.. is this article the art and science of Nude Circe aka Nude uma...
#7 = Volume 2, Part 3 =
November 1975
Donald
F. Theall
The Art of Social-Science Fiction: The
Ambiguous Utopian Dialectics of Ursula K. Le Guin
1. The Outside Observer
in Utopia. 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
of writers of SF, including utopian fiction. Although concern with
social and cultural questions has always been a central feature of
the utopian tradition within SF, a conscious use of concepts from the
social sciences has been considerably slower to develop in SF than
that of concepts from the natural sciences. In this development
toward artistic self-consciousness the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin
occupy a significant role; they are constantly concerned with
questions of cultural interaction, cultural growth, communication,
and the differences between fictional but always parabolic "highly
intelligent life forms."
Le Guin's interest in humane sciences and cultural change
appears to be linked to her concern with utopianism. Most of her
imaginary societies are models critical of our present societies.
Although her first major novel, The Left Hand of
Darkness (LHD), did not, strictly speaking,
provide a utopian model, both the nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn are
meant as criticisms of the present social and cultural order: the
former by contraries, in terms of its anarchistic directions, and the
latter directly, in terms of its bureaucratization. Further, the
broader background of the interplanetary organization of the Ekumen
is an "ideal" model with implicit criticisms of
contemporary intercommunication between nations. Thus, following the
utopian tradition, Le Guin provides a tension between the
here-and-now and her various fictional futures. But her fictional
future worlds also differ sharply from each other, allowing her to
further investigate the potential of various social and cultural
developments. Such juxtapositions of fictional societies are a
feature of all of her Hainish novels; her only non-Hainish SF novel,
The Lathe of Heaven, is a
psychological study of dreams which materialize, providing a variety
of modes of life within the same culture. In her most recent novel,
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
(TD), Le Guin overtly juxtaposes the capitalist aggressive and
competitive nations on the world of Urras and the anarchist satellite
world of Anarres. These two worlds are juxtaposed within the broader
framework of an interstellar community of planets containing a
possible future world of Earth (Terra), and using the Terran
ambassador as a choral commentator on the concluding action of the
novel. This counterpoints the entire action of the novel with the
here and now, so that Anarres and Urras assume a variety of complex
relationships with societies of the present.
Such a strategy of utopian fiction begins with More's
juxtaposition of Books I and II in Utopia
as well as his counterpointing of Utopia as a whole with events in
his own historical time. It continues through Swift, who developed it
with greater compositional complexity (though not necessarily greater
conceptual complexity) in Gulliver's Travels.
This strategy involves a dialectical logic and an implicit critique
of society as well as providing critical rather than futurological
models of possible alternative ways of life. In order to achieve this
end, Le Guin seems to have quite consciously developed some aspects
of this utopian tradition (down to Thoreau and Morris), and in
particular the role of the stranger visiting a
new world. The actual sensory experience and
subjective response of strangers or outsiders plays a central role in
validating the carefully chosen and believable details which compose
the thorough accounts Le Guin gives us of her fictional worlds. In
Rocannon's World the hero is
a museumologist who comes to the planet as a cultural investigator;
in Planet of Exile both
Jakob and Rolery are outsiders who cease to be total strangers in
each other's culture; in City of Illusions
the outsider is a total stranger to the world and unaware, for most
of the novel, of his own identity. In each case the separateness of
the outsider makes him an observer as well as a participant, and
allows for the particularly descriptive approach. In LHD,
interestingly enough, the stranger—who is also the main narrator—is
a professional cultural analyst and cultural communicator, whose
concern with a thorough account of the culture provides the novel
with the characteristic features of an anthropological report. Yet
even in this respect Le Guin employs the techniques of ambivalence,
for her field-worker, her "mobile" from the Ekumen to the
Gethenians, realizes that the "truth" of the humane
sciences is founded in imagination as well as fact:
I'll make my report as
if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my horneworld that
Truth is a matter of imagination. The soundest fact may fail or
prevail in the style of its telling; like that singular organic jewel
of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it, and worn by
another, dulls and goes to dust. (LHD §1)
Le Guin weaves into the utopian social-science-fiction the
vigorous story-telling techniques used in adventure fantasy. This
respect for an imaginative approach means among other things that
Genly Ai's subjective emotions become part of his account, permitting
others to judge it in the light of his subjective bias. In the
telling, the subjective reactions of Ai (the name obviously involves
a complex pun on I," "eye," etc.) are illustrated:
reactions to the coldness of the climate, to the sexual problems
posed by a world where everyone is a neuter except during periods of
kemmer when they can become either male or female, to the political
anarchy created by a world where there are no worlds and the entire
planet is, like Karhide, "a family quarrel" (LHD §1). Le
Guin consequently can use Ai as an ambivalent focus, in the same way
that Hythloday or Gulliver are used: Ai himself reveals some of the
naivete which complicates the action of the novel and impedes the
success of his mission. The subjective mode of telling is extended in
TD to a technique where the third-person narrative reappears, but
always with a sense that the action is being seen through the eyes
and the feelings of Shevek. Like Ai, Shevek becomes an ambivalent
narrator, although like Ai he grows in the process so that his
insights by the end of the novel are more perceptive than those at
the beginning. Even though Shevek is not the "professional"
which Ai is, the work itself develops the fictional societies on
Urras and Anarres with the same detail and thoroughness as was done
in LHD. That is, we learn about the details of physical geography,
sexual customs, cultural evolution, ideology, life-style, and the
like on the two worlds. The relating of Shevek's learning process,
while it includes a fairly thorough anthropological description of
the societies in question, involves equally an account of the
emotions of Shevek as he explains his experiences.
That Le Guin's overall conception is utopian is apparent in
the history and nature of the Ekumen. In our world, where there has
been a constant need and desire for a world federation of nations, Le
Guin's Ekumen—the most utopian concept of LHD—acts as a critique
of the everyday strivings in this direction. However, she manages to
preserve a dialectical tension which also provides internal criticism
of the Ekumen itself. The critique of the Ekumen that is part of the
action of LHD is part of that idea itself, because the way in which
the Ekumen encounters new worlds is to open up a communication or
trade of idea in which processes of mutual change take place—just
as the First Mobile, Ai, is changed through his contact with Estraven
and with the Foretellers as the action unfolds. Thus, Le Guin has a
very complex and sophisticated dialectical conception of utopia: the
observing outsider is a visual and emotional "eye" that
negates its "outside" character by the very process of
observing. The tradition of Hythloday and Gulliver is reconstructed
in a period highly self-conscious of the humane sciences. Therefore,
Le Guin's works and the observers themselves show a high
consciousness of these sciences.
2. Le Guin and the Humane Sciences:
Communication, Education, and Social Critique.
To establish the degree of Le Guin's
awareness of the humane sciences it is necessary to explore some of
her main themes. These involve among other things: communications,
intercultural interaction, social structure, role-playing,
ideologies. The prime theme of her major novels and, in fact, the
unifying theme of her Hainish novels, is communication,
particularly communication between different kinds of highly
intelligent life forms ("hilfs"). In many ways LHD provides
a basic pattern for these concerns. Therefore, let us consider here
the focus of communication in its action. First of all, Ai's
particular mission, which gives rise to the action of the novel, is
an attempt on the part of the association of planets, known as the
Ekumen, to open communication with new areas where there are
intelligent life forms. In performing his function, Ai is fully aware
of the difficulties involved in the process of intercultural contact
and the need for caution and prudence in the pursuit of intercultural
exchange of knowledge. As he points out, the Ekumen send only one
envoy (First Mobile) on the first contact with any new planet:
The first voice, one man
present in the flesh, present and alone. He may be killed ...or
locked up with madmen...yet the practice is kept, because it works.
One voice speaking truth is a greater force than fleets and armies,
given time; plenty of time; but time is the thing that the Ekumen has
plenty of.... (LHD §3)
He is preceded by a team of undercover investigators, some of
whose reports are cited during the telling of his story; forty years
after they leave, the First Mobile comes. He leaves his ship in space
so that it is not observed, and comes only with his interstellar
communication device (the ansible) and some pictures of his
homeworld, so as not to intrude alien artifacts prematurely into the
culture. The Stability of Ekumen has established a carefully
rationalized method of inter-culture contact and communication.
Exploring the deepest meaning of such communication becomes one of
the central concerns of the novel.
The most relevant differences between Gethen and Ai's
homeworld are the facts that each person can assume the role of
either sex in sexual and parental relations, and that Gethen itself
is at the very limit of coldness inhabitable by intelligent life.
These facts pose two major problems for Ai, and provide the novel
with some of its major metaphors. The communication between Ai and
the hero of the action, Estraven—who saves Ai's life and opens
Gethen up to the Ekumen—only comes about through a long and
difficult process of understanding. Early on in his account, Ai
suggests that sex or "biological shock" is perhaps the
chief problem, in a world where he can say of the person he rents his
quarters from: "He was so feminine in looks and manner that I
once asked how many children he had. He looked glum. He had never
borne any. He had, however, sired four" (HD §5). Eventually,
after a long period of isolated companionship while fleeing across a
great glacier, Ai comes to recognize how gender had been an
impediment to communication with Estraven and how, sharing a constant
threat of death, he has learned to overcome this and love Estraven.
Speaking of his new awareness of Estraven gained while crossing the
glacier, Ai says:
And I saw then 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, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had
rejected him, refused him his own reality.... I had not been willing
to give my trust, my friendship, to a man who was a woman, a woman
who was a man. (LHD §18)
The unrecognized biological shock has been an impediment to
human communication; but once recognized, it provides Ai with a whole
new relationship to the culture with which he must work. A symbolic
support for the episode is provided by its setting on the glacier.
The glacier is a world somewhat like Poe's world in the closing of
The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,
for it is a world of which Estraven says, "There is nothing, the
Ice says, but Ice" (LHD §16). The quality of whiteness on this
ice world is reminiscent of the one in the writings of Poe and
Melville, who would appear to be part of an American tradition of
writing to which Le Guin's work is related.1
The incident on the ice illustrates Ai's coming to master the
genuine art of communication with a Gethenian as a fellow human
being, achieving mutual trust and understanding. This justifies the
Ekumen's sending a single Mobile to first encounter a new society, as
a means of having him learn to establish genuine relations with its
inhabitants. Again and again Ai's perceptions, which shift from
naivete to understanding as his account unfolds, focus on means of
communicating with the society and of understanding the way of
education and communication within the society itself. His
investigation of the quasi-religious phenomenon of "foretelling,"
which is so central to Gethenian society, is just such a process, for
he comes to realize that the Foretellers are using their
understanding of the world in a peculiarly paradoxical way as a means
of educating their fellow-Karhidians. The purpose of Foretelling is
ultimately not to provide answers but to demonstrate that there is
only one question that can be answered—"That we shall die."
Therefore, as Faxe says, the basis of Foretelling is "The
unknown,...the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based
on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of
action" (LHD §5). Foretelling within the social structure of
Karhide is a basic education in the values of the society. The
Foretellers really teach that change cannot be brought about through
the reading of prophecies or predictions; that uncertainty is of the
essence of the social fabric. The process of Foretelling is a social
dramatization of this fact, in that it provides correct answers which
are not necessarily (in fact, not usually) helpful answers since they
do not cover enough of the future contingencies.
The Ekumen has produced its own form of wisdom for learning
the wisdom of others as well as communicating whatever wisdom it may
also contain. As Ai attempts to tell the Commensals of Orgoreyn (the
bureaucratic collectivist society of Gethen):
the Ekumen is not
essentially a government at all. It is an attempt to reunify the
mystical with the political, and as such is of course mostly a
failure; but its failure has done more good for humanity so far than
the successes of its predecessors. It is a society and it has, at
least potentially, a culture. It is a form of education; in one
aspect it's a sort of very large school—very large indeed. The
motives of communication and cooperation are of its essence.... (LHD
§10)
The Ekumen as an instrument of education is an instrument of
communication, a way towards interplanetary wisdom. Such an approach,
however—as Ai realizes and stresses—is essentially a dualistic
approach, a fact dramatized in the structures that Le Guin chooses to
create in her tales. In a section of Estraven's journal, the
following exchange is recounted:
Ai brooded, and after
some time he said, "You're isolated, and undivided. Perhaps you
are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism."
"We are dualists
too. Duality is an essential, isn't it? So long as there is myself
and the
other."
"I and Thou,"
he said. "Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex...."
(LHD §16)
This duality of "myself and the other" or "I
and Thou" is naturally at heart of human communication, but it
is also a duality which generates all of the other dualities in the
processes of cognition and understanding. Such a sense of duality is
common to all of Le Guin's writings, culminating in the duality of
the opposed worlds of TD.
The very structure of her works is determined by this theme,
for it is a structure of dualities—in LHD, of Gethen and the
Ekumen, of Karhide and Orgoreyn, of Ai and Estraven. From the
bringing together of the dualities and from the understanding that is
generated by coming to terms with each of them, the process of
discovery by which the meaning of the Ekumen is encompassed comes
about. The process is dialectical and complexly critical, for each of
the dual ingredients which will end up in creating a wholeness
modifies and is modified by the other. Orgoreyn's bureaucracy
displays both its greater rationality and its greater tendency
towards totalitarianism when viewed against the anarchy and
decentralized government of Karhide; Orgoreyn and Karhide show their
provincialism in contrast to the Ekumen, but also some of the wisdom
gained in having to come to terms more slowly—e.g. without an
Industrial Revolution—on the world of Gethen. Finally, because of
Le Guin's social-science consciousness, the presence of the
contemporary world is to be found in the critical conceptions of LHD.
The "simplicity" of Karhide becomes one mode of criticizing
many contemporary phenomena; the centralization of Orgoreyn, another.
Orgoreyn's prison camps, secret police forces, interminable politics,
and incredible bureaucracy are modes of satirizing similar phenomena
in our own culture. Karhide's Foretellers with their stress on
ignorance become one mode of critical parable directed against the
futurologists and the planners. All of Karhide with its different
sexual arrangements and the relative peace which is maintained
through them becomes a mode of critique of the over-use of sexual
stimuli (see particularly §7 of LHD).
Le Guin, speaking of LHD, has suggested that she does use her
novels to explore situations which have their parallel in the real
world.2 She designed the
world of Gethen in part to explore the male-female problem in a
context where it would be possible to examine the thoughts and
feelings of individuals who could be both men and women. But LHD goes
further, involving a large number of social and human issues, as all
her novels do. They are utopian in the specific sense of creating
some relative perfection as a contrast with the world of the reader.
3. Ambiguous Utopianism: Le Guin's
Dialectics of Socialist Democratic Humanism.For
this reason, it is not surprising that Le Guin's most recent, major
novel, TD, was subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia." The
subtitle calls attention to ambivalence as an overt aspect of much of
her work. In LHD, the nations of Gethen, in the act of intercultural
contact with the Ekumen, also give rise to ambivalence; for example,
many of the customs of Karhide, as Ai notes, have much to suggest by
way of improvement to a Terran member of the Ekumen. But further, Le
Guin uses the essential ambivalence of the utopian tradition.
Beginning with More, many possible alternative fictional worlds were
conceived as ambivalent, founded in the paradoxes generated by the
juxtaposition of fictional models and real worlds. The fondness for
paranomasia (puns) in More and Swift reflects this complex
ambivalence by which they seduce the uncritical rationalist into
double binds. An example which parallels Le Guin's treatment of
Anarres occurs when "More" (the fictional character in
Utopia who has listened to
Hythloday's account, including the part about the use of gold and
ornament in Utopia—an account paralleling the incident of the
necklace in TD §10) remarks on the many values of Utopia but notes
that among other qualities the virtue of magnificence—the ethical
art of doing and making things well and in the grand manner—is
absent from the commonweal. In the context of the narrative, More's
(the author's) other works, and the values More saw in the play
impulse, this creates precisely such an ambiguous tension; for the
necessary critique which the Utopians have performed by suppressing
such magnificence will eventually become a problem for them as their
society evolves. Part of the tension of More's Utopia
arises through a double historical vision: Hythloday's awareness—e.g.
of the potential for change his own coming to Utopia represents—is
more limited than that of "More" (the character) and, of
course, More the author. Hythloday's Platonic Utopia is a static
concept, though his intrusion into its society—like Ai's intrusion
into Gethen—creates a process of historical change. The very nature
of the collision between the processes of history and of utopianizing
creates an ambiguity, which so many critics attempt to resolve in
utopian novels in order to have a definite outcome.
Le Guin, though, is too aware of the tension in the tradition
and the fact that it arises out of the process of estrangement which
is bound to occur in intercultural communication; the Ekumen as a
utopian conception is—as I argued in section 1—one way of taking
this into account. The action of TD, therefore, begins before the
utopian Ekumen has come into being, so that it explores the problem
of utopia within a Pre-Ekumenian, relatively pre-utopian framework,
so to speak. The parameters within which it does this, though, are
the same parameters of "social-science fiction" which mark
all of Le Guin's other SF novels.
In TD, therefore—as in LHD—communication is a central
theme and motivation for producing the action of the novel.
Intercultural contact again plays a major role and—though not as
central to the novel as Ai—a Terran plays the role of chorus at its
conclusion when Shevek is given sanctuary in the Terran embassy to
Urras. The action of TD rises out of its central character's,
Shevek's, growing realization that the presumably anarchistic utopian
world of Anarres is seriously flawed in many ways, especially in
terms of the freedom of communication in ideas. Metaphorically, the
world of Anarres as a whole looms more and more like a prison (of
which there are none on Anarres)—a metaphor the understanding of
which goes back to a childhood experience of Shevek's when he and
some of his schoolmates tried to recreate what prison was like on a
world that does not have any. The metaphor of prison becomes even
more closely linked to inhibition of communication when related to
the dominant symbol of the novel—walls. The novel opens with a
reference to walls:
There was a wall. It did
not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An
adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it.
Where it crossed the roadway instead of having a gate it degenerated
into mere geometry, a line, an idea of a boundary. But the idea was
real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing
in the world more important than the wall.
Like all walls it was
ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it
depended on which side of it you were on. (TD §1)
The wall could be seen either as enclosing the universe and
"leaving Anarres, outside, free" or it could be seen an
enclosing Anarres and making it a "great prison camp, cut off
from other worlds and other man, in quarantine" (TD §1).
One dimension of Anarres as an ambiguous utopia—and one
that it shares with More's Utopia—is the necessity of cutting
itself off from other men and other history. It can maintain its
utopian purity only as long as it does not communicate with those
outside itself, so that it becomes a total institution. This also
means that within the individual groups of "syndicates"
that form the anarchistic society there is a substantial control of
ideas, a fact Shevek suffers from since his theories of time cannot
be developed as he wishes, yet "it is of the nature of an idea
to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It
craves light, like crowds, thrives on cross-breeding, grows better
for being stepped on" (TD §3). As Shevek grows and develops, he
becomes dedicated to the liberation of ideas and of the mind; before
leaving for Urras, he establishes a printing syndicate on Anarres to
communicate ideas which were being inhibited. He finally decides to
leave Urras in order "to go fulfill my proper function as a
social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls" (TD §10).
TD begins with Shevek leaving Anarres for Urras, and his
earlier life is presented through a series of flashbacks juxtaposed
with his current life on Urras, a technique which has obvious
affinities with his own Theory of Time. This strategy creates a
constant tension between the values of the two worlds and their
varying impacts on Shevek. It is one of the clearest devices for
demonstrating the weaknesses (and hence ambiguities) in Anarres by
exposing it to the one type of scrutiny which it forbids itself from
doing. The tension is neither simple nor solely paradoxical, for in
Shevek's intensely critical perspective on injustice, poverty,
commercialism and other aspects of Urras, and in his final return to
Anarres, the novel is achieving a sophisticated reshaping of the
world of Anarres within Shevek's vision of what it might be or ought
to be. During their meeting, when Keng, the Terran, provides him with
sanctuary, she takes exception to Shevek's view that "Hell is
Urras." In comparison to the (future) Earth, ecologically
destroyed and inhabitable only by means of "total
centralization...total rationing, birth control, euthanasia,
universal conscription into the labour force...," Urras seems
the kindliest, most
various, most beautiful of all the inhabited worlds. It is the world
that came as close an any could to paradise. I know it's full of
evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it is also
full of good, of beauty, of vitality, achievement. It is what a world
should be! It is alive,
tremendously alive—alive despite all its evils, with hope. (TD §11)
This newly introduced perspective performs a function similar
to the removing of Karhide and Orgoreyn from the perspective of
Gethen to that of the universe, though it is, again, not the final
word on Urras, merely a testimony to the hope it still contains.
This complexity of perspectives which Le Guin develops is a
characteristic of her works as a whole. Rocannon's
World, Planet of Exile,
and City of Illusions all
strive for similar conceptual complexities by involving life on
worlds with a variety of different peoples inhabiting them and the
intrusion of outsiders into these worlds; the tendency in each is
towards some ambiguity or ambivalence. In each case, too, the
presence of history (a fictional world history) is an important
ingredient of the works as well as a constantly implied comparison
with the present. But only in TD is this overtly linked with a fully
articulated theory of time and history which is an intrinsic part of
the novel, since it is because of inhibitions to developing and
disseminating this theory that Shevek travels from Anarres to Urras
and back.
The theory of time propounded by Shevek dialectically
interrelates a theory of sequence with a theory of simultaneity. As
his social education matures throughout the novel, he comes to apply
his theory to social and ethical questions. This suggests to him
that—while he left Anarres for Urras because Anarres attempted to
sever its communications with history and its past, with those who
still lived in it on Urras—Urras as well as the Terran ambassador
sever themselves from the future which Anarres presents to them.
While Shevek's return to Anarres clearly indicates his preference for
his home-world, he returns as a more critical and aware person to
await the time when finally the Terrans or the Urrasti will seek out
Anarres, ready to understand its values. There's no attempt in the
fictional situation to eliminate the ambivalences in Anarres, for
they are there partly as a result of a total sociopolitical
situation—the Odonian flight from Urras. On the other hand, the
story—just as Shevek's theory of history—does not eliminate the
possibility of change or hope. In fact, contingency, chance, change
are the factors which make Shevek's dream possible. He can begin to
develop his unified field theory because he has finally accepted the
fact that "In the region of the unprovable, or even the
disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and
going ahead" (TD §9). This, too, he discovers in history, the
history of his subject—physics. There he learns that the ancient
Terran physicist, "Ainsetain," in his unwillingness to
accept the indeterminacy principle (in a way similar to the
principles of the Karhidians and their Foretellers), had created
flaws and inadequacies in his theory, but that the theory is still
"as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever, after these
centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be
proved true and that could be and had been proved false in certain
circumstances" (TD §9).
This, though, demonstrates a greater affinity between art and
science; Shevek had discovered that through the fate of his friend
Turin, whose imagination could not be contained within the world of
Anarres. Le Guin, here, as in her other works, attracts the reader
with an ambiguous kind of anarchist or—more generally—subversive
dialectic, which has strong roots in the everyday situations of human
living and in a sense of history. As in Ai's account, imagination
becomes central to the Truth of this critique. The world of
contemporary Marxism, the world of contemporary capitalism, the Third
World, and the variety of contemporary attitudes towards these, play
through each of her novels—including Lathe of
Heaven which breaks the normal pattern of
historically-oriented works to investigate one founded in the world
where dreams create possible future histories. Her dialectic uses the
utopian ideas of social science and Marx as a counterpoint to
imaginative speculations at every level of her works, from
composition and setting to ideas and character. In TD, for example,
the characters form a world of oppositions through whose
communication the mutual education of all develops. Shevek is a
physicist, his wife Takver a biologist. Her awareness provides the
critique of physical science necessary to come to terms with
humanity. Tirin, as the artist, poses the challenge of creativity and
of imagination to Shevek; Bedap, the propagandist-philosopher, shows
the value of social awareness and social communication. While all of
these characters are linked by the bonds of love and friendship, they
differ enough so that they can interact, teach and learn from each
other. Tirin, for example, "could never build walls.... He was a
natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one" (§9). Yet
Tirin was not a "strong person." The value of Tirin in the
story is that he brings Shevek to see the necessity of unbuilding
walls.
Le Guin's treatment of character by means of contrast and
opposition parallels her way of dealing with ideas and structures in
terms of both balance and imbalance. While balance is obviously a
central feature of her writing, she also takes the concept of
ambivalence very seriously, stressing history as perpetually
upsetting the balance and creating new tensions. Le Guin sees balance
as a dynamic principle mediating between oppositions. Hence her
preoccupation with the paradox of communication: in order to
communicate, it is necessary to recognize differences and to move
toward an understanding of these differences. The stress on
uncertainty and the recognition of "flaws"—becomes
explicit in Shevek's theory—create a sharpened reinterpretation of
the Taoist concept of balance in LHD, where
she had expressed it by way of paradoxical epigram, e.g.: "Darkness
is in the mortal eye that thinks it sees and sees not" (LHD
§12). Le Guin is in some ways similar to a socialist humanist such
as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, who in the essay "In
Praise of Inconsistency" pointed out that an acceptance of
contradiction did not automatically result in a simple balance based
on a reconciliation of opposites:
Inconsistency is simply
a refusal once and for all to choose beforehand between any values
whatever which mutually exclude each other. A clear awareness of the
eternal and incurable antinomy in the world of values is nothing but
conscious inconsistency, though inconsistency is more often practiced
than proclaimed.3
Kolakowski—who shares Shevek's fate of an exile from a
"closed" society—suggests that inconsistency which is an
"awareness of the contradictions in this world" is "a
consciously sustained reserve of uncertainty."4
With Le Guin as with Shevek, the uncertainty is an important aspect
of the balance, for wholeness is only gained in a process of change
and the process of change is only raised to consciousness through her
ambiguous utopian dialectic.
NOTES
1. The rather striking parallel between the
situation on the glacier and the conclusion of Poe's The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym
is pointed out in David Ketterer, New
Worlds for Old (New York:
Anchor, 1974), p. 88. The ambivalent use of the situation and of the
color white suggests a wider range of American writing, all of which
Le Guin seems conscious of. Melville's Typee
and Moby Dick
are immediate points of reference for aspects of the situation and
the treatment of the color white. Le Guin has a deep affinity with
the American literary tradition, especially its New England aspects,
and a fuller investigation of her work from this point of view would
be of value. Much of her utopianism appears to echo traditions
emanating from Thoreau, her interest in yin-yang and balance echoes
Emerson, and her interest in black and white contrasts echoes
Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe. Perhaps the most striking reminder of
New England is the use of "walls" in The
Dispossessed, with its
obvious ironies directed towards a philosophy such as that examined
in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall." There would appear to be
a strong though again ambiguous connection between such a Puritan or
Yankee tradition and Le Guin's sensibility, which manifests itself in
descriptions such as those of the rigors of Karhide or the asceticism
of Anarres.
2. Ursula K. Le Guin, "Is Gender
Necessary?," in Aurora:
Beyond Equality, ed. Susan
J. Anderson and Vonda McIntyre (in press at New York: Fawcett, 1975).
3. Leszek Kolakowski, Toward
a Marxist Humanism (New
York: Grove, 1968), pp. 216-17.
4. Ibid., p. 214. The problem of inconsistency
and uncertainty implicit in the "ambiguous" dialectics
ought to be considered in relation to the role of hope
in utopias, for both The Left
Hand of Darkness and The
Dispossessed end on a note
of uncertainty but hope.
See "On Hope the Principle," Ernst Bloch, A
Philosophy of the Future
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), Man
on His Own (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1970), and three essays of his in Maynard Solomon ed.,
Marxism and Art
(New York: Random House, 1974); and about Bloch, for example, Jurgen
Habermass, "Ernst Bloch—A Marxist Romantic," Salmagundi
No. 10-11 (Fall 1969-Winter 1970), 311-25, and Fredric Jameson,
Marxism and Form
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
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.
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