins on Earth and
for an understanding of their relationship with the rest of humanity.
Both Le Guin's story and Orry's story are romances, the characteristic
narrative form of most of Le Guin's fiction, the characteristic form
of the tradition of literary fantasy in which she locates herself,
The expanding pattern of relationships, historical, cultural, social,
and personal, that is the shape of Falk's journey in City of Illusions
is at once process and result; Le Guin's typical protagonist discovers
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his or her identity during a journey, most often in some sense
a journey home. This journey is a process of discovering roots and
recognizing a destiny prefigured in those roots; it is a process of
recognizing one's relationships with his environment, material or
imaginative, social or personal, and generally both. Whether mediat-
ed through the science fiction conventions of the Hainish stories
(Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, The Left Hand
of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, and The Dispossessed), or
through the less displaced conventions of juvenile fantasy in the
Earthsea trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The
Farthest Shore), the pattern of this discovery process in Le Guin's
fiction is the romance quest.
This to say that not only the form itself of Le Guin's stories--
the poetics of the romance--but also the relationship she creates be-
tween her stories and their readers--the rhetoric of the romance~-is
their content. What we experience as we read City of Illusions--imag-
inatively traveling into the far future to trek with Falk across
North America--is analogous to Falk's traveling 142 light years from
Werel to Earth, then 2,000 miles from the Appalachians to the Rockies,
in order to discover who he was, who he is, and who he might be. The
Test of this chapter will be devoted to an examination of how the
story, "cne of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the
purpose of gaining understanding," may be used to discover, to explore,
and to constitute who we are,
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I
The sentence Le Guin uses to describe Falk's reaction to Orry's
"childish narrative" points to the major concerns of the romance.
The jewel that Falk gazes at in his mind is at once a conventional
symbol of the precious object of the quest and also a symbol of the
Self (in the Jungian sense). It echoes other jewel images in City of
Illusions. The patterning frame, used by the Prince of Kansas to give
an enigmatic forecast of Falk's destiny, contains an opal which stands
for Falk. This image is recalled at the end of the story as Falk-
Ramarren and Orry are escaping in a comandeered Shing spaceship, as
they watch sunlight creating dawn on the Earth's Eastern Ocean, "shin-
ing like a golden crescent for a moment against the dust of stars,
like a jewel on a great patterning frame" (p. 370).
So the jewel Falk gazes at after hearing Orry's story turns out
to be both a symbol for his self and an image of a planet seen from a
Spaceship, a "world." The merging of self and world in the image of
the jewel is analogous to the syntax of the whole sentence, which col-
lapses and synthesizes into apposition the words "jewel," "story," and
"pattern," modified by "vision," all modifying "world": "the jewel
that might be false and might be priceless, the story, the pattern--
true vision or not--of the world he had lost." The "world" Falk has
lost is in one sense the planet Werel, and in another, it is his iden-
tity as Ramarren. At the same time that it is a physical environment,
a culture, a history, a home, it is also selfhood, "world" as "Welt"
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7
in Weltanschauung, a configuration of concepts, a pattern or mode of
perceiving with which one individually responds to and orders his ex-
perience. Thus a "world" is the totality of the dialectical inter-
play of individual self and environment, a Gestalt which can be
either a conglomeration of alienated fragments or an integrated unity,
an identity. This "world" is no ahistorical, static entity, though,
for it exists as a "story," and therefore unfolds in time, in an order-
ed and coherent fashion, structured according to a particular "pat-
tern," a plot, which leads up to and expresses a "vision." It is here,
in the apposition and interweaving of the words "jewel," "story,"
"pattern," "vision," and "world," that the meaning of Le Guin's fic-
tion is embedded. A "world" is the way things happen, not a thing; it
is the path (Tao) that all events take, and as such it includes the
way (tao) an individual perceives and acts, whether in violation of it,
or in harmony with it. This is the foundation of Le Guin's ethics,
The plots of her romances carry the protagonist and the reader from a
situation in which the protagonist's world is fragmented and alienated,
quite often because of something he or she did, toward a momentary
vision of harmony, balance, and identity of world as self and world
as environment, an identity of Self and Other.
A story is the tool Falk uses to discover-recover and to under-
stand his world, just as it is, according to Le Guin, the tool we use
to do the same thing. What Falk needs in the Shing city of illusions
is a way of seeing, a mode of vision that will enable him to make the
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proper choices. Orry's story helps him to achieve this. Similarly,
for readers of stories, fantasy and science fiction can provide glimp-
ses of reality more penetrating than those offered by realism, which
Le Guin regards as "the least adequate means of understanding or por-
traying the incredibile realities of our existence. "? Science fiction,
says Le Guin, is a "way of seeing"; it can offer a "view ia? Who we
are may be more readily understood with the romance than with realism;
realism may merely reinforce and legitimate the obstacles that stand
in the way of true vision. To the degree that we, like Falk, are im-
prisoned in cities of illusions, we need the vision that the romance
offers. A view in may be the way out.
Le Guin's concern with the value of story-telling for acquiring
and forming perception and vision is central not only to City of Illu-
sions; it animates most of her other fiction as well, and the same
cluster of imagery that carries the idea in City of illusions is the
vehicle for the theme in her other novels. The opening paragraphs of
her first published novel, Rocannon's World, and the opening para-
graphs of The Left Hand of Darkness, announce it. An anonymous story-
teller prefaces his narrative about Rocannon with these words:
In trying to tell the story of a man, an ordinary League scien-
tist, . . . one feels like an archeologist amid millennial ruins
now struggling through choked tangles of leaf, flower, branch
and vine to the sudden bright geometry of a wheel or a polished
cornerstone, and now entering some commonplace, sunlit doorway
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to find inside it the darkness, the impossible flicker of a
flame, the glitter of a jewel, the half-glimpsed movement of a
10
woman's arm.
remarks:
I'l] make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a
child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of the telling:
like the singular jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one
woman wears it, and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust.
Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls
ahs il
are, But both are sensitive.
These two storytellers have similar purposes: one, in "trying to
tell the story of a man," feels like an archeologist groping through
the detritus of nature and history, searching for a pattern ("geometry
of a wheel") which when discovered appears like a vision or a jewel
("sudden bright . . . flicker... glitter"). The storyteller's
goal here is discovery through recovery. Genly Ai, on the other hand,
certainly no positivist, proceeds toward his goal, Truth, by invention
rather than discovery, for storytelling is obviously inventive. He
wants to offer facts set in a story so that they produce a vision; he
knows that facts without aesthetic value are as dull and dusty as
jewels without a beautiful setting. For both narrators, facts are
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10
perceived in flashes and glimpses and have meaning only when under-
stood as elements in a pattern. Although one emphasizes discovery and
the other emphasizes invention, the two processes are really one. The
dialectic of invention-discovery is the Storyteller's art just as it is
Falk's method of reconstituting his identity: he adds "guesses and ex-
trapolation" to Orry's "childish narrative" (p. 310).
Storytellers have no monopoly on the method of invention-discov-
ery--and here is a point where fiction and science fuse to form
science fiction--for the great experimental and theoretical physicists
of the twentieth century have used it to understand the nature of real-
ity when their standard paradigms or categories have failed them.
Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) is the name Ernst Mach coined
late in the nineteenth century for the procedure of using entirely
fictive or fantastic constructions or Situations in order to discover
or explain something about reality. | Many physicists after Mach,
Einstein and Schrödinger mest notably, used Gedankenexperimenten to
explore problematic aspects of quantum theory, and they have been fol-
lowed by science fiction writers, including Le Guin, who consciously
and deliberately use Gedankenexperimenten to ask questions about who
13
we are,
II
But what, one might ask, is invented-discovered by the storytel-
ler? An artist, of course, uses imagination and invention to make
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11
discoveries, reach understandings, and communicate truths about who we
are. The specific nature of the discoveries, understandings, and
truths crafted with a particular tool will depend on the capacities
and qualities of the tool, as well as on the ways the tool is used.
Before we can understand how Le Guin uses her tools, we have to under-
s.and the tool itself. If, as Bohr and Heisenberg have taught us, and
as artists have repeatedly shown us, our instruments form a constitu-
tive part of the reality they help us see, then the forms a writer
chooses to communicate meaning will be a constitutive part of that
meaning.
I believe, along with E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that generic conceptions
are heuristic devices that a writer uses to constitute meanings. Fan-
tasy and science fiction--Le Guin's major forms--are sub-genres of the
romance, so fantasy and science fiction should exhibit the same general
configurations that the romance goen We must recognize, however,
that generalizations about the romance carry us only part of the way
toward an understanding of the specific forms Le Guin uses. The fol-
lowing discussion of the poetics and the rhetoric of the romance
should not, therefore, be taken as an attempt to: provide a final and
inflexible pattern, but is intended only to identify the most central
generic patterns and impulses and the most significant rhetorical
strategies in Le Guin's fiction, We are for the moment concerned with
langue, not parole, with what Todorov calls a theoretical genre rather
than a historical genre. !>
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12
"The most important principle in any genre," says Darko Suvin,
following Aristotle and more recent genre theorists like R. S. Crane,
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and Claudio Guillén, "is its purpose, which is to
be inferred from the way the genre ineno According to Hirsch,
the notion of purpose, "the most important unifying and discriminat-
ing principle in genres," is similar to an Aristotelian final cause;
it is "an entelechy, a goal-seeking ree that animates a particular
kind of utterance,"!” Literary forms, of course, are not organisms
with a vital force that "animates" them, so the notion of entelechy
is metaphorical. But if literary forms are not part of first nature,
like acorns which become oaks, they may be thought of as operating ac-
cording to second nature. Because definite meanings become associated
with different literary forms, even to the point of becoming virtually
identical with them, we "naturally" expect certain specific meanings
when we encounter well-established conventions and usages, When a
story begins "once upon a time," we "naturally" form a whole system
of expectations, which are in a sense the genre itself; genre is, in
Hirsch's words, "an anticipated sense of the hott” Thus we can,
with Guillén, speak of a genre's "informing deve”
What, then, is romance's informing drive; what is the purpose or
final cause that can be inferred from the way romances operate; does
the romance have an end like that inferred by Aristotle to be the end
of tragedy, the arousing and purging of pity and fear? A. Bartlett Gia-
matti supplies one: he argues that the "Romance, at its heart, con-
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15
stantly yearns" for moments of vision from enchanted ground, °° Gia-
matti's formulation, resting as it does on the personified yearning
heart of the genre, embodies the notion of vital force or entelechy.
"Impulse" is another word he uses to describe the cause of those
moments of vision when "the reader, or protagonist of chivalric ro-
mence--or both--discovers an image of permanence and perfection
through the reconciliation of opposites .""74 For Spenser and his con-
temporaries, this moment is symbolized with the gesture of raising a
visor or a helmet. Although it may appear to be a violation of his-
torical and cultural relativity to extend Giamatti's definition of the
telos of the romance to apply to all romances, whether Greek, Continen-
tal, English, or American, whether Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Roman-
tic, or Modern, this is not necessarily the case. The raising of the
visor or helmet is, certainly, specifically native to the romances
that yielded Giamatti's observation, and cannot be replanted in differ-
ent cultural soil without shock, But as Frye points out, "the conven-
tions of prose romance show little change over the course of the cen-
turies, and conservatism of this kind is the mark of a stable genre."*"
As a matter of fact, Giamatti's thesis is reaffirmed in other recent
Studies of the romance. Fredric Jameson, for example, writes that
"the romance must seal the hero's mission by some form of revelation,
of which the most celebrated is of course the appearance of the enig-
Matic grail itself,"'-" and Kathryn Hume speaks of an “epiphanic
vision [that] is proper to the special world [of the nonprobable in
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14
romance] ,""74
The essential parts of Giamatti's formulation of the purpose or
final cause of the romance are (1) the enchanted ground (if not a
world of the marvelous and the improbable, at least a strange and dif-
ferent world, what Tolkien calis a "Secondary World") ; (2) the
vision of permanence and perfection (or of unity, balance, wholeness,
and harmony~-the absence of, or the momentary synthesis of contradic-
tions and conflicting opposites); and (3) the sharing of the vision
by protagonist and reader alike. Thus there is, built into the very
being of the romance genre, a drive, a yearning, or an impulse,
analogous to the acorn's drive to become an oak tree, toward a vision-
ary reconciliation and synthesis. That the genre is personified in
this formulation is evidence that the poetics and the rhetoric of the
romance are cognate: the anticipation and expectation aroused in the
reader are the shape of the genre.
Having posited this much as the purpose of the romance, we can
make some initial statements about the potential and the limits of the
form. Unlike comedy, romance cannot resolve conflicts between social
groups (like young and old) with a social ceremony (marriage); rather,
it resolves psychological and metaphysical oppositions and contradic-
tions, including related ethical problems, with a visionary experience,
or even a magical event. One should not expect from romances, then,
at least not from the relatively conventional and traditional ones,
very much in the way of realistic and direct social statement. On the
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15
contrary, one can expect the resolution of conflicts--even those
which may appear on the surface to be social conflicts--to be effected
by magic of some sort. As Auden says, 2 little too categorically per-
haps, the traditional quest tale "provides no image of our objective
experience of social life"; instead, it is a "symbolic description of
our subjective personal experience of existence, ... the literary
mimesis of the subjective experience of becoming,”°
This definition of the romance need not positively exclude
social meanings. Our subjective selves, our individual worlds, how-
ever private, do not exist in a vacuum, but are influenced by, and
formed in response to, the world around us. Romance forms, because
they have always contained a latent "identity between individual and
social quests," are liable to "kidnapping," argues Frye, by absorption
into "the ideology of an ascendant classe” Whoever the kidnapper,
though, the resolution of class conflict or ideological contradiction
is still magical. To the extent that political or social concerns
are identified with the fundamental concerns of the romance, which
are psychological and metaphysical, to the degree that the special
enchanted world of the romance represents or corresponds to or direct-
ly contradicts the reader's world, the resolution of the conflict in
the romance will have some social and political resonance. But the
resolution itself remains visionary and magical, not objectively
social,
This is not to say, however, that it is not "true." The sense in
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16
which the magical or visionary resolution of a romance plot is "true"
is rooted in its rhetorical power tc create in its readers an intense
absorption in the experiences of the protagonist. And this absorption,
which may be more intense with the romance (because more subjective)
than with other genres like comedy or tragedy, arises from the con-
gruence between the pattern or structure of the romance (its poetics)
and the most fundamental psychological processes in every reader. The
reader responds to a romance quest in much the same way that a tuning
fork in one corner of a room begins to vibrate when an identical tun-
ing fork is struck in another part of the room. This congruence
accounts for the existence in the romance of the enchanted world, as
well as for the fact that protagonist and reader alike share the
vision (the rhetoric of the romance) that comes from experiences in
that special secondary world.
Kathryn Hume's essay "Romance: A Perdurable Pattern" presents a
useful outline of the basic structure of the romance, The article
calls for close attention on two accounts. First it provides a fuller
understanding of the rhetoric of the romance, the ways in which ro-
mance is de te fabula, and second, it elaborates a poetics of the ro-
mance, one paradigmatic or ideal-typical plot against which we can
perceive and appreciate Le Guin's artistry in constructing her own
romances,
Hume's essay is essentially an elaboration of Auden's incisive
remark that the romance is the "literary mimesis of the subjective
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17
experience of becoming." While Auden explains becoming in conscious
and existential terms, Hume draws on the psychological understanding
of ego development in order to explain the nature of the becoming that
is re-presented and re-iterated when a storyteller presents a romance
quest. Ever since the early psychoanalysts noticed similarities be-
tween the pattern or logic of dreams and the structures of myth, hero
legends, folk tales, and fairy tales, psychological explanations of the
"meaning" of myth and folklore have been commonplace, Hume, however,
makes a distinction between the archetypal infrastructure of the ro-
mance and its culturally conditioned literary reflexes or projections.
Implicitly, she makes the same distinction that Frye, borrowing Schil-
ler's terms, makes between "naive" and "sentimental" romances.
Hume begins be establishing the congruence between the develop-
ment of the ego (her model for that being the theory of Centroversion
from Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness), and the core
pattern of the hero myth (the tripartite process of Departure, Initia-
tion, and Return outlined in Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand
Faces). She then proceeds to set forth her own tripartite organiza-
tion of the romance hero's experiences, choosing terminology which
emphasizes the "state of the hero mentally and socially." Like the
ego's development, the prototypical romance hero's experiences can be
described in three stages: Equilibrium, Struggle, and Higher Harmony.
The first stage, Equilibrium, shows us a hero at home with him-
self and his world, In this relatively helpless and unthinking state,
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18
the hero feels secure, comfortable, and sheltered. That his needs
are taken care of is often indicated by his high social status: he
really does not have to do anything. But this idyllic situation is
interrupted by what Campbell calls the Call to Adventure. The hero
either responds to a summons (rumor of damsel in distress, someone's
demand for help), or he is precipitated outright into the adventure by
being kidnapped, dispossessed, drugged, or otherwise carried away
against his will from the state of Equilibrium. Quite often the ro-
mance hero is merely a passive observer who finds himself caught up in
a conflict larger than himself, but who nevertheless undertakes the
quest and somehow emerges from it victorious, Many of Le Guin‘s pro-
tagonists unwittingly precipitate the action by some deed for which
they alone are responsible: Ged releases his Shadow in Earthsea and
Genly Ai's very presence on the planet Gethen creates the situation
which forces him to trek across the Ice with Estraven. Because Le
Guin's heroes are responsible for creating the need for the journey
and for making the journey themselves, her romances have a strong
ethical dimension.
The second stage, Struggle, takes place in a special world ridden
with magic and irrational forces. This world, radically different from
the one the hero has known, is closed; to enter it, the hero must
cross a threshold, whether it be by going through a door or a gate,
by entering a forest, by crossing a body of water by bridge or boat,
or by crossing interstellar distances in a spaceship. Sometimes the
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19
hero must defeat or outwit the guardian of the passage to the special
world. The hero's adventures in this world, which correspond to the
ego's struggles in the unconscious during the process cf Centrover-
sion, are epitomized by a fight with a monster or a dragon. These
fearsome opponents may be represented by wicked step-kin, satanic ad-
versaries, witches, wolves, cannibals, or foreign invaders. In A
Wizard of Earthsea it is Ged's own Shadow, and in The Left Hand of
Darkness, Genly Ai's adversaries are the categories he uses to in-
terpret reality, the most obvious being the dualism of male and female.
But the hero does not face these enemies alone; at some point he re-
ceives help in the form of luck, wisdom, or magic; he may get advice
from a wise old man or Wizard, assistance from animals, or help from
devices like magic swords, spears, purses, rings, or other identity
tokens. Whatever forms these malignant and benign beings take, they
are, says Hume, "identical with the symbols collected from the study
of dreams, the dragon fight being both prime expression of the ego's
struggle and the most basic of romance adventures "°° Like the ego,
which must venture into the unconscious and struggle there with "all
manner of powers, . . . all extra-rational [and] not regulated by
reason or logic," "1 the romance hero must enter upon enchanted
ground and there face ordeals more extreme and more terrible than any-
thing he has experienced in his normal world. Because these powers
inhabit a realm totally alien to the hero's normal world (and alien
to the ego's rationalism and logic), they assume hyperbolic
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20
characteristics. Thus, there is little subtlety in the characteriza-
tions in romance; to ask for subtle delineations of character in a ro-
mance is to ask the unconscious to speak the language of consciousness.
What Erich Fromm calls "the forgotten language," what Le Guin calls
"the language of the night"--these are the native tongues in romance's
enchanted worlds. >”
Of paramount significance to the reader of romance is the equi-
valence between the nonprobable world depicted in romances and his own
unconscious. Because of this, argues Hume, the special world of ro-
mance is "relevant to every member of the audience whether in its past
or present development.'"°° It is this equivalence which makes possible
Frye's statement that "the message of all romance is de te fabula,"
and also makes possible the likelihood that the reader will share the
protagonist's vision from enchanted ground. Moreover, this equiva-
lence accounts for the reader's sense that the fictional experiences
depicted in romances, even the most hyperbolic ones, are "true," even
while they are not, as is often charged, "true to life." As Auden
says, these experiences "correspond to an aspect of our subjective ex-
perience." The struggle in the quest tale, he continues, "must be
dualistic": it must be "a contest between two sides, friends and ene-
mies,'">* In slightly different terms, Frye writes that "the central
form of the romance is dialectical: everything is focussed on a con-
flict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader's values are
bound up with the hero."
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21
Hume accounts for this polarization by referring to the related
"nexus of concerns" that the world of romance and the unconscious
share, Just as the forces in the romance are “sharply polarized into
good and evil," the forces confronted by the ego in the unconscious
may be "destructive at one stage [and] helpful at another, but at any
given point in the conflict, evil is evil because it can harm the ego,
- and good is good because it has the potentiality to help." This of
course applies more to "naive" than to "sentimental" romances. A
writer like Le Guin, conscious of the potentialities of the genre, can
exploit them for numerous effects by manipulating the reader's expec-
tations. In City of Illusions the guide and helper Estrel turns out
initially seems to be Ai's enemy, turns out to be his guide and double,
At any one moment in Le Guin's romances, friend and enemy may be sharp-
ly distinguished, but then again, their differences may, at another
moment, be confused and ambiguous; ultimately, though, when we see
them whole, we realize that friend and enemy are complementary parts
of a unity. Like Estraven, Ged's Shadow initially appears as the
hero's enemy, but ultimately we recognize it as a helpful though fear-
ful guide and an integral part of Ged's Self.
The third and final Stage of the romance, Higher Harmony, shows
us a hero in a new equilibrium, the most common being the standard
“they lived happily ever after" ending, which Hume regards as "axio-
matically demanded by the romance construct." We see a hero who,
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22
having passed out of the strange world, is older, more mature, more
experienced, and radically changed. The harmony and balance that
characterized the first stage, Equilibrium, is regained, but it is
qualitatively different in that it is more secure and lasting. Bor-
rowing a phrase from Campbell, Hume describes the hero as a Master of
Two Worlds: he has experienced both the baleful and helpful forces of
the strange world, and has had a vision during which he has experienc-
ed a "sense of wholeness, peace, affirmed identity.1°°
Although Hume mentions "affirmed identity" as a probable result
of the hero's experiences in the enchanted world, she is not as con-
cerned with this dimension of the romance as Frye is. Unlike Frye,
whose exposition of the structure of the romance in The Secular Scrip-
ture centers on the hero's loss of identity, alienation, and subse-
quent recovery of identity and self-recognition, Hume is more interest-
ed in establishing the romance as "an objective correlative to the re-
lated unconscious troubles." 39 While Frye's ultimate object is to
demonstrate that secular romances form "a single integrated vision of
the world, parallel to the Christian and biblical vision," and more
than that, that they are a "revelation from God," he does discover
along the way toward this goal valuable insights which can stand by
themselves apart from the conclusions he pursues. “©
I have so far been using recent theories about the romance in or-
der to show that the words that head this chapter--"jewel," "story,"
"pattern," "vision," and "world"--refer to essential aspects of the
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25
romance. Giamatti's essay on Spenser opened the discussion of vision,
and Hume's essay on the "perdurable pattern" of the romance led into
a treatment of pattern and story. What still needs separate treatment
is the concept world. Frye's emphasis on the romance hero's identity
leads us directly into that. Frye proposes that in the romance
heroes and villains exist primarily to symbolize a contrast be-
tween two worlds, one above the level of ordinary experience, the
other below it. There is, first, a world associated with happi-
ness, security, and peace: the emphasis is often thrown on child-
hood or on an ‘innocent! or pre-genital period of youth, and the
images are those of spring and summer, flowers and sunshine. I
shall call this world the idyllic world. The other is a world of
exciting adventures, but adventures which involve separation,
loneliness, humiliation, pain, and the threat of more pain, I
shall call this world the demotic or night world. Because of the
powerful polarizing tendency of romance, we are usually carried
directly from one to the other (p. 53).
These landscapes are Synonymous with the state of the protagonist's
self: in the idyllic world he has a sense of identity, and in the de-
motic world, he is reified and alienated:
Reality for romance is an order of existence most readily assoc-
lated with the word identity. .. . It is existence before Tonce
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24
upon a time,‘ and subsequent to ‘and they lived happily ever
after.' What happens in between are adventures, or collisions
with external circumstances, and the return to identity is a re-
lease from the tyranny of these circumstances. Illusion for ro-
mance, then, is an order of existence that is best called aliena-
tion. Most romances end happily, with a return to the state of
identity, and begin with a departure from it (p. 54).
In most romances, therefore, we follow the protagonist as he makes a
cyclical movement through these two worlds: descent into the night
world and return to the idyllic world,
Rather than organizing the structure of the romance in three
parts, Frye concentrates his discussion on these two movements.
Descent begins with the "motif of amnesia": the hero experiences "some
kind of break in consciousness [involving] forgetfulness of the pre-
vious state" (pə 102). Just as the hero in Hume's scheme leaves the
state of Equilibrium, Frye's prototypical romance hero experiences a
sharp descent in social status which may take the form of disposses-
sion, even slavery (e.g., Arren's capture by pirates in The Farthest
Shore). Whatever form the descent takes, though, "the structural core
is the individual loss or confusion or break in the continuity of
identity" (p. 164). From that point on, there is further descent into
the demotic world, and the hero progressively loses his sense of free-
dom, The central images during this descent into alienation are meta-
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25
morphosis and doubling: "every aspect of fall or descent is linked to
a change in form in some way, usually by associating or identifying a
human or humanized figure with something animal or vegetable" (p. 105).
During the earlier stages of descent, the doubling image appears in
the "Narcissus theme! in which the hero exchanges his original self
for his mirror image or shadow, while at later stages in the descent,
this theme appears in the form of the doppleganger or shadow figure
who threatens the hero with disaster and death, This is clearly what
happens in both A Wizard of Earthsea as Ged confronts his Shadow and
in The Farthest Shore, when Arren is nearly seduced by Sopli and when
Ged confronts Cob. With increasing loneliness and alienation, the
hero approaches the nadir of the descent, and just when he seems to
be impossibly imprisoned or caught in enchantment and binding spells,
or captured in the bowels of a monster, he escapes, the "standard es-
cape device of romance [being] that of escape through a shift of iden-
tity, the normal basis of the recognition scene" (p. 136). This shift
of identity usually comes at the moment of vision from enchanted
ground; I will return to it in a moment when I discuss the nature of
the moment of vision in Le Guin's fiction.
Ascent, argues Frye, is movement toward self-recognition and iden-
tity, and "all the Narcissus and twin and doppelganger themes that oc-
cur in the descent are reversed" (p. 152). When the demotic enchant-
ment of the double or the shadow is broken, the severed current of
memory is restored. Crucial to this process is that moment when by
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26
some paradox, the hero releases himself from bondage and enchantment,
and achieves separation from the demotic double by "consolidating and
defining it" (p. 142). For Frye, the end of romance, the outcome of
the upward journey which began at the moment of recognition or death/
rebirth, is the creation of a model world, "not like a past state to
return to, but an inner model or social vision to be recreated out
of our 'lower' world of experience" (p. 184). Clearly implicit in
this statement is the suggestion that utopian vision is a direct re-
sult of the romance pattern. One could go beyond Frye at this point
and argue that the utopia is the logical consequence of the romance.
This seems to have been the case with Le Guin's career from 1966 to
1974: after she had written a few straightfoward romance quests in the
sixties, she produced a utopia, albeit an "ambiguous" one, The Dispos-
sessed, in the seventies. “1
One thing that Frye does not make clear is the precise nature of
the relationship between the idyllic and demotic worlds on the one
hand, and identity and alienation on the other. His notion that the
ascending movement in romance is "an upward journey toward man's re-
covery of what he projects as sacred myth" (p. 183) suggests that the
downward journey, conversely, is similarly a consolidation of project-
ed demotic qualities, but he does not say this in so many words. Le
Guin would, I think, contend that the consolidation of projected
demotic qualities is the Sine qua non of the recovery of utopian
vision (she might not search for sacred myth as Frye does). 4? Not
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27
only is the dystopia on Urras a necessary precondition for the utopian
society on Anarres; they are complementary, for they both orbit around
a common center of gravity.
In Fredric Jameson's essay on the romance, we find a discussion
of two senses of the word "world," a discrimination which clarifies
the relation between the protagonist's state of mind (and the reader's)
and the worlds we see represented in the romance, In one sense, says
Jameson, a "world" is an object of representation, and as such "never
completely severs its connection with sense perception, even when it
has become relatively figurative," as for example, when it is used to
refer to detached realms of good and evil in romances, "> This is
"world" as it is used in Frye's definition of the idyllic and demotic
worlds. In another sense, though, the word "world" reflects its
origins in the phenomenological movement; Jameson writes that
it originally designated something like the frame or the Gestalt,
the overall organizational category within which the various
empirical innerworldly phenomena are perceived and various inner-
worldly experiences take place, In this sense, then, a world
cannot . . . be itself the object of experience or perception,
for it is rather that Supreme category which permits all exper-
ience or perception in the first place and must thus lie outside
$ S eee 44
them as their own first condition.
Given these two senses of "world," Jameson proposes the following
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28
definition of the romance:
romance is that form in which the world-ness of world reveals it-
self, .. . romance as a literary form is that event in which
world in the technical sense of the transcendental horizon of my
experience becomes precisely visible as something like an inner-
worldly object in its own right, taking on the shape of world in
the popular sense of nature, landscape, and so forth,”
This definition is compatible with Giamatti's and Hume's, When
Jameson says that the romance as a literary form is an "event" in which
"the world-ness of world reveals itself," he is speaking of the genre's
tendency to culminate in a visionary moment on enchanted ground. And
this visionary moment would involve, in the Jungian terms that are the
substratum of Hume's account of the romance, the hero's confrontation
with his shadow: the struggle between two "worlds" (the one unconscious
and hence opaque to perception by the rational mind, and the other a
projection), issues in the creation of a new "world'' in the instant
that the horizon separating the two worlds ceases to exist. This is
the moment when the ego embraces the shadow, a pure example of which
is Ged's naming of his Shadow. This is the moment Frye refers to as
"consolidation and definition"; it is the moment of the hero's escape
from alienation and tyranny "through a shift of identity, the normal
basis of the recognition scene." The shift of identity is a shifting
of the horizons of a "world" in the phenomenological sense; it is the
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29
radical transformation of the categories and configurations which had
constituted the old Gestalt. This is, indeed, precisely what Falk ex-
periences in City of Illusions as he listens to Orry's narrative; it
is the "event" experienced by most of Le Guin's protagonists as they
stand on enchanted ground.
The enchanted ground in The Left Hand of Darkness and the moment
of vision experienced by Genly Ai are. characteristic of the moments of
Vision in Le Guin's other romances, In the world of ice, snow, and
extreme cold on the Gobrin Ice, in this world of swirling whiteness,
nothing can be distinguished from anything else. Genly Ai sees "no
sun, no sky, no horizon, no world. A whitish-gray void." In "the
place inside the blizzard," there are no shadows; there is only "bland
blind nothingness," what Estraven calls "the Unshadow.'t”° The "world"
as a Gestalt that makes perception possible floats free because there
is no "world" as a landscape for it to perceive; Frye might say that
it is consolidated and defined. And floating free, it ceases to exist,
Here, on the Gobrin Ice, the world-ness of Genly Ai's world reveals
itself: the categories (e.g., male-female, and all other dualisms) he
has used to see Estraven vanish, and he can, when he is otherwise
blind, perceive Estraven as he-she really is. Genly Ai experiences
the "shift of identity" Frye speaks of when the ways in which he sees,
which are his identity, see se! As Estraven and Ai pull the sledge
across the glacier, they create a new world, the nucleus of a commun-
ity, through their interaction and Mutual aid. The moment of vision
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when Ai sees Estraven truly is not to be dismissed as a private
mystical experience; it is a social act. The void Ai experiences on
the Ice is not something that creates angst and fear for Le Guin;
resembling more the Oriental than Occidental void, it is the source of
all creativity, including the creativity necessary for building a com-
munity. Le Guin's characters often enter this void with another per-
son or with a guide, and there experience a moment of Vision, trans-
cend dualistic categories as they see things whole, and emerge with
the seeds of a new social organization, a new understanding of the
moral order underlying all existence, and a new realization of self
based on a relationship with an other.
It is important to understand that the moment of vision in the
romance is the culminating event in a story that unfolds in time;
rather than speaking of romance's dualistic images and polarizing
forces, we should instead conceive of the romance as a dialectical pro-
cess. Two boxers squaring off, one wearing white trunks and the other
black, is not dialectical; a dialectical process begins when an
initial element (thesis) creates out of its own contradictions an in-
verted image of itself (antithesis). The conflict and opposition be-
tween thesis and antithesis are resolved into a synthesis, a resolu-
tion which can be denoted best by the untranslatable German word auf-
heben, which means three things simultaneously: negate, absorb, and
transcend. “S Good and evil, friend and enemy, helper and harner,
idyllic and demotic--these are not eternally separate and conflicting
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31
opposites or dualities; rather, they are complements, by themselves
incomplete moments in a unified process, but together internally re-
lated parts of a coherent whole. Each exists only by virtue of being
the inverted or negated counterpart of the other. As Horkheimer and
Adorno say, "everything is always that which it is, only because it
becomes that which it is not"; things are, according to Chinese
philosophers, "all the time on the way to something else." Becoming,
not Being, is the way we are,
So it is with the concepts identity and alienation. An individ-
ual's or a social group's attempt to create and maintain an identity
dialectically creates its antithesis, alienation, for in the ego's or
group's conscious desire to keep its inner world constant, in the act
of reaffirming its organizational categories merely by using them, it
unconsciously ignores and excludes whatever does not conform te its
Gestalt. Ged looses his Shadow from his inner into his outer world and
Anarresti children watch propaganda films, relieving them from most all
responsibility for their own failings and shortcomings. The ego cannot
see whatever is outside the horizons of its world, It has conceptual
blind spots. Thus a "world" in the phenomenological sense cannot exist
without its horizons; it cannot exist without alienating whatever con-
tradicts or threatens its identity. In order for the ego to maintain
its identity in the form that its organizational categories determine
to be good and worthwhile, it must alienate whatever is evil and
worthless, and avoid humiliation or annihilation by creating a shadow.
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32
The ego's fear of admitting to itself that it is evil or worthless is
then directed outward as the shadow is projected onto others. Con-
tradictions are expelled beyond the horizon of the ego's world; the
Other assumes ownership of all that is alienated; thus Self and Other
may be bound together with fear and suspicion into a society in which
individual and social alienation are the main cohesive forces.
A social group, like the individual, needs to alienate all that
threatens its ideological consistency so that it can preserve its iden-
tity. If something happens within a society which the society cannot
admit to its collective conscience, it can expel it or imprison it or
blame it on outsiders, and thus remove it from its collective con-
sciousness. Since an individual cannot have an identity without mem-
bership in some social group, the opportunities for individual alien-
ation and social alienation to reinforce each other are legion. As
Frye says, "an identity between individual and social quests has al-
ways been latent in romance,""*"
To recall Frye is to return to the consideration of the romance
genre as a tool for invention and discovery, for constituting meanings
and stating truths about who we are, in all our manifold alienations
and identities. The singular power of the romance consists in its
ability to complete (in the course of the imaginative experience of
reading) the dialectical synthesis of identity and alienation into a
new identity characterized not by what it excludes, but rather by what
it includes. The only way to resolve the contradictions between iden-
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35
tity and alienation, in their interrelated individual and social forms,
is to resolve them into a synthesis in which the old horizons that
had separated one world from another are transcended as they are ne-
gated by means of an absorption of one into the other at the moment
that what had been forgotten or repressed or alienated or excluded
from consciousness is re-cognized as part of the whole self. This
is the telos of the completed romance quest. When Ged and his Shadow
say each other's names at the same time and embrace each other, the
horizons between them are aufgehoben. ''I am whole, I am free,''' Ged
Says to Estarriol. And in his wholeness and freedom, he transcends
whatever would have power over him: "naming the shadow of his deat
with his own name, [Ged] had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing
his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other
than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and
never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the darka
Ai's moment on the Gobrin Ice is analogous, as is Shevek's moment on
Urras when he sees the fundamental unity of Sequency and Simultaneity.
Ail three of these moments take place away from "home," in an alien
environment, on enchanted ground where the rules of habit and logic
are suspended, As sailors in Earthsea say, "Rules change in the
Reaches."
The completed romance quest, then, is pre-eminently a tool for de-
alienating alienation; it is the mediation by which, in dialectical
terminology, we negate the negation. The "natural" and "appropriate"
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34
language for this, said Le Guin in a lecture presented at the Library
of Congress, is fantasy. "The great fantasies, myths, and tales," she
said, "are indeed like dreams":
they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the
language of the unconscious--symbol and archetype. Though they
use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit ver-
bal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep
to utter. They cannot be translated fully into the language of
reason...» They are profoundly meaningful, and usable--practi-
cal--in terms of ethics; of insight, of growth. °?
For Le Guin, the journey into the unconscious is not only a psychic
journey; it is a moral journey as well. It is, she believes, "the
individual's imperative need and duty. "5? The individual who projects
his shadow "denies his own profound relationship with evil" and there-
: z ? 53 : i
fore "denies his own reality." On another occasion, she said,
If you deny affinity with another person or kind of person, if
you declare it to be wholly different from yourself--as men have
done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done
to nation--you may hate it, or deify it; but in either case you
have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You
have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relation-
Ship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impover-
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35
ished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself"
So the denial of affinity and relationship, the ego's exclusion
from its world of whatever threatens its limited and limiting iden-
tity, creates reification, alienation, and power relationships. What
the romance genre can do is help the reader discover the real relation-
ships and affinities, affirm rather than deny profound relationships
with evil, and it does this through what Le Guin calls the "very
strong, striking moral dialectic" that we find in the greatest fan-
tasies. This dialectic, she says, is "often expressed as a struggle
between the Darkness and the Light. But that makes it sound simple,
and the ethics of the unconscious--of the dream, the fantasy, the
fairytale--are not simple at all. They are, indeed, very strange."
What the "standards of conscious, daylight virtue" find when they en-
ter this strange dialectic are not actions which are "good" and "bad";
rather, they will find that
evil . . . appears in the fairytale not as something diametrical-
ly opposed to good, but as inextricably involved with it, as in
the yin-yang symbol, Neither is greater than the other, nor can
human reason and virtue separate one from the other and choose
between them. The hero or heroine is the one who sees what is
appropriate to be done, because he or she sees the whole, which
is greater than either evil or good,
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36
What romances can do--and Le Guin believes they are "usable" and
"practical" in terms of ethics and insight--is provide both the means
and the end of the process of moral discovery, a discovery which comes
in the form of a vision of the wholeness that transcends the ethical
horizons of the conscious world, The creation of a Secondary World in
the romance, a strange world where extra-rational phenomena are the
rule, where events unfold according to narrative logic rather than
rational logic, is a privileged mode for doing this. To attempt it
. with the language of realism alone is to use an element of the very
identity that created the alienated contents of the other world in the
first place, and the result of the attempt to negate alienation in
this manner will be continued and increased alienation. What Le Guin
calls "false fantasies, rationalized fantasies," those stories in
which the "tension between good and evil, light and dark, is drawn ab-
solutely clearly," are stories in which the "author has tried to
force reason to lead him where reason cannot go! Reason cannot go
there because reason excluded "there" from itself in order to be
reason; if reason wanted to go there it would have to cease being
reason. And this is precisely what happens in romances: fantasies,
says Le Guin, "short-circuit verbal reasoning." In The Farthest Shore,
when Ged takes on Sopli as a guide, Arren protests:
"I would not quarrel with you, my lord," he said as coldly as
he could. "But this--this is beyond reason!"
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37
"It is all beyond reason. We go where reason will not take
usares
Ged's answer is Le Guin's prescription to the writer who would
write "real" fantasies. A writer's moral responsibility, she believes,
is to write "real" fantasies (what I have been calling dialectically
complete romance quests, journeys that take us where reason cannot go),
rather than getting "entangled in the superficialities of the collec-
tive consciousness, in simplistic moralism, in projections of various
kinds, so that you end up with the baddies and goodies all over
S The way to "speak absolutely honestly and factually" to a
reader, says Le Guin, is "to talk about himself, Himself, his inner
self, the deep, the deepest seren” Along with Frye, Le Guin is well
aware that the message of romance is de te fabula.
III
We can conclude this examination of the poetics and rhetoric of
the romance by looking at one of its sub-genres, science fiction, the
form of most of Le Guin's work, As a sub-genre or a mode of romance,
science fiction contains the dialectical potential already described,
but while retaining the psychological, metaphysical, and ethical cate-
gories inherent in the romance, science fiction centers its attention
on cognitive categories, Although some writers and critics of
science fiction would like to establish some strict boundaries between
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38
fantasy (or romance) and science fiction, Le Guin herself does not.°2
Romance is, after all, a form that ultimately transcends categorical
horizons. In an autobiographical essay, Le Guin described her first
efforts in science fiction as "fairytales decked out in space suits,"
and on another occasion, she compared her modes of fantasy and science
fiction to the two hemispheres of the same brain, emphasizing that
even if distinctions between them are possible, they are in fact two
parts of a single whole: they are complementary,
A widely accepted definition of the science fiction genre--one
that Le Guin herself accepts--is Darko Suvin's:
SF is . . a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient con-
ditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and
cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative frame-
. ee i 65
work alternative to the author's empirical environment.
Science fiction's "main formal device," clearly, is the same as the
romance's: the alternative imaginative framework in science fiction
corresponds to the nonprobable or enchanted world in the romance.
Suvin's emphasis on estrangement signals his awareness that science
fiction, like the romance, is a genre defined as much by its rhetor-
ical strategies as by its poetics. Science fiction, through its
estrangement techniques, reminds us that our world, our empirical
environment, is not eternally fixed by unalterable scientific law.
As Thomas Kuhn has shown in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
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39
a scientist's empirical world is constituted by the paradigms he and
his colleagues accept, and these paradigms operate only until they
are replaced by new paradigms (a process not unlike the dialectic in
the romance), which can account for the anomalous data that could not
be explained by the old paradigms. In a sense, a scientist is not
really aware of the paradigms that control his thought until he is
faced with accounting for the unexplained events which have no meaning
in the obsolete categorical schemes, The phenomenological notion of
"world," described by Jameson as "the framework for a description of
the distinctive features of this or that world structure, [which can]
not itself figure within that description as one of the latter's con-
ponents ,""°* resembles Kuhn's concept of the paradigm, but only to a
point. World in the ordinary sense, as an object of representation
or a concrete physical environment, cannot--since Heisenberg, at any
rate--exist independently of world in the technical phenomenological
sense, as the framework used to describe a world. Romance, that
literary form which is an “event in which the world-ness of world re-
veals itself," has had a tacit awareness of that all along, and only
the most diehard mechanical materialist would deny the interpenetra-
tion of the two senses of the word "world."
The starting point of the romance dialectic is a world or an
identity which believes itself to be self-sufficient, a world hased on
the idea of substance, not relation. The sine qua non of this sense
of self-sufficiency is someone or something to absorb whatever is
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40
alienated, whatever threatens self-sufficiency. Similarly, the start-
ing point in science fiction is a scientifically explained empirical
environment that appears to be self-sufficient. But just as the ro-
mance carries the hero and the reader into a different world where
they discover alien things and beings and forces, science fiction car-
ries us into other worlds where we discover not only aliens but also
alien scientific laws. The alien worlds in science fiction can be-
distinguished from the secondary worlds in fairy tales and fantasies,
two other sub-genres of the romance, by their emphasis on cognitive
rather than magical modes of thought. Suvin, in fact, does this.
But the distinction between science and magic, or between science and
myth, should not be made too rigidly, for the more rigidly it is made,
the easier it is for magic to become science and science to become
magic,°> Science and myth and magic, as I will argue later in chapter
three, are complementary in Le Guin's fiction, The point to insist on
is not the qualitative distinctions that one can make between the
different worlds in sub-genres of the romance; rather we should con-
centrate on relationships between the so-called "zero world" we oper-
ate in from day to day, and the "other" worlds in all forms of the ro-
mance. That relationship is responsible for the moment of vision from
enchanted ground, the event that characterizes, more than any other,
the special purpose of the romance plot.
Science fiction, says Suvin, is a "creative approach tending
toward a dynamic transformation rather than a static mirroring of the
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41
author's environment "°° Unlike realism, romance does not affirm
or confirm the self-sufficiency of the author's environment by trying
to mirror it; instead, romance estranges (and science fiction cogni-
tively estranges) the apparently self-sufficient identity or world by
re-presenting its complementary alienation or its complementary other
world. Thus what appeared normal appears strange; what had been alien-
ated is brought home, When estrangement is carried through its dialec-
tical synthesis, normal and strange, identity and alienation, are
seen as they really are, interrelated and complementary parts of a
Whole, Literalization of metaphor is a method science fiction uses
to do this: we go on quests to alien worlds in order to recover-dis-
cover our native world,
In an essay exploring the manifold meanings and relationships
of the German words entfremdung (alienation) and verfremdung (estrange-
ment) (an essay that not only stands behind Suvin's definition of the
genre science fiction but also could serve as one of the best glosses
on the theories of the romance genre I have mentioned), Ernst Bloch
writes, "the roundabout way of estrangement is, after all, the short-
est route away from alienation to self-confrontation--[it is] that
exoticism that looks homeward." Although Bloch's main focus is on
Brechtian drama and Verfremdungseffekt, his words about the recogni-
tion scenes in Brecht are a precise restatement of the purpose or
telos of the romance:
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42
the beholder achieves insight by means of the estrangement-
effect which can turn into its dialectical opposite~-the recogni-
tion, or "Aha!" experience; insight into what is closest to the
beholder grows out of his amazement at being confronted with what
is farthest away . . . wherever it leads to recognition, estrange-
ment is concerned with the "tua fabula narratur,"
IV
"Our curse is alienation," writes Le Guin in "Is Gender Neces-
3
sary?" (an essay on her intentions and methods in The Left Hand of
Darkness); our curse, she says, is
the separation of Yang and Yin. Instead of a search for balance
and integration, there is struggle for dominance, Divisions are
insisted upon, interdependence is denied. The dualism of value
that destroys us, the dualism of superior/inferior, ruler/ruled,
owner/owned, user/used, might give way to what seems to me, from
here, a much healthier, sounder, more promising modality of inte-
gration and integrity. °°
This observation is made from a position Le Guin calls "here," and I
will conclude this chapter by speculating on where that place is; on
what kind of world it is; on how we May travel there; and on why the
natural and appropriate mode for making the journey is the romance
quest.
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One could easily discover Le Guin's "here" in Taoism, Her
remark about the separation of yin and yang in this passage is only
one of the many references to Taoist ideas in all forms of her work,
fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, Her description of the
"striking moral dialectic" in fairy tales, quoted earlier, is another,
Whenever she uses the words "way," or its cognates "path" or "road"--
and she uses them quite often--they are sure to have most of the mean-
ings and implications, ethical and metaphysical, that the Chinese
character Tao has, In her reply to the essays in the special issue of
Science-Fiction Studies devoted to her work, she wrote, "the central
image/idea of Taoism [the t'ai chi, the yin-yang symbol] is an impor-
tant thing to be clear about, certainly not because it's a central
theme in my work, It's a central theme, period, "69 There is an inti-
mate connection between some form of belief and the romance: for Frye,
Christian redemption and the telos of the romance are virtually synony-
mous, and Jameson notes that the "romance unfolds beneath the sign of
destiny." As I will argue in chapter five, Le Guin's belief in
Taoism ("it's the central theme, period") and her romances are as in-
separable as are Frye's Christianity and his characterization of the
romance as "the secular scripture."
Another way to discover where Le Guin's "here" is, is to assume
that "here" is just where it Says it is: right here, right now, where
we all are: home, present time. Because we are too alienated from it
to see it, however, because we lack the necessary vision, because we
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44
have conceptual blind spots, it does not exist for us: we do not feel
at home. Because it does not exist for us, it is "nowhere," the
English word for More's Greek neologism utopia. "Utopia," says Frye,
"in fact and etymology, is not a place; and when the society it seeks
to transcend is everywhere, it can only fit into what is left, the
invisible non-spatial point at the center of space, The question
"Where is utopia?! is the same as the question 'Where is nowhere?! and
the only answer to that question is there, 1/2 Frye's statement con-
tains an implicit distinction between utopia as a place and utopia as
a possibility, a distinction that is analogous to Jameson's between
"world" as an object of representation (a place) and "world" as a mode
of perception (a possibility). Utopias, Suvin reminds us, are "verbal
artifacts before they are anything else"; and the verbal mode appro-
priate to the utopia as an imaginative alternative, an "as if," is the
subjunctive. /7 The verbal mode of Le Guin's perception from "here" is
subjunctive ("dualism ... might give way"), so Le Guin's "here" is,
in the light of all this, utopia.
In order to get "here," a real piace where hope and promise and
possibility and integration and integrity exist, we have to go "there,"
to an imaginary place in another world that exists subjunctively. We
have to see the "world-ness of world reveal itself" in an estranged
environment in order to see it in an alienated world, And as we know
from the dialectical process at the very heart of the romance, the
vision and integration we search for is right here; when we discover
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45
it, we will recognize that we are recovering it: "true voyage is re-
turn" reads the inscription on Odo's tombstone in The Dispossessed.
Along with discovering the possibility of utopia, or perhaps on
the way toward that discovery, we can recover and de-alienate other
things, like the true nature of our own sexuality; this is what hap-
pens as we travel imaginatively to Gethen in The Left Hand of Dark-
ness. Le Guin emphasizes the fact that this story is about "here"
in her "Introduction" to the novel:
Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn't
mean that I'm predicting that in a millennium or so we will all
be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought
to be androgynous. I'm merely observing, in the peculiar,
devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fic-
tion, that if you look at us at certain times of the day and in
certain weathers, we already are [androgynous]. ’
In "Is Gender Necessary?" Le Guin elaborates on the “"thought-experi-
mental manner proper to science fiction":
I was not recommending the Gethenian sexual set-up: I was using
it. It was a heuristic device, a thought-experiment. Physicists
often do thought experiments. Einstein shoots a light-ray
through a moving elevator; Schrödinger puts a cat in a box.
There is no elevator, no cat, no box. The experiment is perform-
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46
ed, the question is asked, in the mind, Einstein's elevator,
Schrédinger's cat, my Gethenians, are simply a way of thinking.
They are questions, not answers; process, not stasis. One of the
essential functions of science fiction, I think, is precisely
this kind of question-asking: reversals of an habitual way of
thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet,
: Bie : - 74
experiments in imagination.
And just to drive the point home that science fiction is concerned with
"here," she adds,
The purpose of the thought-experiment, as the term was used by
Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future--
indeed, Schridinger's most famous thought-experiment goes to show
that the 'future,' on the quantum level, cannot be predicted--but
to describe reality, the present world, ”>
Like the romance, Schr8dinger's thought experiment, his placing
a cat in a box with radioactive matter, Geiger counter, and cyanide,
an event in which the paradigms of quantum theory are laid bare, is an
event in which the world-ness of world reveals itself. Thus, a liter-
ary genre and one kind of scientific method are complementary, even
cooperative modes of understanding, or, in Le Guin's words, "ways of
thinking . . . experiments in imagination." Schrödinger had a dialec-
tical purpose in mind when he imagined a cat in a box with a mechanism
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47
that might, or might not, kill it. He wanted to burlesque the cur-
rent theories about quantum phenomena, and at the same time make a
Statement about the reality those theories purported to explain. The
sentence that opens his famous description of the thought experiment
is "Man kann auch ganz burleske Fille konstruieren." Í In order to
produce a description of reality, Schrödinger had to negate a descrip-
tion which ignored an aspect of reality; he did what a romancer does
when he creates an imaginary country and sends a hero to it. There is
in fact a good chance that Schrödinger could not have formulated his
descriptions of reality unless and until he has burlesqued another
description. Such, at any rate, is the way that writers and readers
become aware of new literary senres; “ In the same way, the romance
quest takes alienation as its given, then dialectically negates it
with estrangement in order to discover for at least a moment an iden-
tity in a balanced, harmonious world. Unlike the discoveries in
quantum mechanics, though, the discoveries made in the romance are re-
coveries. "We find ourselves facing what is yet to be in what was
jong forgotten," Ged tells Arren in The Farthest Shore, to which we
can add Frye's observation that the "recreation of the possible future
or ideal constitutes the wish-fulfillment element of the romance,
which is the normal containing form, as archaism or the presentation
of the past is the normal content," "S But in a real sense, the con-
taining form and the content of the romance are compiementary, even
cognate, for the paradox that lies at the heart of the form is that we
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48
move forward only by zeturning. ?
This means that the romance's temporal "then" and "now" have the
same relationship as do the spatial "there" and "here," and that
history as well as psychic geography is a proper concern of the genre.
The last stage of Hume's tripartite pattern, Higher Harmony, can re-.
cover the Equilibrium of the first stage only through a struggle in
which the Equilibrium is transformed into a world whose temporal and
spatial horizons transcend the dualistic or polarized oppositions
which emerged from the Equilibrium, This process is depicted on a
cosmic scale in Le Guin's Hainish future history: the Fore-Eras of
Hain disintegrate into fragmentation; some worlds are then collected
into a federation, the League of All Worlds; then the arrival of the
Shing brings the destruction of the League and begins the Age cf the
Enemy; and finally, the worlds are gathered again, this time into an
Ekumen (this process will be treated in more detail in chapter four).
This pattern embodies Le Guin's own convictions about the nature of
reality and the course of its changes, from the smallest to the
largest entities. "Existence of the sub-atomic particles," she says,
"is in a sense a function of their relationship"; she believes that
"one is justified in seeing, even in this dispersed and disorderly
cosmic dust [the Crab Nebula], not only a potentiality for order, but
a tendency towards ae Reality for Le Guin is dialectical--"pro-
cess, not stasis" is her description of her own thought--she believes
that there is a "law of mutual attraction," a law of elective affinity,
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49
of "cooperative relationship" in both art and life that "tends to
bring things into a complexly ordered and harmoniously functioning
thereat As a character in one of her short stories says, "sentience
or intelligence isn't a thing, you can't find it in, or analyze it out
from, the cells of a brain, It's a function of the connected cells,
It is, in a sense, the connection: the connectedness ,""°" This meta-
physic, which may very well be a product of a mind schooled in the
reading and writing of romances, might be generalized as "existence is
a function of relationship." It stands behind her aesthetics:
The novel's been Confucian, one might say, and it's time it went
Taoist. A human being has relationships with things, things he
handles and uses; with machines; with animals; with landscapes;
with ideas; with the earth as a whole, and with the entirety of
tase
The Left Hand of Darkness mediates this Taoist metaphysic for
Western readers as it embodies it in aesthetic form with the romance
quest. The nominal goal of Genly Ai's mission to Gethen is to invite
that world to join the 83 worlds in the Ekumenical Scope, to create
a relationship between part and whole. But as his name (containing
puns on "I" and "eye") indicates, the real goal of his quest is a
discovery of self, a discovery that his own existence as an I is a
function of his relationship with a Thou. This event, which culminates
on the enchanted ground of the Gobrin Ice, involves his realization
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50
that sexuality is not a dualism of male and female, but an integrated
whole in which masculinity and feminity are so inextricably involved
with each other that they cease to exist as independent entities. At
the moment that synthesis occurs, Genly Ai discovers a relationship
with another person and finds himself capable of love for an alien
Other, Estraven, the "other aigenat Having made these discoveries
(which we make with him), Genly Ai is like the protagonist of the
fairy tale, whom Le Guin describes as "the one who sees what is ap-
propriate to be done, because he or she sees the whole, which is
greater than evil or good." What is appropriate for Ai to do is to
do nothing. This is the ethical imperative of Taoism, wu wei,
usually translated as "inaction, "S> "Because of the alien who lay
ill," Ai says of himself, "not acting, not caring, in a room in Sassi-
noth, two governments fell within ten days °° With the Sarf faction
in Orgota and the Tibe ministry in Karhide gone, Gethen joins the
Ekumen, Genly Ai's personal discoveries are thus parallel with and
a symbol of social, political, and even metaphysical discoveries of
relationship, affinity, and complementarity,
Although feminists have criticized Le Guin for choosing a male
protagonist, she was, I think, right to do so, for the dialectic of
the romance (and science fiction estrangement) almost makes it impera-
tive. She chose a male, she says,
because I thought men would loathe the book, would be unsettled
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and unnerved by it. .. . Since the larger percentage of
science fiction readers are male... I thought it would be
easier for them if they had a man--and a rather stupid and bigot-
7
ed man actually--to work with and sort of be changed with.®
Le Guin knows-that it is male consciousness that is largely responsible
for the sexual dualism in her empirical environment. She knows that
a man cannot "be a man," as high school football coaches and army drill
sergeants implore him to be, unless he alienates his femininity. What
ee
the world of sexual dualisms--and many other dualisms too--on which
Genly Ai's (and our) essential nature and identity (partial and frag-
mented as they are) are based. Sitting across from Estraven at a
table, Genly Ai reflects:
Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from
being able to see people of the planet through their own eyes. I
tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing
a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into
those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to
88
my own.
"Seif-consciously" seeing from an alienated identity merely affirms the
alienation and separation. What Ai needs to do is search for and
struggle with (not against) what he has alienated, with what he fears
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52
to admit to consciousness, fears, because to admit it to consciousness
would change that consciousness, would destroy the identity he brought
to Gethen. Journeying with tstraven through another world, the Gobrin
Ice, on which the "categories so essential" to his own nature are
estranged, is the only way for him to do this. And in a moment of
Vision, analogous to the lifting of a visor or helmet in chivalric ro-
mance, Ai gets a "view in"; he sees:
And I saw again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to
see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as
well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear
vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, accep-
tance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused
: ‘ . 89
him his own reality.
Now that Ai has ceased to refuse Estraven his-her own reality, he has
ceased to refuse his own reality; the sources of his fear of seeing
Estraven, his alienated identity, disappear as it is negated, absorb-
ed, and transcended in a new identity: aufheben completes the dialec-
tic and Genly Ai has arrived "here" while he is "there" on the Ice.
Had Le Guin chosen a militant feminist for a protagonist, she
would have perpetuated the dualism and division; as it is, she includes
a female ethnologist, a double of sorts for Ai. Ong Tot Oppong, a
member of the first Ekumenical landing party on Gethen, had reported
that
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53
the first Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he
is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer. A man
wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appre-
ciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard
and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respect-
ed and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling exper-
ience,
In addition to being a superb piece of estrangement, this passage shows
that the alienating divisions insisted upon infect the alienated as
well as the alienator. One way to de-alienate both, and return them
to balance, integration, and harmony, is to use the romance quest, the
dialectical thought-experimental method proper to science fiction.
Le Guin could, of course, have written a polemic against sexism
and militarism, but she chose instead to write a Story with a "rather
stupid and bigoted man" as the protagonist and narrator, so that, by
implication, her male audience, "rather stupid and bigoted," would
have someone to identify with. She knows that telling them that they
are stupid and bigoted would alienate them; but she also knows that
the message of romance is de te fabula; she therefore tried to speak
honestly to her male reader by talking "about himself, Himself, his
inner self, the deep, the deepest Self." It is a measure of her com-
passionate radicalism that she chose to tell a story to her readers
about themselves, to give them the chance to see what it is like
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54
"here," that place from which we might perceive the hope of a "much
healthier, sounder, more promising modality of integration and integ-
rity." In a serenely confident defense of her art, Le Guin concluded
her acceptance speech for the 1973 National Book Award for children's
literature by saying
The fantasist, whether he uses the ancient archetypes of myth and
legend or the younger ones of science and technology, may be talk-
ing as seriously as any sociologist--and a good deal more direct-
ly-~about human life as it is lived, and as it might be lived, and
as it ought to be lived. For after all, as great scientists have
said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination
that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope, ”1
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NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE
l. Le Guin, City of Illusions, in her Three Hainish Novels
(Garden City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1978), p. 350. This edition of
her first three novels contains the best texts; subsequent references
to City of Illusions, indicated parenthetically, are to this edition,
which was issued by the Science Fiction Book Club. The Two-Minded Man
was Le Guin's original title, See her "Introduction," City of Illu-
Sions (New York: Harper § Row, 1978), Pe Ve
2. Thus City of Illusions is like Lord Jim, which, according to
J. Hillis Miller, is "like most works of literature" in that it "con-
tains self-interpretative elements" ("The Interpretation of Lord Jim,"
The Interpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice, ed. Morton W.
Bloomfield [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970], p. 211). It
only makes sense, then, to gain entry into Le Guin's fiction through
one of these self-interpretative elements.
3. Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Ro-
mance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 186.
4, Le Guin, "Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of
Seeing," The Living Light: A Christian Education Review, 7 (Fail, 1970
1970), 111-12. Compare Sir Karl Popper's thesis: "what is most char-
acteristic of the human language is the possibility of story telling,"
quoted by George Steiner, After Babel (London: Oxford University
Press, 1975), p. 224n.
55
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56
>. Dinesen, "The Cardinal's First Tale," Last Tales (New York:
Random House, 1957), p. 23.
6. Le Guin outlines her tradition in "The View In," A Multitude
of Visions, ed. Cy Chauvin (Baltimore: T-K Graphics, 1975), p. 6:
The tradition into which I fit by disposition and choice . . .
was mostly written in English: for example Dunsany, H. L. Myers,
A. T. Wright, Isak Dinesen, Tolkien. But if I have appeared to
be anti-French, let me here rendre hommage tres sincere a Super-
vielle, St Exupery, Giradoux. From the Germans comes Rilke's one
novel; in Russia, early Pasternak, Olesha and Zamyatin are relat-
ed to the Western tradition. As one moves on East, through India
and Japan, sometimes all the novels seem to be related to the fan-
tasy tradition; which surely must be an effect of the fact that a
Japanese commonplace can seem a wild flight of fancy to the ig-
norant Westerner; and also to the fact that the East sees reality
differently from the West.
7. In her "Introduction" to the 1978 edition of City of Illusions
Le Guin writes, with tongue just barely in her cheek,
Most of my stories are excuses for a journey. (We shall hence-
forth respectfully refer to this as the Quest Theme.) I never
did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B--or
more often, from A to A--by the most difficult and circuitous
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57
route (p. viii).
8. Le Guin, "In Defense of Fantasy," Horn Book, 49 (1973), 239.
9. These phrases are from the titles to the essays by Le Guin
cited in notes 4 and 6, above.
10. Le Guin, Rocannon's World in Three Hainish Novels, p. [3].
11. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969; rpt., New York:
Ace Books, 1976), p. 1l.
12. Erwin N. Hiebert, in "Mach's Use of the History of Science,"
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 5, Historical and
Philosophical Perspectives of Science, ed. Roger H. Stuewer (Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), pe 200, reports that
"Mach first discussed 'Gedankenexperimente' in an article entitled
"Uber Gedankenexperimente,' Zeitschrift für den physikalischen und
chemischen Unterricht, 10 (1897), 1-5." For a general understanding
of thought experiments, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 88; and
Kuhn, "A Function for Thought Experiments," in his The Essential Ten-
Sion: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977), ppe 240-65. One of the most
famous thought experiments in twentieth-centur-: physics is the one
devised by Einstein to discredit the Copengahen interpretation of
quantum theory and to show that God does not play dice with the world.
See the diagrams included in Niels Bohr's essay "Discussion with
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58
Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics," in his
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958),
pp. 32-66.
13, See Thomas Scortia, "Science Fiction as the Imaginary Experi-
ment," Science Fiction: Today and Tomorrow, ed. Reginald Bretnor (Bal-
timore: Penguin, 1975), pp. 135-47, Although Scortia gives Heisenberg
credit for coining the term (credit due to Mach), he offers a succinct
explanation of the technique in science and in science fiction. For
Le Guin's remarks on the thought experiment, see her "Is Gender Neces-
sary?" Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Vonda McIntyre and Susan Anderson
(Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1976), pp. 130-39; and her "Introduction,"
The Left Hand of Darkness, pp. [xii]-[xvi].
14, On science fiction as a sub-genre of the romance, read Wells,
who labeled his science fiction novels "scientific romances." See also
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1957), esp. pe 49; Lionel Stevenson, "The Artistic Problen:
Science Fiction as Romance," SF: The Other Side of Realism, ed. Thomas
D. Clareson (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular
Press, 1971), pp. 96-104; Mark Rose, "Introduction," Science Fiction:
A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1976), pp. 1-7; Frye, The Secular Scripture, passim; and Robert
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), esp. the "After-
word," pp. 101-104.
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59
15. Tzvetan Todorov, "Literary Genres," in his The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. [3]-23. See also Uri Mar-
golin, "Historical Literary Genre: The Concept and Its Uses," Compara-
tive Literature Studies, 10 (1973), 51-59. Although Margolin's termin-
Ology differs slightly from Todorov's, his essay touches on the same
problems of genre theory.
16. Suvin, "The Significant Context of SF," Science-Fiction
Studies, 1 (Spring, 1973), 47.
17. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1967), pp. 100-101.
18. Ibid., p. 82.
19. Guillén, "On the Uses of Literary Genres," in his Literature
as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 121. "The crucial point," says
Guillén earlier in this essay, "is this: form is the presence in a
created, man-made object of a ‘cause.! It is the revelation or the
Sign of a dynamic relationship between the 'finished' artifact and its
origins in previous life and previous history. The genuinely great
work of art vibrates and 'moves' still from the artist's ability to
proceed from one order of life to another by virtue of his modeling,
reshaping, informing skills. Form is the visible manifestation later
of this victorious process of formation, making, poiésis" (p. 1ll, em-
phasis in original).
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60
20. Giamatti, "Spenser: From Magic to Miracle," Four Essays on
Romance, ed. Herschel Baker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1971), p. 18.
21, Ibid. This applies to Le Guin's romances only in the most
general way: the reconciliation of opposites in her fiction does not
come with an image of permanence and perfection, but rather Signals a
momentary balance which is of course subject immediately to change.
22. The Secular Scripture, p. 4.
23. Jameson, "Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre," New Liter-
ary History, 7 (Autumn, 1975), 153.
24, Hume, "Romance: A Perdurable Pattern," College English, 36
(October, 1974), 143.
25. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories," Tree and Leaf, rpt. in The Tol-
kien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966).
26. Auden, "The Quest Hero," Texas Quarterly, 4 (Winter, 1961),
85, my emphasis. Auden's emphasis is not on who we are, but on who we
are becoming.
27. The Secular Scripture, pp. 57, 58.
28. Ibid., p. 4.
29. “Romance: A Perdurable Pattern," p. 135.
30. Ibid., p. 144, Le Guin's romances do include dragons, but
they are not necessarily the threatening Western dragons; they resemble
more the dragons of the East.
31. Ibid., p. 132.
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61
52. Fromm, The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Under-
and Winston, 1951); and Le Guin, “Fantasy, Like Poetry, Speaks The
Language of the Night," World (Sunday Supplement to the San Francisco
Examiner & Chronicle), November 21, 1976, p. 41.
33. "Romance: A Perdurable Pattern," p. 144.
54. "The Quest Hero,” p. 84.
35. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 187.
36. "Romance: A Perdurable Pattern," p. 144,
57. Ibid., p. 141,
38, Ibid., p. 143.
59. Ibid., pe 134n,
40. The Secular Scripture, pp. 15, 60. The foliowing paragraphs
contain several references to Frye's book; they are indicated paren-
thetically. It will be obvious that Frye's account of the structure
of the romance contains a marked orientation around a vertical axis,
while Hume's account seems oriented more to journeys on a horizontal
plane. Hume's orientation is probably more compatible with Le Guin's
fiction, but again, Frye's ideas are helpful apart from his ulterior
motives.
4l. The progress of Le Guin's career from the publication of
Rocannon's World (1966) through The Dispossessed (1974) is in many
ways parallel to Edward's Bellamy's career from the publication of
Six to One (1874), a conventional romance, to Looking Backward (1888),
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62
the last American utopia before Le Guin's that was optimistic; between
Bellamy and Le Guin the utopian genre was submerged (or inverted), as
writers produced a continuous stream of dystopias. The Dispossessed
may turn out to be a hinge in literary history like Looking Backward,
marking a turn from dystopia to utopia,
I have argued elsewhere that Bellamy's utopia is a direct out-
growth of the four romances that preceded it, and that the romance
plot of Looking Backward is not the sugar-coating of the socio-econom-
ic pill as Bellamy said it was, but is the necessary condition of the
utopian vision. The romance, however, is not by itself sufficient to
generate a utopia; but the romance, when it engages history, may pro-
vide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of a
utopia. The novels in the careers of Bellamy and Le Guin that immed-
iately precede the utopias are romances that face history from a left-
leaning political point of view: The Duke of Stockbridge (which deals
with the American aggression in Vietnam).
42. See Le Guin's "The Child and the Shadow," Quarterly Journal
of the Library of Congress, 32 (April, 1975), esp. 147-48, where Le
Guin argues that a writer should offer self-knowledge to readers, which
includes their accepting their personal capacity for evil. The charac-
ters Don Davidson in The Word for World is Forest and Dr. Haber in The
Lathe of Heaven both came from Le Guin's creative unconscious; both
are evil and may represent for her the consolidation of her own
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63
capacity for evil and thus may have freed her to write The Dispos-
sessed,
43. "Magical Narratives," p. 141,
44, Ibid,
45. Ibid., p. 142.
46. The Left Hand of Darkness, pp. 260, 261.
47. Another romance, Shakespeare's The Tempest, concludes with
some lines which refer pointedly to this shift of identity as an essen-
tial moment in the romance hero's self-recognition:
Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue
Should become king of Naples? 0, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,
When no man was his own (V.i.205-13, my emphasis).
48. Two good discussions of the difficult term aufheben are
Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City: Doubleday
Anchor, 1966), pp. 144 and 181; and M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernatur-
alism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 177, 182, 212-15, 219-20,
and 230. Although I have used the terms "thesis," "antithesis," and
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64
"synthesis," it should be noted that Hegel himself did not. See
George Lichtheim, "Introduction to the Torchbook Edition," The Phenom-
enology of Mind, trans. J. B, Baillie (New York: Harper § Row, 1967),
Pe xxiv. Lichtheim's "Introduction" is a gold mine for ideas from the
tradition of Romantic philosophy that are directly relevant to a
theory of the romance genre, and to the philosophical underpinnings of
Le Guin's thought.
49. The Secular Scripture, p. 58.
50. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Berkeley: Parnassus Press,
1968), pp. 202, 203.
Sl. "The Child and the Shadow," pe 141.
52. Ibid., p. 144,
53. Ibid., pe 141.
54. Le Guin, "American SF and the Other," Science-Fiction
Studies, 2 (November, 1975), 209-10,
55. "The Child and the Shadow," p. 144,
56. Ibid., p. 145,
57. Ibid., p. 147
58. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (New York: Atheneum, 1972), pp.
104-105.
59. "The Child and the Shadow," p. 147,
60. Ibid.
6l. See Le Guin's "The View In"; and Gene Van Troyer, "Vertex
Interviews Ursula K., Le Guin," Vertex, 2 (December, 1974), 96-97,
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65
62. For Le Guin's own perceptive comments on her own fiction vis
a vis the fantasy-science fiction split, see her "A Citizen of Mon-
dath," Foundation 4 (July, 1973), 23; and "Ursula K. Le Guin: An Inter-
view," Luna Monthly, No. 63 (March, 1976), 1-2. In her "Introduction"
to Rocannon's World (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), she compares fan-
tasy aud science fiction to the red and blue bands in a spectrun,
placing her first novel in the purple area between then.
63. Suvin, "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,"
College English, 34 (December, 1972), 375. (This seminal, and by now
standard essay is reprinted in Rose, ed., Science Fiction, cited in
note 14, above.) In an autobiographical statement, Le Guin writes,
I have always written science fiction and fantasy, I suppose
because life has seemed a very strange business to me, and you
can communicate that best by using what Darko Suvin calls the
devices of ‘estrangement’ ("Arcs and Secants," Orbit 12, ed.
Damon Knight [New York: Putnam's, 1973], p. 212).
64. "Magical Narratives," p. 142.
65. This is the central thesis of Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
See also Samuel R. Delany, "About Five Thousand One Hundred and
Seventy Five Words," SF: The Other Side of Realism (see note 14,
above), pp. 150-45, Delany notes that "virtually all the classics of
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66
speculative fiction [his term for science fiction] are mystical" (p.
144), A good discussion of these matters in Le Guin's fiction is an
unpublished paper by Robert Galbreath, "Holism, Openness, and the
Other: Le Guin's Use of the Occult,"
66. "On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre," p. 377.
67. Bloch, "Entfremdung, Verfremdung: Alienation, Estrangement,"
trans. Darko Suvin, The Drama Review, 15 (Fall, 1970), 124-125,
68. "Is Gender Necessary?" pp. 138-39.
69. Le Guin, "A Response to the Le Guin Issue," Science-Fiction
Studies, 3 (March, 1976), 45.
70. "Magical Narratives," p. 153.
71, Frye, "Varieties of Literary Utopias," Utopias and Utopian
Tnought, ed. Frank Manuel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p.e 49.
72. Suvin, "Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Histori-
cal Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea," Studies in the
Literary Imagination, 6 (Fall, 1973}, 123.
75. "Introduction," The Left Hand of Darkness, p. [xv].
74, "Is Gender Necessary?" p. 132. I return to this whole idea
at the end of chapter three when I discuss Le Guin's story "Schrding-
er's Cat."
75. "Introduction," The Left Hand of Darkness, p. [xiii].
Another of Le Guin's statements of this idea is in her "Exploring the
Future," Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 1974, p. 13.
76. Schridinger, "Die gegenwdrtige Situation in der Quanten-
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mechanik," Die Naturwissenschaften, 23 (1935), 812. See also the
letters exchanged by Einstein and Schr8dinger in Letters on Quantun
Mechanics, ed. K., Przibram, trans. Martin J. Klein (New York: Philo-
sophical Library, 1967), pp. 35-40. A defense of the Copenhagen in-
terpretation of quantum mechanics, the butt of Schrédinger's burlesque,
may be found in Harry P. Stapp, "The Copenhagen Interpretation," Amer-
ican Journal of Physics, 40 (1972), 1098-1116.
77. Guillén argues that the picaresque genre did not exist in
the consciousness of its writers and readers until it was parodied,
See his essay "Genre and Countergenre: The Discovery of the Picares-
que," Literature as System, pp. 135-58. This is consonant with the
epigraph fromHorkheimer and Adorno at the beginning of this chapter.
78. The Secular Scripture, p. 179.
79. This is, of course, a very old and quite common idea, stem-
ming at least from Socrates who thought of learning as a reawakening
of what was once known but has been forgotten. The Romantic circui-
tous journey, which carries a quester forward only by returning him
to the past, is thoroughly analyzed by Abrams in Natural Supernatur-
alism. That Le Guin has first-hanc knowledge of it is apparent in
The Farthest Shore: Ged tells Arren "we find ourselves facing what is
yet to be in what was long forgotten" (p. 86).
80. Le Guin, "The Crab Nebula, the Paramecium, and Tolstoy,"
Riverside Quarterly, 5 (February, 1972), 89, 90.
81. Ibid., pp. 90, 91.
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68
82. Le Guin, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow," The Wind's
Twelve Quarters (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 208. I thank my
colleague Thomas Remington for reminding me of this passage,
83. "The Crab Nebula," p. 96.
84. There is a good deal of word-play in Le Guin's fiction, and
Genli Ai's play on the words "alien" and "other" is one of the most
significant. Recalling one of their nights on the Ice, Ai reports
this exchange: '''Good night, Ai, said the alien, and the other alien
Said, 'Good night, Harth'" (p. 213). Both Ai and Estraven are exiles,
both are aliens, and both are the Other to each other. These relation-
ships suggest the hypothesis that the rhetorical device of chiasmus
may be the root of nearly everything in Le Guin's fiction. The way
she shifts points of view, the way she engineers complementary es-
trangements, the way she structures The Dispossessed, alternating
the Urras and Anarres chapters, the way hunter and hunted switch roles
in A Wizard of Earthsea--all of this is chiasmus on one level or
another,
85. Two sources, both recommended by Le Guin, for an understand-
ing of Taoist wu wei are Holmes Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 18-35; and Joseph Needham, Science
and Civilisation in China, vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), Pp. 68-70, 562-63, and 576-
77. As both Welch and Needham labor to point out, wu wei means action
not contrary to Tao, not complete inaction and catatonia. Wu wei
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69
appears as inaction because it is so in accord with Tao, the way of
Nature, that it indistinguishable and hence imperceptible.
86. The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 287, my emphasis.
87. Quoted by Paula Brookmire, "She Writes about Aliens--Men
Included," Milwaukee Journal, July 21, 1974; rpt., Biography News
(Detroit: Gale, 1974), p. 1155.
88. The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 12.
89. Ibid., p. 248,
90. Ibid., p. 95.
91. "In Defense of Fantasy," pe 239.
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CHAPTER TWO
PERSUADING US TO REJOICE AND TEACHING US HOW TO PRAISE:
HISTORY, FICTION, AND ETHICS IN ORSINIAN TALES
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
--W. H. Auden
70
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71
In 1951, the year Ursula Kroeber entered Columbia University to
begin graduate work in French and Italian Renaissance literature, she
invented an imaginary Central European country and wrote her first
Orsinian tale. The country's name--Orsinia, or the Ten Provinces--
and its creator's name have the same root: orsino, Italian for "bear-
ish," and Ursula come from the Latin ursa. Le Guin explains rather
dryly that "it's my country so it bears my aame]
After marrying Charles Le Guin in 1953, she abandoned her aca-
demic career to concentrate on writing. By 1961, she says in an auto-
biographical essay, she had completed five novels, four of them set
in Orsinia, "as were the best short stories I had done." When these
novels and stories, classifiable as neither fantasy nor realism, were
submitted to publishers like Knopf or Viking, or to magazines like
Harper's, Cosmopolitan, or Redbook, they came back with the editor's
remark, "this material seems remote." It was remote, says Le Guin:
searching for a technique of distancing, I had come upon this
one. Unfortunately it was not a technique used by anybody at
the moment, it was not fashionable, it did not fit any of the
categories. You must either fit a category, or "have a name,!
to publish a book in America. As the only way I was ever
going to achieve Namehood was by writing, I was reduced to fit-
ting a category. Therefore my first efforts to write science
fiction were motivated by a pretty distinct wish to get pub-
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72
lished,”
But Orsinia did not go entirely unnoticed. 4 poem and a story set
there were published in little magazines in 1959 and 1961." Yet just
as a couple of Le Guin's minor Orsinian pieces were appearing in
print, she discovered the science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith, re-
discovered science fiction, which she had read as an adolescent, and,
intent on getting published, started writing fantasy and science fic-
tion for Fantastic and Amazing magazines. By 1963 she had begun her
exploration of Earthsea and the Hainish worlds, and was on her way to
Namehood, Now, of course, with numerous awards from both inside and
outside the science fiction ghetto, she has achieved it; twenty-five
years after her Orsinian tales started collecting rejection slips, her
Orsinian Tales (1976) received a nomination for the National Book
Award for fiction,
I go into all this--the date of the earliest Orsinian tales, and
their place vis a vis categories like "realism," "fantasy," and
"science fiction"--to dispel the notion, put forward by a reviewer in
a widely circulated science fiction fanzine, that Orsinian Taies is Le
Guin's attempt to extend the range of her talents beyond the bound-
aries of fantasy and science fiction.” If anything, the opposite is
the case. Orsinian Tales includes chunks of the bedrock that lies
beneath Le Guin's other imaginary countries and worlds. Or, using
another metaphor, I would suggest that a trip through Orsinia may lead
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us to those underground streams that nourish the imagination that
(1969), and The Dispossessed (1974).
Relationships between Orsinian Tales and the rest of Le Guin's
fiction will be one of my concerns in this chapter. Some of these
tales were written before Le Guin discovered-invented Earthsea and
the Hainish worlds, some were written at the same time she was writ-
ing fantasy and science fiction, and they were all collected, arrang-
ed, and published after she had written the works that brought her
Namehood. We cannot, therefore, try to understand Orsinian Tales as
a discrete stage or step in Le Guin's development, for the parts and
the whole were composed at different times. Accordingly, my approach
here will be eclectic. In the first section below, I will treat the
book as a whole, discussing Le Guin's synthesis of complementary
aesthetic and historical perspectives, and arguing that Le Guin's
historical understanding is mediated by the literary form that struc-
tures most of her fiction, the circular journey or romance quest.
Then, I will look at the country Orsinia as an imaginary construct
whose fluid boundaries enclose both fantasy and realism, and also as
a paysage moralis which manifests the same qualities we find in Le
Guin's other imaginary landscapes. In the final two sections, I will
concentrate on parts rather than the whole, as I examine "Imaginary
Countries" and "An die Musik," two tales Le Guin wrote in 1960, before
she turned to fantasy and science fiction, reading the first as the
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74
central tale in the collection, and the second as an early formulation
of a problem that continues to be prominent throughout Le Guin's
career, the conflict between her deep devotion to art and her strong
commitment to ethical principles.
I
Orsinian Tales, Le Guin's second collection of short fiction, is
radically different from The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975), her first.
In her "Foreword" to The Wind's Twelve Quarters, she explains that is
is "what painters call a retrospective": the stories are assembled in
the order they were written to give us an overview of her artistic
development.° The tales in Orsinian Tales, however, are not arranged
in the order of their composition, so this is not another Le Guin
retrospective. But if "retrospective" does not describe the collec-
tion, then another word from painting, "perspective," may indicate
something about the nature of the tales and may help to reveal the
ordering principles embedded in their arrangement.
After we finish any story, we step back from it as though we were
stepping back from a painting, adjusting our vision to get an impres-
sion of its total design and meaning. This is aesthetic perspective,
the desired effect of any technique of distancing. The distancing
technique Le Guin uses in Orsinian Tales, the technique she develop-
ed in the fifties before she began writing for Amazing and Fantastic,
is derived from Isak Dinesen's tales and from Austin Tappan Wright's
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Islandia.® This technique does something more than create an
aesthetic perspective; it creates a twofold perspective--aesthetic
and historical,
Le Guin achieves aesthetic distance from her materials by writing
tales, not stories (notwithstanding the publisher's dust jacket sub-
title "A Collection of Stories"). Orsinian Tales does not belong in
a class with Joyce's Dubliners and Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio; rather,
its title recalls the tradition that includes Scott's Tales of My
Landlord, Hearn's Tales Out of the East, Dunsany's A Dreamer's Tales,
and Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales and Winter's Tales. Le Guin's title
is a clear echo of Dunsany's and Dinesen's titles.” A tale does not
pretend to represent everyday reality as faithfully as a story does;
more than a story, a tale calis attention to itself as a work of art,
closed off from the world, and in its tendency to state a moral more
overtly than a story usually does, it has affinities with fables,
parables, and legends. A tale offers a clearer understanding of the
shape and action of the moral order we dimly perceive in our sometimes
disordered daily experience, and it does this because it detaches it-
self from the contingencies of a particular time and place: the very
word tale has an archaic, distant tone missing from the common story.
The discovery and delineation of moral laws, in fact, may be the most
important goal of the teller of tales, and the pattern of those moral
laws cannot be separated from the aesthetic forms which enable the
artist to discover them and to communicate them to others. As ethicai
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76
choices in our everyday lives are not free from history, those in a
tale are bound by aesthetic forms. A tale offers a perspective that
combines aesthetics and ethics in a single vision.
Yet at the same time that Le Guin creates this aesthetic perspec-
tive, she negates it by regrounding her tales in history, seemingly
contradicting, yet really complementing the ahistorical qualities of
the tale with precise historical connections. Le Guin sets her tales
in an imaginary country, to be sure, but that country is in Mittel-
europa, not Faerie: Orsinia is in the "sick heart" of modern Europe
and knows at first hand what Mircea Eliade, a native of Romania, calls
the "terror of histone Le Guin therefore evokes as the larger
setting of her tales some of the darkest, most chaotic, and most vio-
lent history available. Like Hardy's Wessex, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
County, and Wright's islandia, Le Guin's Orsinia may be imaginary, but
it is profoundly affected by real historical forces.
At the end of each tale we discover a date; these dates, ranging
from the Early Middle Ages (1150) to the recent past (1965), locate
each tale at a precise moment in Orsinia's (and Central Europe's)
history, and invite us to step back from our involvement with a
character's experiences, to insert those experiences in a definite
historical contect, and to understand them in a historical perspec-
tive. It is significant that the dates are at the end of each tale;
they appear at the very moment we are Stepping back to see aestheti-
caily, At that moment, history and aesthetics, two modes of seeing
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77
and knowing and understanding, become one.
The process of reading the eleven pieces in Orsinian Tales, then,
is the process of forming and re-forming this two-fold aesthetic and
historical perspective, progressively enlarging our understanding of
the relationships among individual tales and deepening our understand-
ing of the relationships between any one moment in the lives of indi-
vidual Orsinians and the whole web of Orsinian history, As we finish
the collection, we realize that the two perspectives are not contra-
dictory, but complementary; the one being the dialectical negation of
the other, art and history combine to create a Single vision. "Heroes
do not make history," says the narrator of "The Lady of Moge"--"that
is the historians? jon" Grsinian Tales, however, offers abundant
evidence that the job is not the sole responsibility of historians:
it is shared by artists. 1? Le Guin's tales are as historical as
Scott's Waverly novels are, and her history is as much an aesthetic
invention as are Dinesen's finely crafted tales. As Le Guin's art
in Orsinian Tales redeems her history from meaningless contingency and
hopeless determinism, her history redeems her art from amoral escap-
ism.
Le Guin's arrangement of the tales embodies a complex organic
vision of history. If they are not arranged as they were written,
neither are they arranged as history courses are, to give the impres-
sion that chronology and historical causality are somehow synonymous.
Nor are they randomly mixed up just to give us the exercise of recon-
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78
stituting Orsinia's history. Le Guin's ordering of the tales guides
us through the history of Orsinia so that we move forward only by cir-
cling back to the past; we understand any present moment (actuality)
only as we understand it to be an organic part of its past and future.
After beginning in 1960 ("The Fountains"), we return to 1150 ("The
Barrow"), move forward to 1920 ("Ile Forest" and "Conversations at
Night"), then on to 1956 ("The Road East"), back to 1910 ("Brothers
and Sisters"), forward beyond 1956 to 1962 ("A Week in the Country"),
back to 1938 ("An die Musik"), forward beyond 1962 to 1965 ("The
House"), back to 1640 ("The Lady of Moge"), and finally forward to
1935 ("Imaginary Countries"), coming to rest, at the end of the col-
lection, at the chronological center of these eleven tales: five are
set before 1935, and five after 1935, As I will show later, this is
not the only way in which "Imaginary Countries" is the central tale
in Orsinian Tales.
The pattern of this movement through these tales that are
Orsinia's history--a synthesis of circularity and linearity, a series
of returns which are also advances--is not only the configuration of
Le Guin's sense of history; it is also the aesthetic structure that
informs most of her fiction. The romance quest which is at once a
return to roots and an advance is Ged's path (way, Tao) in Earthsea;
it is the route taken by Genly Ai and Estraven from Karhide over the
Gobrin Ice to "The Place Inside the Blizzard" and back to Karhide; and
it is the form of Shevekts journey from Anarres to Urras (the home of
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79
his ancestors) and back home again to E In Orsinian Tales,
this pattern is present not only in the shape of the whole collection;
it is present also in individual tales: Freyga, Count of Montayna, re-
turns to pagan sacrifice then advances the cause of Benedictine monks;
Dr. Adam Kereth returns to Orsinia after "defecting" at Versailles;
and Mariya returns to her husband Pier Korre in Aisnar after searching
for independence and freedom from marriage in Krasnoy.
These circular journeys are in one way or another versions of the
Romantic quest for home, freedom, and wholeness. 1? What Le Guin's
characters learn on their quests is that freedom and wholeness are
not to be found in self-regarding individualism, but in cooperative
partnership, and further, that freedom from historical necessity comes
not from escaping history, but from returning to roots. This is the
moral message that emerges and takes shape when we see Le Guin's fic-
tion from the perspective created by her distancing techniques. It
is the ethical principle discovered by Sanzo Chekey and Alitsia Benat,
by Stefan Fabbre and Bruna Augeskar, and by Mariya and Pier Korre. In
Le Guin's fantasy and science fiction it is discovered by Ged and
Vetch, Tenar and Ged, Arren and Ged, Genly Ai and Estraven, George Orr
and Heather Lelache, Shevek and Takver. In The Dispossessed, we find
Le Guin's most concise statement of the principle, chiseled into Odo's
tombstone: "to be whole is to be part: / true voyage is return." It
is the ethical foundation of Le Guin's fiction, even as it is aesthe-
tic form and historical consciousness,
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80
Ethics, art, and history, along with religion, philosophy,
politics, and science, are what Joseph Needham calls "moulds of under-
standing." Each one, taken by itself, offers a limited and limiting
mode of comprehending and experiencing the world. Orsinian Tales is
one of Le Guin's attempts to formulate a unified mould of understand-
ing that integrates artistic, ethical, and historical modes. Convin-
ced that the worlds we experience, from subatomic to cosmic levels,
whether material or imaginative, are all integrated parts of an
ordered whole, a continuous process, Le Guin has from the beginning
of her career tried to fashion fictional techniques to explore and
to understand that order. S The hybrid of realism and fantasy in
Orsinian Tales, the fantasy of the Earthsea trilogy, and the science
fiction of the Hainish novels are all different means to the same end:
a realization of the unity of the world we live in. The practical
end, unity, and the formal means, a circular journey, are cognate, In
one sense, Le Guin uses different genres; but in another sense, those
genres are merely distinct, though not radically different, constella-
tions of moulds of understanding. Just as artist and historian in Le
Guin collaborate in Orsinian Tales, artist and scientist work together
in her science fiction. We can recall again (see p. 9, above), in
this.new context, Genly Ai's opening remarks:
I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a
child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
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81
The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of the tell-
ing: like that singular organic jewel of our sea, which grows
brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and
goes to dust, Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and
real than pearls are, But both are sensitive.
Ai then proceeds to weave together his own story; extracts from Es-
traven's journal; an anthropological report; and Gethenian legends,
folktales, religious texts, and myths. Each presents only a partial
view of the truth; together they may come cioser to Truth. For Le
Guin, the real and the fantastic, fact and value, art and history,
myth and science are neither separate nor even separable realms and
modes of discovery; they are complementary and internally related
parts of the same realm. "How can you tell the legend from the fact?"
asks the narrator of Rocannon's World.” The answer, of course, is
"you can't." Another answer, an ethical one, is "you shouldn't." Le
Guin's fiction denies the walls we build with different moulds of
understanding; it denies by negating the reification and dehumaniza-
tion that a fragmented and compartmentalized way of life produce, and
then, completing the dialectical process, affirms and celebrates the
whole, which is greater than the parts. Like the music Ladislas Gaye
hears at the end of "An die Musik," "it denies and breaks down all the
shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the
sky" (p. 145).
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82
II
The Italian sociologist and economist Vilfredo Pareto was per-
turbed by the shifting and sometimes contradictory meanings of Marx's
words and concepts:
If you raise some objections against a passage in Capital, a
passage whose meaning seems to you incontestable, someone can
quote another, whose meaning is entirely different. It is the
fable of the bat all over again. If you embrace one meaning,
someone tells you
I am a bird; see my wings;
Long live the flying things!
And if you adopt the other, someone tells you
I am a mouse; long live the rats;
8
Jupiter confound the cats!
Much the same can be said--indeed has been said, though in a
positive rather than a negative sense--about the ideas and concepts
in Le Guin's fiction. In his essay on the Earthsea trilogy, T. A.
Shippey may not argue that Le Guin's words are, like bats, both birds
and mice, but he does note that Le Guin's story embodies an "argument"
against "conceptual barriers" that result from "the very sharpness
and hardness of modern concepts." 1° Not only does Le Guin make "co-
vert comparisons between ‘fantastic! and 'familiar,'" says Shippey,
She also shifts the meanings of familiar concepts: at times magic in
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83
Earthsea seems to be a science, at other times an art, and at still
other times, it is ethics. The "oscillation between concepts" that
Shippey sees in the Earthsea trilogy is not peculiar only to Le Guin's
juvenile fantasy; it permeates nearly everything she has written, from
her individual sentences to her major themes, images, and even charac-
ters. Were Pareto alive, he might consider Le Guin's Gethenians just
as bat-like as Marx's concepts: it he tried to see them as women,
they would become men, and if he tried to see them as men, they would
become women. Le Guin wants to teach readers like Pareto (and charac-
ters like Genly Ai) to think both-and (or even, perhaps, neither-nor)
rather than Sitnersore She started doing just that in the fifties
and sixties when she was writing her Orsinian tales.
Long before Le Guin wrote a sentence like "The king was preg-
this one in Orsinian Tales: "On a sunny morning in Cleveland, Ohio, it
was raining in Krasnoy and the streets between grey walls were full of
men" (p. 108). This sentence first situates us in a familiar time and
place, then erases the distinctions we make between a real country
like the USA and and an imaginary country like Orsinia. Cleveland and
Krasnoy do not exist in the same world. Or do they? Le Guin's sen-
tence creates a new world, neither our familiar one, nor an entirely
fantastic one, but a world which is both realistic and fantastic, The
point of this sentence is not that one thing is real and the other is
imaginary; the point is that they are both in the same sentence. The
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84
world of Le Guin's fiction, built from sentences like this as surely
as our world is built from rock and stone and trees, is not a realm
of well-defined, discrete things and places and times and ideas;
rather, it is a realm where categories and perspectives are fluid, a
world which is an ordered process in which nothing, except change it-
self, can be taken for granted as certain. In Earthsea, "the ever-
changing does not change, "72 and in Orsinia, the country's location,
its political history, even its geology, are all in flux.
Orsinia can be placed on two different maps. Darrell Schweitzer
says that "in Orsinian Tales Le Guin seems to be trying to do a Dub-
liners set in an unnamed central European country (clearly Hungary,
complete with a revolution against foreign conquerers in 1956) .1"°7
Le Guin's brother Karl Kroeber, on the other hand, tells us "not to
seek in Bulgaria for the setting of 'Brothers and Sisters.' The
curious growthless plain of limestone quarries is not East of the Sun
and West of the Moon, just a little south of Zembla and north of Grau-
stark,"""> Though Kroeber is mostly right in placing Orsinia on the
same map with Nabokov's distant northern kingdom in Pale Fire and Mc-
Cutcheon's Balkan kingdom, rather than in a totally fantastic realm
("East of the Sun and West of the Moon"), and though Schweitzer is
mostly wrong in identifying Orsinia with Hungary, neither of these two
mappers takes full account of Le Guin's "oscillation," as Shippey
might call it, between Joycean naturalism and the escapism of McCut-
cheon's Graustark or Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, Literary natural-
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$5
ism and Ruritanian romances were contemporary phenomena at the turn
of the century when many writers and readers were making clear dis-
tinctions between realism and romance. Le Guin's fictional techniques
dissolve those distinctions; the boundaries between the real and the
fantastic disappear when we understand them to be complementary and
internally related parts of the imaginary.”
Le Guin herself says that Orsinia is an "invented though non-
fantastic Central European country. "2> Le Guin's invented worlds,
whether set in Europe or in the Hainish universe, still contain accur-
ate naturalistic facts, history in the first instance, science in the
second. To make the transition from writing Orsinian tales to writing
Science fiction was no major step for Le Guin; all she had to do was
replace one social science (history) with another (anthropology), in-
tegrate some elements from the hard sciences, and master a new set of
literary conventions. Some of the Orsinian tales, in fact, were writ-
ten at the same time she was writing the Hainish novels and the Earth-
sea trilogy.
There are, certainly, ample naturalistic facts in Orsinian Tales
to justify looking for Orsinia on a map of Europe. We visit Versail-
les, hear of Croatian microbiologists, get a glimpse of the conflict
between Teutonic paganism and Christianity in the early Middle Ages;
we see the social and economic dislocation caused by late nineteenth-
century industrialization, watch the suffering of a disabled World
War I veteran, and hear about an insurrection in Budapest in October,
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86
1956. But just when we become secure with our identifications between
the fictive and the real, the things we see change (like Pareto's bat),
and we're in places that appear on no map of Europe. Conversely, when
we suspend belief and get comfortable in Krasnoy of Sfaroy Kampe or
Aisnar, we learn, with a clerk-composer (who has a sister in Prague),
that Hitler is meeting Chamberlain in Munich in September, 19358. One
city in Orsinia seems to have a foot in both worlds: Brailava csuid be
as real as Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, or it could be as imaginary as
Sfaroy Kampe. The point, however, is this: we must not read Orsinian
Tales the way three blind men read an elephant. To avoid seeing
either a tree trunk or a wall or a rope, we must see the whole, be
sensitive to the relationships among parts which characterize an or-
ganic whole. Relationships, not discrete things, are the subject of
all of Le Guin's fiction. In "A Week in the Country," Stefan Fabbre
recalls the story of a Hungarian nobelman who lived through the wars
between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The wars were real; the story
is a legend; and Stefan Fabbre is a product of Le Guin's imagination.
They are all related. "How can you tell the legend from the fact?"
"Truth is a matter of the imagination."
The political entities in Central Europe, like the boundaries be-
tween the familiar and the fantastic, have been fluid, and this is
probably one reason that Le Guin chose Central Europe as the location
of Orsinia. Orsiniats name does more than play on its creator's
name; it echoes names like Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia, Galicia, and
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87
Croatia. The singular fact of political experience for these peoples
is that while they have tenaciously preserved their nationality, they
have never had lasting political independence. Orsinia shares with
these countries a position on the battlegrounds of European and Asian
imperialism, from Attila to the present. Orsinia may have come under
Hapsburg domination in the sixteenth century (Isabella, "the Lady of
Moge," has a Spanish-sounding name) and was probably threatened by the
Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the
eighteenth century Austria and Prussia could have fought a war in Or-
sinia; in the nineteenth century, Napolean's armies probably crossed
over Orsinian soil; and up to World War I, Orsinia was probably part
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then in the twentieth century, after
a short-lived political independence, Orsinia was probably overwhelmed
from the west by Hitler, and then a few years later, from the east by
Stalin. 7° This long historical nightmare of violent political change
and oppression by authoritarian states only brings into sharper relief
one of the major themes, if not the major theme, of these tales: the
struggle of the individual to win a sense of freedom and wholeness in
a prison-like society, and his heroic (the word is not too strong) ef-
forts to maintain a sense of identity and self-respect. It is but a
short step from this to the thematic center of The Dispossessed,
Le Guin's imaginary countries are not finished creations in which
the landscape, geological or moral, is set for all time. The glaciers
on Gethen, the earthquakes on Anarres, as well as Orsinia's limestone
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88
bedrock, are notable instances of geological flux. As Genly Ai and
Estraven are ascending a glacier (a fluid solid) past the active vol-
canoes Drumner and Dremegole to reach the Gobrin Ice, Estraven re-
cords in his journal,
We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of
a world in the process of making itself.
Praise then Creation unfinished (p. 227).
Orsinia's topography may not change as dramatically as Gethen's, but
it is nevertheless also in flux; it too is "in the process of making
itself." One of the striking features of the Orsinian landscape is
the Karst, the setting of "Brothers and Sisters." Karst topography
is characterized by rocky barren ground, caves, sinkholes, underground
rivers, and the absence of surface streams and lakes, resulting from
the work of underground water on massive soluble limestones. Origin-
ally the term "karst" was applied to the Kras, a limestone area along
the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia. (The principal city in Orsinia,
Krasnoy, may take its name from the Kras, and the name of Foranoy may
be related to foraminiferan tests, the raw material from which lime-
stone is formed.) There are no hymns like "Rock of Ages" in Orsinia,
The rocks dissolve in water,”
Like all of Le Guin's imaginary landscapes, Orsinia is a paysage
moralisé. The moral and psychological resonance of the settings and
5
landscapes in Le Guin's science fiction has already been recognized,
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89
What she does in the Hainish worlds and in Earthsea is anticipated in
Orsinian Tales. Like the chasm beneath the Shing city in City of
Illusions, like the forests in "Vaster then Empires and More Slow" and
in The Word for World is Forest, like the islands and seas of the
Earthsea Archipelago (another solid-liquid combination), the Karst in
"Brothers and Sisters," the forest in "Ile Forest," and the mountains
in "The Barrow," as well as the decaying house and garden on the Hill
in Ríkava in "Conversations at Night," are both eee and symbols:
they are at once themselves even as they refer beyond themselves to
moral and psychological values and meanings. If Orsinia's bedrock
can be dissolved and reconstituted, so can moral values, Dr. Adam
Kereth steals freedom and is then drawn back to Orsinia by mere fidel-
ity; Count Freyga sacrifices a Christian priest and then aids Christ-
ian monks; and Dr. Galven Ileskar, who believes that murder ought to
be an unpardonable crime, loves a murderer who turns out to be his
brother-in-law, and brother, too,
The thematic significance of the fluidity of Le Guin's political,
topographical, and moral landscapes is this: her human actors are free
to choose and to be responsible for their choices. No less than the
rocks in her landscapes, Le Guin's characters are "in the process of
making themselves." Neither reality nor ethics is handed to them on
adamantine tablets (though some of them may think they are); whole
cultures as well as individuals dissolve and reconstitute themselves
as they change and grow, This happens repeatedly in her science
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90
fiction: Terrans and Tevarans cease to exist as independent cultures
in Planet of Exile, Gethenian cultures are on the brink of a major
change in The Left Hand of Darkness, and reality itself is repeatedly
reconstituted by George Orr's effective dreams in The Lathe of Heaven,
It goes without saying, of course, that the society on Anarres in The
Dispossessed is a society in the process of making itself which offers
the individual the most freedom to make himself (thereby remaking the
society), as long as it does not petrify. Faxe the Weaver speaks for
Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness when she-he says "The only thing
that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not
knowing what comes next" (p. 71). Life is making choices; if we knew
what comes next, we could not choose,
But what certainties can Le Guin offer in the midst of all this
flux? Only human relations: fidelity, constancy, and love. In "A
Week in the Country," Stefan Fabbre and Kasimir Augeskar, on their
way to visit the Augeskar's summer home, exchange these words in a
train compartment:
‘So here we are on a train to Aisnar,' Kasimir said, ‘but we
don't know that it's going to Aisnar. It might go to Peking.'!
‘It might derail and we'll be killed. And if we do come to
Aisnar? What's Aisnar? Mere hearsay.'--'That's morbid,! Kasimir
said . a . --'No, exhilarating,' his friend answered. 'Takes a
lot of work to hold the world together, when you look at it that
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91
way. But it's worthwhile, Building up cities, holding roofs
up by an act of fidelity. Not faith. Fidelity" (pp. 109-110).
What at first strikes us as merely an academic discussion by two stu-
dents to pass the time takes on new meanings by the end of the tale.
After Stefan falls in love with Bruna Augeskar, after he hears Joachim
Bret sing an English lute song,
You be just and constant still, Love may beget a wonder.
Not unlike a summer's frost or winter's fatal thunder:
He that holds his sweetheart dear until his day of dying
Lives of all that ever lived most worthy the envying (p. 120),
after he sees Kasimir killed by the secret police, and after he is
tortured himself--after all that, when Bruna comes for him, he knows
that there is "no good letting go, is there. .. . No good at all"
(p. 129). Fidelity--being just and constant still--and love hold the
world together in ways Stefan had not imagined. And the more precar-
ious existence becomes, the more necessary fidelity becomes. In "Con-
versations at Night," Sanzo Chekey and Alitsia Benat are little more
than beggars, and their hope, like Stefan's and Bruna's, lies in the
personal fidelity that holds their world together:
"Lisha,' he [Sanzo] said, 'oh, God, I want to hold on....
Only it's a very long chance, Lisha.!
"We'll never get a chance that isn't long.'
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92
"You would,!
"You are my long chance,* she said, with a kind of bitterness,
and a profound certainty. ...
‘Well, hang on,’ he said. ... ‘If you hang on, I will' (pp.
58-59, my emphasis).
"Betrayal and fidelity were immediate to them," Le Guin says of
the Augeskar family in "A Week in the Country" (p. 121). Like many
Le Guin characters, the Augeskars live out on the edge; they live near
the Iron Curtain, in a political climate that makes their existence
as perilous as the Gethenians' is in their barely habitable natural
climate. It is worth remembering that Le Guin says that The Left Hand
of Darkness is "a book about betrayal and fidelity,’ Betrayal and
fidelity are as immediate to Genly Ai and Estraven when they trek
across the Ice and when they seek aid from Thessicher, as they are to
the Augeskars in Orsinia. Probably the best example in Le Guin's
fiction of personal fidelity against a background of flux and uncer-
tainty comes in The Dispossessed. Just as Shevek is coming into
Chakar to rejoin Takver and Sadik after a four-year separation, an
earthquake hits the region. He finds Takver's domicile, and knocks.
She answers the door:
She stood facing him. She reached out, as if to push him away
or to take hold of him, an uncertain, unfinished gesture. He
took her hand, and then they held each other, they came together
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and stood holding each other on the unreliable earth. °?
Just a moment before, Shevek had thought that "the earth itself was
uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made
by the human mind." Human relations are no different on Orsinian soil.
A good analogue, perhaps a source, for Le Guin's use of landscape
in Orsinian Tales is another paysage moralisé, Auden's "In Praise of
Limestone":
If it form the landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. ..
It has a worldly duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into questions
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. ...
when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmer
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.>!
Le Guin knows Auden's work, and may have read "In Praise of Limestone"
52 yen if Le Guin
at the time she was inventing her Orsinian Karst.
was not directly influenced by Auden, there are elective affinities
here, and these might be explained by the fact that both Auden and
53
Le Guin have been influenced by Rilke. Like Rilke, both Auden and
Le Guin rely on concrete settings and naturalistic landscape detail to
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94
express emotions and moral values. When Dr. Kereth returns to his
hotel in Paris after having "stolen" freedom at Versailles, "kingly he
Strode past the secret-police agent in the lobby, hiding under his
coat the stolen, inexhaustible fountains" (p. 4).
In a review of Rilke's Duino Elegies, Auden wrote that Rilke is
almost the first poet since the seventeenth century to find a
fresh solution [to the poet's problem of] how to express abstract
ideas in concrete terms. . . . He thinks in physical rather than
intellectual symbols. . . . Rilke thinks of the human in terms
of the non-human, of what he calls Things (Dinge), a way of
thought which, as he himself pointed out, is more characteristic
of the child than of the adult. >4
What Auden says of Rilke applies to Le Guin, and may help to account
for the artistic Superiority of the Earthsea trilogy over the science
fiction. Science fiction, as many have pointed out, is a literature
of ideas. Le Guin succeeds as well as anyone in finding concrete
images for the abstract ideas of modern science, but this success
falls short of what she accomplishes in her juvenile fantasy, and in
many of the pieces in Orsinian Tales. In her "Response" to the Le
Guin issue of Science-Fiction Studies, Le Guin says that she
can't even think one stupid platitude without dragging in a mess
of images and Metaphors, domes, stones, rubble [Rilkean Dinge?].
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95
- + + This lamentable concreteness of the mental processes is
supposed, by some, to be a feminine trait. If so, all artists
. 3
are women. And/or vice versa.
Or children. Whenever Le Guin succeeds in expressing human values
and abstract ideas (freedom) in vividly sketched landscapes, or with a
"mess of images and symbols" (fountains), she creates superior art.
In his discussion of Auden's moral landscapes and "psychic geog-
raphy," Monroe K. Spears notes that "for Auden, as for Rilke, the dis-
tinction between inner and outer worlds is tenuous and interpenetra-
tion is constant ."""° He could say the same of Le Guin, for the Earth-
Sea trilogy is as much about Le Guin's own inner world as an artist as
it is about Ged. Le Guin herself admits as much in "Dreams Must Ex-
plain themselves," an essay recounting the genesis and growth of the
Earthsea trilogy:
Wizardry is artistry. The trilogy is then, in this sense, about
art, the creative experience, the creative process. There is
always this circularity in fantasy. The snake devours its tail.
Dreams must explain themselves.”
In the same sense that Ged is Le Guin, Orsinia is Ursula; the "true
name" of her country, a pun on her own name, is one more instance of
this "circularity of fantasy." And that circularity can be seen
clearly in the last and central tale in Orsinian Tales, "Imaginary
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96
Countries."
III
"Imaginary Countries" is a family portrait. Baron Severin Egi-
deskar, his wife, and their three children Stanislas (fourteen), Paul
(seven), and Zida (six) are in the last few days of their annual stay
at "Asgard," their summer home in the country. The baron will return
to his chair as Follen Professor of Medieval Studies at the University
of Krasnoy. Josef Brone, his research assistant, has been with them
throughout the summer, helping the professor with the documentation
for his history of the Ten Provinces (Orsinia) in the Early Middle
Ages. Rosa, the maid, and Tomas, the caretaker, complete the group.
The family that sat for this portrait is the A. L. Kroeber family, who
used to spend summers at "Kishamish' in the Napa Valley, 60 miles
north of Berkeley, where Kroeber was Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California. Like Kroeber, who spent his summers in the
thirties working on an encyclopedic study in comparative cultural
anthropology (Configurations of Culture Growth), Egideskar is at work
on a "history [that] was years from completion" (p. 172). And like
Ursula Kroeber, born in 1929, Zida Egideskar is six years old in 1935;
so "Imaginary Countries" is, among other things, a portrait of the
artist as a young girl.°°
Le Guin has written a tale about the family of a professor who is
writing a history of Orsinia, a country she invented; the professor
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97
has a daughter who is a portrait of the girl who grew up to invent an
imaginary country where, in 1935, a professor is writing a history
- - . and so on. The snake devours its tail. In addition to recog-
nizing the uroboros, though, we might as easily see Chinese boxes: Le
Guin includes in a collection of tales set in an imaginary country a
tale entitled "Imaginary Countries," which includes characters who live
from time to time in imaginary countries... "Imaginary Countries"
is the central tale in the collection in the same sense that the point
at which the snake's tail disappears into its mouth is central; or, it
is central in the way that the intersection of two mirrors that pro-
duce an infinitely regressing image is central.
So "Imaginary Countries" is central in Orsinian Tales in more ways
than just being the middle tale chronologically. If we read Le Guin's
Orsinian Tales as Ursuline tales, then our reading of them becomes at
once a journey into Orsinia's history and a journey into the history of
Le Guin's invention of Orsinia's history. The work created and the
creative work become one. Just as Le Guin's arrangement of the tales
directs us back into Orsinia's past even as we move forward into the
collection, "Imaginary Countries" returns us to the roots of the imag-
ination that created the book we have just finished reading: the last
tale concludes the collection at the same time it looks forward to the
creation of the collection by showing us a portrait of the artist as a
young girl. When Le Guin placed "Imaginary Countries" at the end of
Orsinian Tales, she was saying, in effect, "In my beginning is my
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98
end" and "In my end is my beginning" (the first and last lines of
T. S. Eliot's "East Coker"). Orsinian Tales, then, has the same or-
ganic structure that The Dispossessed has. The alternating chapters
on Anarres and Urras are put together so that when we come to the end
of Shevek's story on Anarres, he is ready to begin the trip to Urras
that opens the novel; and when we come to the end of Shevek's story on
Urras and his return to Anarres, we see him ready to leave Anarres.
Le Guin would probably accept what another Romantic, Coleridge, says
about the function of poetry:
The common end of all narrative, nay of all, Poems is to convert
a series into a Whole: to make those events, which in real or
imagined History move on in a strait Line, assume to our Under-
standings a circular motion--the snake with it's Tail in it's
Mouth. >
Orsinian Tales does this for the imaginary history of Orsinia at the
same time it does it for the real history that is Le Guin's career as
a writer.
It could be that Egideskar, who writes narratives of "real"
history, as well as his creator, who writes narratives of imagined
history, would agree with Coleridge. An observer of history as sensi-
tive as the baron would have seen that the idea of Progress, the ever-
ascending "strait Line" of history that was born in the Enlightenment,
was not working in the ethics and politics of the twentieth century ;
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99
by studying early medieval times, he may be trying to understand
history not in strictly linear terms (chronology and causality), but
in circular terms as well (returns and rebirths). The baron could
not be unaware of the goings on to the west of Orsinia in the thirties.
Nazi barbarism, in fact, may be the silent subject of his history of
Orsinia in the Early Middle Ages.7° Among the events he is studying
and interpreting would be incidents like the one Le Guin describes in
"The Barrow," set in 1150. His assistant Josef Brone reads from "the
Latin chronicle of a battle lost nine hundred years ago" (p. 172); one
of the incunabula Josef and the baron pack in a trunk probably con-
tains the "bad Latin of [the Benedictine] chronicles of Count Freyga
and his son," mentioned at the end of "The Barrow" (p- 14). Ccunt
Freyga lived at the time when pagan ethics and Christian ethics clash-
ed; although he is nominally a Christian, he reverts to sacrificing a
priest to "Odne the Silent" to relieve his terrifying anxiety about
his wife and unborn child. The baron lives at a time when a nominal-
ly civilized culture is reverting to barbarism. Understanding
medieval Orsinia, going to historical roots, may help Egideskar under-
stand twentieth-century Europe.
Some readers may think that the baron, who calls his wife Freya
and his summer home Asgard, is implicated in the revival of Norse myth
used by the Nazis to legitimate their T That would be
doing the baron a disservice, for he does know the difference between
a unicorn's hoofprint and a pig's (p. 177), and there is as much
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100
difference between a true myth and a false myth as there is between
a unicorn and a pig.” The baron faces the problem that any serious
Student of history and culture sooner or later faces: he is part of
what he is trying to understand. He needs a technique of distancing.
He can get it by spending his summers away from Krasnoy, by partici-
pating in his family's imaginary countries, and by studying the his-
tory of Orsinia in the Early Middle Ages. In order to get free of the
distorting fog of subjectivity and ideology, he needs an Archimedes
point from which he can get "a view in"; he needs to see from a place
"a very long way from anywhere aisen The baron, that is to say,
encounters the same problems as a historian that Le Guin faces as a
writer, and this is yet another way in which "Imaginary Countries" is
the central tale in Orsinian Tales. In a book that is in many ways
about history, we have a portrait of a historian: still another in-
stance of the circularity of fantasy.
But "Imaginary Countries" is more than the central tale in the
collection. Earlier I said that a trip through Orsinia may take us to
the underground streams that nourish the roots of the imagination that
created Earthsea and the Hainish worlds. Coming at the end of the
trip, "Imaginary Countries" brings us as close as we are likely to
come to those streams, Le Guin's childhood experience of Norse myth
and folklore.
Written in 1960, after Le Guin had been exploring Orsinia in
novels and tales for a decade, and before she turned to stories that
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101
fit publishers' categories, "Imaginary Countries" is a tale in which
Le Guin returned to the myths that informed her childhood play and
nourished her imagination. “4 Like "the Oak" in Stanislas' "kingdom of
the trees," the whole body of Le Guin's fiction can be seen as Yggdra-
sil, the Norse world-tree, with its roots in Orsinia and its branches
and leaves in the far-away galaxies of the Hainish universe. When
Josef Brone follows Stanislas into "the Great Woods," Stanislas guides
him to "the Oak":
It was the biggest tree [Josef] had ever seen; he had not seen
very many. 'I suppose it's very old,' he said; looking up puzzl-
ed at the reach of branches, galaxy after galaxy of green leaves
without end (p. 173).
In this tale, which precedes by three years Le Guin's invention-dis-
covery of the Hainish universe, she was already using the language of
science fiction with Norse myth. As we will see in the next chapter,
that is exactly how she created the Hainish worlds: in "The Dowry of
Angyar" (retitled "Semley's Necklace" in The Wind's Twelve Quarters),
she wove together the Einsteinian notion of time-dilation with the
Norse myth of Freya and the Brisingamen Necklace. That story became
the germ of Rocannon's World, her first novel, and from that the rest
of the Hainish novels followed. The Earthsea trilogy evolved in much
the same way.
After Le Guin started writing science fiction, she returned to
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102
Yggdrasil again and again. In Planet of Exile, Rolery gazes at a
mural representing Terra and "the other worlds":
The strangest thing in all the strangeness of this house was the
painting on the wall of the big room downstairs. When Agat had
gone and the rooms were deathly still she stood at this picture
till it became the world and she the wall. And the picture was
a network: a deep network, like the interlacing branches in the
woods, like interrunning currents in water, silver, gray, black,
shot through with green and rose and yellow like the sun. As one
watched their deep network, one saw in it, among it, woven into
it and weaving it, little and great patterns and figures, beasts,
trees, grasses, men and women and other creatures, some like far-
borns and some not; and strange shapes, boxes set on round legs,
birds, axes, silver spears with wings and a tree whose leaves
were stars (my emphasis) . “>
Here is an actual landscape (spacescape?) painting (which, incidental-
ly, describes Le Guin's fiction as well as any critical article has--
it is just one more of the many self-interpretative elements in her
fiction), a paysage moralisé, representing an imaginary landscape, the
Hainish worlds, seen through the eyes of a native of Gamma Draconis
III, a person whose ways of seeing have been shaped by the landscape
of her native world, itself another of Le Guin's paysages moralisés.
The tree in this painting, "the Oak" in "Imaginary Countries," and all
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103
the other trees in Le Guin's fiction from the rowan tree (which, like
Yggdrasil, is an ash) in the opening scene of The Farthest Shore, in
Le Guin's "Inner Lands," to the forests on Athshe in The Word for
World is Forest, in her "Outer Space''--they all have the same roots.
Like the painting we see through Rolery's eyes, Le Guin's prose
landscapes are full of things. Could it be that her artistry in rep-
resenting abstract concepts derives from her childhood moulds of
understanding, moulds like those of Zida Egideskar, who builds a uni-
corn trap from "an egg-crate decorated with many little bits of figur-
ed cloth and colored paper . . . a wooden coat hanger . . . an egg-
Shell painted gold . . . a bit of quartz . . . a breadcrust" (pp. 176-
77)? Rilke, who believed that thinking of the human in terms of Dinge
is characteristic of the child, would answer yes. Like Zidats unicorn
trap, Le Guin's fiction is built by an artisan from a "mess of images
and metaphors, domes, stones, rubble" to catch imaginary beasts, im-
aginary people, imaginary countries, androgynes, mythic archetypes,
truth. Zida Egideskar is indeed a portrait of the artist as a young
girl.
When Josef Brone asks Stanislas what he does in the "Great
Woods," Stanislas answers, ''Oh, I map trails'" (p. 173). That answer
is profoundiy meaningful, for it describes what Le Guin herself does
in her fiction. Her discovery-invention and mapping of imaginary
countries has been her artistic solution to the epistemological prob-
lem that confronts everyone in the human sciences: like anthropol-
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104
ogists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and students of art,
Le Guin is part of the social and cultural situation she wants to
write about. In this position, objectivity and truth seem impossible
ideals, especially when the writer's culture debases language and fic-
tional forms, the writer's only tools for discovering truth. Because
Le Guin is an artist, this philosophical/ideological/political problem
presents itself to her as an artistic problem requiring an artistic
solution. And because artists are supposed to tell the truth, it is
an ethical problem. Inventing imaginary countries and mapping them
has been Le Guin's solution to her artistic/ethical problem. Lies are
the way to truth. The real subject of Le Guin's fiction is not life
in any of her imaginary countries, in Orsinia or on Gethen or Anarres
or Gont or Havnor; these are metaphors, landscapes, Dinge, thought
experiments, what Kafka (in a letter to Max Brod) calls "strategic
considerations":
It sometimes seems to me that the nature of art in general, the
existence of art, is explicable solely in terms of such 'strate-
gic considerations,' of making possible the exchange of truthful
46
words from person to person.
Seen in this light, "Imaginary Countries" is not just the central tale
in Orsinian Tales; more than that, it is central to the whole body of
Le Guin's writing, and still more than that, to the act of writing it-
self.
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105
IV
Even if Le Guin's strategic considerations do make possible the
exchange of truthful words, what if no one wants to publish them?
What good are truthful words if they are not exchanged? What's the
use of writing? What's the use of art? Questions like these may have
been in Le Guin's mind around 1960 when she wrote "An die Musik.''*7
Like Ursula Le Guin herself, who had been writing Orsinian novels and
tales for ten years without seeing them in print, Ladislas Gaye (whose
name faintly echoes his creator's) has been writing songs and a Mass
for ten years and has little hope of ever hearing them performed. If
"Imaginary Countries" includes a portrait of the artist as a young
girl, then "An die Musik," written at the same time, includes an
oblique portrait of the artist as a grown woman. Like the Earthsea
trilogy, it is "about art, the creative experience, the creative pro-
cess." "An die Musik," however, is much more than self-portraiture,
for it raises questions about the relationship between art and
politics--questions fundamental not only to any serious discussion of
Le Guin's later works, but fundamental also to any serious discussion
of the social role of art in the twentieth century.
The tension between "public and private imperatives"*® in Earth-
sea and the Hainish worlds is a reflection or a projection of an
ethical conflict in Le Guin herself, and that conflict--between her
duty as an artist to serve her art and her commitment to a social
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106
and political ideal--is at the center of "An die Musik," and continues
to be prominent in her later fiction, even when an artist is not the
central character. A theoretical physicist like Shevek or a mathema-
tician like Simon in "The New Atlantis" is as much an artist as are
the musicians that appear throughout Le Guin's fictions 7 Le Guin
does, of course, define the problem in radically different ways in "An
die Musik" early in her career and in her later works like The Dispos-
sessed and "The New Atlantis." But beneath the changing counterpoint
of art and politics runs a cantus firmus; her conception of the pur-
pose of art has remained constant and Steady. With Auden, she be-
lieves that the end of art, its final cause, its raison d'être, is to
persuade us to rejoice and to teach us how to praise. Answering Tol-
stoy's question "What is Art?" Le Guin defines the job of art with one
word: "celebration."
If Le Guin's trilogy of imaginary countries--Orsinia, Earthsea,
and the Hainish worlds--manifests the same circularity that her fan-
tasy trilogy does (as I think it does), then we can apply her injunc-
tion "dreams must explain themselves" to the whole body of her fic-
tion. In order to begin an exploration of the problematic relation-
ships in her later fiction between creativity and politics, between
the demands of the imagination and the demands of everyday life, or,
more broadly, between the individual and society, we can do no better
than return to "An die Musik," her first published story. It is the
first of many works in which Le Guin dramatizes the problems she her-
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107
self faces whenever she sits down to write. This is not the place
to make a comprehensive survey of the ways Le Guin has handled these
issues in all of her fiction; that would be a major study in itself.
All I will do here is look carefully at one of her earliest formula-
tions.
As she would do in The Left Hand of Darkness when she constructed
a thought experiment to explore sexuality, in "An die Musik" Le Guin
creates a character--a composer with an “absolutely first-rate" talent
(p. 249)--and places him in a setting--Foranoy, Orsinia, in 1938, a
"dead town for music . . . not a good world for music, either" (p.
254)-~in order to ask three related questions: (1) should an artist,
as a private individual, ignore the demands of his family to meet the
demands of his art, (2) should an artist use his public voice to
Serve art or a political cause, and (3) what is the function of art?
When Le Guin puts Gaye in a cramped three-room flat and gives him
a bedridden mother, an ailing wife, and three children to support on
his wages as a clerk in a steel ballbearing factory, and when she
makes him a talented composer with a compulsion to rival Berlioz and
Mahler by writing a grandiose Mass for "women's chorus, double men's
chorus, full orchestra, brass choir, and an organ" (p. 249), she form-
ulates the question in such stark either-or terms that Gaye's conflict-
ing ethical duties are simply irreconciliable. At the same time, she
dramatizes each of these claims on Gaye so skillfully that neither
can be denied; Gaye cannot abandon his Mass because, as he tells
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108
Otto Egorin, "'I've learned how to do what I must do, you see, I've
begun it, I have to finish it'" (p. 253), and he cannot abandon his
family because he is "not made so" (p- 251). If neither obligation
can be denied and if their conflicting claims are so polarized that
they cannot be reconciled, then Gaye's moral dilemma cannot be resolv-
ed; it can only be transcended, and then only for a moment. Moreover,
by setting the tale in 1938, Le Guin polarizes the artist's public
duties as severely as she polarizes his private ones. His only
choices are to write apolitical music (Lieder or a Mass) or socialist
realism (a symphony "to glorify the latest boiler-factory in the
Urals" [p. 255]).
Le Guin's formulation of Gaye's moral/aesthetic dilemma is
thoroughly dualistic: it rests on the belief that a devotion to art,
like the devotion to a religious creed, is absolutely incompatible
with everyday life. In "An die Musik" art is religion; if it traffics
in social issues, it debases itself. Just as Jesus Christ called on
his disciples to abandon all family ties if they wanted to follow Him
(Matt. 10:34-39; Mark 5:31-35; Luke 14:25-26), Egorin, who believes
that "if you live for music you live for music," suggests to Gaye that
he "throw over . . . [his] sick mother and sick wife and three brats"
if he wants to write his Mass and hear it performed (p. 251). And
then quoting Christ directly, he tells Gaye,
'You have great talent, Gaye, you have great courage, but you're
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109
too gentle, you must not try to write a big work like this Mass.
You can't serve two masters [Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13]. Write
songs, short pieces, something you can think of while you work at
this Godforsaken steel plant and write down at night when the
rest of the family's out of the way for five minutes. . .
Write little songs, not impossible Masses (p. 252).
But Gaye, like Kasimir Augeskar, another Orsinian musician, is an
"enemy of the feasible" (Orsinian Tales, p. 121). He must write the
Mass. He will continue to serve art and his family, Godly art and a
Godforsaken steel plant, knowing that the tension might tear him in
two. All he wants from Egorin is the recognition of his identity as a
musician; that would give him the strength and freedom he needs to en-
dure the conflict he can neither escape nor resolve.
Finally exasperated by "the arrogance, the unreasonableness ...
the stupidity, the absolute Stupidity” of artists (p. 255), yet recog-
nizing Gaye's talent and wanting to encourage him to write and then to
produce some of his work, Egorin gives Gaye a volume of Eichendorff's
poetry. ''Set me some of these,'" he tells Gaye, ""here, look, this
one, "Es wandelt, was wir schauen,” you see--that should suit you!"
(p- 253). It is one of Eichendorff's religious lyrics:
Es wandelt, was wir schauen,
Tag sinkt ins Abendrot,
Die Lust hat eignes Grauen,
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110
Und alles hat den Tod.
Ins Leben schleicht das Leiden
Sich heimlich wie ein Dieb,
Wir alle müssen scheiden
Vor allem, was uns lieb.
Was gub' es doch auf Erden,
Wer hielt' den Jammer aus
Wer möcht’ geboren werden,
Hielt'st du nicht droben haus!
Du bist's, der, was wir bauen
Mild Uber uns zerbricht,
DaB wir den Himmel schauen--
Darum so klag' ich nicht.
Things change, whatever we look at,
Day sinks into sunset glow,
Desire has its own horror,
And everything dies.
Into life steals sorrow
As secretly as a thief,
We must all be separated
From everything that loves us.
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lil
What is there of value on earth,
Who could endure the misery,
Who would want to be reborn,
Dost Thou not promise a home above!
It is Thou, who, whatever we build,
Gently breakest down over us
That we may see Heaven--
And so I do not complain.>+
Why should this "suit" Gaye? Egorin sees Gaye's personal dilemma as
hopeless and wants to offer him the consolation that things change:
"TEs wandelt.! Things do change sometimes, after all, don't they?"
(p. 253). He wants to offer Gaye some way of enduring the suffering
he cannot escape. The religious belief of Eichendorff, a Roman Cath-
olic, is Egorin's solution to Gaye's personal problems as an artist.
Egorin can offer no consolation whatever to Gaye to help him out
of his public dilemma. Because his conception of art forces him to
separate it from politics, Egorin's attitude toward the possibility
that art can change things in 1938, can make something happen, is com-
pletely defeatist:
'Gaye,' said Otto Egorin, 'you know there's one other thing.
This world now, in 1938. You're not the only man who wonders,
what's the good? who needs music, who wants it? Who indeed, when
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112
Europe is crawling with armies like a corpse with maggots, when
Russia uses symphonies to glorify the latest boiler-factory in
the Urals, when the function of music has been all summed up in
Puzzi playing the piano to soothe the Leader's nerves. By the
time your Mass is finished, you know, all the churches may be
blown into little pieces, and your men's chorus will be wearing
uniforms and also being blown into little Pieces. If not, send
it to me, I shall be interested. But I'm not hopeful. I am on
the losing side, with you. . . . music is no good, no use,
Gaye. Not any more. Write your songs, write your Mass, it does
no harm. But it won't save us . . .' (pp. 254-55).
Perhaps because she has a hindsight Egorin does not have, and perhaps
because she does not share his views on the relationships between art
and politics, Le Guin does not share his defeatism. As we discover at
the end of the tale, Gaye does not share Egorin's defeatism either.
Music does save him, though not in the sense Egorin has in mind.
In the final scenes, Le Guin brings all the questions about the
artist and art together, forces Gaye's tensions to the breaking point,
and then resolves them not by answering any of the questions she has
raised, but by arranging an epiphany which transcends the questions.
On the afternoon of the day that Chamberlain meets Hitler in Munich to
give him the Sudentenland, Gaye is trying to finish his setting of "Es
wandelt" and his wife is demanding that he do something about their
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113
son Vasli who has been caught with some other boys trying to set a cat
on fire. Gaye's cry "let me have some peace" (p. 257) is both his and
Europe's: private and public merge. A moment later, European poli-
tics, the coming war, his family problems, and his Mass all converge
as he consoles Vasli, with the sound of his mother's radio coming from
the next room:
All cruelty, all misery, all darkness present and to come hung
round them. .. . In the thick blaring of the trombones, thick
as cough-sirup, Gaye heard for a moment the deep clear thunder
of his Sanctus like the thunder between the stars, over the edge
of the universe--one moment of it, as if the roof of the building
had been taken off and he looked up into the complete, enduring
Ww
darkness, one moment only (p. 257).>
In the evening, as he sits at the kitchen table with his wife, who is
mending and listening to the radio (full of news of Munich, no doubt),
Gaye tries to recapture the accompaniment to the last verse of "ES
wandelt" so he can write it down and send it to Egorin in Krasnoy. At
the moment when "the total impossibility of writing was a choking
weight in him," at the moment when he thinks "nothing would ever
change," he hears Lotte Lehmann on the radio Singing Schubert's Lied
"An die Musik.'> The barrier between inner and outer worlds evapo-
rates as he initially mistakes the music on the radio for the unwrit-
ten music in his mind:
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114
He thought it was his own song, then, raising his head, under-
Stood that he was actually hearing this tune. He did not have to
write it. It had been written long ago, no one need suffer for it
any more. Lehmann was singing it,
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir.
He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin
had said. Not you, or me, . . . not Lehmann who sang the song;
not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead.
What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point.
To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders,
music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a
god, to the suffering man it Says only, 'Listen.' For being saved
is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it
denies and breaks down all the Shelters, the houses men build for
themselves, that they may see the sky (p. 258).
Gaye's epiphany rises not only from the identification of inner
and outer music; it also depends on the conjunction of the words in the
last stanza of Eichendorff's "Es wandelt" and the words in the lyric
Set by Schubert, Schober's "An die Musik." Here is Schober's poem:
Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Harz zu warmer Lieb' entzunden,
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115
Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entriickt!
In eine bessre Welt entrückt.
Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf’ entflossen
Ein slsser, heiliger Akkord von dir,
Den Himmel bessrer Zeiten mir erschlossen
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür!
Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir.
O kindly Art, in how many a grey hour
when I am caught in life's unruly round
have you fired my heart with ardent love
and borne me to a better world!
Borne me to a better world
Often, has a sigh from your harp,
a chord, sweet and holy, from you
opened for me a heaven of better times;
8) Kindly Art, for that I thank you!
O kindly Art, I thank you."
Gaye has been suffering, trying to write the music for the last stanza
of Eichendorff’s poem, which Le Guin renders as "It is Thou in thy
mercy that breakest down over our heads all we build. that we may see
the sky: and so I do not complain" (p. 257). In the afternoon, Gaye
had heard the thunder of his Sanctus like thunder between the stars "as
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116
if the roof of the building had been taken off." Now, in the evening,
as he hears his own unwritten tune in Schubert's, Gaye also hears
Eichendorff's and Schober's lyrics simultaneously, the first inside
his head and the second outside, sung by Lehmann on the radio. He ex-
periences the synchronicity of a poem addressed to God and a poem ad-
dressed to Art: Eichendorff's God, who breaks down what men build that
they may see heaven, is incarnated in Schober's kindly Art, realized
by Schubert and performed by Lehmann, opening for Gaye a heaven of bet-
ter times (not eternity). "Arrogant and gentle as a god," music, not
God, "breaks down all the Shelters, the houses men build for them-
selves, that they may see the sky." It fires his heart with love and
carries him to a better world. Art renews the possibility of opa
The paradox at the core of Gaye's epiphany is religious: what he suf-
fers for releases him from suffering for it. Music does save him. Le
Guin arranges Gaye's salvation from the conflict of "public and pri-
vate imperatives" as she merges inner and outer worlds in a palimpsest
of art and religion, immanence and transcendence.
Gaye's epiphany does not, however, unravel the Gordian knot of
his ethical dilemmas. It cuts right through them. Otto Egorin, who
believes that "music is no good, no use . . . not any more," has a
defeatist attitude because he retains vestiges of a belief that music
is of some good, that it is of some use. Gaye's flash of insight
saves him from defeatism by wiping out entirely the question of the
success or failure of an artist's attempts to do some good. The
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117
world's states, its armies, its factories, and its Führers are all
simply irrelevant; politics and economics are of no concern to the
artist. The function of art is not to save anything or to make some-
thing happen or to change the world. Its function is to deny the
world, to detach people from politics and history so they can receive
visions of a better world, and perhaps redeem politics and history
with that vision. Art mediates a negative dialectic; it removes the
obstacles that block the way to a better world, but it does not bring
that world into being. That is the historical task of the artist's
audience.
So, as he sits in Foranoy, Orsinia, in September, 1958--as Hitler
is meeting Chamberlain and as "Europe is crawling with armies like a
corpse with maggots"--Gaye concludes that "music saves nothing." A
few months later, after Chamberlain had returned to London proclaiming
“peace with honour . . . peace for our time," W. B. Yeats died. Auden,
who had wrestled throughout the thirties with the problem of the art-
ist's duty, came to a position in his elegy on the death of Yeats that
is nearly identical with Gaye's:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
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118
A way of happening, a mouth.
If poetry makes nothing happen, what then is the proper duty of the
poet? What should he do in a world where
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Auden's answer is
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
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119
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prisons of his days
56
Teach the free man how to praise.
This is, I would argue. what Le Guin does, not only in "An die
Musik," but throughout Orsinian Tales and the rest of her fiction as
well. With "all cruelty, all misery, all darkness present and to
come" hanging about him, Gaye hears his Sanctus and looks into "the
complete, enduring darkness." In each volume of the Earthsea trilogy,
Le Guin journeys into the "nightmare of the dark," to the "bottom of
the night," and emerges to rejoice and to praise. Genly Ai and Estra-
ven go into "The Place Inside the Blizzard" and Shevek's quest takes
him into a cellar with a dying man. Each of the Orsinian tales de-
scribes a similar journey into darkness. And there is, moreover, a
sense in which every story Le Guin tells is an Orsinian tale: they all
bear her name. In that sense, the trip into darkness that most of her
characters make is a trip she herself makes as an artist whenever she
writes a story. Along with some other modern writers Le Guin shares
a common ancestor: Orpheus.” Sometimes the map of her journey is
historical, as in Orsinian Tales; sometimes it is psychological and
ethical, as in the Earthsea trilogy; sometimes it is political, as in
The Word for World is Forest and The Dispossessed. It is always an
aesthetic journey. In each case, the message Le Guin returns with is
a version of the invocation Estraven murmurs every night as he goes to
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120
i : og 58
sleep: "Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished."
If we could abstract from Le Guin's practice the ideas that de-
fine for her the proper duty of an artist, if we could formulate a
Statement of the ethics that guides her when she practices her art, it
would probably come close to Rilke's definition of the artist's role:
Art cannot be helpful through our trying to keep and specially
concerning ourselves with the distresses of others, but fonly]
in so far as we bear our own distresses more passionately, give
now and then a perhaps clearer meaning to endurance, and develop
for ourselves the means of expressing the suffering within us and
its conquest more precisely and clearly than is possible to those
who have to apply their powers to something else.”
Le Guin has consistently occupied herself with her own inner life.
She has always written fantasy, searching not in the outside world,
but in her own creative unconscious, for the subjects of her fiction.
The course of her development from the early sixties when she wrote
"Imaginary Countries" and "An die Musik" into the middle seventies
when she wrote The Dispossessed and "The New Atlantis" has been a
series of attempts to develop for herself the means of expressing her
own suffering (which, of course, can be ethical and political as well
as psychological) and its conquest more precisely and clearly. She
would probably agree with Rilke's repeated assertion that we are "only
60
just where we persist in praising." But she also feels the need to
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121
blame. The strength of her convictions and her ethical principles--
and even her outrage at some of the conditions of modern life--demands
that. When her fiction blames, however, as The World for World is
Forest does, it is less just.
Ultimately, the real subject of "An die Musik" and the rest of
Le Guin's fiction that explores ethical problems is not a group of
ethical questions. These are means, not ends. Her purpose is to ask
them, not to answer them. The real subject of "An die Musik" is cele-
bration; the tale is a celebration of Gaye's devotion to his art, and
beyond that, a celebration of art itself. That is the meaning of its
title. Like Estraven, Shevek, Kasimir, and many other Le Guin charac-
ters, Gaye is "an enemy of the feasible." Le Guin places so many ob-
Stacles between him and his music not merely to wrestle with questions
about the duty of the artist and the function of art, but to dramatize
more vividly Gaye's capacity to endure and Survive, and to pursue an
ideal without compromising either himself or his goal. Like Auden's
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats," which, in Samuel Hynes's words, "trans-
forms calamity into celebration by an act of the imagination, and so
affirms the survival of art in a bad tines "An die Musik" and Or-
Sinian Tales are acts of imagination that transform the calamity of
history that is Central Europe into a celebration of the individual's
ability to survive bad times.
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NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
l. Le Guin, personal correspondence, March 7, 1977, The name
Orsinia and the adjective Orsinian appear nowhere in the text of Or-
Sinian Tales. Le Guin's imaginary country is neither realistic nor
fantastic; to have named it would have been defining it too clearly,
and she does not want the boundaries of Orsinia to be well-defined.
2. Le Guin, "A Citizen of Mondath," Foundation 4 (July, 1973),
22.
3. Ibid., pp. 22-23, For another account of Le Guin's shift to
writing for fantasy and science fiction pulp magazines after her con-
tinued unsuccessful tries to get her Orsinian tales and novels pub-
lished, see Vonda McIntyre, "Ursula Ke Le Guin: "Using the Language
With Delight,'" Encore (Portland), 1 (April/May, 1977), 6-7,
4. "Folksong from the Montayna Province," Prairie Poet (Charlese
ton, I11.), Fall, 1959, Po 75; and "An die Musik," Western Humanities
Review, 15 (Sumer, 1961), 247-58, are Le Guin's first published poem
and first published story,
5. Darrell Schweitzer, "The Vivisector," Science Fiction Review
(Portland), 6 (February, 1977), 36=38, It is understandable that
Schweitzer should assume that Le Guin was "abandoning" science fiction,
Other writers, Harlen Ellison and Robert Silverberg most notably, were
announcing at the time that they would write no more science fiction
because of the way the publishing industry handled their work. For
122
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one episode of this hotly discussed issue, see "The Launching Pad,"
Extrapolation, 18 (May, 1977), 100-106, which includes letters from
Ellison and Silverberg, and a comment by Le Guin.
6. Le Guin, "Foreword," The Wind's Twelve Quarters (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), Pp. vii.
7. Le Guin, personal correspondence, March 7, 1977,
8. Eleanor Cameron, apparently on the basis of information sup-
plied by Le Guin, writes that "almost all of what [Le Guin] wrote be-
fore publication was fantasy in the style of Isak Dinesen's tales or
Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia" ("High Fantasy: A Wizard of Earthsea,"
Horn Book, 47 [1971], 131). Le Guin herself says "I read Islandia
first at 13 [Le Guin was 13 when Islandia first appeared in 1942] and
so of course its influence is generic in all my work" (personal cor-
respondence, September 15, 1976). Even a cursory glance at both
Islandia and The Left Hand of Darkness would reveal the extent of the
influence,
9. Because Le Guin owes not only a title, but much more to
Dinesen, what Robert Langbaum says about Dinesen's use of the word
tale is relevant here:
When we were talking once about the sense in which she used the
word tale, Isak Dinesen said that she did not intend the word in
the sense of the Danish eventyr (which Danes translate as fairy
tale and associate with Hans Christian Andersen), but in the sense
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124
of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale. Her second volume of stories
takes its title from Shakespeare's play, and the Danish title,
Vinter-Eventyr, is a translation from the English. For the Dan-
ish titles of Seven Gothic Tales and Last Tales, she uses the
word fortaellinger which does not carry the connotation of fairy
tale. If, following her hint, we assimilate her use of the word
tale or story to Shakespeare's last plays, we may understand her
to mean romance, but romance used to achieve tragi-comedy--to
subsume the opposition between the tragic and comic, that is dis-
cussed throughout her work, in the naive view of a child or prim-
itive who sees a story as neither tragic or comic but as marvel-
ous (The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art [New
York: Random House, 1965], p. 56).
This applies to Le Guin's fiction even without the condition mutatis
mutandis. A winter's tale in any number of senses, The Left Hand of
Darkness ends with Estraven's son asking for a story. Ai's tale would
likely be a romance used to achieve tragi-comedy, for Estraven's death
has brought together the two hostile nations on Winter/Gethen. For a
brief discussion of what "winter's tale" meant to the Elizabethans,
see Hallet Smith's introduction to The Winter's Tale in The Riverside
Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 1567-68.
10. See Hugh Seton-Watson, The "Sick Heart" of Modern Europe: The
Problem of the Danubian Lands (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
—_——S— a
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125
1975), and Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Wil-
lard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), pp. 139-62.
ll. Le Guin, Orsinian Tales (New York: Harper § Row, 1976), p.
157. Subsequent references are to this edition and are indicated
parenthetically.
12. That presumably objective historical narratives are also proe
foundly poetic is the thesis of Hayden White's Metahistory: The Histor-
ical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1973). Conversely, profoundly poetic works may aim
at historical "objectivity": War and Peace is one of Le Guin's favor-
ite novels.
15. The whole idea of going home again as it is worked out in
The Dispossessed is similar to the way Le Guin plays with the alien
instance of chiasmus in her fiction (see p. 68, note 84, above). On
his return to the Northsetting Institute after a stint in the Dust,
Shevek reflects, overturning Heraclitus and Thomas Wolfe:
You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go
home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view
of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved
his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be
fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the
river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at
once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity.
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126
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so
long as you understand that home is a place where you have never
been (The Dispossessed [New York: Harper § Row, 1974], p. 48).
Shevek's General Temporal Theory, a synthesis of Sequency and Simultan-
eity, is homologous with the configuration of Le Guin's sense of his-
tory in Orsinian Tales.
14. The best treatment of the Romantic "circuitous journey" is
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971),
pp. 141-524.
15. Needham, Moulds of Understanding: A Pattern of Natural
Philosophy, ed. Gary Werskey (London: Allen § Unwin, 1976), pp. 221ff.
Le Guin knows and admires Needham's work.
16. Le Guin expresses her convictions about the fundamental
order of nature and imagination in "The Crab Nebula, the Parameciun,
and Tolstoy," Riverside Quarterly, 5 (February, 1972), 89-96.
17. Le Guin, Rocannon's World in Three Hainish Novels (Garden
City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1978), p. [3].
18. Pareto, Les Systèmes socialistes, 2 vols. (Paris: Giard §
Brière, 1902-03), II, 332. My translation. For knowledge of this
anecdote I am indebted to Bertell Ollmann, Alienation: Marx's Concep-
tion of Man in Capitalist Society, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1976), p. 3.
19, Shippey, "The Magic Art and the Evolution of Words: Ursula
Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy," Mosaic, 10 (Winter, 1977), pp. 148£.
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127
20. For Le Guin's comments on binary thinking and "the dualism
of value that destroys us," see her "Is Gender Necessary?" Aurora, ed.
Vonda McIntyre and Susan Anderson (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1976),
pp. 138-39; and Charles Bigelow and J. McMahon, "Science Fiction and
the Future of Anarchy: Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin," (Port-
land) Oregon Times, December, 1974, pp. 24-29, where Le Guin says "if
science fiction has sort of a moral usefulness it is just exactly that.
It's just to shake people out of ruts of thinking [i.e., binary think-
ing], which tend to be prejudices" (p. 28).
21. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (New York: Atheneum, 1972), Pp.
133.
22, "The Vivisector," p. 37.
25. Kroeber, "Sisters and Science Fiction," The Little Magazine,
10 (Spring-Summer, 1976), 89.
24. I am using the word complementary here with all the overtones
it had for Niels Bohr (see P- x, above, and note 9, pp. xix-xxi), and
I am referring to the philosophy of internal relations, discussed by
Ollmann, Alienation, passim. Pareto's bird and mouse are internally
related parts of a whole, as are the complementary Chinese concepts
Yin and Yang. These are concepts, not independent entities: one can-
not exist without the other any more than reality can exist without
fantasy and vice versa. The epigraph to chapter one above, from Hork-
heimer and Adorno, is most apposite for an understanding of the rela-
tionships between reality and fantasy,
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128
25. "A Citizen of Mondath," p. 22.
26. Le Guin is most likely referring to Orsinia's brief period
of political independence in "A Week in the Country" when she says
that Stefan Fabbre, born in 1939, was "born in jail" (p. 116), while
Stefan's grandfather, the Stefan Fabbre of "Brothers and Sisters,"
and his father, have "known other houses" (p. 115). Joachim Bret,
"born outside prison" (p.e 121), i.e., before Nazi domination, has
"German numbers, out of date" (p. 121) tatooed on his arn, indicating
that he spent some time in a Nazi concentration camp.
27. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1974), SV., "karst
topography." An album of stunning photographs of the various forms
karst can take is Karst in China (Shanghai: People's Publishing
House, 1976). That the modern Chinese (and Le Guin) should be fas-
cinated by karst topography probably derives from the Taoist tradi-
tion, twenty-five centuries old, that values nature's flux, especial-
ly water's ability to wear down stone. The editors of Karst in China
add an ideological preface to their collection of photographs, using
a reference to Engels' Dialectics of Nature to make the study of this
geological feature ideologically respectable, Apart from its context,
however, Engels' remarks are relevant to Le Cuin's world view, and
could even have been written by Le Guin herself:
The [nineteenth century's] new conception of nature was complete
in its main features: all Yigidity was dissolved, all fixity dis-
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129
sipated, all particularity that been regarded as eternal be-
came transient, the whole of nature shown as moving in eternal
flux and cycles.
Thus we have once again returned to the mode of contemplation
of the great founders of Greek philosophy: that all nature, from
the smallest thing to the biggest, from grains of sand to suns,
from protista to man, has its existence in eternal coming into
being and going out of being, in ceaseless flux, in unresting
motion and change. Only with the essential difference that what
for the Greeks was a brilliant intuition is in our case the re-
sult of strictly scientific research in accordance with exper-
ience, and hence appears in much more definite and clearer form
("Introduction to Dialectics of Nature," in Karl Marx and Fred-
erick Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols. [Moscow: Progress Publish-
ers, 1970], III, 49-50).
This parallels exactly what Oppenheimer said about the idea of comple-
mentarity (see pp. ix-x, above).
28. Two essays on landscape and setting in Le Guin's science
fiction are Ian Watson, "The Forest as Metaphor for Mind," Science-
Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 231-37, and Elizabeth Cummins Cogell,
"Setting as Analogue to Characterization in Ursula K. Le Guin," Extra-
polation, 18 (1977), 131-41. Neither Watson nor Cogell refers to
landscape painting. Le Guin says that J. M. W. Turner has probably
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150
helped her "make a world out of chaos" more than her literary in-
fluences have ("A Response to the Le Guin Issue," Science-Fiction
Studies, 3 [1976], 46). Turner was influenced by seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century French painters of the paysage moralisé like Claude,
Poussin, and Watteau. See Le Guin's story about a landscape painter,
"The Eye Altering," The Altered I, ed. Lee Harding (Melbourne: Nors-
trilia Press, 1976), pp. 108-17,
29. "Is Gender Necessary?" p. 131. Le Guin's full statement
merits quotation: "The fact is that the real subject of the book is
not feminism or sex or gender or anything of the sort; as far as I
can see, it is a book about betrayal and fidelity."
30. The Dispossessed, p. 227.
31. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1966), pp. 238-41.
52. Le Guin refers to Auden as perhaps the only twentieth-
century poet with enough science to bridge the gap between Lord
Snow's Two Cultures from the side of the humanists ("The Crab Nebu-
la," p. 95). Le Guin has reservations about Auden's Christianity,
though; see her poem "The Entrance of Mr. Audiot and Mr. Elen Into
Heaven," Nimrod, 5 (Fall, 1960), 15-16. "In Praise of Limestone"
appeared first in Horizon, July, 1948, pp. l-3, and then in Auden's
Nones (New York: Random House, 1951). Le Guin wrote the first Or-
sinian tale in 1951.
53. Le Guin lists "Rilke's one novel" (Die Aufzeichnungen Malte
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151
Laurids Brigge) as part of the "tradition into which [she] fit[s] by
disposition and choice" ("The View In," A Multitude of Visions, ed. Cy
Chauvin [Baltimore: T-K Graphics, 1975], pe 6). In her "Response to
the Le Guin Issue," she lists Rilke as one of the poets who have in-
fluenced her (p. 46). According to Le Guin's mother, Theodora
Kroeber, she introduced Rilke to her father in the late fifties (Al-
fred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration [Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1970], p. 261). Le Guin has published translations of
six of Rilke's French poems in Mr. Cogito (Forest Grove, Ore.), 1
(Winter, 1973), 8-13. There are some astonishingly clear echoes of
Rilke's Tenth Duino Elegy in The Farthest Shore, and Rilke may have
helped Le Guin invent the Orsinian Karst. Scholss Duino, near
Trieste, where Rilke conceived the Duino Elegies, is on the edge of
the Adriatic Karst. Sonnet xi in Part 2 of Sonnets to Orpheus is
about the Karst. For Rilke's influence on Auden, see Monroe K.
Spears, The Poetry of W. H, Auden (New York: Oxford University Press,
1968), pp. 141-42.
54. Auden, "Rilke in English," The New Republic, September 6,
1959, pp. 155-36.
35. "A Response to the Le Guin Issue," p. 45.
56. The Poetry of W. H. Auden, p. 142.
37. Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," Algol 21 (Novem-
ber, 1973), p. 12.
58. For the biographical facts, see Theodora Kroeber, Alfred
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Kroeber, pp. 139-42.
I am not suggesting that the Egideskar family is an exact photo-
graphic reproduction of the Kroeber family, any more than I would
argue that Shevek in The Dispossessed is a realistic portrait of J.
Robert Oppenheimer. Le Guin has used the same distancing techniques
in "Imaginary Countries" that she uses throughout Orsinian Tales.
Besides shifting her parents from California to Orsinia and transform-
ing them into a baron and a baroness, she reduces the number of
children from four to three, and adds Josef Brone so that the tale
has a character who can contribute an outside perspective on the fam-
ily (most of the tale is told through his point of view). Kishamish,
Theodora Kroeber explains, got its name when "Karl, the youngest of
the boys, was in his nyth-making period in imitation of Greek and
Norse myths. [He] saw the two nearer knolls as being Thor and Kisha-
mish (the latter an invented giant), the two recumbent after a fight
to the finish: hence the name Kishamish's Place" (p. 140). Le Guin is
Still in her myth-making period.
Nor am I suggesting that any of this biographical information ac-
counts for the aesthetic qualities that make "Imaginary Countries"
and Orsinian Tales worthwhile reading experiences. I am sympathetic
with the position on biographical approaches taken by Karl Kroeber (a
professor of English at Columbia), but I certainly do not accept his
extreme statement of that position: "to know these [biographical]
sources is to know nothing of significance about the stories as
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133
stories. Bad stories often are raw biography. Literary art consists
in transforming one kind of reality, that of literary experience, into
another kind of reality, that of literary experience" ("Sisters and
Science Fiction," p. $7). It does not necessarily follow from this
that raw biography is bad art; in any case, "Imaginary Countries" is
not raw biography. Take, for example, these two descriptions:
The Kishamish guestbook kept during those years [the thirties]
can be read as a roster of graduate students in anthropology
stopping by, to and from the field; of California Indians and
other Indians; of visiting writers and scholars; of the child-
ren's friends; of family. Among the names are those who stayed
for days or weeks and whose repeated names tell the story of the
circle of intimacy which completed itself there--very California
Indian, very Kishamishian (Alfred Kroeber, p. 142).
all summer in tides and cycles the house had been full or half
full of visitors, friends of the children, friends of the baron-
ess, friends, colleagues and neighbors of the baron, duck-hunters
who slept in the disused stable since the spare bedrooms were
full of Polish historians, ladies with broods of children the
smallest of whom fell inevitably into the pond about this time of
the afternoon. No wonder it was so still, so autumnal now: the
rooms vacant, the pond smooth, the hills empty of dispersing
laughter (Orsinian Tales, pp. 174-75).
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134
Having placed these two passages together, we can see more clearly the
way Le Guin uses Rilkean Dinge and landscape to create atmosphere and
meaning. The shift in her passage from fullness and activity to emp-
tiness and stillness, and from the house to the hills beyond, is simi-
lar to the landscape painting we find not only in Orsinian Tales, but
also in the Earthsea trilogy, where Le Guin often pauses in her nar-
ration to direct our gaze toward distant hills and the horizon.
Although both Le Guin and her mother are writing in the elegiac
mode, neither passage can be reduced to the other, nor can either be
reduced to the raw experience that stands behind each of them. Both
are works of art, but they are different genres: biography and fic-
tion. One is written by a woman who was an adult when she lived the
experiences she describes; the other is written by a woman who was a
child when she experienced what she describes. Like Wordsworth's
"Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," "Imaginary Coun-
tries" is "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Where Le Guin's
mother emphasizes the circle of intimacy at Kishamish, Le Guin evokes
the mood and atmosphere of endings as moments in "tides and cycles"
at Asgard. The imminent change from summer to autumn and winter is
analogous to other changes in the tale, personal and public. Zida is
on the verge of passing from childhood into an awareness of time and
season, and Mitteleuropa in 1955 is on the verge of total war between
totalitarian superpowers. Ragnarok is a game played both by the Egi-
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135
deskar family and by the nations of Europe. Much of the aesthetic
effect of the tale, in fact, comes from the contrasts between the
masterfully delicate and sensitive portrayal of Zida's world and the
ominous and brooding shadows of a war more destructive and barbaric
than anything history had ever witnessed.
Another tale in Orsinian Tales, "A Week in the Country,” appears
to draw on the same materials that "Imaginary Countries" does. Both
tales include the word country in their titles, and both show us
families nearing the end of their stays at summer homes. Not only are
the family names similar (Egideskar and Augeskar), but the experiences
of the daughter are similar: Zida discovers time and loses something
of the never-never land of her childhood, while Bruna ere death,
interestingly enough, at about the same age Le Guin encountered death
(see note $2 in chapter four, p. 337, below).
39. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols., ed.
Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1956-71), IV, 545.
40. If so, the baron's history may turn out to be like E. R.
Curtius' European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, which, Curtius
explains, was conceived in the thirties and was intended to serve the
idea of humanism in the face of "the German catastrophe . . . it grew
out of a concern for the preservation of Western culture" ([New York:
Harper & Row, 1963], p. viii).
41. Christina Robb insinuates this in her review of Orsinian
Tales:
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156
Le Guin's political fairy tales are unbeatable in their mode.
The second and last of these tales tell the story of civiliza-
tion: from the local baron in "The Barrow" who sacrifices a
Christian priest to Odne because his wife's labor is taking too
long, to the refined and professional baron in "Imaginary Coun-
tries" who names his summer house Asgard to play along with his
children's sunny infatuation with the Norse god fad in 1935.
The year tells that story, Europe's and ours ("Political fairy
tales where the princes are charming," The Boston Globe, Decem-
ber 10, 1976, p. 36).
I am indebted to Mr. John Fleming of Merrimack College for sending me
this review.
42. Without disparaging the imagination, the baron can disting-
uish between fantasy and reality, and respect the value each has for
the other. Note that the pig, though "real," is imaginary:
"What is that?" [the baron asks Zida].
"A trap for catching a unicorn." She brushed hair and leaf-
mold off her face and arranged herself more comfortably on him.
"Caught any?"
"No."
"Seen any?"
"Paul and I found some tracks."
“"Split-hoofed ones, eh?"
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157
She nodded. Delicately through twilight in the baron's imagin-
ation walked their neighbor's white pig, silver between birch
trunks (p. 177).
43. "A View In" is an essay in which Le Guin explains why she
writes science fiction (see note 33, above), and A Very Long Way From
Anywhere Else (London: Gollancz, 1976) is the British edition of Le
Guin's juvenile novella published in the USA as Very Far Away From
Anywhere Else (New York: Atheneum, 1976). Owen Griffiths, the narra-
tor and principal character, has invented an imaginary country named
"Thorn": "a very small country, on an island in the South Atlantic,
only about sixty miles across, and a very long way from anywhere
else. The wind blew all the time in Thorn" (Atheneum ed., p. 51).
When Owen's friend Natalie Field helps him to take imaginary countries
seriously (she introduces him to Angria and Gondal, the Bront#s' imag-
inary countries), he begins to escape the ideology of consumerism and
mediocrity that smothers his parents in a fog. The wind on Thorn,
which would of course keep the island free of fog, means the same
thing to Owen that the breeze in Book I of The Prelude means to Words-
worth: freedom.
Just as Owen discovers an Archimedes point in his imaginary
country, Le Guin and the baron discover Archimedes points in their
imaginary countries. The baron uses myth and history to discover
his, while his creator uses myth and history along with the estrange-
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ment techniques of science fiction to discover hers.
44. "I grew up," said Le Guin in an interview, "reading the
Norse myths and they have always meant incomparably more to me than
the Greek or any other. They are in fact part of my ‘childhood lore,'
they shaped my imagination; to me the reality of Ragnarok lies on the
same profound, subrational level as the Crucifixion or the Resurrec-
tion lies for one brought up as a Christian. One may no longer 'be-
lieve in' it, but it remains a basic symbol, a mode of one's imagina-
tion--both a limiting, and an enabling mode" ("Ursula K. Le Guin: An
Interview," Luna Monthly no. 63 [March, 1976], p. 3, my emphasis).
45. Le Guin, Planet of Exile, in Three Hainish Novels, p. 166.
46. Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans.
Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1978), quoted by V. S.
1978, p. 4. For Le Guin's own remarks on the artist's obligation to
tell the truth, see her "The Child and the Shadow," Quarterly Journal
of the Library of Congress, 52 (April, 1975), 139-48, and her "Escape
Routes," Galaxy, 35 (December, 1974), 40-44.
47. In the discussion of "An die Musik" that follows, I cite
the text as first published in 1961 (see note 4, above). When Le Guin
revised it for publication in Orsinian Tales, she removed most of the
allusions to Romantic poets and musicians.
48. Sce John Huntington, "Public and Private Imperatives in Le
Guin's Fiction," Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (November, 1975), 2537-42.
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139
49. The subject of music and musicians in Le Guin's fiction de-
serves extended treatment. Musicians are important characters in two
Orsinian tales, "A Week in the Country" and "An die Musik," and alse
in several other stories by Le Guin, science fiction and otherwise:
"Schr8dinger's Cat," Universe 5, ed. Terry Carr (New York: Random
House, 1974), pp. 31-40; "The New Atlantis," The New Atlantis and
ee a a ŘĖ— iaaŘħI
(see note 43, above); and "Gwilan's Harp," Redbook, May, 1977, pp.
229-50. Le Guin's musicians often appear paired with scientists or
in a scientific context: Kasimir Augeskar, a bassist, is with a micro-
biologist, Stefan Fabbre; the narrator of "Schridinger's Cat" gets
involved with quantum theory; the composer Natalie Field is with Owen
Griffiths, who wants to be a psychobiologist; and Belle, a violist,
is married to a mathematician and physicist. In these pairings Le
Guin is, clearly, exploring the relationships between art and science,
two forms of creativity that are as complementary and interdependent
as the two hemispheres of the brain. Shevek, a scientist, tells Salas,
a musician, that music is "the noblest form of social behavior we're
capable of" (The Dispossessed, p. 156).
It would certainly be worthwhile to explore the ways Le Guin has
used musical forms and techniques to structure her fiction and to tex-
ture her prose style. Rafail Nudelman's "An Approach to the Structure
of Le Guin's SF," Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (November, 1975), 210-20,
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140
opens with an epigraph from Thomas Mann: "I felt that the book itself
had become what it treated of, i.e., a musical construct,” but he
does not pursue this idea in detail. Most of Le Guin's fiction is
not as rigorously musical as Mann's Doctor Faustus. Whatever musical
structure there is in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," subtitled
“Variations on a Theme by William James," is probably only loosely
metaphorical. Salas' composition The Simultaneity Principle may offer
a key to the structure of The Dispossessed: "Five instruments each
playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward
progress entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes lovely
harmony" (p. 155). The musical structure and texture of "The New At-
lantis" could reward a close look. R. V. Cassill says that Le Guin's
“efforts at musicalizing the prose daydream make it equate somehow
with the musical improvisation that Belle performs on her viola...
The story seems to end with the certain uncertainty of a musical state-
ment™ (Instructor's Handbook for The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction,
ed. R. V. Cassill [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], p. 129). (Le Guin's
use of colors in the Atlantean passages could as easily be explored
in terms of landscape painting.) It might be, then, that Le Guin's
use of musical forms is comparable to Eliot's use of Beethoven's
quartets in The Four Quartets, or to Hesse's use of Mozart's sonatas
in Steppenwolf. Le Guin is aware of the "tension between the musical
structure of her work and the political content" (John Boe, personal
correspondence, reporting a conversation with Le Guin).
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141
50. "The Crab Nebula," p. 96.
51. Eichendorff, Neue Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Schriften, 4
vols. (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung, 1957), I, 294. My
translation. "Es wandelt, was wir schauen" is one of five lyrics
grouped under the title "Der Umkehrende," "Turning Back" or "Return."
Although Le Guin does not believe in Eichendorff's God, the idea/image
of return is at the very center of her thought, as is the idea of
change. Return is the movement of the Tao, and change is what the I
Ching is all about. Here is a point where Le Guin's roots in the
Romantics, especially the Continental Romantics, and her interest in
Chinese philosophy, become cooperative, even identical, parts of
her world view.
52. This image is recycled in "Schrédinger's Cat," a science
fiction story written more than a decade after "An die Musik." See
the last section of chapter three for a full discussion of the later
story.
55. That Le Guin should have chosen Lotte Lehmann to be the veh-
icle for Gaye's epiphany is but one instance among many in this remark-
able tale of the way each element resonates in all the others. Lotte
Lehmann, born in Prussia in 1888, became "one of the most eminent
lyric-dramatic sopranos of her time" (Richard Capell, "Lotte Lehmann,"
Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., V, 116). Lehmann
was a product of the culture of Mitteleuropa, a culture Le Guin eulo-
gizes in Orsinian Tales, a culture Lehmann gave voice to: "the lyric
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142
Stage of the time knew no performance more admirably accomplished:
it seemed to embody a Civilization, the pride and elegance of old
Vienna, its voluptuousness, chastened by good manners, its doomed
beauty" (Capell, p. 116). Lehmann was barred by the Nazis from sing-
ing in Germany, and when Hitler took Austria, she emigrated to the
USA.
Lehmann's attitude toward the relationship between music and
politics is consonant with Le Guin's in "An die Musik" (though not
in her later fiction). In her autobiography, Lehmann writes,
I cannot serve politics. I can only serve that which always has
been and still is the mission of my life. I cannot paint polit-
ical boundaries on the measureless ways of the art-world. I
will not, and cannot probe whether the people to whom I give my
art are good or bad, believers or unbelievers; nor does it in-
terest me to know what race they belong [koi or to what politics
they subscribe. . . . God put music into my heart and a voice
in my throat. I serve Him when I serve music ("Postscript, May,
1938," Midway in My Song [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1938], p-
vii).
Le Guin says that Lehmann "has been my favorite woman singer for many
years. . . . She ended many concerts--and the last of her whole
career--by singing An die Musik" (personal correspondence, September
9, 1977). Lehmann's performance of "An die Musik" may be heard on
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145
[Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964], p. 195). This recording is out of
print and difficult to find, but one ought really to hear the song
performed to appreciate fully Le Guin's tale.
Lehmann died in Santa Barbara, California, one month before Har-
per & Row published Orsinian Tales.
54. The Fischer-Dieskau Book of Lieder, trans. George Bird and
Richard Stokes (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 53, slightly altered to
conform to the way Schubert wrote the song to be performed. See
Franz Schubert, Comniete Works, 19 vols. (New York: Dover, 1965), XV,
86-87.
55. In her "Response to the Le Guin Issue," Le Guin says that
Schubert, along with Beethoven and Turner (as I noted above, in note
28) may have heiped her "make a world out of chaos" more than specif-
ically literary influences. (Note that all three artists worked with
poetry: many of Turner's paintings were exhibited with verses; Beet-
hoven of course used Schiller's "An die Freude" in his Ninth Symphony;
and Schubert wrote over 600 Lieder. There were all three Romantics.)
If music does for Le Guin what it did for Schober and Schubert, i.e.,
bear her to a better world and open for her a heaven of better times,
then it is a crucial factor in her utopian visions. Music does
this for Belle and Rose in "The New Atlantis" and for Owen Griffiths
in Very Far Away From Anywhere Else. If art has this liberating power
—_—— eo OCS
for Le Guin--and in her “Author's Introduction" to The Word for World
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144
is Forest, she says that if she had to seek a Single motive for writ-
ing she would use Emily Bront8's word "liberty" to define it ({London:
Gollancz, 1977], p. 6)--then she is in the German tradition which in-
cludes Schiller and Marcuse and in the English tradition which in-
cludes Shelley, traditions which value art for its power to negate
alienation and fragmentation and to generate utopian possibilities.
56. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939)," Collected
Shorter Poems, PpP- 142, 143. (Note that Auden's poem, like Le Guin's
Orsinian tales, includes a date: it is a meditation on history as
well as an elegy.) See also Auden's "The Public v. the Late Mr. Wil-
liam Butler Yeats," Partisan Review, 6 (Spring, 1939), 46-51, for
Auden's thoughts in prose on the relationship between Yeats's art
and his politics. Evaluations of Le Guints politics will have to
proceed along similarly cautious lines, will have to define precisely
the relationships between her aesthetics and her politics, and finally
will have to be careful about claiming her for a particular political
position, as some of the essays in the Le Guin number of Science-Fic-
tion Studies do.
57. See Walter A. Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme
in Modern Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1671}.
58. The Left Hand of Darkness, p. 246. My discussion of Le
Guin's artistic journeys is partially indebted to Susan's Wood's ex-
cellent essay "Discovering Worlds: The Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin,"
Voices for the Future, Vol 2, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green,
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145
Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979), in press. I am
grateful to Ms. Wood for sending a copy of her MS.
59. Quoted by J. B. Leishman, Introduction," Duino Elegies,
trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: W. W. Norton,
1959), p. 15. Auden quotes this passage in his review of Duino Ele-
gies, and adds these comments:
This . . . is not to be dismissed with the cheery cry 'defeat-
ism.' It implies not a denial of political action, but rather
the realization that if the writer is not to harm both others
and himself, he must consider, and very much more humbly and
patiently than he has been doing, what kind of person he is,
and what may be his real function. When the ship catches fire,
it seems only natural to rush importantly to the pumps, but per-
haps one is only adding to the general confusion and panic: to
Sit still and pray seems selfish and unheroic, but it May be the
wisest and most helpful course ("Rilke in English," p. 135).
Le Guin has had to make these choices. With The Word for World is
Forest, she rushed to the pumps, and has said since that she regrets
it and hopes never to do it again. She would not, like Auden, pray,
but she might meditate: that would be in keeping with the quietist
ethic of Taoism, wu wei, which Le Guin translates as "action through
Stillness" ("Introduction to the 1978 Edition," Planet of Exile [New
York: Harper & Row, 1978], p. ix).
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146
60. Quoted by J. B. Leishman, "Introduction," Sonnets to Or-
pheus, trans. J. B. Leishman (London: Hogarth Press, 1936), p. 23.
61. Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in Eng-
land in the 1950s (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 353. Hynes's
account of "Auden Country" bears at a number of points on Le Guin's
fiction of the late sixties and early seventies. The historical
pressures on artists in the thirties were not unlike those on artists
in the sixties, and may have made it necessary for writers like Auden
and Le Guin to invent imaginary countries, to use Kafka's "Strategic
considerations" to make possible the exchange of truthful words.
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CHAPTER THREE
THE COMPLEMENTARITY OF MYTH, MAGIC, AND SCIENCE
IN LE GUIN'S FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION
* I have wondered if there isn't some real connection
between a certain kind of scientific-mindedness (the
explorative, sythesising kind) and fantasy-minded-
ness. Perhaps "science fiction" isn't really such
a bad name for our genre after all. Those who dis-
like fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled
by science. They don't like either hobbits, or
quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they
don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is
any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically
an aesthetic one.
~-Ursula K. Le Guin
It seems that if one is working from the point of
view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if
one has a really sound insight, one is on a sure
line of progress,
~-Paul A. M. Dirac
147
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148
When Darko Suvin introduced the essays in the special Le Guin
issue of Science-Fiction Studies, he wrote that he was sorry that he
“couldn't find anybody to integrate the Earthsea trilogy with Le
Guin's SE. Within a year, George Edgar Slusser's The Farthest
Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin appeared and offered one way of under-
standing the relationship between Le Guin's fantasy and her science
fiction. Slusser argues that Le Guin wrote the trilogy in a period
of "bifurcation": on the one hand, she explored and developed her
characteristic themes in "a fantasy setting which bears no resemb-
lance with our contemporary world; on the other, she examined the
need to come to grips with the pressing problems of the day.
(1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), says Slusser, the Earthsea trilogy
(1968-72) "provided a counterweight" to the pessimism and despair of
2
science fiction novels like The Word for World is Forest (1972).”
I think Slusser's mimetic and thematic approach concentrates too
much attention on the divisions between Le Guin's fantasy and science
fiction, and thus neglects the complementary relationships between
them. I will use a genetic approach to emphazise the connections; my
goal, like Falk-Ramarren's in City of Illusions, is "not really that
of creating a unity, only of comprehending zen? In order to under-
stand Le Guin's fiction as an "organized unity in which all individua-
tion and diversity survive . . . as distinctions without division,"
I will look at the three stories that Le Guin wrote in the earlv
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149
sixties that are the genesis of the Earthsea trilogy and the Hainish
cycle, and will argue that not only these stories, taken individually,
but also the body of fiction that grew from them, taken as a whole,
and the process by which it grew, have the form of a spiral journey
back home, the Bildungsreise characteristic of Romantic thought and
imagination. The science fiction novel that Slusser opposes to the
securely rooted in "The Word of Unbinding," the earliest Earthsea
story, than in any of the four novels that preceded it in the Hainish
cycle.
Like the romance plots that inform most of her fiction, Le Guin's
imagination moves in circles, synthesizing divergent elements. The
science in the Hainish novels and the magic in the Earthsea trilogy
are not the diametrical opposites we customarily take them to be:
rather, they are complementary and compensatory modes of understand-
ing. In the same way that there is a spot of yin in the yang half
of the t'ai chi symbol, and a spot of yang in the yin half, Le Guin's
Science is as fantastic as her fantasy is scientific. The middle
section of this chapter will illustrate this by exploring the rela-
tionships between myth and science in "Semley's Necklace," a science
fiction story, and by showing how the magic in the Earthsea fantasies
is a weaving together of myth and science. This chapter's discussion
of complementarity concludes with an analysis of "Schrédinger's Cat,"
a science fiction fable that conflates two readings of reality, one
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159
a famous Gedankenexperiment from quantum mechanics, the other a Greek
myth, in order to see some of the most fundamental problems in the
history of philosophy in a new light, to get "a view in."
I
Le Guin invented-discovered both Earthsea and the Hainish worlds
in 1962-65 when she wrote three stories that turned out to be the
"germs," as she calls them, of the Earthsea trilogy and the Hainish
novels. Two of the three stories, "The Word of Unbinding" (Fantas-
tic, January, 1965) and "The Rule of Names" (Fantastic, April, 1963),
gave her the setting (an archipelago) and a subject (magic) for the
Earthsea fantasies, while the third story, "The Dowry of Angyar"
(Amazing, September, 1964), gave her the hero (Rocannon) and the set-
ting (Fomalhaut II, and the League of Worlds) for the first novel in
the Hainish cycle. Throughout the next nine or ten years, Le Guin
explored and mapped these two Secondary Worlds, working sometimes in
one, sometimes in the other, and occasionally in both at the same
time.
Le Guin put down deep roots when she wrote those three stories,
for they nourished a decade of intense creativity. In 1964-65, she
wrote, but never published, "a longish story about a prince" from
Havnor, the central island in the Earthsea Aeneas” in those
years she also wrote the first three Hainish novels: Rocannon's World
(1966), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967). Contin-
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151
uing her simultaneous exploration of these two worlds in 1967-68, she
wrote A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness
the USA in 1968-69, Le Guin was in England writing The Word for World
is Forest (1972, and separately, 1976). In 1979 she was working on
The Tombs of Atuan and The Lathe of Heaven at the same time; these
two novels appeared in magazines in the winter and spring of 1971,
and were published in hardcovers by Atheneum and Scribner's in June
and October, 1971, respectively. And then in September, 1972, three
months after Atheneum published The Farthest Shore, Scribner's
announced its forthcoming publication of The Higos Because
The Dispossessed was finally published by Harper § Row in 1974, it
has appeared to occupy a separate place in Le Guin's oeuvre. In time
of conception and execution, however, it is as close to The Farthest
Shore as The Left Hand of Darkness is to A Wizard of Earthsea.
This brief sketch of Le Guin's writing and publishing in the
decade 1963-75 indicates that we cannot separate the Earthsea trilogy
from Le Guin's other writing and treat it as though it were written
in a period of bifurcation and experimentation between The Left Hand
of Darkness and The Dispossessed. In fact, any separation of Le
Guin's writing into only two strands, or into two parallel worlds, is
to oversimplify and misrepresent with linear images a process more
adequately described with circular images. As I pointed out in chan-
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152
ter two, Le Guin was writing and rewriting stories set in Orsinia as
she was exploring Earthsea and the Hainish worlds; she was returning
to the country she discovered-invented in the early fifties even as
she was advancing her travels into the two imaginary countries she
invented-discovered in the early sixties.
All three of the stories with which Le Guin began her explora-
tions of Earthsea and the Hainish universe depict the failure of a
solitary individual's quest for home. Festin seeks home in his
native forests and Blackbeard and Semley seek it in jewels owned by
their ancestors. Like the novels that grew from them, these stories
are romance quests; but the heroes of the novels, unlike the questers
in the germinal stories, are successful in varying degrees because
they realize that the means and end of their quests is community--a
relationship with another person or persons who are racially, cultur-
ally, or sexually Other. The Dispossessed expresses this most fully:
Shevek and Takver and Bedap and Efor, like their predecessors Rocan-
non and Mogien, Jakob and Rolery, Genly Ai and Estraven, Sparrowhawk
and Vetch, Tenar and Ged, Arren and Sparrowhawk, and George Orr and
Heather Lelache, realize that they get on better "with a little help
from their friends." Le Guin's novels thus add a social dimension
missing from her early stories and from the traditional Romantic
Bildungsreise (educational journey) into Nature and back home again.
Still, the plot of nearly every piece of fiction Le Guin writes is
7
the distinctively Romantic “spiral journey back home." What M. H.
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153
Abrams identifies as the characteristic philosophies and forms of
imagination of the Romantic Age are all deeply embedded in Le Guin's
fiction and thus constitute her world-view: the self-moving and self-
sustaining system, immanent teleology, unity lost and unity regained,
progress by reversion, spiral journey back home, and the literary plot
of the circular or spiral auger” Not only are these embedded in Le
Guin's fiction: they are also present in the shape of her development
as awriter. The three stories I will be concentrating on in the
first parts of this chapter--"The Word of Unbinding,” "The Rule of
Names," and "Semley's Necklace" (Le Guin's preferred title for "The
Dowry of Angyar")--form the starting points for Le Guin's spiral
journeys in Earthsea and the Hainish universe.
II
In "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," Le Guin offers us a "history
of the discovery of Earthsea." Describing herself as an explorer
rather than an inventor, she says that she did not deliberately in-
vent Earthsea, nor did she plan it; she found it in her subconscious,
and then began to explore it.? The first published report of her dis-
covery is "The Word of Unbinding," the story of a middle-aged wizard
named Festin who has withdrawn from human society on his island in
order to learn patience by talking to trees, "whose roots are in pro-
found communication with running parapa S His goal, presumably, is
to find a way to be at home with himself, to get in touch with the
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154
deepest springs of his own being. For six months he ceases all doing,
speaking to no one and casting no spells. But Festin's urge to com-
mune with Nature, his attempt to go home again to "his own woods"
(p. 72), fails. Voll the Fell and his trolls, evil powers that de-
stroy forests and fields, enslave men, and imprison any wizard or
mage who resists, block Festin's Romantic solution to his middle-age
malaise. The plot of "The Word of Unbinding," if it can be said to
have a plot, is the story of Festin's repeated failures to escape
from a dungeon guarded by one of Voll's trolls. After exhausting his
repertoire of spells of Projection and Transformation, and after dis-
covering that even the "magic of going home" fails (p. 76), Festin
finally freely chooses the inevitable (death) by uttering the "word
of unbinding" (p. 77). Freed from the dungeon and from Being itself,
he can thus face Voll on his own terms. After chasing Voll down the
"far slope of the hill of being" (p. 78) into the "heart of the coun-
trv which has no seacoast" (p. 79), where nothing changes, Festin
forces Voll back into his body, which immediately returns to its
grave. He must then guard "this place where death had found a way
back into the other land" (p. 79).
Festin's search for the roots of being and of life leads him
through doing into non-being and death; intending to communicate with
running water, he ends in a dry stream bed, forgetting "the sound of
rain on the leaves of the forests of life" (p. 79). Festin, Le
Guin's first Earthsea hero, dies in order to learn what a later
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155
character in the Hainish universe already realizes before he dies: in
The Left Hand of Darkness Estraven knows that his "one way home was
by way of vee And like Festin, Estraven freely chooses the ul-
timate necessity when he skis into the foray guns of the Karhide bor-
der guards.
As a study of the relationship between life and death, between
being and doing, freedom and necessity, spirit and matter--themes
which have become central in Le Guin's work--"The Word of Unbinding"
is more psychomyth or psychodrama than a story with a well-developed
character and plot. The symbolic settings-~the paysage moralisé of
the land of the dead, which may owe much +o Rilke--carry the story's
meaning. Even so, the story is rich with discoveries that Le Guin
developed more fully in those later works in which her heroes go on
a quest with another person. As she points out in the headnote to
the story in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, the imagery of the land of
the dead foreshadows the end of The Farthest Shore. What she calls
her "obsession with trees," apparent throughout her work, makes its
first appearance in this oe” But "The Word of Unbinding" is
germinal for more than just the Earthsea trilogy: it anticipates The
Word for World is Forest, her fifth Hainish novel, as well as the
third Earthsea novel. Just as Voll the Fell and his trolls destroy
Festin's forest-home and enslave his people, Davidson and the Terran
loggers destroy Selver'’s forest-home and enslave the Athsheans;
Selver, like Festin, has to fight the forest-destroyers on their own
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156
terms; he must learn their ways with weapons. As a middle-aged hero
whe is forced into action and self-discovery, Festin is an early,
naive version of later Le Guin heroes like Rocannon, Estraven, Selver,
the Archmage Sparrowhawk, and Shevek, all of whom face a mid-life
crisis and must make moral descisions which in the end, after pain
and loss, create the possibility of a world in which they can "be at
home with themselves in their otherness as such," as Hegel says, and,
more importantly, to be at home with the Other in a community.
III
Le Guin's first Earthsea story does not give us a very clear idea
of the geography of the Archipelago and the Reaches (although the
Reaches are mentioned once, Festin's island is not named). Comparing
herself to the first discoverers of Antarctica, she says that she did
not know whether she had discovered an island or the tip of a conti-
TRT Nor does the story develop magic as fully as does the second
Earthsea story, "The Rule of Names." If "The Word of Unbinding" is
symbolic, "The Rule of Names" is imagistic: much of the story is made
up of marvelously detailed set-pieces of descriptions of daily life on
Sattins, an island Le Guin populates not with faceless evil and trolls,
but with "characters" in the old sense of the word. Goody Guld and
her nephew Birt would be at home in a low-life comic interlude in one
of the Waverly novels. More than mere set-pieces, though, the first
few scenes carefully prepare for the dramatic demonstration of "the
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157
rule of names" in the confrontation between Blackbeard and Mr. Under-
hill/Yevaud. In one of the first stories-within-a-story that she
would write, Le Guin has Blackbeard explain to Birt that he is a
descendant of the Sealords of Pendor, "mighty men, in the old days be-
fore the League" (p. 87). But they were not mighty enough to with-
Stand the attacks of the dragon Yevaud, who drives the people of Pen-
dor from their island and rather conventionally (the dragons in the
trilogy do not act so much like traditional Occidental dragons) hoards
the treasure of the House of Pendor, including "the great emerald, the
star of the hoard, Inalkil the Greenstone" (p. 88). After a League is
formed, it clears the Archipelago of piracy, then launches a fleet to
attack Pendor and recover the hoard for the League's treasury. But
Yevaud evades them ("evade," perhaps being his "true name"), leaving
a false trail that Blackbeard picks up and follows to Sattins. With
total self-sufficiency and self-righteous bluster, Blackbeard tells
Birt, "'I am the Sealord of Pendor, oaf, and I will have the gold my
fathers won, and the jewels my mother wore, and the Greenstone! For
they are mine''' (p. 89). Although Blackbeard has learned Mr. Under-
hill's true name, he has not learned that Yevaud is a dragon; in a
recognition scene which is also a reversal, he dies as he discovers
the truth.
One of the distinctive qualities of Le Guin's prose style in the
Earthsea trilogy makes its appearance in "The Rule of Names": her un-
canny knack for interweaving the familiar and the strange, for invest-
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eee
158
; r : 15 A P
ing ordinary events with aura. When Blackbeard arrives on Sattins
Island, he poses as a peddlar with a "small mixed cargo of cloth and
sandals and piswi feathers for trinming cloaks and cheap incense and
levity stones and fine herbs and great glass beads from Venway" (p.
84). It is just this kind of detail--Rilkean Dinge--that makes Le
Guin's fantasy (and her science fiction, too) so compelling. As Peter
Dickinson, a British writer of fantasy, has remarked,
If you're writing fantasies, you're like somebody who is trying
to lay a carpet where there's a terrifically strong draught
coming up between the floor-boards; the carpet keeps billowing
up and you've got to tack it down with detail all the time.
Le Guin's carpets are well tacked down.
Another important element in the Seige dragons, first appears
in "The Rule of Names." The history of the dragon Yevaud provides us
with an excellent opportunity for studying the relationship between a
germinal story and a fully developed novel, and throws some light on
the way Le Guin's writing has developed. In her headnote to "The Rule
of Names" in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, she rather coyly explains
that
readers familiar with the trilogy will notice . . . that the
history of the dragon Yevaud is somewhat obscure. (He must have
been on Sattins Island some decades or centuries hefore Ged
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159
found him, and bound him, on the Isle of Pendor.} But this is
only to be expected of dragons, who do not submit to the uni-
directional, causal requirements of history, being myths, and
neither timebinding, nor timebound (p- 71).
It may be true that dragons do not submit to the unidirectional,
causal requirements of history (little else in Le Guin's fiction does),
but this one, Yevaud, does submit to the requirements of the dialec-
tical logic of Ged's Romantic Bildungsreise. Yevaud has to be on Pen-
dor when Ged is sent to Low Torning in the Ninety Isles. When Le
Guin planned A Wizard of Earthsea, she cast Ged's coming of age in
the form of a story which is, she says, "essentially a voyage, a pat-
tern in the form of a long aera” What Abrams identifies as "a
distinctive figure of Romantic thought and imagination--the ascending
circle, or spiral . . . a circuitous journey back E is the in-
evitable aesthetic form for Ged's journey toward selfhood and whole-
ness, a process which some have identified with Jungian individua-
Han? Beginning his clockwise spiral journey from Gont, Ged sails
to Roke, then swings up to Low Torning and Pendor, tries to get back
to Roke but is impelled by his destiny up to Isskil, then across to
Gont (home again), and on out toward the Open Sea where the conflict
between Ged and his Shadow is aufgehoben. His struggle with Yevaud
on Pendor, and not elsewhere, is as necessary for the completion of
that journey as are his return home to Ogion and his visit to Vetch
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160
on Iffish (see the maps of Earthsea for this).
But why Yevaud and not some other dragon? Why not leave Yevaud
on Sattins and bring in another dragon to Pendor from Selidor or The
Dargons' Run? Because, possibly, the course of Le Guin's literary
career, her own Bildungsreise, follows the same pattern that her
heroes' journeys do. Each new book she creates is at once a circling
back to an earlier work to pick up a character or an image or a plot
Structure or a way of handling point of view, even as it is, at the
same time, an advance into new territory. If we consider Yevaud sub-
ject to the dialectical process that is the pattern of Le Guin's
career, his history becomes less obscure. Just as Ged had to return
home to Ogion before he could advance to meet his Shadow, Le Guin re-
turned to "The Rule of Names" to advance the plot of A Wizard of
Earthsea. Thus the Romantic paradigm of a "circular return which is
also an advance” is not only the informing structure of the parts
and wholes of her fiction, but it is also the design of the whole
body of her fiction as it grows and evolves. l
In "A Citizen of Mondath," Le Guin explains that her writing "has
been a matter of keeping on pushing out toward the limits--my own, and
those of the medium." For each push at the limits, though, there
has been a complementary return to the sources. One of her larger
pushes, The Left Hand of Darkness, is also a return; it is almost a
point by point retelling of Rocannon's Word. 7? And like Planet of
Exile, The Left Hand of Darkness portrays love between a black Terran
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161
and a lighter-skinned alien. Genly Ai's clockwise journey from Hor-
den Island through Erhenrang, Sassinoth, Mishnory, Pulefen Parmo aver
the Ice and then back through Sassinoth and Erhenrang, ending in Kerm
Land (Estraven's home), not far from Horden Island, where he began,
is a journey nearly homologous with Ged's in Earthsea. The idea of
the Shadow on Gethen, moreover, is as important as it is in Earthsea.
So a push at the limits of the Hainish cycle does not preclude a re-
turn to sources in Earthsea. Conversely, a push at the limits of the
Earthsea trilogy includes a return to the Hainish cycle: The Tombs of
Atuan is about how a white-skinned young woman comes of age with the
aid of a dark-skinned alien man, just as Planet of Exile, written six
years earlier, showed a white-skinned young woman coming of age with
the help of a black-skinned alien. Just as Jakob Agat entered
Rolery's mind with mindspeech, Ged enters Arha's labyrinth, patently
a symbol of her unconscious. Another Hainish novel, The Word for
World is Forest, reaches back to the first Earthsea story, "The Word
of Unbinding," echoing its title as well as its themes, and, like
Planet of Exile, contains three points of view, as does the science
fiction novel that followed it, The Lathe of Heaven. Finally, The
Dispossessed (a circular journey if ever there was one), which returns
the Hainish cycle to the Pre-League days, ends with a conversation be-
tween Shevek and Ketho, first mate on the Hainish starship Davenant.
The first Hainish novel, Rocannon's World, opens with a conversation
between Ketho, curator of the League museum in Kerguelen on New South
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162
Georgia, and Rocannon. Like Yevaud, Ketho (if he is the same person
in both novels) may not be subject to the unidirectional, causal re-
quirements of history.
It is possible to read each one of Le Guin's novels as the quest
of an E it is also possible to read her entire body of
fiction as we read The Prelude and other Romantic epics: as the growth
of the artist's mind. From this perspective, we should be able to
see Le Guin's fiction as an "organized unity in which all individua-
tion and diversity survive . . . as distinctions without division"
and not as a unidirectional stream that bifurcates. In 1961 Le Guin
returned to science fiction, which she had left behind in the late
forties as she went on to Radcliffe and Columbia and Orsinian tales
in the fifties; in the seventies she returned to her Orsinian tales,
publishing them after she had been making a name for herself by
writing fantasy and science fiction for over a decade. The relation-
ships between Orsinia, Earthsea, and the Hainish worlds are thus con-
siderably more complex than images of parallelism or counterweights
would indicate.
But to circle back to "The Rule of Names''~-one thing (in addition
to the trolls) that Le Guin did not bring forward from that storv into
the Earthsea trilogy is the League. If, as she explains in The Wind's
Twelve Quarters, “trolls became extinct in Earthsea at some point"
(p. 71)--her roundabout way of saying that she tapped her own creative
unconscious and did not have to rely on the Norse collective uncon-
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163
scious for imagery--then the League, by an analogous explanation, may
have teleported from her Inner Lands to her Outer Space, there to
find a home as The League of Worlds in the Hainish universe, which
Le Guin discovered as she wrote "Semley's Necklace." Besides sharing
the League, "The Rule of Names" and "Semley's Necklace" have other
things in common. Both stories open with the point of view of the
owners of the jewels the heroes quest for, and both stories are
failed quests, making the same ethical judgments about arrogance and
self-sufficiency. "Semley's Necklace" draws on Earthsea as it
creates the Hainish universe.
IV
When Le Guin assembled The Wind's Twelve Quarters, she placed
"Semley's Necklace" first because it is, she says in her headnote,
"the most characteristic of [her] early science fiction and fantasy
works, the most romantic of them all" (p. 1). ''Semley's Necklace"
is characteristic in that it combines fantasy and science fiction,
myth and science; it is one of those early stories Le Guin elsewhere
calls her "fairytales decked out in space saa But "Semley's
Necklace" is more than a characteristic and romantic early story;
it was the germ of Rocannon's World, the first of six science
fiction novels set in Le Guin's Hainish future history.
"Semley's Necklace," as it appears in The Wind's Twelve Quarters,
was first published as "Prologue: The Necklace" in Rocannon's World
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164
(1966). "Prologue: The Necklace," in turn, is the revision of "The
Dowry of Angyar" (1964). In her account of the genesis of Rocannon's
World in her "Foreword" to The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Le Guin says,
I had done with Semley when I had finished ("The Dowry of Ang-
yar"], but there was a minor character, a mere bystander, who
did not sink back obediently into obscurity when the story was
done, but kept nagging me. ‘Write my story,' he said. 'I'm Ro-
cannon. I want to explore my world' (pp. vii-viii).
Le Guin responded to Rocannon's nagging by writing parts I and II of
what is now Rocannon's World. When her manuscript reached Ace books,
it was not long enough to fill one-half of an Ace Double, so she re-
vised thoroughly "The Dowry of Angyar," added the opening paragraphs
on fact and legend, and attached it to Rocannon's World as "Prologue:
25
The Necklace."
By describing ''Semley's Necklace" as the germ of Rocannon's
World, Le Guin invites us to consider that novel and the subsequent
stories and novels in the Hainish cycle as an organic growth from the
story. "Semley's Necklace," then, would be the formal and thematic
source of the Hainish cycle, the root of the more complex and develop-
ed plots and statements in the later works. This does not mean that
"Semley's Necklace" is the first of several serial-linear episodes
set on Hainish worlds. Rather, it means that "Semley's Necklace,"
although complete in itself, contains tensions and raises questions
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165
that its plot resolves only temporarily. "Semley's Necklace" is an
aesthetic whole that synthesizes divergent elements, yet it is like
the synthesis in any open-ended dialectical process: its internal
tensions produce contradictory elements that require a new synthesis.
Rocannon is one such element: he does not sink back into obscurity,
but nags for further development.
"Semley's Necklace" opens with one of the most conventional sit-
uations in science fiction: the encounter with an alien. The original
version of the story begins with Rocannon reading from his Handy
Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms (at the same time Le Guin in-
vites us to identify with Rocannon's point of view, seeing through his
eyes as he reads, she also signals us not to trust too fully someone
who uses a guidebook with so many telling adjectives in its title;
The Left Hand of Darkness opens with a much more subtle use of the
same technique). A stunningly beautiful woman (Semley) and four
"dwarves" have come to the Leaguc museum in Kerguelen, capital of New
South Georgia (a member world in the League of Worlds), and stand
before Ketho and Rocamon. 7° Rocannon has encountered the "dwarves"
before, but because the League contacts with their home have been
selective, he has no idea what or who the woman might be. So he con-
sults his guide book and determines that she is an Angya escorted by
four Gdemiar from Fomalhaut II, several light-years away. Looking up
from his book, Rocannon says, "'Well, now at least we know what she
is.' Ketho, profoundly impressed by her beauty, replies, "'I wish
P y I ;
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166
there were some way on knowing who she is. . . .'" (p. 3). There is
a way, but it is not available to Rocannon and Ketho. Le Guin offers
it to us as she shifts from Rocannon's point of view to Semley's, and
tells Semley's story, for she knows intuitively what Hannah Arendt ex-
plains in The Human Condition: "who somebody is or was we can only
know by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero i . . every-
thing else we know of him. . . tells us only what he is or nag 02?
In the opening paragraphs of this germinal story, Le Guin uses
a narrative technique and establishes a theme that she will return to
again and again: the relationship between different kinds of knowl-
edge or ways of knowing, and the use of multiple points of view to
explore those relationships. On the one hand there is "what-knowl-
edge," the product of an advanced technology based on rational, objec-
tive, scientific, and conscious thought: on the other hand, the "who-
knowledge" we get from a story grounded in intuitive, subjective,
artistic, and unconscious modes. (These are analogous to the
Gesellschaft-Gemeinschaft cultural pairings in most of Le Guin's
science fiction novels, as well as to the complementarity of science
and myth.) In 'Semley's Necklace" these two modes are literally
light-years apart, even when they meet in the museum as Rocannon and
Semley face each other; without a common language, they cannot com-
municate, But if the characters in the story cannot understand each
other, the story itself gives us, its readers, ways of seeing the
connections between them: the story itself is the mediation between
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167
the two modes of knowing, the metalanguage that can synthesize seem-
ingly irreconciliable opposites into complementary aspects of a
whole. And this is precisely one of the functions of story-telling:
"the way of art," says Le Guin, "is. . . to keep open the tenuous,
difficult, essential connections between the two extrenest Le
Guin's principal tool for that integrative task is, as I argued in
chapter one, the romance quest.
Although "Semley's Necklace" contains all the trappings of a
quest, it is not a romance. It is a tragedy. Like the other heroes
and heroines of the romance, though, Semley has experienced a loss of
social status, and is acutely aware of her deteriorating identity as
a pure descendant of the first kings of the Angyar. Who she is has
become problematic for her; she does not feel at home. After her
marriage to Durhal, her pride turns to envy and resentment as she dis-
covers that she is not able to "outshine other women" (p. 6), espe-
cially those who defer to her because of her superior birth and rank,
but who nevertheless display greater riches. The Angyar, described
in Rocannon's guide book as a "feudal-heroic culture" (p. 5), have
accumulated wealth as the Vikings did, in raids and wars on their
neighbors, just as the Sealords of Pendor do in "The Rule of Names,"
just as the Kargad Empire does in A Wizard of Earthsea. But since
the League has been taxing the Angyar, they sit in their Revelhalls
in "idle shame" (p. 4), their warlike spirits and their cultural
identities broken. Semley remembers that her great-grandmother had
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168
worn a Massive sapphire set in a solid gold necklace--lost now for
three generations--and she hopes that by recovering it she will be
able to restore the lost glory of her ancestral identity, just as
Blackbeard had hoped to restore himself as a Sealord of Pendor by re-
trieving Inalkil the Greenstone. "'Think, Durossa,'" Semley says to
her sister-in-law, "’if I could come into Hallan Revel and sit down
by my husband with the wealth of a kingdom round my neck, and outshine
the other women as he outshines all ment!" (p. 6).
Impulsively brushing aside Durossa's suggestion that Durhal's
pride is in his wife and not in what she wears, Semley leaves her
three year-old daughter with Durossa and sets out on a quest to re-
cover the precious object she hopes will re-establish and reconfirm
her identity. She flies to her father's home on a windsteed (a horse-
Sized flying cat) but finds him in a drunken stupor amid the ruins of
his castle and of no assistance. The "magic of going home" is as
futile for Semley as it was for Festin. She visits the Fiia, an elv-
ish people living an idyllic life in sunshine and happiness (cf.
Frye's "idyllic world"); they advise her against her quest. Single-
mindedly intent on getting the necklace, she disregards their warnings
and flies on to the caves of the Gdemiar, a race of dwarf-like people
who made the necklace, sold it to Semley's ancestor, and are rumored
to have stolen it back. Just as many questers cross a threshold into
another world, enchanted or demotic, Semley enters a '"cave-mouth, a
toothless, yawning mouth from which a stinking warmth sighed out" (p.
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169
12), the entrance to "the Realm of Night" (p. 13) (clearly, Frve's
"demotic world," characterized by alienation). Semley is no less in-
Sistent than Blackbeard, though she is more polite, as she asks the
Gdemiar for the Eye of the Sea (Seaheart in the original version).
The Gdemiar, who had traded it to the League for an automatic-drive
spaceship, agree to guide Semley to the necklace, knowing that the
trip will take sixteen years, vet telling her that it will last "but
one long night" (p. 16). They have recognized that Semley's single-
minded commitment to recovering the necklace leaves her vulnerable
to manipulation and they maliciously anticipate an opportunity to
dupe and to take advantage of an arrogant and beautiful Angya. In
due course, she receives the necklace from Rocannon (from Ketho in
the original version), returns to her home planet, flies back to Hal-
lan on her windsteed, only to discover Durhal has been dead for nine
years, her sister-in-law Durossa is an old woman, and her daughter
Haldre is as old as she is. These revelations overwhelm Semley; drop-
ping the necklace on the stone floor, she runs into the forest, lost
in madness. Like Blackbeard's quest, hers has not led to a re-
covery of identity, but to comlete alienation and disaster.
V
When Ted White reprinted the story in The Best from Amazing, he
introduced it with this headnote:
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170
the idea as such is not new. We've all played with the notion
of time-dilation, with the Einsteinian principle of the con-
traction of time as one approaches the speed of light. But
Ursula K. Le Guin--in a story which became the root of her first
novel, and thus the entire series which has culminated in her
superb The Left Hand of Darkness--has distilled this common con-
cept into the purity of myth. 7?
White's remarks, which embody a widely-held belief that science fic-
tion is the mythology of the modern world, and which imply that a
Science fiction writer makes myths from the materials of twentieth-
century science, do not accurately describe what Le Guin is doing in
"Semley's Necklace." On three different occasions, when she was dis-
cussing the role of myth in science fiction, Le Guin has explained
that in "Semley's Necklace" she was retelling a Norse myth, the story
of Freya and the Brisingamen Necklace. So the purity of myth is
clothed in science fiction, not distilled from as Better than
metaphors of extraction and purification or covering and disguising,
however, the idea of chiasmus describes what Le Guin is doing in "Sem-
ly's Necklacd': myth and science are crossed with each other as the
nerves from our eyes to our brains are, making left into right and
right into left, or, they are crossed as homologous chromosomes are
during meiosis, producing exchanges and recombinations of senes
In the Norse story, Freya, the lascivious goddess of summer and
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171
love, leaves Asgard in a chariot drawn by cats, wanders into Midgard,
and in a cave encounters four dwarves making the Brisingamen Neck-
lace. The beauty of the necklace so impresses Freya that she has to
have it at any price. The dwarves have all the gold and silver they
want, and therefore reject her offer of hard currency. They are in-
terested in Freya herself. So Freya exchanges her favors for the
necklace, and returns to Asgard only to find that her husband Odur
is gone. Broken by her loss, she runs from Asgard looking for him,
dropping tears of gold (or flowers in some versions) wherever she
goes. Like the Greek myth of Persephone's Marriage to Pluto, Freya's
story is connected with the end of summer; the tragic simplicity of
her fate is rooted in the inevitability of seasonal change.
The Gdemiar, who have "grey-white skins, dampish looking like the
skins of grubs" (p. 11), are Le Guin's version of the subterranean
nocturnal dwarves who grew from maggots in the corpse of the giant
Ymir, just as the Fiia are her version of the airy and benevolent
elves of Norse myth and legend. The windsteeds have their source in
the cats which pull Freya's chariot (crossed, perhaps, with something
like Pegasus}, and the necklace Semley quests for resembles not only
the Brisingamen Necklace, but also the various rings in Norse myth
and legend which exercise a baleful influence on their possessors and
ultimately return to their makers, myths revived by Wagner in the
nineteenth century and by Tolkien in the twentieth. Four dwarves
receive Freya's favors; four Gdemiar escort Semley to Kerguelen,
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172
pawing and fondling her along the way. In addition to borrowing and
transforming specific elements from Norse myth, Le Guin preserves the
flavor of Norse poetic style with kennings: Semley's father is "gray
and swollen as the web-spinner of ruined houses" (p. 8), and Semley
herself is "Halla's bride, Kirien-lady, Windborne, Semley the Fair"
(p. 9). This orvhic style contrasts sharply with the pedestrian
speech of Ketho and Rocannon, and reinforces the divisions between
the two worlds.
But it is less important to know Le Guin's source than it is to
understand the relationship between the myth and its science fiction
setting. Le Guin said in an interview that her job as an artist "is
not to use myths, but to be used by myths. . . . The real thing is
to find the native symbology of your own creative unconscious
and try to integrate it in terms comprehensible to others, and aes-
thetically solid." Norse myths, she continued, "are part of mv 'child-
hood lore,' they shaped my imagination. "”" So Freya's story is part
of the native symbology of Le Guin's creative unconscious, which she
integrated with the idiom of science fiction, terms comprehensible to
twentieth-century readers. Ina sense, Norse myth is a heuristic
device, a catalyst for freeing Le Guin's own creativity; she circled
back to her "childhood lore," a circular return which was also an ad-
vance. What makes Semley's tragedy "aesthetically solid" is the tra-
gic irony Le Guin creates from the intersection, the crossing and
interaction of the myth and its science fiction setting, and from the
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173
mutually estranging interplay of the two points of view in the story.
Frye says that the normal containing form of the romance is a possible
future while archaism is the normal content; the science fiction and
the myth in "Semley's Necklace" seem to fit this notion, and Le Guin
consciously exploits the clash between the two. In a review of a
Russian science fiction novel, she writes,
The genre [of Hard to be a God] is one familiar to American SF
readers: Terran observers of the future, bound to non-interfer-
ence, among (extraterrestrial) human beings whose society and
culture resemble that of mediaeval Europe. A double estrange-
ment, and the best of both worlds--the romance of future tech-
nology, plus the romance of feudalism. Something similar has
been done by several American authors . . . including nyself.>>
But the science fiction in "Semley's Necklace" does not "contain"
the myth, as Frye's formulation would suggest; rather, it is braided
together with it, woven in and out of it. Because the two points of
view estrange each other, and because we hold them both in our minds
as we read the story, each event has at least two dimensions, mythic
and scientific, unconscious and conscious. After we read (through Ro-
cannon's eyes) the coldly "scientific" description of the races on
Fomalhaut II. we then experience them mediated through Semley's eyes
as we participate in her intense desire to recover the Eye of the Sea.
And while we subjectively experience "one long night" with Semley, we
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174
objectively know that it is sixteen years long. With one "part" of
our minds, we are actors in the story, and with another "part," we
are spectators: acting with Rocannon, we watch Semley in the museum:
acting with Semley, we arrive in the museum to watch Rocannon. The
ironies are reciprocal. Fact and myth and scientific law and tragic
fate are intertwined so that (to shift the metaphor) the story be-
comes a Möbius strip: the two sides or "parts" may seem to be dif-
ferent, yet they are in fact the same. Through coincidentia opposi-
torum, the chiasmus becomes a E
This is more a description of the potential of Le Guin's method;
in practice, in this story, one side is decidedly weaker than the
other. Rocannon the objective intellectual is a "mere bystander";
his main function is to embody the scientific point of view, to be a
vehicle for introducing the notion of time-dilation so that Semley's
mythic fate becomes rationally credible for readers who have come to
expect scientific explanations. Crossed with relativity physics, a
myth about seasonal change is readily accepted by readers who might
otherwise dismiss it as a "mere story."
Just as Le Guin uses physics to translate Semley's fate for
modern readers, she uses another science, anthropology, to translate
mythic and fairy-tale figures into the individuals, races, and cul-
tures which give Semley's story a vividly imagined background. In
the process of inventing the settings and cultures in which Semley
enacts her quest, Le Guin placed her in a complex web of relationships
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175
on Fomalhaut II, and made the initial exploration of a theme which is
developed more fully in the Hainish cycle: the relationship of part
and whole.
Semley is a member of a culture which is part of a world of many
Separate cultures which in turn become part of the colonial empire of
the League. When the League begins taxing the Angyar and developing
the technological skills of the Gdemiar with only the most superficial
knowledge and understanding of their cultural patterns and relation-
Ships, it upsets the balance on Fomalhaut II and thus dislocates the
culture of which Semley is a part. Semley's quest is her response.
It is reactionary in that she wants to recover a necklace which is a
symbol of the old ways before the coming of the League when Angyar
lords conquered fiefs, dressed their women in jewels, and bought hus-
bands for their daughters with dowries of "heroic loot” (p. 4). Sem-
ley's quest is a denial of the new relationships with the League, a
denial of something she is ignorant of. In a series of dialectical
reversals, Semley's effort to deny the League carries her into the
future. She does not understand, and because of her pride as an Angya
does not want to understand, her culture's relationships with the
Gdemiar and the League. The goal of her quest, like the goal of
Blackbeard's quest, is self-aggrandizement, and the failure of her
quest is a pointed ethical judgment of her motivation. Her sixteen
year-long journey is Le Guin'ts metaphor for the judgment that Semley's
self-absorption and pride, her tragic flaws, cut her off from rela-
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176
tionships with those around her, remove her from history, and form
a breach between herself and her world that leads to madness. She
ceases to be part of the whole.
The thematic statement that runs throughout the Hainish cycle,
and the Earthsea trilogy as well, and is articulated first in "Sem-
ley's Necklace" is this: if people act without an understanding and
appreciation of the web of relationships in which they are a strand,
they will find their actions producing effects and consequences which
are the opposite of those intended. But if one acts in harmony with
the whole, he wiil be at home with himself and his world. And it
seems that the only way one ever gets knowledge of the whole is to
gO on a quest, to go "there" in order to discover "here," to discover
and confront the Other in order to find the Self. A recent poem by
Le Guin says it well:
Travelling
Use is grace.
Spirit in constancy
finds voice, binds space
Silence of absence: heart
seeks to speak, but faint,
strained among strangers.
Alone is all constraint
Call self O prison! -- free
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177
is not to be
3 35
but to be part.
But all the responsibility for Semley's failure to understand
her part in the web of relationships on her world and between her
world and the League cannot be assigned to her alone. She is also
a victim of the manner in which the League cavalierly exploits Fomal-
haut II without understanding the people there. In the Norse myth,
Freya's tragedy is as natural as seasonal change. In "Semley's Neck-
lace," Le Guin has translated a myth of the end of summer into a story
about the personai costs of cultural and militaristic imperialism.
Ketho and Rocannon, mere bystanders, are in the story to represent the
League's ignorance of its colonial subjects. Rocannon has to consult
his guide book, a parody of ethnological knowledge, merely = identify
what Semley is. Who she is is completely bevond his grasp because he
does not know any of her culture's stories (and, as I will argue in
chapter four, that is why Genly Ai collects Gethenian narratives: he
wants to know who Estraven is so that he can find out who he is by
telling "the story of which he is himself the hero"). Not knowing who
Semley is. Rocannon greets her with a Silly gesture he calls his All-
purpose Intercultural Curtsey. He corrects Ketho when he hears him
using the label "trogs'" for the Gdemiar, and then nearly uses the
same racial slur when he says, "'I wish we could talk to her without
these tr-- Gdemiar as interpreters’ (p. 19).
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Rocannon's desire for unmediated communication with Semley,
prompted by a curiosity partially erotic and partially scientific, is
an impulse toward direct communication between the two worlds repre-
sented by the two points of view in the story. His impulse is frus-
trated, for it is incompatible with the tragic myth that is Le Guin's
source. Instead of integrating and synthesizing two points of view
(as she would do in The Left Hand of Darkness, for example), Le Guin
plays them off against each other, using the one for an ironic per-
spective on the other. By opening the story with the tableau in the
museum, then switching to Semley's point of view, Le Guin can narrate
Semley's quest with tragic irony at every step, just as she did in
"The Rule of Names" by opening with Mr. Underhill, and just as she
wouid do in The Left Hand of Darkness, where she subtly undercuts
Genly Ai's point of view from the beginning. Rocannon's point of view
is as ironically undercut as Semley's: its limitations are obvious
when we, who have traveled with Semley to Kerguelen, watch him gues-
Sing about the relationship between Semley and the Gdemiar. Communi-
cation, frustrated in "Semley's Necklace," will be one of the most
central, and sometimes the central, theme in the Hainish novels.
When Le Guin constructed the complex situation in which Semley's
quest is played out, she created tensions and raised questions that
the tragic resolution of the plot holds together only momentarily.
The background of Semley's tragedy, the conflict between the feudal-
heroic world of the Angyar and the technological-militaristic world
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of the League, remains. If Le Guin were a writer with a tragic
vision, she could rest there, for tragedy confirms the status quo as
it bows to the inevitability of fate. But she is a Romantic, and
therefore sensitive to the possibilities and potentialities that may
be latent in the present situation. At the end of "Semley's Necklace"
Rocannon is aware of a blind spot in the League's understanding of its
colonial races and cultures. Twice Le Guin has Rocannon admit his
lack of understanding: "'I never feel I really understand these hiera-
tic races,''"' he says of the Gdemiar; and as Semley walks away from
him, he feels as though he has ''blundered through the corner of a
legend, of a tragic myth, even, which I do not understand'" (0. 21).
Rocannon's new awareness of the League's limitations, combined with
the erotic awe and curiosity Semley elicits from Rocannon, raise
possibilities and expectations that are neither fulfilled nor dissi-
pated at the end of the story.
What Le Guin needed after finishing "Semley's Necklace" was a
structure capable of carrying the creative growth that resulted from
her planting Freya's story in the conventions and traditions of
science fiction. So after she finished with Semley, she responded to
Rocannon's nagging by sending him to Fomalhaut II as the leader of an
ethnographic survey team. Nowhere in the original version of "Sem-
ley's Necklace" does Le Guin identify Rocannon as an ethnologist. But
when Rocannon nagged himself into existence as a fully fledged ethnol-
ogist, Le Guin had a ready vehicle for exploring the details only
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180
hinted at in "Semlev's Necklace." As an ethnologist, he can explore
the cultures only glimpsed briefly in "Semley's Necklace," he can in
his own person as scientist and romance hero represent a combination
of "what-knowledge" and "who-knowledge," and he can sublimate his
desire to know more about Se.iley and her world in a romance quest that
will bring together the two points of view that had been light-years
apart when they first met in the League museum. More than that, he
will learn mindspeech, a new form of communication, and will communi-
cate his discovery of the "Last Art" to the rest of the League, giving
it a way of breaking down the walls that separate worlds and cultures.
Communication creates community.
VI
"Bacon's attempt to rehabilitate magia as natural science in its
5 s = „36 7 t
operative aspect proved quite abortive. Not so Le Guin's attempt
in the Earthsea trilogy, at least not for Robert Scholes: "no one,"
says Scholes, "has ever made magic seem to function so much like
science as Ursula Le Guin." Scholes quotes Ged's words to Yarrow,
Vetch's sister, on the sources of power,
It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think.
Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and
wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's
root: they all arise together. My name and yours, and the true
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181
name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all
are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the
i 37
shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.
and then asks,
Is this magic? Religion? Science? The great gift of Ursula Le
Guin is to offer us a perspective in which these all merge, in
which realism and fantasy are not opposed, because the super-
natural is naturalized--not merely postulated but regulated,
systematized, made part of the Great Equilibrium teceie
The perspective Scholes is talking about here is just one facet of
Le Guin's over-all perspective, just one constellation of her moulds
of understanding. Like her distancing technique in Orsinian Tales,
which dissolves the barriers between realism and fantasy as it syn-
thesizes aesthetics, history, and ethics, and like her perspective in
"Semley's Necklace," which crosses myth with science, Le Guin's per-
spective in the Earthsea trilogy (whose genre has been aptly and, I
believe, accurately, labeled “ethical fantasy'"">*) demonstrates the
complementarity of myth and legend, magic, science, and religion (in
a general sense: Taoism).
Le Guin's artistry in '"Semley's Necklace" is a process of weaving
together a Norse myth and a principle of physics; in her fantasy tri-
logy, she projects and objectifies that creative process as the insti-
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182
tution of magic in Earthsea, and that institution is simultaneously
and similarly woven from two major strands. On the one hand there is
the warp of myth and legend: the Celtic and Teutonic lore about magic
which Le Guin has been absorbing since she was a child; and on the
other hand there is the weft of science: the anthropological investi-
gations and theories of magic which she has also been absorbing since
she was a child growing up in the Kroeber household. Complementing
the literary and imaginative image of magic she received from Colun,
Asbjornsen, Andersen, the Eddas and Sagas, Dunsany and Tolkien, is a
scientific image of actual magic from Frazer and Malinowski, the two
anthropologists who seem to have contributed the most to Le Guin's
picture of magic in Earthsea.
One of the familiar elements in Le Guin's magic is the 600 Hardic
runes that every wizard must learn to read; anyone coming to Le Guin's
trilogy from Tolkien's would he at home with them. But Le Guin's
wizards, unlike Tolkien's aged and solitary men of wisdom and power,
are members of a social institution (except Ogion, pernaps, who is
more Taoist hermit-sage than wizard). The institution shares much
with Celtic seater Like the druids, who were a non-hereditary
order headed by a leader elected to serve for life, the wizards and
mages of Earthsea are a society which elects an Archmage to rule over
them. Becoming a druid meant undergoing a protracted period of oral
instruction in subjects like astrology, geography, physical science,
and natural theology; the school for wizards on Roke in Earthsea, like
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183
the colleges for druids reputed to have existed in Ireland, provides
just this kind of training for would-be mages. The druids were re-
nowned as shape-changers, as are the wizards in Earthsea, who can
change themselves into animals or birds. The druids were supposed to
have resisted Christian missionaries with mists and fogs, and were
credited with saving Paris from Viking marauders in A.D. 845: thev
enveloped them in a fog and then the Parisians easily cut down the
baffled invaders. Ged uses this spell to save his home town Re Albi
from the Kargad warriors and to save Arren from pirates.
The vital significance of the Innermost Grove for all of Earthsea
is a reflection of the importance of trees for the druids. The Romans
knew very well that tree-worship was the heart and soul of druidism:
when Suetonius Petronius wanted to eliminate the power of the druids,
he defoliated their sanctuaries on Angelsea in A.D. 58. Although Le
Guin shrouds the Immanent Grove in mystery, she clearly indicates that
it means as much to Earthsea as the sacred groves of oak meant to the
druids:
What is learned in the Immanent Grove is not much talked about
elsewhere. It is said that no spells are worked there, vet the
place itself is an enchantment. Sometimes the trees of that
Grove are seen, and sometimes they are not seen, and they are not
always in the same place and part of Roke Island. It is said
that the trees themselves are wise. It is said that the Master
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184
Patterner learns his supreme magery there within the Grove, and
if ever the trees should die so shall his wisdom die, and in
those days the waters will rise and drown the islands of Earth-
sea (WE, p. 87).
In The Farthest Shore, Le Guin gives us a fuller picture of the Grove.
We learn that "the Grove does not move. Its roots are the roots of
being. It is all the rest that moves" (FS, p. 12).
Most of this lore, along with much more on weather-working, the
shadow, and the magic power of names, is collected in Frazer, which
Le Guin came to quite early on. She says she read Leaves from the
Golden Bough, a children's edition "culled" by Lady Frazer, as other
children would read Beatrix Potter's animal fables, and then, "as a
kid," she went on to read The Golden Bough itself. Frazer surely
contributed to Le Guin's notion of magic as a kind of science, and
probably influenced or reinforced some of the ideas that form the
general framework of her fiction: the seasonal changes that are the
background for almost all the turns of plot in her romances, and the
waste land myth that she dramatizes in The Farthest Shore. But Le
Guin has not accepted Frazer's condescending attitude toward his sub-
ject (he described The Golden Bough as "a dark, a tragic chronicle of
human error and folly, of fruitless endeavor, wasted time, and
blighted hones?” -)3 she has instead adopted some of the ideas about
magic that Malinowski, one of Frazer's disciples, derived from his
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185
fieldwork in the archipelagos of the western Pacific.
Frazer says in his "Preface" to Argonauts of the Western Pacific
that "magic is a power of supreme importance either for good or
evil; 4? Ogion tells Ged that "every word, every act of our Art is
said and done either for good, or for evil" (WE, p. 35). This is but
one of the many echoes of Malinowski's book in Le Guin's trilogy.
Malinowski, in fact, may have had something to do with Earthsea being
an archipelago: Le Guin did not have a clear picture of what her
imaginary country was like until ee gave "serious consideration
[to] magic," she says, and that could have included looking into Mal-
E a The Long Dance in Earthsea, "one music binding together
the sea-divided lands" (WE, p. 69), does for the several peoples of
Le Guin's archipelago what the Kula does for the cultures Malinowski
studied. It
welds together a considerable number of tribes, and it embraces
a vast complex of activities, interconnected, and playing into
one another, so as to form one organic whole. . . . All around
the ring of Kula there is a network of relationships . . . the
whole forms one interwoven fabric.
Malinowski's organicism and his weaving metaphor would be attractive
to Le Guin; her cosmology of Equilibrium and Balance in Earthsea may
derive as much from Malinowski's study of the Kula as it does from
Taoism.
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186
Unlike some anthropologists, Mauss and Levi-Strauss for example,
Malinowski is more interested in the relationships between magic and
Science than the similarities between Magic and religion; he follows
Frazer in seeing it as a pseudo-science:
Magic is akin to science in that it always has a definite aim
intimately associated with human instincts, needs, and pursuits.
- . Like other arts and crafts, it is also governed by a
theory, by a system of principles which dictate the manner in
which the act has to be performed in order to be effective.
- . Both magic and science develop a special technique. In
magic, as in the other arts, man can undo what he has done or
mend the damage which he has wrought. . . . Thus both magic and
science show certain similarities, and, with Sir James Frazer,
we can appropriately call magic a pseudo-science.
Le Guin’s magic is very close to this. In Earthsea, evil is something
woven by men alone, and can be unraveled only by another man. The
School for Wizards on Roke is devoted to teaching the system of pitie
ciples which govern the use of magic. For both Malinowski and Le
Guin, magic is a thoroughly humanistic and secular activity, based not
on rites but on the magic word. Magic, says Malinowski,
is a specific power, essentially human, autonomous and indepen-
dent in its action. This power is an inherent property of
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187
certain words [whose] action is direct and not mediated by any
other agency. . . . The native is deeply convinced of this mys-
terious, intrinsic power of certain words; words which are be-
lieved to have their virtue in their own right, so to speak;
having come into existence from primeval times and exercising
47
their influence directly.
The Old Speech, or Eldest Tongue as it is sometimes called, has been
in existence in Earthsea since primeval times, indeed since the demi-
urge Segoy created the world with a speech act. When he knows these
words, the "true names" of things, the mage can control them and
change them. Like the natives Malinowski studies, Le Guin herself is
“deeply convinced of this mysterious, intrinsic power of certain
words." They are the tools of her craft. For her, she says, "as for
wizards, to know the name of an island or a character is to know the
island or person.""7°
According to Malinowski, magic "bridges over the gap" between the
realm of myth and everyday eS It is "not only human in its
embodiment, but also in its subject-matter . . . it is not directed so
much to nature as to man's relation to nature? Magic, then, is an
activity that connects the timeless world of myth with present actual-
ity, or, using words familiar to European thought, we could say that
magic bridges over the gap between the unconscious and consciousness
even as it connects subject and object. It is an activity that makes
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188
possible a coherent relationship between humanity and nature, between
perceiving mind and perceived object. In this sense, in terms of its
purpose, it is no different from art and science. "The force of
magic," says Malinowski, "resides within man and can escape only
through his voice." This is to say that the individual magician
uses language, like an artist or a scientist, to shape the relation-
shiv between self and other in two senses: in one sense it binds the
Other within and the Other without, and also binds the realm of spirit
and the realm of matter. Magic, like art, is an integrating and syn-
thesizing activity. In Le Guin's cosmology these two realms are one:
Ged can communicate with dragons (which he calls dreams and which Le
Guin calls myths) as easily as he can control rocks. Their true
names are words in the same language. He can be both Dragoniord and
builder of "the deep-founded sea wall of Nepp" (FS, p. 9).
There are, surely, many more sources for Le Guin's Magic, but
these two, the Celtic-Teutonic from the extreme northwest corner of
the Eurasian landmass and the Melanesian from the extreme southeast
corner, the first mythic and the second scientific, seem to be the
most important. A brief survey of the curriculum of the School of
Wizards on Roke will illustrate how Le Guin has woven them together
on a frame of ethics. After an apprectice mage has learned to read
and write the Six Hundred Runes of Hardic, he goes to Roke where his
instruction begins with myth and legend, ends with physics, and is
crowned with metaphysics and mysticism.
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189
He studies with the Master chanter and the Master Windkey, learn-
ing from the first the legends, songs, and myths of Earthsea, and
from the second meteorology and sailing, the "arts of wind and
weather" (WE, p. 55). "Mage and sailor are not so far apart," Le Guin
tells us; "both work with the powers of sky and sea, and bend great
winds to the uses of their hands" (FS, p. 39). From the Master Herbal
he learns botany, medicine, and medical ethics: "heal the wound and
cure the illness, but let the dying spirit go" (WE, p. 95). The
Master Hand teaches entertainment and conjuring, "sleight and jugglery
and the lesser arts of Changing" (WE, p. 55), as well as giving Ged a
lesson on the ethical uses of power:
Illusion fools the beholder's senses; it makes him see and hear
and feel that the thing is changed. But it does not change the
thing. To change this rock into a jewel, you must change its
true name. And to do that, my son, even to so small a scrap of
the world, is to change the world. It can be done. Indeed it
has been done. It is the art of the Master Changer, and you will
learn it, when you are ready to learn it. But you must not
change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know
what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in
Balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of changing and Sum-
moning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that
power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve
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190
need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow (WE, pp. 56-57).
He could as easily be speaking to an atomic physicist. Because
"magic consists in. . . the true naming of a thing" (WE, p- 59), the
Master Namer has a central place in the education of a mage. In A
Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin shows him teaching geographical place
names, and in The Farthest Shore, he is teaching botanical names.
Like the other Masters, he too teaches ethics:
In the world under the sun, and in the other world that has no
sun, there is much that has nothing to do with men and men's
speech, and there are powers beyond our power. .. . A mage can
control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and
wholly. And this is well. If it were not so, the wickedness of
the powerful or the folly of the wise would long ago have sought
to change what cannot be changed, and Equilibrium would fail.
The unbalanced sea would overwhelm the islands where we perilous-
ly dwell, and in the old silence all voices and all names would
be lost (WE, pp. 60, 61).
The Master Changer teaches not only the "true spells of Shaping" (WE,
Pp- 67), but also the wider implications of changing anything:
if a thing is really to be changed into another thing, it must
be re-named for as long as the spell lasts, and . . . this
affects the names and natures of things surrounding the trans-
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ig]
formed thing (WE, p. 67).
Once again, the teaching of a skill involves lessons in the ethical
use of that skill. The Master Summoner teaches nothing less than
physics:
only true magic, the summoning of such energies as light, and
heat, and the force that draws the magnet, and those forces men
perceive as weight, form, color, sound: real powers, drawn from
immense fathomless energies of the universe. . . . [He] showed
them why the true wizard uses such spells only at need, since to
summon up such earthly forces is to change the earth of which
they are a part (WE, p. 68).
Finally, the student wizard enters the Immanent Grove to learn from
the Master Patterner. All along his instruction has been studded with
ethical lessons based on a metaphysics of organicism and integration
and balance. Now he enters the Immanent Grove and apparently exper-
iences that ultimate reality of Being into which all contraries and
dualities merge. Perhaps in the Immanent Grove the mage hears the
one word Segoy spoke when he created the world, that "great word that
is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars" (WE, p. 185).
Whatever happens there--and Le Guin wisely leaves it all shrouded in
mystery--we know that ultimate Being in Earthsea, the Urgrund, is im-
manent, not transcendant, and that creation is a dynamic process ever
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192
continuing, ever unfinished. The education of a Mage, then, which be-
gan with instruction in the myths and legends of Earthsea, concludes
with physics and metaphysics; the scientific conception of magic cul-
minates in one of the most abstract and formalistic of sciences and
the mythic conception of magic culminates in the mysticism of tree-
worship. Le Guin affirms not only Nicholas of Cusa, a mystic (coinci-
dentia oppositorum), but also Niels Bohr, a physicist (contraria sunt
complementa).
VII
"Schrodinger's Cat" may seem, on a first reading, radically dif-
ferent from both "Semley's Necklace" and the Earthsea trilogy, but it
too weaves together myth and science in complementary patterns, even
as it creates an entirely different enai” Unlike the landscapes in
Le Guin's outer space and in her inner lands, unlike Orsinian geogra-
phy, the world we experience as we read "Schrédinger's Cat" resembles
neither the conventional imaginary landscapes of fantasy and science
fiction nor any familiar landscape we have experienced or might ex-
perience. There are, to be sure, allusions to Michelangelo, Bach,
and Schumann; there are references to Democrats, Episcopalians, Metho-
dists, and Baptists; there is an account of Erwin Schrodinger's
famous Gedankenexperiment, "performed" originally in 1935, and a large
fragment of the myth of Pandora's Box; and, finally, there are cans of
sardines and pork and beans. But even if these people and things are
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193
familiar, the context in which we find them is entirely strange and
anomalous: the whole world outside the house to which the narrator has
retreated is heating up and speeding up. Recalling Jameson's distinc-
tion between the technical and popular senses of the word world (see
above, pp. 27-28), we might say that while the world in the normal
sense of nature, people, and things is familiar, the world in the
phenomenological sense as a Gestalt, the “supreme category that per-
mits all experience or perception in the first place," is strange.
In "Schrodinger's Cat," our normal categories of time and logic and
causality do not apply. In most of her fiction, Le Guin positions
invented cultures and beings and things in an environment which has
been created according to familiar conventions or rules or paradigms,
but in "Schrodinger's Cat" she seems to place familiar things in a
world that exists wholly outside the horizons of our normal world.
Instead of estranging a familiar conceptual framework by putting
strange things in it, Le Guin seems to be estranging the familiar
things in our world by putting them into a strange frame. Thus the
relationship between the two senses of world is reciprocal; they are
internally related and relative to each other.
If the two senses of world are relative to each other, so also
are our notions of strangeness, our categories of reality and fantasy,
objective and subjective, subject and object. The strange frame of
"Schrodinger's Cat," therefore, may not be the world outside the
house, but rather may be in the house itself: the narrator's conscious-
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194
ness and its contents. We know from the relativity theory that our
“perception of time and velocity is relative to the time frame in which
we are moving. To the extent that biological processes and heat (the
velocity of molecules) are functions of time, they would be relative
also. Thus if it appears to the narrator that the world inside the
house is cooler and that things move more slowly there, then those im-
pressions may be the result of the narrator's speeding up. Like
Semley, who returns from "one long night" of near lightspeed travel
to find her daughter sixteen years older than she was "yesterday," the
narrator of "Schrodinger's Cat" may be in a time frame moving faster
than the world around her (him?--we never know for certain). If that
is the case, then the outside world with its increasing heat (kisses
like a branding iron) and its accelerated biological processes (child-
ren growing up before your eyes) would appear to be moving faster.
Moreover, the suggestion at the end of "Schrodinger's Cat" that the
narrator is mad--she recognized before the glue of her mandolin melted
that the note she had been hearing on "the mandolin strings of the
mind" was A, "the note that drove Robert Schumann mad" (implying that
her mind has become unglued?)--parallels Semley's madness at the end
of "Semley's Necklace." In one sense, then, "Schrodinger's Cat" may
be a retelling of "Semley's Necklace," this time wholly from the sub-
jectivity of the time traveler's point of view. But all of this may
be merely the metaphorical mechanics of science fiction, the literal-
ization of metaphor and the concretizing of subjective perceptions in
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195
aesthetic imagery which we should not read literally. Even so, one
gets the impression that the tenors of some metaphors come from one
world while the tenors of others come from another world.
Indeed, one could just as easily account for the differences be-
tween the world outside the house and the narrator's world by reading
the house as a metaphor for a dream world separated from the outside
waking world. Dreamers may have the impression of living if not in a
timeless world, then in a world that moves more slowly than their
waking worlds. Even in our waking moments time passes more quickly
at one "time," and more slowly at other "times." This reading would
explain the dream-like qualities of the narrative, the sudden shifts
and interruptions, the coincidences, and the overdeterminations, in
sum, the absence of normal causality. The narrator's punning ambi-
guities about telling stories and sleeping and dreaming seem to sup-
port this:
the impulse to narrate remains. Many things are not worth doing,
but almost anything is worth telling. In any case, I have a
severe congenital case of Ethica laboris puritanica, or Adam's
Disease. It is incurable except by total decephalization. I
even like to dream when asleep, and to try and recall my dreams:
it assures me that I haven't wasted seven or eight hours just
lying there. Now here I am, lying, here. Hard at it.
Is the narrator merely lying, there (making things up, telling a
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196
story), or is she lying here before us (asleep), while we see the
world from her dream-world?
The point of all this uncertainty is just that: Uncertainty. We
could press an interpretation of the story in scientific terms, but
that would displace the dream elements into the background; on the
other hand, we could foreground the dreamy qualities of the narrative,
sacrificing a full understanding of the purely scientific elements.
We are in a position similar to the physicist's as he tries to observe
the velocity and momentum of an electron at the same time: only one
can be measured accurately. And what better position to be in while
reading a story that deals with just those anomalies of quantum
mechanics that arise from the relationships between the observing
subject with his tools and the observed object? Only when we try to
"measure" the story with our critical tools do we need an Uncertainty
Principle. If contraria sunt complementa is a useful motto for
physicists, it is equally useful for readers. In "Schrodinger's Cat,"
literal and figurative, outside and inside, the language of science
and the language of dreams--these are by no means mutually exclusive,
but are rather complementary parts of an imaginative whole, the story
itself, a metalanguage that incorporates apparently separate languages.
Although "Schrodinger's Cat" is one of Le Guin's shortest stories,
it has a density and a range of meaning that are as allusive and com-
plex as what we encounter in some difficult modern poetry. It takes
us to the heart of epistemological and ontological questions raised by
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197
the modern revolutions in physics at the same time that it engages
pressing moral problems in its search for Hope in a world where
marriages (Le Guin's "central, consistent theme") are "coming apart"
and where people are reified into “hopelessly tangled" and chaotic
fragments of themselves. Yet for all its complexity, "Schrodinger's
Cat" has a classical simplicity: the implied equation of Pandora's
Box and the box in Schrédinger's thought experiment has an elegance
that matches the beauty Dirac and other physicists try to get in their
equations. More than any other story Le Guin has written, it displays
self-consciously the "thought-experimental manner proper to science
fiction" (see above, pp. 45-46). Itself a thought experiment, the
story contains a thought experiment that is one part of an aesthetic
connection between an explorative, synthesizing scientific-mindedness
and a fantasy-mindedness. Its yoking together of a Greek myth and
quantum theory, a chiasmus of science and fantasy, is "simply a way of
thinking," a question, not an answer. "One of the essential functions
of science fiction," said Le Guin as she compared it to the thought
experiments of Einstein and Schrodinger, "is precisely this kind of
question~asking: reversals of an habitual way of thinking, metaphors
for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagina-
tion." The question-asking Le Guin has in mind here is the same pro-
cess George Steiner has recently described:
our asking is, in Hegel's incisive terminology, an Aufhebung.
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198
Asking is an action, a possible bringing into view and into being
of perspectives in which the question is seen to be trivial or
falsely posed. Or, at its rare best, to ask is to provoke not
the answer one actually fears or aims at, but the first contours
of a new and better asking--which is then a first kind of
53
answer.
This is precisely what happens in "Schrodinger's Cat," whose plot,
like the plots of Le Guin's romances, culminates in a moment of vision
in which contradictions are aufgehoben, a moment that brings into view
new perspectives. Like Le Guin's other science fiction, "Schrodinger's
Cat" generates a "view in" as it reverses habitual ways of thinking.
The person who barges into the narrator's cool retreat accepts the
orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, and wants to use
the narrator's cat to prove that "if you desire certainty, any certain-
ty, you must create it yourself!" Apparently unaware of the contradic-
tion, he wants certain nonedee of uncertainty; he wants to prove
Einstein wrong: he wants "to know for sure that God does play dice
with the world." The narrator raises the same epistemological
questions that Eugene Wigner raised, but "Rover" brushes them aide?
He does not want the issue complicated by involving the observer in
his system. He wants to keep things restricted to the box and con-
fined within the categorical boxes of his binary thinking. Either the
cat will be dead or not dead. When the narrator flings back the lid
of the box and the cat is not there, Rover's questions are aufgehoben.
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199
A new perspective has come into view, a perspective much larger than
the one permitted by Rover's categorical boxes: Non-Being transcends
both life and death and certainty and uncertainty. Because the
answer he aimed at is not provoked by his questions, Le Guin is telling
us, his questions have been falsely posed. There are always more than
two alternatives. And then when the roof of the house is lifted off
"just like the lid of a box," the Aufhebung of Rover's questions is
itself aufgehoben. If the “unconscionable, inordinate light of the
stars" that floods into the house carries our minds beyond the box of
the house, beyond our Earth, our solar system, even beyond our galaxy,
then we might also think of boxes larger than our universe. When Le
Guin removed the cat from the box she was not only doing a conjuring
trick, an inversion of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Since this is
a science fiction story, she may be suggesting that the cat is in an
alternate universe. ‘his hypothesis is not as fantastic as it might
seem. The multiple universe interpretation of quantum theory--the
"EWG metatheorem" proposed by Elliot, Wheeler, and Graham--would give
that hypothesis scientific credibility. The EWG metatheorem posits
not only the existence of "simultaneous, noninteracting, but equally
real worlds"; it says there are 10!9°+ of them!
If physicists can soberly conjure other worlds into existence and
then support their theories with mathematical equations, the only
language in which these ideas can be expressed, then their questioning
of reality parallels the questionings of science fiction writers, who
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likewise hypothesize other worlds and then use stories, the only
language in which their ideas can be expressed, to communicate with
an audience. It is at this point that the incomplete myth of Pandora
takes on significance. If Hope is blocked from a world (in the popu-
lar sense of the word) by the categorical boxes that constitute that
world as they make perception of it possible (world in the technical
sense), then a new and larger perspective that includes other worlds
(in both senses of the word) means that a world without hope is not
the only answer, and certainly not the final answer. Science fiction
can create those other, alternate worlds (again, in both senses of the
word) and therefore can change the way we ask questions of this world.
If the perspectives that constitute a world without Hope are aufgehoben
by a new asking, by the estranging techniques of science fictional
thought experiments, then we will see that grief and loss, fear and
Angst, are not the final human condition, but on the contrary are only
the answers to a specific and limited kind of questioning.
The narrator enters her cool retreat grieving over a loss; she
seems "to have no other self, nothing further, nothing that lies out-
Side the borders of grief." What she has lost and cannot remember,
the Nothing that lies outside the borders of her grief--Hope itself--
constitutes the horizons of her world by its absence as surely as it
would by its presence. While the cat is in the box, the narrator
muses:
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201
Nothing happened. Nothing would happen. Nothing would ever hap-
pen, until we lifted the lid of the box.
“Like Pandora," I said in a weak whisper. I could not quite
recall Pandora's legend. She had let all the plagues and evils
out of tie box, of course, but there has been something else, too.
After all the devils were let loose, something quite different,
quite unexpected, had been left. What had it been? Hope? A dead
5
cat? I could not remember.
The world does not happen unless and until we look at it. Esse est
percipi, as Berkeley said. Recalling Michelangelo's "Last Judgment,"
the narrator thinks of the fellow "who has clapped his hands over
his face in horror as the devils drag him down to Hell." But she
notes that he has covered only one eye: "the other eye is busy looking.
It's all he can do, but he does it. He observes. Indeed, one wonders
if Hell would exist if he did not look at it." Significantly, just as
the narrator cannot remember what was left in Pandora's Box, she does
not refer to the top half of the painting. It is as though she too is
looking with just one eye. The mandolin strings of her mind have a
limited range of notes.
In The Dispossessed, published the same year (1974) as "Schroding-
er's Cat," Shevek says that "the earth itself was uncertain, unre-
liable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human
mind." Similarly, in the world of total Uncertainty in "Schrodinger's
Cat," Hope is something that exists in the human mind, or it exists
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202
Nowhere. Having forgotten a myth, the narrator has lost hope and is
thus confined within the boundaries of her grief. The value-free
language of science cannot predict the future, at least on the quantum
level. The multivalent languages of myth, however, determine the
moral attitude toward the future that we adopt in the present, and if
we forget parts of that language, we alienate ourselves from signifi-
cant parts of reality. Recovery of that language is then a moral
task, as seeing with both eyes is a moral imperative. Seeing with
only one eye the devils, plagues, and evils in the world, we capitu-
late to despair and thereby help bring about the very conditions that
we fear. But if we see with both eyes, along with an inner imagina-
tive eye, if we use the complementary languages of myth and science
when we interrogate the world, we make room for moral choice. "I
shall miss the cat," says the narrator at the end of the story; "I
wonder if he found what it was we lost?" If the cat is Nowhere
(u-topia), in an world simultaneous with this one but equally real,
then he may have found it. The message of "Schrédinger's Cat" is
the message of Le Guin's "ambiguous utopia" The Dispossessed: for a
full view of present reality, this world, we must see with hope as
well as grief and fear, we must include utopia on our maps of this
world. Because Hope is absent from the narrator's world, it is all
the more present in our minds as we read the story, whose theme then
appears as the theme of much of Le Guin's fiction: the necessity of
Hope. Demogorgon's words at the end of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound
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203
may be the best gloss on this story as well as Le Guin's work as a
whole:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the think it contemplates;
Neither to change nor falter nor repent:
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
58
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
VIII
Myth and science are usually regarded as two mutually exclusive
languages, each with its own vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, each with
its own way of seeing the world, each constituting its own world. What
Heisenberg says of scientific work in physics applies, mutatis mutandis,
to one who uses myth or any other specialized language to understand
nature:
We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself
but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific
work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the
language that we possess and trying to get an answer from
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204
experiment by the means at our disposal. In this way quantum
theory reminds us, as Bohr has put it, of the old wisdom that
when searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in
the drama of existence we are ourselves both players and specta-
tors. It is understandable that in our scientific relation to
nature our own activity becomes very important when we have to
deal with parts of nature into which we can penetrate only by
using the most elaborate tools.
Like physicists, Le Guin asks questions of nature--the primary question
being "who are we?"--as she experiments with one of the most elaborate
toois human beings have developed, the story, not so much to get an
answer as to provoke an Aufhebung that brings into view the first con-
tours of a new and better asking. She knows that Mind and Nature are
interdependent, perhaps even identical at some Moments, and that the
specialized tools made for exploring one will not yield results when
they are used on the other. There are parts of nature--the imagina-
tion, the mind, the moral intelligence--which can be penetrated with
the language of the night: the symbols and narrative logics of dreams
and myths. Conversely, there are parts of nature that we know best
with the language of the day: the concepts and logic of science and
rationality. Recognizing that these several parts of nature are
interdependent, that we are ourselves both players and spectators in
the drama of existence, and that a view of the whole web of relation-
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205
ships in the drama requires complementary modes of thought and feeling,
Le Guin has tried to fashion stories which, as they weave together the
languages of myth and science, as they make connections between
fantasy-mindedness and scientific-mindedness, become themselves a new
language in which myth and science can communicate with each other.
That language then becomes an elaborate tool in the search for harmony
in life.
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NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
1. Suvin, "The Science Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin," Science-
Fiction Studies, 2 (November, 1975), 204.
2. Slusser, The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin (San Ber-
nadino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1976), p. 32.
3. Le Guin, City of Illusions in Three Hainish Novels (Garden
City, N.Y.: Nelson Doubleday, 1978), p. 359.
4. Coleridge, paraphrased by M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernatural-
ism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 185.
5. Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," Algol 21 (Novem-
ber, 1975), 8. Like the three stories that are the germs of the
Earthsea trilogy and the Hainish cycle, this story has a single
quester, and was never published, perhaps because Le Guin was begin-
ning to realize that cooperation and mutual aid are just as important
as individual enterprise.
6. See Scribner's advertisement on p. 15 of the L. A. Con Pro-
gram Book, distributed at the 50th World Science Fiction Convention,
September l-4, 1972. My thanks to Jeff Levin for showing me this.
7. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 190ff.
S. Ibid., pp. 172-95. One difference between Le Guin and the
Romantics is that she complements the Romantic preoccupation with
sight and seeing with an emphasis on the importance of touch. Abrams
notes "the extraordinary emphasis throughout the Romantic era on the
206
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207
eye and the object and the relations between them" (p. 375). This is,
of course, also present in Le Guin's fiction, and comes to the fore-
ground in The Left Hand of Darkness; Genly Ai ("I" and "eye") learns
to see in new ways. A more recent example is her story "The Eye
Altering," The Altered I, ed. Lee Hardin, (Melbourne: Norstrilia
Press, 1976), pp. 108-17, whose title comes from a line in Blake's
poem "The Mental Traveller," "the Eye altering alters all." But as
Thomas Remington has shown, touch is a vital element in most of Le
Guin's fiction ("A Touch of Difference, a Touch of Love: Theme in
Three Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin," Extrapolation, 18 [December,
1976], 28-41). The shift from seeing, to seeing znd touching is part
of the shift from Nature to natural social relations in Le Guin's
Bildungsreisen.
9. This account of the process of artistic creation is, as
Susan Wood has pointed out, distinctively Romantic ("Discovering
Worlds: The Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin," Voices for the Future, vol.
2, ed. Thomas D. Clareson [Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univer-
sity Popular Press, 1979], in press).
10. Le Guin, "The Word of Unbinding," The Wind's Twelve Quar-
ters (New York: Harper § Row, 1975), p. 72. Subsequent quotations
from this story, from "The Rule of Names," and from 'Semley's Neck-
lace" are from this edition, and are indicated parenthetically.
ll. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books,
1976), p. 73.
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208
12. Le Guin mentions her "obsession" in the headnote to "The
Word of Unbinding" in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (p. 71). See also
Ian Watson, "The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: 'The Word for World is
Forest' and 'Vaster than Empires and More Slow," Science-Fiction
Studies, 2 (November, 1975), 231-37, for a treatment of the obsession
in two of Le Guin's science fiction stories. Images of trees and
forests, e.g. the Immanent Grove, may be more central in Le Guin's
fantasy than in her science fiction, and surely derive from her child-
hood fascination with Norse myth, among other things. See my discus-
sion of "Imaginary Countries," pp- 101-103, above.
13. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie
(1910; rpt., New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 790, slightly altered.
The Romantic narrative plot of Hegel's Phenomenology and the plots of
Le Guin's novels share many features. Abrams offers a convenient
introduction and concise explication of Hegel's narrative in Natural
Supernaturalism, pp. 225-37.
14. Le Guin, statement made while sitting on a panel at Aussie-
con, the 35rd World Science Fiction Convention, Melbourne, August 14-
17, 1975.
15. For discussions of this aspect of Le Guin's style, see
(April, 1971), 129-38, and T. A. Shippey, "The Magic Art and the Evo-
lution of Words: Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy," Mosaic, 10 (Win-
ter, 1977), 147-65. See also George Woodcock's "The Equilibrations
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209
of Freedom: Notes On The Novels Of Ursula K. Le Guin,'' Georgia
Straight (Vancouver, B.C.), vol. 10, no. 467 (October 21-28, 1976),
p. 4:
whether from example or from the slow perfection of her craft,
[Le Guin has] evolved a style of crystalline clarity and func-
tional flexibility that has always reminded me of the limpid
prose in which the great naturalist travellers of the nineteenth
century revealed their discoveries to an astonished public. The
difference of course [is] that Ursula Le Guin [does] not, like
the Victorian explorers, reveal the wonders of newly discovered
regions of actuality; she [is] leading us in the investigation
of strange worlds of the imagination that--for all their mar-
vels--hauntingly resemble our own.
Le Guin's style produces the same freshness of vision the Romantics
tried to achieve (see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 375ff.).
One could draw a direct line from Romantic defamiliarization, through
the ostranenie of the Russian Formalists, through Brecht's Verfren-
dungseffekt, to Suvin's theory of science fiction as "cognitive es-
trangement."' In one sense, then, Le Guin's fantasy and her science
fiction have common sources in the history of literary techniques.
For the connections between the Romantics and the Russian Formalists,
see Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1974), and for the connections between the Russian
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210
Formalists, Brecht, and science fiction, see Suvin, "On the Poetics
of the Science Fiction Genre," Stienes Fiction: A Collection of Crit-
ical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1976), esp. pp. 60-61.
16. Quoted by Jay Williams, "Very Iffy Books," Signal:
Approaches to Children's Books, no. 13 (January, 1974), 26.
17. Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," p. 10. Contin-
uing this, Le Guin says,
I began to see the places where the young wizard would go.
Eventually I drew a map. Now that I knew where everything was,
now was the time for cartography. Of course a great deal of it
only appeared above water, as it were, in drawing on the map.
Thus the invention-discoverv of the Earthsea Archipelago followed
hard on Le Guin's decision to cast Ged's travels in the form of a
spiral. This conjunction between plot-making (poiesis) and map-making
(cartography) not only illustrates the intimate relationship between
these two activities (the words "plot" and "plat" are etymologically
related; see the OED, s.v. "plat" and "plot'), but it also suggests
that mythic patterns may be an efficient cause of the creation of a
secondary world down to the last detail. This is apparent not only
in pre-Renaissance maps which are filled with all sorts of mythic
monsters and maelstroms, but also in the maps which seem inevitably
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211
to accompany almost any literary fantasy, as well as some works that
are not normally regarded as fantasies, e.g., Faulkner's Yoknapataw-
pha saga. Journeying (whether literal or figurative), myth (here in
its familiar sense, as well as in the sense of "plot," the word we
use to translate Aristotle's mythos in the Poetics, the soul of the
drama), poiésis, and cartography are all apparently intertwined at
very deep levels.
18. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 184, 191.
19. In Anatomy of Wonder, ed. Neil Barron (New York: R. R. Bow-
ker, 1976), Francis J. Moulson describes A Wizard of Earthsea as "Le
Guin's weaving together of myth and Jungian psychology” (p. 325).
Charlotte Spivak presented a Jungian interpretation of the Earthsea
trilogy at the 1976 MLA Convention, and John Crow and Richard Erlich
did likewise at the 1977 Popular Culture Association Convention. See
also Sneja Gunew, "To Light a Candle is to Cast a Shadow: The Shadow
as Identity Touchstone in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy and in The
Left Hand of Darkness," SF Commentary (Melbourne), no. 48/49/50 (Octo-
ber/November/December, 1976), 32-38.
Le Guin disavows any intentional Jungianism in the trilogy; she
says she had "never read a word of Jung when [she] wrote the book"
("A Response to the Le Guin Issue," Science-Fiction Studies, 3 [March,
1976], 45). Jungian interpretations of Le Guin's fiction work so
well because both Le Guin and Jung draw their inspiration from a
common spring: their imaginations work within the Romantic paradigm
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212
of the circular Bildungsreise as the patterning structure of a per-
son's coming of age and his growth toward wholeness. On Jung as a
Romantic, see Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious
(New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 204, 657. I am indebted to Martin
Bickman for leading me to Ellenberger.
20. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 209
Note Tenar's circling back home in the opening paragraph of The
Tombs of Atuan:
"Come home, Tenar! Come home!"
In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were
on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs
one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star.
Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little
girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not
come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face
towards home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with
the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bob-
bing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass be-
neath the trees ({New York: Atheneum, 1971], pp. 3-4).
As in many of Le Guin's novels, the whole story is in the first para-
graph. For a discussion of how this pattern is manifest in portions
of Le Guin's oeuvre much larger than this paragraph, see the treatment
of her Hainish future history in chapter four.
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21%
24.
213
Le Guin, "A Citizen of Mondath,'' Foundation 4 (July, 1973),
22. The parallelisms are obvious:
a. Rocannon on Fomalhaut II for
400 days when he is stranded,
eight light-vears from home.
b. Faradavan attack cuts off Ro-
cannon's Ethnological Survey.
c. Mogien offers help.
d. Rocannon captured at Oafs-
castle after crossing the sea
to Southern Continent.
e. Rocannon and Mogien separated.
f. Rocannon fascinated at first
by the precision and order
of the hive city.
g. Rocannon realizes he's im-
prisoned.
h. Amid snow and ice at high al-
titude, Rocannon enters cave
and receives mindspeech.
i. Mogien dies flying into heli-
copter.
j- Lady Ganye's son asks Rocan-
non for stories about other
lands.
a.
Genly Ai on Gethen for two years
when his mission is "betrayed,"
five years from rescue.
. Tibe's rise ends Ai's mission in
Erhenrang.
Estraven helps (but Ai doesn't
realize it}.
Ai captured after crossing the
Ey River into Orgoreyn.
Ai and Estraven separated.
Ai hopeful that his mission will
succeed in the orderly politics
of Orgoreyn.
. Al in Pulefen Farm.
. On Gobrin Ice, in the "Place In-
Side the Blizzard," Ai "sees"
Estraven, and they trv mind
speech.
Estraven dies skiing into Kar-
hide border guards' foray guns.
. Estraven's child asks Ai for
story of crossing the Ice and
stories of other lands.
23. See Wood, "Discovering Worlds."
24, Le Guin, "A Citizen of Mondath," p. 23.
For a more detailed
discussion of genre-mixing in Rocannon's World, see Le Guin's "Intro-
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214
duction," Rocannon's World (New York: Harper § Row, 1977).
25. This account is from Jeff Levin, Le Guin's bibliographer,
and from Terry Carr, who was a junior editor at Ace at the time (con-
versation at MidAmeriCon, 34th World Science Fiction Convention, Kan-
sas City, September 1-4, 1976).
26. This situation is not unlike Ishi standing in a museum in
Berkeley with the anthropologists Waterman and Kroeber. In his "Fore-
word" to Theodora Kroeber's Ishi: in Two Worlds (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1961), Lewis Gannet writes:
For Ishi to adjust to what Mrs. Kroeber calls "the wilds of civi-
lization" was as remarkable as for Mark Twain's Connecticut Yan-
kee to settle down in King Arthur's England, or for a modern
astronaut to survive the wilds of outer space. It is far easier
to romanticize such a story than to understand it (p. ix).
As we can see from Gannet's remarks, and as we know from Le Guin's
science fiction, anthropology and science fiction are easily combined.
The progress of Le Guin's career might be understood as a development
from romanticizing such stories to understanding them; that, at least,
is one difference between Rocannon's World and The Left Hand of Dark-
ness.
27. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958), p. 186.
28. Le Guin, "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction," Parabola,
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215
1 (Fall, 1976), 45.
29. White, ed., The Best from Amazing (New York: Manor Books,
1975), p. 83.
30. Le Guin discusses myth and science fiction in "Ursula K. Le
Guin: An Interview," Luna Monthly, no. 65 (March, 1976), 1-4, in "Myth
and Archetype in Science Fiction," and in her "Introduction" to Rocan-
non's World.
Her primary source for Freya's story is Padraic Colum, The Child-
ren of Odin (New York: Macmillan, 1920), which she read as a child so
thoroughly that she "practically knew it by heart" (personal corres-
pondence, March 14, 1977). Part II of Colum's book, "Odin the Wander-
er," is the source for a few episodes of Rocannon's World. As "Olhor
the Wanderer," Rocannon is a reincarnation of Odin. Le Guin may also
have read, at one time or another, Annie and Eliza Keary, The Heroes
of Asgard (London: Macmillan, 1871):
Keary Le Guin
Then Freya sprang into her swift, "O take it, Haldre," she cried
softly-rolling chariot, which was again, and then, weeping aloud,
drawn by two cats, waved her hand turned and ran from Hallam, over
as she rose over the city, and the bridge and down the long, broad
was gone.(p. 176). steps, and, darting off eastward
into the forest on the mountain-
Side like some wild thing escaping,
was gone (WTQ, p. 24)
As the last sentences of the respective stories, Le Guin's, with its
halting cadence, is clearly superior.
31. I am referring here to the chiasma opticum and to chiasmata
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216
in genetics, which, like the rhetorical device, take their names from
the Greek letter chi X.
Le Guin, "Ursula K. Le Guin: An Interview," p. 3.
wa
tv
Le Guin, "European SF: Rottensteiner's Anthology, the Stru-
Gl
QI
gatskys, and Lem," Science-Fiction Studies, 1 (Spring, 1974), 182.
The basic situation, of course, is similar to that of an anthropolog-
ist from the urbanized Gesellschaft who, "bound to non-interference,"
Studies a rural Gemeinschaft. The situation can produce intense
emotional strain. Margaret Mead reports somewhere that she often
collapsed in tears when she faced a situation she knew could be solved,
very easily with modern medical skills, but which she could, in her
role as an anthropologist, do nothing about.
34. I have Bohr and Nicholas of Cusa in mind here. Bohr often
referred to an "admonition in old Oriental Philosophy" that we should
"never forget as we search for harmony in human life that on the
scene of existence we are ourselves actors as well as spectators";
this was part of his philosophical approach to complementarity. See
York: John Wiley, 1958), p. 81.
35. Published on a postcard by the Bellevue Press, Binghamton,
New York, 1976.
36. R. R. Marett, "Magic," Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
ed. James Hastings (New York: Scribner's, 1928), VIII, 245.
57. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Berkeley: Parnassus Press,
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217
1968), p. 185. The following paragraphs contain several references
to A Wizard of Earthsea and The Farthest Shore, which are to the
edition just cited, and to the 1972 Atheneum edition of The Farthest
Shore, and are indicated with the abbreviations WE and FS.
38. Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the
Future (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), pp. 82,
86-87.
39. Francis J. Moulson, "The Earthsea Trilogy: Ethical Fantasy
Space, ed. Joe De Bolt (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979).
40. My discussion of druidism is drawn mainly from Encyclopaedia
Britannica, llth ed., s.v. "duidism," and J. A. MacCulloch, "Magic
(Celtic)," Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, VIII, 257-59. A
fuller treatment may be found in Stuart Piggott, The Druids (New York:
Praeger, 1968).
41. Le Guin says, "we [the Kroeber family] had a child's version
of the Golden Bough that Lady Frazer wrote ... and I grew up with
that, it was something I read like Peter Rabbit" (Barry Barth,
"Ursula Le Guin interview: Tricks, anthropology create new worlds,"
Portland Scribe, May 17-May 23, 1975, p. 8). For another reference
to her debt to Frazer, see "Ursula Le Guin: Woman of Science Fiction,"
an interview recorded in February, 1973, and issued on a cassette
tape by The Center for Cassette Studies, Inc., 8110 Webb Avenue,
North Hollywood, California 91605.
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218
42. Frazer, "Preface," Aftermath (New York: Macmillan, 1956),
p. vi.
43. Frazer, "Preface" to Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the
Western Pacific (1922; rpt., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961), p. xiii.
44. Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themlelves," p. 10.
45. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, pp. 83, 92.
46. Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essavs |
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), pp. 86-87. For a survey
of theories linking magic to religion rather than to science, see Nur
Yalman, "Magic," International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,
ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1958), IX, 521-28.
47. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, pp. 427, 451. Belief in
the magical power of words is, of course, nearly universal in human
cultures. For a thorough, scholarly treatment, see Malinowski, "The
Power of Words in Magic--Some Linguistic Data," Argonauts of the
Western Pacific, pp. 428-63, and also his "An Ethnographic Theory of
the Magical Word," Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 2 vols. (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1965), II, 213-50.
48. Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," p. 10.
49. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, p. 401.
50. Magic, Science and Religion, p. 75, my emphasis.
51. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, p. 409.
52. Le Guin, "Schrodinger's Cat," Universe 5, ed. Terry Carr
(New York: Randon House, 1974), pp. 32-40. Because the story is so
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219
short, I have omitted page numbers when I quote the text.
93. Steiner, "After the Book?" On Difficulty and Other Essays
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 187. Although Steiner's
subject is books and their readers, his description of the action of
asking is virtually homologous with Thomas Kuhn's analysis of the
active role played by thought experiments in scientific revolutions
(see his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., enl. [Chica-
go: University of Chicago Press, 1970], p. 88). In "A Function for
Thought Experiments," The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1977), Kuhn writes,
The outcome of thought experiments can be the same as that of
scientific revolutions: they can enable the scientist to use as
an integral part of his knowledge what that knowledge had pre-
viously made inaccessible to him. That is the sense in which
they change his knowledge of the world. And it is because they
can have that effect that they cluster so notably in the works
of men like Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes, Einstein, and Bohr,
the great weavers of new conceptual fabrics (pp. 263-64).
While science fiction has not yet produced any Aristotles, Galileos,
or Einsteins, the techniques of cognitive estrangement available to
science fiction writers do help to change our knowledge of the world
and sometimes even lead to new conceptual fabrics. Le Guin's two
best science fiction novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispos-
sessed, are, arguably, new conceptual fabrics.
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220
54. The fascinating and often dramatic controversies over the
correct interpretation of the quantum theory and its philosophical im-
plications have already produced volumes, and cannot be neatly summar-
ized here. For the non-specialist, chapter 44, "More Theory and Ex-
periment: Physics Today," in Eric M. Rogers, Physics for the Inquiring
Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 714-59, pro-
vides a superb introduction, beautifully illustrated, to the twentieth-
century revolutions in physics. Norwood Hanson's "Quantum Mechanics,
Philosophical Implications of," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul
Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), VII, 41-49, offers an orientation
to the philosophical issues. Hanson writes that "the advent of
quantum mechanics seems, ina special and pointed way, to have gone to
the heart of the corpus of philosophical commitments concerning the
EEEE E within our knowledge of matter and of our understanding
of the world in which we live" (p. 48). See also, for a fuller treat-
ment of the issues, Milič Capec, The Philosophical Impact of Contempor-
ary Physics (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1961).
For the Copenhagen interpretation, see the essays of Bohr, cited
above (note 9 to the Preface), and Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy:
The Revolution in Modern Science (1958; rpt., New York: Harper & Row,
1962). For an attempt to defend the Copenhagen interpretation with the
philosophy of William James, see Henry P. Stapp, "The Copenhagen Inter-
pretation," American Journal of Physics, 40 (August, 1972), 1098-1116.
Schrodinger and Einstein, old-fashioned rationalists who believed
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221
in the existence of an objective, comprehensibly ordered reality inde-
pendent of a perceiving subject, never accepted the Copenhagen inter-
pretation. Schrödinger, in fact, invented his Gedankenexperiment with
the "smeared-out cat" to burlesque the "mixed-up model" (verwaschenes
Modell) that came out of Bohr's institute in Copenhagen. We don't
know, says Schrodinger, whether we're looking at "a blurred or unfocus-
sed photograph" or a photograph of "clouds and foggy vapors" (einer
vetwackelten oder unscharf eingestellen Photographie . . . Wolken und
Nebelschwaden) ("Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik,"
Die Naturwissenschaften, 23 [1935], 812). See Einstein's letters to
Schrodinger, approving of his position, in K. Przibram, ed., Letters
on Quantum Mechanics, trans. Martin J. Klein (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1967), pp. 35-40. William T. Scott, Erwin Schrodinger: An
Introduction to His Writings (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1967), is a clear outline of Schrodinger's world view.
Einstein's crack "God does not play dice with the world" was
made, though not in those exact words, during his debate with Born and
Bohr in the twenties and thirties. See Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The
Life and Times (New York: World Publishing Co., 1970), p. 340. "Ein-
stein believed," writes Clark, "that the universe had been designed so
that its workings could be comprehensible, therefore these workings
must conform to discoverable laws; thus there was no room for chance
and indeterminancy-~God, after all, did not play the game that way"
(p. 346). During the forties, Einstein wrote to Born, "The great
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nN
i)
N
initial success of quantum theory cannot convert me to believe in
that fundamental game of dice. ... However, I cannot provide logical
arguments for my conviction, but can only call on my little finger as
a witness, which cannot claim any authority to be respected outside my
own skin" (Max Born, Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance [1949; rpt.
New York: Dover, 1964], pp. 122, 123).
55. Wigner, 1963 Nobel Laureate in Physics, argued that the
paradox of the half-live and half-dead cat must be resolved by includ-
ing the observer in the experiment. See his "Remarks on the Mind-Body
Question," The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked
Ideas, ed. Irving J. Good (New York: Basic Books, 1962), pp. 284-502.
See also Bryce S. De Witt, "Quantum Mechanics and Reality," Physics
Today, September, 1970, pp. 30-35, for a discussion of the paradox in
quantum mechanics that Schrodinger did not accept. De Witt's article
includes illustrations of Schrodinger's Gedankenexperiment that are
extremely helpful in clarifying the issues involved. De Witt summar-
izes Wigner's position on p. 32.
56. De Witt, pp. 31, 33-35.
57. Le Guin's narrator is not the first to have recalled the myth
of Pandora's Box and to have forgotten Hope. In Pandora's Box: The
Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, 2nd ed., rev. (1962; rpt., New
York: Harper § Row, 1965), Dora and Erwin Panofsky report that Marc-
Antoine de Murret commented (in 1578) on an allusion to Pandora in
Ronsard's Les Amours XXXII (1552) by relating “after Hesiod, the story
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225
of Pandora at great length . . . but omitting the motif of Hope" (p.
58n6). Le Guin, who wrote her MA thzsis on Ronsard, may have encoun-
tered this.
In a discussion of "Ronsard's observations on the impossibility
and impiety of forseeing the future" (a thought clearly relevant to
"Schrodinger's Cat"), Le Guin mentions "Prometheus, Daedalus, Pandora--
the mythical figures who brought to men that which was not ordained
to them, fire and wings and certain knowledge" (Ursula Kroeber, "As-
pects of Death in Ronsard's Poetry," MA Thesis, Columbia University,
1952, pp. 28-29). Pandora as a bringer of certain knowledge may have
been a motif peculiar to the French Renaissance, which might be related
to the uncertain world of "Schrodinger's Cat," but the connection, if
there is one, isn't clear. Other aspects of the French Renaissance
interpretation of the myth, however, may have echoes, perhaps sub-
audible, in "Schrodinger's Cat." The Panofskys report that "the great
Joachim du Bellay, philosophizing about Les Miseres et fortunes
humaines, proceeds exactly like Plutarch in linking the vases at the
Gates of Jupiter to the vase of Pandora" (p. 52). Jupiter's vases are
described in the Iliad, XXIV, 527f£f (in Ogilby's translation, cited by
the Panofskys, p. 49):
Two Tuns with Lots stand at Jove's Pallas Gates,
From whence he draws our good and evil Fates.
Those worser he with better fortune blends,
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224
Them one day hurts, another makes amends;
Who only bad encounter, wander hurl'd
In want by Gods and Mortals round the World.
Jean Cousin's illustration Fata Homerica, based on this passage (and
reproduced by the Panofskys, p. 49) is not unlike Michelangelo's "Last
Judgment," referred to in "Schrodinger's Cat."
Because the Pandora myth is so polyvalent, it has attracted an
incredibly wide range of interpretations. One could raid the Panof-
skys' book, and, with a little ingenuity, tie many things in "Schré-
dinger's Cat" to the myth. I would not argue that Le Guin consciously
"intends" any meanings or set of Meanings in her story. When she uses
a myth, however, she ipso facto refers to them all. What is important
in Le Guin's allusion to Pandora and her connecting it to a thought
experiment from twentieth-century physics is not the specific meanings
that may be embedded in the fusion of science and myth; rather the act
of linking itself is the important thing: the chiasmus that produces
exchanges and recombinations. In this attempt to create a synthetic
language from the complementary languages of myth and science, Le Guin
manifests some of the same spirit of the French Renaissance humanists,
who had, she says in her MA thesis, a "generous, presumptuous desire
for all enjoyment and knowledge at once" (p. 28).
58. Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon
B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 210.
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225
59. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. 58.
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CHAPTER FOUR
LE GUIN'S HAINISH FUTURE HISTORY:
THE DIALECTIC OF BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
What counts for total comprehension of the story of
man's doings . . . is the concantenated masses of
culture and the interrelations of these--interrela-
tions of transmittal and absorption of content, along
with regrouping and refashioning according to national
and supranational style of civilization. t is in
connection with the understanding of major drifts such
as these that the concept is here submitted of an
Oikoumené consisting of a specific, preponderant,
interwoven, definable mass of culture charged with
a modern significance additional to the original
[Greek] socio-geographical designation in which cul-
ture was at best only implicit.
--A. L. Kroeber
". . . all the men we've run into are in fact men.
But the kinship goes back some five hundred and fifty
thousand years, to the Fore-Eras of Hain. The Hainish
settled a hundred worlds . ..."
"The Powers of the Ekumen dream, then of restoring
that truly ancient empire of Hain; of regathering all
the worlds of men, the lost worlds?"
T. . . Of weaving some harmony among them, at least.
Life loves to know itself, out to its farthest limits.
To embrace complexity is its delight. All these worlds
and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives
on them: together they would make a really splendid
harmony."
"No harmony endures," said the young king.
"None has ever been achieved," said the Plenipoten-
tiary. "The pleasure is in trying."
--Ursula K. Le Guin
226
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227
If we go back to the forties--back to the years of global war
when Le Guin was an adolescent--we will discover what I believe are
the most important sources of the "rather erratic 'future history!
scheme," as Le Guin calls it, that forms the background and frame-
work for four science fiction stories and six science fiction novels
she wrote between 1963 and 1973. Cne of those sources is Isaac Asi-
mov's series of Foundation stories, first published between 1942 and
1949 in Astounding Science Fiction, one of the pulp magazines Le Guin
was reading in the early Forres" Later collected and published as
The Foundation Trilogy, Asimov's serial combined space opera with
macro-historical speculations about the course of galactic civiliza-
tion in future millenia, and thereby established a set of conventions
that no writer of science fiction in the fifties and sixties could
easily escape. Another source is her father's anthropology, specifi-
cally his Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1945, ''The Ancient Oikoumené as
an Historic Culture Aggregate," a macro-historical cultural theory
about the single origin and centrifugal diffusion of "the millemially
interrelated higher civilizations in the connected land masses of the
Eastern Hemisphere." Both Asimov and Kroeber were writing in the
shadows of Spengler and Toynbee (and, in Asimov's case, of Gibbon),
Asimov following them derivatively, Kroeber offering alternatives to
a cyclic view of history.” Spengler and Toynbee, in turn, were re-
sponding to the early twentieth century and World War I by writing
Universalgeschichte in the tradition stemming from Herder and Schiller
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and branching off into German and English Romanticism.” Modern
science fiction, it should be noted, is generally agreed to be an
offshoot of Romanticism, having its origin when Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein in the company of her husband and Lord Byron.° Science
fiction after the Second World War, then, including Le Guin's, recom-
bines the romance, one of the major forms of Romantic prose, with the
universal history, one of the major forms of Romantic philosophy.
"De nobis fabula narratur," wrote Will Durant when he presented the
third volume of his Story of Civilization in 1944; "of ourselves this
Roman story is told.” The message of the Universalgeschichte is the
message of the romance: de te fabula. It is surely no coincidence
that wars should stimulate the creation of universal histories, for
it is during wars that writers feel intensely the pressure of Plo-
tinus' demand "And we, who are we, anyway?"
Asimov's concern is teleology; Kroeber's, etiology: the former
extrapolates and projects into the future, while the latter delves
into the past, exploring for roots and origins. The one asks "where
are we going?" while the other asks "where have we been?"; both are
versions of "who are we?" Northrop Frye would see these two impulses
in terms of myth:
There are two social conceptions which can be expressed only in
terms of myth. One is the social contract, which presents an
account of the origins of society. The other is the utopia,
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to
N
ie)
which presents an imaginative vision of the telos or end at
which social life aims. These two myths both begin in an anal-
ysis of the present, the society that confronts the mythmaker,
and they project the analysis in time and space. The contract
projects it into the past, the utopia into the future or some
distant place. . . . The social contract, though a genuine
myth which, in John Stuart Mill's phrase, passes off a fiction
as a fact, is usually regarded as an integral part of social
theory. The utopia, on the other hand, although its origin is
much the same, belongs primarily to fiction. . . . the contract
myth preserves at least the gesture of making assertions that
can be definitely verified or refuted, [but] the utopia is a
speculative myth; it is designed to contain or provide a vision
of one's social ideas, not to be a theory connecting social
8
facts together.
Like many of Frye's formulations, this is persuasive because of its
elegant neatness--and Asimov and Kroeber do indeed fit it very neat-
ly--but it is also, again like many of his theories, over-generaliz-
ed. One would like to see, for example, sharper discriminations be-
tween society and culture, and among myth and ideology and scientif-
ic theory, and one might also like to see a space made for a synthe-
Sis of social vision with social theory connecting facts, rather than
their separation into an either-or dichotomy. Yet for all that, I
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230
introduce it as a heuristic device to identify the mythic archetypes
buried in Asimov's ideological stereotypes and embedded in Kroeber's
anthropological theory, and to prepare for a discussion of the mythic
dimensions of Le Guin's Hainish future history, which, like her
father's theory, deals with "major drifts" in a "specific, prepon-
derant, interwoven, definable mass of culture."
Asimov's teleological myth issues in a utopia--a “civilization
based on mental science," as he calls it in Second Foundation, the
third volume of the trilogy--a utopia accurately characterized by
Charles Elkins as an alienated humanity dominated by a "techno-
bureaucratic elite";? yet buried in that ideologically motivated
view of the future is a real desire to have some control over human
destiny in the present (in the early forties, an understandable
desire). Kroeber's etiological myth, on the other hand, returns us
to "that first hearth of all higher civilization--in the Near Eastern
area of the Neolithic Revolution, of the first farming and towns and
kings and letters"; embedded in the hearth metaphor is the myth of a
unified primal family and its dispersion, a creation myth that ex-
presses a desire for wholeness and integration (again, in the early
forties, an understandable desire) S For Asimov, for Kroeber, and,
a generation later, during the Vietnam War, for Le Guin too, "the
society that confronts the mythmaker" is riddled with deep divisions,
is fragmented and alienated, and is at war. Le Guin has responded
to that society by inventing a science fictional future history in
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251
which those two mvths~the etiological creation myth, and the teleo-
logical utopian myth--are married. "Men die because they cannot join
the beginning to the end," said Alcmaeon of Croton, a Presocratic
physician and philosopher. Le Guin's marriage of myths of beginning
and myths of ending suggests that she would agree with Alcmaeon, and
would extend his idea beyond the life of an individual to cover whole
cultures and the ecumene of which they are all a part}!
Unlike Athena, Le Guin's Hainish future history did not spring
from its creator fully-formed, nor is it completely consistent; it
has developed story by story and novel by novel, and it is, as she
admits, "rather erratic." Instead of analyzing its final shape, I
will trace its growth from its origins in "The Dowry of Angyar"
(1964) through "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974). My thesis is
that the development of Le Guin's future history--its history--may
be understood best as a dialectical interplay between the conventions
of pulp science fiction and the methods, attitudes, ideas, and values
of anthropology; and that this development is, on a deeper level, a
dialectical or complementary interplay between teleological and etio-
logical myths, leading to a synthesis of telos and aitia, the crea-
tion of the present. Rather than expressing a contradiction, the
two words future and history together define the present.
In the first third of the decade 1963-73 in which Le Guin's
future history was taking shape, she was working largely within the
science fiction conventions established by Asimov and others, but in
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232
1966, when she drew on her father's anthropology to invent the Ekumen,
she outgrew those conventions and began to concentrate on beginnings:
instead of extending the chronology of her Hainish future history for-
ward, she wrote novels set progressively farther in the past.
Paradoxically, her return to origins and her creation of an anarchist
utopia went together; only when she turned back to her father's etio-
logy did she advance toward utopia. At the same time that the form
of her future history was influenced by sources in the early forties,
it was being shaped by the narrative techniques she was developing as
she matured as an artist in the sixties. Drawing on Mark Schorer,
we could say that she used technique to discover the "intellectual
and moral implications" of her material.” Before tracing that
development, however, we should review briefly the "cosmogony of
the future," as Donald Wollheim calls it, that Le Guin found when
she returned to science fiction in the early sixties.
I
Asimov's Foundation trilogy is the story of the fall of a 12,090
year-old Galactic Empire of 25,000,000 inhabitable worlds with a
total population of 1,000,000,000,000. Earth is apparently the
source of all this (space opera was written before "be fruitful and
multiply" became dirty wer In the last years of the Galactic
Era, Hari Seldon perfects a science called psychohistory, defined by
his biographer Gaal Dornik as:
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235
that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of hu-
man conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli. ..
Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the hu-
man conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid
statistical treatment. .. . A further necessary assumption is
that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistorical
analysis in order that its reactions be truly random {I, 14).
Psychohistory is based on "the synthesis of the calculus of n-varia-
bles and of n-dimensional geometry . . . what Seldon once called 'my
little algebra of humanity'" (III, 93). Seldon predicts that the im-
minent fall of the Galactic Empire will be followed by a 30,000 year-
long Dark Age; he therefore sets in motion "Seldon's Plan" to reduce
this to 1,000 years, and succeeds. Bentham'’s hedonistic calculus
never really caught on, but Seldon's psychohistory and Asimov's pro-
jection of Occidental history took the science fiction world by
storm; Wollheim calls the Foundation trilogy "the pivot of modern
science fiction" (p. 37), and science fiction fans have overwhelming-
ly confirmed his judgment. ?6 Bourgeois ideology dies hard.
“Because science fiction builds on science fiction," says Woll-
heim, "and one man's originations become the next man's [sic] accept-
ed premises, the rise, reign, and fall of a galactic empire is .
taken for granted in the many millerniaspanning novels" that followed
Asimov's trilogy in the fifties and sixties (p. 41); this is, in the
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234
words of another historian of modern science fiction, the "consensus
future ceo The Foundation novels established a set of assump-
tions, premises, and conventions that allow any reader of science fic-
tion to "tell what is implied by the simple facts of a story's back-
ground" (p. 42). And the background implied by those simple facts is
a version of the Western, middle-class, technological vision of his-
tory that Asimov puts forth in the Foundation trilogy. Almost all the
future histories invented during the years following Asimov's fit
into a scheme, outlined by Wollheim as follows:
I. Exploration of the Solar System: contact with intelligent
species on other planets; colonization of the planets; colon-
ial problems; problems of interplanetary commerce.
II. Flights to the Stars: problems of time-dilation and faster-
than-light (FTL) travel; discovery of life in other solar
systems; encounters with and problems with alien intelli-
gences; establishment of human colonies in other solar sys-
tems; renewed contact with Mother Earth; commerce--exploita-
tion and otherwise.
III. Rise of the Galactic Empire: contact and commerce between many
human-colonized or alien worlds; treaties and defensive al-
liances to solve problems between worlds; presence of aliens
who threaten the Galactic Empire; eventual triumph of a union
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235
or federation, "dominated usually from Old Earth" (p. 43).
IV. Galactic Empire in Full Bloom: commerce and adventure; maver-
ick worlds on the Galactic Rim; Brobied of extra-galactic
alien enemies; political intrigue; robots vs. humans; explora-
tion of the rest of the galaxy by official exploration ships,
adventurers, or commercial pioneers.
V. Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire: intrigue, palace re-
volt, breakaway planets; rebellions and corruption, invasion
by extra-galactic enemy; crumbling of commerce, distrust and
fear, loss of contact with worlds farthest away from the cen-
ter of the Empire; rebellious worlds withdraw into themselves
as "empire/alliance/federation/union becomes an empty shell
or is destroyed at its heart" (p. 43).
VI. Interregnum: reversion to pre-spaceflight conditions; savage-
ry, barbarism, superstition; raids of one barbaric world on
another; loss of knowledge, dissolution of centers of learn-
ing; attempts to save fragments of scientific knowledge and
technological skills; loss of contact for thousands of years;
humanity becomes indigenous to most inhabitable worlds, for-
getting origins; evolutionary changes and mutations on iso-
lated worlds.
VII. Rise of Permanent Galactic Civilization: restoration of
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256
commerce; re-exploration of lost worlds; restoration of tech-
nology to high levels and democratic politics; efforts to
smooth over hostility between worlds that no longer recognize
each other as kin; beating back new efforts to form new em-
pires; eventual rise of galactic harmony; exploration of
other galaxies and of the entire universe.
VIII. Challenge to God: galactic harmony at undreamed-of high level;
experiments in creation; harmony between galactic clusters;
seeking out and confronting Creative Force or Being or God;
sometimes merging with that Creative First Principle; end of
the universe and end of time; beginning of a new universe and
a new space-time continuum.
This class-bound, ethnocentric vision of universal history ignores
the ways and values of no less than three-quarters of our world's
cultures as it projects European and American values--essentially
imperialistic, mechanistic, and masculine values--onto the galaxy
(and a galaxy, our Milky Way at any rate, contains 100,000,000, 000
stars and is over 22,000 light-years wide), and even onto the uni-
iae Although Le Guin would surely reject almost all of the
assumptions and premises on which this historical vision is based--
she professes anarchistic, organic, and feminist values--she still
had to work within the literary conventions that carried it when she
started writing science fiction in the early sixties.
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237
II
Le Guin gave up reading science fiction after her high school
years and thus did not follow the development of this "cosmogony of
the future" into a "consensus future history." Science fiction in
those post-war vears, she Says, ''seemed to be all about hardware and
soldiers. Besides, I was busy with Tolstoy and thnsa "And
things" included degrees from Radcliffe and Columbia, a Fulbright to
France to study Jean Lemaire de Belges, marriage, college teaching,
children, and Orsinian tales. Then in 1961, a friend in Portland
loaned her a copy of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction;
it contained Cordwainer Smith's story "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard." Le
Guin discovered that, compared to the science fiction she had read
as an adolescent in the forties, “everything was different" in the
sixties. Unlike the writers for the pulps, Smith "was using the
language with delight 172 She started reading science fiction again,
and, not having much success with her Orsinian tales, began writing
and submitting stories to science fiction magazines. She sold her
first story in 1962, and in 1964 published "The Dowry of Angyar," the
story that turned out to be the germ of her Hainish future history.
By the middle of the seventies, she had published six novels and four
stories set in this future history scheme:
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Story or Novel
"The Dowry of Angyar"
("Semley's Necklace")
Rocannon's World
Planet of Exile
City of Illusions
"Winter's King"
The Left Hand of
Darkness
The Word for World
is Forest
"Vaster than Empires
and More Slow"
The Dispossessed
"The Day Before the
Revolution"
Le Guin's Hainish Cycle
Date of
Composition
1963
1963
1963-64
1965
1966
1967-68
1968-69
1970
1971-75
22
Date of
Pub lication
1964
1966
1966
1967
1969
1969
1972
197]
1974
1974
Position in
Hainish 3%
Chronology”
5
10
& 4
Gi
Ww
It is unlikely that the Asimov-Wollheim tradition exercised any
direct (positive) influence on the genesis of Le Guin's future his-
tory.
Cordwainer Smith, however, whose "Instrumentality of Mankind"
epic of the future was being developed at the same time as Asimov's
Foundation series, but was far less influential in shaping the con-
ventions of the Galactic Empire, may have been the catalvst, the
writer who mediated the conventions to Le Guin and made them palat-
able to her.
Smith's future history, while superficially similar to
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the Asimov-Wollheim scheme, is subtly different:
In Cordwainer Smith's epic of the future, the Instrumentality
of Mankind has all the hallmarks of both a political elite and
a priesthood. Its hegemony is that, not of the Galactic empire
so typical of less imaginative SF, but of something far more
Subtle and pervasive--at once political and spiritual. Its
lords see themselves not as mere governors or bureaucrats or
Bante 3 é £ 2
politicians, but as instruments of human destiny itself. $
How much Le Guin knew of the whole shape of Smith's future history
in 1963 is uncertain; this description was made in 1975, nine years
after his death. Nevertheless, the cultural values apparent in
Smith's individual stories would have appealed to Le Guin. Unlike
most American science fiction writers that preceded Le Guin, Smith
was widely experienced in other cultures, especially the Chinese, and
this gave his work a tone that Le Guin, herself deeply involved in
Chinese thought, would have found most attractive.” Absent from
Smith's fiction is the aggressive ethnocentrism so pervasive in the
Asimov-Wollheim tradition.
If Mr. Underhill, the "use-name" of the dragon Yevaud in Le
Guin's Earthsea story "The Rule of Names" is taken from Smith's story
"The Game of Rat and Dragon," the hero of which is a Mr. Underhill,
then Smith may have helped Le Guin, is an oblique way, to create the
26
League of All Worlds in her Hainish future history. "The Rule of
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240
Names" marks the first appearance of dragons in Earthsea, and it in-
ciudes the first (and last) appearance of a League, which was formed
to defeat an alien enemy (the dragon Yevaud, who came from beyond the
western edge of the archipelago). When Le Guin wrote "The Dowry of
Angyar,"' she transferred the League into outer space, where we first
See it as it is preparins for a war against an alien enemy.
Le Guin tells us very little about the League in "The Dowry of
Angyar."' What she does reveal indicates that she was working both
within, and at the same time criticizing, the Asimov-Wollheim vision
of galactic civilization. We do know from Rocannon's Handy Pocket
Guide to Intelligent Life-forms, for example, that the galaxy (pre-
sumably our Milky Way) is divided into at least eight areas, and that
Galactic Area 8 includes at least 62 worlds inhabited by intelligent
life-forms ("DA," p. 46). Fomalhaut II, world number 62, is not yet
a member of the League ("DA," p. 61). The League classifies and cata-
logues the life forms on these worlds according to criteria which
help it determine which races or species.to enlist as allies in the
coming war. The League has given the Gdemiar, one of the five species
on Fomalhaut II, an automatic-drive NAFAL (not as fast as light) mes-
senger-ship for travel to and from New South Georgia, a League member.
"Pidgin-Galactic" is a lingua franca that makes inter-species communi-
cation possible ("DA," p. 60). We learn from Semley's narrative that
the Strangers had come in their warships and put an end to the
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241
old ways and wars, exacting tribute for their greater war that
was to be fought with some strange enemy, somewhere in the hollow
places between the stars, at the end of time ("DA," p. 49).
All we know of Ketho and Rocannon is that they are League function-
aries, the former a museum director, the latter of unknown profession
(only in Rocannon's World is he identified as an ethnologist); their
birthplaces are not given, so readers in 1964 would probably assume
that they are Terrans. If they are representative of the League and
its values, and there is no reason for them not to be, then the League
is not only ignorant of the people it is exploiting; it regards them
as things ("DA," pp. 59-61). The League is, in short, racist and
ethnocentric; in "handy pocket guides" it grants other people recog-
nition only as potential extensions of itself.
When readers of science fiction magazines picked up their Sep-
tember issues of Amazing Stories in the autumn of 1964, and began
reading them from beginning to end, they came upon Le Guin's story
after finishing Edmund Hamilton's "Kingdom of the Stars," and before
they started Ben Bova's "The Alien Worlds," an essay on the techno-
logical problems to be surmounted when we begin colonizing the
planets in our solar system. Hamilton, credited by Wollheim with set-
ting off the spark in the late twenties "that was . . . to light up
the greatest concept of the world of science-fiction ideas: the
galactic civilization" (p. 30), was one of the fathers of the space
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opera. In a context like this, Le Guin's barest allusion to her
story's background would call up in her readers' minds the whole "con-
sensus future historv" that had taken Shape in the forties and fif-
ties; they would quickly recognize that her League falls somewhere
near the end of Wollheim's fourth Stage, "Galactic Empire in Full
Bloom." Aware or unaware of the conventions, Le Guin allowed her
readers' generic expectations to flesh out her bare skeleton with the
body generated by Asimov's Foundation trilogy. Since she gives so
little information about the League, that was all they could do. Yet
even as the first story in Le Guin's Hainish cycle appeared in a pulp
magazine in the context of space opera and technological problem-solv-
ing, it uses the conventional machinery of science fiction only as a
vehicle for Semley's story, which, as I pointed out in chapter three,
is a retelling of a Norse myth. Because it is Semley's story, nar-
rated from her point of view, our sympathies are with her, not with
the League. Le Guin uses the convention of a galactic empire to
criticize it for its disregard for people like Semley. It is here,
in the germinal story of the Hainish cycle, that the dialectical
interplay between science fiction conventions and myth generates Le
Guin's history of the future.
III
In the two-year interval between the appearance of "The Dowry of
Angyar" and Rocannon's World, the League publishing house issued a
gy mnnon s World P
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new edition of Recannon's Handy Pocket Guide: it has become the
Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms (this is one of
the changes Le Guin made when she revised "The Dowry of Angyar" to
make it into "Prologue: The Necklace"). The amended title emphasizes
more strongly the League's cavalier disregard for its subject peoples;
the amended contents include dates, missing from the first edition of
the Guide. Le Guin had begun to invent history. At the same time,
she invented her first science fiction world. The description of
Fomalhaut II extracted from the League Handbook for Galactic Area
Eight, and placed at the beginning of Rocannon's story, is a well-
worn convention not only in science fiction (Asimov, for example, uses
extracts from the Encyclopedia Galactica in the Foundation trilogy),
but also in the long tradition of fantastic narratives which include
"documents" to create an air of factuality. It is as though science
fiction writers were appropriating the methods for creating a contract
myth ("which, in John Stuart Mill's phrase, passes off a fiction as a
fact"), in order to transform a teleological myth into history.
The following selection from the League Handbook gives us an
idea of how Le Guin's League operates:
History: The planet was charted by the Eleison Expedition in
202, robot-probed in 218.
First Geographical Survey, 235-36. Director: J. Kiolaf. The
major landmasses were surveyed by air (see maps 5114-a, b, c,
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244
5115-a, b.). Landings, geological and biological studies and
HILF contacts were made only on East and Northwest Continents
(see description of intelligent species below).
Technological Enhancement Mission to Species I-A, 252-4.
Director: J. Kiolaf (Northwest Continent only).
Control and Taxation Missions to Species I-A and II were
carried out under auspices of the Area Foundation in Kerguelen,
N.S.Ga., in 254, 258, 262, 270; in 275 the planet was placed
under Interdict by the Allworld HILF Authority, pending more
adequate study of its intelligent species.
First Ethnographic Survey, 321. Director: G. Rocannon (RW,
pp. 25-26).
This is all standard science fiction machinery (except, perhaps, for
the ethnographic survey), even down to the "Foundation" in Kerguelen,
New South Georgia, perhaps an allusion to Asimov's trilogy. Even so,
Le Guin does not present a sympathetic image of the Foundation; it
is the arm of the League that dominates and exploits colonial worlds;
its activities are based on incomplete information (Kiolaf ignored
several areas of the nan With hindsight, we can see the seeds
of Winter/Gethen here: Kerguelen and South Georgia are islands that
figured in the early exploration of Antarctica, and the literature of
Antarctic exploration would become a major element in The Left Hand
of Darkness.
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245
The picture of the League Le Guin gives us in Rocannon's World
is quite different from the one she hinted at in "The Dowry of Ang-
yar." Not only does she invent a history for it; she also introduces
ethnology to it: a new element joins the myth-science fiction dialec-
tic. Rocannon's World is a weaving together of myth (Rocannon is a
reincarnation of Odin), space opera (he saves Fomalhaut II from evil
invaders by calling in FTL bombers), and ethnology (Rocannon is no
longer the faceless bystander he was in "The Dowry of Angyar," but is
rather a "hilfer, an ethnologist of the High Intelligence Life
Forms" [RW, p. 20]}. It is clear from Rocannon's reflections on the
League's policies, that the "Area Foundation" (i.e., the Asimov-Woll-
heim vision of the future) and the "All-World HILF Authority" (i.e.,
anthropology) have different values:
- + - to an aggressive people only technology mattered. And
there . . . was the League's own weak spot. Only technology mat-
tered. The two missions to this world in the last century had
Started pushing one of the species toward pre-atomic technology
before they had even explored the other continents or contacted
all intelligent races. He had called a halt to that, and had
finally managed to bring his own Ethnographic Survey here to
learn something about this planet, but he did not fool himself.
Even his work here would finally have served only as an informa-
tional basis for encouraging technological advance in the most
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246
likely species or culture. This was how the League of All Worlds
prepared to meet its ultimate enemy. A hundred worlds had been
trained and armed, a thousand more were being schooled in the
uses of steel and wheel and tractor and reactor. But Rocannon
the hilfer, whose job was learning, not teaching, and who had
lived on quite a few backward worlds, doubted the wisdom of
staking everything on weapons and the uses of machines. Domina-
ted by the aggressive, tool-making humanoid species of Centaurus,
Earth, and the Cetians, the League had slighted certain skills
and powers and potentialities of intelligent life, and judged by
too narrow a standard. . . . Other races on other worlds could |
be pushed faster ahead, to help when the extra-galactic enemy
returned at last. . . . What if the weapons of the Enemy were
things of the mind? Would it not be well to learn a little of
the different shapes minds came in, and their powers? The
League's policy was too narrow; it led to too much waste, and
now evidently it had led to rebellion. If the storm brewing on
Faraday ten years ago had broken, it meant that a young League
world, having learned war promptly and been armed, was out to
carve its own empire from the stars (RW, pp. 32-35).
This is both conventional science fiction and a critique of it. The
number of worlds involved, while not as large as Asimov's 25,000,000,
is still larger than it would be in the later history of the League
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247
and the Ekumen; one hundred and one thousand are merely numbers that
Le Guin tosses off as easily as rhymes like "steel and wheel and trac-
tor and reactor." The "extra-galactic enemy" is little more than a
stage prop, as is a rebellious world "out to carve its own empire
from the stars." But the humanist critique of materialism from an
ethnological point of view, which recognizes the self-destructive im-
pulses of a culture devoted to technology and militarism, is Le Guin's
own voice.
It is in Rocannon's World that Le Guin mentions Hain for the
first time. That world, Rocannon explains to Yahan, is his birth-
place:
I was born on a world called Hain by my mother's people, and
Davenant by my father's. You call its sun the Winter Crown.
- - By blood I'm entirely of my mother's race; my father, who
was Terran, adopted me. This is the custom when people of dif-
ferent species, who cannot conceive children, marry. As if
one of your kin should marry a Fian woman. . . . Terran and
Davenanter are as alike as you and I. Few worlds have so many
different races as this one. Most often there is one, much like
us, and the rest are beasts without speech (RW, p. 74).
Now there is nothing in Rocannon's World to indicate with any cer-
tainty that Hain is the single source for all the races or species on
worlds in the League; Le Guin was not yet actively interested in the
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248
aitia (Gk., responsibility, cause; the root of "etliology") of the
cultures she had invented. That interest developed as she went
sees” The League is dominated by Centaurans, Terrans, and Cetians
and is therefore much closer to the conventional Galactic Empire than
it is to the Ekumen Le Guin invented later, replacing imperialism
with anarchism. The seeds of Le Guin's later etiological interests,
however, are latent in the very structure of Rocannon's World, whose
plot carries the questing party first to the Ancient One and then to
the Liuar, the undifferentiated sources of the Fiia and Gdemiar, and
the Angyar and Olgyior, respectively. This impulse to return to
roots, this journey into the realm of mythic origins, which drives
and guides the plot of Rocannon's Worid, would become the pattern
controlling the action not only of individual stories and novels
later in the Hainish cycle, but also of the whole cycle itself. The
techniques Le Guin uses in Rocannon's World thus led to discoveries;
patterns in a part of the cycle influence the shave of the whole
cycle as it grows; we can understand, therefore, the growth of Le
Guin's Hainish future history as a creative hermeneutic circle. Dis-
coveries in the parts influence inventions of the whole, and discover-
ies about the whole influence inventions in the audits”
We know that Le Guin uses names with care and with a profound
respect for their power, and we know that Hain, in the final version
of Le Guin's future history, is the source of all the humanoid
species on one hundred worlds in one corner of the galaxy. The
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249
meaning of the name "Hain" should be an important piece of the whole
meaning of Le Guin's "history." Rocannon's birthplace Hain may be
named after Hainaut, a province in southwest Belgium, the birthplace
of Jean Lemaire de Belges, a Renaissance poet who was the subject of
Le Guin's research when she went to France on a Fulbright in 1953.”
Hainaut would be pronounced as if we were spelling out the English
word "no." Rocannon says "no" to the Area Foundation's exploitation
of Fomalhaut II when he places the planet under Interdict, and he
carries "a battered volume of Hainish poetry" when he begins his
quest (RW, p. 47). Le Guin's critique of technology and militarism
and aggression may be coming from the standpoint of early Renaissance
humanism. More likely than this far-fetched explanation, though, is
the possibility that Hain is an allusion to the murder and dismember-
ment of Hainuwele (a creation myth from Ceram in the Moluccas); more
likely still is the probability that it means "hate," as the French
word haine does.
Buried in "Davenant," the Terran name for Hain, may be a hint
that that world is indeed a source or a beginning. If "Davenant"
comes from the French avenement (coming, advent), or French avenir
(future, future ages), or both, then d'avenant may be Le Guin's
French neologism meaning "from the beginning" or "of the future" (a
synthesis of beginning and ending, of etiology and teleology); or, if
"Davenant" comes from the French avenant (prepossessing, personable,
comely), then d'avenant may mean "of the prepossessing [people]."
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250
with these qualities, as is Ketho, the Hainish first mate on the star-
31
ship Davenant in The Dispossessed. The text of Rocannon's World,
however, offers little support for these speculations; they exist, as
it were, only as potentia, as material not represented by drawing on
the map.
IV
Planet of Exile is the story of a stranded Terran colony; it
would fit easily, and its first readers probably understood it to fit
easily, into Wollheim's sixth phase, "Interregnum," that time after
the fall of the Galactic Empire when isolated worlds, long out of
touch with the mother planet, either drift back into barbarism, or try
tenaciously to preserve the knowledge, skills, and old ways of their
ancestors. (As Le Guin developed her future history and filled in the
prehistory before and the future beyond the League Era, she discovered
that the League Years were themselves part of a larger Interregnum
between the Hainish seeding of a hundred worlds and the Ekumen.) In
the eleven-century interval between League Year 321 (RW, p. 26) and
League Year 1405 (PE, p. 27), the League of All Worlds continued to
prepare for the "War to Come" (RW, p. 28), and then apparently lost it
sometime around the beginning of the ninth century.
Le Guin uses Rolery's curiosity to elicit from Jakob an exposi-
tory chunk of the League's history, as the Terrans on Gamma Draconis
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251
III understand it:
"I'll tell you if you want to hear, but it's not just a tale,
Rolery. There's a lot we don't understand, but what we do know
of our history is true."
"I hear," she whispered in the ritual phrase, impressed, but
not entirely subdued.
"Well, there were many worlds out among the stars, and many
kinds of men living on them. They made ships that could sail the
darkness between the worlds, and kept traveling about and trading
and exploring. They allied themselves into a League, as your
clans ally with one another to make a Range. But there was an
enemy of the League of All Worlds. An enemy coming from far off.
I don't know how far. The books were written for men who knew
more than we know. . ." [. . .]
"For a long time the League prepared to fight that enemy. The
stronger worlds helped the weaker ones to arm against the enemy,
to make ready. A little as we're trying to make ready to meet
the Gaal, here. Mindhearing was one skill they taught, I know,
and there were weapons, the books say, fires that could burn up
whole planets and burst the stars... Well, during that time
my people came from their home-world to this one. Not very many
of them. They were to make friends with your peoples and see
if they wanted to be a world of the League, and join against the
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252
enemy. But the enemy came. The ship that brought my people
went back to where it came from, to help in fighting the war,
and some of the people went with it, and the... far-speaker
with which those men could talk to one another from world to
world. But some of the people stayed on here, either to help
this world if the enemy came here, or because they couldn't go
back again: we don't know. Their records say only that the ship
left. A white spear of metal, longer than a whole city, stand-
ing up on a feather of fire. There are pictures of it. I
think they thought it would come back soon... That was ten
Years ago [600 League Years]."
"What of the war with the enemy?"
"We don't know. We don't know saythine that happened since
the day the ship left. Some of us figure the war must have been
lost, and others think it was won, but hardly, and the few men
left here were forgotten in the years of fighting. Who knows?
If we survive, some day we'll find out; if no one ever comes,
we'll make a ship and go find out..." (PE, pp. 42-43; ellipses
in original text except where indicated).
This passage sounds a new note in Le Guin's science-fictional histor-
iography, a note that echoes the harmonies between tale and historv
in Orsinian Tales. While it still contains elements of space opera
(star-bursting weapons and the "far-speaker" {the ansible]), it is
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255
not an extract from a document; rather, it is a self-contained narra-
tive, a "true" story that is "not just a tale," but a tale neverthe-
less. The one piece of documentary evidence that Jakob does
include, an old picture, is brought to u through poetic diction:
"a white spear of metal . . . standing on a feather of fire." This
aestheticizing of a bare historical document anticipates Le Guin's
more scphisticated use of "documents" in her historiography in later
episodes in the Hainish history, especially "Winter's King" and The
Left Hand of Darkness. Historical consciousness in Planet of Exile
is mediated through art not only in this tale Jakob tells Rolery, but
also in the murals in the Hall of the League in Landin (PE, pp. 27-
28, 61-62).
Rolery's curiosity about the murals (which, as I noted in chapter
two, affect her to the point that she identifies with them), elicits
some more history of the League, this time from Seiko Esmit:
"What is that?" Rolery pointed, from a respectful distance.
"A building--the Great Hall of the League on the world called
Davenant."
"And that?"
"An erkar." ...
"Can your people make such cars now?" .. .
"No. . . . You see, we don't know all about erkars and many
other things that used to belong to our people, because when our
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254
ancestors came they forbade them to use many things different
from the things the native people used. This was called the
Cultural Embargo . . . It means, you see, that we were to live
exactly as you live. In so far as we do not, we have broken our
own Law" (PE, pp. 62-63).
Besides dropping a hint (and no more than a hint) that Hain-Davenant
is the central world in the League, Le Guin invents the Law of Cul-
tural Embargo, indicating that ethnology has played a greater role
in the League's policies than it did before Rocannon went to Fomal-
haut II. The League (at least until its defeat) controlled the
"technological enhancement" of newly discovered worlds to avoid fur-
ther rebellions by newly armed aggressive peoples like the Faradayans.
Hilfers like Rocannon were probably granted a more important role in
inviting worlds into the League; the Law of Cultural Embargo, in fact,
may have been drafted by an ethnologist, for it appears to be an ex-
tension of the practices an ethnologist would use during his field-
work. (This all prefigures the methods of the Ekumen, which sends
ethnologists to newly discovered worlds rather than exporting mili-
tary hardware to them.)
This new emphasis on anthropology in the League's history is re-
flected in the whole structure of Planet of Exile, distancing it
from space-opera conventions. Le Guin was beginning to free herself
from the Asimov-Wollheim traditions by turning them inside out. If
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255
the Gaal hordes on Rolery's planet are named after Gaal Dornick, Hari
Seldon's biographer, Le Guin may be suggesting that the real enemies
of civilization are the techno-bureaucratic elites who run the Galac-
tic Empire. It is in her handling of the narrative point of view,
however, that Le Guin integrates anthropological values in the story
(perhaps a case of "technique as discovery"). Rather than following
the heroic adventures of a white male protagonist as she did in Ro-
cannon's World, Le Guin begins Planet of Exile with Rolery's trip
into Landin. Through an alien white woman's eyes, we first see the
black Terrans as aliens, and we see their disintegrating science-
fictional civilization as something strange and abnormal, something
to be feared and distrusted. Not until chapter three of the novel
are we introduced to the Terran point of view, and then we discover
that ethnocentrism and fear of the alien other is reciprocal. "Man"
(i.e., Occidental white males), Le Guin is telling us, is not the
focal point of the universe; there are other, no more and no less
valuable, points of view. The Terran adherence to the League's old
Laws is as conservative as the Tevaran holding to the "Way of Man"
(PE, p. 36). This relativistic, even egalitarian, view of cultural
values, more catholic than the one implicit in the Asimov tradition,
may be called a properly anthropological point of view.
Yet for all its qualifications of the values and attitudes of
conventional science fiction, Planet of Exile is still an Interreg-
num story. Like many others in that category, its plot turns on an
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256
evolutionary genetic change on an isolated world. The alliance be-
tween the Terrans and the Tevarans, as Jakob's analogies indicate,
is a replication of the League's policy of banding together to meet
an alien invader, and, to that extent, is again conventional. But
as Le Guin worked out the plot of Planet of Exile, she discovered a
theme, which grows inevitably from her handling of point of view,
and which would influence the later history of the Hainish worlds:
the problems of communication and love between aliens who happen to
be distant kin. Moreover, teleological and etiological impulses be-
gin to emerge. The Terrans, Jakob tells Rolery, want to "make a
ship and go find out" what happened to Terra and the League. Their
goal is to discover their origins, to connect beginning and end.
Vv
Six centuries later, a descendant of Rolery and Jakob does
exactly that in City of Illusions. Le Guin's third novel, which ad-
vances the chronology of her future history forward in a customary
manner, is one of her least successful works. She recognizes that
"it has some good bits," but admits that it "is only half thought
F 3 hu
out. I was getting hasty," she says. > Twelve years after writing
it, she put her finger on the major flaw: "villain trouble. . . . The
54
Shing are the least convincing lot of people I ever wrote." Her
hero is not very convincing, either. Single-handedly, Falk-Ramarren
outwits the Shing with his superior mindscience, escapes from Earth
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257
in a stolen Shing space ship, and sets in motion their ultimate de-
feat, bringing an end to the Age of the Enemy that followed upon the
fall of the League. One senses that Le Guin was feeling cramped by
the future history conventions she had been using, or perhaps had
been used by, and was looking for a quick way to write herself out
of a corner.
As she did so, she experimented with methods of integrating
historical narrative into the plot of her novel, and tried out a
technique that she would use in The Left Hand of Darkness: inserting
and interpolating self-contained pieces of narrative that by them-
selves look back to origins but function to advance the plot into
the future.” In Planet of Exile, Jakob's explanation of the League's
history does no more to advance the plot than the extract from the
League Handbook does to advance the plot of Rocannon's World; but
Orry's "childish narrative" (CI, p. 100), the story of the Terran
colony on Werel and its search for its roots on Earth, is an indis-
pensible step in Falk's recovery of his identity as Ramarren, and
thus necessary for his progress toward integrating his two selves and
overpowering Ken Kenyek so that he and Orry can escape from the Shing.
Before Falk had left Zove's Clearing, he did learn what little
history the Terrans had preserved during the 1,200 years since the
fall of the League: "a few names of worlds and heroes, a ragtag of
facts . . . patch[ed] into a history. . . . but all that was vague
36
and half-legendary, like all of man's history" (CI, pp. 18, ane
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258
Orry's history of Werel is likewise vague and half-legendary. He
describes a world that "was rife with earthquakes, volcanoes, plants
that walked, animals that sang, men who spoke and built cities: a
catalogue of wonders" (CI, p. 98; note that Werelian geology, like
the geology on Le Guin's other imaginary worlds, is "in the process
of making itself"). Orry, who must enjoy spinning a yarn, tells Falk
about the League's attempts to gain allies,
ever since, generations before, warnings had come from beyond
Hyades of a great wave of conquerers that moved from world to
world, from century to century, closer toward the farflung
cluster of eighty planets that so proudly called itself the
League of All Worlds (CI, p. 98).
(Le Guin silently reduces the number of worlds in the League, and
gently satirizes its pretensions to embrace the whole universe, as
well as gently mocking her own use of the conventions of the Galactic
Empire.) Orry goes on to explain how the Terran colony was stranded,
_cut off from Earth and "the Prime World Davenant" (CI, p. 98) (Le
Guin's first explicit indication of the central place Hain-Davenant
holds in the League), how it decayed for 600 years until the Terrans
made an alliance with the Tevarans, discovered that they could repro-
duce, and founded a hybrid race:
The new mixed stock and mixed culture of the Tevar-Alterran
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259
nation flourished in the years after the perilous Tenth Winter.
The little cities grew; a mercantile culture was established on
the single north-hemisphere continent. Within a few generations
it was spreading to the primitive peoples of the southern conti-
nents, where the problem of keeping alive through the winter was
more easily solved. Population went up; science and technology
began their exponential climb, guided and aided always by the
Books of Alterra, the ship's library, the mysteries of which
grew explicable as the colonists’ remote descendants relearned
lost knowledge. They had kept and copied those books, genera-
tion after generation, and learned the tongue they were written
in--Galaktika, of course. Finally, the moon and Sister-planets
all explored, the sprawl of cities and the rivalries of nations
controlled and balanced by the powerful Kelshak Empire in the
old Northland, at the height of an age of peace and vigor the
Empire had built and sent forth a light-speed ship (CI, p. 100).
It sounds as though Orry has been reading old Terran science fiction
pulp magazines; that "history" is straight out of Wollheim's "Rise
of the Galactic Empire" stage of the future--except for the "of
course" that follows the word "Galaktika": with that ironic aside,
and with the change from "Galactica" to "Galaktika," Le Guin mocks
her own use of the hackneved machinery of space opera.
Le Guin's attitude toward the Kelshak Empire, which is to say
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260
her attitude toward science fiction conventions, for that Empire is
little more than a convention, is ambiguous. Ramarren, navigator of
the Alterra, "the greatest prosteny, a mathematician-astronomer, in
all Kelshy" (CI, p. 102), is the highest expression of that culture,
and, as the "good guy," has our sympathies throughout the story. The
Kelshak art of mindguarding helps him foil the plans of tho. "bad
guys," the Shing, so it must have our sympathy too. The conventions
of the romance genre demand it. Thus, this description of the Kelshak
code of secrecy must be sympathetic:
The Kelshak code of secrecy concerning the Books of the Lost
Colony had evolved along with a whole technique of mindguarding.
The mystique of secrecy--or more precisely restraint--had grown
over the long years from the rigorous control of scientific-tech-
nical knowledge exercised by the original Colonists, itself an
outgrowth from the League's Law of Cultural Embargo, which for-
bade cultural importation to colonial planets. The whole concept
of restaint was fundamental in Werelian culture by now, and the
stratification of Werelian society was directed by the convention
that knowledge and technique must remain under intelligent con-
trol. Such details as the True Name of the Sun were formal and
symbolical, but the formalism was taken seriously--with ultimate
seriousness, for in Kelshey knowledge was religion, religion
knowledge. To guard the intangible holy places in the minds of
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261
men, intangible and invulnerable defenses had been devised. Un-
less he was in one of the Places of Silence, and addressed in a
certain form by an associate of his own level, Ramarren was ab-
solutely unable to communicate, in words or writing or mind-
speech, the True Name of his world's sun (CI, pp. 142-43).
But stratification and Empires are not positive things elsewhere in
Le Guin's work, even if restraint in some forms May be. Indeed, when
she introduced a new edition of City of Illusions in 1977, she ex-
pressly rejects them: she says she is grateful to the book for the
"chance to speak of civilization not as a negative force--restraint,
constraint, repression, authority,--but as an opportunity lost, an
ideal of ered Is this a case where we must trust the tale, not
the teller? Was Le Guin cornered into inventing Kelshak culture in
order to resolve her plot, to get rid of the Shing, who had got rid
of the League, to move her future history out of the constraints of
the conventions she had been using? I think Phe
Although the content of the history in City of Illusions is a
regression to pulp conventions, Le Guin's use of that content is an
advance in the development of her narrative techniques. Just as the
story that frames Orry's historical narrative tells of the return of
the Werelians-Alterrans to their origins on Earth and of Falk's trek
across North America, the story Orry tells Falk in Es Toch on Earth
is also a return. A necessary moment in the process by which the
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262
Alterrans rediscover their origins on Earth is the rediscovery by an
Alterran on Earth of his origins on Alterra (another instance of
chiasmus in Le Guin's work). Orry's etiological tale augments the
inherently teleological impulse of the narrative by contradicting it.
Only by going back into the past can Falk move into the future.
These paradoxes, which rise from the ways Le Guin mixes together the
historical time of Hainish chronology with the narrative time in one
episode in the Hainish cycle, blur the distinctions between "history"
and "story."
The catalysts for this advance in Le Guin's story-telling tech-
nique Might have been Dinesen and Taoism. Robert Langbaum identi-
fies Dinesen's "most conspicuous narrative device" as a
frequent use of tales within the tale as a kind of dialogue that
advances the action. Inset tales are to be found within the
stories of The Arabian Nights; they are to be found in Ovid,
Cervantes, and the whole romance tradition--the tradition that
presents the story as story rather than as an imitation of
R 3
reality.
In addition to writing in the romance tradition, in addition to model-
ing her own techniques of distancing after Dinesen's, Le Guin is a
Taoist. Literary technique and philosophical orientation thus rein-
force each other. Like the movement of the Tao that controls Falk's
"way" when he loses it (the content of the story), the plot of City
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263
of Illusions is a reversion to roots and a search for origins (the
technique of the story). Return is the movement of the Tao.
City of Illusions is also a springboard into the future, the
last moment in the League's history before Le Guin jumped forward
toward the Ekumen, a move she made when she wrote "Winter's King,"
the next Hainish story. From 1963 to 1965 she had written three
novels, following rather conventionally the canons for inventing a
science fiction future history, and had reached what was for her a
dead end. She could no longer develop as an artist, could no longer
develop her narrative techniques within the conventions established
by Asimov in the early forties. "Winter's King" is not only a large
step forward in the Hainish chronology; it is an even larger step
backwards, back to the Fore-Eras of Hain.
VI
The story that generated Le Guin's League history in 19635, "The
Dowry of Angyar," weaves together a Norse myth and time dilation, a
science fiction convention borrowed from relativity physics. Three
years iater, when the forward movement of her history hit a snag, Le
Guin backed off, returned to that earlier technique, and advanced her
history past the snag: another circular journey in her artistic Bil-
dungsreise. "Winter's King," the story that creates the Ekumen, is,
like "The Dowry of Angyar," a weaving together of myth and time dila-
tion, but this time the myth is mediated to Le Guin through a science,
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264
her father's anthropology. The dialectical interplay between liter-
ary convention and myth that generated her future history now reaches
a higher, more complex level with the integration of anthropology's
mythic substratum. Le Guin's stories shift from science fiction to
science fiction, while her history simultaneously reaches back to its
mythic beginning and forward to its mythic end: the aitia of Hain and
the telos of the Ekumen.
Set six centuries after the Age of the Enemy ("WK," p. 77),40
"Winter's King" carries the Hainish chronology as far forward as Le
Guin would take it; "the Ekumen of Known Worlds" ("WK," p. 74), men-
tioned now for the first time, is the utopian ideal at the end of her
future history. But Le Guin's Ekumen, 2 teleological myth, is a
transformation of her father's etiological myth, her science fictional
version of the Oikoumené he proposed in 1945. Just as A. L. Kroeber
hypothesized that Eurasian cultures are "an historic culture aggre-
gate" with a single origin, Le Guin in "Winter's King" reveals for
the first time in her future history that Hain is the Single origin
of the Ekumenical worlds, a fictional-historical culture aggregate.
Interestingly enough, Kroeber's idea becomes the beginning of Le
Guin's history, while the name of the idea becomes the end; in source
and significance they are one. With "Winter's King" Le Guin joins
beginning and end and mocks death. According to Nor-
throp Frye, "the question 'Where is utopia?' is the same as the ques-
tion 'Where is nowhere?’ and the only answer to that question is
there. 10° Le Guin's utopia argues implicitly that Frye's spatial con-
cepts need a temporal dimension: the question "When is utopia" is the
same as the question "When is never?" (or, perhaps, "When is 'once upon
a time'?"), and the only answer to that question is "now." Shevek and
The Dispossessed are "here, now."
The anarchist society on Anarres, fashioned out of the ideas of
the Taoists, William Godwin, Shelley, Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Ghandi,
and Paul Goodman, along with a fragment or two from Engels, is, if not
a realistic elaboration of Ekumenical principles, then at least a ccn-
crete embodiment of the Ekumen in history (fictional history, to be
sure, but history nevertnelessyc In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly
Ai explains that
the Ekumen doesn't rule, it co-ordinates. Its power is precisely
the power if its member states (LHD, p. 22).
The Ekumen is not a kingdom, but a coordinator, a clearinghouse
for trade and knowledge (p. 38).
- . . the Ekumen is not essentially a government at all. It is
an attempt to reunify the mystical with the political . . .. It
is a form of education; in one respect it's a sort of very large
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298
school--very large indeed. The motives of communication and co-
operation are of its essence . . .. The Ekumen as a political
entity functions through coordination, not by rule. It does not
enforce laws; decisions are reached by council and consent, not by
consensus or command. . . . [It is] an experiment in the super-
organic (pp. ress}. °°
In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body
mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Be-
ginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the
doctrine that the end justifies the means. It proceeds, therefore
- . . rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses our
model. . . . (p. 245) °
The PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination) system on Anarres
is the Ekumen brought down to earth; it is a "network of administration
and management, . . . a coordinating system for all syndicates, feder-
atives, and individuals who do productive work" (TD, po. 67-68). When
Odo planned the society for Anarres,
she had no intention of trying to de-urbanize civilization. .
she intended that all communities be connected by communication
and transportation networks, so that goods and ideas could get
where they were wanted, and the administration of things might
work with speed and ease, and no community should be cut off from
change and interchange. But the network was not to be run fron
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299
the top down. There was to be no controlling center, no capital,
no establishment for the self-perpetuating Machinery of bureauc-
racy and the dominance drive of individuals seeking to become
captains, bosses, chiefs of state. . . . However vast the dis-
tances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of complex
organicism. They built the roads first, the houses second (TD,
pp. 84-85).
Gdo's plans and intentions, her promise, were for a utopia in history,
a society that was to be alterable in essence. Unlike the mythic Eku-
men, which does not change, the historicized utopia on Anarres does in-
deed evolve, but in its first two centuries it changes into a society
that obstructs change and gives rein to the very impulses it was design-
ed to rein in. Bedap, the novel's sharpest critic of counter-revolu-
tionary trends on Anarres, sees bureaucratic Machinery everywhere:
Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries,
agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-
product communities--anywhere that function demands expertise and
a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the
authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we
were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated
very carefully then between administering things and governing
people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to
dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual
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300
aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new
generation. Nobody's born an Odonian any more than he's born
civilized! But we've forgotten that. We don't educate for free-
dom. Education, the most important activity of the social organ-
ism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian (TD, p. 149).
Shevek's goal--the purpose of the Syndicate of Initiative and his trip
to Urras (and, not so incidentally, the purpose of Le Guin's science
fiction as well)--is "to shake things up, to stir up, to break some
habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchists!" (TD,
p. 339). 7°
In a sense, Shevek's trip to Urras is King Argaven's trip to Ollul
turned inside out. Instead of making a circular journey from the realm
of history to the realm of myth and back again in order to learn "the
nature and history of a kingdom that was a million years old," Shevek
makes a Circular journey from the realm of myth (historicized) back in-
to history to learn something about the eight millennia of Urrasti
history that preceded the Settiement and the century and a half that
followed it--to return to roots and thus regenerate the social organ-
ism on Anarres. The Ekumen, a teleological myth that marks the termi-
nus ad quem of Hainish history, may therefore be understood as the
"cause" of the utopia on Anarres, which is itself the goal, or, in
retrospect perhaps the final cause, of the history of the evolution of
Le Guin's future history. Yet one product of that utopia, Shevek's
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301
General Temporal Theory, makes possible the invention of the ansible,
without which there would be no Ekumen; and Shevek's dialectics of
simultaneity and sequency, a microcosmic analogy for the dialectics of
history (sequency, linear time) and myth (simultaneity, circular time)
that informs the whole macrocosm of the Hainish saga, is inconceivable
apart from Anarresti social conditions and Odonian modes of cognition,
themselves anticipated by, and even a product of, the Ekumen. Since
Shevek's theory makes ansible communication possible, and since ansible
communication makes society possible (as Commander Yung argues in The
Word for World is Forest and as Ambassador Keng hopes in The Disposses-
sed), it is part of what Frye would call "an account of the origins of
society," a social contract myth which projects an analysis of the
present into the past and "passes off a fiction as a fact." But The
Dispossessed is also a utopia, in Frye's words, "a speculative myth"
which projects an analysis of the present "into the future or some dis-
tant place," and "presents an imaginative vision of the telos or end at
which social life aims." Within the horizons of Le Guin's future his-
tory, The Dispossessed is both social contract and utopia; not only
does it present "a theory connecting social facts together," but it
also "contain[s] or provide[s] a vision of [Le Guin's] social ideas."
By marrying these two mythically conditioned social conceptions,
which, says Frye, "begin in an analysis of the present," Le Guin turns
them around so that they end in an analysis on the present, in the
“here, now." Le Guin's purpose in The Dispossessed is to constitute
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302
and explore "the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck
and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and
cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings" (TD, p.
295). In order for a landscape to be inhabitable by human beings, it
not only must permit, but also should encourage human acts, that is to
say ethical acts, and those occur only in the present, "within the
landscape of the past and the future" (TD, p. 295): not on Urras, where
the future is denied, nor on Anarres, where the past is denied, but in
the process of a journey from one to the other and back again. Shevek
does not go back home again; his going creates the home he returns to.
As Ai says in The Left Hand of Darkness, "it is good to have an end to
journey towards, but it is the journey that matters, in the end" (p.
209).
Rather than going to Urras to report that he has been into the
future and that it works, Shevek wants to reconnect the future to its
roots in the past so that the administrative machinery in the future
will not work as well as it did in the past and the revolution that be-
gan in the past will continue in the te ee He wants to make of
the present not a wall separating the past and the future but an open
door allowing free interplay between them. He hopes that by recovering
the Urrasti history his world has denied, he will end ignorance, pre-
vent the wrong that comes from ignorance, and return Anarres from its
exile from history. One of his first requests on Urras is for books:
pictures, stories, anything. Maybe they should be books for
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303
children. You see, I know very little. . . . We ignore you; you
ignore us. You are our history. We are perhaps your future. I
want to learn, not to ignore. It is the reason I came.
Such ignorance is wrong, from which wrong will arise (TD, pp. 66-
67).
After he becomes acclimated to the home of his ancestors, his hosts
take him to see the people (but not to talk to them), to see the coun-
try, the cities, Odo's grave, and Fort Drio, where Odo was imprisoned.
Little of the fort is left, Shevek discovers, because the Urrasti con-
sidered Drio "a moribund sort of town, and the Foundation just wiped
out and started fresh" (TD, p. 77). The Urrasti are as accomplished as
the Anarresti are in closing themselves off from history, particularly
threatening history, and thus insure its return. If the authoritarian
impulse stays alive on Anarres, the revolution re-emerges on Urras.
cs hosts' carefully pianned tours let him see "all the grace
and beauty" of Urras, isolate him from the ugly underside, and weigh
him down not with the burden of history, but with the costs of denying
it:
He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past,
their history. The Settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on
the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as
surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future.
To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been
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304
wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to
forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come
back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer,
only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile (TD, p. 79).
True to the chiasmatic structure of the novel and the dialectic
of the romance, Shevek's quest to return from exile, to go home again,
carries him into the very heart of Urras: it is an exile-turned-inside-
out: jail and a cellar and death and a box without freedom. Finally
realizing, after Vea's party, that by coming to Urras he had "locked
himself in jail," Shevek tries to "act as a free man" by locking him-
self in his room and formulating the General Temporal Theory (TD, pp.
241ff.). Efor's gentle and healing touch during his illness breaks
through the wall that had separated them, opens up to Shevek the other
side of Urrasti history, and finally permits him to experience the
reai historical roots of Odonianism--violent repression of revolution-
ary hopes by the military arm of the authoritarian State. He discovers
that the essence of Urrasti history is a room below ground and death,
and he discovers it by participating in history, by acting, not by
reading children's books and taking guided tours. Thus he can explain
to Ambassador Keng:
There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras.
There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and
fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning
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305
without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or try-
ing to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people,
you must Manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick
them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave
you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box--Urras is a box, a
package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows
and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is
inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man
whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have
been in Hell at last. . . . it is Urras; Hell is Urras (TD, pp.
305-306) .
But without Urras, there would be no Anarres, and the only way Shevek
discovers the real Anarres (and at the same time the unity of Sequency
and Simultaneity) is by going to Urras, "the world that had formed Odo's
mind and had jailed her eight times for speaking it, . . . the human
suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the ground
from which they sprang" (TD, 251).
"The ground from which they sprang" is the goal of all of Le Guin's
questers--Semley, Rocannon, Ramarren-Falk, Ged, Genly Ai, Estraven,
and Shevek--as it is the goal of Le Guin's Hainish history. Only by
returning to roots, by connecting beginning and end, by "binding time
into a whole" (TD, p. 295) is it possible to create the "Circle of
Life," a nearly closed circle that symbolizes "a landscape inhabitable
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306
by human beings" who are free because they are bound together by pro-
mises, fidelity, and loyalty--responsibilities and commitments that
assert "the continuity of the past and future'' (TD, p. 295) and so
create a real presents The significance of Le Guin's narrative
forms, and the real, human significance of Shevek's chronosophy, what-
ever its relevance to physics, is ethical, and is clustered about the
idea of the promise. The shy man at Vea's party is quite right when
he remarks, "It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in
ethics." After a feeble attempt to evade that issue~-Shevek says,
"Well I don't know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot
make equations of ethical behavior"--Shevek makes the connection:
it's true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of
time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and
end. The baby, again, the animal, they don't see the difference
between what they do now and what will happen because of it.
They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the dif-
ference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And
there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end
will follow from a bad means is like saying that if I pull a rope
on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a
promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to
deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions
of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better
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307
know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly (TD,
73
p. 199).
Using an analogy between a promise and a pulley may be a contrived
way to marry temporal physics and ethics; more enlightening is the
dialectic of freedom and the promise in marriage, Le Guin's "central,
consistent theme":
The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was
deep in the grain of Odo's thinking; though it might seem that
her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of
promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful.
A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As
Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere,
no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will
be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own
building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So
Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as
essential in the complexity of freedom (TD, p. 216).
and
There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising
direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the
expectation of stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all com-
mitments thus understood took on substance and duration.
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308
Fulfillment . . . is a function of time. The search for pleasure
is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the
spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always
ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and
has to start over. t is not a journey and return, but a closed
cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time . . ..
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past
and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty . . . is the root
of human strength; there is no good to be done without it (TD, pp.
294-95).
The Circle of Life is not closed; closed, it would be a jail or a lock-
ed room or a cellar full of death. Rather, it is a unity of sequency
and simultaneity, of the arrow of time "without which there is no
change, no progress, no direction, or creation" and the circle of time,
"without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a
world without clocks or seasons or promises" (TD, p. 198). It is
journey and return, a process of renewal, a recreation of the present.
The Dispossessed ends with Shevek still in space, orbiting Anarres
in the Hainish starship Davenant and making plans to land with Ketho,
the Hainish first mate. In one sense, Shevek's has not completed the
journey he began on Anarres in the first chapter, but in another sense
he has. One of the reasons he went to Urras was to "help keep the
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309
Revolution alive" (TD, p. 332), and he learns, just prior to landing,
that "things are . . . a little broken loose, on Anarres" (TD, p. 339;
ellipses in original). The future is open, as the Circle of Life is
open, because it is grounded in history, as life is grounded in death,
as Anarres is rooted on Urras, as Odo's ideals begin in a dusty cellar
and a dead man.
This painting by the Zen artist Sengai resembles Le Guin's Circle
of Life and thus symbolizes not only the narrative structure of The
Dispossessed, but the shape of her whole Hainish future history: /4
RESIDENSSI LLLP VEIN INNOD IINIT INTTI ENEA ANIANI L TAYA me
EIAS OES: VANT SIANA TENT TASTAN A Se
NGN UT RO a Se I. SM RLY
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ALUN
Vy
Pà
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310
In Zen, the circle symbolizes, among other things, fulfillment; "Ful-
fillment," says Le Guin, “is a function of time."
X
One last beginning concludes Le Guin's Hainish saga. Set several
generations before The Dispossessed, "The Day Before the Revolution" is
a portrait of the aged revolutionary Odo as she goes through what
appears to be her last day. Like The Dispossessed, it is a journey
and a return: for the first time since a crippling stroke, Odo leaves
the communal House in which she has been confined, and walks toward a
park "to sit there and be oid" ("DBR," p. 29). She is not strong
enough to get that far, however, so she turns back toward the House,
finds a doorstep and sits down to rest. "Who am I?" she mutters to
an invisible audience. Only a story can answer that question; she
remembers her life, returning to the beginning:
She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the door-
step staring down through the dirty golden haze of River Street
in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-year-
old, the fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable.
She was herseif. Indeed she had been the tireless worker and
thinker, but a bloodclot in a vein had taken that from her. In-
deed she had been the lover, the swimmer in the midst of life, but
Taviri, dying, had taken that woman away with him. There was
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311
nothing left, really, but the foundations. She had come home;
she had never left home. . . . Dust and mud and a doorstep in
the slums. And beyond, at the far end of the street, the field
full of tall dry weeds blowing in the wind as night came ("DBR,"
pp. 29-50).
Odo never arrives at that field where the wind (freedom) blows, nor
does she live to see the Revolution the next day. "TI won't be here
tomorrow," she says when someone asks her to speak at a meeting to
plan a demonstration, a march, a general strike. Her story finished,
she bequeaths to a younger generation of revolutionaries the task of
making history not in a promised land flowing with milk and honey, but
on an arid planet where the wind blows and where it is possible "to
act rightly, with a clear heart."
No mythical law-giving patriarch, but a girl with scabby knees
who grows up into a revolutionary anarchist with corns, discolored and
shapeless nails, and knotted veins on her feet~-this is the telos of
the future history that germinated from Le Guin's combining the
Norse myth of Freya and the Brisingamen Necklace with the conventions
of pulp science fiction. Le Guin's Hainish future history thus ends
as it began, with a story about a woman, but instead of portraying a
member of a feudal aristocracy, a mythic figure who rides windsteeds
and quests for a jewel to salve her ego, Le Guin presents a tough revo-
lutionary from the working class who had
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312
mined the shipyards of Seissero, and had cursed Premier Inoilte
to his face in front of a crowd of seven thousand, telling him he
would have cut off his own balls and had them bronzed and sold as
souvenirs, if he thought there was any profit in it--she who had
screeched, and sworn, and kicked policemen, and spat at priests,
and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square
that said HERE WAS FOUNDED THE SOVEREIGN NATION STATE OF A-IO ETC
ETC, pssssssss to all that! ("DBR," p. 26).
That can stand as the epitaph of the Asimovian Galactic Empire and the
beginning of a new and open history for science fiction.
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NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
l. Le Guin, "Foreword," The Wind's Twelve Quarters (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), p. viii.
2. Le Guin, "A Citizen of Mondath," Foundation 4 (July, 1973),
21. When Le Guin says she read Astounding, she does not mention Asi-
mov's stories; she merely says that she read the pulps because she
liked trash.
5. A. L. Kroeber, "The Ancient Oikoumené as an Historic Culture
Aggregate," The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of
Great Britain and Ireland, 75 (1945), 9. The lecture is reprinted in
Kroeber, The Nature of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1952), pp. 379-95. It was very early in my work on Le Guin Turr
Rabkin told me about Kroeber's theory and provided the initial impe-
tus to look into Kroeber's wide-ranging and prolific writings.
4. On Asimov's debt to Gibbon, see Donald A. Wollheim, "The De-
cline and Fall of the Galactic Empire," The Universe Makers (New York:
Harper § Row, 1971), pp. 37-41; on the Spenglerian element in Asimov
see Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, Science Fiction: History -
Science ~ Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 59-
60; and on Asimov's use of history in general and Toynbee and Marx in
particular, see Charles Elkins, "Issac Asimov's 'Foundation' Novels:
Historical Materialism Distorted into Cyclic Psycho-History," Science-
Fiction Studies, 3 (March, 1976), 26-36.
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314
For Kroeber's criticisms of Spengler and Toynbee, see his "'Toyn-
bee's A Study of History" and "Is Western Civilization Disintegrat-
ing?" in The Nature of Culture, pp. 373-78 and 402-408. In her bio-
graphy of Kroeber, Theodora Kroeber describes their walk through Lon-
don after World War II, when they were in England to deliver the Hux-
ley Lecture:
We scuffed through the rubble remains of bombing, going behind
the hoardings where the old city was already giving way to the
new. As we walked, Kroeber mused aloud: To what end this Western
civilization, this gift of the Greeks, this so triumphant accomp-
lishment of man? Spengler, with his bizarre view of history, his
racism, could not be right that the West was in fact doomed. How
truly to understand--not predict--the rise and course ana fall of
a civilization? History surely is never invariable, inevitable,
unchangable, predictable--whither the civilizations of the world?
(Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration [Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1970], pp. 198-99).
Where Asimov set out to demonstrate that the future could be predicted
with statistical data, Kroeber explicitly disavows such thinking, as
does his daughter.
5. On the Universalgeschichte and Romanticism, see M. H. Abrams,
Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 210-17.
A collection of essays with an extremely valuable introduction to the
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315
whole project of universal history is Ernst Schulin, ed., Universal-
geschichte (Koln: Kiepenheuer § Witsch, 1974). In Shapes of Philo-
sophical History (Sanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965),
Frank E. Manuel provides a readable survey of the universal history
from the end of the Enlightenment to the present. A recent example
of the twentieth century's renewed interest in the philosophy of his-
of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977). All
of these books are relevant for understanding the context in which
science fiction writers form their future histories.
6. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science
Fiction (1973; rpt., New York: Schocken, 1974), pp. 1-39, and Scholes
and Rabkin, Science Fiction, pp. 6-7, 191-96.
7. Durant, "Preface," Caesar and Christ (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1944), p. viii.
8. Frye, "Varieties of Literary Utopias," Utopias and Utopian
Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 25.
9. Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (New York: Avon, 1974). The
three volumes in this edition are not paged consecutively. The quota-
tion is from p. 101 of Second Foundation. Elkins' characterization
is in his "Isaac Asimov's ‘Foundation Novels,''" p. 35.
10. Kroeber, "The Ancient Oikoumené,"' p. 10.
11. Alcmaeon's idea may have contributed to Plato's doctrine of
the immortality of the soul in Phaedrus, and may have influenced his
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316
doctrine in the Timaeus of revolving circles in the soul (W. K. C.
Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The Earlier Preso-
cratics and the Pythagoreans [Cambridge: At the University Press,
1962], pp. 351ff., and G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic
Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts [Cambridge:
At the University Press, 1957], p-235). Kirk and Raven comment on
Alcmaeon's fragment as follows:
The heavenly bodies have the property of continuous motion in a
circle, and the soul, too, . . . is endowed with continuous mo-
tion; but whereas the movement of the heavenly bodies is circu-
lar, 'man . . . is unable to join the beginning to the end'--
in other words the soul's motion cannot long remain circular--
and so dies. This curious doctrine recalls {Heraclitus' frag-
ment] 'on a circle beginning and end are the same! (p. 235).
Unlike Kirk and Raven, Frank Kermode does not consider Alcmaeon's idea
"curious." Kermode uses it, citing Aristotle's approval of the idea,
as a basis for a discussion of what lies before and beneath fiction-
making and narration. If men cannot join beginning and end, says
Kermode, they can still make art, models of the world that "make
tolerable one's moment between beginning and end, or at any rate keep
us drowsy emperors awake" (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the
Theory of Fiction [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967], p. 4).
Even if this is a commonplace, it is not the less significant and
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317
profound for being so. As I will argue later in this chapter, death,
the End, what Le Guin calls the "ultimate Ultimate," is very much in
her consciousness of life and probably motivates her drive to tell
stories as much as anything else.
12. Readers familiar with Le Guin criticism will see that I am
overturning Ian Watson's theory of Le Guin's development. In "Le
Guin's Lathe of Heaven and the Role of Dick: The False Reality as
Mediator," Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (March, 1975), 67-75, Watson
argues that Le Guin reversed the chronological direction of her Hain-
ish history after she used the "Dickian mode" (i.e., the techniques
of Philip K. Dick, a science fiction writer) to "discharge the accum-
ulated energy vested in the paranormal theme" in her first four Hain-
ish novels. When she wrote The Lathe of Heaven, says Watson, Le Guin
was saying "goodbye to all that," to all the mystification that was
building up around the paranormal theme, and therefore cleared the air
so that she could write The Dispossessed. The one science fiction
novel in her canon that does not fit into the Hainish future history
scheme is, according to Watson, a release of 'schismogenic tension--
the increasing emphasis on the paranormal, fed by the flow of Hainish
history itself" (p. 69).
I disagree with all of this on several counts: (1) Le Guin re-
versed her future history chronology before, not after The Left Hand
of Darkness, which is set "several generations" before "Winter's
King," the Hainish story that preceded it ("several generations" are
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318
Le Guin's words; see the interview in Entropy Negative 3 [1971], p. 4
of "Le Guin (II)"); (2) Le Guin's Hainish history cannot be said to
begin until she wrote "Winter's King"; the future history stories she
wrote before that were conventional exercises within the bounds of
traditional science fiction, as I argue fully in what follows; (3) the
"cause," if there must be one, for the reversal of Le Guin's explora-
tion of her future histcry, is her discovery of creation myths in
"Winter's King" and in A Wizard of Earthsea; if we need to put a fin-
ger on the novel that stands at what Watson calls "The Break," it
would be the first volume of the Earthsea trilogy (see my argument
in section Vi, below, and note 52, below). Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy
and her science fiction are much more intimately related than most of
her critics from the science fiction world have yet realized.
I think Watson goes wrong because he is trying to explain the
flow of time in Le Guin's future history not by examining the way she
handles time and history and myth, but by examining thematic and
mimetic categories like "reality" and "false reality." These are
more spatial than temporal concepts, and as Le Guin says (see note 53
below), spatial categories imply boxes, and time keeps changing the
walls of the boxes.
15. Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," The World We Imagine:
Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), p. 10.
14. References in what follows to Wollheim's The Universe
Makers are indicated in parenthesis. Asimov's future history was not
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319
the only one--only the one that found "general acceptance in the main
current of science fiction and produce[d] a framework and inspiration
for a thousand later stories [by other writers], which would fill in
that framework with details" (James Gunn, Alternate Worlds: The Illus-
trated History of Science Fiction [Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1975], p. 169). For other science fictional future histories and
galactic empires, see The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed.
Brian Ash (New York: Harmony Books, 1977), pp. 110-20, and Pierre Ver-
sins, Encyclopédie de 1'Utopie, des Voyages extraordinaires et de la
Science-Fiction (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1972), s.v. "Anderson,"
"Asimov," "Blish," "Demuth," and "Histoire futur."
15. That Earth is the origin for the Galactic Empire is apparent
when Asimov tells us that the Intergalactic Standard Year is 365 days
long (Second Foundation, p. 166).
16. Elkins discusses briefly the "spectacular popularity" of the
trilogy in the introduction to his essay (p. 26), and Gunn reports
that "the Foundation trilogy has seldom been out of print since the
books were first published" (p. 169).
17. Gunn, p. 169.
18. For a penetrating analysis and critique of the world-view
which produced this vision of the future, see Gérard Klein, Malaise
dans la science-fiction (Metz: L'Aube Enclavée, 1977); an edited
version appears as "Discontent in American Science Fiction," trans.
Darko Suvin and Leila Lecorps, Science-Fiction Studies, 4 (March,
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320
1977), 3-13. I am grateful to Henry-Luc Planchat for sending me a
copy of Klein's book.
19. Le Guin discusses her values and her attempt to strike a
balance between the feminine and the masculine in "Is Gender Neces-
sary?" Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Vonda McIntyre and Susan Anderson
(Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1976), pp. 130-39.
20. Le Guin, "A Citizen of Mondath," p. 22.
21. Quoted by Vonda McIntyre, "Ursula K. Le Guin: 'Using the
Language with Delight,'" Encore (Portland), 1 (April/May, 1977), 7.
22. Sources for these dates are as follows: for "The Dowry of
Angyar'': headnote to "Semley's Necklace," The Wind's Twelve Quarters,
p- 1; for Rocannon's World: inferred from other dates; for Planet of
Exile: “Introduction to the 1978 Edition," Planet of Exile (New York:
Harper § Row, 1978), p. viii; for City of Illusions: "Introduction,"
City of Illusions (New York: Harper § Row, 1978), p. vi; for "Winter's
King": headnote in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, p. 93; for The Left
Hand of Darkness: letter from Le Guin cited by Elizabeth Cogell,
"Taoist Configurations: The Dispossessed,"' Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager
to Inner Lands and to Outer Space; ed. Joe De Bolt (Port Washington,
N.Y.: Kennikat, 1979), p. 154; for The Word for World is Forest:
lancz, 1977), p. 7; for "Vaster than Empires and More Slow": letter
from Le Guin, cited by Cogell; for The Dispossessed: letter from Le
Guin, cited by Cogell; and for "The Day Before the Revolution": infer-
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321
red from Le Guin's "Foreword," The Wind's Twelve Quarters, p. viii.
In the discussion of these stories and novels that follows, I cite
the first publication of each text (unless otherwise indicated), and
use these abbreviations in my parenthetical references:
"pa"
"yg"
LHD
WWF
TD
"DBR"
"The Dowry of Angyar"
Rocannon's World
Planet of Exile
City of Illusions
"Winter's King"
——— eee ee m
The Dispossessed
"The Day Before the Revolution"
For complete data on the first appearances, see the bibliography.
23. For more detail of the chronology, see the chart at the
end of this chapter.
24. J. J. Pierce, "Cordwainer Smith: The Shaper of Myths," The
Best of Cordwainer Smith, ed. J. J. Pierce (Garden City, N.Y: Nelson
Doubleday [for the Science Fiction Book Club], 1975), p. 4. See
Pierce's chart of Smith's “Instrumentality of Mankind" future history
(pp. [vii]-[viii]), and compare it with Wollheim's "cosmogony of the
future." A narrative summary of Smith's future history, without dates
however, is offered by Alice K. Turner, "Chronology,'' Exploring Cord-
wainer Smith, ed. John Bangsund (New York: Algol Press, 1975), pp. 28-
50.
25. Pierce, "Cordwainer Smith," pp. 1-8.
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322
26. Smith, "The Game of Rat and Dragon," The Best of Cordwainer
Smith, pp. 67-81. Gary K. Wolfe's "Mythic Structures in Cordwainer
Smith's 'The Game of Rat and Dragon,'" Science-Fiction Studies, 4
(July, 1977), 144-50, throws some light on Le Guin's fiction, espec-
ially those pieces that encounter the unknown, e.g., 'Vaster than Em-
pires and More Slow."
27. Kiolaf's blindness to the full range of cultures on Fomal-
haut is the occasion for Le Guin to make a statement about cultural
relativity, expressed in terms of landscape:
Why the devil had the first surveys picked these people to en-
courage for League membership? [Rocannon asks]. Rocannon had
a perhaps unworthy explanation: those first surveys had been
from cold Centaurus, and the explorers had dived rejoicing into
the caves of the Gdemiar, escaping the blinding floods of light
and heat from the great A-3 sun. To them, sensible people lived
underground on a world like this. To Rocannon, the hot white sun
and the bright nights of quadruple moonlight, the intense weather-
changes and ceaseless winds, the rich air and light gravity that
permitted so many airborne species, were all not only compatible
but enjoyable. But, he reminded himself, just by that he was
less well qualified than the Centaurans to judge these cave-
folk. They were certainly clever (RW, pp. 34-55).
Because he is an ethnologist, Rocannon is conscious of his limitations;
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Gi
N
[97]
Kiolaf was not.
28. This seems to be the way Le Guin's creative imagination
works: she discovers something in her creative unconscious and then
explores it, usually looking for its beginnings. See note 52 below
for her account of the way she goes "groping around in the dark."
29. This dialectical interplay between part and whole in the
development of Le Guin's Hainish future history would almost inevi-
tably lead to microcosm-macrocosm analogies, and is probably the
explanation for the "iconicity" that Rafail Nudelman identifies as
the "essential structural principle" of Le Guin's science fiction
("An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin's SF," Science-Fiction
Studies, 2 [November, 1975], 213).
50. The oniy mention in print of the subject of Le Guin's Ph.D.
research in France is in Henry-Luc Planchat's introduction to his
translation of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," "Ceux qui partent
d'Omelas," La frontière avenir: anthologie de la science-fiction
americaine d'aujourd'hui, ed. Henry-Luc Planchat (Paris: Editions
Seghers, 1975), p. [130]. See Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed.
(1974), s.v. "Jean Lemaire de Belges" and "Hainaut." Hainaut is
noted for its castles and limestone quarries, and would, on those
two counts alone, be attractive to Le Guin.
31. Le Guin confirmed these speculations in a letter dated
April 21, 1978: she says Davenant comes from "avenant lus) avenir
(=future) You know this is the name the Terrans called Hain?"
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324
32. See A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical
Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, [1965]), esp.
se ee
The [Matthew] Arnold-[John Cowper] Powys-[Werner] Jaeger concept
of culture is not only ethnocentric, often avowedly Hellenocen-
tric; it is absolutistic. It knows perfection, or at least what
is most perfect in human achievement, and resolutely directs its
‘obligatory’ gaze thereto, disdainful of what is 'lower.' The
anthropological attitude is relativistic, in that in place of
beginning with an inherited hierarchy of values, it assumes that
every society through its culture seeks and in some measure finds
values, and that the business of anthropology includes the deter-
mination of the range, variety, constancy, and interrelations of
these innumerable values.
incidentally, we believe than when the ultramontane among the
humanists renounce the claim that their subject matter is super-
ior or priviliged, and adopt a more catholic and humble human
attitude--that from that day the humanities will cease being on
the defensive in the modern world.
The Arnold-Powys-Jaeger concept of culture is the sine qua non of the
Spengler-Toynbee theories of the rise and fall of civilizations, and
is therefore implicit in the Asimov-Wollheim "cosmogony of the future"
which regards Western science and technology as the highest achieve-
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325
ments of the human race, the apex of Western culture inherited from
the Graeco-Roman tradition. When the ultramontane among the science
fiction writers renounce their belief in the superiority of their way,
science fiction will from that day be less pessimistic (cf. Klein,
"Discontent in American Science Fiction"), for that pessimism arises
from the inevitable frustration of speculations like these:
"What if the Romans had prepared and distributed broadly across
their empire volumes containing all their knowledge and that of
the Greeks and Egyptians and all previous civilizations? Would
the Dark Ages have lasted for a thousand years?" Or, as Arthur
Clarke pointed out, the ancient Greek computer found in an under-
sea wreck might have been built 500 years ago, and "if that cul-
ture had continued in a linear way--well, by this time we would
have been at Rigel, because that thing was only five hundred
years from the spaceship in linear development" (Gunn, p. 169).
Le Guin's science fiction, thoroughly permeated by the anthropological
concept of culture, would never support such a teleology because it
arises from different beginnings: Hain, not Earth. And, after she
found where she was going with her future history, she did not "con-
tinue in a linear way."
35. Le Guin, "A Citizen of Mondath," p. 25.
54. Le Guin, "Introduction," City of Illusions, p. vi.
35. Whether Le Guin started doing this in the Orsinian tales
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326
she had been writing for fifteen years is something we cannot know.
It is clear, however, that she uses the technique whether she writes
science fiction, fantasy, or "mundane" fiction, as science fiction
fans call it.
56. That "all men's history" is "vague and half-legendary" is an
observation Le Guin could have derived from her study of Jean Lemaire's
Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troie (1511-13), a universal
history (if we can call it that) tracing a line beginning with Noah,
running through Priam, and culminating in Charlemagne. It concludes
with an appeal, based on their common ancestry, to unite Gaule orien-
tale (Germany; the Teutons) and Gaule occidentale (France; the Franks).
Like Lemaire's history, which begins with the dispersion of a primal
family (Noah's), then describes the dispersion of a later primal fam-
ily (Priam's), in order to lead up to an "ecumenical" civilization in
Western Europe, Le Guin's Hainish history begins with the dispersion
of a primal family (the Hainish), goes on to recount a regathering of
that family's members and descendants (the League of All Worlds),
which is followed by another dispersion (the Age of the Enemy), only
to culminate in the civilization of the Ekumen. Le Guin's future
history is less ethnocentric than Lemaire's, for her native Terran
culture is merely a part, not the telos, as Lemaire's is in his, of
all history. Nevertheless, Lemaire's look backwards and Le Guin's
look "forward" are structured by the same mythic pattern. In her
first publication, a review of Jean Lemaire de Belges: Le Temple
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d'honneur et de vertus, ed. Henri Hornik, The Romanic Review, 49
(1958), Le Guin calls Illustrations de Gaule Lemaire's "most histor-
ically significant and artistically valuable work" (p. 211).
See Marian Rothstein, "Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez
de Troie: The Making of History," Diss. University of Wisconsin 1974,
esp. chapter V, "Poetic Sources of History," a discussion of the re-
lationship between fact and fiction, between documentary accuracy
and moral purpose, in pre-Renaissance historiography, a discussion
that has bearing on Le Guin's fiction, and on post-modern fiction
in general, which has freed itself from the sharp distinctions the
nineteenth century liked to make between fact and fiction. Even
historians are coming to realize, along with artists, that history
is a product of making, poiésis, and that “covering laws" are, willy-
nilly, mythic (see Munz, The Shapes of Time). It seems, then, that
writers of science fictional future histories and writers of "real"
histories are converging on the same point, a point occupied already
by an early French Renaissance artist like Jean Lemaire de Belges.
Lemaire's Illustrations was Englished by Richard Lynche as An
Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah into Europe (London, 1601).
a rs m M,
—— ee ee eee a
haut II would not misrepresent Rocannon's World. “How can you tell
the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many vears
away?" asks the narrator before telling Semley's story, a Norse myth.
And then s/he begins Rocannon's section of the book with this: "So
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328
ends the first part of the legend [i.e., Semley's story]; and all of
it is true. Now for some facts, which are equally true, from the
League Handbook for Galactic Area Eight" (RW, pp. 5, 25). These
"facts" are followed by a story partially borrowed from Odin's wan-
derings in Midgard.
Three or four centuries from now, perhaps a scholar will come
along and study twentieth-century fiction and history after the man-
ner of Don Cameron Allen's The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rational-
ism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1949). Allen discusses Lemaire's Illustrations on pp. 115ff.
37. Le Guin, "Introduction," City of Illusions, p. vii.
38. The following exchange from an interview is relevant here:
Q: In the three books about Earthsea, there's an original lang-
uage which the demiurge Segoy spoke when he raised the moun-
tains from the sea. People learn this language, but they
can't lie in it; everything has its true name in it.
A: I can't explain that, that's from too deep inside me, about
not being able to lie and the true language and so on.
Q: And you write that one can't lie in Mindspeech either, except
the "Shing" can, in City of Illusions.
A: That book, City of Illusions--it's got some good bits, but
it's certainly the poorest thing I've done. I never did solve
the problem of the Shing. I never was happy with their being
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329
able to lie in Mindspeech, obviously this goes against my grain.
I had to do it for the plot of the book ("Science Fiction and
the Future of Anarchy: Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin,"
Oregon Times, December, 1974, pp. 26-27).
Having invented the League and mindspeech in Rocannon's World, Le
Guin was stuck with them, and so invented the Shing to get rid of
them. But then she had to invent Kelshy mindscience to get rid of
the Shing. Having done that, she was ready to write science fiction
in her own voice, ready to go with her grain, rather than against it.
It is interesting to note that when Le Guin botches a story in
the Hainish cycle, she tries out the theme in a book outside the
Hainish universe: Ged's search for his "true name" is written better
than Falk's search for his "true name," and The Lathe of Heaven hand-
les Taoism and the "two-minded man" themes better than City of Illu-
sions does, as well as employing the dream research Le Guin had been
reading better than The Word for World is Forest does. Having treated
such themes more successfully outside the Hainish universe, Le Guin
then returns to Outer Space to write her best novels, The Left Hand
of Darkness (which followed A Wizard of Earthsea) and The Dispossessed
(which followed The Lathe of Heaven).
59. Langbaum, The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's
Art (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 24.
40. The text of "Winter's King" I am citing was published in
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330
Orbit 5, ed. Damon Knight (New York: G. P. Putnam's Son's {for the
Science Fiction Book Club], 1969).
The pagination may differ
slightly from the regular trade edition, which I could not locate.
When Le Guin revised this story for The Wind's Twelve Quarters,
she changed not only all masculine pronouns for Gethenians to the
feminine (see her headnote in WTQ, pp. 93-94, for her reasons), but
also made other changes (mark the house metaphor for the universe; it
Signals an ecumenical [from Gk. oikos, house] consciousness):
"Winter's King" £1969)
"Once you said something, Lord
Axt, which seemed to imply that
all men on all worlds are blood
kin. Did I mistake your mean-
ing?"
"Well, so far as we know, which
is a tiny bit of dusty space un-
der the rafters of the universe,
all the men we've run into are in
fact men. But the kinship goes
back some five hundred and fifty
thousand years, to the Fore-Eras
of Hain. The ancient Hainish
settled a hundred worlds." .
"The
then,
Powers of the Ekumen drean,
of restoring that truly an-
cient empire of Hain; of regath-
ering all the worlds of men, the
lost worlds?"
- "Of weaving some harmony
among them, at least. Life loves
to know itself, out to its farth-
est limits. To embrace complex-
ity is its delight. All these
worlds and the various forms and
ways of the minds and lives on
them: together they would make a
splendid harmony" (p. 77).
"Winter's King" (1975)
"Once you said, Lord Axt, that dif-
ferent as I am from you, and differ-
ent as my people are from yours, yet
we are blood kin. Was that a moral
fact, or a material one?"
Axt smiled at the very Karhidish
distinction. "Both, my lord. As
far as we know, which is a tiny cor-
ner of dusty space under the rafters
of the Universe, all the people
we've run into are in fact human.
But the kinship goes back a million
years and more, to the Fore-Eras of
Hain. The ancient Hainish settled
a hundred worlds." .
"The dream of the Ekumen, then, is
to restore that truly ancient com-
monality; to regather all the peo-
ples of all the worlds at one
hearth?"
- . . 'To weave some harmony among
them, at least. Life loves to know
itself, out to its farthest limits:
to embrace complexity is its de-
light. Our difference is our beau-
ty. All these worlds and the var-
ious forms and ways of the minds
and bodies on them--together thev
would make a splendid harmony" (pp.
105-106).
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331
Here is evidence (if any is needed) to corroborate Le Guin's saying
that she is a discoverer, not a planner. Between the 1969 and the
tween 1969 and 1975, she discovered that her writing, like much of
science fiction, was sexist (though not as much as most science fic-
tion), and that the source of her future history, the Fore-Eras of
Hain, was, again like much of science fiction, imperialist. So "men"
become "people" and an "empire" becomes a "commonality," which turns
' after an "ambig-
out to be twice as old as the empire. "Difference,'
uous utopia" becomes an important complement to harmony.
41. Afnna] K. Sfeidel], "Taoism," Encyclopaedia Britannica,
15th ed. (1974), vol. 17, p. 1055. Strictly speaking, ch'ang tao
means Invariable Way. T'ien tao is the Way of Heaven. But for all
practical purposes, they may be synonymous. See Fung Yu-lan, A His-
tory of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, 2 vols. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1952-53), I, 30-32, 118-20, 181-85.
42. Without difference there is danger of “over-communication"
(PE, p. 27), a problem only in those cultures which refuse contact
with alien cultures. The ultimate result is solipcism and cultural
entropy. Entropy is a fact of life in closed systems, whether per-
sonal or cultural. Gérard Klein's discussion of cultural plurality
as a necessary precondition for the creation of ethics in Le Guin's
work is particularly good ("Le Guin's 'Aberrant' Opus: Escaping the
Trap of Discontent," Science-Fiction Studies, 4 [November, 1977], 287-
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95, the second part of his Malaise dans la science-fiction).
Readers of Le Guin who emphasize wholeness and unity and androg-
yny should recognize that without difference, love is not possible in
Le Guin's fiction:
She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined
with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great
difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between
them, that let them meet, and that in joining together, freed
them (PE, p. 74).
For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from the
sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not
assuaged, that the great and sudden acceptance of friendship be-
tween us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our
exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our
bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later,
love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the
affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that
love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across
what divided us (LHD, p. 255).
It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate
us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the
distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the
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335
difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which
we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest
thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how
far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back,
he comes back. ... (TD, p. 284).
This lyricism sounds the clearest and purest tones of Le Guin's own
voice. It is a note she added to the revised "Winter's King": "Our
difference is our beauty."
43. Breadfruit, Autocarpus communis, is a most appropriate food
for a common meal, as its name indicates. It is also bisexual, a fact
of some importance, perhaps, in the genesis of The Left Hand of Dark-
ness. Le Guin says that when she wrote "Winter's King," she did not
know "that the inhabitants of the planet Winter or Gethen were andro-
gynes" (The Wind's Twelve Quarters, p. 93). She knew, however, that
bread-apple was a staple of the Gethenians' diet, and that may have
tipped her off. Breadfruit figures in another of Le Guin's stories,
George Hay (London: New English Library, 1974), pp. 81-97, a witty
spoof on "Star Trek" sexism. There are also allusions to Captain
William "Breadfruit" Bligh's attempt to transplant it in the West
Indies to feed slaves, so she is probably pointing the barbs of her
wit at colonialism as well. Le Guin dramatizes the story's characters,
Single-voicedly, on Gwilan's Harp and Intracom, Caedmon TC1556 (re-
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334
cord) and CDL51566 (cassette), 1977. She must have heard of bread-
fruit quite early on, as anthropologists stopped by the Kroeber house
on their way back from fieldwork in the South Pacific, and talked shop
with her father.
44. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1974), s.v. "breadfruit."
45. C[harles] H. L[ong], "Creation, Myths and Doctrines of," En-
cyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1974), vol. 5, p. 242. For the full
text of the myth, see Long's Alpha: The Myths of Creation (New York:
Mythology (1959; rpt., New York: Penguin, 1976), pp. 173-76, where it
is presented in a section entitled "The Descent and Return of the Maid-
en," words directly applicable to Le Guin and her fiction (cf. my
reference to Orpheus in chapter two, p. 119, above). Le Guin pleads
"ignorance" of this myth (personal communication, April 21, 1978).
46. Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, p. 182.
This quotation is from the section following his discussion of the
Hainuwele myth, and treats death and sex as “complementary aspects of
a single state of being" (p. 177). Because Campbell's analysis of
the Hainuwele myth is most helpful in illuminating the matters I
take up in note 52, I will quote it there at greater length.
47. Entropy Negative #3 (1971), p. 4 of "Le Guin (II)."
48. In "The Interpretation of Lord Jim," The Interpretation of
Narrative: Theory and Practice, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1970), J. Hillis Miller cites this letter
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335
of Coleridge's and discusses it as an image of "the work of art in its
rounded unity . . . aesthetic form modeled on a cosmos with an extern-
ally existing divine center, something outside it that is its creating
source and that stills its movement" (p. 213), and argues that such a
concept of the work of art "cannot be detached from its theological
basis" (p. 214). Le Guin's "Winter's King" shows that it can. There
is no "externally existing divine center" in Le Guin's world, but that
does not preclude "the wholeness of a universe which circles in time,"
in the absence of "a God to whose eternal insight all times are co-
present." As a matter of fact, Le Guin, as well as Alcmaeon, can get
along without such a postulate: with the literary conventions avail-
able to her, and with Taoist philosophy, she can connect beginning and
end, and can seek the One in the Many: they are in the t'ai chi.
49. Langbaum, The Gayety of Vision, p. 25.
50. "Ursula K. Le Guin: An Interview," Luna Monthly, No. 63
(March, 1976), 3.
51. Long, Alpha, pp. 223, 224; my emphasis. Long mentions all
three creation myths on one paragraph:
Tiamat in Enuma Elish is the great mother possessing all the
potencies of life; . . . Ymir, the primordial giant, possess the
great power inherited from a race of primordial beings. Hainu-
wele's power is shown in her magical ability to produce valuable
goods. Even her excrement contained articles of great value (p.
224).
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356
Campbell calls this last image an "infantile motif," but goes on to
say that the "idea itself cannot be called infantile" (p. 180). The
Taoists, who regarded an infant as one of the prime symbols of the
Tao, would agree, and would agree with exuberance, as witness this
catechism from the Chuang Tzu, chapter 22:
Master Tung Kwo asked Chuang:
"Show me where the Tao is found."
Chuang Tzu replied:
"There is nowhere it is not found."
The former insisted:
"Show me at least some definite place
Where Tao is found."
"It is in the ant," said Chuang.
"Is it in some lesser being?"
"It is in the weeds."
"Can you go further down the scale of things?"
"It is in this piece of tile."
"Further?"
"It is in this turd."
At this Tung Kwo had nothing more to say.
(From Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu [New York: New Directions,
1965], p. 123. While Merton's rendition is not directly from the
Chinese, it is superior, I think, to the standard translation of this
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337
passage in Burton Watson's The Complcte Works of Chuang Tzu [New York:
Columbia University Press, 1968], pp. 240-41.)
52. In order to understand (but not necessarily explain) how
life and death and murder and creation are complementary and internal-
ly related parts of an organic whole in Le Guin's fiction, we might
review some of the story of which she herself is the heroine. Bio-
graphical criticism of a living author sometimes carries the distaste-
ful flavor of premature forensic surgery; I hope to avoid that here.
Noting that the French haine means "hate," Gérard Klein has al-
ready made a foray into the subject by speculating about Le Guin's
"guilt and hate sustained by the contemplation or the fantasy of the
"original scene,'" suggesting that she has “incorporated the ‘original
scene,’ has taken it up as a woman, has installed herself as mother";
Klein then hypothesizes that this may be one source specifically of
the Hainish worlds and generally of the fecundity of Le Guin's writ-
ing ("Le Guin's ‘Aberrant’ Opus," pp. 293-94). Klein's Freudian anal-
ysis is far from simplistic, nor is it vulgar: he understands that
psychological factors cooperate with the social determinants of artis-
tic creativity. Lacking the specialized training needed to psycho-
analyze an artist, I will not pursue that line here. Rather, I will
assemble some of Le Guin's statements, add some material from her
mother's biography of her father, and will try to see how the circum-
stances of her life may have put her in situations that could have
called up powerful archetypal images. Further, I will note some of
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338
the similarities between those situations and their apparent reflec-
tion in Le Guin's fiction with what Joseph Campbell calls "the mytho-
logical event," the model of which is the Hainuwele myth from the
Molucca Islands. Finally, I believe that all this will help us recog-
nize the common sources of Le Guin's fantasy and science fiction: in
short, I will try to understand how the fantasy and science fiction
that Le Guin wrote after 1966--regarded by many of her readers as her
best work--is "all one story."
In 1965, Le Guin was asked to write a book for young people by
Herman Schein, who, with his wife Ruth Robbins (an illustartor), is
Parnassus Press, just as Leonard and Virginia Woolf were Hogarth
Press. Parnassus had published in 1964 Theodora Kroeber's Ishi, Last
of His Tribe, a fictionalized children's version of her Ishi In Two
Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961}. It was prob-
ably not long after that that Schein asked Theodora Kroeber's daughter
for a juvenile. “He wanted scvething for older kids," explains Le
Guin:
till then Parnassus had been mainly a young-juvenile publisher,
putting out the handsomest and best-made picture books in America
[for a sample of their work, see Theodora Kroeber's A Green
Christmas, published a year before A Wizard of Earthsea]. He
gave me complete freedom as to subject and approach. Nobody un-
til then had ever asked me to write anything; I had just done so,
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339
relentlessly. To be asked to do it was a great boon. The exhil-
aration carried me over my apprehensions about writing 'for
young people,' something I had never seriously tried. For some
weeks or months I let my imagination go groping around in search
of what they wanted, in the dark. It stumbled over the Islands,
and the magic employed there [the Islands and magic that she had
discovered in "The Rule of Names" and "The Word of Unbinding" two
or three years earlier]. Serious consideration of magic, and of
writing for kids, combined to make me wonder about wizards. Wi-
zards are usually elderly or ageless Gandalfs, quite rightly and
archetypically. But what were they before they had white beards?
How did they learn what is obviously an erudite and dangerous
art? Are there colleges for young wizards? . . . And so on.
The ‘story of the book is essentially a voyage, a pattern in
the form of a long spiral. I began to see the places where the
young wizard would go. Eventually I drew a map. Now that I
knew where everything was, now was the time for cartography. Of
course a great deal of it only appeared above water, as it were,
in drawing on the map ("Dreams Must Explain Themselves," Algol
21 [November, 1973], p. 10).
This account of the genesis of A Wizard of Earthsea, like the map of
the archipelago, leaves a lot below the surface. "Serious considera-
tion of magic," as I argue in chapter three, may have included
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340
looking into Celtic lore about druids for models of "colleges for
young wizards," and may have included reading or re-reading (besides
Sir James's and Lady Frazer's books) Bronislaw Malinowski, and that
means looking at the Malay Archipelago: islands and Magic. "Serious
consideration of writing for kids" included serious consideration of
death, "the ultimate Ultimate" (Ibid.). She had written a story about
a prince from Havnor a couple of years earlier, a story that "never
worked itself out at all well," perhaps because all the elements, per-
sonal and aesthetic, needed to come to terms with death were not yet
within her grasp.
The subject of A Wizard of Earthsea, she says, is "the most
childish thing about" it: "coming of age." She continues:
Coming of age is a process that took me thirty years; I finished
it, so far as I ever will, at about age 31; and so I feel rather
deeply about it. So do most adolescents. It's their main occu-
pation, in fact (Ibid., pp. 12-14, my emphasis).
Le Guin was seventeen days short of her thirty-first birthday when her
father died. By the time she was thirty-two, she had written "Coming
of Age" (the longest poem in Wild Angels [Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra
Press, 1975], pp. 8-16), and "Imaginary Countries," which became the
central tale in Orsinian Tales (see chapter two, above, pp. 96-104).
The subject of the second book of the Earthsea trilogy is, "in one
word, sex. . . . More exactly, you could call it a feminine coming of
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341
age. Birth, rebirth, destruction, freedom are the themes" (''Dreams,"
p- 14). The Farthest Shore, the third book, "is about death." Death,
writes Le Guin,
seemed an absolutely suitable subject to me for young readers,
since in a way one can say that the hour when a child realizes,
not that death exists--children are intensely aware of death--
but that he/she, personally, is Mortal, will die, is the hour
when childhood ends, and the new life begins. Coming of age
again, but in a larger context (Ibid.).
Just before The Farthest Shore was published, Le Guin told a newspaper
reporter that adolescents
want to face the issues. ... You raise a problem and thev
really live through it. It fills a need. They are so intense
about life. You never take it quite that hard again after the
teens. . . . But when you're older you have to respect them.
Some people lose touch with their adolescence, those passionate
hates and loves. If you remember them you won't be so difficult
(Helen L. Mershon, "''Teen Passions' Motivate Author Here," [Port-
land] Oregon Journal, September 8, 1972, sec. 2, p. 1, my empha-
sis).
When Le Guin was thirteen, her father nearly died. At the beginning
of the summer of 1943, Kroeber was in a "state of near exhaustion"
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342
from working in the Army Specialized Training Program in Berkeley
(Theodora Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber [Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1970], p. 186). He was persuaded to take two weeks off, and
along with Theodora, Karl and Ursula (the two eldest sons were in the
Navy and Air Corps), went to Lake Tahoe. Kroeber did not feel well,
wanted to "get to a lower altitude," so Karl and a local doctor
arranged for an ambulance to take the family (Theodora herself was
quite ill) back to Berkeley. In Berkeley, Kroeber suffered a "severe
thrombosis." He "did not expect to survive . . . nor did Dr. Donald
pretend to any confidence that he would" (p. 187). He did, though,
and the next summer,
Kroeber, Ursula, and I decided to try Kishamish, the three of us
alone. . . . Ursula and Kroeber wrote prodigiously--poetry and
science, respectively (p. 190).
Having returned to life from the edge of death, Kroeber soon fornulat-
ed his theory of the Oikoumené; Ursula, in the shadow of death and at
the beginning of adolescence, "wrote prodigiously" (cf. Alcmaeon and
Kermode: fictions "make tolerable one's moment between beginning and
end"). A year and a half later, Kroeber sailed on the Queen Mary to
England to address the Royal Anthropological Society.
Twenty years later, Le Guin transformed her father's Oikoumené
into her science fictional Ekumen--"an in-memoriam in-joke," she
calls it (personal correspondence, March 21, 1977)-~-and wrote "Win-
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343
ter's King," a time-loop story that mocks death by connecting beginning
and end, the story of a king who returns from the dead to weave his
country into a harmony and to re-unite it to the Ekumen. At about the
same time, she was beginning A Wizard of Earthsea, a story "in the
form of a long spiral" about death and coming of age. Several things
seem to have coalesced in Le Guin's creative unconscious as her imag-
ination was groping in the dark in 1966 or thereabouts, after Schein
asked her for a book: she was giving serious consideration to magic
{a metaphor for her art, and therefore for creation), reading or
thinking about creation myths, thinking about death, thinking about
coming of age, thinking about adolescents, probably remembering on
some level her father's near-death when she was an adolescent, re-
membering her father's 1945 Huxley Memorial Lecture, perhaps looking
at the Malav Archipelago and the breadfruit indigenous to those is-
lands, thinking about Antarctica, finding in Scott's journals "a land-
scape of the mind" (personal correspondence, September 15, 1976) which
congealed into the frozen landscape of the planet Winter, whose staple
food is the bread-apple. All of this was something like a primal egg,
a swarm of potentiality, undifferentiated and single in her creative
unconscious, all clustered around the idea of death, waiting for and
at the same time motivating its own expression in aesthetic form. At
a time of life the Jungians are extremely interested in, middle-age,
Le Guin at thirty-six or thirty-seven again "wrote prodigiously"--
seven novels and several short stories between 1966 and 1972--wrote
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344
the works that established her reputation as "probably the best writer
of speculative fabulation working in this country today, [who] de-
serves a place among our major contemporary writers of fiction"
(Robert Scholes, Speculative Fabulation [Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1975], p. 80).
I believe that Le Guin experienced what Joseph Campbell calls
"the mythological event" in the summer of 1943 and then lived with it
in her creative unconscious until 1966, when it rose into conscious-
ness as she wrote "Winter's King," A Wizard of Earthsea, and The Left
Hand of Darkness; it found expression in aesthetic form in the circu-
lar journeys her heroes and heroines make through the Earthsea Archi-
pelago and the Hainish future history, journeys which connect begin-
ning and end; and it may have been a crucial and determining factor
in her decision to reverse the Hainish chronology after she wrote
"Winter's King." She had let herself be used by myths and had found
her own voice.
When asked if the name "Hain" was connected in any way with the
murder and dismemberment of Hainuwele, Le Guin answered, "No - I plead
ignorance" (personal correspondence, April 21, 1978). She need not
have knowledge of this particular myth, however, to have experienced
the power of the archetype. The Norse and the Mesopotamian creation
myths are images of the same archetype (I am here making the Jungian
distinction between an archetype and an archetypal image--the arche-
type would overwhelm and obliterate consciousness, while the image
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345
ailows consciousness to assimilate the power of the archetype and use
it creatively). Commenting on the Hainuwele myth, Campbell writes,
The leading theme of the primitive-village mythology of the Dema
is the coming of death into the world, and the particular point
is that death comes by way of murder. ... Moreover, as we
learn from other myths and mythological fragments in this culture
sphere, the sexual organs are supposed to have appeared at the
time of this coming of death. Reproduction without death would
be a calamity, as would death without reproduction.
We may say, then, that the interdependence of death and sex,
their import as complementary aspects of a single state of being,
and the necessity of killing . . . this deeply moving, emotional-
ly disturbing glimpse of death as the life of the living is the
fundamental motivation supporting the rites around which the
social structure of the early planting villages was composed
(pp. 176-77).
Death came into Le Guin's world when she was in early adolescence;
"this deeply moving, emotionally disturbing" combination of events
("You never take it quite that hard again after the teens") may be the
fundamental motivation supporting the fictions around which her life
as a writer is composed. In the culture sphere of the Moluccas, "the
mythological image, the mythological formula is rendered present, here
and now, in the rite"; in the modern West, it is actualized in Le
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346
Guin's life and in her fiction. If, as Campbell says,
the festival is an extension into the present of the world-crea-
ting mythological event through which the force of the ancestors
(the eternal ones of the dream) became discharged into the roll-
ing run of time and where what then was ever present in the form
of a holy being without change now dies and reappears, dies and
reappears--like the moon, like the yam, like our animal food, or
like the race (pp. 179-80),
then Le Guin's creation of imaginary worlds is likewise an extension
into the present of the same world-creating mytholegical event. The
whole Hainish cycle, from the Fore-Eras of Hain to the League, the
Age of the Enemy, and the Ekumen, shows a race dying and reappearing
like the moon, one of those heavenly bodies that Alcmaeon and Heracli-
tus knew to be ever present because in their circular motions they
connect beginning and end: they provide a model of and a justification
for Plato's doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
This does not mean, however--and Le Guin knows this well--this
does not mean personal immortality. For, according to Campbell,
when the will of the individual to his own immortality has been
extinguished--as it is in rites such as these [or in fictions,
in Kermode's sense, like Le Guin's]--through an effective
realization of the immortality of being itself and of its play
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347
through all things, he is united with that being, in experience,
in a stunning crisis of release from the psychology of guilt
and mortality (pp. 180-81).
To claim this for fiction is perhaps too grandiose; but the myths em-
bodied in fictions may support it. Science fiction, at its best,
claims Le Guin,
is a new integrative effort, a way of enabling the contemporary,
scientific, individualistic consciousness to achieve the collec-
tive power of myth, to cope with thunder and suffering by aesthe-
tic, integrative means ("Ursula K. Le Guin: An Interview," p.5).
Even if it cannot do that for its readers, I am arguing here that it
does do that for its writers, at least for Le Guin.
Like her father's Oikoumené, itself a fundamentally mythic, as
well as a scientific construct, Le Guin's best fantasy and science
fiction, themselves as mythic as they are scientific, seem to grow
from a single source, some moment when her imagination went groping
in the dark, allowing itself to be used by myth, so that it could
discover its native symbology. Her fantasy and science fiction, as
different as the two halves of the brain, as separate as adjacent
colors on the spectrum, as distinguishable as two veins in marble
(all metaphors she has used), seem to flow from some moment in 1966.
When she concluded her autobiographical "A Citizen of Mondath" with
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348
the statement that "Outer Space, and the Inner Lands are still, and
always will be my country" (p. 24), she located those two realms in
One country, going against many critics who try to draw sharp bound-
aries around them (Le Guin recognizes distinctions; see her "Do-It-
Yourself Cosmology," Parabola, 2, iii [1977], 14-17). Le Guin takes
that position as a result, I believe, of her creative experiences
in or around 1966, when she invented-discovered Earthsea and Gethen
and the Ekumen at the same time and structured both A Wizard of Earth-
image of the Shadow: death.
53. A search for origins is at the very heart of anthropology
and ethnology, at least according to the American Heritage Dictionary:
a ets ements
anthropology: The scientific study of the origin and of the
physical, social, and cultural development and behavior of
man.
ethnology: The anthropological study of socio-economic systems
and cultural heritage, especiaily of cultural origins and of
factors influencing cultural growth and change, in technolog-
ically primitive societies.
Le Guin's whole future history, with its manipulation of history,
myth, and time, is her way of expressing as an artist what she has
absorbed from living with an anthropologist father and a historian
husband (Charles Le Guin is Professor of History at Portland State
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349
University). She says that
spatial minded people want to get things in boxes. But in
time you can't keep things in boxes--all the walls of the
boxes change. The reason I think that way is, I think, pretty
clear. I'm an anthropologist's daughter and an historian's
wife. I've lived among people who think in terms of what was
here way back until we don't know what kind of creature we
were (''Vertex Interviews Ursula K. Le Guin," Vertex, 2 [Decem-
ber, 1974], 96).
Not knowing "what kind of creature we were," of course, leaves room
for myth-making and history-making, poiesis, and plot-making, mytho-
poiesis, an activity that synthesizes myth and history in the art of
storytelling. See note 70 below on doors open to the past and future.
54. Dinesen, "The Cardinal's First Tale," Last Tales (New
York: Random House, 1957), p. 26. Note the ambiguous way the word
"only" works in this sentence: only the story has authority to ans-
wer the question, and the only authority the story has is to answer
the question.
55. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958), p. 186.
55. Langbaum, The Gayety of Vision, p. 20. See also, in this
connection, my discussion of "here" and "there" in chapter one, above,
pp. 42ff.
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350
57. These are the terms in which Le Guin herself understands
Along about 1967, I began to feel a certain unease, a need
to step on a little farther [than Emmeline Pankhurst and Vir-
ginia Woolf], perhaps, on my own. I began to want to define
and understand the meaning of sexuality and the meaning of
gender, in my life and in our society. Much had gathered in
the unconscious--both personal and collective--which must
either be brought up into consciousness, or else turn destruc-
tive [see note 52, above]. It was that same need, I think,
that led Beauvoir to write The Second Sex and Friedan to write
The Feminine Mystique, and that was, at the same time, leading
Kate Millet and others to write their books, and to create a
new feminism. But I was not a theoretician, a political think-
er or activist, or a sociologist. I was and am a fiction writ-
er. The way I did my thinking was to write a novel. That
ness, the process of my thinking ("Is Gender Necessary?" p.
130).
58. Rich, "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," quoted
by Donna Gerstenberger, "Conceptions Literary and Otherwise: Women
Writers and the Modern Imagination," Novel, 9 (Winter, 1976), 141.
59. Le Guin, quoted by Paula Brookmire, "She Writes about
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351
Aliens--Men Included," Milwaukee Journal, July 21, 1974; rpt., Bio-
graphy News (Detroit: Gale, 1974), p. 1155. Fora sociological study
of the composition of Le Guin's intended audience, see Albert I. Ber-
ger, "Science Fiction Fans in Socio-Economic Perspective: Factors in
the Social Consciousness of a Genre," Science-Fiction Studies, 4 (No-
vember, 1977), 252-46.
60. "Is Gender Necessary?" p. 132.
61. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson
and Brooke Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 210.
62. !
Le Guin never gives us that name; it is the "eternal name" of chapter 1
of the Lao Tzu:
The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
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384
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the mother of all things (Chan, p. 97).
(These four lines translate the Chinese characters at the head of this
chapter.)
II
Taoist imagery and symbolism, and Taoist or quasi-Taoist attitudes
are present in Le Guin's fiction from the earliest stories through The
Dispossessed. “? Just as Le Guin relied heavily on characters and plots
from Norse myth and legend in her earliest fantasy and science fiction
stories and then later found her own vehicles for her ideas and themes,
so she has used Taoism: sometimes her fiction is embroidered with ob-
vious Taoist borrowings, while at other times, usually in her better
works, Taoism disappears into the warp and weft of the narrative, but
is nevertheless still present. I will here discuss some of the Taoist
elements of her earlier romances, reserving for another time a fuller
treatment of Taoist themes in her more mature works.
What seems to be the first direct allusion to Chinese philosophy
in Le Guin's science fiction appears in Rocannon's World. Although all
the dualisms in that novel--the Fiia and the Gdemiar, matter and spirit
(i.e., the technological/materialistic imperialism of the League vs.
the feudal values of the Angyar and the frail spirituality of the Fiia)--
are traditional aspects of any romance, in which moral values are
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385
Sharply polarized, they can as well be read in terms of the two elemen-
tary principles yin and yang. Le Guin marries the dialectic of the
romance to the interaction of yin and yang when she seemingly alludes
to the t'ai chi at the very moment that Rocannon has his moment of
vision on enchanted ground, which comes as he searches for some water
amid the ice and snow of a high mountain pass and discovers a cave:
All about him the unavailing sunlight shone on gray rock. The
mountain peaks were hidden by the nearer cliffs, and the lands
below to the south were hidden by unbroken cloud. There was
nothing at all here on this gray ridgepole of the world but him-
self, and a dark opening between boulders.
After a long time he got to his feet, went forward stepping
across a steaming rivulet, and spoke to the presence which he
knew waited inside the shadowy gap. "I have come," he said.
The darkness moved a little, and the dweller in the cave stood
at its mouth.
It was like the Clayfolk, dwarfish and pale; like the Fiia,
frail and clear-eyed; like both, like neither. The hair was
white. The voice was no voice, for it sounded within Rocannon's
mind while all his ears heard was the faint whistle of the wind;
and there were no words. Yet it asked him what he wanted.
"I do not know," the man said aloud in terror, but his set will
eee ee ee
oa
E E
destroy him.
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386
The "gray ridgepole of the world" symbolizes the same thing the t'ai
chi symbolizes. According to Gabelentz, the German translator of Chou
Tun-I's T'ai Chi T'u Shuo, chi
originally signified, as is indicated by its radical (which is No.
75, "tree," or "wood'"), the ridge-pole in the gable of a house.
Because it is the topmost part of the building, the term is used
of all topmost and extreme points. Since we cannot go beyond the
top of the gable, but only cross over to descend on the other
side of the roof, chi means "goal," or "turning-point." The lat-
ter meaning implies the idea of neutrality, which is neither on
this nor on that side. As is well known, the Chinese word pos-
sesses the functions of various parts of speech. Thus chi, as
adverb, means "very highly, extremely”; as a verb, "to reach the
34
goal, to exhaust."
Rocannon stands on the summit of the mountain range that crosses the
Southwest Continent on Fomalhaut II; he is detached from familiar sur-
roundings by the cliffs and the clouds and therefore cannot orient him-
self. He has arrived at what is both a goal (the gift of mindspeech)
and a turning TE (he will descend the southern face of the range and
complete his mission). Amid neutral tones, in a grayness that is
neither light (yang) nor darkness (yin), but both light and darkness,
Rocannon stands on the ridgepole. He is at the center of the unity of
yin and yang, not between two opposites. Just as the yin-yang circle
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(commonly called the t'ai chi) is neither one nor the other, the
"guardian of the well" is like both the Fiia and the Gdemiar, yet like
neither. The Ancient One, then, is the primal beginning of those two
divided races just as the Liuar in Breygna Castle farther south are
the unified and integrated origin of the Angyar and Olgyior on the
Northwest Continent. The movement of the plot of Rocannon's World
is the movement of the Tao: return to origins and to wholeness.
All of this is deftly interwoven with the dynamic of the romance
plot in the book. The gray ridgepole of the world is the enchanted
ground of the romance, that setting which is detached and can only
be reached after passing through ordeals on a quest. It is the place
where the protagonist encounters or experiences a visionary or magical
moment in which dualisms and divisions are rejoined and synthesized
into a whole. The central conflict in Rocannon's World, the struggle
between the spiritual values of the Fiia and the Angyar and the
Material values of the League and the Gdemiar, is there resolved. Ro-
cannon receives the gift of mindspeech which enables him, in combina-
tion with his technological knowledge, to penetrate the Faradayan base
and send a message to the League. Le Guin sides with neither the
materialistic drive of the League nor the spiritual quietism of the
Fiia; both are extremes and therefore of limited value. She seeks
a synthesis, an integrated balance. Similarly, she seeks to integrate
the forward drive of the romance plot with the cyclical movement of
the Tao, linear time and eternal return. This will be accomplished
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388
in The Left Hand of Darkness; it will be Shevek's intellectual task,
and Le Guin's artistic task in The Dispossessed.
One more element in the scene on the ridgepole of the world in Ro-
cannon's World should be noted: the archetypal Wise Old Man in the cave.
Taoists often retreated to mountain caves where they could meditate on
the subtle mysteries of Nature. In the Chuang Tzu, "the Heavenly Gate
is nonbeing. The ten thousand things come forth from nonbeing."">> It
is nonbeing because things are not yet differentiated and therefore can-
not be perceived as being: yin and yang are potential, not actual (cf.
the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness). Le Guin combines the
cave, a symbol of nonbeing or perhaps of the non-ultimate (wu chi)
with the peak of a mountain, a symbol of the ultimate (t'ai chi). Thus
it is appropriate that Rocannon receive the gift of mindspeech there.
Language discriminates and distinguishes; because the Tao is beyond
and before all naming and differentiation, language cannot describe it.
"The name that can be named is not the eternal name." It must be in-
tuited, and mindspeech in Le Guin's novels is a metaphor for, among
other things, that way of knowing. "The voice was no voice...
there were no words"; thus the Ancient One "speaks" to Rocannon.
Similar scenes appear in most of Le Guin's other novels. When
Falk-Ramarren touches for a moment "the balance-pole, the center";
when Ged names and is named by his Shadow; when Genly Ai and Estraven
are in the "place inside the blizzard" on the Gobrin Ice; and when
Shevek finally achieves his General Temporal Theory--they all stand
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389
on the ridgepoles of their worlds. It is there, on the enchanted
gound of the romance's landscape that the logic of opposition is seen
for the first time as only a distorted version of the logic of correla-
tion.
Planet of Exile, Le Guin's second novel, contains no specific al-
lusions like the word "ridgepole" in Rocannon's World, yet it is clear-
ly Taoist in its overall design and movement. The opposition and hos-
tility between the black Terran colonists of Werel and the white Tevar-
an natives must become mutual aid and cooperation if they are to sur-
vive the Gaal Southing and the long winter. The entire shift in the
plot from opposition to correlation accompanies seasonal changes on
Werel/Alterra. The t'ai chi symbolizes enantiodromia (reversal in ex-
tremis): when anything reaches its limit, it becomes its opposite or
correlate. "Reversion is the action of the Tao," says the Lao Tzu.
Planet of Exile opens with the tide coming in around the Stack, with
the approaching Gaal, and with the sun moving toward the winter sol-
stice. It ends with the tide going out, with the Gaal retreat, and
with the sun moving away from the winter solstice. Significant action
in Le Guin's novels almost always takes place at solstices and equi-
noxes; she focusses her attention on those moments when nature and
human action are either in equilibrium or when one extreme is about to
change into its complement. Faith in a Taoist order of Nature seems
to be behind the several winter journeys her protagonists make; just
when Genly Ai's situation in Pulefen Farm is most hopeless on the eve
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390
of the winter solstice, Estraven rescues him and they set off across
the Gobrin Ice.
In the same way that the t'ai chi contains a small dark (yin) spot
within the light (yang) side and a small light (yang) spot within the
dark (yin) side, Planet of Exile begins with Rolery's (a white [yang]
woman [yin]) making a trip into Landin (home of black people) and
Jakob's (a black [yin] man [yang]) making a trip to the Tevaran Winter
City (home of white people). Le Guin manipulates the point of view
in the novel so that we see Tevarans through the consciousness of a
Terran and the Terrans through Tevaran eyes. As we read, these two
points of view estrange each other and are finally synthesized as the
plot moves Rolery and Jakob, the Terrans and Tevarans, into marriage
and a cooperative relationship. The shape and movement of the story
thus has a diagrammatic simplicity, evidence, perhaps, that Le Guin's
ideas about the movement of the Tao are something like a destiny con-
trolling human fate. An optimistic fatalism underlies it all.
Like Planet of Exile, though in a different way, City of Illusions
is Taoist in its overall conception. The movement of the plot is
again the movement of the Tao: reversion to origins and return to
roots. Like Rocannon's World, City of Illusions turns on a moment
when the hero stands on enchanted ground on the ridgepole of his world:
when Falk-Ramarren, the two-minded man, becomes a single in-dividual
after reading the first few passages on the Lao Tzu in the Shing city
of illusions Es Toch, he experiences wholeness as he "touches for the
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391
first time, for a moment only, the balance-pole, the center, and for
a moment was himself." 56 From its opening to its closing sentence,
City of Illusions is more thoroughly Taoist than either of Le Guin's
first two novels. The Clearing in the Eastern Forest where Zove and
his clan live appears to be modeled on the Taoist utopia described in
chapter 80 of the Lao Tzu. >’ Zove's clan studies the "Old Canon of
Man" (the Lao Tzu) and teaches it to Falk, as does All-Alonio, the
"Thurro-dowist" (Thoreau-Taoist), and the eccentric Prince of inai
Falk thinks of the Old Canon as "that shrewd and patient mysticism of
a very ancient civilization, that quiet voice speaking from amidst for-
gotten wars and disasters . . . that old canon of Unaction" (p. 246),
that last word being a translation of wu wei, the cardinal ethical im-
perative of Taoism, which Le Guin elsewhere refers to as "action
through TE The Prince gives Falk a copy of the Old Canon
to replace the one from Zove he lost at the "house of Fear." It is a
bilingual edition, Chinese-Galaktika face en face, modeled perhaps on
the edition Le Guin inherited from her fathar.” The Prince describes
the Chinese characters as "the symbols it was first written in, five
or six thousand years ago: the tongue of the Yellow Emperor" (p. 290).
We later see the Chinese through Ramarren's eyes as "columns of mar-
velously complicated patterns that might be holistic symbols, ideo-
graphs, technological shorthand" (p. 342).
Ramarren's mission is to return the Alterrans to their origins,
to search for the "mother" planet, thus to search for the Tao, for
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392
the Tao is frequently identified with the Mother. Falk's trek across
the North American continent is a return to his root being as Ramarren,
and Falk-Ramarren's and Orry's return to Werel at the end of the story
is another return to roots and origins (this is also the basic pattern
of The Dispossessed). Analogues to these movements may be found in the
Lao Tzu, chapter 16:
All things come into being,
And I see thereby their return.
All things flourish
But each returns to its root (Chan, p. 128),
or, chapter 65:
Always to know the standard is called profound and secret virtue.
Virtue becomes deep and far-reaching,
And with it all things return to their original state.
Then harmony will be reached (Chan, p. 216),
or, best of all, chapter 25:
There was something undifferentiated and yet complete,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless, it depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.
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If forced to give it a name, I shall call it Great.
Now being great means functioning everywhere.
Functioning everywhere means far-reaching.
Being far-reaching means returning to the original point (Chan, p.
144),
The description of Falk that opens the novel--"wholly involved in chaos,
he knew no pattern. He had no language and did not know the dines
to be night" (p. 215)--echoes the opening line of chapter 25 of the Lao
Tzu. It is as though Falk were identified with the Tao when the novel
begins, but he loses his way as he makes a quest, only to find it again,
this time as the Way, in Es Toch. After leaving the Clearing at the
beginning of his quest, he thinks about the Old Canon, "which declared
that when all ways are lost the Way lies clear" (p. 235).
Where Chan uses "Great" in his translation of chapter 25 of the
Lao Tzu, Derk Bodde uses "Vastness," and renders the last three lines
of chapter 25 as "Vastness means passing on, and passing on means
going far away, and going far away means returning."4! This is as good
a description as any of the plot of City of Illusions (and of The Dis-
possessed as well): Falk-Ramarren's 284 light-year trip from Werel to
Earth and back again is certainly passing on, going far away, and re-
turning. This connects neatly with the Vastness pattern that appears
on Buckeye's patterning frame just after Falk is brought into the
Clearing (pp. 216-17), and again on the Prince of Kansas' patterning
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394
frame, just after Falk tells him that what he most wishes for is "to
go home" (p 286-87). The patterning frame
originally [came] from the great culture of Davenant, though it
was now very ancient on Earth. The thing was a fortune-teller,
a computer, an implement of mystical discipline, a toy. ...
it took forty or fifty years to get handy with one (pp. 286-87).
It resembles in many respects the I Ching. The forty or fifty years
required to "get handy" with it may be an echo of the unwritten law in
China that "only those advanced in years regard themselves as ready to
learn from [the I Ching} ."°* The I Ching hexagrams are thought to mir-
ror or embody in some way the state of the universe at the moment the
oracle is consulted; thus, when Falk with his amber eyes enters the
clearing, the amber bead on Buckeye's patterning frame slides off into
the Vastness pattern. The Vastness pattern could, then, be read as
an analogue to the hexagram Fu in the I Ching, which means "Return
(The Turning Point)," and is associated with the winter PAT
Just as in Planet of Exile, when the opposition and hostility
between the Terrans and Tevarans reaches its extreme and then turns in-
to cooperation and mutual aid at the winter solstice, so in City of Il-
lusions the 1200 year-long domination by the Shing is about to reach
its limit. As Fung Yu-lan says in his discussion of the Lao Tzu, "of
all the laws underlying phenomenal change, the greatest is that if any
one thing moves to an extreme in one direction, a change must bring
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395
about the opposite resuit."""4 The fear that controls the lives of
everyone on Earth when Falk lands is approaching its limit; the
change brought about by Falk (who is, hardly coincidentally, at the
extreme limit of his journey from Werel) will transform that fear into
hope. He will return to Werel with the message that the Shing are few
and can be easily defeated. It is thus quite appropriate that the
Prince of Kansas should show Falk some lines from chapter 20 of the
Lao Tzu: "O desolation! / It has not yet / not yet reached its limit!"
(p. 289). Because he is a Taoist, the Prince senses that the Shing's
desolation of Earth is about to reach its extreme. Then, through the
agency of Falk-Ramarren, will come the return of what Zove remembers:
"once we used knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry
across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life" (p. 228).
Without extending this catalogue of allusions to and ideas from
Taoist philosophy too far, it should be enough to say here that all of
Le Guin's quotations from the Lao Tzu in City of Illusions come from
chapter 1, the "most important of all chapters" (Chan, p. 97), and chap-
ter 20, which Holmes Welch reads as a picture of the Taoist sage "as
he appears to himself while still in search of his original TN
Welch's reading of chapter 20, which Le Guin had close at hand as she
wrote City of Iliusions, is the story of Falk-Ramarren in a nutshell.
Before leaving the novel, however, we might look at one of Falk's al-
lusions to chapter 20 of the Lao Tzu. one which has significant bearing
on the theme of truth and lies, reality and illusion, in the novel.
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396
Shortly before Falk is to leave the Clearing for Es Toch, he discusses
his situation with Zove:
"While I was studying with Ranya last summer, she showed me
how I differ from the human genetic norm. It's only a twist of
two of the helix . . . a very small difference. Like the differ-
ence between wei and o." Zove looked up with a smile at the refer-
ence to the Canon which fascinated Falk (p. 226).
Falk is a descendant of the Terran colonists who left Earth twelve cen-
turies before. The twist of a DNA helix is the result of the genetic
changes experienced by the Terrans on Werel and the result of their
intermarriages with the Tevarans after Jakob and Rolery break taboos
to show such marriages possible. Falk's allusion to the "Canon" is to
the first few lines of chapter 20, which have been translated in many
different and often contradictory ways. The point of the allusion
seems to be this: biological and ethical distinctions vanish into noth-
ing when seen from the perspective of the Tao. Wei and o are both af-
firmations in Chinese. One is formal, unequivocal, and polite while
the other is informal, hesitant, and rude. Unlike the Confucians, who
prescribed thousands of rules of propriety and morality, the Taoists
considered those discriminations merely relative, if not eine
Chapter 2 of the Lao Tzu says:
Being and non-being produce each other;
Difficult and easy complete each other;
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397
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low distinguish each other;
Sound and voice harmonize each other;
Front and behind accompany each other (Chan, p. 101).
Anyone who accepts this must also accept its implications for morals;
good and evil, truth and lies, are not in conflict, but are inter-
dependent, even cooperative: they accompany each other. Le Guin seems
to believe this, for she has Falk-Ramarren deliver an authorial message
that crystalizes the thematic content of City of Illusions:
there is in the long run no disharmony, only misunderstanding, no
chance or mis-chance but only the ignorant eye. . . . Harmony
exists, but there is no understanding it; the Way cannot be gone.
- + perhaps the essence of their [the Shing's] lying was a pro-
found, irremediable lack of understanding. They could not get in
touch with men. They had used that and profited by it, making it
into a great weapon, the mindlie; but had it been worth their
while, after all? Twelve centuries of lying, ever since they had
first come here, exiles or pirates or empire-builders from some
distant star, determined to rule over these races whose minds made
no sense to them and whose flesh was to them forever sterile.
Alone, isolated, deafmutes ruling deafmutes in a world of delu-
sions. Oh desolation. . . . (pp. 362-63, 368-69; italics and the
last ellipsis in original).
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III
Among the preconditions necessary for the creation of a utopia are
the convictions that human beings are basically good; that they are mal-
leable; and that socio-political institutions are not sacred structures
good for all time, but rather are alterable in essence and need to be
refashioned to permit the creation of a more perfect society (if one
holds the outmoded idea of a static utopia) or to permit the growth of
a more humane society, and at the same time to remove all those con-
straints that hinder the development of an individual's inherent good-
ness. Le Guin holds these convictions. In an interview conducted
about a year before The Dispossessed was published, she discussed the
book and her vision of the ideal society:
UKL: . . . it would be a world with a great deal less comfort
and less convenience for the wealthy, I think, than our
world. Nobody would be as well off, but nobody would be as
badly off as our poor, or the poor of other countries. It
would be a levelling. In the economic sense it would be a
complete levelling.
INT: It's a nice thing if you believe that people, once their
basic needs are taken care of, will find all sorts of things
to do.
UKL: That's the act of faith you have to make. If people have
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399
what they really need then they won't be quite as driven and
as grabby. That's the act of faith that all leftists make:
that human nature has capacity for being relatively good.
INT: You make that leap for the purposes of this novel [The Dis-
possessed]?
UKL: Yes. And I do make it; I can't help but make it. I'm
obviously a true believer in the sense that give us a chance
47
and we won't be quite as bad as we are.
And then about a year after The Dispossessed was published, she wrote
that Odonianism, the ethico-political theory on which her utopia is
based is
anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded
by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism's
principal target if the authoritarian State (capitalist or
socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation
(solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me
4
the most interesting, of all political theories.
That Le Guin is a "true believer," an anarchist, and the author of a
utopia is a logical result of her Taoist beliefs and the modes or pro-
cesses of thought embodied in the romance, the major narrative form of
most of her work. The seeds of her utopia are in City of Illusions,
simultaneously one of the most conventional of all her romance quests
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400
and the most explicitly Taoist of all her books; I have already noted
that the Clearings in City of Illusions are based on the Taoist utopia
and that the basic structure of The Dispossessed is an elaboration of
the "Vastness pattern," the going out and returning, that informs the
earlier novel. In concluding this chapter I will propose that the ro-
mance and Taoism share some common deep structures and that, as I
noted in chapter one (see above, pp. 26 and 43), Le Guin's Taoist be-
liefs, carried onward and shaped by the forward-moving narrative drive
of her romance plots, produce her utopia.
In a remark that reflects Christian (or at least Western) ideas,
Frye says that "Romance has its own conception of an ideal society, but
that society is in a higher world than that of ordinary EE
If we reformulate Frye's statement, it may be applied to Le Guin's fic-
tion: her early romances have their own conception of an ideal society,
but that society is repressed and thwarted by the world of ordinary ex-
perience--the State and other forms of authoritarianism and domination.
Because Le Guin does not recognize a cleavage between creator and
creation, because her world-view does not admit a distinct realm higher
than ordinary experience, we cannot say that her utopia is something to
be achieved by transcending mundane experience. Instead, in accordance
with the idea of an immanent Tao whose operation is good~-"an organisa-
tion center . . . identical with the organism itself," as Needham says--
we should locate Le Guin's ideal society in this world of ordinary ex-
perience. That ideal is to be articulated by liberating it from re-
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401
pressive forces, not by ascending toward it. Le Guin Might agree with
Frye when he writes, "the secular scripture [romance] tells us that we
are the creators"; but she would part company with Frye when he follows
that with "other scriptures tell us that we are actors in the drama
of divine creation and redemption" (p. 157). If, however, we replace
Frye's words "divine creation" with "natural evolution" or the Chinese
word sheng, "production," we might then see that the romance and Taoism
are as firmly wedded in Le Guin's world as the romance and Christian
redemption are in Frye's. Thus, if Frye understands the goal of ro-
mance to be the merging of sacred and secular scriptures during an up-
ward journey toward the recovery of sacred myth, we may read Le Guin's
romances as inward journeys toward the liberation of a creative energy
which, given enough freedom, can generate or produce a convincing por-
trait of an ideal society. Before Le Guin created her anarchist utopia
in The Dispossessed, she wrote The Word for World is Forest and The
Lathe of Heaven, two journeys inward into a world of dreams and dream-
ing, a world threatened from the outside by militarism, capitalist ex-
ploitation, and social engineering.
The wish-fulfillment and yearning that impel the forward drive of
the romance have the same goal that the movement of the Tao has: return
and recovery. This paradoxical advancing by returning is, moreover,
the process that generates utopias. °° The synthesis of the romance's
dialectic of recovery and projection is utopian: in Frye's words, "a
union of past and future in a present vision of a pastoral, paradisal,
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402
and radically simplified life" (p. 179). Although Le Guin inverts the
traditional pastoral and paradisal conventions when she places her
utopia on an arid planet where scarcity rather than abundance is the
rule, her present social vision is surely of a radically simplified
ideal; and even if the lush planet Urras were not in the novel, the
radical negation of pastoral conventions would certainly evoke an
image of the Arcadian-Edenic utopia Frye has in mind. At a time when
the utopian novel seemed to have died, partly perhaps because Edenic-
Arcadian images from the Hebrew-Hellenic tradition no longer commanded
belief, Le Guin was able to breathe new life into the form because of
the fortuitous coincidence in her writing of on the one hand science
fiction, a form of the romance that speaks to the modern imagination,
and on the other hand Taoism, an archaic philosophy and system of
beliefs not only compatible with the configurations of the romance but
acceptable to those readers who had rejected traditional Western beliefs,
blaming them for the many world-wide crises of the 1960s. Le Guin's
"scheme of perceiving and communicating," formed in part by Taoism and
the romance and articulated with anarchist ideas and science fiction
forms, was able to make the Janus-faced leap into the future and return
to the past without which the construction of a utopia is not possible.
In doing that she has made a significant contribution to literary his-
tory as well as renewing our faith in the possibility of a just and
humane social order.
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NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
1. Le Guin, "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," Algol, No, 21
(November, 1973), 8.
2. Gene Van Troyer, "Vertex Interviews Ursula K. Le Guin," Ver-
tex, 2 (December, 1974), 96.
3. Ina letter to Elizabeth Cogell, dated August 13, 1976, Le
Guin writes, "that volume of the Lao Tzu was always within reach of my
father's hand, as it were. It's not that he talked about it much, but
evidently it came as near to supplying a 'religion' as he (or I)
wanted." My thanks to Ms. Cogell for showing me this.
4. On organicism as a world-view, see Stephen C. Pepper, World
Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942), pp. 280-
314. On Romantic organicism, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the
Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 156-225. On
organicism in the philosophy of nature, see J. Ronald Munsen and
Richard C. York, “Nature, Philosophy of," Encyclopaedia Britannica,
15th ed. (1974), which includes a useful bibliography. For a thorough
discussion of organicism as the philosophia perennis of China, see the
Magisterial treatment in Joseph Needham, History of Scientific Thought,
versity Press, 1954--).
5. Although this chapter holds the place usually reserved for a
conclusion, it is more an exploration into the possibilities of using
405
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404
a philosophical approach to understand Le Guin's fiction and a summary
of a few ideas treated from other angles in the previous chapters.
Along with the bibliographical appendix that follows it, this chapter
is the result of a mining and assay operation: if, in the future, this
vein proves worth working, it will at least have been opened, but if
it turns out to have produced low-grade ore, then others will know to
explore other, more profitable veins. As Darko Suvin has remarked,
"in research a negative result is sometimes as important as, or even
more important than, a positive one, for--as Spinoza figured out for
us all even before Hegelian dialectics--'Omnia determinatio est nega-
tio'" ("On What Is and Is Not an SF Narration. . .," Science-Fiction
Studies, 5 [1978], 45).
6. Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1963), p. 136. For another clear and helpful
discussion of the meaning of the concept Tao, see Max Kaltenmark, Lao
Tzu and Taoism, trans. Roger Greaves (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1969), pp. 22ff.
7. See T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London: Macmillan,
1895); Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902; rpt.,
with an introduction by Ashley Montagu, Boston: Extending Horizons
Books, n.d. [1955]); Kropotkin, Ethics: Origins and Development (New
York: Dial Press, 1934); C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal (London:
George Allen § Unwin, 1960); and A. G. N. Flew, Evolutionary Ethics
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967). The debate over whether human
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40S
beings are innately aggressive or cooperative goes on still, between
Robert Ardrey and Conrad Lorenz on the one hand and Ashley Montagu on
the other. Le Guin regards The Dispossessed as an antidote to the
innately aggressivist school, and thus joins Kropotkin, Julian Huxley,
Joseph Needham, and C. H. Waddington in arguing that competition is
not the only law driving evolution of nature and human society.
8. The ideas in this paragraph are derived from Chang Tung-sun,
"A Chinese Philosopher's Theory of Knowledge," ETC: A Review of General
Semantics, 9 (1952), 203-26; and from Needham, "Correlative Thinking
and its Significance," section 13(f) of his History of Scientific
Thought, pp. 279-303.
9. Ollmann, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist
Society, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
10. Published in Riverside Quarterly, 5 (February, 1972), 89-96.
11. Le Guin, "A Response to the Le Guin Issue (SFS #7)," Science-
Fiction Studies, 3 (March, 1976), 45.
12. Chang, "A Chinese Philosopher's Theory of Knowledge," p. 223,
Chang, who was a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese
People's Government, is aware of the possibility that Marx's thought is
conditioned by capitalist relations of production and exchange, and is
thus aware that Marx and Mencius are not only thinkers representative
of European and Chinese modes of thought, but also of capitalist and
pre-capitalist modes. Still, Hegel, Marx, and Lenin have been wel-
comed in China while non-dialectical thinkers from the West have not.
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406
15. Granet, La Pensée Chinoise (Paris: Renaissance du livre,
1934), p. 280.
14. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books,
1976), pp. 233-34, 267.
15. Richard Wilhelm, "Introduction," to The I Ching or Book of
Changes: The Richard Wilhelm Translation rendered into English by Cary
F. Baynes, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p.
lv. Le Guin could have referred her readers to a better source if she
wanted them to understand that yin and yang are not opposites. Wil- /
helm says of yin and yang, "these opposites . . . created a great stir,
especially in the transition period between the Ch'in and Han dynas-
ties [3rd century B.C.]. ... speculations of a gnostic-dualistic
character are foreign to the original thought of the I Ching" (p. iv).
Moreover, Wilhelm does not distinguish the I Ching from the Lao Tzu
as carefully as do other, more authoritative scholars. "Lao-tse
knew this book [the i Ching]," says Wilhelm, "and some of his profound-
est aphorisms were inspired by it" (p. liv). But Fung Yu-lan, author
of the standard history of Chinese philosophy, writes, "these methods
{in the I Ching] for dealing with things in the world are only similar
to, but not identical with, those in the Lao-tzu. The latter work ad-
vocates that extremes be synthesized so as to form a new blend of har-
mony, whereas the I Appendixes simply advocate the taking of the mean
or middle way between those two extremes, . . . and in this respect
remain Confucian documents" (A History of Chinese Philosophy, 2 vols.,
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407
trans. Derk Bodde [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952-55],
I, 392). The contamination of the true relationship between yin and
yang that Le Guin inveighs against has Confucian sources as well as
Manicheaen and Marxist ones.
16. The I Ching, p. lv, note 14. Baynes is not a Sinologist,
but a translator of Jung, and it was apparently in the service of
Jungianism, not Sinology, that he rendered Wilhelm's translation
into English. Wilhelm was a personal friend of Jung's.
17. Ibid., p. lvi.
18. Ibid., p. 298.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Needham, History of Scientific Thought, p. 464.
22. Fung, A History, II, 435.
23. Needham, p. 460.
24. Chan, Source Book, p. 463.
25. Needham, pp. 462-63.
26. Quoted by Needham, p. 465, note f. Needham also invokes
Hegel and Whitehead as he discusses Chou Tun-I.
27. The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching), trans. Wing-tsit Chan
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 149. Subsequent references
indicated parenthetically.
28. For a discussion of the Taoist elements in The Lathe of
Heaven, see Douglas Barbour, "The Lathe of Heaven: Taoist Dream,"
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408
Algol, No. 21 (November, 1973), 22-24; and Jerry Kaufman, "Haber is
Destroyed on The Lathe of Heaven," Starling (Madison, Wis.), No. 27
(January, 1974), 35-40.
29. The I Ching, p. 319.
30. Needham, pp. 465-66.
31. (Berkeley: Parnassus Press, 1968), p. 185.
52. A first attempt to see The Dispossessed in terms of Taoist
thought is Elizabeth Cogell, "Taoist Configurations: The Dispossessed."
in Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, ed.
Joe De Bolt (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1979), pp. 153-79.
33. Rocannon's World, in Three Hainish Novels (Garden City, N.Y.:
Nelson Doubleday [for the Science Fiction Book Club], 1978), pp. 96-97.
34. Quoted by Paul Carus, "Chinese Philosophy," The Monist, 6
(January, 1896), 211.
35. The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 257. Similar images are to
be found in the Lao Tzu: "the door of subtleties" (ch. 1), "the gate
of the subtle and profound female / Is the root of Heaven and Earth"
(ch. 6), and "can you play the role of the female in the opening and
closing of the gates of Heaven?" (ch. 10). Anyone interested in
a psychological reading of Le Guin's fiction would quickly identify
the cave as a womb symbol in which Rocannon is reborn. Chan plays
down a sexual meaning in the Taoist "gate of Heaven" (pp. 111, 117,
and 118). Le Guin herself uses Giles's translation of the passage
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409
from the Chuang Tzu that I have quoted in my text in The Lathe of
Heaven as one of the Taoist chapter epigraphs: "The portal of God is
non-existence," which may indicate that she thinks of the Taoist gate
of Heaven in a sense wider than the sexual.
36. City of Illusions, in Three Hainish Novels, p. 349. Subse-
quent references indicated parenthetically.
37. Le Guin's description, via Falk's point of view, of the
Clearing emphasizes a Taoist denial of anthropocentrism and the
Taoist concept tzu-jan, which means "spontaneous," "self-originating,"
or "natural":
There was no shutting out the inhuman here, no narrowing man's
life, as in the cities of earlier ages, to within man's scope.
To keep anything at all of a complex civilization intact here
among so few was a singular and very perilous achievement, though
to most of them it seemed quite natural: it was the way [i e;
tao] one did; no other way was known (p. 225).
Although the people in the Clearings have extremely advanced tech-
nology (fusion-powered sliders), they use horses to travel from one
Clearing to another, whenever they do travel. Some, like Buckeye,
never leave their homes. This reflects the principles stated in chap-
ter 80 of the Lao Tzu:
Let there be a small country with few people.
Let there be ten times and a hundred times as many utensils
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410
But let them not be used.
Let the people value their lives highly and not migrate far.
Even if there are ships and carriages, none will ride in them.
Even if there are arrows and weapons, none will display them.
Let the people again knot cords and use them (in place of writing).
Let them relish their food, beautify their clothing, be content
with their homes, and delight in their customs.
Though neighboring communities overlook one another and the crow-
ing of cocks and the barking of dogs can be heard,
Yet the people there may grow old and die without ever visiting
one another (Chan, p. 238).
This way of life, as Le Guin realizes, is limited. They have no "in-
struments of communication over distance" (p. 225), and this enables
the Shing to keep them isolated and fragmented and thus prevent any
mass action.
On the Taoist utopia, see Chan's comment in his translation of
the Lao Tzu (p. 238). See also Chang Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of
Thinking (New York: Harper § Row, 1975), pp. 207-299; and above all,
see Needham, "The attack on feudalism," section 10(g), History of
Scientific Thought, pp. 100-132. Holmes Welch concludes his Parting
of the Way with a speculation on what it will be like after a nuclear
war (a characteristic exercise during the fifties), and suggests that
the survivors may have to live by Taoist principles. Welch comes
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411
close to using the kechmas of science fiction as he offers his ex-
position of a Taoist future world, and this may have influenced Le
Guin as she created the Clearings in City of Illusions, for she had
Welch's book beside her as she wrote the novel (personal correspon-
dence, September 9, 1977).
38. Le Guin is not the first to link Thoreau and Chinese thought.
Lin Yu-tang writes that "Thoreau is the most Chinese of all American
authors in his entire view of life. . . . I could translate passages
of Thoreau into my own language and pass them off as original writing
by a Chinese poet, without raising any suspicion" (The Importance of
Living, quoted by Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook [New York: New
York University Press, 1961], p. 199).
59. Le Guin, "Introduction to the 1978 Edition," Planet of Exile
(New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. ix.
40. See item #2 in the Appendix that follows this chapter.
41. Bodde, trans., Fung, A History, I, 182.
42. Hellmut Wilhelm, Eight Lectures on the I Ching, trans. Cary F.
Baynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 3.
43. See The I Ching, pp. 97-100, 504-509. See also James Legge,
trans., The Yi King (1882; rpt., Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), pp.
107-111. The text under this hexagram and the commentaries on it by
Wilhelm and Legge are directly relevant to the plot of City of Illu-
sions, as well as to the plots of Le Guin's other novels which include
“winter journeys" that reach their turning points on or about the
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winter solstice.
44. Fung, A History, I, 182.
45. Welch, Taoism: The Parting of the Way, rev ed (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1966), p. 48.
46. Extensive quotation is necessary to document these points.
Here are a half-dozen translations of the first few lines of chapter
20 of the Lao Tzu (for full bibliographical data, see the Appendix):
Abandon learnedness and you have no vexation. The 'yes' compared
with the 'yea,' how little they differ! But the good compared
with the bad, how much do they differ!
What the people dread cannot be dreadless! How great is their
desolation. Alas! it has not yet reached its limit (Carus, 1898
ed., p. 106) .
Banish learning and there will be no more grieving.
Between wei and o
What after all is the difference?
Can it be compared to the difference between good and bad?
The saying ‘what others avoid I too must avoid'
How false and superficial it is! (Waley, p. 168).
Banish learning, and vexations end.
Between 'Ah!' and 'Ough!'
How much difference is there?
Between 'good' and tevil'
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How much difference is there?
That which men fear
Is indeed to be feared;
But, alas, distant yet is the dawn (of awakening)! (Lin Yutang,
Wisdom of Laotse, p. 128).
Exterminate learning and there will no longer be worries.
Between yea and nay
How much difference is there?
Between good and evil
How great is the distance?
What others fear One must also fear
And wax without having reached the limit (Lau, p. 76).
Abandon learning and there will be no sorrow.
How much difference is there between 'Yes, sir,' and 'Of course
not'?
How much difference is there between 'good' and 'evil'?
But, alas, how confused, and the end is not yet (Chan, p. 134).
What is the difference between the respectful 'wei' and the dis-
respectful 'o0'?
What is the difference between good and bad?
Where others are afraid, must I too be afraid?
How extremely ridiculous this is! (Chang, p. 56).
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414
Here is proof positive that any one translation of the Lao Tzu is insuf-
ficient for an understanding of the text. Taken together, several com-
mentaries on this passage from chapter 20 illuminate the ideas:
The Chinese possess two affirmatives wei (5) and o (8); the for-
mer is an equivocal, but the latter is a hesitating assent. The
former is definite and should be used by men and boys. The latter
indicates modesty and should be used by women and girls. This
distinction is made according to the rules of Chinese propriety,
but Lao-Tze deems it unessential (Carus, p. 297).
‘Learning’ means in particular learning the '3300 rules of eti-
quette'. Wei and o were the formal and informal words for 'yes',
each appropriate to certain occasions (Waley, p. 168, note 1).
A Confucianist would never say, ‘Abandon learning.' Further, he
would distinguish sharply between good and evil. The Neo-Confu-
cianist, Ch'eng Hao, has been severely criticized for his saying,
"Good and evil in the world are both Principles of Nature,' and
Wang Yang-ming was likewise widely attacked for teaching that ‘in
the original substance of the mind there is no distinction between
good and evil' (Chan, pp. 134-35).
This chapter expresses the self-identity of contradictions as it
is experienced in actual life, which is different from the unifi-
cation or synthesis of opposites achieved through intellection.
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415
X - Chinese moralists often maintained a strict distinction be-
tween right and wrong, high and low, good and bad. . . . Intellec-
tual and moral discrimination lead to the ego self. This chapter
depicts the genuine man who lives in accordance with reality.
- - - Jung maintains: 'The identity of opposites is the character-
istic of every psychic event that is unconscious’ (Chang, pp. 57-
58).
While Le Guin would never ask us to abandon distinctions between right
and wrong, she does recognize the limitations of over-intellectualized
moral discriminations, and would probably agree most strongly with
Chang's comments.
47. "Ursula K. Le Guin," interviewed by Jonathan Ward, Algol, No.
24 (Summer, 1975),10.
48. Le Guin, headnote to "The Day Before the Revolution," in her
The Wind's Twelve Quarters (New York: Harper § Row, 1975), p. 285.
49. Frye, The Secular Scripture (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1976), p. 150. Further references indicated parenthetically.
50. See Eric S. Rabkin, "Atavism and Utopia," Alternative Futures:
The Journal of Utopian Studies, 1 (Spring, 1978), 71-82.
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APPENDIX
A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ORIENTATION TO TAOISM
No book in the world, perhaps, with the excep-
tion of the Bible, has been translated so often
as the Tao te Ching. . . . The structure of
the work is in the highest degree incoherent:
it is a collection of aphorisms jumbled together
with little or no attempt at an orderly arrange-
ment, and even the divisions into chapters
(which is probably a later addition) helps
hardly at all. The whole gist of the book is
the glorification of simplicity, yet it con-
tains passage after passage of the most baf-
fling obscurity, and the numerous translations
often differ so widely that they hardly seem
to represent the same text. Perhaps it is
this very absence of finality, this unlimited
variety of interpretation, that has proved
so alluring. At any rate, though mirrored in
the facets of many minds, the sayings of Lao
Tzu remain as enigmatical as ever.
--Lionel Giles
416
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417
If a reader were to approach Le Guin's fiction through Taoism,
he or she would probably touch most of her central themes; but that
approach, like others which use Le Guin's sources and influences as
an entry into her work--approaches which are essentially thematic--
would finally have its limitations. Even if one were to use some
of her other sources such as Norse myth and legend; Romantic poetry,
painting, and music; the traditions of the European novel; fantasy
and science fiction; dream research; narratives and journals of ex-
plorers of Antarctica; anthropology; or feminism and anarchism, the
final picture would not include a full sense of Le Guin's formal
artistry. Yet even if knowledge of Taoism is not in itself sufficient
for a complete understanding and appreciation of Le Guin's fiction,
it is still necessary. And because Taoism is probably less accessible
to Le Guin's reader than the other elements that contribute to her
world-view, an orientation may be helpful.
Le Guin herself apparently realized that her readers would need
some guideposts, and therefore used quotations from the Lao Tzu (Tao-
te Ching) and the Chuang Tzu (the two principal Taoist texts) as
chapter epigraphs in The Lathe of Heaven. She wanted people to real-
ize, she said to a reviewer who objected to the epigraphs, that George
Orr is not a "dolt," but a Taoist, and that his passivity and still-
ness are not defects or shortcomings, but are his greatest strengths. 1
This appendix carries that kind of guidance further by offering a
bibliographic guide to Taoism so that those who are unfamiliar with
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418
Chinese philosophy will have a map to guide them through the often
strange, complex, and sometimes obscure landscapes of Chinese thought
that are always on the horizon and sometimes in the foreground in Le
Guin's fiction.
In the chapter on Lao Tzu in his The Great Philosophers, Karl
Jaspers outlines what is probably the best way to study Taoism (short
of spending several years learning classical Chinese):
A layman can study the text only by comparing the numerous trans-
lations and their commentaries. We cannot read Lao-tzu as we
read Kant, Plato, or Spinoza. The text does not speak to us
directly in its own language, but through a medium which clouds
and muffles it--or on occasion sets it off in too glaring a
light. The difference in meaning between one translation and
another are sometimes enormous. . . . The reader is advised to
make use of several translations.”
This is, in fact, the method Le Guin used when she made the "transla-
tions" from the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu that appear in City of
Illusions and The Lathe of Heaven. Those translations, she explained,
when someone remarked on their strangeness, are "mine--not from the
Chinese, believe me--but from collating about five different transla-
tions, all of which are totally differe" On another occasion, she
said that she makes "[her] own interpretation, using the literal word-
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419
by-word version [in Carus's 1898 translation]. (I cheat -- like Ezra
4
Pound).'"' When she introduced a new edition of City of Illusions, she
wrote,
Every novel gives you a chance to do certain things you could not
do without it. .. . I am grateful to this book for. . . the
chance to use my own "translation’ (collation-ripoff) of the Tao
Te Ching.”
Even those who do read classical Chinese proceed by comparing other
translations as they make their own, for the text is by no means
: ; 6
transparent, even to Chinese philosophers.
A. English Translations of the Lao Tzu.
The Lao Tzu has been translated into Western languages more often
than any other Chinese text. Almost all of the translations below
(listed in chronological order) are in print. Many have valuable in-
troductions, commentaries, and notes which help illuminate this diffi-
cult text. Those who want to locate other translations may consult
Chan Wing-tsit, An Outline and an Annotated Bibliography of Chinese
Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), and Michel Soymie
and F. Litsch, "Bibliographie du Taoisme: Etudes dans les Langues
Occidentales," ÑP (Doky Kenkyu [Etudes Taoistes]), 3 (1968),
1-72. Other lists of English translations of the Lao Tzu are in the
translations below by Bahm (another collation-interpretation) and
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420
Chan, and in Holmes Weich's book. The translations that Le Guin used
to make her own "translation" are indicated with an asterisk. A. L.
Kroeber owned a copy of Carus's 1898 edition and read it regularly;
Le Guin says that she "took over [her] father’s copy of Lao Tse § con-
: : 7
tinue[s] to wear it out."
*1. Legge, James. The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Tao-
ee eee eee, eC =e
ism. Vols. 39 and 40 of The Sacred Books of the East,
ed. F. Max Muller. London: Oxford University Press,
1891; rpt., 1927; rpt., with an introduction by D. T.
Suzuki, New York: Julian Press, 1959; rpt., New York:
Dover, 1962; rpt., New York: Paragon, 1963; rpt.,
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966.
*2. Carus, Paul. Lao-Tze's Tao-Teh-King [actually translated by
D. T. Suzuki on his first trip to the USA]. Chicago:
Open Court, 1898; rpt., without character-for-word
Open Court, 1974. Includes Chinese text.
3. Medhurst, C. Spurgeon. The Tao-Teh-King: Sayings of Lao-Tzu.
Chicago: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1905; rev ed.,
Wheaton, I11.: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1972.
*4. Waley, Arthur. The Way and Its Power: A Study of the Tao Te
Ching and Its Place in Chinese Thought. London: Allen
and Unwin, 1934; rpt., New York: Grove Press [Evergreen
E84], 1958.
5. Ch'u Tao-kao. Tao Te Ching. London: The Buddhist Society,
1937; rpt., New York: Samuel Weiser, 1973.
6. Wu, John C. H. Lao Tzu / Tao Teh Ching. New York: St.
John's University Press, 1961. Originally published
in T'ien Hsia Monthly (Shanghai) in 1939-40. Chinese-
English face en face.
*7. Hughes, Ernest R. "Tao Te Ching." Chinese Philosophy in
Classical Times. London: Dent, 1942; rev. ed., 1954;
rpt., 1974.
8a. Lin Yutang. "The Wisdom of Laotse." The Wisdom of India and
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421
China. New York: Random House, 1942; rpt., New York:
Modern Library [Modern Library Giant G59], 1955.
8b. - The Wisdom of Laotse. New York: Modern Library
[Modern Library 262], 1948. Lin uses extracts from the
Chuang Tzu as commentaries on the Lao Tzu.
9. Brynner, Wytter. The Way of Life According to Lao-tzu. New
York: John Day, 1944; rpt., New York: Capricorn, 1962.
10. Duyvendak, J. J. L. Tao Te Ching: The Book of the Way and
its Virtue. London: John Murray, 1954.
ll. Blakney, R. B. The Way of Life. Lao Tzu. A New Transla-
tion of the Tao Te Ching. New York: NAL Mentor [MW1459]
1955.
12. Bahm, Archie J. Tao Teh King by Lao Tzu. Interpreted as
Nature and Intelligence. New York: Ungar, 1958.
13. Mei Yi-pao. "Metaphysics and Government in the Lao Tzu: Sel-
ections from the Lao Tzu (or Tao-te Ching).' Sources
of Chinese Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary, et al.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.
14a. Chan Wing-tsit. "The Natural Way of Lao Tzu." A Source
Book in Chinese Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1963.
14b. - The Way of Lao Tzu (Tao-te Ching). New York:
Bobbs-Merrill [LLA 159], 1963.
15. Lau, D. C Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. Harmondsworth: Penguin
3 3.
1], 196
16. Tang Zi-Chang. Wisdom of Dao: Lao Zi Recompiled, Annotated,
17. Feng Gia-fu and Jane English. Tao te Ching by Lao Tsu. New
1972. With calligraphy and photographs.
18. Van Over, Raymond. The Chinese Mystics. New York: Harper å
Row, 1973.
19. Chang Chung-yuan. Tao: A New Way of Thinking. New York:
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422
Harper & Row, 1975. Jungian/Heideggerian commertaries.
B. English Translations of Commentaries on the Lao Tzu.
No Chinese reader would ever approach the Lao Tzu without reading
commentaries by later philosophers. The two most important have been
translated, along with translations of the text of the Lao Tzu itself:
20. Erkes, Eduard. Ho Shang Kung's Commentary on Lao-tse.
Artibus Asiae, 8 (1945), 119-96; 9 (1946), 197-220;
and 12 (1949), 221-51; rpt., together in one volume,
Ascona, Switz.: Artibus Asiae, 1950.
21. Lin, Paul J. A Translation of Lao Tzu's Tac Te Ching and
Wang Pi's Commentary. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese
Studies, University of Michigan, 1977.
C. English Translations of the Chuang Tzu.
The Chuang Tzu has received far less attention from translators
than the Lao Tzu has; but if the Lao Tzu is the most famous Taoist
text, the Chuang Tzu is generally regarded by students of Taoism as
the most important, and has "deeply influenced" Le Guin, she says.
Translations used by Le Guin are again indicated by an asterisk:
*22. Giles, Herbert. Chuang Tzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social
Reformer. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1889; 2nd ed.
rev., 1926; rpt., London: Allen and Unwin, 1961 and
New York: Humanities Press, 1961. Lionel Giles's
Musings of a Chinese Mystic: Selections from the Phil-
osophy of Chuang Tzu (London: John Murray, 1906) uses
his father's translations.
*25. Legge, James. The Texts of Taoism (see #1 above). Clae
Waltham's Chuang Tzu: Genius of the Absurd (New York:
Ace Books, 1971) is a modernization of Legge's transla-
tion, revised to conform to the Wade-Giles system of
transliteration.
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423
22. Fung Yu-lan. Chuang Tzu: A New Selected Translation with an
23. Waley, Arthur. Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China.
London: Allen and Unwin, 1939; rpt., Garden City:
Doubleday Anchor, n.d. Selections from the Chuang Tzu.
24. Lin Yutang. The Wisdom of Laotse (see #8b above). Each of
the 81 chapters of the Lao Tzu is glossed with several
passages from the Chuang Tzu.
25. Chan Wing-tsit. "The Mystical Way of Chuang Tzu." A Source
Book in Chinese Philosophy (see #14a above).
26. Mei Yi-pao. "Skepticism and Mysticism in Chaung Tzu."
Sources of Chinese Tradition (see #13 above).
27. Ware, James B. The Sayings of Chuang Chou. New York: NAL
Mentor [MT543], 1963.
*28a. Watson, Burton. Chuang Tzu: The Basic Writings. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964.
28b. - The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1968.
29. Merton, Thomas. The Way of Chuang Tzu. New York: New Di-
rections [NDP276], 1969. Collation/interpretation.
30. Graham, A. C. "Chuang-Tzu's Essay on Seeing Things as
Equal." History of Religions, 9 (Nov/Feb, 1969-70),
137-59. Translation and commentary on the important
chapter 2 of the Chuang Tzu.
31. Feng Gia-fu and Jane English. Chuang Tsu / Inner Chapters.
New York: Knopf, 1974 and New York: Vintage, 1974.
Companion to #17 above.
D. English Translations of Other Taoist Texts
Although a reading of the Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu will probab-
ly tell the non-specialist all he wants to know about Taoism, those
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424
two texts are not the only classical texts of Taoisn. Others which
may be consulted for comment on, elaboration and extension of, the
Lao Tzu and the Chuang Tzu are the following:
32. Graham, A. C. The Book of Lieh-tzu. London: John Murray,
1960. Supercedes Lionel Giles's Taoist Teachings from
the Book of 'Lieh Tzu' (London: Murray, 1912) in the
Mee a a n
Wisdom of the East series.
33. Morgan, Evan S. Tao, the Great Luminant: Essays from Huai
nan tzu. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1933; rpt.,
London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935; rpt., Taipei:
Ch'eng-wen Publishing Co., 1966.
54. Maverick, Lewis, ed. Economic Dialogues in Ancient China:
Selections from The Kuan-Tzu, trans. T'an Po-fu, et
al. Carbondale, Ill.: The Author, 1954.
35. Rickett, W. Allyn. Kuan Tzu: A Repository of Early Chinese
Thought. Vol. 1. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1965.
E. General Introductions to Chinese Philosophy and Taoism
At the same time one is reading the Taoist texts, he should not
lose sight of their place in the history of Chinese philosophy and cul-
ture. Taoism is less a self-contained philosophical system than it is
a response to the political and economic conditions during the Warring
States period (480-221 B.C.), anda response to other philosophical
schools such as the Confucian and the Mohist. The following surveys,
most for the general reader, are helpful in shaping an understanding
of the social and intellectual context in which Taoism was formed, and
that is necessary for explaining why an ancient Chinese philosophy may
be applicable to a seemingly alien culture and historical era. If the
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425
problems of twentieth-century Western culture are similar in some ways
to those of the Warring States period in China, then Taoism can offer
living answers--more than just another version of the philosophia per-
emnis~-2,500 years after its birth.
36. MacNair, Harley F., ed. China. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1946. See especially Derk Bodde,
"Dominant Ideas," pp. 18-28; Hu Shih, "Chinese Thought,"
pp. 221-30; and Homer H. Dubs, "Taoism," pp. 226-89.
The volume is worth reading in its entirety.
37. Creel, Herlee G. Chinese Thought from Confucius to Mao Tse-
tung. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953; rpt.
New York: NLA Mentor [MQ888], n.d.
38. Feng [Fung] Yu-lan. The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy.
Trans. E. R. Hughes. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner,
1947.
39. - A Short History of Chinese Philosophy. Ed. Derk
Bodde. New York: Macmillan, 1948; rpt., New York: Free
Press, 1966. Not an abridgement of Fung's two-volume
History.
40. Hu Shih. "Religion and Philosophy in Chinese History."
Symposium on Chinese Culture, ed. Sophia H. Zen Chen.
Shanghai: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1931; rpt.,
New York: Paragon, 1969.
41. Chan Wing-tsit. "Chinese Philosophy." Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica, 15th ed. (1974).
42. - "Chinese Philosophy." Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
43. Seidel, Anna K. "Taoism." Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th
ed. (1974).
44. Strickmann, Michael. "Taoism, History of." Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 15th ed. (1974).
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426
F. Major Studies of Chinese Philosophy
At one point or another, the standard works of Fung Yu-lan and
Joseph Needham (whom George Steiner says is the only worthy successor
to Proust in the art of weaving a narrative) should be read.° Fung's
is the standard history of Chinese philosophy, considered by some to
be the best in any language, and Needham's History of Scientific
Thought is the core of his monumental survey of Chinese science and
civilization. Not only has Le Guin read and recommended Needham;
Needham has become a fan of Le Guin's and says that he is "a tremen-
dous admirer of her work, and [he] has told her than when she comes to
Cambridge [he] shall greet her at the station like Semley with an 'all-
purpose inter-cultural curtsey'" (personal correspondence, September
11, 1978).
45. Granet, Marcel. La Pensée Chinoise. Paris: Renaissance du
livre, 1934.
46. Fung Yu-lan. A History of Chinese Philosophy. 2 vols.
Trans. Derk Bodde. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1952-53.
47. Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilisation in China. 7 vols.
SS a aa
in 15 parts. Cambridge: At the University Press,
1954--. Vol. 2, History of Scientific Thought (1956),
has a full treatment of Taoism.
G. Books on Taoism
Among the several book-length studies of Taoism, there are some
which emphasize mysticism, some science, some art and creativity, and
some the history of the school after the time of the Lao Tzu and the
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427
Chuang Tzu, when it degenerated from a philosophy into a religion cen-
tered on pseudo-scientific techniques (alchemy) used to achieve per-
sonal immortality. The studies of Taoism and science should be con-
sulted to test Fung Yu-lan's remark (quoted by Needham) that Taoism is
"the only system of mysticism which the world has ever seen which was
not profoundly anti-scientific," and to confirm Lin Yu-tang's belief
that Taoism is the only "religion" acceptable to the scientist in the
twentieth century.”
Le Guin has read the book by Welch and recommends it. I find it
dated and colored by an irritating parochialism characteristic of the
fifties. Kaltenmark is a much better first book to read for an intro-
duction to Taoism. Creel is scholarly, thorough, and enlightening.
Izutsu's study repays careful reading and reflection.
48. Blofeld, John. Beyond the Gods: Buddhist and Taoist Mystic-
ism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1974; New York: Dutton,
1974.
49. . The Secret and the Sublime: Taoist Mysteries and
— ———— Ee, eaea => SSO ___.
50. Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the
Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism.
Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1975; rpt., New York: Bantam,
1977.
51. Chang Chung-yuan. Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese
Philosophy, Art, & Poetry. New York: The Julian Press,
1965; rpt., New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
52. Creel, Herrlee G. What is Taoism? and Other Studies in
Chinese Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1970.
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428
ee — L
54. Izutsu, Toshihiko. A Comparative Study of the Key Philosoph-
ical Concepts in Sufism and Taoism: Ibn 'Arabî and Lao-
tzu, Chuang-tzu. 2 vols. Tokyo: Keio Institute, 1966-
67.
55. Saso, Michael R. Taoism and the Rite of Cosmic Renewal.
56. Siu, Ralph G. Ch'i: A Neo-Taoist Approach to Life. Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1974.
57. - The Tao of Science. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1957.
58. Smullyan, Raymond M. The Tao is Silent. New York: Harper &
Row, 1977.
59. Watts, Alan. Tao: The Watercourse Way. New York: Pantheon,
1975.
60. Welch, Holmes. The Parting of the Way: Lao Tzu and the Tao-
=. En ee eee ele e a o e
ist Movement. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957; rev. ed.,
— [l u- Oe Le
H. Articles on Taoism
From the dozens of articles on special topics in Taoism, the fol-
lowing are selected as having some bearing on issues raised by Le
Guin's work. Chang Tun-sun's essay is a lucid exposition of the fun-
damental differences between Chinese and European modes of thought.
Girardot, who did a dissertation on the theme of chaos in early Taoism,
writes fascinating articles.
6l. Chang Tung-sun. "A Chinese Philosopher's Theory of Know-
l ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 9 (1952),
62. Chen Chung-hwan. "What Does Lao-tzu Mean by the Term 'Tao'?"
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63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
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429
Tsing Hua Journal, n.s., 4 (1964), 150-60.
Chen, Ellen Marie. "The Meaning of Te in the Tao Te Ching."
Philosophy East and West, 23 (1973), 457-70.
"Nothingness and the Mother Principle in Early
Chinese Thought." International Philosophical Quarter-
ly, 9 (1969), 391-405.
"Tao as the Great Mother and the Influence of
Motherly Love in the Shaping of Chinese Philosophy."
History of Religions, 14 (1975), 51-63.
Duyvendak, J. J. L. "The Philosophy of Wu-wei." Asiatische
Studien, 1 (1947), 81-102.
Fu, Charles Wei-hsun. "Lao Tzu's Conception of Tao." In-
quiry, 16 (1973), 367-91.
Girardot, N. J. “Myth and Meaning in the Tao Te Ching:
Chapters 25 and 42." History of Religions, 16 (1977),
294-325.
"Returning to the Beginning' and the Arts of Mr.
Hun-Tun in the Chuang Tzu." Journal of Chinese Philos-
ophy, 5 (1978), 21-69. ~
Graham, A. C. "'Being' in Western Philosophy Compared with
shih/fei and yu/wu in Chinese Philosophy." Asia Major,
7 (1959), 79-112.
Hsu Sung-peng. "A Comparative Study of Lao-Tzu's Conception
of Ultimate Reality." International Philosophical
Quarterly, 16 (1976), 197-218.
- "Lao Tzu's Conception of Evil." Philosophy East
and West, 26 (1976), 301-16.
Lau, D. C. "The Treatment of Opposites in Lao Tzu." Bulle-
a ar a a e PTY
Shien Gi-ming. "Being and Nothingness in Greek and Ancient
Chinese Philosophy." Philosophy East and West, 1
(1951), 58-63.
"Symposium on Taoism." History of Religions, 2, ii § iii
430
(Nov & Feb, 1969-70), 107-255. Report on the 1968 Bel-
lagio Conference on Taoism, with five articles.
76. Tan Chee Ing, Paul. "The Principle of "Acting by Not Act-
ing' in the 'Tao Te Ching.'" International Philosophi-
cal Quarterly, 11 (1971), 362-71.
77. Watts, Alan. "The Philosophy of the Tao." The Way of Zen.
New York: Pantheon, 1957, pp. 3-28.
I. The I Ching (Book of Changes)
Though valued highly by the Taoists, the I Ching is not, strictly
speaking, a Taoist text. But it may be included in this bibliography
because Le Guin often mentions it in the same breath when she mentions
Taoism or Jung. The Lao Tzu and the I Ching did come together in
Chinese philosophy when Chou Tun-I (1017-1073): synthesized them in his
T'ai Chi T'u Shuo (Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate).
According to Chan Wing-tsit, the I Ching "has exerted more influence
[philosophically speaking] than any other Confucian Classic."
Along with the Tarot and other occult materials, the I Ching en-
joyed a vogue among the counterculture in the sixties, and attracted
a good deal of attention, from the profound to the absurd. How
seriously Le Guin takes it as a book of divination is hard to say; the
central concept of the I Ching, change (i Sh ), she takes most
seriously. Le Guin has used several translations, finally settling on
Wilhelm's, which she has "studf[ied} . . . at length," she says, and
recommends it to others: "Jung & Wilhelm are the only satisfactory
analysts of the book I have come upon. "11
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431
Additional translations and studies in Western languages may be
found in Hellmut Wilheln, The Book of Changes in the Western Tradition:
A Selective Bibliography (Seattle: Institute for Comparative and
Foreign Area Studies, University of Washington, 1975).
78. Legge, James. The (i King. Vol. 16 of The Sacred Books of
the East, ed. F. Max Müller. London: Oxford University
Press, 1882, 1899, 1927; rpt., Delhi: Motilal Banarsi-
dass, 1966; rpt. with "Introduction and Study Guide" by
Ch'u Chai and Winberg Chai, New York: University Books,
1964, and New York: Bantam, 1969; plus other reprintings
and adaptations too numerous to list.
79. Wilhelm, Richard. The I Ching, or Book of Changes. Trans.
from the German by Cary Baynes. Foreword by C. G. Jung.
3rd. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.
80. Siu, R. G. H. The Man of Many Qualities: A Legacy of the I
Ching. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968. Uses selections
from Western thinkers as commentaries.
81. Wilhelm, Hellmut. Change: Eight Lectures on the I Ching.
82. . Heaven, Earth, and Man in the Book of Changes:
Seven Eranos Lectures. Seattle: University of Washing-
ton Press, 1977.
85. Progoff, Ira. Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny: Non-
causal Dimensions of Human Destiny. New York: Delta,
1973. On the I Ching, multiple universes, archetypes,
Einstein, and a host of other topics.
84. Sherrill, W. A., and W. K. Chu. An Anthology of the I Ching.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977. Emphasis on divi-
nation, astrology, and geomancy.
A final comment: like the Foretellers in The Left Hand of Darkness,
the I Ching and the other Chinese texts listed above will answer only
answerable questions. They thus have the ultimate value of teaching
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432
what questions to ask. If scholars in the Han Dynasty wanted to "take
a naturalistic attitude toward phenomena such as magnetism or the
tides," says Needham, they would have been better off not consulting
the I Ching; "they would have been wiser to tie a millstone about the
neck of the I Ching and cast it into the sea, tt?
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NOTES TO APPENDIX A
1. See Le Guin's letter, published in S F ECHO (Moebius Trip Li-
brary 19), January, 1974, pp. 123-24.
2. Jaspers, The Great Philosophers: The Original Thinkers, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, Brace §
World, 1966), p. 389.
3. Charles Bigelow and J. McMahon, "Science Fiction and the
Future of Anarchy: Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin," (Portland)
Oregon Times, December, 1974, p. 26.
4. Le Guin, personal correspondence, August 15, 1976.
5. Le Guin, "Introduction," City of Illusions (New York: Harper
& Row, 1978), p. vii.
6. Joseph Needham, for example, bases his translation on the
original Chinese text, four English translations, and one German trans-
lation. Thomas Merton, who, like Le Guin, does not read the text in
Chinese, used Jaspers method to make his "translations" of selections
from the Chuang Tzu. The eminent sinologist Burton Watson, himself
translator of the standard English text of the Chuang Tzu, praises
Merton for catching "a fine sense of the liveliness and poetry of
Chuang Tzu's style” ("Introduction," The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu
[New York: Columbia University Press, 1968], p. 28).
7. Le Guin, personal correspondence, September 15, 1976, and
September 9, 1977. Theodora Kroeber reports that Kroeber read and
435
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434
reread "the hymns of the Rigveda; the Upanishads; Book of Tao; the
Golden Mean; the Shinto Way of the Gods" (Alfred Kroeber [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1970], p. 261). In the summer of
1978, Le Guin said at the SFRA Conference in NESTO: Iowa, that she
was becoming interested in Hinduism.
8. Steiner, "A Future Legacy," Atlantic, August, 1971, p. 43.
9. Needham, History of Scientific Thought, p. 33; and Lin, The
Wisdom of Laotse, p. 15.
10. Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, p. 263.
11. Le Guin, personal correspondence, August 13, 1976.
12. Needhan, History of Scientific Thought, p. 311.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography is arranged in three parts. Part I is the re-
sult of a collaboration between Jeffrey H. Levin and myself; Parts
II and III are my own work. One of the first steps in my research on
Le Guin's fiction was to begin assembling materials for an exhaustive
bibliography. I soon discovered that Levin had a Similar project
underway, and that he had already invested enormous amounts of time
and energy in it. He kindly invited me to collaborate with him on
producing a full descriptive bibliography, and generously shared his
Materials. As Le Guin's authorized bibliographer, he has access to
sources unavailable to others, and I am thankful to have had his help
in assembling this checklist.
The checklist of Le Guin's works that follows is, as it were, a
report on a work in progress. Eventually Levin and I will publish the
full bibliography. Levin has already published a checklist, organized
on principles different from the ones I have used; it appears in The
Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, by Ursula
K. Le Guin, ed. Susan Wood (New York: Berkley/Putnam, 1979). This is
a much expanded version of the checklist Levin published in the special
Le Guin number of Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (November, 1975). Levin's
expanded checklist includes a few items not in Mine, and also includes
a listing of translations of Le Guin's work into languages other than
English. My list contains a few items not in Levin's. Except
455
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
436
for those differences, and except for differences in format and style,
our checklists contain the same basic information. My goal has been
to list each separate edition (i.e., whenever the type is re-set or
when the text is issued by another publisher), in addition to the first
appearance. I have organized the bibliography as follows:
I. A BIBLIOGRAPHIC CHECKLIST OF THE WORKS OF URSULA K. LE GUIN IN
ENGLISH (Copyright (©) 1979 by James W. Bittner and Jeffrey H.
Levin)
A. Separate Publications (items Al - A22)
B. Contributions to Periodicals and Anthologies
1. Fiction (items B1 - B45)
2. Poetry (items B50 - B76)
3. Essays, Published Speeches and Lectures, Introductions,
and Notes (items B80 - B125)
4. Reviews (items B130 - B144)
5. Letters (items B150 - B182)
6. Other: Autobiographical Notes, Translations, Miscellaneous
(items B200 - B210)
C. Interviews and Feature Articles Containing Interview Materials
(items C1 - C25)
D. Miscellaneous: Recordings, Tapes, Unpublished Materials
(items D1 - D12)
II. A BIBLIOGRAPHIC CHECKLIST OF WORKS ABOUT URSULA K. LE GUIN
III. GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
437
I. A BIBLIOGRAPHIC CHECKLIST OF THE WORKS OF URSULA K. LE GUIN IN
ENGLISH
A. Separate Publications
Al Rocannon's World
a. New York: Ace Books, 1966. (Ace Double G-574) 117pp
b. New York: Ace Bcoks, 1972. (Ace 73291) 136pp
c. London: Tandem, 1972. 122pp
d. New York: Garland, 1975. (reprint of 1972 Ace text)
e. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. (reprint of 1972 Ace text with
corrections of errors from 1966 Ace text; errors in 1972 Ace
text uncorrected) With new introduction. See item B116.
f. London: Universal Tandem, 1978.
g. Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1978. See item A21.
A2 Planet of Exile
a. New York: Ace Books, 1966. (Ace Double G-697) 113pp
b. New York: Ace Books, 1971. (Ace 66951) 126pp
c. New York: Ace Books, 1973. (Ace 66952) 124pp
d. London: Tandem, 1972. (reprint of 1971 Ace text)
e. New York: Garland, 1975. (reprint of Tandem text)
f. London: Universal-Tandem, 1978.
8. New York: Harper & Row, 1978, xvit+140pp With new introduc-
tion. See item B122.
h. Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1978. See item A21.
A3 City of Illusions
a. New York: Ace Books, 1967. (Ace G-626) 160pp
b. New York: Ace Books, 1974. (Ace 10702) 217pp
c. London: Gollancz, 1971. 192pp
d. Frogmore, St. Albans, U.K.: Panther, 1973. 159pp
e. New York: Garland, 1975. (reprint of 1967 Ace text)
f. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Viitl99pp With new introduc-
tion. See item B123. Includes acknowledgement of Jeff Levin's
help in establishing a correct text.
g. Garden City: Nelson Doubleday, 1978. See item A21.
A4 A Wizard of Earthsea
a. Berkeley: Parnassus Press, 1968. 205pp
b. New York: Ace Books, 1970. (Ace 90075) (reprint of Parnassus
text)
Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1971. 203pp
London: Gollanez, 1971. 19lpp See item A20.
London: Heinemann, 1973. 19lpp (reprints 1971 Gollancz text)
New York: Bantam, 1975. viii+183pp
moan
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AS
AG
A7
A8
A9
Alo
438
The Left Hand of Darkness
a. New York: Ace Books, 1969. (Ace 47800) 286pp
b. New York: Walker, 1969.
c. New York: Walker for SFBC, 1969. vi+218pp
d. London: Macdonald, 1969. (reprints 1969 Ace text)
e. Frogmore, St. Albans, U.K.: Panther, 1973. 205pp
f. New York: Ace Books, 1976. (Ace 47805) xvit304pp With new
introduction. See item B109.
The Tombs of Atuan (see item B14)
a. New York: Atheneum, 1971. x+163pp
b. London: Gollancz, 1972. 160pp See item A20
c. Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1974. 155pp
d. London: Heinemann, 1974. (reprints 1972 Gollancz text)
e. New York: Bantam, 1975. x+146pp
The Lathe of Heaven {see item B15)
a. New York: Scribner's, 1971. viii+184pp
b. New York: Scribner's for SFBC, 1971. viii+185pp
c. London: Gollancz, 1972. vi+184pp
d. New York: Avon, 1973. 175pp
e. Frogmore, St. Albans, U.K.: Panther, 1974. 156pp
The Farthest Shore
New York: Atheneum, 1972. xii+223pp
New York: Atheneum for Jnr Lit Guild, 1972. xii+223pp
London: Gollancz, 1973. 206pp Revisions in text.
Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1974. 214pp
New York: Bantam, 1975. x+197pp
London: Heinemann, 1975. (reprints 1973 Gollancz text)
mhoanda p
From Elfland to Poughkeepsie (lecture published in chapbook)
a. Portland: Pendragon Press, 1973. Introduction by Vonda McIntyre,
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
a. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. x+341pp
New York: Harper & Row for SFBC, 1974. x+338pp
London: Gollancz, 1974. 319pp
- New York: Avon, 1975. viii+3llpp
- Frogmore, St. Albans, U.K.: Panther, 1975. 319pp
onan
Wild Angels (poetry)
a. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1975. SOpp
Dreams Must Explain Themselves
a. New York: Algol Press, 1975. Collects items B91, B6, B86, C9.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
A13
Al4
A15
Al6
Al7
A18
A19
A20
A21
439
The Wind's Twelve Quarters (Collects items B2, B3, B4, B5, B6,
B8, B9, B10, Bll, B12, B13, B16, B20, B21, B22, B23, B24; some
texts revised. With Foreword and headnotes to each story.)
- New York: Harper & Row, 1975. vii+303pp
. New York: Harper & Row for SFBC, 1976. vii+246pp
- London: Gollancz, 1976. (reprints 1975 Harper text)
- New York: Bantam, 1976. viii+277pp
London: Panther-Granada, 1978. 2 vols.
onanap
The Word for World is Forest (see item B17)
a. New York: Berkley/Putnam, n.d. [1976]. 189pp
b. New York: Berkley, 1976. vi+169pp
c. London: Gollancz, 1977. 128pp With new Introduction. See
item B117.
Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (in U.K. A Very Long Way from
Anywhere Else)
a. New York: Atheneum, 1976. vi+89pp
b. London: Gollancz, 1976. 94pp
c. New York: Bantam, 1978. vi+87pp
d. Harmondsworth: Peacock, 1978.
Orsinian Tales (Collects items Bl, B18, B31, B32, B33 along with
six previously unpublished tales.)
a. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. viii+179pp
b. London: Gollancz, 1977. (reprints 1976 Harper text)
c. New York: Bantam, 1977. viiit+209pp
d. London: Panther-Granada, 1978.
Nebula Award Stories Eleven (Edited, with Introduction, by Le
Guin)
a. London: Gollancz, 1976. 255pp (lacks headnotes)
b. New York: Harper §& Row, 1977. xiv+258 (headnotes by Virginia
Kidd)
. London: Corgi, 1978
- New York: Bantam, 1978. xiv+30l1pp
aoa
The Water is Wide (short story published in chapbook)
a. Portland: Pendragon Press, 1976. x+16pp
— a — m — e
Earthsea (collects A4d, A6b, A8c)
a. London: Gollancz, 1977. 19lpp+160pp+206pp
Three Hainish Novels: Rocannon's World Planet of Exile City of
Illusions (texts established by Jeffrey H. Levin)
a. Garden City, N.Y: Nelson Doubleday for SFBC, 1978. viii+370
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
440
A22 The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Ed. Susan Wood. Bibliographical checklist by Jeffrey i. Levin.
Collects twenty-two previously published and one unpublished essay.
New York: Berkley/Putnam, 1979. l
B. Contributions to Periodicals and Anthologies
l. Fiction
Bl "An die Musik"
a. Western Humanities Review, 15 (Summer, 1961), 247-58.
b. Orsinian Tales (item Al6).
B2 "April in Paris"
a. Fantastic Stories of Imagination, 11 (September, 1962), 54-65.
b. Strange Fantasy, no. 10 (Fall, 1969), 97-108.
c. The Best From Fantastic, ed. Ted White. New York: Manor
Books, 1973, pp. 138-50.
d. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13).
B3 "The Masters"
a. Fantastic Stories of Imagination, 12 (February, 1963), 85-99.
b. Sword & Sorcery Annual (Fantastic Stories Special--1975),
pp. 107-21.
c. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13).
B4 "Darkness Box"
a. Fantastic Stories of Imagination, 12 (November, 1963), 60-67.
b. Weird Mystery, no. 2 (1970), 48-55.
c. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13)
B5 "The Word of Unbinding"
a. Fantastic Stories of Imagination, 13 (January, 1964), 66-73.
b. Strange Fantasy, no. 13 (Fall, 1970), 103-109.
85.
d. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item Al3).
e. Literary Cavalcade Scholastic Magazine, April, 1977.
B6 "The Rule of Names"
a. Fantastic Stories of Imagination, 13 (April, 1964), 79-88.
b. The Most Thrilling Science Fiction Ever Told, no. 13 (Summer,
1969), 111-26.
Algol 21 (November, 1975), 16-20.
The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13).
Dreams Must Explain Themselves (item A12).
oman
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
441
B6 £. Puffin Post, 10, ii (1976)
g- The Fantastic Imagination: An Anthology of High Fantasy, ed.
Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski. New York: Avon,
1977, pp. 297-310.
h. Phantasmagoria: Tales of Fantasy and the Supernatural, ed.
Jane Mobley. Garden City. N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977, pp. 181-
91.
B7 "Selection"
a. Amazing Stories, 38 (August, 1964), 36-45.
b. Science Fiction Greats, no. 17 (Spring, 1970), 112-21.
B8 "The Dowry of Angyar"
a. Amazing Stories, 38 (September, 1964), 46-63.
b. Rocannon's World (item Al} (revised; as "Prologue! The Neck-
c. SF Greats, no 19 (Fall, 1970), 42-59. lace’)
d. The Best from Amazing Stories, ed. Ted White. New York:
Manor Books, 1973, pp. 83-101. (as "The Dowry of the Angyar")
e. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13) (reprints text of "Pro-
logue: The Necklace" from item Alb as "Semley's Necklace")
B9 "Winter's King"
a. Orbit 5, ed. Damon Knight. New York: Putnam, 1969, pp. 66-78;
New York: Putnam for SFBC, 1969, pp. 66-78; New York: Berkley,
1969, pp. 67-88.
b. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13) (revised text)
B10 "Nine Lives"
a. Playboy, 16 (November, 1969), 128-29, 132, 220-22, 224, 226-27,
228, 230.
Terry Carr. New York: Ace Books for SFBC, 1970, pp. 302-27;
New York: Ace Books, 1970, pp. 302-527,
c. Best SF: 1969, ed. Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss. New
York: Putnam, 1970; New York: Berkley, 1970, pp. 89-116.
d. Nebula Award Stories 5, ed. James Blish. Garden City, N.Y:
Doubleday, 1970; New York: Pocket Books, 1972, pp. 56-82.
e. The Dead Astronaut, ed. the Editors of Playboy. Chicago:
Playboy Press, 1971, pp. 51-81.
f. The Best from Playboy, no. 7, ed. the Editors of Playboy.
Chicago: Playboy Press, 1973.
g- The New Prometheans, ed. John S. Lambert. New York: Harper å
Row, 1975.
h. Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson. New York: NAL Mentor,
1973, pp. 179-205. With Le Guin's essay "On Theme" (item B89).
i. As Tomorrow Becomes Today, ed. Charles Wm. Sullivan III.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974, pp. 394-416.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
442
B10 j. Introductory Psychology through Science Fiction, ed. Harvey A.
Katz, Patricia Warrick, and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York:
Rand McNally, 1974, pp. 72-97.
k. Man Unwept: Visions from the Inner Eye, ed. Stephen V. Whaley
and Stanley J. Cook. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974, pp. 322-48.
Modern Science Fiction, ed. Norman Spinrad. Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, 1974, pp. 506-33
in Dreams Awake: A Historical-Critical Anthology of Science
Fiction, ed. Leslie A. Fiedler. New York: Dell Laurel, 1975,
pp- 289-315.
n. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item Al3) (revised text)
[e
.
2
o. A Strange Glory, ed. Gerry Goldberg. Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart, 1975, pp. 107-21; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977.
p- Beyond Tomorrow, ed. Lee Harding. Melbourne: Wren, 1976;
London: New English Library, 1977.
q. Bio-Futures: Science Fiction Stories about Biological Meta-
morphosis, ed. Pamela Sargent. New York: Vintage, 1976, pp.
97-132.
r. Approaches to Science Fiction, ed. Donald L. Lawler. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1978, pp. 385-407.
s. Fiction's Journey, ed. Barbara McKenzie. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1978.
t. Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology. The SFWA-SFRA Anthol-
Ogy, ed. Patricia Warrick, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Joseph
Olander. New York: Harper & Row, 1978, pp- 307-31.
Bll "The End"
a. Orbit 6, ed. Damon Knight. New York: Putnam, 1970; New York:
b. The Best From Orbit, Volumes 1-10, ed. Damon Knight. New York:
Berkley/Putnam, 1975, pp. 212-20; New York: Berkley, 1976,
pp. 232-40.
c. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13) (as "Things")
B12 "The Good Trip"
a. Fantastic Stories, 19 (August, 1970}, 6-11, 145.
eS ee
Parry. Frogmore, St. Albans, U.K.: Panther, 1974, pp. 127-34.
B13 "A Trip to the Head"
a. Quark/#1, ed. Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker. New York:
Paperback Library, 1970, pp. 36-42.
b. The Liberated Future: Voyages into Tomorrow, ed. Robert Hos-
kins. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1974, pp. 297-304.
c. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
B14
BIS
B16
B17
B18
B19
B20
B21
443
"The Tombs of Atuan"
a. Worlds of Fantasy, Issue 3 (1970-71) 4-76. (abridged version
of item A6)
"The Lathe of Heaven"
a. Amazing Science Fiction Stories, 44 (March, 1971), 6-61, and
44 (May, 1971), 6-65, 121-23. (item A7)
"Vaster than Empires and More Slow"
a. New Dimensions 1, ed. Robert Silverberg. Garden City, N.Y.:
b. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, ed. Terry Carr. New
Cc. Wondermakers 2, ed. Robert Hoskins. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett,
1974, pp. 266-305.
d. Explorers of Space, ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Nelson,
1975, pp. 187-225.
e. Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories by Women about Women,
= = m e ee eee — M
f. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13). (revised text)
"The Word for World is Forest"
a. Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison. Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972, pp. 39-108; Doubleday for SFREC, 1972,
pp. 32-117; New York: NAL Signet, 1973, vol. l, pp. 35-126.
(item A14)
b. The Hugo Winners, Volume 3, ed. Isaac Asimov. Garden City,
ee ee ——_— —
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977; Doubleday for SFBC, 1978, pp. 225-327.
"Imaginary Countries"
a. Harvard Advocate, 106, no. 2/3 (Winter, 1973), 40-43.
b. Orsinian Tales (item A16).
"Cake and Ice Cream"
a. Playgirl (Indianapolis, Indiana), FebMar, 1973, pp. 36, 50-55.
“Direction of the Road"
a. Orbit 12, ed. Damon Knight. New York: Putnam, 19735, pp. 31-38;
Putnam for SFBC, 1973; New York: Berkley, 1974, pp- 30-36.
b. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13).
c. a. by the author on The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (item
"Field of Vision"
a. Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, 34 (October, 1973}, 83-99.
b. The Best from Galaxy Volume II, ed. the Editors of Galaxy
Magazine. New York: Award Books, 1974, pp. 9-353.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
444
B21 c. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13) (as "The Field of
Vision")
B22 "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (Variations on a Theme by
William James)"
a. New Dimensions 3, ed. Robert Silverberg. Garden City, N.Y.:
Nelson Doubleday for SFBC, 1973, pp. 1-8; New York: NAL Sig-
net, 19:73, pp. 1-7.
b. The Best Science Fiction of the Year #3, ed. Tarry Carr. New
c. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item Al3).
d. Read by the author on The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (item
D1).
e. The Hugo Winners, Volume 3, ed. Isaac Asimov. Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977; Doubleday for SFBC, 1978, pp. 471-77.
f. Elements of Literature: Essay Fiction Poetry Drama Film, ed.
Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus, and Michael Silverman. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 234-39.
B23 "The Stars Below"
a. Orbit 14, ed. Damon Knight. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, pp.
92-112,
b. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13).
B24 "The Day Before the Revolution; In Memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911-
1972"
a. Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, 35 (August, 1974), 18-30.
b. Bitches and Sad Ladies: An Anthology By and About Women, ed.
Pat Rotter. New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1975, pp. 375-
89; New York: Dell, pp. 389-403.
c. The Wind's Twelve Quarters (item A13).
d. The Best from Galaxy, Volume III, ed. James Baen. New York:
Award Books, 1975, pp. 9-23.
e. Nebula Award Stories Ten, ed. James Gunn. New York: Harper &
Row, 1975, pp.129-45; London: Gollancz, 1975; New York: `
Berkley, 1976, pp. 123-38; London: Corgi, 1977.
More Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Novelettes by Women
About Women, ed. Pamela Sargent. New York: Vintage, 1976, pp.
279-301.
ai
B25 "Intracom''
Oe Ce
Hay. London: New English Library, 1974, pp. 81-97.
b. Performed by the author on Gwilan's Harp and Intracom (item D2).
B26 "The Author of Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
445
B26 of the Association of Therolinguistics"
a. Fellowship of the Stars, ed. Terry Carr. New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1974, pp.213-22; Simon § Schuster for SFBC, 1974,
Pp. 170-78
B27 "Schrodinger's Cat"
a. Universe 5, ed. Terry Carr. New York: Random House, 1974, pp.
31-40; Random House for SFBC, 1975, pp. 26-34; New York:
Popular Library, 1976, pp. 33-41.
B28 "The New Atlantis"
a. The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction, ed.
Robert Silverberg. New York: Hawthorn, 1975, pp. 57-86; Haw-
thorn for SFBC, 1975, pp. 57-85; New York: Warner Books, 1976,
pp. 65-93.
b. The Best Science Fiction of the Year #5, ed. Terry Carr. New
c. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, ed. R. V. Cassill. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1978, pp. 801-20.
B29 "Desperadoes of the Galactic Union"
a. London: Post Card Partnership, 1975.
b. Science Fiction Review 14 (vol. 4, no. 3) (August, 1975), 22.
B30 "Mazes"
a. Epoch, ed. Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg. New York:
Berkley/Putnam, 1975, pp. 83-87; Berkley/Putnam for SFBC,
1976, pp. 79-83; Berkley, 1977, pp. 75-79. (with a note
by Le Guin, item B102).
B31 “A Week in the Country"
a. The Little Magazine, 9, iv (Winter, 1975-76), 28-46.
b. Orsinian Tales (item A16).
B32 “Brothers and Sisters"
a. The Little Magazine, 10, i & ii (Spring-Summer, 1976), 91-125
(with Karl Kroeber, "Sisters and Science Fiction," pp. 87-90).
b. Orsinian Tales (item Al6).
B35 "The Barrow"
a. Fantasy and Science Fiction, 51 (October, 1976), 52-59.
b. Orsinian Tales (item Al6).
B34 "The Eye Altering"
a. The Altered I, ed. Lee Harding. Carlton, Australia: Norstrilia
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
446
B34 Press, 1976, pp. 108-17; New York: Berkley Windhover, 1978,
pp. 17-28.
B35 "No Use to Talk to Me"
a. The Altered I, ed. Lee Harding. Carlton, Australia: Norstrilia
Press, 1976, pp. 90-91; New York: Berkley Windhover, 1978, pp.
146-48. ;
B36 "The Diary of the Rose"
— Å aa eee A A O D
Ace, 1978.
c. Psy Fi One, ed. Kenneth Melvin, Stanley Brodsky, and Raymond
Fowler, Jr. New York: Random House, 1978.
B37 "Solomon Leviathan's Nine Hundred Thirty-First Trip Around the
World"
a. The First Puffin's Pleasure, ed. Kaye Webb and Treld Bicknell.
Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1976, pp. 18-22.
B38 "Gwilan's Harp"
a. Redbook, 149, i (May, 1977), 229-30.
b. Read by the author on Gwilan's Harp and Intracom (item D2).
c. The Australian Women's Weekly, 45 (September 21, 1977), 171-
74, 176.
d. Folk Harp Journal (Mt. Laguna, Calif.), 21 (June, 1978)
B39 "Ghost Story"
a. Encore (Portland), 1 (April/May, 1977), 8.
B40 "Courtroom Scene"
a. Encore (Portland), 1 (April/May, 1977), 9:
B41 "The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of
Derb"
a. Antaeus, no 29 (Spring, 1978), 144-49.
B42 "The Eye of the Heron"
a. Millennial Women, ed. Virginia Kidd. New York: Delacorte
Press, 1978; Delacorte Press for SFBC, 1978, pp. 88-209.
B43 "SQ"
a. Cassancra Rising, ed. Alice Laurance. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1978, pp. 1-10.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
447
B44 "The Eye Altering (II)"
a. The Altered I, ed. Lee Harding. New York: Berkley Windhover,
1978, pp. 168-80.
B45 "Malheur County"
a. Kenyon Review, NS, 1 (Winter, 1979), 22-30.
2. Poetry
BSO "Folksong from the Montayna Province." Prairie Poet (Charleston,
I11.), Fall, 1959, p. 75.
B51 "A Dedication." Literary Calendar (Shreveport, La.), December,
1959, p. 7.
B52 "Napa Valley: Fort Valley." New Atheneum (Crescent City, Fla.),
Winter, 1960, p. [13].
B53 "On Sappho's Theme." The Husk (Mt. Vernon, Ia.), 39 (March, 1960),
87.
B54 "An Experiment in Youngness."" The Husk, 39 (May, 1960), 127.
BSS " The Team." Today the Stars, comp. Lilith Lorraine. The 8th
Avalon Anthology. Alpine, Texas: Different Press, 1960,
p. 36.
B56 "The Year Without an Easter." Quicksilver (Ft. Worth, Tex.), 13
(Aummer, 1960), 14.
B57 "The Entrance of Mr. Audiot and Mr. Elen Into Heaven." Nimrod
(Tulsa, Okla.), 5 (Fall, 1960), 15-16.
B58 "A Scene from an Opera." The Minority of One (Passaic, N.J.),
3 (August, 1961), 9.
B59 "Notes from an Excursion." Quicksilver, 14 (Spring, 1961), 18-19.
B60 "Botticelli." The Galley Sail Review (San Francisco), 3 (Fall,
1961), 26. `
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
448
B61 “Warp and Weft." In Theodora Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal
Configuration (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1970). p. 216. Later incorporated into "Coming of Age" in
Wild Angels (item A11).
B62 "Roots." KiNeSiS (Milford, Pa.), no. 3 (December, 1970), 6
B63 "The Wolves." KiNeSiS, no. 3, p. 6.
B64 "Discovery." KiNeSiS, no. 3, p. 6.
B65. "Therem's Quatrain." An example of Karhidish literature. In
"Le Guin (II),'' Entropy Negative (Vancouver, B.C.), no. 3
(1971), p. 4.
B66 "Rakaforta."” Mr. Cogito (Forest Grove, Ore.), 1 (Fall, 1973),
[14].
B67 "Mount St Helens / Omphalos." Quarter (Portland, Ore.), no. 2
(August, 1974), [3]. (in item All)
B68 "Tao Poem." Papers, Inc., (1974), p. 8. (in item A11)
B69 "Für Elise." Papers, Inc., 2nd ed. (1974), p. 5. (in item All)
B70 "Travelling." In Set no. 6, Poetry Post Cards, ed. Jack Dann.
Binghamton, N.Y.: Bellevue Press, 1976.
B71 "Everest." Encore (Portland), 1 (April/May, 1977), 9
B72 "Equinox 75." Speculative Poetry Review, no. 1 (1977), 24
B73 "Invocation." Speculative Poetry Review, no. 2 (1977), [4].
B74 "The Song of the Dragon's Daughter." Algol, 15, i (Winter, 1977-
78), [47]-49.
B75 "In San Spirito Square." Oregon East 8 (1977-78), p. 55.
B76 "October 6." 10 point 5 #7 (Summer, 1978), p. 7.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
449
3. Essays, published speeches and lectures, introductions, notes
B80 “Prophets and Mirrors: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing." The
Living Light: A Christian Education Review, 7, iii (Fall,
1970), 111-21. On how science fiction answers the question
"who are we?" Excerpts in item A22.
B81 "The View In." Scythrop #22 (April, 1971), 1-3; Philosophical Gas
#25 (Spring, 1973), 10, 13-14; A Multitude of Visions, ed.
Cy Chauvin (Baltimore: T-K Graphics, 1975), pp. 5-7. On
why she writes science fiction; lists influences. Excerpts
in item A22.
B82 "The Crab Nebula, the Paramecium, and Tolstoy." Riverside Quar-
terly, 5, ii (February, 1972), 89-96. Speech delivered at
the first Vancouver Science Fiction Convention, February,
1971.
B85 "Thea and I." Entropy Negative #5 (1972), [37]- [38]. On D. G.
Compton's Synthajoy. Excerpts in item A22.
B84 "Fifteen Vultures, the Strop, and the Old Lady." Clarion il, ed
Robin Scott Wilson (New York: NAL Signet, 1972), pp. 48-50.
On experiences at Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop.
B85 "Afterword" [to "The Word for World is Forest"]. See item B17.
On intentions and moralizing in the novel.
B86 "National Book Award Speech." Locus #140 (April 28, 1973), 3;
Fantasiae, 1, ii (May, 1973), 4; Horn Book, 49, iii (June,
1973), 239 (as “In Defense of Fantasy"; excerpts); Top of
the News, 29, iv (June, 1973), 302-303 (excerpts); SFWA
Bulletin, no. 47-48 (Summer, 1973), 32; Signal 12 (Septem-
ber, 1973), 15 (excerpts); Algol 21 (November, 1973), 14;
Orbit 14, ed. Damon Knight (New York: Harper § Row, 1974),
p. 2 (excerpts); Philosophical Gas #26 (Summer, 1974),
back cover; Dreams Must Explain Themselves (item Al2), pp.
28-29; Crosscurrents of Criticism: Horn Book Essays 1968-
(item A22).
B87 "A Citizen of Mondath.'' Foundation , no. 4 (July, 1973), 20-24;
The Language of the Night (item A22). Autobiographical
essay.
B88 "The Ursula Major Construct, or a Far Greater Horror Loomed."
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
450
B88 Clarion III, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (New York: NAL Signet,
1973), pp. 52-37. On experiences at Clarion Workshop.
B89 "On Theme." Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (New York:
NAL Mentor, 1973), pp. 203-209; excerpts in item A22.
Essay on genesis and writing of "Nine Lives" (item B10).
B90 "Surveying the Battlefield." Science-Fiction Studies, 1, ii
(Fall, 1973), 88-89; Science-Fiction Studies: Selected
Articles on Science Fiction, 1975-75, ed. R. D. Mullen and
Darko Suvin (Boston: Gregg Press, 1976), pp. 52-54. Comments
on the contributions of James Blish and Franz Rottensteiner
to the SFS Symposium "Change, SF, and Marxism," SFS, 1, ii
(1973), 84-94.
B91 "Dreams Must Explain Themselves." Algol 21 (November, 1973), 7-
10, 12, 14; Dreams Must Explain Themselves (item A12), pp.
4-15; Signal 19 (January, 1976), 3-11; The Language of the
Night (item A22). On genesis and growth of Earthsea
trilogy.
B92 "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" PNLA Quarterly, 38, ii
(Winter, 1974), 14-18; as "This Fear of Dragons," The
Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children, ed. Edward
Blishen (Harmondsworth: Kestrel Books, 1975), pp. 87-92;
The Language of the Night (item A22). On fantasy.
B93 "The Staring Eye." Vector, No. 67-68 (Spring, 1974), 5-7; The
Language of the Night (item A22). On J. R. R. Tolkien.
B94 "Introduction." [to OMSI's Kendall Planetarium production of Isaac
Asimov's "Nightfall"] In the program leaflet. Portland:
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, 1974, p. [4].
B95 "Science Fiction Tomorrow." [in the series "Exploring the Future'']
Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 1974, p. [13], cols. 1-3.
B96 "Escape Routes." Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, 35 (December,
1974), 40-44; Antaeus, No. 25/26 (Spring/Summer, 1977), 301-
305; The Language of the Night (item A22). ‘Amalgamation
and summation of several talks" given in 1974.
B97 "The Child and the Shadow." Quarterly Journal of the Library of
Congress, 32 (April, 1975), [139]-48; Signal 18 (September,
1975), 136 (excerpt); The Language of the Night (item A22).
Lecture presented at Library of Congress in November, 1974;
on moral responsibilities of writers for children.
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451
B98 "Foreword" and headnotes to each story. The Wind's Twelve Quar-
ters (item A13).
B99 "Ketterer on The Left Hand of Darkness." Science-Fiction Stud-
ies, 2, ii (July, 1975), 137-39. Response to David Ketter-
er's criticism in his New Worlds for Old.
B100 “American SF and the Other." Science-Fiction Studies, 2, iii
(November, 1975), 208-10; Science-Fiction Studies: Selected
Articles of Science Fiction, 1973-75, ed. R. D. Mullen and.
Darko Suvin (Boston: Gregg Press, 1976), pp. 238-40; as
"Science Fiction Chauvinism," Ariel, vol 2 (Leawood Kansas:
The Morning Star Press, and New York: Ballantine, 1977), pp.
34-35; The Language of the Night (item A22). Polemic,
originally as a talk at a panel on Women in Science Fiction,
Bellingham, Washington, in 1974.
B101 "The Stone Ax and the Musk Oxen." Vector, No. 71 (December,
1975), 5-13; SunCon Convention Journal, No. 1 (1976), pp.
6-8, 10-12; The Language of the Night (item A22). Guest
of Honor Speech at Aussiecon, 33rd World Science Fiction
Convention, Melbourne, August, 1975.
B102 Afterword [to 'Mazes"]. See item B30.
B103 "A Response to the Le Guin Issue [SFS #7]." Science-Fiction
Studies, 3, i (March, 1976), 43-46; The Language of the
Night (item A22) (excerpts).
B104 "In Response to Mr Eisenstein." Science-Fiction Studies, 3, i
(March, 1976), 98. Answerto his critique of item B100.
B105 "Is Gender Necessary?" Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Vonda N.
McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson (Greenwich, Conn.: Faw-
cett, 1976), pp. 150-39; The Language of the Night (item
A22). On genesis, intentions, and methods in The Left Hand
of Darkness.
B106 "Introduction," "The Transglobal Workshop," and "The Workshop-
————— MÁ e
New York: Berkley Windhover, 1978, pp. 5-14, 15-16, 44-46.
B107 "A Note About Names . . ." Puffin Post, 10, ii (1976), 5.
Accompanies "The Rule of Names," item B6f.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
452
B108 "The Space Crone." The CoEvolution Quarterly, No. 10 (Summer,
1976), 108-11; as "On Menopause: The Space Crone," Med-
ical Self-Help Journal, 11, i (Spring, 1977), 22-23. "On
changes in women, not just menopause.
B109 "Introduction." The Left Hand of Darkness (item ASf), pp. [xi]-
—==S n OC ×
[xvi]; The Language of the Night (item A22).
B110 "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown." Science Fiction at Large: A
Collection of Essays by Various Hands, about the Interface
Between Science Fiction and Reality, ed. Peter Nicholls
(London: Gollancz, 1976, pp. [13]-33; New York: Harper §
Row, 1977; as "Explorations of the Marvellous," London:
Fontana, 1978, pp. [13]-33; The Language of the Night
(item A22). On character in science fiction; originally
delivered as lecture at Institute of Contemporary Arts,
London, January, 1975.
B111 "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction." Parabola, 1, iv (Fall,
1976), 42-47; The Language of the Night (item A22).
B112 "Introduction." Nebula Award Stories Eleven (London: Gollancz,
1976), pp. [9]-12; New York: Harper § Row, 1977, pp. xi-
xiv; London: Corgi, 1978, pp. 9-12; New York: Bantam, 1978.
pp. 1-4. On intensification of moral conscience in recent
science fiction.
B113 "Science Fiction as Prophecy: Philip K. Dick." The New Republic,
175 (October 30, 1976), 33-34; as "The Modest One," The
Language of the Night (item A22).
B114 "Fantasy, Like Poetry, Speaks the Language of the Night." World
(Sunday supplement to The San Francisco Examiner and Chron-
icle), November 21, 1976, p. 41; as "The Language of the
Night," The Language of the Night (item A22).
B115 "Concerning the Lem Affair." Science-Fiction Studies, 4, i
(March, 1977), 100. On the ouster of Lem from the SFWA.
B116 "Introduction to the 1977 Edition." Rocannon's World (item Ale),
pp- v-ix; The Language of the Night (item A22).
B117 "Author's Introduction." The Word for World is Forest (item
Al4c), pp. [S]-10; The Language of the Night (item A22).
B118 "Do-It-Yourself Cosmology " Parabola, 2, iii (Summer, 1977), 14-
17; The Language of the Night (item A22). On inventing
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
B118
B119
B120
B121
B122
B123
B124
B125
4.
B133
worlds in fantasy and science fiction.
"The Stalin in the Soul." The Future Now, ed. Robert Hoskins
Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1977), pp. 11-20; The Language
of the Night (item A22). On Zamyatin, censorship, and
forms of internalized censorship in the USA
"Books Remembered." The Calendar, 36, ii (November, 1977-June,
1978), n.p. On childhood reading, especially The Rise of
the Red Alders. (excerpt in item A22
"Vonda N. McIntyre." Janus, 4, i (Spring, 1978), 9-10.
"Introduction to the 1978 Edition." Planet of Exile (item A2g),
pp. vii-xii; The Language of the Night (item A22) .
"Introduction." City of Illusions (item A3f), pp. v-viii; The
Language of the Night (item A22).
"Introduction." Star Songs of an Old Primate, by James Tiptree,
Jr. (New York: Ballantine, 1978), pp. vii-xii; The Language
of the Night (item A22).
"Talking About Writing." The Language of the Night (item A22).
—_— —— c _——
Reviews
Rev. of Jean Lemaire de Belges: Le Temple d'honneur et des ver-
ee a e e
tus, ed. Henri Hornik. The Romanic Review, 49, iii (Octo-
ber, 1958), 210-11.
"On Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream." Science-Fiction Studies,
1, i (Spring, 1973), 41-44.
"European SF: Rottensteiner's Anthology, the Strugatskys, and
Lem." Rev. of View from Another Shore, ed. Franz Rotten-
steiner; Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky;
and The Invincible, by Stanislaw Lem. Science-Fiction
Studies, 1, iii (Spring, 1974), 181-85.
"No, Virginia, There is not a Santa Claus." Rev of Red Shift, by
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
454
Alan Garner. Foundation, No. 6 (May, 1974), 109-12.
B134 "SF in a Political-Science Textbook." Rev. of Political Science
Fiction: An Introductory Reader, ed. Martin Harry Greenberg
and Patricia S. Warrick. Science-Fiction Studies, 253
(March, 1975), 93-94.
B135 Rev. of The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem, and The Futurological
Congress, by Stanislaw Lem. Vector, No. 73/74 (March,
1976), [5]-6.
B136 "New England Gothic." Rev. of Lovecraft: A Biography, by L.
Sprague de Camp. Times Literary Supplement, March 26, 1976,
p. 335.
B137 "All About Anne." Rev. of The Wheel of Things: A Biography of
L. M. Mongomery, by Mollie Gillen. Times Literary Supple-
ment, June 4, 1976, pp. 676-77
B138 "You Wouldn't Like Oregon." Rev. of Mrs Frisby and the Rats of
B139 "Out of the Ice Age." Rev. of The Stochastic Man, by Robert
Silverberg; The Status Civilization, by Robert Sheckley;
The Space Machine, by Christopher Priest; and Eye Among the
Blind, by Robert Holdstock. Times Literary Supplement,
July 30, 1976, p. 950.
B140 Rev. of Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Hedgehog #1 (February
1977), pp. 22-23; excerpt rpt. in Orbit 20, ed. Damon
Knight (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 4-5.
B141 "A Review." Rev. of The Best from the Rest of the World: 14
—— e ee,
B142 Rev. of The Dark Tower and Other Stories, by C. S. Lewis. New
— — SSO COL
B143 "A New Book by the Strutgatskys." Rev. Roadside Picnic and Tale
of the Troika, by Arkady and Boris Strutgatsky. Science-
Fiction Studies, 4, ii (July, 1977), 157-59.
B144 Rev. of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars.
Meaning in SF Films," Future #4 (August, 1978), 18, 74.
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455
5. Letters
B150 Australian Science Fiction Review, No. 12 (October, 1967), 43-44.
Comments on fanzines and on Philip K. Dick.
B151 Australian Science Fiction Review, No. 17 (September, 1968), 35-
36. Report on recent Nebula Awards.
B152 New MillennialHarbinger, No. 4 (January, 1969), 11. Comments on
dme eee
B153 Phantasmicom, No. 2 (Winter, 1970), 52 [sic; actually 51].
Response to two reviews of The Left Hand of Darkness in
Phantasmicom, No. 1.
B154 Amazing Science Fiction Stories, 44 (November, 1970), 133. Com-
ments on Ted White's review of A Wizard of Earthsea in the
March issue of Amazing.
B155 Science Fiction Review, No. 41 (November, 1970), 51. On Richard
Geis's sexism.
B156 Renaissance, 2, iv (1970), 14. Comments on review of The Left
Hand of Darkness; mentions Wright's Islandia.
B157 Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, by Theodora Kroeber
rem es eg
B158 S F Commentary, No. 20 (April, 1971), 43-44. Comments on SF
Commentary and praises Philip K. Dick.
B159 "High Fantasy: A Wizard of Earthsea," Horn Book, 47 (April, 1971),
—, OS _ uae m —-_ m—
B160 S F Commentary, No. 23 (September, 1971), 5-6. Comments on SF
Commentary, Nos. 19 & 20, especially articles by Rotten-
steiner and Lem, and the letter on Dick.
B161 Entropy Negative, No. 4 (October, 1971), [39]. Comments on
Harris's talk on Lovecraft in Entropy Negative, No. 3.
B162 S F Commentary, No. 26 (April, 1972), 90-93. Lengthy reply to
Stanislaw Lem's criticism of The Left Hand of Darkness in
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
456
S F Commentary, No. 24; excerpts rpt., in "Introduction:
Women in Science Fiction," by Pamela Sargent, in Women
of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. xxxiv-xxxvi.
B165 Philosophical Gas, No. 13 (June, 1972), n.p. Comments on letters
from Compton and Wheelahan in Scythrop, No. 23.
B164 "Introduction" by Harlan Ellison to "The Word for World is For-
est" (item B17), p. 27. Comments on life in England.
B165 “McLuhan, Youth, and Literature," Horn Book, 49 (1973), 99.
Support of Eleanor Cameron's criticisms of Dahl's Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory.
B166 Locus, No. 140 (April 28, 1975), 3. Letter accompanying text
of National Book Award Acceptance Speech.
B167 BCSFA Newsletter , No. 8 (February, 1974), 4.
B168 SF ECHO. Moebius Trip Library 19 (January, 1974), 125-24. Com-
ments on review of The Lathe of Heaven and on "Vive la Dif-
ference for God's Sake," by Jack Woodhams in SF ECHO 18.
B169 Son of Machiavelli, No. 13 (July, 1974), n.p.
B170 #18 Gonzo (December, 1974), 4. One-liner on learning to read.
B171 SF ECHO. Moebius Trip Library 21 (1974), 132-33.
B172 "Arcs and Secants," Orbit 12, ed. Damon Knight (New York: Putnam,
1973), pp. 248-49 (see item B20a). Autobiographical sketch.
B173 "Arcs and Secants," Orbit 14, ed. Damon Knight (New York: Harper
& Row, 1974), p. 209 (see item B23a). On state of mind
while writing The Dispossessed.
B174 Women and Men, No. 4 (February, 1975), 4.. Declines interview.
B175 Science Fiction Review, No. 12 (February, 1975), 29-30. Comments
on review of The Dispossessed; on Hainish chronology.
B176 Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, 36 (August, 1975), 157. Re-
sponse to Lester Del Rey's "Stay Out of My Ghetto," a
critique of her "Escape Routes" (item B96).
—_—_—_— — e
B177 The Witch and the Chameleon, No. 4 (September, 1975), 25-26.
; Praise for "Ahout 2,675,250 Words," by Vonda McIntyre, and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
457
B178 SFWA Forum, No. 45 (April, 1976), 7-8. On the Lem affair (see
item B115).
B179 Women and Men, No. 6 (May, 1976), 3-4. Response to Denys
Howard's letter in Science Fiction Review, No. 15, about
homosexuality in The Dispossessed.
B180 Locus, No. 200 (March, 1977), 5, 12. Withdrawing "The Diary of
the Rose" from competition for Nebula in protest over Lem
affair.
B181 S F Commentary, No. 52 (June, 1977), 21. Response to George
Turner's remarks on criticism of science fiction by major
review organs.
B182 "Letter from Ursula K. Le Guin (to Philip K. Dick)." Science
Fiction Review, No. 24 (February, 1978), 79. On Lem affair
and her dealings with Polish publisher.
6. Other
B200 “Ursula K. Le Guin." New York: Atheneum, 1972. Leaflet issued
to promote The Farthest Shore; contains autobiographical
note, statement about fantasy.
B201 "Ursula K. Le Guin." Stella Nova: The Contemporary Science Fic-
tion Authors, ed. R. Reginald (Los Angeles: Unicorn § Son,
1970), p. 157; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1974. Contains
Statement by Le Guin on why she writes science fiction.
B202 "The Farthest Shore." Junior Literary Guild (September, 1972),
p. 44. Autobiographical material in magazine announcing
new selections.
B203 "Le GUIN, Ursula K({roeber) 1929-" Something About the Author,
ed. Anne Commire. Detroit: Gale, 1973. vol. 4, pp. 142-44.
Autobiographical notes.
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458
B204 "The Plain of Ice," by Ugo Malaguti. Translated from the
Italian by Ursula K. Le Guin [from chapter 2, "Charonia
reptans," of Malaguti's novel Il Palazzo nel Cielo (1970)].
Edge, No. 5/6 (Autumn/Winter, 1973), 62-68, 73. Trans-
lator's note," p. 112.
B205 Six poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the French by
Le Guin. Mr. Cogito, 1, iii (Winter, 1973):
a. "Ebauches et Fragments," p. [8].
- "Les Fenêtres," p. [9].
- "Vergers," p. [10].
. "Les Roses," p. [11].
"Les Roses," p. [12].
"Les Roses," p. [15].
moan o&
B206 "Crab Nebula," "Fresh Gichumichy," "Primitive Chocolate Mousse."
Cooking Out of this World, ed. Anne McCaffrey (New York:
Ballantine, 1973), pp. 104-107. Recipes.
B207 “Announcing the First Annual O-Melas Fill-in Contest." OMELAS,
No. 2 (July, 1976), p. [15]. Le Guin's entry selected as
winner.
B208 "Dragon." Encore, 1, vi (April/May, 1977), 8. Woodblock print.
B209 "Ursula K. Le Guin." Robot (Milan, Italy), No. 23 (February,
1978), p. 16. Short autobiographical statement in Italian,
with drawing of a cat.
B210 "Ursula K. Le Guin." Citadel (1976), p. 11. Drawing of dino-
saur-stork carrying baby dinosaur, Le Guin's contribution
to a symposium on "How Dinosaurs Did It."
C. Interviews and Feature Articles Containing Interview Materials
Cl "Meet Ursula: She can shape you a universe," by Clifford E. Lan-
ders. Northwest Magazine (supplement to The Sunday Oregon-
ian), July 26, 1970, pp. 8-10..
C2 "Voices 3." Colloquy, 4, v (May, 1971), [6]-7. Response to
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
459
questionnaire.
CS "Le Guin (I)." Entropy Negative, No. 3 (1971), [17]-[22]. Tele-
phone interview by Mike Bailey.
C4 "Le Guin (II)." Entropy Negative, No. 3 (1971), [23]- [26]. Re-
sponses to written questions posed by Daniel Say.
CS "Ursula Le Guin: What's wrong with our new left is we're trying to
work through the existing power structure," by Daniel Yost.
Northwest Magazine (supplement to The Sunday Oregonian),
February 13, 1972, p. 8. An
c6 "'Teen Passions’ Motivate Author Here," by Helen L. Mershon.
Oregon Journal, September 8, 1972, sec. 2, p. 1, cols.
3-8.
C7 "Ursula Le Guin: Woman of Science Fiction." Interview by Char-
lotte Reed, recorded February 3, 1973. North Hollywood,
Calif.: Center for Cassette Studies, 1973. Tape #33459.
C8 "Author broke into print by writing out of this world.” Oregon-
ian, April 16, 1973, sec. 2, p. 8.
C9 "Ursula K. Le Guin.” Interviewed by Jonathan Ward. Algol, No.
24 (Summer, 1975), 7-10. Excerpt appeared earlier in Algol,
No. 21 (November, 1973), p. 24. Reprinted in Dreams Must
Explain Themselves (item Al2), pp. 31-37. May have been
recorded in April, 1973, and broadcast on radio in New York.
C10 "She Writes About Aliens-~-Men Included," by Paula Brookmire.
Milwaukee Journal, July 21, 1974; reprinted in Biography
News (Detroit: Gale, 1974), p. 1155.
C11 "SSF INTERVIEWS URSULA K. LE GUIN," by James Cowan. SSF (Milwau-
kee), 3, i (Fall, 1974), 30-40.
C12 "Ursula K. Le Guin," by Roger Scafford. Prism (Corvallis, Ore.),
Fall, 1974, pp. 11-13.
C13 "Vertex Interviews Ursula K. Le Guin,” by Gene Van Troyer. Ver-
tex, 2 (December, 1974), 34-39, 92, 96-97.
C14 "Science Fiction and the Future of Anarchy: Conversations with
Ursula K. Le Guin," by Charles Bigelow and J. McMahon.
Oregon Times, December, 1974, pp. 24-29.
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460
C15 “Ursula Le Guin Interview: Tricks, anthropology create new
worlds," by Barry Barth. Portland Scribe, May 17 - May 25,
1975, pp. 8-9.
C16 "Galaxy of Awards for Ursula Le Guin," by Anthony Wolk and Susan
Stanley Wolk. Willamette Week, June 50, 1975, p. 11.
C17 "Ursula K. Le Guin: An Interview," conducted by Paul Walker.
Se rr ee ee ae Seen ee
C18 “Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin." 10 point S arts magazine, No.
5 (Spring, 1977), 10-15.
C19 "Ursula K. Le Guin: ‘Using the Language with Delight,''" by Vonda
McIntyre. Encore, 1, vi (April/May, 1977), 6-7.
C20 "Creating realistic utopias: 'the obvious trouble with anarchism
is neighbors': An interview with Ursula LeGuin,” by Win Mc-
Cormack and Anne Mendel. Seven Days, 1, v (April 11, 1977),
38-40.
C21 "'Real women' in fantasies--Will science fiction ever be the
same?" [by Susan Stanley]. Oregon Journal, April 28,
1977, p. 21.
C22 "The not-so-science fiction of Ursula LeGuin," by M. G. Horowitz.
Downtowner (Portland), August 29, 1977, pp. 10-11.
C23 "Ursula K. Le Guin." Auto Delerium (Australia), 1978, pp. 16-17.
Response to questionnaire.
C24 "An Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin," conducted by Mark P. Hasel-
korn. Science Fiction Review, No. 25 (May, 1978), 72-74.
C25 "Interview: Ursula K. Le Guin," by Dorothy Gilbert. California
Quarterly, No. 13/14 (Spring/Summer, 1978), 38-55.
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461
D. Miscellaneous: Recordings, Tapes, Unpublished Materials
DI The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. New York: Alternate World
Recordings, AWR 7476, 1976. Le Guin's readings of "The
Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" (item B22), "Direction of
the Road" {item B20), and "An Orgota Creation Myth" from The
Left Hand of Darkness (item A5). Liner notes by Vonda Mc-
Intyre.
D2 Gwilan's Harp and Intracom. New York: Caedmon Records, TC1556
(record) and CDL51556 (cassette), 1977. Le Guin's reading
of "Gwilan's Harp" (item B38) and "Intracom" (item B25).
Liner notes by Le Guin.
D3 Aussiecon Tapes. Available from Aussiecon, G.P.O. Box 4039, Mel-
bourne, Victoria 3000, Australia . Pubiished on demand.
Audio and video tapes of the following from Aussiecon, the
33rd World Science Fiction Convention; August, 1975:
a. Guest of Honor Speech (Le Guin's "The Stone Ax and the
Musk Oxen" [item B101])
b. Panel: Discovering Worlds. Panelists Stella Lees, Peter
Nicholls, Anne Sydenham, Anna Shepherd, and Ursula K. Le
Guin discuss Le Guin's fantasy.
c. Panel: Myths and Legends in Science Fiction. Panelists
John Alderson, David Grigg, A Bertram Chandler, and Ursula
K. Le Guin discuss "omni-present pan-cultural myths cen-
tral to many works of science fiction." Moderated by
Christine McGowan.
D4 Broadcast performance of A Wizard of Earthsea. The "Jackanory
Story" on BBC1 at 4:30 on November 25-29, 1974.
D5 Radio Interview. Broadcast on December 19, 1976 by KPFA in San
Francisco.
D6 "Turnabout." Prod. Roxanne Russell. PBS Television. Broadcast
on July 23, 1978, by WHA-TV, channel 21, Macison, Wisconsin.
Michelle Nichols, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin dis-
cuss women in the space program and in science fiction.
D7 "Wild Angels of the Open Hills," by Joseph Schwantner. Musical
settings for poems from Wild Angels, world premiere on Feb-
ruary 2, 1978, by Jubail Trio in Alice Tuliy Hall, New York.
See New York Times, February 4, 1978, p. 13, cols. 1-3.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
462
D8 Proceedings of the SFRA Conference, Denver, Colorado, April, 1975.
Tapes in the possession of Thomas D. Clareson, Box 3186,
The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH 44691. Excerpts publish-
ed in "The Launching Pad," Extra Olation, 18 (1977), 105-106.
Le Guin's remarks on how she started to write science
fiction.
D9 Panel Discussion at the University of California, Berkeley, July
30, 1977. Tape in possession of Susan Wood, Department of
English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada. See Locus, No. 203 (August, 1977), 1, for news item
and a photo of the panel. Le Guin comments on The Word for
World is Forest, Eastern European science fiction, the moral
responsibilities of writers, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Angus Wilson,
Parnassus Press, Doris Lessing, and other matters.
D10 Informal Dialogue between Le Guin and the audience at the 1978
National Conference of the SFRA, Waterloo, Iowa, June, 1978.
Transcript to be published in the Selected Proceedings of the
Conference.
D11 "The Metaphor of the Rose as an Illustration of the 'Carpe Diem!
theme in French and Italian Poetry of the Renaissance." By
Ursula Kroeber. Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of A.B. with honour in the
Department of Romance Languages and Literature, Harvard
University. April 9, 1951. 99pp.
D12 "Aspects of Death in Ronsard's Poetry." By Ursula Kroeber. Sub-
mitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Philosophy,
Columbia University. April, 1952. 89pp.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
463
II. A BIBLIOGRAPHIC CHECKLIST OF WORKS ABOUT URSULA K. LE GUIN
Alterman, Peter S. "Ursula K. Le Guin: Damsel with a Dulcimer." In
Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Green-
berg. New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp. 64-76,
Annas, Pamela J. "New Worlds, New Words: Androgyny in Feminist Science
Fiction." Science-Fiction Studies, 5 (1978), 143-56.
Arbur, Rosemarie. "Beyond Feminism, the Self Intact: Woman's Place in
the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin." Forthcoming in the Proceedings
of the 1978 Science Fiction Research Association National Confer-
ence.
Bankier, Jennifer. "Socialism and The Dispossessed, or, A Study in
e-
Selective Perception." The Witch and the Chameleon (Hamilton,
eee e a
Ontario), No. 3 (April, 1975), 4-8.
Barbour, Douglas. "The Lathe of Heaven: Taoist Dream." Algol, 11
(November, 1973), 22-24.
---------- - "On Ursula Le Guin's 'A Wizard of Earthsea.!" Riverside
Quarteriy, 6 (1974), 119-23.
---------~ - "Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K.
Le Guin." Science-Fiction Studies, 1 (1974), 164-73.
~--------- - "Wholeness and Balance: An Addendum." Science-Fiction
Studies, 2 (1975), 248-49.
Bierman, Judah. "Ambiguity in Utopia: The Dispossessed."" Science-Fic-
tion Studies, 2 (1975), 249-55.
Bittner, James W. "Persuading Us to Rejoice and Teaching Us How to
Praise: Le Guin's Orsinian Tales." Science-Fiction Studies, 5
(1978), 215-42.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
464
Brennan, John P., and Michael C. Downs. "Anarchism and Utopian Tradi-
tion in The Dispossessed." In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Olander
and Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp. 116-52.
Brigg, Peter. "The Archetype of the Journey in Ursula K. Le Guin's
Fiction." In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Olander and Greenberg. New
York: Taplinger, 1979, pp. 36-63.
--------- = - "The Consistent Extrapolation: A Critical Approach."
Forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 1978 Science Fiction Research
Association National Conference.
Caimmi, Giuseppe, and Piergiorgio Nicolazzini. "Ritratto di Ursula Le
Guin." Robot (Milano), No. 6 (February, 1978), 6-13.
Cameron, Eleanor. "High Fantasy: A Wizard of Earthsea." Horn Book, 47
ee ee ee —_— ee’
Cassill, R. V. "Ursula K. Le Guin The New Atlantis." In Instructor's
Handbook for The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1978, pp. 128-29.
Cogell, Elizabeth. "Setting as Analogue to Characterization in Ursula
Le Guin." Extrapolation, 18 (1977), 131-41.
--------~- . "Taoist Configurations: The Dispossessed." In Ursula K.
Le Guin. Ed. Joe De Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press,
1979, pp. 155-79.
Crow, John H., and Richard D. Erlich. "Words of Binding: Patterns of
Integration in the Earthsea Trilogy." In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed.
Olander and Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp. 200-23.
De Bolt, Joe. "A Le Guin Biography." Empire, No. 13 (April 7, 1978),
pp. 23-28; rpt. in Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. De Bolt. Port Washing-
ton, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979, pp. 13-28.
Delany, Samuel. "To Read The Dispossessed."" In his The Jewel-Hinged
Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Elizabethtown, N.
goe Mee e m a a ee
Dick, Philip K. "Man, Android and Machine." In Science Fiction at
Large. Ed. Peter Nicholls. London: Gollancz, 1976, pp. 199-224.
Dillard. R. H. W. "Speculative Fantasy and the New Reality." The
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 1976, p. 12.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
465
Donoghue, Anthelme. "ursula le guin: une morale pour le futur."
Univers/04 (Paris: Editions J'ai lu, Mars, 1976), pp. 148-57.
Eisenstein, Alex. "On Le Guin's "American SF and the Other.'"' Science-
Fiction Studies, 3 (1976), 97.
Elliott, Robert C. "A New Utopian Novel." Yale Review, 65 (1976), 256-
6i. RO
Ellison, Harlan. "Introduction to The Word for World is Forest." In
Again, Dangerous Visions. Ed. Ellison. Garden City, N.Y.: Double-
day, 1972, pp. 26-29.
Esmonde, Margaret P. "The Master Pattern: The Psychological Journey in
the Earthsea Trilogy." In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Olander and
Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp. 15-35.
Fleck, Leonard M. "Science Fiction as a Tool of Speculative Philosophy:
A Philosophic Analysis of Selected Anarchist Themes in Le Guin's
The Dispossessed." Forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 1978
Science Fiction Research Association National Conference.
Fox, Geoff, ed. "Notes on 'teaching' A Wizard of Earthsea." Children's
Literature in Education, No. 11 (May, 1973), 58-67.
Friend, Beverly. "Virgin Territory: The Bonds and Boundaries of Women
in Science Fiction." In Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form
in Science Fiction. Ed. Thomas D. Clareson. Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1977, pp. 140-63.
Gerstenberger, Donna. “Conceptions Literary and Otherwise: Women Wri-
ters and the Modern Imagination." Novel, 9 (1976), 141-50.
Gillespie, Bruce. “Ursula Le Guin: Explorer of New Worlds." Educa-
tional Magazine, 32, iii (1975), 43-46.
Gunew, Sneja. "Mythic Reversals: The Evolution of the Shadow Motif."
In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Olander and Greenberg. New York: Tap-
linger, 1979, pp. 178-99.
---------- - "To Light a Candle is to Cast a Shadow: The Shadow as
Identity Touchstone in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy and in
The Left Hand of Darkness." S F Commentary (Melbourne), No.
48/49/50 (Oct/Nov/Dec 1976), 32-38.
Hayles, N. B. "Androgyny, Ambivalence, and Assimilation in The Left
Hand of Darkness." In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Olander and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
466
Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp. 97-115.
Huntington, John. "Public and Private Imperatives in Le Guin's Novels."
Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 237-43.
Jago, Wendy. "'A Wizard of Earthsea! and the charge of escapism."
Children's Literature in Education, No. 8 (July, 1972), 21-29.
Jameson, Fredric. "World-Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Uto-
pian Narrative." Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 221-30.
Kaufman, Jerry. "Haber is Destroyed on The Lathe of Heaven." Starling
(Madison, Wis.), No. 27 (January, 1974), 35-40.
Ketterer, David. "The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula K. Le Guin's Arche-
typal ‘Winter-Journey.'" Riverside Quarterly, 5 (1973), 288-97.
Rpt. in his New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination,
q ee
Science Fiction, and American Literature. Bloomington, Ind.:
re | oee
Indiana University Press, 1974; and Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
---------- - "In Response [to Le Guin's remarks on his New Worlds for
Old]." Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 143-44.
Klein, Gérard. "Ursula Le Guin, ou la sortie du piège." In his
Malaise dans la science-fiction. Metz: L'Aube Enclavée, 1977,
pp. 48-78; trans. and abridged by Richard Astle as "Le Guin’s
‘Aberrant’ Opus: Escaping the Trap of Discontent." Science-Fic-
tion Studies, 4 (1977), 287-95.
Koper, Pete. "Science and Rhetoric in the Fiction of Ursula Le Guin."
In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. De Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kenni-
kat Press, 1979, pp. 66-86.
Kroeber, Karl. "Sisters and Science Fiction." The Little Magazine, 10,
No. 1 § 2 (Spring-Summer, 1976), 87-90.
Lasseter, Rollin A. "Four Letters About Le Guin.” In Ursula K. Le Guin.
Ed. De Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979, pp. 89-
114.
Lem, Stanislaw. "Lost Opportunities." S F Commentary, No. 24 (November,
1971), 22-24; excerpts in Pamela Sargent, “Introduction: Women in
Science Fiction." Women of Wonder. Ed. Sargent. New York: Vin-
tage, 1975, pp. xxxii-xxxvi.
Malaguti, Ugo. "Introduzione alla Prima Edizione" and "Commento alla
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
467
Seconda Edizione." In La mano sinistra delle tenebre. Trans.
— oe OOO
Malaguti. Bologna: Libra Editrice, 1976, pp. 5-19, 311-18.
Malzberg, Barry N. "Circumstance as Policy: The Decade of Ursula K. Le
Guin." In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. De Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.:
Kennikat Press, 1979, pp. 5-9.
McIntyre, Vonda N. "Introduction." In From Elfiand to Poughkeepsie.
By Ursula K. Le Guin. Portland, Ore.: Pendragon Press, 1973, pp.
xi-xviii.
Molson, Francis J. "The Earthsea Trilogy: Ethical Fantasy for Children."
In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. De Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat
Press, 1979, pp. 128-49.
Nicholls, Peter. "Showing Children the Value of Death." Foundation,
No. 5 (January, 1974), 71-80.
Nudelman, Rafail. "An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin's SF."
Trans. Alan G. Myers. Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 210-20.
Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg. "Introduction." In
their Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp. 7-14.
Pagetti, Carlo. "Anarres dopo Anarres." In i rietti dell'altro pia-
neta [The Dispossessed]. Trans. Pagetti. Milano: Editrice Nord,
1976, pp. i-viii.
Pfeiffer, John R. "'But Dragons Have Keen Ears': On Hearing Earthsea,
with Recollections of Beowulf." In Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. De
Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979, pp. 115-27.
Plank, Robert. "Ursula K. Le Guin and the Decline of Romantic Love."
Science-Fiction Studies, 3 (1976), 36-43.
Porter, David L. "The Politics of Le Guin's Opus." Science-Fiction
Studies, 2 (1975), 243-48.
Priest, Christopher. "Cool Dreamer." Maya (U.K.), No. 7 (1975), 19-
23.
Remington, Thomas J. "The Other Side of Suffering: Touch as Theme and
Metaphor in Le Guin's Science Fiction Novels." In Ursula K. Le
Guin. Ed. Olander and Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1979, pp.
153-77.
---------- - "A Touch of Difference, a Touch of Love: Theme in Three
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
468
Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin." Extrapolation, 18 (1976), 28-41.
Russ, Joanna. "Books." Rev. of The Dispossessed. Fantasy and Science
Fiction, 48 (March, 1975), 41-44.
---------- . The Image of Women in Science Fiction." Red Clay Reader,
No. 7 (Charlotte, N.C., 1970), pp. 35-40. Rpt. in Images of Women
in Fiction. Ed. Susan Koppleman Cornillon. Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973, pp. 79-94.
Scholes, Robert. "The Good Witch of the West." The Hollins Critic, 11
(April, 1974), 2-12. Rpt. in his Structural Fabulation: An Essay
a e
---------- - "Science Fiction as Conscience: John Brunner and Ursula K.
Le Guin." The New Republic, 175 (October 30, 1976), 38-40.
--~------- » and Eric S. Rabkin. "The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)."
In their Science Fiction: History - Science - Vision. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 226-30.
Shippey, T. A. "The Magic Art and the Evolution of Words: Ursula Le
Guin's Earthsea Trilogy." Mosaic, 10 (Winter, 1977), 147-63.
Sinclair, Karen. "Solitary Being: The Hero as Anthropologist." In
Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. De Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat
Press, 1979, pp. 50-65.
. Slusser, George E. The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin. San
-—— e —— e a Ce
Smith, Curtis C. "LE GUIN, Ursula K(roeber)." Contemporary Novelists.
2nd ed. Ed. James Vinson. London: St. James Press, 1976, and
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976, pp. 795-97.
Smith, Philip E., II. "Unbuilding Walls: Human Nature and the Nature
of Evolutionary Political Theory in The Dispossessed." In Ursula
K. Le Guin. Ed. Olander and Greenberg. New York: Taplinger,
1979, pp. 77-96.
Suvin, Darko. "Parables of De-Alienation: Le Guin's Widdershins Dance."
Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 265-74.
---~+----- . "SF and The Left Hand of Darkness." Seldon's Plan (De-
troit), 7, No. I (February-March, 1975), 6-17.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
469
Suvin, Darko. "The SF Novel in 1969." In Nebula Award Stories 5.
Ed. James Blish. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970, pp. 193-
205.
Taylor, Angus. "The Politics of Space, Time, and Entropy." Foundation,
No. 10 (June, 1976), 34-44.
Theall, Donald F. "The Art of Social-Science Fiction: The Ambiguous
Utopian Dialectics of Ursula K. Le Guin." Science-Fiction Studies,
2 (1975), 256-64.
Tifft, Larry L., and Dennis C. Sullivan. "Possessed Sociology and Le
Guin's Dispossessed: From Exile to Anarchism." In Ursula K. Le
Guin. Ed. De Bolt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979,
pp. 180-97.
—_—_— c c ee ee
Turner, George. "From Paris to Anarres: The Le Guin Retrospective."
S F Commentary, No. 44/45 (December, 1975), 20-23, 28.
---------- - "Paradigm and Pattern: Form and Meaning in The Disposses-
sed." S F Commentary, No. 41/42 (February, 1975), 65-74. 64.
Urbanowicz, Victor. "Personal and Political in Le Guin's The Dispos-
sessed." Science-Fiction Studies, 5 (1978), 110-17.
Watson, fan. "The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: 'The Word for World is
Forest' and 'Vaster than Empires and More Slow.'" Science-Fiction
Studies, 2 (1975), 231-37.
---------- . "Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven and the Role of Dick: The False
Reality as Mediator." Science-Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 67-75.
-~-=------ - "What Do You Want--the Moon?" Foundation, No. 9 (Novem-
ber, 1975), 75-83.
Williams, Raymond. "Utopia and Science Fiction." Science-Fiction
Studies, 5 (1978), 203-14.
Wood, Susan. "Discovering Worlds: The Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin."
In Voices for the Future. Vol. 2. Ed. Thomas D. Clareson.
Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979.
Fantasy and Science Fiction. By Ursula K. Le Guin. Ed. Susan
Wood. New York: Berkley/Putnam, 1979.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
470
Woodcock, George. "The Equilibrations of Freedom: Notes On the Novels
of Ursula K. Le Guin." ‘Georgia Straight (Vancouver, B.C.), 10,
No. 467 (Oct 21-28, 1976), 4-5, 9; and No. 468 (Oct 28-Nov 4,
1976), 6-7.
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TITLE OF THESIS _ APPROACHES TO THE FICTION OF URSULA K. LE GUIN
rn epee rere
Major Professor Joha 0. Lyons
Major Department Department of English
Minor (s) Sociology
Full Name James Warren Bittner
Place and Date of Birth Manitowoc, Wisconsin March 15, 1945
Colleges and Universities: Years attended and degrees
University of Illinois, Urbana, 1962-67, B.A.
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, 1970-72, M.A.
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1972-79, Ph.D.
_ Orr eee
Membership in Learned or Honorary Societies
_Modern Language Association (MLA), NCTE, Popular Culture Association,
Science Fiction Research Association
Publications Sa,
"A Survey of Le Guin Criticism," Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner
Lands and to Outer Space, ed. Joe De Bolt (Port Washington, N.Y.:
Kennikat Press, 1978).
"Persuading Us to Rejoice and Teaching Us How to Praise: Le Guin's
Orsinian Tales," Science-Fiction Studies, 5 (November 1978)
Date May 21, 1979
rere
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