The Legacies of Ursula K Le Guin Science Fiction Ethics 1St Edition Christopher L Robinson Editor Full Chapter
The Legacies of Ursula K Le Guin Science Fiction Ethics 1St Edition Christopher L Robinson Editor Full Chapter
The Legacies of Ursula K Le Guin Science Fiction Ethics 1St Edition Christopher L Robinson Editor Full Chapter
Le Guin:
Science, Fiction, Ethics 1st Edition
Christopher L. Robinson (Editor)
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The Legacies of
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science, Fiction, Ethics
Edited by
Christopher L. Robinson
Sarah Bouttier
Pierre-Louis Patoine
Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture
Series Editor
Sherryl Vint
Department of English
University of California
Riverside, CA, USA
This book series seeks to publish ground-breaking research exploring the
productive intersection of science and the cultural imagination. Science is
at the centre of daily experience in twenty-first century life and this has
defined moments of intense technological change, such as the Space Race
of the 1950s and our very own era of synthetic biology. Conceived in dia-
logue with the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this series
will carve out a larger place for the contribution of humanities to these
fields. The practice of science is shaped by the cultural context in which it
occurs and cultural differences are now key to understanding the ways that
scientific practice is enmeshed in global issues of equity and social justice.
We seek proposals dealing with any aspect of science in popular culture in
any genre. We understand popular culture as both a textual and material
practice, and thus welcome manuscripts dealing with representations of
science in popular culture and those addressing the role of the cultural
imagination in material encounters with science. How science is imagined
and what meanings are attached to these imaginaries will be the major
focus of this series. We encourage proposals from a wide range of historical
and cultural perspectives.
dvisory Board:
A
Mark Bould, University of the West of England, UK
Lisa Cartwright, University of California, US
Oron Catts, University of Western Australia, Australia
Melinda Cooper, University of Sydney, Australia
Ursula Heise, University of California Los Angeles, US
David Kirby, University of Manchester, UK
Roger Luckhurt, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Colin Milburn, University of California, US
Susan Squier, Pennsylvania State University, US
The Legacies of
Ursula K. Le Guin
Science, Fiction, Ethics
Editors
Christopher L. Robinson Sarah Bouttier
École Polytechnique École Polytechnique
Palaiseau, France Palaiseau, France
Pierre-Louis Patoine
New Sorbonne University
Paris, France
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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Acknowledgments
For all their help and support for this project during its various stages, we
wish to extend a warm thanks to the following: Danièle André, Daniel
Argèles, Pierre Dauchy, Brian Attebery, Jennifer Eastman Attebery,
Stephanie Burt, Marie-Pier Boucher, Victor Bournerias, Meghann Cassidy,
Jean-Marc Chomaz, Bruce Clarke, David Creuze, Arwen Curry, Maya
Curry, Mathieu Duplay, Vivien Feasson, Gaïd Girard, Carole Khalil,
Veronica Hollinger, Sandrine Laguerre, Eva Lafuente, Irène Langlet,
Christine Lorre, Hélène Machinal, Julie Phillips, Béatrice Pire, Marc
Porée, Isabelle Réguillon, Fabienne Robinson, Julie Sauret, Chantal
Schütz, Olivier Semonnay, Anne Simon, Héloïse Thomas, Natacha Vas-
Deyres, Sherryl Vint, and Frédéric Zantonio.
We would also like to thank Allie Troyanos at Palgrave Macmillan and
Tikoji Rao at Springer Nature for their enthusiasm and kind assistance in
preparing the publication of this book.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Christopher L. Robinson, Sarah Bouttier, and Pierre-
Louis Patoine
vii
viii Contents
Author Index137
Works by Le Guin141
Notes on Contributors
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
will appear in 2022. With Jay Edidin, Rachel Gold, and others, she is at
work on a book about the X-Men.
Francis Gene-Rowe is a Ph.D. student and an associate tutor at Royal
Holloway, University of London, UK, as well as a sessional lecturer at the
University of Surrey, UK. His thesis explores utopian politics of time, sub-
ject, and world in the work of Philip K. Dick and William Blake. He also
works on and with tabletop gaming, SF poetry, ecocriticism, and decolo-
niality. Gene-Rowe co-directs the London Science Fiction Research
Community and is a Councilor of the British Science Fiction Association.
In 2017, he won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Student Paper
Award, and now serves as one of the Association’s official UK representa-
tives. Gene-Rowe has written for Foundation, SFRA Review, Fantastika
Journal, and Oxford Bibliographies, and serves on the editorial board of
the Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy A New Canon series.
Eli Lee is a novelist working at the intersection between literary fiction
and science fiction. Her debut novel, A Strange and Brilliant Light, came
out in July 2021 with Quercus. It explores artificial intelligence and the
politics of job loss through automation, as well as the themes of love,
friendship, and family. She is the Fiction Editor at the literary journal
Minor Literatures, was previously an Articles Editor at Strange Horizons,
and has written fiction, non-fiction, and criticism for The Financial Times,
the i newspaper, The Quietus, The Pigeonhole, and Delayed Gratification.
She is at work on her next novel.
Pierre-Louis Patoine is Assistant Professor of American Literature at
Sorbonne Nouvelle University, co-director of the Science/Literature
research group (litorg.hypotheses.org), and co-editor of the journal
Epistemocritique.org. He has written a monograph on the role of the
empathic, physiological body in the experience of reading (Corps/texte,
ENS Éditions, 2015), and articles exploring biosemiotic, ecocritical, and
neuroaesthetic approaches to immersion and altered states of conscious-
ness, virality, planetary life, and anthropocenic acceleration in literature
(Ursula K. Le Guin, William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard) and video games
(Final Fantasy VII).
Christopher L. Robinson is Assistant Professor of English at the École
Polytechnique, France. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory
of X (LinX), the research group Identities, Cultures, and Histories
(GRICH), and the pilot committee of the Chair of Arts and Sciences
jointly held by École Polytechnique and École nationale supérieure des
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Introduction
1
A practice anticipated by Le Guin in the practice of telling life stories in Always
Coming Home.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Le Guin’s reputation has only continued to grow since the turn of the
millennium, due in no small part to how she anticipated many of the prob-
lems we now face and, above all, to how she imagined new ways of think-
ing about such problems. The essays in this collection explore how these
new ways deploy an ethics of science fiction, or more broadly of specula-
tive fiction.
A reader and collaborator of Le Guin over several decades, and the chief
editor of the complete edition of her work published by the Library of
America, Brian Attebery comes back on the so-called two periods of Le
Guin’s writing: a first phase with the early Hainish novels and the Earthsea
trilogy, and then the second more feminist, less epic phase starting with
Tehanu (1990). In Chap. 2 “Always Coming Home and the Hinge in
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Career,” Attebery questions this dichotomy by focus-
ing on a work that would constitute the “hinge” between the two phases:
Always Coming Home.
In Chap. 3 “Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,
Rosi Braidotti, and Teresa de Lauretis,” Christopher L. Robinson turns to
a short story written during this hinge period of Le Guin’s career, “Ether,
OR” (1996), to connect the author’s personal views on narrative with the
feminist theories of the subject and narrativity that were evolving around
the same time, notably in the work of the Italian philosophers Rosi
Braidotti and Teresa de Lauretis.
Following these attempts at situating Le Guin’s writing within the
recent history of ideas, the next two chapters focus on the utopian aspects
of Le Guin’s writing. In Chap. 4 “Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous:
Plato, Leo Strauss, and The Dispossessed,” Dennis Wilson Wise draws a
provocative parallel between The Dispossessed, and Socrates’s three-fold
utopian polis presented in Plato’s Republic. For Wise, Le Guin and Socrates
are akin in their fundamentally literary approach to utopia, allowing for
ambiguity, irony, and contradiction to settle in at its very heart.
In Chap. 5, “Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in
Le Guin’s Ekumen,” Arwen Spicer carefully unpacks the complex, multi-
layered position of Le Guin’s utopian impulses as they relate both to her
care for and knowledge of indigenous cultures, and to her experience as
belonging to a group of privileged Westerners. By putting in parallel Le
Guin’s oeuvre and recent indigenous SF, she illuminates the power, speci-
ficity, and contradictions of Le Guin’s utopian world-making. In doing so,
Spicer follows Le Guin’s own vision of non-coercive intercultural exchange.
6 C. L. ROBINSON ET AL.
References
Davis, Laurence, and Peter G. Stillman. 2012. Utopian Journeying: Ursula K. Le
Guin’s The Dispossessed. In Utopian Moments. Reading Utopian Texts, ed.
Miguel A. Ramiro Avilés and J.C. Davis, 133–129. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Hymes, Dell. 1964. Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and
Anthropology. New York: Harper and Row.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1979. Introduction to The Word for World is Forest. In The
Language of Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood,
149–154. New York: Putnam.
———. 2019. Always Coming Home (Author’s Expanded Edition). Ed. Brian
Attebery. New York: The Library of America.
CHAPTER 2
Brian Attebery
B. Attebery (*)
Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
But I do see a difference between the early and late Le Guin, and it is a
difference in how she viewed herself, her work, and the world. Or maybe
it is a difference in how we, her readers, are invited to view those things. I
know my own view changed radically in the late 1980s. Before then, Le
Guin was a distant, imposing figure, one of my personal idols, someone I
had met once and corresponded with a little but mostly worshiped from
afar. Afterward (the turning point was a conference where she and I were
both on the program and had a chance to talk between events), there was
also a funny, no-nonsense person named Ursula, who came equipped with
a charming, supportive partner named Charles. I don’t know if everyone
who knew Ursula had the same reaction I did, but I distinctly remember
moments in mid-conversation when I would suddenly be flooded with the
realization, “My God, I’m talking with Ursula K. Le Guin!” And then she
would crack a joke or offer a cup of tea, and she would be my friend Ursula
again. For me, that double awareness never got in the way of reading her
work, but it did add an extra resonance, the echo of a living voice, to the
words on the page. So some of what I will say about her later work reflects
my own uniquely privileged and enhanced sense of how literature comes
about and how it communicates, but that altered sense is also related to
the change in Le Guin’s work itself after Always Coming Home.
I will go ahead and refer to Always Coming Home as a novel because
there isn’t really a better word for it, even though it profoundly challenges
our sense of what a novel might be. A novel can be the story of a character
or an anatomy of a world: many novels are both. ACH (for short) is mostly
a world: an imaginary ethnography complete with footnotes and back
matter and a self-doubting ethnographer who calls herself Pandora. It is
an encyclopedia as much as a novel; and also a piece of metafiction and an
anthology of poems, songs, plays, and even recipes. It takes the idea of a
science fictional megatext—the body of knowledge a reader must bring to
the text in order to unfold it—and moves its megatext to the foreground.
There is a more conventional character-centered novel doled out among
its pages but that novel, about a woman called Stone Telling, is (I believe
deliberately) less compelling than the matrix in which it is embedded.
So Always Coming Home is big; it is ambitious; it is strange. Early reac-
tions to it reflected its un-novelish novelty. Everyone agreed that it was
beautifully written—that was pretty much a given with Le Guin—and
meticulously imagined, but it almost seemed designed to frustrate expec-
tations. It was the opposite of space opera: determinedly earthbound, un-
spacey, and un-operatic. In a moment when the great new thing in science
12 B. ATTEBERY
I don’t know the genesis of the book, but would guess that separate stories,
which she had tried retelling for their own sake and the work’s sake, began
to make a whole, a shape in her mind. Perhaps she set out to write a book of
stories about women, but I think it more likely that the pattern became
apparent, and the connections imperative, as she worked and reworked and
re-reworked the material—for she was a hard writer, a merciless reviser.
(1989, p. 139)
place.1 These had always been present as themes in her work: now they
became its foundation. Having taken part in 1979 in a powerhouse sym-
posium on narrative at the University of Chicago—where speakers
included Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Victor Turner, and Hayden
White—Le Guin was beginning to question assumptions about her chosen
art form. What does the capacity for narrative have to do with being
human? Why does a novel have to follow an arrow-like trajectory? Why is
prose fiction separated off from poetry? Who says utopias are inherently
less interesting, or more impossible, than dystopias? What if Henry James’s
description of novels as “loose, baggy monsters” was not a criticism of the
novel’s form but a celebration of its possibilities?
All of these questions and more are addressed in essays such as “The
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1989), which is why Library of America
editors and I included a handful of them in the expanded edition of Always
Coming Home. I think of these essays as parts of the novel though pub-
lished apart from it. They are exclaves: non-contiguous territories like the
state of Alaska or Russian Kaliningrad. A book that welcomes into itself
diverse and even contradictory forms of expression already challenges the
idea of textual boundaries. If a novel can be so permeable, then it can also
send parts of itself outside of its covers—an idea that strikes me as being a
lot like contemporary ideas about bodies, consciousness, and the self—for
example, in N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999).
So Always Coming Home is a portrait of an artist undergoing personal
change and undertaking professional reassessment. And yet it is very much
of a piece with her earlier work, from the Taoist emphasis on purposeful
inaction to the playful exploration of rhetorical modes and alternative
social structures (think of “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other
Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,”
collected in The Compass Rose, 1982, or “The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas,” collected in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, 1975). How can I
describe that stability through change, or change within continuity?
Running through ACH is a simple geometric figure, a double spiral,
something like a galaxy with two arms curving out from or into the center,
1
The following essays, originally published in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts
on Words, Women, Places (1989), have been reprinted in the expanded version of Always
Come Home (2019): “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”; “The
Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”; and “Text, Silence, Performance.”
2 ALWAYS COMING HOME AND THE HINGE IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S… 15
story. She thought she was done with Earthsea, but Tehanu opened the
gates again. It became the first of three new volumes that complement and
critique the first three. I’ll come back to Tehanu in a bit, because its rela-
tionship to ACH is complicated.
The story collection Searoad (1991) picks up some of the themes and
narrative innovations of ACH and applies them to a contemporary coastal
town in Oregon. Searoad was mostly ignored by science fiction and fan-
tasy fans while being hailed by the literary mainstream (one of the stories
won a Pushcart Prize and the whole book was a finalist for a Pulitzer). Yet
I think readers schooled by working through ACH will see the essential
strangeness, the refusal of norms and narrative centering, in the book. I
would love to see an extended reading of Searoad as utopian fiction.
Also in the 1990s, having reached a point where she felt she could no
longer “do space,” that she had exhausted the metaphoric possibilities of
conventional science fiction, Le Guin found a way to launch once again.
First in short stories and then in the novellas that make up Five Ways to
Forgiveness (2017) and finally in the novel The Telling, Le Guin proved
that she was still at the top of her game as an SF writer. Evidence of this
resurgence includes science fiction awards such as the Endeavor and Locus
Awards won by The Telling and Locus and Imaginaire Awards (the latter
for the French translation) for Four Ways to Forgiveness.2
Again bringing in a personal perspective on this renewal of her SF
career, I will point out that Le Guin was reading more science fiction soon
after ACH because she, along with a couple of co-conspirators, was
involved in selecting stories for The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993).
This project is not to be confused with a Norton Anthology of Science
Fiction—which does not exist because the Norton textbook division has
not yet been persuaded that science fiction belongs in the canon. Books in
the “Norton Book of” line were intended to be popular offerings on inter-
esting themes, curated by various literary celebrities. For example, Eudora
Welty edited The Norton Book of Friendship with scholar Ronald A. Sharp.
I was the scholar in this case; Karen Joy Fowler, who was just beginning to
publish, was brought in by Ursula as someone more immersed in the cur-
rent state of the genre than either Ursula or I.
2
In 1995 Le Guin published a collection of four novellas as a “suite” entitled Four Ways to
Forgiveness. She published a new edition with The Library of America in 2017 that included
a fifth novella, and she consequently changed the title to Five Ways to Forgiveness.
2 ALWAYS COMING HOME AND THE HINGE IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S… 17
At any rate, Ursula took the editing duties very seriously, and that
meant reading scores of stories from the past three decades. We divided up
story collections, anthologies, and magazines to read separately, exchange
favorites, and discuss. And I got the impression that Ursula was growing
more and more excited about a field that had changed since her early
engagement in it. The literary ambitions that were just beginning to be
tolerated in 1960s SF now permeated the genre. As we read new work by
a younger generation of writers—and half-forgotten treasures such as
Carol Emshwiller and R. A. Lafferty—I could see Ursula beginning to
consider how she might fit into this new and exciting version of SF. So it
was no surprise when she began to produce a raft of new science fiction
stories rivaling or bettering anything she had done before.
This set of stories differed from those of the 1960s and 1970s, though.
They were more elusive, more metafictional. Without falling into self-
conscious literariness, they acknowledged the constructedness of the form.
In “The Shobies’ Story” (collected in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea,
1994), a method of transport called transilience is revealed to be a func-
tion of narrative and shared belief. From there it is only a side step to the
parables and playfulness of her most Borgesian work, Changing Planes.
But all of this second flowering is forecast in Always Coming Home, includ-
ing the power of shared belief to shape reality. One expression of this
power comes in previously unpublished chapters from the Kesh novel
“Dangerous People,” in which each point-of-view character brings a dif-
ferent meaning to the disappearance of the woman Whette. Another is the
embedded story mentioned before, “A Hole in the Air,” which looks at
our world through the eyes of one of the Kesh who has somehow slipped
back in time. The final dialogue between Pandora and her Kesh informant,
the archivist at Wakwaha-na, celebrates meetings across time and world-
view, where there is not necessarily full understanding but there can be
communion.
Le Guin’s career on the outward spiral of its hinge was not just a mirror
of the first, inward half, with matching volumes of fantasy and SF. A new
self-awareness shows in her writing in an array of forms. She was an acute
critic before the hinge; afterward she became a foundational thinker about
narrative and gender and language. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”
for instance, helped redirect Donna Haraway’s thinking about human
development and art, as noted in Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble
(2016, p. 118). “Text, Silence, Performance” shows us how to critique
assumptions about literary value and meaning from outside, from the
18 B. ATTEBERY
All of which tells us that Le Guin was now looking for another kind of
poetry: unmediated, immediate. She told that story on herself in a talk to
the Mythopoeic Society about the writing of Always Coming Home, which
required her to come home, in several senses. She had to write about the
place that was deepest in her heart, and to find a language that was, liter-
ally, grounded:
If I was ever to speak as a native of my own country, it was the dirt words I
needed; I had to listen to the animals, birds, plants, rocks; to learn the coy-
ote words, quail words, obsidian words, the brown adobe clay words.
(2019, p. 744)
Furthermore, she had to learn silence, and to forget about being the cap-
ital-P Poet. She had to learn to value the evanescence of spoken language:
the way it comes to life in performance and then disappears into the ether.
“Text, Silence, Performance” was originally a speech, and it reproduces
a poem called “She Who,” by Judy Grahn. The entire poem consists of the
two words “she” and “who.” It is, as Le Guin says, “a poem that must be
read aloud, cannot be read silently: its appearance in print is like music
notation—an indication of performance” (2019, p. 738). I heard Ursula
speak it once—I don’t know if her performance was ever recorded—and it
is clear that the seemingly trivial, meaningless repetitions on the page
become something entirely different when voice is added, and breath, and
pacing, and intonation and, above all, direct connection between speaker
and audience. The printed version can only be a marker for what is lost in
time, which is all the more significant for its absence.
Writing the songs of the Kesh, Le Guin learned to emulate the direct-
ness of oral poetry. Here is one of what she called the Blood Lodge songs:
short, often improvisational chants performed by women for women. The
words tell us very little:
In order to “get” the poem, the reader has to know that this is a mother
speaking to her unborn baby. It’s a private ceremony, a bit of casual inter-
nal monologue made into music. It reminds me of something a Papago
Indian singer said to anthropologist Ruth Underhill: “The song is very
short because we understand so much” (1985, p. 51). Complexity is in
the context; significance lives in the pre-internet cultural cloud.
In his book How to Read an Oral Poem (2002), folklorist John Miles
Foley offers insights into the differences between listening and reading,
and between formal composition and improvisation within traditional
modes. Foley’s deliberately provocative, paradoxical title reminds us that
poetry is not the sole province of literate Westerners, nor do our ways of
reading Milton and Wordsworth serve us well when we reach beyond the
written canon. The field of ethnopoetics seeks to transcribe orally per-
formed texts in ways that bring out the artistry and the cultural complexity
that are otherwise lost when the words are captured on the page. Le Guin
was reading some of those ethnopoeticists, probably led there by her
brother Karl Kroeber and by folklorist Barre Toelken, when she was think-
ing her way toward the world of the Kesh. Under their influence, she
began to understand that the discovery by Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme
that he has been speaking prose all his life is not true of everyone every-
where. And once you understand that some speech is poetry, you begin to
process all speech differently, listening for the artful repetitions and echoes,
the melodies of intonation, and the influence of the unspeaking listener—
even when that listener is a fetus in the womb.
In the essay “Text, Silence, Performance,” she says many of the same
things Foley would later say about orality and literature generally and then
turns to her own attempts to bring a different poetic sensibility to the novel:
3
Le Guin continued to think about the world of the Kesh after the publication of Always
Coming Home. She sent the author a page of Blood Lodge songs in about 1991, when his
wife was expecting a child, and “Sweet Chance” was composed for her after a conversation
about the lack of literature dealing with pregnancy. Le Guin later lost track of the Blood
Lodge poems but I tracked down the copy in my correspondence and so she was able to
include them in the expanded edition of the novel.
2 ALWAYS COMING HOME AND THE HINGE IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S… 21
essential part of being alive. The quality of such poetry, sewing, and cooking
of course varies enormously. We have been taught that only poetry of
extremely high quality is poetry at all; that poetry is a big deal, and you have
to be a pro to write it, or, in fact, to read it. This is what keeps a few poets
and many, many English departments alive. That’s fine, but I was after
something else: the poem not as fancy pastry but as bread; the poem not as
masterpiece but as life-work. (2019, p. 739)
That is what “Sweet Chance” is: life-work. It doesn’t stand on its own. It
isn’t meant to, either by the mother who sang it or by the author who
invented both it and its maker. But it makes a connection and it reorga-
nizes the world. Writing it changed the writer in subtle and profound ways.
Years after ACH, she came back to the world of the Kesh, and, writing
as Intrumo of Sinshan (a translation of her name, since both Intrumo and
Ursula mean “little bear woman”), she composed a poem called “Navna:
The River-running.” It starts,
Le Guin’s later poems are informed by her discovery of oral art. Her
English rendering of the Tao Te Ching draws on new awareness to convey
the deceptively simple melody in that text (as well as its humor and wis-
dom). And her stories, too, have the sound of someone pausing to listen
to the breath of the world. Their narrators are quieter, less insistent on
telling us the answers, which, they are likely to confess, they themselves
don’t know. But they invite you to work with them on finding some.
Biographer Julie Phillips asked Le Guin whether ACH influenced the
writing of Tehanu. She didn’t think so:
I wouldn’t connect them very much. Writing Always Coming Home was
kind of a big … step, a different plateau, I guess. But then, so was The
Dispossessed, earlier. Each time I did a big book, it probably left echoes
thereafter.
But I couldn’t trace anything from Tehanu to ACH. (Phillips, Personal
Correspondence, 15 February 2019)
22 B. ATTEBERY
Then when Julie observed that the world of Earthsea seems related to that
of ACH, Le Guin qualified her denial:
I think that’s true. And I think what’s going on is that instead of just accept-
ing the hierarchical, medieval fantasy world ready-made, the tradition I
started the trilogy in, I could take that non-industrialized world and not just
make it a sort of a picture-pretty medieval scene, but think about its eco-
nomics and its—I sort of always knew how people lived—daily life—but
actually thinking, really thinking about the politics and the economics, and
the relationship of the Kargad lands with the Archipelago and so on. Having
developed a world the way I did in ACH, from then on I kind of knew how
to do that. And how to slip in the information if I needed to. (Phillips,
Personal Correspondence, 15 February 2019)
in “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995). All the later Earthsea stories simi-
larly layer her later conceptions of gender and power and identity over
early ones: she doesn’t silence her younger self but listens and responds
and listens again. Her final novel, Lavinia, is a posthumous collaboration
with the poet Virgil, in which she found and filled the gaps in the Aeneid
much as she had with her earlier Earthsea novels.
Collaboration confounds standard critical models. Surveys of literature
usually relegate collaborative texts to footnotes—in science fiction, for
instance, the joint productions of C. L. Moore and her husband Henry
Kuttner get passed over for the less impressive individual output of their
contemporaries. Like 1940s film critics, we want heroic auteurs rather
than teams of writers, directors, and cinematographers, even if we have to
invent those auteurs. We want authors, auctors, and authorizers to tell us
how to feel and how to organize our lives along narrative lines. In this, as
in many of her later artistic choices, what might have seemed contrariness
on Le Guin’s part revealed itself to be prophetic. One of the lasting lessons
of postmodernism is that texts are always multiple, contradictory, and, yes,
collaborative. Language is social, and so are the arts that employ it, no
matter how much we want to turn writers into solitary colossi or demi-
divinities. Stories build on stories. The resonance we value in great litera-
ture is partly the artful echo of other literature.
In writing Always Coming Home, Le Guin renewed her art and her
vision by inviting others—including the reader—to collaborate with her.
The translations from Kesh in that book (the product of Todd Barton’s
suggestion that perhaps Kesh songs should not be in English, necessitat-
ing the invention of a new language) were followed by other such coop-
erative, trans-cultural projects. She translated Argentine SF writer Angélica
Gorodischer’s novel Kalpa Imperial (2003) and worked with poet Diana
Bellessi to produce mutual translations of one another’s verse (The Twins,
The Dream, 1996). She translated Goethe and Borges and Gabriela Mistral
and produced her own version—collaborating with previous translators
and commentators—of the Tao Te Ching (1998).
A different kind of collaboration is represented in Le Guin’s treasured
forms of science fiction and fantasy, which Always Coming Home encour-
ages us to read as translations from unknown originals, collaborations with
those who don’t yet exist. It will take such a joint effort for us to pass
through the crisis of the Anthropocene and out the other side. One of the
later sections of ACH is a dialogue between Pandora, Le Guin’s authorial
stand-in, and the archivist of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha-na.
24 B. ATTEBERY
And so they meet in the middle, in the Hinge, in the silence that we can
only fill with song, together.
There is a terrible gap between the present that is the Anthropocene
and the yin utopia that Le Guin dares to imagine. This is increasingly a
problem for science fiction writers and futurists: how to move beyond
ecological catastrophe and political chaos that loom in the near future to
get to a transcendent far future. Le Guin suggests that we can’t possibly
get there unless we’re already there. As Pandora tells the reader:
When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the
blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late
in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say,
“A little farther.” […] We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the
mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river
running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say,
“Isn’t that it, the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is, “Drink this water
of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go, and I can’t go
without you.” (2019, p. 398)
Now Le Guin is on the other side of the great hinge of death, and it is up
to us to find the way to go on, not without her, but with her, walking
together in companionable silence.
References
Davis, Lauren. 2009. Margaret Atwood Says She Doesn’t Write Science Fiction,
Ursula K. Le Guin Disagrees. Gizmodo, August 31. https://io9.gizmodo.
com/margaret-a twood-s ays-s he-d oesnt-w rite-s cience-f iction-5 349583.
Accessed 19 June 2019.
Foley, John Miles. 2002. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press.
2 ALWAYS COMING HOME AND THE HINGE IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S… 25
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1968. A Wizard of Earthsea. New York: Atheneum Books.
———. 1975. Wild Angels. In Wild Angels, 7. Santa Barbara: Capra Press.
———. 1989. Theodora. In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words,
Women, Places, 138–141. Grove Press.
———. 1993. Earthsea Revisioned. Cambridge: Green Bay Publications.
Reprinted in The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition. Illustrated
by Charles Vess, New York: Saga Press, 2018. 979–992.
———. 2012. Navna: The River-running, by Intrumo of Sinshan. In Finding My
Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 145. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
———. 2016. The Complete Orsinia. Ed. Brian Attebery. New York: The Library
of America.
———. 2019. Always Coming Home (Author’s Expanded Edition). Ed. Brian
Attebery. New York: The Library of America.
Moylan, Tom. 1986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian
Imagination. New York: Methuen.
Underhill, Ruth. 1985. Papago Woman. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
CHAPTER 3
Christopher L. Robinson
This is a revised and updated version of a text that was published in French as
“Subjectivités mobiles dans ‘Ether, OR’ d’Ursula K. Le Guin.” In Le sujet à
l’œuvre: Choix formels, choix politiques dans les arts, la littérature et les sciences
humaines, eds. Daniel Argelès, et al., 127–140. Éditions de l’École
Polytechnique, 2018. My sincere thanks go to Daniel Argèles, as well as to Lucile
Anglés and Dominique Rossin at the Éditions de l’École Polytechnique for
permission to reprint this material.
C. L. Robinson (*)
École Polytechnique, IP-Paris, Palaiseau, France
e-mail: [email protected]
when they fail to make what she calls the narrative connection, they then
perceive their lives as being disjointed, aimless, or meaningless. Edna’s
words also echo the debates that animated the feminist discourse of the
time when the story was written, and thus permits us to draw connections
between the text and the ideas of two major figures associated with third-
wave feminism, Rosi Braidotti and Teresa de Lauretis.
The place of feminism in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin has long been a
subject of debate. Amy Clarke, in a book-length study of the topic, exam-
ines the relationship of the author and her writings to the evolving literary
feminist movement, covering a period of nearly five decades (2010, p. 1).
“As a major contemporary author,” Clarke writes, “Le Guin is an interest-
ing test case for asking how feminism has shaped modern fiction, in part
because she was so slow to embrace feminist ideals” (2010, p. 6). Her
earliest stories and novels from the 1960s focused on, and were narrated
almost exclusively from the point of view of male characters. Later, in the
1970s, criticisms of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed
(1974) were a wake-up call. While these novels were hailed as masterpieces
among specialists of science fiction or utopian studies, they were roundly
criticized by many feminist critics (2010, p. 28). As a consequence, Le
Guin shifted toward a more consciously feminist position with what Clarke
calls “woman’s writing”: “stories about women, told in non-linear fash-
ion, about non-heroic people, and using the ‘mother tongue,’ the lan-
guage of the household” (2010, p. 7). She moreover adopted the eponymic
persona of the essay “The Space Crone,” in which Le Guin proposes to
send an elderly woman as ambassador of the human race to an alien civili-
zation. As Clarke describes her, the Space Crone is “a post-menopausal
woman who because of her marginal social position can comment openly
3 MAKING NARRATIVE CONNECTIONS WITH URSULA K. LE GUIN, ROSI… 29
about her society” (2010, p. 8). Le Guin also became more vocal about
gender issues, more engaged with feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan,
Jean-Baker Miller, Hélène Cixous, Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, and
eventually began to confront and revision her own earlier work (2010,
p. 103). Feeling liberated, thanks to this discourse, from “certain rigidi-
ties” of the masculinist conventions in literature—science fiction and fan-
tasy, in particular—she became more experimental in the writing of fiction,
and began working in a variety of genres (O’Connell 1987, p. 37; qtd. in
Clarke 2010, p. 99). Clarke considers the novel Always Coming Home
(1985) as the culmination of Le Guin’s feminist thought (2010, p. 1).1 At
the same time, some of her writings around this period begin to align with
what Clarke calls “an emerging post-feminist sensibility” (2010, p. 138).
By “post-feminist” she means, not that the author disavowed a feminist
agenda, but rather that Le Guin moved beyond the second wave of femi-
nism, which Clarke claims was characterized by separatism and essential-
ism (2010, p. 74). Le Guin’s “writing reflects the thinking current in the
nineties,” she writes, “especially post-feminism and to an extent both
post-structuralism and post-colonialism” (2010, p. 128).2
The short story “Ether, OR” provides an excellent example of Clark’s
observations concerning Le Guin’s fiction during her transitional period.
Clarke does not mention “Ether, OR” nor any of the other texts in the
collection Unlocking the Air (1996), apart from a very brief allusion to the
title story (2010, p. 9). In what follows, I will demonstrate how the exper-
imental form of “Ether, OR” nonetheless illustrates and puts into practice
1
The novel is therefore a transitional one, or, as Brian Attebery puts it in the first chapter
of this collection, it is the “hinge” in Le Guin’s writing career: “Everything prior winds not
down but in toward it. Everything she wrote afterward expands out from it” (2021, p. 15).
2
In a review of Clarke’s study, Sandra J. Lindow takes issue with the label of post-feminism,
because it suggests that the feminist movement and the struggle for gender equality are
things of the past. It should be noted, however, that Clarke makes a distinction between two
types of post-feminism: the reactionary kind advocated by Camille Paglia and propagated by
the conservative media; and another, more progressive and academic type that reacts to the
limitations of the second wave of literary feminism, but also continues the struggle (2010,
p. 26). That said, a less contentious strategy would be to adopt the more common term of
third-wave feminism. The word “wave,” moreover, is a metaphorical one that Le Guin her-
self has employed and expanded upon in discussing the impact of feminism on her writing:
“the feminism of the ’60s and ’70s and feminist reading, feminist criticism, came along in the
middle of my life and lifted me on a great wave, away from the ever dryer desert of male-
centered fiction and male-directed reading that I was getting lost in. I, and my writing, have
been borne up by that wave ever since” (Ramola D 2002).
30 C. L. ROBINSON
3
Le Guin’s ideas here invite comparison with the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière and nota-
bly his concept of the distribution of the sensible (2006).
32 C. L. ROBINSON
best known for her concept of nomadic subjectivity. Le Guin’s story fea-
tures two nomads, whose fates are intertwined, and evokes the nomadism
of American populations in both the past and present. When the time-
traveler Tobinye Walker took up permanent residence in Ether, it was pos-
sibly out of love for Edna, although he never explicitly admits this. Rather,
he describes his settling down as accidental: “When I first stopped by here,
before my accident, there was no town, of course, no settlement. Several
people came through and sometimes encamped for a season, but it was a
range without boundary, though it had names” (1996, p. 102). Walker’s
words, which describe the reports of Native Americans and early European
settlers to the land, evoke a nomadic way of life. In the past, it was people
who moved, but in the story, it is the town itself that ranges. As the char-
acters say, it is “a town that doesn’t stay in the same place all the time”
(1996, p. 103), but rather “moves all the time” (1996, p. 111) from the
coast to the mountains to the prairies. I propose to read the displacement
of the town as an allegorical backdrop, one that represents something akin
to Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivities. She developed this influ-
ential idea in Nomadic Subjects, a book which appeared in 1994, one year
before Le Guin’s short story was first published. To my knowledge, Le
Guin has never mentioned Braidotti, nor has Braidotti mentioned Le
Guin. Others, however, have established parallels between their work,
notably in connection with subjects such as posthumanism and feminist
utopias.4
In Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti states that contemporary discourse has
inherited a social and intellectual context that “celebrates and rewards
Sameness, cultural essentialism, and one-way thinking” (2011, p. 10).
This is true, she says, not only in masculinist discourse, but also in that of
the second-wave feminists. Aiming for a reversal of hierarchies, critics and
writers of this wave sought to position women as subjects rather than
objects of discourse. Yet, in their search for a properly feminine subject,
they tended to reproduce the reverse of the masculine, which is conceived
as unified, innate, and universal. As such, even if it is constructed in oppo-
sition, the feminine subject conceived in this way is still tied to the mascu-
line standard. The other problem with notions such as l’écriture féminine
is one mentioned by Amy Clark, namely essentialism: the idea that femi-
nine attributes are conferred by sexual biology rather than culturally
4
See, for example, Hansen 2012, p. 117; Lacey 2014, p. 142; Fortunati 2000, p. 225; and
Fortunati and Ramos 2006, p. 3.
34 C. L. ROBINSON
A Life Sentence
Braidotti first proposed the concept of nomadic subjectivity as a model for
a liberated, multifaceted, and dynamic sense of identity. In a revised edi-
tion of Nomadic Subjects, however, she acknowledges that unrelenting
change forces individuals to negotiate multiple social, economic, and
political constraints on a constant basis. Rather than inspire feelings of
liberation, the continual incitation to shift away from traditional forms of
identity can provoke fear, anxiety, and nostalgia. “[S]hifting our imaginary
identifications is not a willful operation, like a change of clothes,” she
writes. Rather, “imaginary relocations are complex and … the task of
working them through is as time-consuming as shedding an old skin”
(2011, p. 79). In Edna’s first monologue, a metaphor similar to that of
shedding skin joins that of nomadism:
3 MAKING NARRATIVE CONNECTIONS WITH URSULA K. LE GUIN, ROSI… 35
I feel like I was walking across Nevada, like the pioneers, carrying a lot of
stuff I need, but as I go along I have to keep dropping off things. I had a
piano once but it got swamped at a crossing of the Platte. I had a good fry-
pan, but it got too heavy and I left it in the Rockies. I had a couple ovaries
but they wore out around the time we were in Carson Sink. I had a good
memory but pieces of it keep dropping off, have to leave them scattered
around in the sagebrush, on the sand hills. (1996, p. 96)
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