#7 = Volume 2, Part 3 = November 1975
David L. Porter
The Politics of Le Guin's Opus
To read Le Guin is to enter a sharply focused world of vivid political drama
from individual struggles to cosmic conflict. The following remarks (based on
seven of her nine novels and five of her stories) first present the general
framework of her political perception, then relate her insights, and her
particular use of the future, to contemporary reality, and finally assess the
relative effectiveness of her writings as a distinct medium of political
communication.
1. Le Guin's perspective seems to have evolved from a more individualized
existentialist orientation and anthropological concern in the mid-1960s to an
emphatic embrace of Taoism. From there, by the mid-70s, she moved to a much
richer social critique and explicit anarchist commitment. To speak of her
evolution, however, is to describe only a shifting of emphases. In fact, Le Guin
is amazingly consistent in her general preoccupation with the relationship of
good and evil, the illusions of superior accomplishment, and the role of the
individual in the face of catastrophic change. She shows a corresponding and
equally constant disdain for the "ordinary politics" of exploitation,
alienation, and egocentrism.
In Le Guin's view, the unity and equilibrium of good and evil in human nature
reflects on the individual scale the larger universal balance and interdependence
of opposites in the broader natural world. Her most emphatic early statement
of dynamic equilibrium is in A Wizard of Earthsea (WE). The apprentice
wizard, Ged, learns through an encounter with his own death-shadow nearly fatal
to himself and to the world, the absolute need to acknowledge this balance: one
cannot mock or evade death without endangering life itself. Le Guin's works
abound with vivid examples of those who fail to comprehend themselves as the
unification of opposites: e.g., the Fiia and Clayfolk in Rocannon's World
(RW), the nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn on the planet Gethen in The Left
Hand of Darkness (LHD), Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven (LoH), the
twin planets of Anarres and Urras in The Dispossessed (TD), Captain
Davidson in the New Tahiti colony in "The Word for World is Forest" (WWF),
and the "happy" citizens of Omelas in "The Ones Who Walk Away
from Omelas" (OWO). By contrast, those who see the unity behind their own
internal conflicts inevitably become Le Guin's leading protagonists: the wizard
Ged in WE, Jakob Agat Alterra in The Planet of Exile (PE), Falk-Agad in City
of Illusions (CI), Genly Ai in LHD, George Orr in LoH, Shevek in TD, Selver
in WWF.
Self-deceiving illusions of superior accomplishment provide another favorite
theme that takes a variety of forms. First and most spectacular is the total
inability of one culture to comprehend another, thereby removing any reference
points whatsoever. Three astronauts exposed to a mind-shattering total
experience in the ruins of a Martian "city" lack any conceptual tools
to communicate their findings back to Earth ("Field of Vision" [FV]).
A second type of illusion of superiority is that form of cultural imperialism
which sees the homeland's way of life as alone deserving recognition; appearing
in virtually all of her writings, it is a dominant theme in WWF. Social self-deception
also appears when competing societies (such as the Askatever and "farborns"—i.e.,
Terrans—of PE, and Karhide and Orgoreyn in LHD) complement each other's
strengths and weaknesses. Another type of illusion appears when a highly
"progressive" society depends for its very success on a fundamental
moral failure; the ambiguously utopian Omelas community of OWO is her perfected
model, though her most explicit imperialists—such as the Terran New Tahiti
colony on Athshe in WWF and the Shing in CI—belong to the same family. A final
self-deception derives from a society's inability to define progress in broad
enough terms: thus Dr. Haber's attempt to end war on Earth in turn causes war
with a non-Earth power (LoH), and even the anarchist utopia of Anarres develops
its own brand of political tyranny by failing to protect that individual
creativity essential to its own health.
Le Guin consistently concerns herself with individuals striving to preserve
their integrity, and their resulting conflicts with society. In her earlier
works, she focuses primarily on the individual. Social action, when it appears,
comes in the form of defensive measures by key characters in a crisis (as in RW,
PE, and CI). In this her tone is existentialist. In the middle transition phase
she still emphasizes individual development, yet also reflects on the need for
balance in the overall society as well. Here Taoist imagery predominates. Her
most recent emphasis shifts to the broad nature and inevitability of constant
social change itself and its effects on the individual (as in WWF, TD, and
"The Day Before the Revolution" [DBR]). In this there is a much more
definite political, specifically anarchist, tone. Each of these phases is
closely related to the others. A continuity exists, but the different emphases
within it seem to express Le Guin's own political maturation. In this evolution
Le Guin represents a significant section of a whole generation of white radical
American intellectuals, from the early 1960s to the present.1
Typical of her first phase are the chief characters of PE, Rolery and Jakob.
These two, strangers from very different though neighboring races, make the
existential leap into the absurd through a love affair that risks the very
annihilation of both peoples. Despite the impending disaster, Le Guin implies
that it is the integrity of the personal relationship, and the willingness to
risk all for it, which really counts. Through the persistence of that integrity,
the two previously irreconcilable groups eventually ally together in a
successful defense and later (as we learn in CI) in a blending of their races.
Le Guin's Taoist tone appears most prominently in WE, LHD, and LoH, though it
resonates in practically every one of her works. George Orr, Genly Ai, and Falk-Agat
each literally confront the experience of chaos. Orr's world dissolves before
his very eyes: "The buildings of downtown Portland, the Capital of the
World...were melting. They were getting soggy and shaky, like jello left out in
the sun.... It was an area, or perhaps a time-period, of a sort of
emptiness" (LoH §10). With each heroic character, however—Le Guin says
loud and clear—if the will is strong enough, if one is wholly committed to
one's deepest understanding of the truth, and at the same time tolerant of
ambiguities, it is possible to pass even through the realm of the void in
confronting one's deadliest enemies, and still meet success.
Le Guin's third phase, that of anarchism, asserts that individuals must
participate collectively in social change as a necessary precondition to
maintaining and developing personal integrity. At the same time, self-development
occurs only if social movements themselves are designed for individual growth
instead of conformity. Both aspects appear prominently in the Odonian and
Athshean revolutionary movements of TD, DBR, and WWF. Selver, for example,
realizes the incompleteness and ultimate impossibility of his people relying
solely on spiritual, intuitional ("dream-time") fulfillment so long as
material ("world-time") conditions were so destructive. Despite his
previous pacifism, he tells captured Terran colonists, "We had to kill you,
before you drove us mad" (WWF §6). On the other hand, while leading the
growing resistance movement, Selver discovers that his political role in turn
prevents "dream" consciousness. In addition, however necessary it may
be for self-preservation, killing or violence changes the previously non-violent
person: "it's himself whom the murderer kills...over and over" (WWF
§5).
According to Le Guin, to neglect the need for balance, for moderation, for
appreciation of the inherent contradictions in individuals and society, is to
cause individual and social egoism and all their disastrous consequences. The
imbalance of egocentrism produces every type of human exploitation and disaster.
In her view, a conservatism which unabashedly glorifies egoistic fulfillment
through existing social structures and a liberalism which protects and
encourages the same egoism behind labels of "social interest" are
equally pernicious. Her detailed images of conservative logic in the character
of Davidson (WWF) and of liberal logic in Lyubov (WWF) and Dr. Haber (LoH) are
powerful indeed. So also is her denunciation of authoritarian collectivism, as
symbolized by the countries of Thu (TD) and Orgoreyn (LHD). For Le Guin, the only
political arrangement sensitive to the need for moderation, for non-egoistic
social relations and identity of humans with nature is a classless society. This
model she offers consistently—despite its own significant problems—from the
primitive tribal groups in her earlier works to the planet-wide anarchist
community of TD.
2. Le Guin articulates her political dilemmas in credible and dramatic
terms, thus inviting the reader to think politically too. Her writing places
believable characters in easily recognizable political settings, and forces them
to deal with significant issues. The reader not only feels involved in the
political drama, but also receives data for independent agreement or
disagreement with the author—a rare quality indeed. Beyond her vividness and
internal consistency, her settings, issues, and solutions are similar enough to
our own contemporary world that the applicability of her thought and action to
our own political problems becomes practically self-evident.
Imperialist relations are clearly one of Le Guin's prime political insights,
a theme presented to greater or lesser degree in practically every one of her
writings. In WWF an ecologically sensitive, non-aggressive native population is
brutally tyrannized by a plundering colonist power all too familiar from the
history of European settlers in America, Africa, and Asia, and the recent U.S.
war in Vietnam. In the words of colonist Captain Davidson: "This world, New
Tahiti, was literally made for men.... Get enough humans here, build machines
and robots, make farms and cities, and nobody would need the creechies [the
native 'creatures'] any more"; "Cleaned up and cleaned out, it would
be a paradise, a real Eden"; "It's just how things happen to be.
Primitive races always have to give way to civilized ones. Or be assimilated.
But we sure as hell can't assimilate a lot of green monkeys" (§1).
Typically, when the "creechie" revolt begins, Davidson can't believe
at first that the natives are involved; it has to be a colonist or off-planet
force. Once he is forced to believe that there is a revolt, he responds by
advocating genocide "to make the world safe for the Terran way of
life" (§4).
Beyond the particular issue of imperialism, Le Guin's works also explore the
other major contemporary foci of political crisis: racism, sexism, nationalism,
militarism, class society, authoritarianism, and ecocide. Sexism, like the other
common issues, usually appears as simply a given aspect of the status quo. It
becomes a dominant theme in LHD. Genly Ai, the male heterosexual envoy from the
Ekumen, is forced to confront at the root of his psyche not only his own biases
against women but a planet of complete bisexuals who regard him as
sexually degenerate. Even after two years among them, "I was still....
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 my own" (§1).
By the end he finally sees in his friend Estraven what he "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" (§18).
As with her statements of issues, Le Guin's particular political strategies
are directly relevant to current American society. Overall, her solution is to
develop awareness of exploitation, expose those structures producing it, and
create alternative communities as open as possible to the fulfillment of all
their members. She clearly favors anarchist and "counter-cultural"
directions. But they must be followed consistently, with the open-endedness
basic to their definition, to avoid the danger of new walls, new supposedly
"liberating" forms of what might turn out to be the old exploitation.
Sabul's quasi-politicking and Vea's supposed "sexual liberation" are
emphatic examples of the latter in TD. Le Guin prefers Taoist non-action to
Western assertiveness. At the same time, she realizes that some action is
necessary (as with the Athshean revolt or Shevek's voyage to Urras) to arrive at
the desired flexible equilibrium.2 One must accept no walls,
though coming home (to one's roots within the walls) is just as important, just
as human, as going forth to adventure. Being and becoming is Le Guin's
political stance, as it is the keystone to Shevek's revolutionary physics (TD
§7).
Le Guin's alternative worlds in the future (from 1990 in FV to about 4800 in
LHD) are primarily either a logical extension of present-day negative trends
(such as militarism, ecocide, and egoism in general) or an analogic
fantasy-context in which to present more selectively and thus more starkly
certain of today's harshest contradictions. In the latter case, it hardly
matters whether the society examined is 20 or 2000 years in the future. Her
worlds are basically worlds of today. She subtracts or adds a small number of
technologies, such as rapid space-flight and instantaneous galactic
communication, but these are not essential to the inner dynamics of the
particular planets involved.
The two main non-technological social innovations of Le Guin's stories are
anarchism and parapsychological communication. Both have recognizable roots in
contemporary practice and theory. Even so, Le Guin is ambiguous. Her anarchism
seems a clearly superior political form when compared to hierarchical models (as
in WWF, DBR, and TD). Yet to date she has placed her anarchist model either in
an ecologically sensitive, economically undeveloped tribal-type setting (as in
WWF), a limited emigrant enclave (as in PE), a situation of extreme economic
scarcity (as in TD), or a vague cosmic setting with great spatial distances
between constituent communities (as with the Ekumen in LHD). None of these has a
clear direct connection to conditions in contemporary America; perhaps Le Guin
will accept that challenge in writings to come. In the meantime, Le Guin clearly
invites her US readers to seriously consider the principle of least
contradictory, least egoistic politics for the society of which they are now a
part.
Le Guin's parapsychology, like her anarchism, is both a critique of existing
society and a positive alternative for the future. There is no more devastating
critique of existing interpersonal relations, for example, than the deadly
subconscious exchanges between shipmates in "Vaster than Empires and More
Slow." The highly sensitive empath, Osden, when asked what he perceives
with his talents, replies: "Muck. The psychic excreta of the animal
kingdom. I wade through your feces." Le Guin's resolution to this story—a
highly tuned-in "bliss-out" between sensitive and balanced beings—is
perhaps one of her basic long-range social preferences.3 Beyond the
totally exceptional and fanciful experiences in LoH and FV, she does suggest
that the development of telepathic talents might promote greater civilization
and understanding. On the other hand, as the "mindlying" talents of
the Shing in CI demonstrate, telepathy also has serious negative political
potentials as well. Perhaps even greater beneficial potentials exist in the
integration of waking and sleep. To dream (in the Athshean sense) is to get back
in touch with the "springs of reality" or subconscious roots (WWF §§
2, 5). To dream is also, perhaps, to be more sensitive to parapsychological
phenomena. In either case, the collective political effects of significant
widespread personal growth in this area could be profound.
3. In conclusion, there is no doubt that Le Guin takes politics extremely
seriously, both in her awareness of the destruction it currently produces and in
her sense of better alternatives. Her images of contemporary existence are
presented clearly and vividly because they are seen in a consistent though
evolving political perspective. From this it follows that she herself must be
taken seriously as a political writer-activist. Le Guin defends the SF form
as a highly important and unique type of political communication:
At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of
understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence. The
fantasist...may be talking as seriously as any sociologist—and a good deal
more directly—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.4
At its best SF removes readers from the stale reference points of everyday
political discourse and life.
It is true that SF is also inherently susceptible to becoming flippant
fantasy, unrelated to the serious world of the present or at best useful merely
as escapist relief. The right formula for positively changing political
consciousness, especially in a mass audience, is amazingly elusive. Yet there is
no doubt that Le Guin's skillful, sensitive, complex, adventurous, and vivid
writing about both the micro- and macro-levels of society is one of the
clearest proofs to date that SF can carry a general reader into a whole new
realm of awareness—an awareness often rejected when presented by other
activists with other manners of invitation. "Good artistry doesn't
moralize; it seeks to engage one more"; a good SF writer may have
"intense and intelligent" moral seriousness, without moralizing and
preaching: "He gambles; he tries to engage us. In other words, he works as
an artist."5 It is far easier for the average reader to dismiss
a radical tract or a radical speaker than to set down a Le Guin writing, once
begun. In her own manner, with her own special skills, Le Guin succeeds in
taking us on that spiral journey of growth—adventuring outward, returning back
home somewhat wiser—which is so central to her own political thought.
NOTES
1. By the 1950s a new generation of rebel intellectuals had emerged that were
apparently not linked to the Old Left Marxist radicalism of the 1930s. Based on
the existentialist concern with individual integrity, social protest
concentrated on immediate issues of individual resistance to social immorality
(such as the Chessman, anti-HUAC, Berkeley Free Speech, and original draft-card
burning demonstrations). By the late 1960s this tendency had led, as in the case
of SDS, to a fundamental alienation from and confrontation with the entire
political structure itself. Simultaneously the rise of drug use and alternative
life-styles, combined with movement reaction against macho heaviness and
Marxian dogmatism, then joined by massive government repression, drove many
radicals into an ill-defined, ambiguously "apolitical" new stage. This
was characterized by inner-directed "counter-cultural" changes and a
more contemplative and sporadically resisting political attitude toward the
broader social structures. It was a time when the worth of assertive politics as
a whole—radical as well as establishment—was subject to challenge. A new
synthesis, the third stage increasingly adopted by the mid-70s, has attempted to
integrate counter-cultural insights and radical politics into a consistent
whole. Face-to-face and small-group politics are seen as just as essential as,
yet also dependent on, the politics of the nation. Non-directive small affinity
groups, less publicized local instead of spectacular national organizing, and an
increasingly explicit anarchist focus characterize the behavior and orientation
of large numbers of radicals in this current stage. Useful statements of this
evolution, beyond the works of Le Guin, are found in several books by Michael
Rossman and Theodore Roszak, as well as Julian Beck's The Life of the Theatre
(City Lights Books, 1972). A 1949 philosophical prefiguration of the same
ideological evolution is found in Herbert Read's Anarchy and Order
(reprinted 1971 by Beacon Press).
2. In her recognition of the necessary interdependence of the two traditions,
Le Guin's politics are quite similar to those of Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg.
See Snyder's essays, "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" and
"Why Tribe," in his Earth House Hold (New Directions, 1969),
and Ginsberg's essay, "Consciousness and Practical Action," in Counter-Culture,
ed. Joseph Berke (London: Owen, 1969). This position, as symbolized also in Le
Guin's descriptions of Thu and Orgoreyn, seems clearly to set forth her attitude
as well toward Marxist-Leninist models of organization.
3. Similar political potentials of paranormal behavior are implied in Roszak,
in surrealist politics, and in research currently encouraged in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. See Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends
(Doubleday, 1972); "Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution," a
special issue of Radical America, January 1970; and Sheila Ostrander and
Lynn Schroder, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (Bantam Books,
1971). I differ here with Ian Watson in his apparent categorizing of paranormal
behavior as necessarily "pararational," a romantic
mystification unfit for serious political concern (see Watson's articles in SFS
#5 and in the present issue).
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, "National Book Award Acceptance Speech," Algol,
Nov 1973, p. 14.
5. Ursula K. Le Guin, "On Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream,"
SFS 1(1973):43.
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 Guins 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
Rocannons 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."
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