Boldly
to Re-Venture:
New
Writing on the Works of
Ursula
K. Le Guin
Sylvia
A. Kelso
Introducing a critical volume on Ursula K. Le
Guin in 2008 is a task that, to outrageously
misappropriate a famous Australian poem, well might make the boldest hold
“his” breath. Given the current accumulation of journal articles,
essay collections, and full-length books on Le Guin’s
work, bold indeed must be the soul who dares assume the usual omniscient,
omnipotent editorial voice, implying that he or she has not only read all the
original texts, but all the secondary work, and now knows better enough to pontificate upon it all.
It hardly seems necessary to supply the
obligatory career sketch with an author like Le Guin:
especially since said author is currently garnering starred reviews for Lavinia, a return to the historical novel, last seen
from her with Malafrena (1979), which, we
usually assume, grew out of the Orsinian tales
composed in her oldest imagined country of all. Nevertheless, between There and
Here intervenes a writing span of more than half a century, if we include those
early unpublished inventions, not only studded with notable works, but in my
view, growing stronger as it goes. The nearest parallel I can find is W. B. Yeats, whose fruitful span is also
astonishing, and whose work “improves,” from the melopoeia of the “Celtic Twilight” and classics
like “The Sally Gardens,” to the bareboned
landmarks of final poems like “Under Ben Bulben.” Nor is it difficult
to apply to Le Guin, as is so often done with Yeats,
the adjective “great.”
It’s personally heartening to me, a
late starter in publication, that over ten years of that writing span lie before Cele Goldsmith
published “April in
Nor does it seem necessary to labour Left Hand’s import. Le Guin’s first Hugo and
Nebula awards—so affirming to a young
writer, as she noted in a recent interview (Chee,
“Breaking”)—the visibility the novel brought to SF as a
whole, when a literary luminary like Harold Bloom edited the first collection of critical essays; most
importantly, perhaps, to Le Guin as well as to
others, her first public engagement with
feminism, and her first visibility to
feminists.
More gallons of ink must have been expended
on Left Hand of Darkness than any other Le Guin
opus, except perhaps The Dispossessed (1974). The blaze of attention has
tended to mask her other remarkable achievements of the ‘70s. Stories
that have become SF classics, like “Vaster than Empires and more Slow
(1971), “The Day before the Revolution”(1974),
and of course, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”(1973).
Cheek by jowl with Left Hand, the first Earthsea trilogy—I shall use editorial force majeure
here to apply Darko Suvin’s
suggestion that the later Earthsea books form a
second series—then The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Word for
World is Forest (1972), and in the middle, The Dispossessed itself.
Beyond that, The Language of the Night (1979) establishing Le Guin’s lyrical, unruly, and individual critical voice
with essays like “From Elfland to
Poughkeepsie,” “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” and
“Why Americans Are Afraid of Dragons.” Also Orsinian
Tales (1976), and a book of poetry, Wild Angels (1974)… does
the woman ever eat or sleep?
Not, apparently, in the ‘80s, which produced another critical collection, Dancing at the Edge
of the World (1989) with such pieces as “The Carrier Bag Theory of
Fiction.” Short stories are assembled in The Compass Rose
(1982), with such memorable inclusions as “The New Atlantis” and
“The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” then the further collection, Buffalo
Gals (1987), which to stories of “Animal Presences” added the
viewpoint of rocks, or in “View of the Road,” trees.
Along with these come two further poetry
books, and the novels The Eye of the Heron (1983), when Le Guin herself judges she first
made the full transition to a female-centred novel (Chee, “Breaking”), and the major achievement of
the decade, Always Coming Home (1985), a work where Utopian social
thoughts unite, at last, with a Utopic experiment in
form.
At this point most writers would be resting
on their laurels. Not Le Guin. The ‘90s open with the first
of the two new Earthsea novels, Tehanu
(1990), in itself a major achievement, topped by The Other Wind (2001),
which rewrites not merely Earthsea’s gender
politics but its cosmology, as the series moves into its most powerful
resistance to Le Guin’s longtime model, the
binary oppositions of Jung and the Tao. These traditional hierarchies of
light/dark, male/female, white/black, good/bad, now turn emphatically on their
archetypal heads.
Along the way, we have five
story collections, including Tales from Earthsea
(2001), the “back-stories” of both Earthsea
trilogies, Searoad (1991) Le Guin’s “realist” variations on Living in
Nor is the hard-pressed critical commentator
allowed to relax in the 21st Century. So far we have another book of poetry, Incredible
Good Fortune (2006), two more Spanish translations, the critical collection
The Wave in the Mind (2004), with Le Guin’s
thoughts on the importance of rhythm, in particular; and two story collections,
The Birthday of the World (2002) and the suite of post-modern parables, Changing
Planes (2003). To open the millennium on the novel front, we have The
Telling, in 2000, followed by the Annals of the
The critical commentary is beginning to rival
that on the Tao Te Ching. From here I discern
some three critical generations, and three distinguishable though not mutually
inaccessible faces, to use a geographical metaphor, by which critics and
theorists most often approach the oeuvre that comprises Mt. Le Guin.
Notable from the beginning has been the
Taoist face, first mapped, perhaps, by Douglas
Barbour in 1973. Unearthing evidence of the Tao’s presence and function
in Le Guin’s oeuvre is an ongoing critical
enterprise, as in Dena C. Bain’s and Elizabeth Cummins’ (then Cogell) 1970s work, soon supplemented by critiquing uses of
the Tao in Le Guin. At this point the Taoist face may also be traversed by
feminist critics.
As second-wave feminist thought has worked on
the philosophical underpinnings of women’s oppression, the question of
binaries and superior/inferior oppositions has been a lasting focus. And since
Taoism is so apparently thoroughly binary, Le Guin’s
long fidelity to its imagery and its paradigms
has collected some serious flak along with
simple explorations and explanations. An article by Jewell Parker Rhodes in the
late ‘80s, which actually targeted the use of the androgyne
in Left Hand of Darkness, also pointed out the problems with a binary
that can simplify and essentialize a man/woman
opposition that ‘80s feminists were eagerly, angrily, or desperately finding had already fractured into Women. As Audre Lord asked Mary Daly at the end of the ‘70s, Who you calling Woman, white girl?
The feminist face of Mt. Le Guin is one of the most frequently traversed, from the
early strictures of Joanna Russ on that male/female hero in Left Hand of
Darkness (90-91) to the pointed remarks of Sarah Le Fanu
in the ‘80s on the dead weight of the liberal humanist hero at the centre
of the great ‘70s novels (137). Despite Le Guin’s
own public espousal of feminism, and its often militant infiltration
of her work from Left Hand on, as feminism has diversified,
among the praise, so have the critiques.
Most frequently, such critiques centre on Le Guin’s enduring heterosexuality, her determination
that love, usually heterosexual, can bridge even galaxies, and what she herself
has called the central topic of her work: marriage (“Introduction to Planet
of Exile,” 143). Outliers such as Elyce
Helford, using post-colonial as well as feminist theory, have complained about
what appears appropriation of non-white cultures, as Le Guin
herself attempts to redress the not always repressed racial bias in,
particularly, SF.
Among these critiques, essentialism is not
infrequently mentioned, especially from the ‘90s on. First Woman had to
become Women, then, in the burgeoning field of
masculinity studies, Man almost at once became Men. I myself find that some of Le Guin’s
more exhilarating essays produce a certain draft of second thoughts up the back
of the neck. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” is a good case.
It’s very righteously valorizing to think that WE, by virtue of our mere
sex, don’t produce those tales “starting here and going
straight there and THOK!” (169) as heroes’,
and by implication men’s stories do. That we, out “wrest[ing] a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another”
(165) could produce the novel like a “medicine bundle” (169) that
Le Guin herself sewed so brilliantly in Always
Coming Home.
But, memory ripostes, is all men’s work
so linear? What, for instance, about Laurence Sterne? The last thing Tristram Shandy
does is go from here to there…. Even more uncomfortably, there’s
Homer, and after him, Vergil. “In medias res” was coined for Greek
and Roman epics, the template of “heroic” tales. Those loops may
not be a carrier bag, but a (human) appendix, perhaps? And there’s always
the grand-daddy of modern novels, with those wanderings of Don Quixote; not to
even begin mentioning modern novelists like Robbe-Grillet.
There has been rather less critique on the
third face of Mt Le Guin, which the Utopists map.
Here too, there was much early unearthing of sources, as with the anarchism of
Kropotkin (Smith), and siting, particularly of The
Dispossessed, among the famous ‘70s SF heterotopias and
“critical” Utopias (Moylan, Somay) The
second generation, following very short upon if not overlapping the first, began to critique aspects of The
Dispossessed, in particular its heterosexuality, as with Samuel
Delany’s pioneering “To Read The Dispossessed” (1977).
Numerous commentators have followed, whose debates frequently spill over onto
the mountain’s feminist face. An entire recent collection, reviewed by
Mike Cadden in this volume, debates the possibly
bourgeois nature of The Dispossessed.
As these expeditions continue, a variety of
new climbing tools—I am unable to resist this slightly passé
extension of the metaphor—have appeared, from post-colonialism to queer
theory as well as masculinity studies, and eco-feminist or other environmentally
based approaches. Le Guin specialists, such as
Elizabeth Cummins, Mike Cadden, and Warren Rochelle,
have emerged, whose scholarly focus has been largely on her texts. Indeed, Mt.
Le Guin is beginning to resemble Beowulf in
Tolkien’s essay, “The Monsters and the Critics”: a massive
site—not, in this case, a ruin—that provides an inexhaustible
source of academic building material (8).
Reading for this volume, I also began to
discern the three critical generations adumbrated above. Though these blend and
overlap, the first includes pioneering
approaches and source identification, among
which should also be counted Le Guin’s entry in
the first anthology of feminist SF criticism, Marleen Barr’s Future Females (1981). The
second generation, who began to debate and critique earlier with Russ and
Delany, is now extending into the third, who, just as Beowulf is being
re-read against post-modern theories, are coming to scale the faces and re-view
the famous prospects of Mt. Le Guin with new voices,
and sometimes, different tools.
Le Guin’s
international standing appears in the history of this volume. The first call for papers brought responses from
academics and non-academics across three continents. Beyond the
Deliberately, the scope of the volume also
exceeds the purely academic. At its heart, we have a new essay from Le Guin herself, “Living in a Work of Art,” an
aesthetic/philosophical pondering on beauty, and whether beauty might instill
moral awareness, especially if encountered in youth. These thoughts spring from
a memoir that opens a door—yes, the metaphor is also deliberate—on
Le Guin’s own youth: the experience of growing
up in a Maybeck house in San Francisco, a house where
early and continuous experience of aesthetic beauty may foster an expectation
of order and harmony that might in turn lead to an active desire for moral
clarity.