Science Fiction Studies

#7 = Volume 2, Part 3 = November 1975

ARTICLE ABSTRACTS

THE SCIENCE FICTION OF URSULA K. LE GUIN

Douglas Barbour

Wholeness and Balance: An Addendum

Abstract.-- This brief analysis of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is intended as an extension of the analysis of light and dark imagery, wholeness and balance, in my earlier essay "Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin" (SFS 1:164-73). It is important to add The Dispossessed to my discussion of the earlier novels because it is not only an important addition to the small shelf of superior SF works but also a large and central piece in the Hainish mosaic.

 

Judah Bierman

Ambiguity in Utopia: The Dispossessed

Abstract.-- Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopian tale The Dispossessed (TD) does not merely pose another blueprint for an anarchist commune in the SF skies—an escape from sour democracies or immanent fascist tyrannies on Earth. Subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia, this spiritual autobiography and utopian quest of the brilliant physicist Shevek explores the difficulties besetting the idea of an anarchist-socialist utopia. Further, like Plato and More, Le Guin also measures how the utopian vision presses a social responsibility and alienation on the "knower." I propose to consider two senses in which the TD world of Annares may be read: first, the place is only ambiguously good, and second, ambiguity is implicit in its organizing principle. The dominant life style is not permanently set but permits, indeed demands, personal choices to meet inevitable social and environmental changes. Though obviously linked with Le Guin’s earlier SF and wizard stories, TD is a moral allegory that should be read in the context of other contemporary utopian tales. It is a worthy contribution to the debate about the responsibility of knowledge (both of the visionary and the scientist) in a planned society.

 

John Huntington

Public and Private Imperatives in Le Guin's Novels

Abstract.-- The typical Le Guin hero is a visitor to a world other than his own. Sometimes he is a professional anthropologist; sometimes the role is forced on him: in all cases, he is a creature of divided allegiance. As a student of an alien society, he has responsibilities to his own culture and to the culture he visits; he must sympathize with and participate deeply in both, for it is by the experience and analysis of their differences that he hopes to arrive at a deeper understanding of the nature and possibilities of the mind and of social organization. In his role as scientist, the anthropologist expects cultural division and has been trained to explore it, but as an individual, he finds that his personal attachments exist to an important degree independent of and at times in conflict with his social duty. Almost inevitably in Le Guin’s work, the hero finds that he has difficulty reconciling his public, political obligation with the bonds he has developed as a private individual. Though the cultural division often serves to exacerbate his dilemma, Le Guin’s hero, as a moral individual rather than as a scientist, often confronts a human problem of, in bald terms, how to harmonize love and public duty. The two divisions the anthropologist hero faces are not completely separate, however: different societies demand and deserve different sacrifices. Therefore, the inquiry into what the individual owes society leads naturally into a study of the nature and possibilities of different political structures. Among the works discussed are Rocannon’s World, City of Illusions, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and "The Word for World is Forest."

 

Fredric Jameson

World Reduction in Le Guin:The Emergence of Utopian Narrative

Abstract.-- Some part of the fascination of Left Hand of Darkness—as well as the ambiguity of its ultimate message—derives from the reductive and subterranean drive within it toward a utopian "rest," toward some ultimate "no-place" of a collectivity untormented by sex or history. But the only conceivable way of breaking out of the vicious circle of feudalism and capitalism is a quite different one from Le Guin’s liberal "solution"—the Ekumen as a kind of galactic United Nations. One is tempted to wonder whether the Handdara strategy of never asking questions is not the way in which the utopian imagination protects itself against a fatal return to just those historical contradictions from which it is supposed to provide relief. The attempt, in the portrayal of feudal Karhide, to imagine something like a West that has never known capitalism is of a piece, structurally and in spirit, with Le Guin’s attempt, in the portrayal of the ambisexuality of the Gethenians, to imagine biology without desire. Le Guin’s underlying identification between sex as a well-nigh gratuitous complication of existence and capitalism as a disease of change and meaningless evolutionary momentum is powerfully conveyed by the technique of world-reduction: in world reduction, omission functions as utopian exclusion. Karhide is not, of course, a utopia, but it is now clear that The Left Hand of Darkness served as a proving ground for The Dispossessed. In the latter novel, the device of world-reducing is expressed in the emphasis on the inseparability of utopia and scarcity. The Odonian civilization of barren Annares becomes the most through-going application of the world reduction technique at the same time that it constitutes a timely rebuke to present attempts to parlay American abundance and consumerism into some ultimate vision of the "great society."

 

Ursula K. Le Guin

American SF and the Other

Abstract.-- The only social change presented by most SF has been towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten. Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the economic destiny of the entire galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women. The whole picture is, if I may say so, curiously "un-American." It is a perfect baboon patriarchy, the Alpha Male on top, being respectfully groomed, from time to time, by his inferiors. Is this speculation? Is this imagination? Is this extrapolation? I call it brainless regressivism. I think it’s time SF writers—and their readers!—stopped daydreaming about a return to the Age of Queen Victoria and started thinking about the future. I would like to see the Baboon Ideal replaced by a little human idealism and some serious consideration of such deeply radical, futuristic concepts as liberty, equality, and fraternity. And remember that about 53% of the brotherhood of man is the sisterhood of women.

 

Rafail Nudelman

An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin's SF

Abstract.-- Basic to Le Guin’s SF is the concept that the world is (and must be) in essence One. Things usually separated are united. The Way of the plot leads to an understanding and realization of this oneness. It is quite deliberate that in Left Hand of Darkness a certain stage of unity is embodied in the androgyne—a character linked in terrestrial myths with the primordial, unfragmented condition of the world. The plot in Le Guin is a symbolic sign for such a mythopoetic Way, in Lévi-Strauss’ sense of myth as a search for mediations between opposing orders of being—a search that is always "androgynous." This is what ancient Chinese philosophy expressed by saying (as Le Guin repeats in Left Hand of Darkness): "the Yin (feminine, left), the Yang (the masculine, right, etc.)—this is called Tao, the Way." (The ancient Chinese divinity of light and darkness also was an androgyne.) Le Guin’s SF is mythopoetic yet nonetheless contemporary: she confronts modern culture with its absolute oppositions. The whole Gethenian culture in Left Hand of Darkness negates the fundamental dualism of terrestrial culture, founded in the division of the sexes: Gethen is based on the inversion of Earth and earthly conceptions. Such an inversion or overturning permits the revelation of the invariables in human existence, independent of sexual dimorphism. The mythological state—the Golden Age—is the goal or end of the historical plot and becomes a means of expressing historical optimism. The consciousness, however, that the way is endless and the final goal unattainable supplies Le Guin’s novels with a constant undercurrent of elegy.

 

David L. Porter

The Politics of Le Guin's Opus

Abstract.-- To read Le Guin is to enter a sharply focused world of vivid political drama, from individual struggles to cosmic conflict. This essay, based on seven of Le Guin’s novels and five of her stories, first presents the framework of her political perception, then relates to contemporary reality her particular use of the future. Finally, I assess the relative effectiveness of her writings as a distinct medium of political communication, concluding that it is far easier for the average reader to dismiss a radical tract or radical speaker than to set down a Le Guin writing once it is begun. In her own manner, with her own special skills, Le Guin succeeds in taking us on that spiral journal of growth—adventuring outward, returning home somewhat wiser—that is so central to her own political thought. Among the texts considered are Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions, Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, The Dispossessed, "The Word for World is Forest," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," "Field of Vision," and "The Day Before the Revolution."

 

Darko Suvin

Parables of De-Alienation: Le Guin's Widdershins Dance

Abstract.-- While Dick is a "romantic" writer whose energy lashes out in a profusion of incandescent and interfused narrative protuberances, Le Guin is a "classical" writer: her energy is as fierce but is strictly controlled within a taut and spare architectural system of narrative cells. Dick writes centrifugally, as it were in revolving sectors (say of a radar sweep). Le Guin writes centripetally, in a narrowing spiral (say of a falcon circling to a swoop); she delineates ever more precisely the same object. Dick sees a world of addition and multiplication, so he reproduces it in his narrative forms. Le Guin sees a world of subtraction and division, and she started by reproducing it. But it seems to me and to many contributors in this issue that with The Left Hand of Darkness she has increasingly expressed the complementary urge toward integration. We need seers of both the Le Guin and the Dick type, for their visions help us to define and thus master our common world. These and many other points are argued abundantly in this special issue. Yet despite the diversity of critical approaches employed here, no contributor attempts to integrate the Earthsea trilogy with Le Guin’s SF. A number of aspects of Le Guin remain to be elucidated.

My thesis is that the main thrust and strength of Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing lies in its quest for and sketching of a new, collectivist system of no-longer-alienated human relationships. This system arises out of the absolute necessity for overcoming an intolerable ethical, cosmic, political, and physical alienation. Le Guin’s heretical protagonists are culture heroes: each founds a major cultural concept, translating it from unnamed to named existence. The ingathering of races and recuperation of mind-speech which permits the naming of Rocannon’s World, Estraven’s "treason," Selver’s liberation warfare, Shevek’s unifying ansible, and Simon’s direct power conversion, are all such concepts. In the long run, culture heroes and their discoveries assert themselves in the Hainish universe, but not necessarily in the short run. Realistically, the heroes pay a stiff price for their victories, though the price decreases through Le Guin’s opus down to Shevek, the first Founding Father who is also a biological father and whose collective or comitatus is not destroyed at the end of the story—another way of saying he can live on and enjoy his victory. Almost everybody else, from Roncannon and Falk to Selver and Simon, is an ambiguous questing figure, "lonely, isolated,. . .out on the edge of things" (Le Guin, "The Masters"). Among the texts considered are "The New Atlantis," The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Le Guin’s "apprentice trilogy": Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions.

Donald F. Theall

The Art of Social-Science Fiction: The Ambiguous Utopian Dialectics of Ursula K. Le Guin

Abstract.-- The 20th century has seen the growth of the social sciences and the "humane sciences" as one of its more important developments in speculative thought, a fact increasingly reflected in the concepts and plots of writers of SF, including utopian fiction. Le Guin occupies a significant role among the SF writers who use concepts from the social sciences: her work addresses issues of cultural interaction, cultural growth, communication, and the differences between fictional but always parabolic (metaphoric) "highly intelligent life-forms." Among works by Le Guin addressed in this essay are The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions; other writers discussed include Thomas More (Utopia), Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels), and the Polish philosopher Keszek Kolakowski.

 

Ian Watson

The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: "The Word for World is Forest" and "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow"

Abstract.-- Out of an original impulse to write about forest and dream, Le Guin imagines in "The Word for World is Forest" (WWF) a world-forest that—while non-sentient itself—nevertheless functions metaphorically as mind, as the collective unconscious mind of the Athsheans. The story, however, is also oriented politically and ecologically: there is a surplus of energy and idea attached to the central image of a forest-consciousness that does not find a full outlet. The "forest-mind" theme, controlled and tempered by politics and ecology in WWF, finds its independent outlet only within a paranormal context in another long story of this period, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (VTE). The two stories are closely linked thematically—the latter involving a general inversion of the plot of the former. If Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven represents a discharge of paranormal elements built into the framework of the Hainish cycle, then, outside that cycle, VTE represents a parallel working out of a conflict between verisimilitude and metaphor in WWF. The world-forests of these two stories, both metaphors for mind, correspond to Shevek’s General Theory of Time in The Dispossessed. Yet whereas the forest-mind is presented as something concrete that lies in wait out there for us, Shevek’s theory arises out the complex dialectic of his own life as scientist and utopian. As he discovers his own unity, his theory becomes possible. This is the vocabulary of reason, which Le Guin’s fiction shows to have a far greater scope than that other vocabulary of unreason or parareason. In the case of The Dispossessed, Le Guin uses a vocabulary of subversive reason, which has had to pass through the false, non-reasonable, non-cognitive expressions of parareason. The two forest-minds of WWF and VTE are, then, beyond their intrinsic interest, necessary stages in a development from SF to the mystico-political theory of time and society in The Dispossessed.

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