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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
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15760
Sarah Bouttier • Pierre-Louis Patoine
Editors
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
ISSN 2731-4359 ISSN 2731-4367 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture
ISBN 978-3-030-82826-4 ISBN 978-3-030-82827-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
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
2 Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le

Guin’s Career 9
Brian Attebery
3 Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,

Rosi Braidotti, and Teresa de Lauretis 27
4 Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss,

and The Dispossessed 47
Dennis Wilson Wise
5 Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in

Le Guin’s Ekumen 65
Arwen Spicer
6 The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and

Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin 83
Katie Stone, Eli Lee, and Francis Gene-Rowe
vii
viii Contents
7 The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula

K. Le Guin and the X-Men107
Stephanie Burt
8 Ursula K. Le Guin, Thinking in SF Mode121

Isabelle Stengers
Author Index137
Works by Le Guin141
Notes on Contributors
Brian Attebery is Professor of English at Idaho State University, USA,

and the editor of Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. He has authored
several books about fantasy and science fiction, including The Fantasy
Tradition in American Literature from Irving to Le Guin (1980), Decoding
Gender in Science Fiction (2002), Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the
Remaking of Myth (2014), and Fantasy in the World: How It Means and
What It Does, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Together with
Ursula K. Le Guin and Karen Joy Fowler, he co-edited The Norton Book of
Science Fiction (1997). He has also edited several volumes in the Library
of America’s reissue of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin: The Complete
Orsinia (2016), The Hainish Novels & Stories (2017), Always Coming
Home (2019), and Annals of the Western Shore (2020).
Sarah Bouttier is Assistant Professor of English at École Polytechnique,
Paris, France. After completing a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne Nouvelle on
D. H. Lawrence’s poetry and his representation of the nonhuman world,
she taught and researched as a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University.
She has been working on a monograph defining a poetics of the nonhu-
man encompassing a broad range of Anglophone poets of the twentieth
and twenty-first century and has written widely on the nonhuman in lit-
erature and modern and contemporary poetry.
Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard University, UK. Her
most recent books include After Callimachus (2020) and Don’t Read
Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (2019). A new book of poems
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
Arts Décoratifs. In addition to completing the first doctoral dissertation

on Le Guin in French at Paris University-Nanterre, he authored the entry
for Le Guin in Le Dictionnaire universel des créatrices (Les Éditions des
Femmes, 2013), a publication sponsored by UNESCO. Interested in both
gender and genre studies, he has written articles on Le Guin, Kathy Acker,
Willa Cather, H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, H. R. Giger,
and Frank Herbert in journals such as Children’s Literature, Extrapolation,
Names, Textes et Genres, and Yearbook of Comparative and General
Literature. He is the editor, with Sam Azulys at NYU-Paris, of 2001:
l’Odyssée de l’espace: au carrefour des arts et des sciences (Les Éditions de
l’École Polytechnique, 2021).
Arwen Spicer holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of
Oregon, USA, where she focused on progressionist and non-progressionist
discourses in utopian science fiction, including Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
More recently, her work on Anthropocene discourse in the science fiction
of Jeff VanderMeer has been published. She teaches English at Clark
College in Vancouver, Washington, USA, and runs community-based
workshops on workable utopias, a framework for seeking hopeful but real-
istic ways forward for our current world. Her short science fiction story
“Let It Die” is forthcoming in the Le Guin-inspired anthology, Dispatches
from Anarres (2021). Her speculative fiction has also appeared in
Challenging Destiny, Women of the Woods, and Spoon Knife 4.
Isabelle Stengers is Professor Emerita at the Université Libre de
Bruxelles, Belgium. After graduating in chemistry, she turned to philoso-
phy and, as a doctoral student, her collaboration with Nobel Prize winner
Ilya Prigogine led her to develop the contrast between the conceptual
inventiveness of physics and its role as a model of objectivity. Claiming the
irreducible plurality of scientific practices, she has proposed, as a challenge
inseparably political and cultural, the concept of an active ecology of prac-
tices, embedded within a demanding, empowered environment. Her work
is related to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred N. Whitehead, and
William James, as well as to the anthropology of Bruno Latour and the SF
thinking adventure of Donna Haraway. Among her books published in
English translation are: Order out of Chaos with Ilya Prigogine (1984); The
Invention of Modern Science (2000); Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell
with Philippe Pignarre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Cosmopolitics I and II
(2011); Thinking with Whitehead (2011) and Women Who Make a Fuss
(2014) with Vinciane Despret; In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming
Barbarism (2015); and Another Science is Possible (2018).
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Katie Stone is a Ph.D. student and an associate tutor working at Birkbeck,

University of London, UK. Her thesis explores childhood and utopianism
as imagined in science fiction and she is particularly interested in Marxist,
feminist, and queer readings of the genre. Stone is the co-founder of the
research network Utopian Acts and the research collective Beyond Gender.
She was recently awarded the Peter Nicholls’s essay prize for her work on
James Tiptree Jr., and she is one of this year’s R. D. Mullen Fellows. Stone
has written for Foundation, MLR Review, Vector, and the SFRA Review.
She has a forthcoming article in Utopian Studies on vampirism and uto-
pian hunger.
Dennis Wilson Wise is a lecturer at the University of Arizona, USA, who
studies the link between political theory and speculative fiction. Previous
academic work has appeared in Gothic Studies, Law & Literature,
Extrapolation, and others, and in 2019 he received a R. D. Mullen
Postdoctoral Fellowship from Science Fiction Studies to study modern
alliterative poetry in speculative fiction. An anthology on this modern allit-
erative verse is forthcoming with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Wise is also the reviews editor for Fafnir, which won a World Fantasy
Award in 2020.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Christopher L. Robinson, Sarah Bouttier,

and Pierre-Louis Patoine
Abstract Ursula K. Le Guin anticipated many of the problems we are now

facing and imagined new ways of thinking about them. This collection of
studies explores the literary and imaginative, speculative and provisional
modes in which she has engaged with ethical questions related to utopia, the
power of social change, non-coercive intercultural exchange, and the inter-
connectedness between readers and writers. By tracing the literary, ecological,
philosophical, sexual, postcolonial, and anthropological ramifications of her
work, Legacies also takes new approaches to making sense of the “science” of
science fiction. In addition to presenting the main themes of the collection,
this introductory chapter provides a brief overview of Le Guin’s family back-
ground, her cultural and intellectual influences, and the diversity of her oeuvre.
C. L. Robinson (*) • S. Bouttier

École Polytechnique, IP-Paris, Palaiseau, France
e-mail: [email protected];
[email protected]
P.-L. Patoine
New Sorbonne University, Paris, France
e-mail: [email protected]
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
C. L. Robinson et al. (eds.), The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin,
Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_1
2 C. L. ROBINSON ET AL.
Keywords Alfred Kroeber • Donna Haraway • Epistemology • Fantasy

• Feminism • Frederic Jameson • Indigenous cultures • Intercultural
commonalities • Isabelle Stengers • Science fiction • Social change •
Theodora Kroeber • Ursula K. Le Guin • Utopia
Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art,
the art of words.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
A visionary thinker, engaging storyteller, and superb stylist, Ursula K. Le

Guin parted from this world on 22 January 2018, leaving behind a sub-
stantial body of fiction and non-fiction that appears more vital with each
passing day. The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics is
the result of a collective effort to trace the ins and outs of this vitality, map-
ping out itineraries through the vast territories she has bequeathed us.
Why is Le Guin so important for us today? As humanity faces climate
change and species extinction, the overexploitation and appropriation of
natural resources, the continuation and the new incarnations of imperial-
ism and colonialism, military conflicts, and racial and gender oppression,
we turn to the arts and to literature in the hope of finding ways to re-
imagine and re-engineer the world we live in. The twenty-first century has
seen a renewed interest in the reparative, didactic, moral, and political
power of art, an interest central to subfields in the humanities such as eco-
criticism, theories of care and narrative medicine,1 post/decolonialism,
feminist and queer theory, disability, trauma, and animal studies. Le Guin’s
legacy here appears invaluable, inviting us to embark on adventures in
which we brush against planetary ethics and aesthetics, interspecies com-
munities, post-gender and anarchist societies, indigenous knowledge, or
vegetal sentience.
But if Le Guin’s fiction and essays engage with the tensions and contra-
dictions that have animated the consciousness of her time—debates that
have gained in urgency as the years have unfolded—she has never forgot-
ten to make us dream, to open the doors of our imagination, transporting
1
A practice anticipated by Le Guin in the practice of telling life stories in Always
Coming Home.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
us to worlds inhabited by complex characters. It is thus no coincidence

that the chapters of this collection explore the specifically literary and
imaginative, speculative and provisional responses Le Guin has created
when engaging with the ethical questions of how we—women and men,
plants and animals, cultures and individuals, ancestors and descendants—
can live together. Across the multiplicity of their perspectives, the contri-
butions to The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin have been drawn to these
questions, weaving common threads in exploring the possibility and desir-
ability of utopia, of wielding the power of social change, or that of consti-
tuting intercultural commonalities.
By tracing the literary, ecological, philosophical, sexual, postcolonial,
and anthropological ramifications of her work, the chapters of this collec-
tion also delineate new ways of making sense of the “science” of science
fiction. Indeed, in her crafting of alternative worlds and myths, Le Guin
combines science and literature, delineating new methodologies for the
weaving and sharing of knowledge.
Le Guin was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, whom Dell Hymes
described as “the greatest general anthropologist that American anthro-
pology has ever known” (1964, p. 689). Le Guin herself developed an
interest in anthropology, and became immersed in Native American cul-
ture from her earliest childhood. Kroeber kept up with developments in
the other sciences, was a correspondent of Carl Jung, and a personal friend
of Robert Oppenheimer, who would serve Le Guin as a model for the
character of Shevek in The Dispossessed (1974). She also owes much to her
mother, Theodora Kroeber, the author of several books related to
Amerindian cultures.
Despite the demands of family life, Le Guin became a highly prolific
writer, producing some 70 titles, including novels, collections of poetry
and short stories, children’s literature, essays, and translations. She also
wrote hundreds of reviews and short articles, screenplays, the libretti for
two operas and for an orchestral work, The Uses of Music in Uttermost
Parts (1996), which was recorded with the author herself reading the text.
Finally, she co-edited, with Brian Attebery, The Norton Book of Science
Fiction (1993). Focusing on just the fiction, Le Guin has contributed to
multiple genres: mainstream, experimental, magical realism, fantasy and,
of course, science fiction.
With its elegant and fluid style, her writing engages ideas from both the
social and the physical sciences, weaving them into finely tuned narratives
that immerse the reader in sensuous and emotional story-worlds. Drawing
with erudition from fields as diverse as linguistics and ecology, compara-

tive religion and political science, physics and historiography, Le Guin’s
fiction and non-fiction moreover requires us to redefine what it means to
be human, by decentring a traditional, potentially racialized and gendered
vision of humans and placing them in a continuum involving animals,
technology, and more generally the environment. Epistemic exigency is
here matched by moral exigency—a commitment, we note in passing, that
is also the origin of one of the most frequent criticisms of Le Guin and of
the author’s own self-admitted flaws in her fiction: she can be overly didac-
tic, polemical, even preachy at times. In writing The Word for World is
Forest, for example, she admits, “I succumbed … to the lure of the pulpit.
It is a very strong lure to a science fiction writer, who deals more directly
than most novelists with ideas … and who therefore is always in danger of
inextricably confusing ideas with opinions” (1979, p. 151).
Despite her proclivity for didacticism, the canonization of Le Guin’s
works is not unrelated to the rich ideational content of her writing. It thus
comes as no surprise that she has inspired philosophers such as Donna
Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Fredric Jameson. The latter’s collection of
essays Archaeologies of the Future (2005) takes its title from a phrase in
Always Coming Home (1985). This novel, which describes the post-
apocalyptic culture of a people who “might be going to have lived a long,
long time from now in Northern California” (Le Guin 2019, p. 7), is the
focus of Brian Attebery’s contribution to this collection. Because they
engage so directly with ideas, her works have drawn admiration, emula-
tion, but also, as we have just mentioned, criticism. This is especially true
of her early science fiction, often deemed timid in its feminism. The Left
Hand of Darkness (1969) continues to generate heated debate and the
expression of divergent opinions. Yet this landmark novel, which describes
a biologically androgynous species, paved the way to an almost exclusively
male literary genre for writers such as Joanna Russ, Doris Lessing, or
Margaret Atwood. In his chapter, Christopher L. Robinson explores Le
Guin’s relationship, indebtedness, and contributions to feminist thought.
The Dispossessed (1974) is recognized not only as one of the masterpieces
of science fiction and anarchist thought, but also an important twentieth-
century contribution to the utopian tradition, which many believe Le
Guin to have revived (see, e.g., Davis and Stillman 2012). Utopianism, a
common thread through this collection, is specifically addressed by Dennis
Wilson Wise and Arwen Spicer.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
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.
Complementing this contribution, Katie Stone, Eli Lee, and Francis

Gene-Rowe, in Chap. 6 “The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism,
Time, and Decoloniality in the Work of Ursula K. Le Guin,” propose a
nuanced analysis of the complex relationship established between, on the
one hand, Le Guin’s writings over the decades, and, on the other, indig-
enous knowledge (especially Western Native American), in terms of her
vision and narrative use of time and of other-than-human life-forms.
Without discrediting her, the authors situate Le Guin racially, through an
exploration of her temporalities, nonhuman or not, decolonial or not.
With Chap. 7 “The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula
K. Le Guin and the X-Men,” we turn from indigenous to popular culture.
Stephanie Burt compares the treatment of super powers in the X-Men
comics, especially Asgardian Wars (1985), and in Le Guin’s fiction, nota-
bly The Lathe of Heaven (1971), but also her last fantasy trilogy, Annals of
the Western Shore: Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007). Burt
strives for a nuanced vision of power and responsibility in the work of Le
Guin, arguing that we must move beyond a simplistic reduction of her
ethos to a celebration of non-action, to one in which power is not power
over things and people, but rather power with, acting and crafting futures
together, instead of dominating.
The final chapter (Chap. 8) of this collection, written by the eminent
philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, addresses fiction and essays span-
ning Le Guin’s entire career to develop an epistemology of “thinking in
SF mode,” one which explores how speculative fiction—more than any
thought experiment in the social sciences—can allow us to see, through
the density of world-building, the potentialities for future change evolving
in the interstices of contemporary experience.
Following a trope dear to Le Guin, this collection of essays offers read-
ings and comments on readings, committing to a hermeneutic practice
reminiscent of the storytelling traditions and the writings scattered on the
walls in the old town of The Telling (2000). Though their methods differ
widely, these readings all avoid translating the intricate thoughts of her
narratives into abstract issues taken outside of their original story-world.
One reading that serves as a primary example here is that of The Asgardian
Wars in the X-Men comics, which, as Burt suggests, explicitly reinterprets
The Lathe of Heaven by introducing nuances in its “ethics of power and
responsibility,” nuances announcing positions that are typical of Le Guin’s
later writing. The centrality of methodology and epistemology in these
readings follows one of Le Guin’s most important teachings: that, as
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Isabelle Stengers shows, SF is a mode of thinking, something to think with

rather than simply about. Within that search for new methods rather than
new content, and for thinking with, rather than thinking about, these
readings bring forth the literary as a site of potentiality and hesitation, as
in the reworking of the interconnectedness of readers and writers dis-
cussed by Attebery and Robinson, or the hesitation as a mode for the
realization of utopias, as Wise deftly introduces. Taken together, these
close readings situate the art of Le Guin in terms of history, race, gender,
and politics, revealing its legacy as an open-ended roadmap to the future,
a methodology for dreaming, and a lesson in style and sensibility. By navi-
gating the constellation of her writings, by making them live through
interpretation, this collection invites us to find, between science, fiction
and ethics, ways of living together in responsibility, joy, and difference.
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
Always Coming Home and the Hinge

in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Career
Brian Attebery
Abstract Always Coming Home (ACH) marks a transition in Ursula

K. Le Guin’s career, from her meteoric rise in the mid-1960s to the
remarkable second half of her career. An appropriate metaphor for the
place of ACH in her life and work is the “hinge” that appears as a visual
motif throughout the book: the empty space joining the two spirals that
her imaginary future community terms the heyiya-if. The novel itself
and the essays it inspired her to write show Le Guin rethinking her role
and her art. Moving outward from the hinge, we find Le Guin develop-
ing its implications in her later work: metafictional play, alternative ways
of living in the world, a poetic voice grounded in speech, and alterna-
tives to the heroic conventions of myth.
B. Attebery (*)
Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID, USA

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_2
10 B. ATTEBERY
Keywords Always Coming Home • Collaboration • Imaginary

ethnography • Science fictional megatext • Ursula K. Le Guin •
Yin utopia
The Ursula K. Le Guin of the 1960s through 1980s, the Ursula K. Le

Guin of the 1990s–2010s: are they the same? The only possible answer is
yes/no. Or perhaps no/yes. When fans and scholars talk of Le Guin’s
work and career, especially those who (like me) were around during the
first phase, they tend to dwell on one era or the other. I have even seen the
question posed by older scholars: does anyone read Le Guin’s work after
The Dispossessed (1974)? As the later Le Guin began to emerge with works
like Tehanu (1990), some readers spoke of how she had gone over to the
wrong side. She was angry, she was feminist, she had forgotten how to tell
a story. But, of course, a whole new set of readers on this side of the divide
are more interested in the post-1990 Le Guin. They like the reframed
Hainish universe and what Le Guin termed, in a celebrated essay, the
“revisioned” Earthsea (“Earthsea Revisioned,” 1993). They enjoy the
narrative experiments of Changing Planes (2003) and other short fiction.
Their Earthsea has always challenged masculine models of power and her-
oism. They see a new political landscape reflected in a series of science
fiction novellas, “[T]he Annals of the Western Shore,” and later Orsinian
tales such as “Unlocking the Air” (1996). Instead of debating whether
The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness was the best SF novel ever,
they want to talk about The Telling (2000) and Lavinia (2008).
What is not discussed as much by either group is the major work that
falls right between these two careers (either of which, I probably don’t
have to point out here, would be more than enough to establish its author
as a major force in American literature). That island between two conti-
nents is Always Coming Home. Since I have been working closely with the
book for the past couple of years in preparing the Library of America’s
expanded edition (2019), I’m very much aware of how it fits or doesn’t fit
with everything that came before and everything that came after. I don’t
want to isolate it from the rest of her work or to promote the mostly false
notion that she had fallen silent before roaring back with the fiction of the
1990s. Le Guin’s writing from the late 1970s and 1980s includes chil-
dren’s and young adult books, a screenplay, a new outpouring of poetry,
category-defying fiction, and powerful essays on, as Le Guin indicates in
the subtitle of one collection, Words, Women, and Places.
2 ALWAYS COMING HOME AND THE HINGE IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S… 11
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
fiction was cyberpunk, it said no both to cyberspace disembodiment and

to street-smart violence.
Not only is Stone Telling’s story less beguiling than many of the other
narrative fragments and cultural glimpses in the book, it is also deliberately
anticlimactic. The novel sets up a potential conflict between the militaristic
Condor and the peaceful Kesh, only to show the Condor invasion fizzling
out because of poor planning, food shortages, and the absence of an
industrial base to support armies and weapons. I suspect that most readers
fail to grasp, at least the first time around, that the Condor story serves
mostly as contrast with less dramatic but ultimately more engaging stories
of ordinary life in the Valley of the Na. The book is really about what it
might mean to be not aggressive, not acquisitive, not wasteful—in other
words, not us. It is not the kind of storytelling we have been told to value:
the kind with violence and catharsis and slices of “real life.” But it’s the
kind of storytelling we need if we are to survive this era of self-interest,
short-sightedness, and cascading catastrophes called the Anthropocene.
This 30-plus-year-old novel is very much a book for the present moment.
We need to take to heart its message (in the poem “Not Being Single-
Minded”) that there is no such thing as throwing away: wherever we
throw things is part of here (2019, p. 567).
The Valley of the Na is a future Napa Valley, California, that looks a lot
like a past, and many hasty readers took the book to be an exercise in nos-
talgia or technophobia. It is, instead, a bold thought-experiment in stabil-
ity and sustainability, which in turn necessitated a literary experiment. To
write Always Coming Home required Le Guin to invent a new kind of
story, one without heroes, one in which community is more interesting
than conflict, and one in which silence is treated as white space is treated
in Zen paintings—not as absence but as an opportunity for imagination.
Le Guin structured the book in such a way that readers could jump
from one Stone Telling segment to the next, treating the rest as backdrop,
like the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings or the cetology sections of
Moby-Dick. But at the same time, she opened a dialogue with the reader
about other ways of reading, writing, and living. The reader who was will-
ing to get lost, to stray from the narrative path, was richly rewarded. I was
recently asked by an interviewer about different ways to read the book,
and it struck me that one could start with the present-day, which shows up
in a story called “A Hole in the Air,” and follow Pandora forward across
the bridge from Here-and-Now to There-and-Then. It really is a
hypertext without a computer interface. That is one reason it gets better

with rereading, when memory provides the linkages.
I’m not sure Le Guin would have been able to write Always Coming
Home if she had not been experiencing a series of personal and profes-
sional transitions. During the time leading up to writing it, Le Guin made
serious efforts to re-identify herself not primarily as a science fiction writer
(though she never did the Margaret Atwood thing of denying her genre
ties—see Davis 2009, for instance) but simply as a writer. In the process of
rethinking her writerly identity, she went back to one of her unpublished
early works, a historical novel set in an imaginary country, and reworked it
as Malafrena, published in 1979 (available in The Complete Orsinia,
2016). In that same year her mother Theodora Kroeber Quinn died.
Ursula was powerfully affected by the deaths of both parents. Referring to
the year her father died, she once commented that, “I came of age, rather
belatedly, at the age of 31,” and one of the first poems that led her to the
world of the Kesh was “written when my mother was mortally ill”; she
called the poem “a first beginning of learning what questions to ask”
(2019, p. 751). Le Guin’s introduction to the 1985 edition of her moth-
er’s volume of California Indian tales, The Inland Whale, suggests autobi-
ography, a glimpse into her own workshop:
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)
In 1983, Charles Le Guin had a sabbatical from Portland State University,

and with their children away at college, both Le Guins were free to take
time off from busy lives. They spent five months at the Kroeber ranch in
the Napa Valley—a longtime summer retreat for the extended family—
where Ursula worked out ideas for a future based on E. F. Schumacher’s
concept of appropriate technology, on ideas about simplicity from Henry
Thoreau and others, and on anthropological theories of community.
She was also taking time to rethink her art. It is no coincidence that
about the same time she was working on Always Coming Home she pro-
duced a cluster of powerful essays about gender, language, literature, and
14 B. ATTEBERY
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.”
depending on one’s trajectory. In the middle, where a galaxy would have

a core cluster of suns, is an empty space. The text calls this figure a heyiya-
if, from a Kesh word of greeting, heya, whose connotations, Le Guin’s
narrator Pandora informs us, “include sacredness, hinge, connection, spi-
ral, center, praise, and change.” Villages use the heyiya-if as a map. Dances
follow its pattern. The book’s design employs it to divide sections of text.
Margaret Chodos’s illustrations echo the heyiya-if in the eye of a puma,
the topknot of a quail. Rituals proceed according to its logic. Pandora tells
us it is “the visual form of an idea which pervaded the thought and culture
of the Valley,” rather as the yin-yang symbol runs through Taoist philoso-
phy and practice (2019, p. 65). And it all depends on the space in the
middle. The Kesh refer to this empty center as the Hinge. A hinge, says
Pandora, “connects and it holds apart.” (2019, p. 288). If the hinge were
not vacant, there would be no room to dance, no place to say “the word
at the center, heya!” (2019, p. 67).
Always Coming Home marks the hinge in Le Guin’s career. Everything
prior winds not down but in toward it. Everything she wrote afterward
expands out from it. Without it (especially considering the critical bias
toward realist novels and against things like children’s literature), she
might have risked becoming one of those American writers whose lives, as
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, have no second acts. And yet what a splendid
second act was to follow the interval that produced ACH! The first great
work that came soon after, and that very much reflects the same sort of
thinking about alternative ways of seeing and of living, is the novella
“Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1988). Like the novel,
the story borrows the Native American trickster Coyote (in this case a
female coyote) and explores what it means to see the world through lenses
other than the Western rationalist, capitalist, anthropocentric one that
reduces all kinds of people except “human people” into enemies or com-
modities. And it’s funny.
Next, after rethinking heroes and quests, she returned to the fantasy
world of Earthsea with Tehanu (1990): a novel that denies nothing in the
first trilogy and yet reinterprets all through a feminist lens. Lines dropped
casually in the first three volumes, like “Weak as women’s magic,” and
“Wicked as woman’s magic” (1968, p. 5) become the basis for question-
ing what women are, what magic is, and why weakness should be equated
with wickedness. All of those questions were implied in the first novels and
in the traditional sources from which she built them. Yet somehow no one
noticed, including Le Guin herself, until she stopped to listen to her own
16 B. ATTEBERY
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.
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
perspectives of anthropology and folklore and music. “A Non-Euclidean

View of California as a Cold Place to Be” articulates the alternative model
of utopia that allowed Le Guin to revive that seemingly dead genre—
scholar Tom Moylan, in Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the
Utopian Imagination, terms her approach the “critical utopia” (1986,
p. 10): utopia as process and dialogue rather than as blueprint. She had
created utopias before: now she articulated a theory of the “yin utopia”:
something like Moylan’s concept but more limited and explicitly “partici-
patory, circular, [and] cyclical” (Le Guin 2019, pp. 713–714). Most of her
later work includes glimpses or moments of such yin utopias.
Looking at another mode, though Le Guin had always written poetry,
arguably after listening to the silences and songs of the Kesh she became a
poet. Her earlier verse was less engaging than her powerful prose. It often
comes across as distant: elegant but too tightly controlled. Here is a sam-
ple, part of the title poem from her first collection Wild Angels. The poet
apostrophizes the landscape of California: “O wild angels of the open
hills […]”
Angels of the shadowed ancient land

That lies yet unenvisioned, without myth,
Return, and silent-winged descend
On the winds that you have voyaged with,
And in the barren evening stand
On the hills of my childhood, in whose silences,
Savage, before all sorrow, your presence is. (1975, p. 7)
This is a lovely poem but it is very self-consciously a Poem, from the

conventional “O” of address that opens the poem to the final poetic inver-
sion. Throw in the loose iambic pentameter, the end-rhymes, and the
romantic rhetoric and it becomes clear that this is a young writer emulat-
ing the masters. The poet tells you not only how she feels but how you
are supposed to feel, using loaded words like “shadowed” and “barren”;
the lines are crowded with significance; there is no space, no silence despite
the two-fold references to silence.
Le Guin says she showed the poem to her father, not thinking about
the irony of telling someone who “had spent a good part of the previous
five decades listening to and writing down the vision-inspired myths of
California” that the place was empty of myth. His reaction was, “It’s fine.
But what do you need angels for?” “To mediate,” was her response.
“Why?” said my father. “Mediate what? You’re here—it’s here.”

The man had spent too much time, you see, with Indians. (2019,
pp. 741–742)
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:
Hey say who, sweet chance, sweet chance,

Hey say who, sweet chance to be,
To come to be, sweet chance,
20 B. ATTEBERY
Sweet chance to come to me, sweet chance. (2019, p. 676)3
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:
Most Kesh poetry was occasional—the highest form, according to Goethe—

and much of it was made by what we call amateurs, people doing poetry as
a common skill, the way people do sewing or cooking, as an ordinary and
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.
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,
Listen to the voices of the water in its going.

Quiet as an outbreath as it wells up in its spring
deep in dirt among the stones, it gathers up its flowing
and creeps out into daylight like a little living thing. (2012, p. 145)
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)
So perhaps the work of coming home in Always Coming Home enabled Le

Guin to remake another of her fictional worlds. But I think the biggest
transformation is at a more granular level: in the words and sentences that
speak more directly, more simply, more collectively.
A big part of the change from one side of the heyiya-if to the other was
that Le Guin became an active seeker of collaborations. ACH not only
celebrates communal creation; it is a collaboration from start to finish, in
which Le Guin’s text is supplemented by George Hersh’s geological spec-
ulation, Margaret Chodos’s drawings, and Todd Barton’s compositions.
Each of those contributions stimulated her imagination, feeding the imag-
inary future. The experience gave her a taste for collective projects. After
working with Barton to fuse musical and poetic visions, she joined with
composer Elinor Armer to produce a set of pieces for orchestra and wom-
en’s chorus called Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts (1996). In the early
1990s, as I mentioned before, she brought Karen Joy Fowler and me in as
co-conspirators in remaking the science fiction canon with The Norton
Book of Science Fiction (1993).
She increasingly used intertextuality to conduct a kind of collaborative
debate with the past and with cultural norms. A couple of examples are her
anti-heroic SF story “Dancing to Ganam” (1993) and her meta-fairy tale
“The Poacher” (1992) in which she lets the poverty of “Hansel and
Gretel” interrogate the wish-fulfillment of “The Sleeping Beauty.” She
debated with her younger self—a kind of self-collaboration—in the
1976/1987 essay “Is Gender Necessary? Redux,” and collaborated with
feminist critiques of The Left Hand of Darkness to re-envisage androgyny
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
Frustrated at their failure to reach consensus about technology or knowl-

edge or the future, Pandora says to the Archivist, “Go sing heya, like any
savage,” and the Archivist replies, “Only if you’ll sing with me.”
PAN: I don’t know how to sing heya.

ARC: I’ll teach you, aunt.
PAN: I’ll learn, niece. (2019, p. 372)
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.
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
Making Narrative Connections with Ursula

K. Le Guin, Rosi Braidotti, and Teresa de
Lauretis
Abstract The form of “Ether, OR” invites comparison with Ursula K. Le

Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of narrative. In this short story, a woman
named Edna meditates on age, sex, work, childcare, and death. Her efforts
to connect the disparate experiences of her life illustrate Le Guin’s asser-
tion that all individuals need both to tell and to listen to stories because,
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

Switzerland AG 2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_3
28 C. L. ROBINSON
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.
Keywords Carrier bag theory of fiction • Rosi Braidotti • Teresa de

Lauretis • “Ether, OR” • Feminist narratology • Feminist subjectivity •
Ursula K. Le Guin • Nomadic subjectivity
An inability to fit events together in an order that at least seems to

make sense, to make the narrative connection, is a radical
incompetence at being human.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
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
the feminist narratological theories that Le Guin elaborates in several

essays collected in Dancing on the Edge of the World (1989). The text
moreover reflects some of the main currents of feminist discourse of the
time in which it was written. In particular, the mobile topology of the city
of Ether, Oregon, the setting of the story, can be read as an allegory of
what Rosi Braidotti, one of the major figures associated with third-wave
feminism, calls nomadic subjectivity. The autobiographical narrative frag-
ments of the central character, Edna, invite comparison with Braidotti’s
recent questioning about the consequences of the loss of a unified subject
in contemporary critical theory and practice. Braidotti, furthermore,
establishes a close link between nomadic subjectivity and narrative. After
exploring the connections between the two, I will come back, by way of
conclusion, to some of the issues raised by Le Guin in her essays on narra-
tive and in her short story, and then draw a few final connections with the
ideas of Braidotti and another seminal figure in gender studies, Teresa de
Lauretis.
A Carrier Bag Narrative

Le Guin’s personal theory of narrative aims to develop an approach to
writing that is both feminist and egalitarian. “Ether, OR” is dedicated to
“the Narrative Americans,” an obvious pun on Native Americans. Yet,
behind this simple wordplay, there lies a democratic theory of narrative
which states that all Americans have a tale worthy of being told, all have
the inborn abilities to tell that tale, and all have a deep-rooted need and
desire to tell it. In an essay entitled, “Some Thoughts on Narrative,” Le
Guin argues that all individuals live their lives as if they were living out a
story. And since all individuals live their lives as a fiction (including fiction
in the negative sense of a falsehood or illusion), they all possess the mini-
mal skills required to recount the stories of their lives in a meaningful way
(1989c, p. 42). Indeed, she claims that, if we accept Aristotle’s definition
of narrative as “language used to connect events in time,” it then follows
that, not only are all humans able to create narratives, but they do create
them—in dreams, in anecdotes, even in accounts of how one’s day has
gone (1989c, p. 38).
Most Narrative Americans hesitate to acknowledge their ability to spin
a tale. They say they do not have the time, or that they lack the imagina-
tion and talent to connect events in a meaningful and artful manner, or
that they have nothing very interesting to tell. Yet, contrary to this
common assumption, narrative is not confined to a partitioned sphere of

cultural production and consumption—Art with a capital A, Literature
with a capital L.3 Rather, Le Guin argues, narrative is “a central function
of language” and “a fundamental operation of the normal mind function-
ing in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story” (1989c, p. 39).
She even goes so far as to say that “[s]o seen, stupidity could be defined as
a failure to make enough connections, and insanity as severe repeated
error in making connections—in telling The Story of My Life” (1989c,
p. 43). Individuals need both to tell and to listen to stories because, when
they fail to make the narrative connection, they then perceive their lives as
being disjointed, aimless, and meaningless. As such, life becomes the very
image of despair.
Making the narrative connection is what “Ether, OR” is all about, the
guiding concept of its content and form. The text consists of 13 short
monologues, headed by the italicized names of the narrators. Each of the
individual texts is in itself a jumble of anecdotes, memories, reflections,
ruminations, fantasies, confessions, and so on. These individuals speak in
their own voices, with their idiolects, colloquialisms, repetitions, and
grammatical errors kept intact. As such, the individual narratives of “Ether,
OR” are similar to the Life Stories in Always Coming Home, which are
described as “naïve autobiographies without literary pretensions” (2019,
p. 311). With the exception of Tobinye (aka Toby) Walker, a former time
traveler (or time walker), the subjects of the narratives in “Ether, OR” are
all more or less ordinary Americans. Edna is a 60-year-old woman who
works in the local grocery store and strongly resembles the “Space Crone.”
Thomas Sunn, an anti-government reactionary and misogynist, describes
himself as a “crusty old bachelor” (1996, p. 97). Ervin Muth, a conserva-
tive real estate agent, rails against immigrants. Starra Walinow Amethyst is
a teenager who has erotic fantasies about Frenchmen. Gracie Fane is a
tomboy who wants to be a truck driver. Archie Hiddenstone, a grocery
clerk who works at the same shop as Edna, has a crush on Gracie. The
owner of the grocery store is J. Needless. Roger Hiddenstone, a former
pilot, has become a ranch owner. Emma Bodely is a paranoiac who has a
morbid obsession with serial killers.
This heterogeneous collection of texts brings to mind yet another essay
on narrative, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” “[T]he natural, proper,
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
fitting shape of the narrative might be that of a sack, a bag,” Le Guin

asserts. “A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A
novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful rela-
tionship to one another and to us” (1989a, p. 169). Following this idea,
the overall narrative structure of “Ether, OR” can be read as resembling a
container of shorter heterogeneous narratives that have been gathered
from among the residents of a small west coast town. Moreover, the order-
ing of these shorter texts is non-linear, purposefully avoiding what the
author derides in her essay as “the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-
arrow mode” of storytelling (1989a, p. 170). Most of the characters have
only one monologue, but two of them, Tobinye Walker and J. Needless,
each have two, while Edna, the most complex and fully developed of the
characters, has three. These sub-narratives have been cut up into two or
three episodes that are dispersed among the others.
Like the lives they recount, the different narratives overlap and connect
with one another in multiple ways, reflecting various relationships among
the characters. These points of connection, however, are never identified
nor brought together by an over-arching narrator. It is rather the role of
the reader, like the nomad woman with the objects in her carrier bag, to
identify the narrative connections, to sort them out, and to make sense of
them. In mapping these connections, the reader will discover that Edna’s
narratives serve as the node of relationships between all the other charac-
ters and their stories. Emma Bodely is Edna’s friend, Thomas Sunn her
former lover. Toby Walker and Roger Hiddenstone both had children
with Edna. Her boss, J. Needless, is in love with her but cannot reveal his
emotions; consequently, he feels perturbed by her presence in the shop.
Ervin Muth believes that Tobinye Walker, the former lover whom Edna
still seems to long for, is an illegal alien. The son of Edna and Roger,
Archie, has a crush on Gracie Fane. Starra has a crush on Archie. Yet, if
Tobinye’s final prophecies are to be believed, it is she and Roger, rather
than Archie, who will one day “lie in each other’s tender arms, she sixteen
he sixty” (1996, pp. 122–123).
A Town on the Move

Having made some of the narrative connections within the text itself, I
will now place “Ether, OR” within the context of the feminist discourse at
the time in which it was written, so as to draw connections between the
story and the critical writings of Rosi Braidotti. The Italian philosopher is
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
constructed. Finally, the exclusive concentration on femininity tends to

ignore how gender and sexuality are differentially constructed, within a
network of intersecting social categories such as race, class, age, health,
and so on. For these reasons Braidotti champions “a nonunitary vision of
a subject,” one that “actively yearns for and constructs itself in complex
and internally contradictory webs of social relations” (2011, p. 10). To
take this into account, we must focus on processes rather than essences,
transformations rather than fixed identities. In addition to the aforemen-
tioned sociological variables, we must develop a theory that sees the sub-
ject as a dynamic and changing entity, one that is “nomadic” (2011,
p. 10). This model, according to Braidotti, “renders an image of the sub-
ject in terms of a nonunitary and multilayered vision, as a dynamic and
changing entity,” situated within what she calls “a politically invested car-
tography” (2011, p. 4). Across the boundaries of community and power,
space and time, without the foundation of a fixed identity, these mobile
subjectivities move from one position or situation to another. Any sem-
blance of unity in these subjects, insists Braidotti, is not due to an essence
given by nature, but rather to a “fictional choreography” of multiple vari-
ables into “one socially operational self” (2011, p. 18). Even if the towns-
people of Ether are sedentary in their primary mode of habitation, they are
nonetheless nomadic in their subjectivities. The setting of the story thus
illustrates how the construction of the subject is a continuous process,
occurring in constantly changing contexts of space and time.
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:
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)
In the introduction to the second edition of her book, Braidotti asks,

“What exactly are the implications of the loss of unity of the subject?”
(2011, p. 3). Observing that the concept of the nomadic subject, with its
fragmentation, complexity, and multiplicity, has become widely accepted
in today’s critical theory, the philosopher finds that this last question, per-
haps the most important of all, has not yet been adequately addressed.
Braidotti suggests that, for the moment, the best way to answer this
question is not through the medium of theoretical discourse, but rather
through what she calls a political fiction. In other words, the semblance of
unity that can be found in the feminine subject is not due to an essence
given by nature, as the feminists of the second-wave claim, but rather to
“the fictional unity of a grammatical ‘I’” (2011, p. 18). With the word
“fictional,” Braidotti insists that this subject is both a socially accepted
convention, as in grammar, but also the kind of imaginary entity that can
be found in a literary narrative. Indeed, she notes that “[t]he nomadic
subject is a myth, or a political fiction,” one which allows her “to think
through and move across established categories and levels of experience.”
The idea of an imaginary, mythical, or fictional subject is inspired by what
Gilles Deleuze calls a “conceptual persona,” which Braidotti defines as “a
theoretical navigational tool that evokes and mobilizes creative possibili-
ties in order to change the dominant subject position” (2011, p. 12). The
intellectual stalemate of which she speaks is partly that of the conflict
between, on the one hand, the desire to escape the constraints imposed by
a unified and innate subject and, on the other, an individual’s perception
that her life has become directionless, piecemeal, and meaningless in the
absence of these constraints. Borrowing the formulation of Fredric
Jameson, we can say that the figuration of the subject as a nomad offers
the possibility of an “imaginary resolution to a real social contradiction”
(1982, p. 77). For Braidotti, as for Jameson, this resolution operates by
and through narrative.
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power of government rested with themselves and not with the
mother country. The remedy, he thought, should have been found
not so much by giving greater power to the Imperial It should have been
Government as by establishing in America itself an controlled from
within, not from
authority controlling the separate Assemblies of the without.
separate states, which body would have been a
‘Partner in the legislation of the Empire’.
It was no new conception that the states should have been in
some sense federated while still under the British flag. Various
governors, and men like Franklin, had proposed or contemplated
some such measure, in order to correct the weakness of the
separate provinces as against the common foe in Canada, while
Canada belonged to France, and in order to minimize the difficulties
which the Imperial Government found in dealing with a number of
separate legislatures at least as jealous of each other as they were
of the Home Government. But the Chief Justice’s retrospect was
based on somewhat different grounds. He would have The grounds on
had a federal legislature in order to control the which Chief Justice
Smith advocated a
provincial legislatures. He would have corrected General Legislature
democracy in America by, in a sense, carrying for British North
America.
democracy further. He would have nothing of the
maxim divide et impera; but, as democracy was born on American
soil, on American soil he would have constituted a popular authority
wider, wiser, and stronger than the bodies which represented the
single provinces. It was a very statesmanlike view. He saw that one
leading cause of the rupture between Great Britain and her colonies
had been the pettiness of the American democracies, the
narrowness of provincial politics, the intensity of democratic feeling
cooped up in the small area of a single colony as in a single Greek
city, the personal bitterness thereby produced in local politicians, and
the obvious semblance of oppression when a great country like
England was dealing with one small state and another, not with a
larger federated whole. A federal legislature would have exercised
home-grown American control over the American Assemblies; it
would have given a wider and fuller scope to American democracy,
enlarging the views, making the individual leaders greater and wider
in mind; it would have been the body with which England would have
dealt; and the dealings would have been those of ‘Partners in the
legislation of the Empire’. This was in his mind when he earnestly
recommended that the grant of constitutional privileges to the
Canadian provinces should be from the first accompanied by the
creation of a general government for British North America, including
the maritime provinces as well as Upper and Lower Canada.
But, if this general government was to be a partner The General
in the legislation of the Empire, it was clearly to be, in Legislature
contemplated by
the view of the Chief Justice, a subordinate partner. Chief Justice Smith
The last of his proposed additions to the Bill began in would have been a
subordinate
the following terms: ‘Be it further enacted ... that Legislature.
nothing in this Act contained shall be interpreted to derogate from
the rights and prerogatives of the Crown for the due exercise of the
Royal and Executive authority over all or any of the said provinces,
or to derogate from the Legislative sovereignty and supremacy of the
Crown and Parliament of Great Britain.’ In other words he re-affirmed
the principle, which the old colonies had rejected, that they were
subordinated to the Parliament of the mother country as well as to
the Crown; and he showed clearly in the clause empowering the
Crown to appoint Executive Councils apart from the Legislature, that
the Executive power was to rest not in British North America but in
Great Britain. The general government of British North America was
to be a partner in the legislation of the Empire, but not in the
Executive, and even in the legislative sphere it was to take a second
place. Theoretically, and to some small extent practically also, the
Dominion Parliament is still a subordinate partner in legislation, so
far as Imperial questions are concerned; but, since the The Chief Justice
days of Lord Durham, colonial self-government has did not contemplate
colonial self-
included control of the Executive in the colony. Chief government in its
Justice Smith had therefore not contemplated or fullest form.
foreshadowed the colonial self-government of the future.
But that he had not done so was not due to want of
statesmanship. He was rather still intent on seeking after a solution
of the problem which later thinkers and statesmen held to be
insoluble. The grant of responsible government in after times was
not so much an act of constructive wisdom as a wise recognition of
what was at the time impossible. To give to the colonial legislatures
the control of the Executive was to remove them practically from the
control of the mother country, and thereby to concede to these
communities the full right of self-government. The first corrective of
this grant was on similar lines to those which Chief Justice Smith
prescribed, viz., to federate the self-governing communities in a
given area, to place their separate legislatures under a general
legislature, and, as the legislatures controlled the Executive, to limit
the provincial executive authorities by a general executive authority,
the control being exercised from within not from without, and small
democracies being rectified by creating from among themselves a
larger and a stronger democratic body. It still remains for the wisdom
of the coming time to carry the constructive work further; if human
ingenuity can devise a practical scheme, again to extend the
principle of democratic representation and control; and to constitute
a body which, with the Crown, shall, alike in legislation and in the
sphere of the Executive, make the great self-governing provinces in
the fullest sense partners in the Empire. In short, the point which it is
here wished to emphasize is that whereas self-government was
conceded not as a solution of the problem but as a final recognition
that the problem was insoluble, men have come to realize that after
all what was intended to be final was only a necessary preliminary to
the possible attainment of an object, which had been relegated to the
land of dreams and speculations.
The views of the Chief Justice were not embodied in The Act of 1791.
the law which was eventually passed in 1791. Pitt had
pledged himself to deal with the Canadian question in the session of
1790, but in that year Great Britain was on the brink of war with
Spain, owing to the seizure by the Spaniards in 1789 of British
trading vessels in Nootka Sound, an inlet of what is now known as
Vancouver Island. The matter was adjusted by the Nootka Sound
Convention of 28th October, 1790, after which Vancouver began his
voyages of survey and discovery along the Pacific Coast of North
America; and, the hands of the British Government being free, a
Royal Message to the House of Commons, dated the 25th of
January, 1791, announced that it was the King’s intention to divide
the province of Quebec into two provinces to be called Upper and
Lower Canada, whenever His Majesty was enabled by Act of
Parliament to make the necessary regulations for the government of
the said provinces. The message further recommended that a
permanent appropriation of lands should be made in the provinces
for the support of a Protestant clergy.
On the 4th of March Pitt introduced the Bill. On the Proceedings in
23rd of March Lymburner was heard at the bar of the Parliament.
House on behalf of its opponents. He took objections, among other
points, to the division of the province, to the creation of hereditary
Legislative Councillors, to the small number of members who were to
constitute the Assemblies, and to making the Assemblies septennial
instead of triennial. The passage of the Bill through Committee in the
House of Commons was chiefly remarkable for the historic quarrel
between Burke and Fox on the subject of the French Revolution
which was dragged into the debate. There was no real opposition to
the measure, though Fox opposed the division of the province, the
hereditary councillors, the small numbers assigned to the
Assemblies, and the large provision made for the Protestant clergy.
The duration of the Assemblies was reduced from seven years to
four, and the number of members in the Assembly of Lower Canada
was raised from thirty to fifty. Thus amended the Bill was read a third
time in the House of Commons on the 18th of May, and received the
Royal Assent on the following 10th of June, one of its sections
providing that it should take effect before the 31st of December,
1791, and another that the Councils and Assemblies should be
called together before the 31st of December, 1792. It had been
intended that Dorchester should be present in London during the
passing of the Act, in order to advise the Government on points of
detail, but the dispatch informing him that the Act had already been
passed crossed him on his way to England.
The omissions from the Act are as noteworthy as its Omissions from the
contents. The Bill, both as presented to Parliament Act.
and as finally passed into law, contained no description of the line of
division between Upper and Lower Canada, or of the It contained no
boundaries of the two provinces. In the draft which definition of the
boundaries of
Grenville sent out in 1789 there was a blank space, in Upper and Lower
Canada.
which Dorchester was invited, with the help of his surveyor-general,
to insert a description of the boundaries; but, wrote Grenville in his
covering dispatch, ‘there will be a considerable difficulty in the mode
of describing the boundary between the district of Upper Canada and
the territories of the United States, as the adhering to the line
mentioned in the treaty with America would exclude the posts which
are still in His Majesty’s possession and which the infraction of the
treaty on the part of America has induced His Majesty to retain,
while, on the other hand, the including them by express words within
the limits to be established for the province by an Act of the British
Parliament would probably excite a considerable degree of
resentment among the inhabitants of the United States.’ Grenville
accordingly suggested that the Upper Province might be described
by some general terms such as ‘All the territories, &c., possessed by
and subject to His Majesty and being to the West or South of the
boundary line of Lower Canada, except such as are included within
the present boundaries of the government of New Brunswick’.
Uncertainty as to what was or was not British territory affected
among other matters the administration of justice. It was from this
point of view that Dorchester mainly regarded it when he wrote in
reply to Grenville, ‘the attainment of a free course of justice
throughout every part of His Majesty’s possessions in the way least
likely to give umbrage to the United States appears to me very
desirable’. He returned the draft of the Bill with the blank filled in with
a precise description of the dividing line within what was beyond
dispute Canadian territory, and with the addition of some general
words including in the Canadas all lands to the southward ‘now
subject to or possessed by His Majesty’, but he reported at the same
time that the Chief Justice was not satisfied that the terms used
would answer the purpose. Eventually the Government left out the
whole clause, omitting also all reference to another difficult point
which had been raised and which had affected the administration of
justice in connexion with the fisheries in the Gulf of St. Lawrence,
viz., the boundary line between Lower Canada and New Brunswick.
Parliamentary debate on a very awkward question was thus avoided,
and the Act contained no provision which could give offence to the
United States.
But it was absolutely necessary to draw some How the
dividing line, and to give some description of the boundaries were
boundaries, however vague. Accordingly the following defined.
very cautious course was taken. A ‘description of the intended
boundary between the provinces of Upper Canada and Lower
Canada’, being Lord Dorchester’s clause with the omission of the
general words referred to above, was printed as a Parliamentary
Paper,[202] while the Bill was before the House; and this line of
division was embodied in an Order in Council issued on the following
24th of August, with the addition of the words ‘including all territory to
the Westward and Southward of the said line, to the utmost extent of
the country commonly known as Canada’. The line of division was
set out again in the new commission to Lord Dorchester, which was
issued on the 12th of September, 1791, the two provinces of Upper
and Lower Canada being specified as comprehending all such
territories to the Westward and Eastward of the line respectively ‘as
were part of our said province of Quebec’.
On the important subject of administration of justice Administration of
the Act was almost silent. One section only had Justice hardly
mentioned in the
reference to it, constituting the governor or lieutenant- Act,
governor and Executive Council in either province a
court of appeal in civil matters, as had been the case in the
undivided province. Nor was any attempt made to Nor did it contain
define the powers of the Legislative Council and any definition of the
respective powers
Assembly in relation to each other; but, in sending out of the two
the Act, Dundas, who had succeeded Grenville, Chambers.
reminded Dorchester of ‘the disputes and disagreements which have
at times taken place between the Councils and Assemblies of the
different colonies respecting the right claimed by the latter that all
Bills whatsoever for granting money should originate with them’, and
he laid down in general terms that the principle, ‘as far as it relates to
any question of imposing burthens upon the subject, is so consistent
with the spirit of our constitution that it ought not to be resisted’.
Out of the fifty sections which composed the Act, no Contents of the Act.
less than thirty-two related to the constitution and
legislative powers of the Councils and Assemblies in the two
provinces. In Upper Canada the Legislative Council was to consist of
not less than seven members, and the Assembly of not less than
sixteen. In Lower Canada the minimum fixed for the Council was
fifteen, and for the Assembly fifty. The electoral qualification was, in
the country districts, ownership of real property to the net annual
value of forty shillings, and in the towns of £5, or in the alternative in
the latter case a rental qualification of £10 per annum.
Of the remaining sections eight related to the Provision for
endowment and maintenance of Protestant clergy and Protestant clergy.
to providing parsonages and rectories for the Church of England.
The wording of these sections, and the system of clergy reserves
which they introduced, proved a fruitful source of controversy in after
years. The Act continued the existing system by which Roman
Catholics paid their dues to the Roman Catholic Church, while the
tithes on lands held by Protestants were applied to the support of a
Protestant clergy. It then went on, in accordance with the terms of
the Royal Message to the House of Commons, to provide that there
should be a permanent appropriation of Crown lands for the
maintenance and support of a Protestant clergy, bearing a due
proportion to the amount of Crown lands which had already been
granted for other purposes, and that all future grants of Crown land
should be accompanied by an appropriation, for the same object of
maintaining a Protestant clergy, of land equal in value to one-
seventh of the amount which was granted for other purposes. The
intention was that the establishment and endowment of Protestant
clergy should proceed pari passu with the alienation of lands for
settlement, so that each township or parish in either province should
have its Protestant minister. So far the general term Protestant was
used, but provisions followed authorizing the erection and
endowment of parsonages or rectories in every parish or township
‘according to the Establishment of the Church of England’, the
incumbents to be ministers of the Church of England, and to be
subject to the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of England
bishop. It was also enacted that, while these provisions relating to
religion and to Crown lands might be varied by Acts of the provincial
legislatures, before any such Acts received the Royal Assent, they
were to be laid before the Imperial Parliament, and, if either House
presented an Address to the King praying that His assent should be
withheld, such assent could not be given. The Act, though obscurely
worded, in effect established and endowed the Church of England in
both provinces alike, while confirming the rights which had already
been conceded to the Roman Catholic Church. The provision made
for the Church of England was, at any rate on paper, very ample,
inasmuch as, while Crown lands were being assigned for its
maintenance, the liability of Protestant land-owners to pay tithes was
not abolished. Dundas, however, in his dispatch which enclosed
copies of the Act, intimated to the governor that it was not desired
permanently to continue the burden of the tithe, if the land-owners
would in lieu subscribe to a fund for clearing the reserve lands and
building the parsonage houses. Fox attacked these sections in the
Act, and he also criticized a suggestion which Pitt made that a
Church of England bishop might be given a seat in the Legislative
Council.
It may be noted that the Act specifically mentioned The first Church of
the Bishop of Nova Scotia as the spiritual authority for England bishops in
British North
the time being over such ministers of the Church of America.
England as might be appointed to the two Canadas. The Bishopric of
Nova Scotia dated from 1787, and was the first, and in 1791 the
only, Church of England bishopric in British North America, the
Bishop—Bishop Inglis, having been a Loyalist clergyman in the city
of New York. In 1793 a separate Bishop of Quebec was appointed,
and in 1799 the Secretary of State authorized the building of a
metropolitan church at Quebec, which was completed for
consecration in 1804, and at the centenary of which in 1904 the
Archbishop of Canterbury was present. There were indications at
this time that the Protestants in Canada, most of whom were not
members of the Church of England, might be inclined to unite within
it, and it was hoped that the building and endowment of a
metropolitan church might tend to such union and to placing the
Church of England in the position of the Established Church of
Canada.
The provisions in the Act which related to religion were followed by
three very important sections dealing with land tenure. The main
grievance of the settlers in Upper Canada was met by Provisions relating
providing that land grants should there be made on to land tenure, and
to taxation by the
the English system of free and common soccage. The Imperial
Parliament.
same system was made optional in Lower Canada at
the will of the grantee, but in that province the seigniors were not
finally abolished until the year 1854. In 1778 an Act of Parliament
had been passed[203]—too late in the day—which abolished the tea
duty in the North American colonies, and laid down that no duty
should in future be imposed by the British Parliament on any colony
in North America or the West Indies for revenue purposes, but only
for the regulation of commerce, and on the understanding that the
net produce of such duties should be at the disposal of the colonial
legislatures. Similar provisions were inserted in the Canada Act of
1791, and, in introducing the Bill, Pitt explained that, ‘in order to
prevent any such dispute as had been the cause of separating the
thirteen states from the mother country, it was provided that the
British Parliament should impose no taxes but such as were
necessary for the regulation of trade and commerce; and, to guard
against the abuse of this power, such taxes were to be levied and to
be disposed by the Legislature of each division.’
Thus Canada was endowed with representative institutions, and
entered on the second stage in its history as a British possession. It
was divided into an English province and a French province, in order
as far as possible to prevent friction between two races not yet
accustomed to each other. For the English province English land
tenure was made the law of the land, in the French province it was
only made optional. Taxation of members of one religion for the
upkeep of another found no place in the Act, nor did taxation of a
colony by the mother country for the purposes of Imperial revenue.
The popular representatives were in the main given control of the
moneys raised from taxes: and no doubt was left as to who had the
keeping of the people’s purse.[204] On the other hand the Executive
power was left with the Crown, and the waste lands provided
possibilities of a revenue by which the government might be
supported apart from the taxes, and by which an Established Church
might be maintained apart from the tithes. The Imperial Parliament
too retained the power of regulating commerce, while making no
money out of the colony by any commercial regulations. It was in
short a prudent and tolerant half-way Act, wise and practical in view
of the times and the local conditions, and it was evidence that
England and Englishmen had learnt good and not evil from the War
of American Independence. A study of Canadian history, with special
reference to the Quebec Act of 1774 and the Canada Act of 1791,
and the results which flowed from them, leads to the conclusion that
in either case the British Government of the day tried most honestly
and most anxiously to deal with a very complicated problem on its
merits; that every effort was made by the ministers of the Crown to
mete out fair and considerate treatment to the majority of the
resident population in Canada; and that those who framed and
carried the laws guided themselves by living facts rather than by a
priori reasoning. But it is also impossible to resist the conclusion that
at almost any time from 1783 onwards, until the Canadian Dominion
came into being, there was little to choose between the arguments
for retaining a single province, and those for constituting two
provinces. In any case it was inevitable that the provisions of the Act
of 1791 should give rise to new complications of various kinds; and
apart from specific questions, constitutional and otherwise, there
were two very practical difficulties which necessarily arose from the
division of the province of Quebec. The first was an Executive
difficulty, of which more will be said presently. From the date of the
Act there was increasingly divided authority in the Canadas. The
second was a financial difficulty arising from geographical conditions.
One of the two provinces had the keeping of the other, so far as
regarded access from and to the sea.
As the line of division was drawn, Upper Canada, Financial difficulties
like the Transvaal at the present day, was compelled between the two
provinces.
to import all sea-borne articles through territory under
the administration of another government, either through Lower
Canada or through the United States. The St. Lawrence being the
high road of import and export, Lower Canada commanded the trade
of Upper Canada. Therefore, in order to collect a customs revenue, it
was necessary for the Upper Province either to establish customs
houses on the frontier of Lower Canada—a measure which would
probably have been ineffective and would certainly have involved
much inconvenience and expense, or to come to some arrangement
whereby a certain proportion of the duties levied at Quebec, which
was the port of entry of Lower Canada, would be handed over to the
administration of the Upper Province. The latter course was taken,
and in 1795, a provisional arrangement was made, by which the
proportion was fixed for the time being at one-eighth. The record of
what followed is a record of perpetual friction, of commissions and
temporary arrangements confirmed by provincial Acts. It was
suggested that the boundaries of the provinces should be altered,
and that Montreal should be included in and be made the port of
entry of Upper Canada, but the suggestion was never carried into
effect. As the population of Upper Canada grew, the discontent
increased. In 1818 one-fifth of the duties was temporarily assigned to
Upper Canada. Then a complete deadlock ensued, which ended
with the Imperial Canada Trade Act of 1822. By arbitration under the
terms of that Act the proportion which Upper Canada was to receive
was in 1824 raised to one-fourth; and when Lord Durham reported, it
was about two-fifths. In his report Lord Durham referred to the matter
as ‘a source of great and increasing disputes’, which only came to an
end when the two provinces were once more united under the
Imperial Act of 1840.
The Canada Act took effect on the 26th of December, 1791.
Dorchester was then in England, and Sir Alured Clarke, Lieutenant-
Governor of the province of Quebec under the old system and
Commander of the Forces in British North America, was acting for
him. Under the new Act Clarke was appointed The position in
Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, while the Canada when the
new Act came into
Lieutenant-Governorship of Upper Canada was force.
conferred upon Colonel Simcoe, both officers being
subordinate to Dorchester as Governor-in-Chief. Dorchester had left
Canada on the 18th of August, 1791, and did not return till the 24th
of September, 1793. His prolonged absence was unfortunate in more
ways than one. Technical difficulties arose owing to the absence of
the Governor-in-Chief, for, as soon as the new Act came into force,
Clarke’s authority was confined by his commission to Lower Canada.
The practical effect too was that Simcoe started on his new charge
with a free hand and found it irksome, when Dorchester returned, to
take a second place. Added to this were the complications caused
by the French declaration of war against Great Britain in February,
1793, the hostilities between the United States and the Indian tribes
on the border land of Canada, and the persistent and increasing
bitterness in the United States against Great Britain, caused partly
by sympathy with the French Revolution and the intrigues of French
agents, and partly by the British retention of the frontier forts and
supposed British sympathy with the Indians.
However, the political arrangements in Canada were carried into
effect without any appreciable friction. Clarke, a man of judgement
and discretion, did not hurry matters in Lower Canada. He divided
the province into electoral districts, and summoned the Legislature
for its first session at Quebec on the 17th of December, 1792, when
the Act had been in force for nearly a year. The session then lasted
into May. Simcoe arrived at Quebec on the 11th of November, 1791;
but, as no Executive Council had yet been constituted for Upper
Canada, he could not be sworn in as Lieutenant-Governor and take
up his duties until the following midsummer, Upper Canada being in
the meantime left without any governor or lieutenant-governor. In
July, 1792, he issued a proclamation at Kingston, dividing Upper
Canada into districts, and on the 17th of September the new
Legislature met for the first time at Newark, on the Canadian side of
the Niagara river, near where that river flows into Lake Ontario. The
Lieutenant-Governor fixed his head quarters at ‘Navy Hall’, a building
constructed in the late war for the use of the officers of the naval
department on Lake Ontario. It stood by the water’s edge, nearly a
mile higher up the river than Newark; and on the bank above, in the
war of 1812, covering the buildings below, stood the historic Fort
George. The session was a short one, closing on the 15th of
October, but important work was done. English law and procedure,
and trial by jury, were established, while proposals for taxation and
the state of the marriage law gave a field for difference of opinion
and debate. When the session was over, Simcoe reported that he
found the members of the Assembly ‘active and zealous for
particular measures, which were soon shown to be improper or
futile’, and the Council ‘cautious and moderate, a valuable check
upon precipitate measures’.[205]
John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe.
of Upper Canada, was the son of a naval officer who
died when serving under Admiral Saunders in the fleet which helped
to take Quebec. The son, who derived his second name from
another sailor, his godfather Admiral Graves, was born in 1752. He
was born in Northumberland, but after his father’s death, his mother
made her home in Devonshire. He was educated at Exeter Grammar
School, at Eton, and at Merton College, Oxford, and he joined the
army in 1771, when he was nineteen years old. He served with much
distinction in the War of Independence, in which he commanded a
Loyalist Corps, known as the Queen’s Rangers. When the war
ended, he held the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After his return to
England in bad health he spent some years at his family home in
Devonshire, he married, and in 1790 became a member of
Parliament, sitting for the borough of St. Mawes in Cornwall. His
Parliamentary career was very short, for in 1791, before he was yet
forty years of age, Pitt appointed him to be Lieutenant-Governor of
Upper Canada. He left Canada in 1796, and soon after he reached
England he was sent out as Governor to St. Domingo. After a few
months in the island, the state of his health compelled him to come
home. He became a lieutenant-general, and was appointed to be
Commander-in-Chief in India in succession to Lord Lake, but he
never took up the appointment. Prior to going out he was sent to
Lisbon in 1806 on a special mission, was taken ill, and brought home
to die. He died at Exeter in October, 1806. There is a monument to
him by Flaxman in Exeter Cathedral[206], and in Canada his name is
borne by Lake Simcoe.
He was not only a good soldier, but a capable, vigorous, public-
spirited man, well suited in many ways to be the pioneer governor of
a new province. He was strong on questions of military defence and
a great road maker. He made Yonge Street, the road from Toronto
north to Lake Simcoe, called after Sir George Yonge then Secretary
of State for War and afterwards for a short time Governor of the
Cape; and he made Dundas Street, christened after the Secretary of
State for the Colonies, which then started from the point on Lake
Ontario where the city of Hamilton now stands and, running west,
connected with the river Thames.
Toronto owed much to him, but not under its present York or Toronto.
name. The name Toronto had been borne in old times
by Lake Simcoe, and on the site of the present city of Toronto the
French had in 1749[207] built a fort, named Fort Rouillé. The place
had come to be known as Toronto, but in 1792[208] the new name of
York came into vogue, and in the autumn of the following year, 1793,
Simcoe reported that that name had been officially adopted ‘with due
celebrity’, in honour of the successful storming of the French camp at
Famars near Valenciennes by the force under the command of the
Duke of York on the 23rd of May, 1793. It was not until 1834, when
the city was incorporated, that the old name of Toronto was restored.
Simcoe wrote of Toronto Harbour as ‘the proper naval Simcoe’s views as
arsenal of Lake Ontario’; but it was not here that he to the seat of
government for
would have placed the seat of government. Strongly Upper Canada.
convinced of the necessity of opening communication
between Lake Ontario and the upper lakes, without making the long
round by the waters of Lake Erie and the Straits of Detroit, in 1793
he explored the peninsula between the three lakes of Ontario, Erie
and Huron; and on a river, running westward into Lake St. Clair,
known at that date as the La Tranche river and afterwards as the
Thames[209], a place which was christened London and where there
is now a city with 40,000 inhabitants, seemed to him to be the most
suitable site for the political centre of Upper Canada. His view was
that the seat of government should be inland, presumably because it
would be more central in respect to the three lakes, and also
because it would be further removed from the danger of raids from
the neighbouring territory of the then unfriendly republic. It is
interesting to note that, in a dispatch expressing an opinion to the
above effect, Simcoe added that sooner or later the Canadas might
be divided into three instead of two provinces and Montreal be made
the centre of an intermediate government. Dorchester held, as
against Simcoe, that Toronto should be the seat of government, and
his view prevailed. The Legislature of Upper Canada met at Newark
for the last time in May, 1796, shortly before the fort of Niagara on
the opposite side of the river was handed over to the Americans,[210]
and from 1797 onwards, Simcoe having left in the meanwhile, it met
at Toronto.
Before Dorchester returned to take up again the duties of
Governor-in-Chief, Simcoe had formed definite views Friction between
as to the civil administration and the military defence Dorchester
Simcoe.
and
of Upper Canada; and it is not surprising that the

keen, active-minded soldier and administrator, who was little more
than forty years of age, did not on all points see eye to eye with the
veteran governor now verging on seventy; or that, when he differed,
he was not inclined to subordinate his opinions to those of
Dorchester. Thus we find Dorchester sending home correspondence
with Simcoe with the blunt remark that the enclosures turned on the
question whether he was to receive orders from Simcoe or Simcoe
from him. In his long official career Dorchester had been much tried.
At the time of the War of Independence, he had been badly treated
by his employers in England and had felt to the full the mischief and
inconvenience caused when those employers divided their
confidence and communicated with one subordinate officer and
another, thereby encouraging disloyalty and intrigue. The
correspondence of these later years points to the conclusion that the
iron had entered into his soul and that, with the weariness of age
growing upon him, he had become somewhat querulous, unduly
apprehensive of loss of authority, and over-sensitive to difference of
opinion. There seems to have been no love lost between him and
Dundas, while the latter was Secretary of State, but all through the
last stage of his career the key-note was dread of divided authority.
We have seen that he had not favoured the policy of Dorchester’s views
dividing the province of Quebec into two provinces, inCentral
favour of a
Legislature
and that he had shown sympathy with Chief Justice and a strong
Smith’s proposals for establishing a general Executive.
government for British North America. In the summer of 1793, after
the Canada Act had come into force but while he was still in England
on leave, he raised again this question of a central government for
all the King’s provinces in British North America, receiving an answer
from Dundas to the effect that the measure would require a new Act
of Parliament and that in Dundas’ opinion it would not add to the real
strength or happiness of the different provinces. After his return to
Canada Dorchester took up his text again, laying stress on the
necessity of welding together the different provinces. In existing
conditions he saw a revival of the system which had caused rebellion
and the dismemberment of the Empire. While the United States were
pursuing a policy of consolidation, the aim of the King’s Government
seemed to be to divide and sub-divide and form independent
governments. All power, he continued, was withdrawn from the
Governor-General, and instructions were sent directly from home to
inferior officers, so that the intermediate authority was virtually
superseded. Everything was favourable to insubordination, and the
fruits of it might be expected at an early season. This was in
February 1795, when the governor was smarting under what he
considered to be unjust censure by the Home Government; and,
though he remained in Canada for some time longer, he continued to
show, by the tone of his dispatches, that he entirely disapproved of
the existing régime. In November, 1795, he wrote of ‘all command,
civil and military, being disorganized and without remedy’; in the
following May he wrote that ‘this unnatural disorder in our political
constitution, which alienates every servant of the Crown from
whoever administers the King’s Government, leaving only an
alternative still more dangerous, that of offending the mass of the
people, cannot fail to enervate all the powers of the British Empire on
this Continent’; and in June he wrote, that the old colonial system
was being strengthened with ruinous consequences.
It is not easy to decide how much ground there was for his
complaints. If the situation was difficult, the difficulty had partly arisen
from the bad custom, of which he had availed himself, of allowing
governors and other holders of posts in the colonies to remain for an
inordinate time at home while still retaining office and receiving the
pay attaching to it. At the very time when he was most wanted in
Canada to carry out the division of the two provinces, and to make
the central authority of the Governor-in-Chief strongly felt from the
first, he had remained away for fully two years, thereby allowing the
new system to come into being and to make some progress before
there was any Governor-in-Chief on the spot. Coming out to Canada
he found the Lieutenant-Governors corresponding direct with the
Home Government, and it was hardly reasonable to insist that they
should be debarred from doing so, provided that, as the Duke of
Portland, who succeeded Dundas, pointed out, the Governor-in-
Chief was supplied with copies of the correspondence. An analogous
case is that of Australia at the present day. The governors of the
separate states correspond directly with the Colonial Office, sending
copies of important dispatches to the Governor-General of the
Commonwealth. Had Dorchester not been absent, Relations of the
when Simcoe took up his appointment in Upper Governor-in-Chief
and Lieutenant-
Canada, and had his mind not been prejudiced by Governors.
bitter memories of the days of Germain, it is possible
that friction might not have arisen. On the other hand the limits of the
authority of the Governor-in-Chief and of the Lieutenant-Governors
in the British North American provinces seem not to have been
clearly defined, with the result that, as years went on, the Governor-
in-Chief gradually became little more than Governor of Lower
Canada, and the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada became, in
civil matters, governor of that province in all but the name. When
Lord Dalhousie was appointed Governor-in-Chief, Sir Peregrine
Maitland, then Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, asked the
Secretary of State for a ruling on the subject; and Lord Bathurst’s
answer, dated the 9th of February, 1821, was that ‘So long as the
Governor-in-Chief is not resident within the province of Upper
Canada, and does not take the oaths of office in Upper Canada, he
has no control whatever over any part of the civil administration, nor
are you bound to comply with his directions or to communicate with
him on any act of your civil government. To His Majesty you are
alone responsible for the conduct of the civil administration’. If, on
the other hand, the Governor-in-Chief were to take up his residence
in Upper Canada and be sworn into office, the Secretary of State laid
down that the functions of the Lieutenant-Governor would be entirely
suspended. By this date, therefore, the two appointments had
become exclusive of each other. At a later date, when Lord Durham
was going out to Canada, Lord Glenelg, then Secretary of State,
emphasized still more strongly the independence of the Lieutenant-
Governors. When sending Lord Durham his commission, he wrote
on the 3rd of April, 1838, of the position which the Governor-General
or Governor-in-Chief had up to that date held in regard to the other
provinces. ‘With the title of Governor-General, he has, in fact, been
Governor of the province of Lower Canada only, and has been
prohibited from resorting to any of the other provinces, lest his
presence should supersede the authority of the respective
Lieutenant-Governors, to whose administration they have been
confided.... Hitherto it has not been the practice to carry on official
correspondence between the Governor-General and any of the
Lieutenant-Governors. The Governor-General and the Lieutenant-
Governors have severally conducted their separate administrations
as separate and independent authorities, addressing all their
communications on public affairs to the head of this department, and
receiving from the Secretary of State alone instructions for their
guidance.’ The result of dividing Canada into two provinces was
necessarily to create two governors. One was intended to be
subordinate to the other, but the subordination gradually became
nominal only. The political problems of Lower Canada were so
difficult and so important as to absorb the full time and attention of
the Governor-in-Chief; no railways or telegraphs facilitated
communication; and the British North American provinces, instead of
being controlled by a central executive authority, for good or evil
went their own way.
It has been seen that during Dorchester’s first government, he had
experienced no little difficulty in dealing with Livius, the
contumacious Chief Justice of Quebec. In the earlier period of his
second government, he had, on the contrary, a wise and loyal fellow
worker in Chief Justice Smith. Soon after the governor returned to
Canada for the last time, towards the end of 1793, Smith died and
his place was taken by Osgoode, the Chief Justice of Upper Canada,
who did not enjoy Dorchester’s confidence to the same extent as his
predecessor. But Osgoode’s appointment was made the occasion for
putting into practice a reform which Dorchester, to his lasting honour,
had urgently pressed upon the notice of the Imperial Dorchester’s
Government, the abolition of fees and perquisites, and opposition to fees
and perquisites.
the payment of judges and other public officers by
adequate salaries alone. Dorchester himself, when he first took up
the government of Canada in 1766, had refused to take the fees to
which he was legally entitled; and in the last years of his Canadian
service he wrote on this subject in no measured terms. In a dispatch
dated the last day of December, 1793, and written in connexion with
the vacant chief justiceship, he referred to the system of fees and
perquisites as one which ‘alienates every servant of the Crown from
whoever administers the King’s Government. This policy I consider
as coeval with His Majesty’s Governments in North America, and the
cause of their destruction. As its object was not public but private
advantage, so this principle has been pursued with diligence,
extending itself unnoticed, till all authority and influence of
government on this continent was overcome, and the governors
reduced almost to mere corresponding agents, unable to resist the
pecuniary speculations of gentlemen in office, their connexions and
associates’. He added that whatever tended to enfeeble the
Executive power in British North America tended to sever it for ever
from the Crown of Great Britain. Subsequent dispatches were to the
same effect. In June, 1795, he reported having disallowed certain
small claims by subordinate officers, expressed regret that
gentlemen in Britain should look to America for a reward for their
services, and laid down that officers should be paid sufficient
salaries to place them above pecuniary speculations in the colonies.
The next month he wrote in the same strain with reference to the
Customs officials and the collection of revenue: and a year later he
again insisted that such officers should not receive indirect
emoluments, that the local administration should not be warped and
made subservient to fees, profits, perquisites ‘and all their dirty train’,
and that the national interests should not be sacrificed to gentlemen
who possessed or were looking out for good places for themselves
and their connexions. Running through the dispatches is insistence
on the principle that the Executive must be strong, that it can be
strong only if the officers are duly subordinate to the representative
of the Crown, that loyal subordination can only be produced by
paying proper salaries and abolishing perquisites, and that the loss
of the old North American colonies had been largely due to abuses
which had lowered the dignity and the authority of the Crown,
alienating from it the confidence and the affections of the people.
The censure, if censure it can be called, which Dorchester
Dundas had passed on Dorchester, and which caused criticized by
Dundas for plain
the latter to tender his resignation, was connected with speaking as to the
the attitude which Dorchester felt it necessary to take Americans.
up towards the United States after his return to Canada in the
autumn of 1793. The Treaty of 1783 had settled, or purported to
settle, the boundaries of Canada as against the United States, but it
had not settled the boundaries of the United States as against the
Indians, and the Indians manfully maintained their right to the
territory north of the Ohio river. In November, 1791, an War between the
American force under General St. Clair, who had AmericansIndians.
and the
commanded at Ticonderoga at the time of Burgoyne’s

advance, was badly defeated in the Miami country to the south-west
of Lake Erie. The British Government and the Canadian authorities
made various efforts to mediate between the contending parties, but
the government of the United States was not disposed to accept
such mediation, though British officers were asked to be present at
conferences which were held in the summer of 1793 between
representatives of the various Indian tribes and commissioners of the
United States. No result came from these negotiations, the Indians
demanding that the Ohio should be the boundary, the Americans
definitely refusing to comply with the demand, and in the following
year fighting began again.
The French Revolution had for some years been gathering
strength. In the autumn of 1792 France had been declared a
Republic; and the execution of the King on the 21st of American sympathy
January, 1793, was followed on the 1st of February by with France.
a declaration of war against Great Britain. The French also declared
war against Spain, the power which now held New Orleans and
Louisiana west of the Mississippi. The position in North America
became at once very critical and very dangerous. Popular feeling in
the United States ran strongly in favour of France. The Republicans
of the New World were enthusiastic for the people who had enabled
them to gain their independence and who, having put an end to

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The Legacies of Ursula K.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World, Planet

Steering the Craft A Twenty First Century Guide to

The Future Is Female 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories

Ursula K. Le Guin’s "A Wizard of Earthsea" 1st Edition

Science Fiction Rebels The Story of the Science Fiction

Poetics and Ethics of Anthropomorphism 1st Edition

Primary Mathematics 3A Hoerst

The Author Cat Clemens s Life in Fiction 1st Edition

More information about this series at

ISSN 2731-4359 ISSN 2731-4367 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Pattern © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com

2 Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le

3 Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,

4 Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss,

5 Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in

6 The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and

7 The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula

8 Ursula K. Le Guin, Thinking in SF Mode121

Brian Attebery is Professor of English at Idaho State University, USA,

Arts Décoratifs. In addition to completing the first doctoral dissertation

Katie Stone is a Ph.D. student and an associate tutor working at Birkbeck,

Christopher L. Robinson, Sarah Bouttier,

Abstract Ursula K. Le Guin anticipated many of the problems we are now

C. L. Robinson (*) • S. Bouttier

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Keywords Alfred Kroeber • Donna Haraway • Epistemology • Fantasy

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

A visionary thinker, engaging storyteller, and superb stylist, Ursula K. Le

us to worlds inhabited by complex characters. It is thus no coincidence

with erudition from fields as diverse as linguistics and ecology, compara-

Complementing this contribution, Katie Stone, Eli Lee, and Francis

Isabelle Stengers shows, SF is a mode of thinking, something to think with

Always Coming Home and the Hinge

Abstract Always Coming Home (ACH) marks a transition in Ursula

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 9

Keywords Always Coming Home • Collaboration • Imaginary

The Ursula K. Le Guin of the 1960s through 1980s, the Ursula K. Le

fiction was cyberpunk, it said no both to cyberspace disembodiment and

hypertext without a computer interface. That is one reason it gets better

In 1983, Charles Le Guin had a sabbatical from Portland State University,

depending on one’s trajectory. In the middle, where a galaxy would have

perspectives of anthropology and folklore and music. “A Non-Euclidean

Angels of the shadowed ancient land

This is a lovely poem but it is very self-consciously a Poem, from the

“Why?” said my father. “Mediate what? You’re here—it’s here.”

Hey say who, sweet chance, sweet chance,

Sweet chance to come to me, sweet chance. (2019, p. 676)3

Most Kesh poetry was occasional—the highest form, according to Goethe—

Listen to the voices of the water in its going.

So perhaps the work of coming home in Always Coming Home enabled Le

Frustrated at their failure to reach consensus about technology or knowl-

PAN: I don’t know how to sing heya.

Making Narrative Connections with Ursula

Abstract The form of “Ether, OR” invites comparison with Ursula K. Le

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Keywords Carrier bag theory of fiction • Rosi Braidotti • Teresa de

An inability to fit events together in an order that at least seems to

the feminist narratological theories that Le Guin elaborates in several

2 Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le

3 Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin,

4 Utopias Unrealizable and Ambiguous: Plato, Leo Strauss,

5 Many Voices in the Household: Indigeneity and Utopia in

6 The Language of the Dusk: Anthropocentrism, Time, and

7 The Dream of Power and the Power of Dreams: Ursula

8 Ursula K. Le Guin, Thinking in SF Mode121