#7 = Volume 2, Part 3 = November 1975
John Huntington
Public and Private Imperatives in Le Guin's Novels
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 mind and of social organization. In his role of 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, so that, almost inevitably in Le Guin's work, he finds that he has difficulty reconciling his public, political obligations 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 universal 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.
The political axis of Le Guin's work exists at right angles, if you will, to the powerful vision of unity that recent criticism has been exploring, and an accurate perception of her whole achievement requires us to engage both dimensions. While the recent popularity of her work derives in part, one expects, from the vision of unity, it also probably owes much to her exploration of political issues that have developed a particular urgency over the last ten years: to her attempt, increasingly precise and detailed, to use SF for studying problems that arose from the United States' use of military power in Vietnam and from the experience of an alienating and technologically bloated economic system. Douglas Barbour's study of the relation of Le Guin's novels to the Tao-te ching points to an aspiration towards unified being that underlies all the novels.1 We need to recognize, however, how the structure of a novel like The Left Hand of Darkness (LHD), by dividing the moral universe into public and private worlds, frustrates unity and turns what might have become ecstatic perceptions and energies into an awareness of tragic incompleteness. It is this failure to achieve a unity the imagery seems to promise which probably accounts for the frustration David Ketterer experiences in LHD and which he attributes to a discontinuity between the mythic theme of the novel and its plot.2 In the light of Le Guin's recurrent political interest we can see that the discontinuity experienced serves an important thematic function and expresses an ironic perception of the difficult relation of the private individual to the public world in which he acts. In her early novels this perception gives heightened value to the unified heroic act. But in LHD the awareness of the incongruity between the public and private worlds interrupts the full "mythic" triumph, and in two works published after LHD we can see Le Guin stretching this tension between the public and private worlds to such a pitch that one or the other of the two poles has had to give way. In her latest novel, The Dispossessed (TD), she breaks through to a new definition of the problem. In order to appreciate the accomplishment of TD, however, we have to understand the problem defined and confronted in the earlier novels.
In Le Guin's early novels there is usually an element of irony inherent in the heroic activity, for public action demands the sacrifice of a private bond. The success of the heroic quest entails personal loss. This theme is given an explicit, fairy tale concreteness in Rocannon's World (RW) when Rocannon makes a contract to give what he holds "dearest and would least willingly give" in return for public victory (§8).3 In this early novel the conflict between the public triumph and private loss does not pose an ethical problem but serves to give contour to the heroic idea: we can admire the hero because he has made sacrifices and, importantly, because it is implicit that he—and the author—see more to life than just public victory. A hero without such awareness becomes either pompously comic (Superman) or sinister (Conan). In RW the reconciliation of the public and private imperatives is rendered fairly easy, however, by the unambiguous clarity and urgency of the political issue. The "enemy," the Faradayans, have no redeeming qualities; they are seen from a great distance and their acts reveal them to be brutal imperialists and terrorists, so that the private sacrifices necessary, however painful, seem a small price to pay for their defeat. Though Rocannon has moments of doubt—when he thinks he has failed he questions the value of the whole enterprise, and when the enemy is obliterated he is appalled at the death of a thousand men (§9)—these suggestions of moral complexity do not really undermine his heroic act; in fact, like his sacrifice of Mogien, his doubt gives his activity moral value; without these qualifications he might seem merely a butcher.
LHD attains a more difficult balance of public and private imperatives, for this later novel does not offer the earlier one's clear-cut public justification for private sacrifice. The two political systems of Gethen, Karhide's feudal one and Orgoreyn's totalitarian-collectivist one, are both corrupt and destructive of individual values, and if the feudal is favored over the totalitarian it is only because it is the more flexible and the more easily influenced of the two; its inefficiency is its virtue. We find no neat distinction available between the good and bad political systems; Genly Ai faces no absolute enemy against whom any act is permitted or sacrifice justified. Also, Ai's goal of persuading Gethen to join the Ekumen lacks the element of urgent crisis that sanctions Rocannon's public acts. In fact, it is important to Ai's mission that there be no public compulsion that would make Gethen's decision to join seem anything less than completely voluntary.
While the public world of LHD exerts a diminished moral imperative, in the intimacy that develops between Ai and Estraven the private world assumes an importance and value that has no equal in any of Le Guin's other novels. The conventional plot carries the public values while behind it, in a separate set of events, the private values develop. Thus, the bond the two alien beings establish on the Gobrin Ice, especially the "bespeaking," has enormous personal significance but does not directly influence political events. There are, then, in effect, two sub-plots to the novel. One is the adventure which, like Rocannon's, leads to political success; the other is the love story of Ai and Estraven. To be sure, a thematic coherence bridges these two plots: insofar as the political problem in the novel involves overcoming the fear of aliens,4 the love story depicts the successful healing of that division between beings. This theme of union is repeated on a more general level by the androgyny of the Gethenians which offers a pervasive image of the union of the primary opposition experienced among humans.5 But though they share common themes, the two sub-plots also move in opposite directions: in the love story Ai begins suspicious of Estraven and learns to trust him; in the political story he begins naively trusting both King Argaven and the Commensals of Orgoreyn and learns to suspect them and be cunning. The main challenge to the suggestions of coherence, however, comes from the death of Estraven, for it points to the gap that continues to exist between the public and the private worlds. Ai finally pays for public success with private loss, and at the end of the novel Le Guin makes us face the disjunction between the two worlds by having Ai force Argaven's hand, but at the cost of breaking the vow he made to Estraven that he would see him pardoned before he brought the ship down.
The Karhidish tale of "Estraven the traitor" serves as an ironic paradigm for the discrepancy between the public and private worlds: in the tale, love ultimately settles a political dispute, but at the cost of the murder of one of the lovers and the branding of the offspring of the lovers' union with the title of traitor. Ai and Estraven reenact the tale and transpose it from the primitive political level of a feud between neighboring families to the more complex level of international politics. In both the tale and the larger world of the novel, traitor becomes an honorific title, thus pointing to the inability of the political terminology to deal with true value.6 But at the very end of the novel Le Guin prevents us from settling down easily with such an ironic view: Ai, speaking to Estraven's father and son, says "Therem was no traitor. What does it matter what fools call him?" To which the father replies, "It matters." One cannot escape the significance of the public world's blind destructiveness simply by ignoring it.
In its structure, therefore, LHD balances public achievement against personal cost, and Le Guin, dismissing neither, maintains the dialectical tension between them. In two works published since LHD she explores the problem further by upsetting the balance between the two worlds. In The Lathe of Heaven (LoH) all public activity leads to failure, and the novel, almost dogmatically, asserts the total primacy of private, inner peace.7 Dr. Haber, the scientist who envisions creating a better world, turns out to be the villain, and George Orr, the protagonist whose private dreams change the world, spends the novel trying to relinquish this power. Orr makes things happen, but he is incompetent to predict the consequences of his acts, and the novel makes it clear that such incompetence is inevitable, that given man's ignorance, any public act is liable to do wrong, no matter how well intentioned. But if in LoH Le Guin upsets the balance in favor of passivity and inner peace, in "The Word for World is Forest," she upsets it in the opposite direction and argues8 for the precedence of the public duty over the private one. In this novella the pressure of political events forces Selver, the alien protagonist, to become an active terrorist and guerrilla in spite of his deep sense of the value of private bonds. In order to free his people from the imperialist tyranny of humans, Selver does not merely lose his friend, a human, he participates in his murder. In the hands of a less honest writer than Le Guin, Selver's extraordinary spirituality might be made to counterbalance sentimentally the pitiless brutality of his political acts, but "The Word for World is Forest" (WWF) does not evade the rigors of the moral question; it studies the savagery of guerrilla warfare and accepts it.9 The story clearly asserts that the private world can flourish only when the public world is benign, that when the public world becomes oppressive the private world must give way.
In all her work Le Guin probes in various ways for the point at which the public and private imperatives intersect, for the act that will allow them to be unified, if only momentarily. Put in the context of this search, it is clear that the split in attention that Ketterer notes in LHD has the important function of carrying one of the major conflicts of the novel, and whatever discontinuity we experience in terms of plot and theme expresses exactly that discontinuity which is being explored between the values of the public and the private worlds. LHD stands apart from Le Guin's other works, however, in its extraordinary balance and its commitment to both of the rival imperatives. The public world of the novel is neither so overpoweringly meaningful that (as in RW) it can easily and indubitably compensate for private loss, nor so arbitrary that (as in LoH) it can be treated as morally trivial. By observing this dialectical balance we can see how far Le Guin differs from an absurdist like Vonnegut who, while he too sees a discrepancy between the two worlds, in much of his work cheerfully dismisses the public world to its insane and pompous self-destruction. LHD renders a basic allegiance to private, humane values without denying the degree to which public, institutional values influence and limit the private ones.
The balance Le Guin achieves in this novel is not a complacent one; it is precarious and leads to serious questions about man's social obligations. LHD marks the beginning of a period in which Le Guin, while always sympathetic to the private world, has pursued these social questions and has become increasingly concerned to anatomize the political structures of the public world which so powerfully affects the private. As a rule she has modeled her fictional public world on familiar western social institutions. In her earlier novels social organizations, with the important exception of primitive ones, are not explored in specific detail. If they appear at all, they do so in symbolic forms—as in the city of the "Winged Ones" in RW (§6)—or as vague and abstract structures like the Ekumen. The city of Es Toch in City of Illusions is an SF convention and has no true political structure. LHD breaks with this essentially literary vision of the political world by treating the destructiveness of Orgoreyn and Karhide as a function of their political organizations. The antagonism of both nations to the private world represented by Ai and Estraven's love is not simply a given; it derives from the nature of power and from the specific mechanisms of the nations' governments. Though Karhide's feudal monarchy owes a good deal to literary convention, it is realized with a detail and with a care for the way politics works in this archaic system which is new to Le Guin. And Orgoreyn, with its prison camps and its tyrannic bureaucracies, is clearly an explicit version of one form of the modern, collectivist nation-state. Thus, Le Guin's work, while it has always had an important political element, now begins to examine the failure of specific political structures to give play and sustenance to private values and desires. The romance quest of Rocannon gives way to a more pessimistic vision in which the protagonist seeks, not for victory, but for meaning and value itself in the face of a dominant and alienating public context. This tendency to treat the public world in terms of known and explicit models becomes even more pronounced after LHD. In LoH, set in Le Guin's home city of Portland, Oregon, and WWF, in which Selver fights an organization that is compared to the U.S. Army in Vietnam, Le Guin depicts the alienating public world as the capitalist-imperialist world of the modern U.S.A.
In spite of the fact that her analysis of the public world has become more specific and more contemporary, Le Guin has continued through this period to envision a primitive economy as the main salvation from the modern, technological, imperialist state. Her heroes usually discover in the primitive cultures they visit values and parapsychological powers which, in one way or another, sustain rather than contradict the private world. But in all cases this primitive unity, while it holds out possibilities for meaningful and integrated social life, is vulnerable to outside threats. Even the primitive sages, whose spiritual accomplishments might seem to allow them to avoid the political dilemma altogether, must step out of the retired life and in one way or another confront the complex and generally destructive public world. Kyo aids Rocannon; Faxe leaves his mountain fastness and enters Karhide politics; Selver becomes a general. But, as Le Guin's vision of the public world changes, this act of commitment to the public world assumes different consequences; what in Kyo's and Faxe's cases is a generous and ennobling act, in Selver's entails a spiritual self-mutilation. For Selver to lose part of his wholeness, even for a brief while, changes him permanently; he cannot, as Kyo apparently expects to do, regain primitive innocence at will. WWF, therefore, differs significantly from RW and even from LHD in its perception of the corrupting power of the technological imperialism that threatens the primitive world. Kyo and Rocannon can fight the Faradayans without being tainted, but for Selver to fight his human enemies is, to some extent, to become like them. Thus, the invasion motif, such a staple of SF, begins to take on an important new aspect in Le Guin's hands: the threat is not simply conquest, it is the corruption of the primitive innocence, the violation of spiritual wholeness by the presence of insanely powerful and greedy forces that have no vision at all of a life in which private and public imperatives are truly in harmony.
So long as the options for social life and action are limited to a physically rich but fragile primitivism and a crudely powerful but spiritually destitute technology, there would seem to be no escape from private tragedy and no possibility of truly voluntary and ethical public action. Le Guin's new novel, The Dispossessed, however, sets up what is for her a new definition of the political problem and thus offers a way out of the bind represented by the modern-primitive conflict of her middle period. In this latest novel Le Guin has focused entirely on modern political systems (or possible systems) and has studied them without the nostalgia for the primitive and the parapsychological machinery that constitute the alternatives to the modern state in her earlier novels. Furthermore the racial differences that in all of her earlier works parallel but also dilute the more explicit political theme have been abandoned. TD differs from earlier Le Guin novels in seeing the private world almost totally as a function of specific political systems. The intimate bonds which in her early novels exist apart from any social organization and often in spite of society and which represent an absolute source of value, are here seen as inherently conditioned by the shape of the society. What is in LHD conceived of as a problem of dialectical conflict between two sources of value, love and society, has been transformed into a conflict between two forms of society, anarchist and capitalist, and the question is, not what does the individual owe to society, but what kind of society makes possible valid human bonds? And just as the vision of the political world has been reshaped, the vision of love, of the valid bond itself, has changed. From the vantage of TD we can see how much the valued private bonds of the earlier works, those between Rocannon and Mogien, Ai and Estraven, are rich expressions, not of man as a social animal, but of man alone in a hostile nature. It is significant that the love of Ai and Estraven reaches its height, not in society, but in the utter desolation of the Gobrin Ice. The failure of the public and private worlds to coalesce, therefore, may be in part the fault of an idea of love that does not allow for a social dimension. Thus, as Le Guin has made the political issues more precise and detailed, she has forced an analysis of the specific political systems themselves, which has, in turn, led her to a reinterpretation of the source of value of the private world. TD is important because, though it generates its own ambivalances and problems, it renews the possibilities for viable social action.
NOTES
1. Douglas Barbour, "Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin," SFS 1(1974):164-73.
2. David Ketterer, New Worlds for Old (New York: Anchor, 1974), pp. 80, 194.
3. In City of Illusions this trade is put in terms of two aspects of a single individual: "To revive Ramarren you must kill Falk" (§8). Falk finally evades the sacrifice, however, by rigging a way of preserving his Falkian memory when he becomes Ramarren.
4. Fear of the alien is a common source of political problems in Le Guin's early and middle work, and she tends to envision some kind of solution in loving the "other." The complement of this idea in her work is the idea that without otherness there can be no love, only narcissism. Her most concise study of this problem is the short story "Nine Lives."
5. Even the members of the ten-person clone in "Nine Lives," identical in all other ways, admit sexual division.
6. A "traitor" is not only one who loves the "other," he is also one who is not aggressive in his country's interest. Estraven is exiled for failing to prosecute the Sinoth Valley border dispute. The antithesis of a traitor is a patriot: Estraven defines patriotism as "fear of the other" (§1).
7. We should note that, just as the novel devalues public activity, the private bond between Orr and Heather Lelache is treated more ambivalently than are those between the heroic aliens in the "Hainish" novels. The private "way" that Orr seeks to follow is therefore significantly different from the kind of private love-bond that gives meaning to the lives of Ai and Rocannon.
8. I use this word on purpose. In her "Afterword" to the story in Again, Dangerous Visions, Le Guin notes, somewhat apologetically, the conscious moralism of the tale.
9. The toughness of "The Word for World is Forest" is evident if we put it next to Rocannon's World. The central event of both works is a guerrilla attack against an imperialist occupation, and in terms of body count the two are very similar. But the enemy in RW is unseen and alien, and all friends are on the "good" side, while in "The Word for World is Forest" we, the human race, are the enemy, and Selver's close friend, Raj Lyubov, is a human. There are no easy answers in the later story.
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."
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