Explicitly Daoist Works:

City of Illusions , The Lathe of Heaven , the Earthsea Series

In the chronology of Le Guin's Hainish cycle, the action of City of Illusions comes about six hundred years after the action of Planet of Exile, when the descendants of Rolery and Jakob Agat send an expedition from Werel ("the world") to reestablish contact with Earth (Bittner, Approaches 99). Symbolically and philosophically, however, City of Illusions goes with the West Coast tale The Lathe of Heaven (1971): both begin where "A Trip to the Head" (1970) begins; both turn inside out the ending of "The Word of Unbinding."¹ Both start with a man's coming to consciousness, in City of Illusions, coming to consciousness at the margin of a literal forest.

The plot of City of Illusions is straightforward, and James W. Bittner has demonstrated that it is quite conventional, even while undermining its own conventionality (Approaches 98-101). I'll argue for its conventionality and anti-conventionality even more strongly than Bittner, since City of Illusions retells, very differently, Philip Francis Nowlan's late 1920s stories "Armageddon 2419 A.D." and "The Airlords of Han." These old stories were emphatically "around" in comics and movies in mid-century America, and in 1962 the two original stories were cleaned up a bit, combined, and reissued as what the 1978 redaction would call "THE SEMINAL 'BUCK ROGERS' NOVEL." However she knew the stories (or whether she consciously knew them at all), Le Guin gives Nowlan's "Yellow Peril" propaganda an ironically just Chinese twist, presenting in City of Illusions a story I've described as "Buck Rogers Goes Taoist."

Before the action of the story, the people of Werel have sent a starship to Earth to reestablish contact. The ship is intercepted by the Shing, a humanoid species that can tells lies telepathically ("mindlie"). They were the Enemy feared in the earlier Hainish stories, and it turns out they won. But it was a pathetic victory since the Shing seem incapable of creating and simply rule Earth, keeping Terrans separated into small groups, isolated and powerless. The Shing present themselves, when necessary, as "the self-sacrificing Lords," holding "the torch of civilization alight" on the "dark barbaric earth" (165, ch. 8; 118, ch. 6), but their benignity is only marginally more noble than that of the liberals in the Belgian Congo at the end of the nineteenth century in our history: whose most famous representative is Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz, a would-be hero picturing himself the Knight serving Lady Civilization holding aloft a torch (Heart of Darkness 27-28; § I). The Shing do better than genocidal Europeans in that they will not kill, at least not human beings or complex animals (CI 196 and passim), but they do "mind raze" all of the captured Werelians, except one child (Har Orry). At least one adult survives, and the story begins with his awakening:

This "blank," however, is luckier than Lewis D. Charles of "A Trip to the Head"; the Other who finds him (the girl, Parth) takes him home, and merciful Terran people decide to keep him and care for him even if he might be a Shing agent. They name him "Falk" -"yellow" in their language -"for his sallow skin and opal eyes" (7; ch. 1), and they raise him, necessarily, as they would raise a baby. Children, though, grow up and must eventually leave home, and Falk reluctantly leaves partner (again Parth) and Forest home on that most basic of quests, to find out who he is, to find his "name and nature" as he puts it, to go the "way" to his "true name," in the words of a wise Prince (99, 100; ch. 5). He intends to go to Es Toch, the one city of the Shing, in the far west. After a number of adventures and what turns out to be the (apparently) good advice to go alone, he is brought to Es Toch by a human agent of the Shing, the Terran woman Estrel. The adventures are significant.

One is among the Nation of the Basnasska (ch. 4), a post-catastrophe Plains Indians society -but not literally descended from Indians with customs like those of a primitive Condor people, and views on ghosts very similar to the Fox Indians discussed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (31).² In his escape from the Basnasska, Falk kills a man: "Without thought, reflex-quick and certain" (73), an act that follows the Dao, and can therefore be done with "Spontaneity. Sureness" (ACH 485).³ Falk also encounters a small gang of thugs who define themselves an "Men, free men, killers" (34; ch. 2), and a "Thurro-dowist" hermit (47-57; ch. 3), an overly sensitive empath who lives like Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, except with far more consistency and dedication. The hermit reads "the Old Canon of Man (the Tao te Ching) and gives his departing guest a "slider" hovercraft, good advice to beware singing hens the femme fatale who both betrays and aids him -and the important "news and wisdom and advice" that "There are not very many of the Shing" (54-55); like the British Raj in India, or most colonizers, the few rule, with local aid. On the Great Plains, Falk finds the Bee-Keepers, clothed all alike "in long shifts of yellow winter cloth marked with a brown cross on the heart." Almost all of the Bee-Keepers range in age from about twelve to forty, and Falk thinks them "a strange community, like the winter barracks of some army encamped here in the midst of utter solitude in the truce of some unexplained war; strange, sad, and admirable." In their order and frugality, Falk is reminded of his own Terran home in the Forest, and he finds their "hidden but flawless, integral dedication" to be "restful to him. They were so sure, these beautiful sexless warriors, though what they were so sure of they never told the stranger" (CI 89), certainly not a stranger accompanied by one they suspect to be an Enemy agent. Estrel tells him (truly or falsely we do not learn) that the Bee-Keepers maintain their numbers by kidnapping and "breeding . . . savage women like sows, and bringing up the brats in groups. They worship something called the Dead God, and placate him with sacrifice murder"; Estrel dismisses them as "nothing but the vestige of some ancient superstition." The Bee-Keepers are hospitable, though; one of their leaders tells Falk that they find solitude "soul's death," believing that "man is mankind"; but they will trust no one "but brother and hive-twin, known since infancy," as the only safe rule (see Remington, "Other Side" 159). Falk though has "no kinsmen, and no safety" (89-90; ch. 5). A bit later Falk encounters the "Prince and God" of the Kansas Enclave and their leader in "one of the great games. King of the Castle it's called." The Prince is bound by the rules of the game, and by no other rules. This Everyman as King, ruling by consent (102-03), does, though, consult his "patterning-frame" as one might consult the I Ching (precisely as one might consult the I Ching, the Chinese "Book of Changes," for philosophy to fortune-telling), which allows him to foreshadow a good deal of City's remaining plot (99-103; ch. 5).

The two-person quest across the middle of a continent prefigures the movement at the center of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and other elements in this section of City will be used to good effect in later works: the privileging of solitude as a choice by those who can use solitude for contact with nature and the Way; the problematicizing of both sacrifice and safety; the idea of royalty as "risk and grace" and a natural king as both a rare fact and a possibility for anarchistic leadership; Daoism, and the I Ching or intuition as a way to find how the Way goes, how the great Wheel turns; "one's name and nature" as, possibly the proper quest, even if they take one to "The Place of the Lie" (99), here Es Toch.

At Es Toch, the Shing produce young Orry of Werel and tell Falk that he, Falk, is really Ramarren, the Navigator of the Werelian ship Alterra, "a decisive and potent person" (190; ch. 9). The Shing tell Falk there never was an Enemy; there was civil war, and some humans took over in order to run Earth until peace came, and now use the lie that there is an Enemy to get the populace to accept their rule. The Shing are lying, and what they want from Ramarren is the True Name of the sun of Werel the name in Galaktika so they can find the Werelians and neutralize them. Neutralizing the Werelians is important to the Shing; Werelian telepathic discipline is good enough that Werelians can know that the Shing can mindlie, and with this knowledge, resist them. The Shing offer Falk an operation that will bring Ramarren back to consciousness but only at the cost of Falk, who will disappear. With a little help from his friend, more or less, Orry, and a lot of help from the opening lines of the Tao te Ching, Falk is not sacrificed but survives; and Falk and Ramarren together become Falk-Ramarren, a "double man" who is strong enough to mentally overpower a Shing, steal a ship, and escape with Orry and a Shing captive to tell the tale on Werel.⁴

The Nowlan Buck Rogers story begins in 1927 when Anthony Rogers (not yet "Buck") enters an abandoned mine near Scranton, PA, inhales radioactive gas, and sleeps in suspended animation for about five hundred years. He awakes in a forest world, where he is discovered by a beautiful and highly competent young woman (Wilma Deering) and adopted by the Wyomings, a gang of Americans. He gets integrated into the gang with amazing speed, marries Wilma Deering, and proceeds to aid the gang and their allies fight the tyrannical Han, "fierce Mongolians, who . . . had in their blood a taint not of this earth, and who with science and resources far in advance of those of a" United States nearly bankrupt after warfare with a Bolshevik Europe "had swept down from the skies in their great airships" to kill most of the "American race" and drive the survivors into the forest that had regrown over America. Rogers leads a commando raid on the Han city of Nu-Yok to get intelligence on American collaborators and then helps attack a nearby American tribe called the Sinsings, who have treacherously joined forces with The "hereditary enemies and oppressors of the White Race in America" ("Airlords" 1106). Rogers is a World War I veteran, and his knowledge of artillery barrages and hand-to-hand fighting helps the Wyomings and the other loyalists totally exterminate the Sinsings, for the climax of "Armageddon 2419" (445).

In "Airlords," Rogers attacks a Han airship in his "swooper" fighter craft, crash lands, gets captured, and is taken across the continent to Lo-Tan, the Rocky mountain capital of the Han in America. The Han treat Rogers quite well physically, but they use coercive psychological methods in an attempt to get from him some sort of information; he guesses they want to learn about American science (1118). In general, Rogers gets a full tour of Lo-Tan, the Magnificent, but at heart a thoroughly dystopian city. Rogers is rescued after a couple of months, most directly by Wilma.

The American example leads to world-wide revolt and the killing of every man, woman, and child among the Han, "that monstrosity among the races" (1134-35).

In her introduction to the 1978 reissue of City of Illusions, Le Guin notes that she has "villain trouble" in the book, primarily that the Shing are unconvincing. Just possibly, Le Guin has villain problems because she presents as rather positive the City in City of Illusions, at least potentially, and allows some validity to "the Yaweh Canon" (54; ch. 3): at least parts of Jewish and Christian Scriptures in City present some newfangled beliefs with some truth or usefulness.⁶ The monotheistic Nation of the Basnasska on the American Plains is pretty negative, and the Shing talk of a singular "Creator" and "God" (143; ch. 7); but the Bee-Keepers are ambiguous, and City of Illusion mostly lacks the constellation of City-Monotheism-Transcendence-Immortality-Sexism-Militarism we will see in later works. That makes City an interesting part of Le Guin's canon, but probably contributes to the inadequacy of the villains.⁷

Perhaps equally important, Le Guin refuses to work out the logic of what to do with a bad people like the Shing, who have done and continue to do great evil and will always be capable of great evil at least as long as their culture exists, possibly as long as they exist. Philip Francis Nowlan had no such qualms, and that far his work is more logically and esthetically elegant than City of Illusions: one possible, very final solution to this villain problem is enthusiastically narrated genocide.

If Le Guin in City of Illusions "mocks her own use of the hackneyed machinery of space opera" of the galactic empire variety (Bittner, Approaches 101), the book can also be read as taking Nowlan's blood-thirsty bit of racist war obscenity and rehabilitating it as a philosophical tale of a quest for wholeness and simultaneously a critique of any attempt at dominion and rootless self-sufficiency (see TD 68; ch. 3).

Anthony Rogers has nearly no internal life except anger and sloppy sentiment; his actions are almost all external and active actions, frequently killing people. Falk will kill if he has to, and in good Daoist fashion does so when he must: "Without thought, reflex-quick and certain Falk fired his laser at pointblank range . . ." (73; ch. 4). Still, his struggle with the Shing is almost entirely internal, literally mental. Falk must first survive by asserting his existence in the personality of the awakened Ramarren; then the yielding Falk and the over-active Ramarren must balance one another and become an integrated whole. They do this in the manner of the Daoist mystic, starting with Falk losing himself and becoming "utterly, everlastingly himself: nameless, single, one" (171-73; ch. 8). And then Falk and Ramarren balance and integrate, remaining two and becoming one: a microcosm of Yin-Yang in contact with the Dao (188-90; ch. 9). Falk-Ramarren's external victory comes because of Ramarren's mental abilities, including, I think, his indoctrination in the Kelshak concept of Rale, "the right thing to do . . . like a river following its course," following the Dao (CI 136; ch. 7). But this victory owes more to Falk's ability to wait and be still, acting at need and at the right moment. Ramarren plays for time and

Ken Kenyek, the Shing expert at mindscience, insinuates himself into Ramarren's mind and carefully seizes control, but, unknown to him, Falk is there, and pounces: "ambush and re-ambush" (209-11; ch. 10).

The original Buck Rogers story inculcates the masculinist and racist lesson of loyalty to the White Race in America and joy in helping to eradicate any "yellow incubus," "inhuman yellow blight," or similar threat (see Kalish 314). In City of Illusions, Falk is yellow, and yellow is mostly a positive color. Aside from racial tolerance or even a celebration of difference a constant in Le Guin's canon City prefigures a number of important ideas in Le Guin's later work. Clearly, City inculcates the Daoist lesson of the strength of quietness, solitude, wholeness, balance, and patience: of what the Daoists call wu wei, action through stillness. The story also privileges self-preservation, starting with avoiding suicide, over self-sacrifice, whether hypocritical or real (165, 172; ch. 8), primarily by finding a way out of an intolerable dilemma, possibly through what Le Guin will later call "the possibility of abnegation" ("Winter's King," WTQ 101). Most important, I think, especially for City in relationship to Buffalo Gals, Always Coming Home, and the rest of Cummins's West Coast grouping, is the isolation of the Shing and Es Toch.⁹ As Thomas J. Remington stresses, the Shing keep to themselves, out of touch.¹⁰ Their city is appropriate to such a people. Nowlan's Han are racist, nationalist, and villainous, and Lo-Tan is the place of tyranny. Es Toch is the place of the lie, most centrally, I think, the "Lords of the Earth" lie the Shing have told themselves (LHD 233; ch. 16): thinking themselves above all, hence putting themselves out of touch with the Dao of humanity, of nature, of the world. Though it is "wonderful, timeless" though it dances its being over the abyss (usually a good thing with Le Guin) Es Toch is radically "alien" in a very negative way. The towers of Es Toch, "jutted up, hardly based on earth at all"; a "wall closed the city off" (113; ch. 6).

The lie that power over other people can lead to a good world even utopia produces in City of Illusions as it produced in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and will produce in Le Guin's work at least into the 1980s the literally or figuratively walled, towered, dystopian city and "the awful darkness of the bright lights of Es Toch" (55, ch. 3; 118, ch. 6).

The Lathe of Heaven (Novel, 1971) and The Lathe of Heaven (TV Film, 1979/80)

Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven (1971), opens in a manner similar to that of City of Illusions (1967) and "A Trip to the Head" (1970) with coming into consciousness. In The Lathe of Heaven, however as in the Atlantean section in the West Coast story "The New Atlantis" (1975) -the forest of being has been replaced by the ocean as "the sea of being" (170; ch. 11); the human mind is imaged as a jellyfish, and we are reminded that this figurative jellyfish gets stranded "on the dry sand of daylight" every morning when people awake (7; ch. 1).¹¹

In one sense, we are in a much more familiar world than Fomalhaut II in Rocannon's World or Werel of Planet of Exile or the far-future America in City of Illusions: the setting in Lathe is mostly Portland, Oregon, in the near future. But even as Le Guin has made strange "defamiliarized" the familiar act of waking up, even so this is a Portland that will be made very strange indeed. Among its inhabitants is George Orr, an abnormally normal man (dead center on all the graphs) with only one rare trait.

In April of 1998, the human world came to an end. Among the people dying of radiation sickness after this nuclear apocalypse was George Orr. Orr passes out, or falls asleep, and has a dream, and the dream he dreams is the world of the story. And in the world Orr made, Orr can dream effectively. That is, when he has very powerful dreams, his dreams change reality for everyone: change reality completely, radically, from its roots, all the way back into the distant past, so only Orr (and people very near him during the change) even notice. For everyone else there is one single, coherent, new reality, complete with appropriate memories. Orr does not want to change the world (18; ch. 2). He tries to avoid dreaming by borrowing Pharmacy Cards and getting more than his "allotment of pep pills and sleeping pills from the autodrug" (12). Some time in 2002, Orr has a very bad drug episode, gets caught and is sent to "Voluntary Therapeutic Treatment" (which is, of course, compulsory) with Dr. William Haber, an oneirologist, a dream specialist (13; ch. 2). Orr tells Haber his problem, and Haber comes to believe Orr; and then Haber uses Orr (assisted by the Augmentor, a machine to augment dreams) to improve the world, to create Haber's idea of a Utilitarian utopia.¹²

The plot thereafter is a series of dreams induced by Haber on an ever more reluctant Orr until Haber can coerce Orr to have one last effective dream to produce a world in which Orr doesn't dream effectively, and Haber does (159-61; ch. 10). Orr, though, has found marriage with Heather Lelache, his attorney in the initial world of the novel, and he gets a little help from his wife and other friends including some aliens he has literally dreamed up. When Haber tries to dream effectively, the nightmare out of the hollowness of his being threatens disaster for at least the Earth. Orr turns off the dream machine which he sees as his one real action and saves the world (165-68, 170; chs. 10, 11). Haber ends up mad and institutionalized, and the world ends up in a mess; indeed, it's a mess where Heather Lelache had not married George Orr but a man killed in the war in the Near East, and the novel ends with Orr's moving toward renewing his marriage with Lelache, a return to a true relationship (172-75; ch. 11).

The complexity of the narrative, film as well as novel, derives from the fourteen significant effective dreams, each dream changing the reality of the world of the story. And the complexity comes in with the ethical implications of the conflict between Orr and Haber. Haber is an active man, a mover and shaker: an idealist, with a vision of the way the world ought to be and a desire to play hero and savior and make it that way. When Haber discovers Orr's talent, he has a way to make the world as it ought to be, to make everything right. In many narratives, Haber would be a hero. In a conservative film of the 1950s, Haber might be a villain, but not because he is overactive and intellectually macho but because he is a scientist and an intellectual, period and a utopian; in such a film he would probably be defeated by a military man even more aggressive than he is.¹³ Elizabeth Cummins neatly sums up Haber's reduction of "principles to three mottoes: The proper study of mankind is man; The greatest good for the greatest number; and The end justifies the means" (1993: 158) which is a serviceable summary of the philosophy of many heroes in U.S. popular culture. Orr is passive, a dreamer, the "uncarved block" of the Daoists.¹⁴ In most stories he'd be a minor character, and a major bore.

Le Guin both uses and mocks the idea of Haber as "a Mad Scientist with an Infernal Machine" (47; ch. 4). In the late 1960s, when Le Guin was writing Lathe, Haber could be read as a more immediate threat: a reduction to the grotesque of corporate liberals like Robert McNamara who were demonstrating dramatically the costs of "nation building" utopian or otherwise in Viet Nam and other exercises in American "toughness": "By attempting to impose its will on a chaotic world . . . the United States had fallen victim to the 'arrogance of power' and was flirting with disaster."¹⁵ The fall of William Haber was a mid-twentieth-century fable for Americans.

Opposed to Haber is Orr, emphatically the hero, if an unlikely one, in both novel and film. In the novel he is the hero because the novel accepts a Daoist world-view and ethic. The Lathe of Heaven, as novel, is an attack not only on Haber and his immediate political implications but also on most of what Haber stands for: much of the ethics and ideal of heroism of "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (82; ch. 6). The PBS film is courageous, but not that courageous. In the film Haber is still not a cliché Mad Scientist, but, as in one place in the novel, a man who would "play God with masses of people" (150; ch. 10), a victim of immoderation, yet another dramatic example of the danger of overweening pride. Thus he comes across in the film's dialog and much of its imagery. He is, in the film, not a SciFi villain but an SF builder of Moloch-machines that engulf and metaphorically devour people, finally engulfing their inventors.¹⁶ The film Haber is the direct descendent of the builders of great cities like Sodom and Gomorrah, and of great buildings such as the Tower of Babel. But there is more to the film that just excellent use of such familiar motifs and prejudices; the film also picks up some important dialog and much of the imagery of the novel and thereby suggests, fairly subtly, the Eastern ideal of balance. Balance as a secondary norm in the film works against not only the immoderate urge to tinker with society and the universe, as if they were machines, but also against the film's more explicit norm of the grey mediocrity of "moderation in all things" a very nonDaoist, Greek rationalist slogan Orr uses in the film.

In the dialog of the film, Orr makes explicit his charges against Haber. They include a rather daring and vigorous assertion of passivity on Orr's part and his denial of human purpose ideas Le Guin stresses; most of the accusations, however, are more familiar: Haber is playing God in using Orr; Haber is immoderately "tinkering" with dangerous powers; Haber refuses to take responsibility for his actions and misunderstands the place of humans in the universe; Haber is overconfident in the power of reason and is much too dedicated to will, power, and control.

Orr in the film is quite correct in his accusations, and his accusations are reinforced by the imagery of coerced containment within a mechanism, the Augmentor, and by Haber's utopian building. When Orr (or Haber) is within the Augmentor, we have an image of the superimposition of the mechanical not only upon Orr or Haber but the superimposition of the mechanical and electronic upon the unconscious dreams and, in effective dreaming, the superimposition of the machine upon the world.¹⁷ The Augmentor by itself changes nothing, but its augmenting aids Haber in making hypnotic suggestions to Orr that do change the world. In a sense, then, as Haber augments the Augmentor by having Orr dream him bigger and better machines a process stressed in the film he puts more and more of his world effectively within the machine he controls.¹⁸

In novel and film, the utopias Haber creates have problems.¹⁹ Most spectacularly, Haber tells Orr to eliminate overpopulation, and Orr's subconscious takes a very direct route: a Plague dream that kills some six billion people. When Haber becomes more accomplished at instructing Orr, the results are much less brutal and very darkly comic but still bad. Haber's world is a better world, in many ways, but a grey, lifeless world, bureaucratized and unfree, what we would expect from the imposing of hubristic rationalism, via a machine, upon the stuff of dreams. Haber's last utopia in the film is also a world without Heather Lelache. Lelache is African-American, brown in color; she cannot exist in a grey world literally a grey world for human beings. Haber tells Orr to solve the race problem, and Orr's subconscious produces a human species with bodies "the color of a battleship" (127; ch. 9). But Haber will not be satisfied with any version of utopia. As the Narrator in the novel tells us, "The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more" (128; ch. 9). To improve the world until it is really right, Haber needs a better tool than Orr. So he cures Orr and prepares to substitute himself.

For Le Guin, Haber is preeminently unsuitable as a dreamer perfecting the world: any dreamer who would want to exert such control is disqualified because he radically misunderstands the nature of dreams. Haber is especially unsuitable because for Le Guin the dream goes to the heart of our being, and Le Guin's Narrator makes clear that Haber is like a dried onion; at his center there is a void (127-28, 82; chs. 9 and 6). Just as bad, Haber is out of touch with the world (150; ch. 10): a loveless loner, someone who sees people only as things to be used or dependent clients to be helped or used (112, 32; chs. 8 and 3).²⁰ Haber "never wanted marriage nor close friendships" and is promiscuous and bisexual, his sex life "almost entirely . . . one-night stands, semipros, sometimes women and sometimes young men" (112).²¹

No film can get into such complexities of psychology as Le Guin's analysis of Haber; but The Lathe of Heaven as film does suggest Haber as a loner, and it certainly shows that Haber's effective nightmare is a disaster for the world. The film shows quite well how different Haber is from Orr, who is capable of love, and therefore capable of saving the world. Twice: first in his dream in April 1998 and again in his one conscious act of turning off the Augmentor and ending Haber's effective nightmare.

The film, then, unlike the novel, does not explicit condemn, generally and forcefully if with bitter comedy the ethics and heroic ideal of the "Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" but instead uses explicitly some of our Western norms to justify Orr and condemn Haber.²² Some dialog and visuals, however, do condemn the busy-ness of Western utopianism and the ethical superficiality of a doctrine of improving the world: When we see a large sign with what is clearly Haber's favorite slogan "THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER" we can be sure there is a satiric attack against the doctrine of Utilitarianism that promulgated that slogan as philosophy (see LoH 132; ch. 9). Indeed, several shots suggest our need to accept and go with the world, to find our way from Haber's over-bright, Utilitarian ways back to the dark Great Way of Being, of the Dao. "When the Great Way is lost, we get benevolence and righteousness" Le Guin quotes from ch. 18 of the Tao te Ching (headnote to LoH ch. 5). Le Guin's point comes across in the film: Haber has lost his way, and his attempts at benevolence and righteousness will not yield good.

The film develops these points visually. Le Guin's image for Being in Lathe is the sea; and opposed to the impressive buildings and machinery (and a couple of muscular thugs) we see with Haber in the film is a series of images associating Orr and Lelache with water, the yielding but yet very powerful water that wears away rock and is the favored element of the Daoists.²³ To oversimplify, water especially in the film, dark, sparkling, and/or misty water stands for Namable Dao: Being, the Absolute, "the milk of the Mother / the Way" (CI 51; ch. 3).²⁴ Out of the sea (in the film) comes Lelache. Out of one in Daoist theory comes two: Yin-Yang, all opposites in dynamic equilibrium, represented schematically at their instant of exact balance: the Yin-Yang figure in black and white, centrally (perhaps) female and male in balance embodied in the film in the image of Lelache and Orr making love.²⁵

The social and political implications of the Lelache/Orr relationship Le Guin handles when Lelache first meets Orr (narrated from Lelache's point of view): "He liked her. He was a poor damn crazy psycho on drugs, he would like her. She liked him. She stuck out her brown hand, he met it with a white one, just like that damn button her mother always kept in the bottom of her bead box, SCNN or SNCC or something she'd belonged to way back in the middle of the last century, the Black hand and the White hand joined together. Christ!" (52; ch. 4). ²⁶

The Lathe of Heaven is part of Le Guin's "marriage group" and a rather somber romantic comedy: a new and chastened world coalesces around Orr and Lelache as they exit to woo again, and I think it is that basic romantic pattern that comes through most clearly in the film. We may read the film as a love story featuring a triangle with Orr at the apex, contested over by Lelache who loves him and Haber who wants to use him. For good and for ill, esthetically, what comes through more strongly in the novel is the ongoing debate between the men, both literal debates and a comparison and contrast between two radically different truly "Either/Or" approaches to life. And it is a familiar one: we have come out of the forest, climbed out of the sea, and we ask with that urExistentialist Koheleth, the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, What is good for the sons of men to do in our few days under the sun? (2.3). Or, in the nonsexist formulation of the Kesh play of Chandi, "How shall a human being live well, then?"²⁷ Except that here the answer is the very nonExistentialist, nonWestern one of Daoist wu wei: Ordinarily, do nothing (Watson, "Le Guin's Lathe" 70). And in the novel there is a third point of view character: Heather Lelache. In The Lathe of Heaven the ideal is not the masculinist one of "having and acting" (WTQ 163) but the more traditionally "feminine," Daoist one of "unaction" doing nothing unnatural, nothing against the Dao, nothing to control others and the world, nothing to move one out of the world, out of touch.

The narration of The Lathe of Heaven is third person, limited omniscient (or selective omniscient) from the points of view of George Orr (chs. 1, 3, 6, 9, the first part of 10, and 11), William Haber (chs. 2, 5, and 8), and Heather Lelache (4, 7, the second part of 10) a division of points of view we have seen in Planet of Exile (1966) and will see again, perhaps most closely paralleled in The Word for World Is Forest (1972).²⁸ In general, Le Guin uses the divided points of view to ensure a positive image of Orr and a negative view of Haber. Orr's thoughts are generally attractive; Haber's are not. Lelache has a relatively positive view of Orr at first, and a strongly positive view later; her view of Haber is negative. Lelache's view of herself starts negative spider, coward (45, 91, 94; chs. 4, 7) and improves. Indeed, it is arguable that Heather Lelache is the only character in the novel to really change. In the novel, Orr returns to what he essentially is, and Haber works out the logic of his villain role, finally (in the dried onion image) having the last layers stripped from him to reveal the void at his core. But such an argument for change in Lelache gets complicated in a world where realities keep changing; different realities may just produce different Heather Lelaches.²⁹

The constants are Orr and Haber, and the novel form allows a good deal of elaboration of what they stand for aided by Lelache's insights and gnomic comments by the Narrator. In the manner of the Germanic scops, Le Guin's early narrators sometimes pause to insert a pithy assertion summarizing the "moral" of the preceding episode. For a central and highly instructive example, consider the Narrator's comments speaking of Lelache, that "A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole: such a person has no desire whatever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at" being (106; ch. 7) or to play God. Such a statement aids Lelache's credibility in her judgments of Orr and Haber, and in its immediate context the comment helps us approve of Lelache even when she is about to move the plot along by making the mistake of giving Orr a hypnotic suggestion on what to dream. A transcendent God isn't, in the universe of The Lathe of Heaven; immanent Dao is: Dao is the ultimate "whole of which one is a part," and only as part of the Dao, and in touch with other people, can one achieve personal wholeness, know one's being. Those who try to exist outside of Nature deny human nature, their human being. Such people necessarily will be more or less out of contact with themselves, and therefore, when in authority, will be dangerous.

When Haber still won't admit he knows Orr dreams effectively, Orr suspects that Haber "might be compartmenting his mind into two hermetic halves," so that he both knows and uses and doesn't know Orr's power. Given his own wholeness, Orr has trouble understanding how Haber might have gotten so "out of communication with himself." Like anyone who grew up in America after Vietnam and the whole series of twentieth-century wars, Orr must recognize the possibility of people high in the hierarchy with compartmentalized minds: "He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in" (87; ch. 6).³⁰

Orr doesn't know the word, Dao, or Eastern philosophy (83; ch. 6), but he is in touch with the Dao. Indeed, his dreams may aid Dao in the process by which reality is constantly "replaced, renewed" (71; ch. 5); certainly, when Orr and Lelache make love, they aid in the remaking of love in the world. Like the Dao and Daoist reality, "Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new" (153; ch. 10). Being in and in touch with the world, Orr can appear to Heather Lelache and be the Daoist ideal, the "block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting . . . : the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything." For Heather Lelache, who frequently sees herself as a black widow spider, what is most impressive about her insight into the mild-mannered Orr is Orr's strength: "He was the strongest person she had every known, because he could not be moved away from the center" (95; ch. 7).

As we would expect from Rocannon's World and City of Illusions, mind and stillness are going to be very important in The Lathe of Heaven . But in Rocannon's World the «Daoist» hermit, the Ancient One, was decidedly nasty in the pricing of «gifts» to suppliants, and in City of Illusions there was something of a fair debate between the still and active lives, at least in the person of Falk-Ramarren and in the balanced characters of the Thurro-dowist hermit and the equally Daoist Prince of Kansas Enclave (chs. 3 and 5). Le Guin does not demonize Haber, or she gives this devil his due, but she is not about to give him a fair chance. By the time of The Lathe of Heaven, the danger of men like Haber had become far too clear (most spectacularly in Indochina) for responsible writers on the Left to stage a dispassionate, «objective» confrontation between two legitimate approaches to life. By the time we reach their crucial philosophical confrontations in Lathe chapters 7-9, we know that Orr will be right, Haber mostly (but not entirely) wrong.

Shortly before she really sees him, Heather Lelache had thought of Orr as "that little bastard . . . . Mr. Either Orr" (90; ch. 7).³¹ Moving into the center of their debate, Haber talks about Orr's test results in the now loaded terms of "Both, neither. Either, or. Where there's an opposed pair, a polarity, you're in the middle; where there's a scale, you're at the balance point." Haber doesn't see Orr's scores as indications of a healthy adjustment, wholeness, or harmony, but a kind of "self-cancellation" that accounts for Orr's lackluster life (134; ch. 9).³²

And accounts for Orr's resistance to change:

Haber has just stated some major ideas from Daoism and the Perennial Philosophy, and some favorite Le Guinian themes: life as process, life as a gamble (see King Dog), the lack of safety, flux at the heart of things. Orr acknowledge these truths but insists that, "We're in the world, not against it. It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them that way. It just doesn't work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it out to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be" (135-36; ch. 9).

After a kind of day dream of encountering an Alien who gives him good Hindu advice "Self is universe" and the phrase "Er' perrehnne!" for summoning "auxiliary forces" (138; ch 9), Orr moves into his direct confrontation with Haber, his just saying "No" 1960s style, challenging authority and force. Orr set his teeth and faced Chaos and Old Night.³³

But it wasn't Haber's Augmentor that did it. Presumably, he got a little help from his friends, from the other "gods": "nameless and unenvious, asking neither worship not obedience" (140), the other people in touch with the universe (145; ch. 9). Without debating the matter with himself, Orr tells Haber firmly that he won't let Haber use his effective dreams any more (140).

Haber appeals to Orr's sense of guilt, without success (142).³⁴ Haber then tries a literally rational appeal "Reason will prevail" and notes all the good he and Orr have done. Orr notes the evil, including the nonexistence in this world of Heather Lelache, which is fine with Haber, and he tells that to Orr: Haber finds both Orr and Lelache irresponsible; Orr lacks a social conscience, displays "no altruism," acts the role of "a moral jellyfish" (143; ch. 9). Haber's attitude toward Lelache makes him appear especially villainous here, and that is useful to «point» for us Le Guin's point that in this book (as in The Dispossessed [1974]) a social consciences is an ambiguous thing, and altruism rather negative: again, "When the Great Way is lost, we get benevolence and righteousness" (53; ch. 5)³⁵ But also, altruism just is suspect as a motivation for political actions. With President Lyndon Johnson and others into the 1970s presented American warfare in Indochina as altruistic, it was clear to anyone thinking seriously that the personal virtue of altruism would easily become a vice when applied abstractly, impersonally, politically. When applied on mass scale, altruism soon becomes just another justification for pushing people around. Opposing the benevolent busy-ness of Haber, Orr recognizes that he has a gift and an obligation to "use it only when I must. When there is no other alternative. There are alternatives now" (143; ch. 9). Haber, though, intends to go on, to where Earth "will be like heaven, and men will be like gods!" Orr says, "We are, we are already" (145; ch.9).

In the climactic chapter 10, Orr receives a gift from an Alien, the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends," drinks some weak cannabis tea and dreams back Heather Lelache. The two of them go together to Haber's lab for one last dream: Orr dreams he's no longer capable of effective dreaming Haber is. Orr advises Haber to consult with the Aliens, who are more experienced than we "At dreaming at what dreaming is an aspect of. They've done it for a long time. For always, I guess. They are of the dream time." In line with the teaching that those who know the Way don't talk about it, and the commonplace that the mystic experience is ineffable, Orr says he does not rationally understand his insight, not can he express it verbally, but,

It really doesn't mean anything to Haber. For Haber, Orr's great speech on "Everything dreams" is all mysticism, and mysticism is not "acceptable" for sensible people. And saying Er' perrehne to "get a little help from your friends" is not acceptable to an egoistic loner like Haber (161; ch. 10).

Using his Augmentor on his own dream, Haber dreams his effective dream, the nightmare Orr stops. In the novel and (perhaps more briefly) in the film, Orr tells an Alien, "I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength of my entire existence, to press one damned OFF button." The Alien replies, "You have lived well." Orr's one action, out of his stillness, has saved the world (170; ch. 11).

At the end of the novel, Orr sleeps and has normal dreams, "like waves of the deep sea far from any shore," coming and going, "profound and harmless, breaking nowhere, changing nothing. They danced the dance among all the other waves in the sea of being" (170; ch. 11). Orr awakes to visit Haber in an asylum and then meet again, for the first time in this new reality, Heather Lelache.

*

The Earthsea Series (1968-72, 1990)

I agree with Le Guin's assessment in her Response to the 1975 Le Guin issue of Science-Fiction Studies that the ideas in her Earthsea trilogy "are more totally incarnated, less detachable from the sounds, rests, and rhythms, less often stated as problems and more often expressed in terms of feeling, sensations, and intuition" than in some of her other work up to that time (45) hence, I would say, probably better art and I follow a fairly widespread consensus that the Earthsea trilogy is among Le Guin's best art. A Wizard of Earthsea won the 1968 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; The Tombs of Atuan got the 1972 Newbery Silver Medal Award; The Farthest Shore won the 1972 National Book Award for Children's Books. As the back blurbs on the Bantam editions of 1975 note, "This trio of novels, a recognized classic of high fantasy, has been compared with [J.R.R.] Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis's Narnia stories." But classifying the Earthsea trilogy with The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia stories, however meant as a compliment, makes it easier for Rosemary Jackson to place the trilogy, plus City of Illusions and The Left Hand of Darkness, among "conservative vehicles for social and instinctual repression" (Jackson 154-55). There are political problems with the trilogy, but not particularly those Jackson identifies. If you accept Jackson's psychoanalytical framework, you should also accept Jackson placing a significant sampling of Le Guin's work along with Tolkien's and Lewis's and to the political right of Charles Dickens whose demonizing of working class movements Jackson documents (131-32) and even Fyodor Dostoevsky (133-36, 154-55), to whom my encyclopedia devotes a full subsection under "Conservatism," for his attacks in later life upon "Socialism, liberalism, materialism, and atheism," preaching instead "Greek Orthodox tsarism, Slavic traditionalism, and the redemption of mankind by 'Holy Russia'" (Viereck 5.65-66). I like Dickens and Dostoevsky, and I will join in insisting upon the liberatory potential and immediate goodness of their "compassion for . . . 'the insulted and injured'" (Viereck 66); but to prefer on Leftist political grounds an antirevolutionary reformer like Dickens and any variety of Czarist over Le Guin is to take Theory and disgust with "an outworn liberal humanism" (Jackson 155) into the perverse. I think it is more accurate to start with the observation that, like Tolkien's trilogy and the Narnia stories, Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy is high fantasy, and then immediately add that Tolkien's work comes out of Christian tradition and Lewis's work is firmly within the Christian tradition and powerfully inculcates significant parts of Christian doctrine. Le Guin's high fantasy is unChristian specifically and more generally outside of the tradition of all institutionalized religions and transcendental theologies. From what we see, the people of Earthsea realize the positive parts of their "religious capacity" in popular celebrations of the high points of the astronomical year; the institutionalized religions we see at Atuan in the trilogy are not positive. Le Guin has shown in Earthsea a Time of Legend that gets along quite nicely without sky gods common enough in science fiction and fantasy but a world not totally desacralized; indeed, at moments in Earthsea we see its key characters in very profound "relationship . . . with the cosmos" (TD 12; ch. 1). And Le Guin provided this elegant counter to Tolkien, Lewis, et al. in a trilogy that is accessible to children, receives Establishment awards, and gets past (apparently) even the Right-wing types who catch on that The Lathe of Heaven might be a dangerous book. The Earthsea series, then, is sophisticated art and serious literature and a nicely subversive contribution to an early round of the most recent Kulturkampf.

*

Moving into the end of the1990s, the Earthsea series consists of four books: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972) "the Earthsea trilogy" and Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990). The temptation, obviously, is to see the series as the trilogy (1968-72) plus Tehanu, with Tehanu as a late addition to, and a correction of, the trilogy. I shall succumb to that temptation shortly, in my chapter on Tehanu; I'll indicate now, though, why Tehanu is a very appropriate "Last Book" for the series, analyzing the series as a Daoist construct.³⁷

We may legitimately see the trilogy as a portrait of an artist in magic, Ged, from birth until he sacrifices his magic power at the beginning of old age. The three books of the trilogy make a Künstlerroman (artist novel) with magic as the art and the story told in third-person, limited-omniscient narration from the points of view of three people: (1) Ged, who starts the novel as the boy Duny, and then goes on to become the wizard Sparrowhawk, and then fully himself as an adult Ged (Wizard); (2) Tenar, the priestess of the Nameless ones (Tombs); and (3) Arren, who goes on to become King (Shore) and rule Earthsea under his true name, Lebannen (Tehanu).

The esthetic world of the trilogy is classic high fantasy and Romance: male-centered, heroic, aristocratic, concerned mostly with youth and the great story of "coming of age" to the first "age" of the (male) hero, adulthood, and the only physiologically marked coming of age for a human male, lacking, as men do, menopause (see "Coming of Age in Karhide"). That far, and not a step farther, the trilogy uses the sort of world Le Guin mocks in "The Pathways of Desire" (1979): a story set in a boy's world (indeed, the world of "Pathways" is dreamed up between a boy's ears), whose native society lacks leading roles for women, a world where old people without power are nearly invisible. As such, the world of the trilogy is out of balance. Tehanu moves toward achieving a better balance, at least addressing what Holly Littlefield correctly identifies as the "fundamental imbalances of power and gender" (252).

As a four-novel series, the odd-numbered books are narrated from the points of view of boys becoming men (Wizard and Shore); the second book is told from the point of view of a girl becoming a woman (Tombs); and the fourth book (Tehanu) is narrated from the point of view of the girl of Tombs grown into a middle-aged widow switching at the very end to a split point of view between the woman, Tenar, and Tehanu: a being both girl and dragon.³⁸ Wizard begins on Gont Island, the birthplace of Ged, and then moves on to extensive sailing about Earthsea. Tombs is quite static: except for an «opening out» at the end, limited to the place of the Tombs of the Nameless Ones on Atuan; put more positively, Tombs adheres fairly closely to the Neoclassical unities of place and action. Shore shows extensive sailing and offers two endings. The official one, so to speak, from The Deed of Ged, ends has Ged return to the center of events, for Arren's crowning in Havnor and then sailing off "westward over sea" to be heard from no more. The version told on Gont is less romantic. Ged returns to Gont and retires to the forest, truly "done with doing," off on the margin of the world of doing, but in the heart of one of Le Guin's forests (WE 196-97), a place to be. In good quest fashion, and following the movement of the Dao (Tao te Ching 40), Tehanu returns Ged to Gont and shows only one short sea trip from one Gontish port to another with the rest of the traveling on foot on Gont.

Further unity of the series is suggested by Wizard and Tehanu's both begin with the same poetic epigraph:

In this epigraph, some key opposites insisted upon in the Judeo-Christian tradition get yoked together in good Daoist fashion, with the careful Yin-Yang balancing of polarities in the first three lines broken only by the denial of any transcendent sky-god(s) of the final two lines. Yin-Yang, indeed, is a unifying symbol in the trilogy. In Wizard, there is a Yin-Yang symbol in the white scars on the dark face of Ged, and again when Ged merges with his Shadow. In Tombs the Yin-Yang symbol is suggested at the climax of the novel, when white-skinned Tenar moves close to Ged, initially intending to kill him, and then bonds with him (140; "Voyage," ch. 12).³⁹ In Tehanu, Yin-Yang is suggested when Ged asks Tenar for a job on her farm and Tenar resolves the sleeping arrangements by asking Ged if he wants her in his bed (189; "Winter," ch. 12). He does, and when they couple his dark skin is balanced against her white skin.⁴⁰ There is an even more powerful symbol of balance, wholeness, and integration in Tehanu herself, and her people. In one aspect, Tehanu is a young girl, Therru, who has been horribly abused and scarred far worse than Ged. In another aspect, she is a dragon, one of "those among us who know they once were dragons," connected with those "among the dragons . . . who know their kinship with us" (12; "Going to the Falcon's Nest," ch. 2). And the dragon she is closest to is Kalessin, the Eldest, who turns out to be Segoy, the demiurge who spoke the Word of Making and brought forth the islands of Earthsea (222-24; "Tehanu," ch. 14).

The Yin-Yang balance, then, of human and dragon leads back to Kalessin, who is Segoy; and that is useful for a Daoist Earthsea. Segoy, a demiurge, had been something of an embarrassment for a Daoist reading of the trilogy, since Segoy could be pictured as transcending the world Segoy made. That embarrassment is eliminated in Tehanu. In the legends of Coyote (e.g., among the Miwok Indians of California), Coyote is a coyote, and emphatically a wily animal in the world and Coyote made the world.⁴¹ In The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr dreams up his worlds, and is within each world. And in Tehanu, Segoy remains the creator of the world, but is clearly shown living in the world as the oldest dragon, Kalessin.⁴² With a little pushing of the point, we can see Kalessin/Segoy as a descendent of Ouroboros as the crowned dragon eating its tail: a symbol in the West for the unity of all things, perpetually mutating one into another in a never-ending cycle of creation and destruction: the mythological embodiment, in our culture, of the idea of the Dao, or Shiva Nataraja dancing the worlds into existence, and he and Kali destroying them.⁴³

Most important, Tehanu goes far to resolve the problem of magic. As Robert Galbreath has argued, there is indeed "Taoist Magic in the Earthsea Trilogy" but it is only relatively Daoist, only restrained and passive and in the tradition of "unaction" relative to western magic. In the trilogy, magic is still essentially power. In Tehanu, Tenar asks Ged,

On Roke, Ged has learned the lesson of Chuang Tzu, that to do right "allow yourself to fall in with the dictates of necessity. For necessity is the TAO of the Sage," which Herbert A. Giles paraphrases, "Do nothing save what you cannot help doing" (Giles 231).⁴⁵ Tenar proposes a theory to appropriate and redefine a phrase from John Keats of "negative capability" for the art of magic, and of life. As Arha, Priestess of the Nameless Ones in The Tombs of Atuan, Tenar had been taught "that to be powerful she must sacrifice. Sacrifice herself and others. A bargain: give, and so get" and Tenar denies neither her life as Arha nor the truth of this lesson. But in her maturity Tenar's soul "cannot live in that narrow place this for that, tooth for tooth, death for life.... There is a freedom beyond that. Beyond payment, retribution, redemption beyond all the bargains and the balances, there is freedom." Ged replies, "The doorway between them," and says no more (Tehanu 194).

Tenar's denial of sacrifice, and questioning the lex talionis (law of retaliation and retribution) and payment and redemption in both capitalist and theological senses are themes Le Guin develops in The Dispossessed, Eye of the Heron, The Beginning Place, and elsewhere. The image of emptiness is the Daoist one of the absence that allows some important existences: the hub as the absence at the center of the wheel, allowing the existence of the wheel, the empty space that is a doorway.⁴⁶

Before Tenar and Ged can get to such an insight, however (whatever it means) before they can get "beyond . . . balances" and understand positive doorways Ged must learn the necessity of balances and how opening some doorways can be very bad.

Which returns us to the trilogy.

*

Margaret P. Esmonde has called the trilogy "straightforward stories [that] deal in strong colors and plain fabrics," works that readily show "the design the master patterner has woven, not just in Earthsea but throughout the entire fabric of her work." The main pattern Esmonde sees is "the psychological journey" passing "through pain and fear" to "the integration of personality that Carl [G.] Jung wrote about" (16 and 34). Esmonde implies that the individual integration of Ged is paralleled by integration of Earthsea politically and cosmically; in an essay ending the anthology Esmonde's begins, John H. Crow and I examine such "Patterns of Integration" explicitly, and I still see in the trilogy, but not Tehanu, patterns of integration on the levels of the individual, society, and the cosmos.⁴⁷

The Earthsea novels, then, are set on Earth in a legendary time in which consolidation of power under a king might be the least bad political option.⁴⁸ It is a time when magic works and there are still dragons, but otherwise a plausible world for moving into a second age of kings (rather like the Mycenaean Age as recalled by Homer). Backward places like Ged's home island of Gont are pretty much in the Bronze Age at the beginning of the story and some forty to fifty years later have as their technological high points the spinning wheel, soap, and a large ship like King Lebannen's Dolphin.⁴⁹ It is an archipelago world of islands and water, a politically simple world where power is generally visible and often quite personal a world where King Lebannen can say "I will forbid," and be convinced that that will be that (Tehanu 147; ch. 10). It is a world moving toward integration, starting with individuals (see Crow and Erlich 202). The integration is most spectacular with Ged in Wizard, but psychological integration is also central to Tombs and Shore in the initiation into adulthood of Arha/Tenar and Arren/Lebannen.

Political integration is less obvious, but it is there as a kind of goal for the trilogy. Near the beginning of Wizard, Gont is raided by Viking-like warriors from the Kargad Lands, and the political situation does not get much better over the next fifty or so years: no wars, but raids, piracy, and slaving make for a political world that could use (arguably) a strong central authority. "Unhappy a land where heroes are needed," as Bertolt Brecht's Galileo put it, but, I will add, unhappier still to need a hero and not get one.⁵⁰ In Wizard, Ged becomes a hero who can oppose the evils of his world. And in Tombs and Shore he does so. In Tombs Ged does find and free Tenar even as Tenar in the plot finds Ged and helps him escape and that coming to freedom is what is most important in Tombs, Tenar's book; still Ged's goal for his quest in Tombs is reuniting the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, thereby completing the Rune of Peace, peace through the dominion of a King.⁵¹ In Shore, the goal of the quest is closing a gap in nature that is draining the vitality from the world, but the quest accomplishes not only this task but also the making of Arren into King Lebannen: Arren is initiated into manhood, brings Ged back to life through pain and the Dry Land of death, and thereby fulfills the prophecy that the true inheritor of the throne will be one "who has crossed the dark land living and come to the far shores of the day" (Shore 17; ch.2).

The One of the Dao that can be named one of the relatively few good "One's" in Le Guin's canon produces the two of Yin-Yang, which in turn produces the many things of the world.⁵² In Wizard, Ged achieves wholeness oneness which allows him to become the hero in Tombs, where Tenar will bond with him, and the two of them will reunite the Ring. The Ring they return to the world bears the sign under which Lebannen will rule when he and Ged return to Earthsea and Lebannen begins the task of uniting the many.

Integration on the cosmic level is a theme more explicit in the trilogy than the politics. There is no problem of integration with most of the cosmos of Earthsea: it is just a small, wholly material world. Ged can know about stars and the fire at the core of the Earth, but as a practical matter the world of the trilogy consists of the islands of the archipelago and the sea, covered by "the empty sky" i.e., just the dome of the sky, without a heaven or transcendent gods. No heaven above, and no hell below, just the Old Powers of the Earth, close enough to the surface to be an immediate problem only in the area of The Tombs of Atuan and at the Court of the Terrenon (WE ch. 7 [see Erlich, in Survey, 450-51]). Where the cosmos gets problematic is with death. No heaven, no hell: but there is Sheol, a Realm of Hel or Hades, "the Dry Land" of the dead. The Dry Land touches Earthsea and is reached by a spirit journey.⁵³ Those desiring to make most of the journey while embodied, head west, toward the setting sun, but the last part of the journey must be made in spirit. "There is a wall of stones . . . at a certain place on the bourne. Across it the spirit goes at death, and across it a living man may go and return again, if he is a mage" (FS 75; "Sea Dreams," ch. 5) or if he's Arren.

Perhaps we can get a better image of the problem Ged confronts with a damaged cosmos if we drop for a moment the psychological and political term "integration" and use Douglas Barbour's phrase, "Wholeness and Balance." Ged tells Arren that "Death and life are the same thing like the two sides of my hand, the palm and the back. And still the palm and the back are not the same.... They can be neither separated, nor mixed" (FS 74; ch. 5; see also WE 80-83; ch. 5). Death and life must be like the clasped hands on the SNCC button described in The Lathe of Heaven, or like George Orr and Heather Lelache making love, or two hands left and right placed together palm to palm: one whole (new) thing possible because two things are both similar and different, touching and separate, complementary: Yin-Yang.⁵⁴

More generally, the principle of the cosmos is Balance. This point is repeated at key moments in the trilogy, most emphatically in a lesson Ged teaches Arren:

On Ged's level of power, the important balance is between the worlds of life and death.

In all things, but especially in matters literally of life and death, the nature of the world of Earthsea makes imperative following the rule Ged suggests to Arren for a mage to advise a king: "My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do any other way" (FS 67; ch. 4 ).⁵⁶ To oversimplify one must act with the Dao, while necessarily within the Dao, embedded in the world; and one must understand the consequences of one's actions. One must act on what one knows, which means acting locally, on the smallest scale possible, and preferably spontaneously, depending upon one's intuition. To attempt large-scale, violent, deadly impositions of will upon the world would be "The Arrogance of Power," a failure to know "The Limits of Power" as local wars taught the Daoist philosophers during China's Warring States period (481-221 B.C.E.), as twentieth-century history had made and was again making very clear.⁵⁷ Most importantly, we do not and cannot "know what life is or what death is," as Ged tells Arren. "To claim power over what you do not understand is not wise, nor is the end of it likely to be good" (FS 74; ch. 5). On great matters, then, the proper (in)action of wu wei would be to do nothing but "that which you must do." Or so the matter must be put if one acts consciously. Alternatively, one might— if one is an adept join oneself with the Dao and be acted through. Ogion rather cryptically explain this to Ged: "A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from the spring to its sinking in the sea" (WE 128; ch. 7). Ultimately, only mystic union with the Dao allows full being and right action, ultimately, even a hero must be a sage.⁵⁸

*

In each of the books of the trilogy there is a balance that must be restored, an integration to be made, and a doorway to be shut.⁵⁹

A Wizard of Earthsea gives Ged's early years, starting with his childhood as a goatherder and witch-child and then his time as apprentice to Ogion the Silent, the Mage of Re Albi on Gont, and Ged's most important teacher. Ged very much needs to learn what Ogion has to teach: silence, patience, humility before nature, unaction.⁶⁰ Not long into Ged's apprenticeship, Ogion offers Ged a choice: to stay with him or to go to the school for wizards on Roke. Ged later sees this offer as the choice between "the life of being and the life of doing" and tells Arren that he "leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly." That "fly," however, had a hook in it: actions have consequences to which one is bound and every act "makes you act again and yet again" (FS 34; "Hort Town," ch. 3).⁶¹

Ged goes to Roke, does very well in his studies, and then acts indeed. He gets into a magic contest with an aristocratic youth and in his anger, envy, and pride summons up the spirit of Elfarran, "the fair lady" from a famous heroic song. But the millennium-dead Elfarran appears only for a moment, "Then the sallow oval between Ged's arms grew bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow, quick and hideous, and it leaped straight out at Ged's face" (60-61; ch. 4). This is "The Loosing of the Shadow," and the act results in Ged's facial scars, and provides the plot of Wizard (plus a favorite Le Guinian image: "the fabric of the world," here torn with "a terrible brightness"). For the rest of the novel Ged is bound to "act again and yet again" as he recovers from his wounds, then avoids his shadow and then flees, desperately trying "to choose his way, to plan where he should go, what he should do; but each choice, each plan, was blocked by a foreboding of doom" (98; ch. 6).

The middle of Wizard stresses three temptations of Ged. In one, he succumbs, trying, "with no thought for himself" to bring back to life a dead child. Whatever other allusions we can find, this action would imitate Christ's raising from the dead the daughter of Jairus (Luke 8.49-56). Going after the child was a bad idea on Ged's part not because it is blasphemous to imitate Christ that literally but because Le Guin's thinking suggests that Christ did ill in self-sacrifice generally and, more specifically here, enforcing his will over nature in ignoring the rule "let the dying spirit go" (WE 80; ch. 5). Ged also confronts the Dragon of Pendor and the Terrenon Stone, where the lure in both cases is telling Ged the name of his shadow. It is well that Ged resists since the Shadow's name is "Ged," and saying "Ged" would give the dragon or the Stone power over him (92, ch 5; 120, ch. 7).

After the confrontation with the would-be mistress and master of the Terrenon, at his psychological low-point in the story, Ged returns in the form of a hawk to Ogion, who changes him back to a man and gives him the advice that he "must be the stream itself." And for the turning point of the novel Ogion notes that Ged returned to Gont and to him and now must "turn clear round, and seek the very source, and that which lies beyond the source." That is, Ged must seek both nameable and unnameable Dao, and, far more immediately, stop fleeing for safety (for there is none in a universe in flux), and instead turn around and hunt his hunter. He must stop allowing his shadow to gain strength from him but instead hunt down and gain strength from his shadow (128; ch. 7). This is a frightening thought, since the shadow somehow knows Ged's true name, and Ged doesn't know the shadow's name, but Ged faces his fear and goes hunting (ch. 8 f.). Along the way he gets help from two strangers and repays their kindness as well as he can, and receives as a gift half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe. Finally he gets a little help from his friend Vetch and confronts the shadow.

Ged and Vetch are in a boat at sea, and yet dry land appears around them—the Dry Land. Ged lifts his wizard's staff and produces light that "harrowed even that ancient darkness." As they approach one another, the shadow "became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped." Simultaneously, they say one word, "'Ged.' And the two voices were one voice." Ged reaches out and "took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one." Ged tells Vetch that "The wound is healed," in the world and in Ged: "I am whole, I am free," and Vetch understands "that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self," including the evil in it, and his mortality, "cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark" (178-81; ch. 10). Ged has integrated his shadow into himself and become a balanced whole: one hero.

*

In her headnote to "The Good Trip" in The Winds Twelve Quarters (1975), Le Guin jokes about her "infallible talent for missing whatever boat all the fashionable people are on" (109), and I'll somewhat flippantly apply this line to The Tombs of Atuan. Tombs appeared in 1971; in 1972 Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" appeared in Harlan Ellison's Again Dangerous Visions, and Russ's story may be usefully set in dialog with Tombs and read as a friendly but firm response to Tombs.⁶² "When It Changed" presents Whileaway, a feminist separatist utopia whose doom (apparently) is announced with the arrival of men. Other separatist works were to follow in the early 1970s, in imaginative literature doing significant thought experiments asking what women's societies might be like, societies without men. Other works investigated the possibility of women's religion. The value system of Tombs is not separatist in terms of gender but strongly integrationist, and against institutionalized religion, period, whether worshipping a Godking or the more feminine, "chthonic" powers of the earth. As we will see, the most politically powerful woman at Atuan is the High Priestess of the Godking and definitely a man-identified woman, and the sexual and religious politics of Tombs may be somewhat problematic.⁶³

In A Wizard of Earthsea , the imbalance to be corrected was Yangish over-action, over-assertion, over-intellectuality, too much desire for life and power: in Daoist (and traditional patriarchal) symbolism, too much light. In The Tombs of Atuan, the balance to be redressed is too much stasis, darkness, "cyclical" reincarnation. In Wizard the doorway to the Dry Land was shut when Ged merged with his shadow. In Tombs, the doorway is rather more literal, the Place of The Tombs of Atuan, where the powers of darkness have irrupted into the light and hold that which is not theirs: the Ring of Erreth-Akbe and Tenar, plus other women and eunuchs who have a chance to escape at the end of the novel, or choose not to escape.

The plot of Tombs starts when the infant girl Tenar is found and declared to be the incarnation of the One Priestess of the Nameless Ones (a process similar to the one for finding a new Dalai Lama). In the ceremony of the Remaking of the Priestess, Tenar has her name taken from her and becomes only Arha, "the Eaten One," a vocational title only, not a name (Prologue, and ch. 1). Arha comes into her full powers as priestess, theoretically, at fourteen, but nothing really changes, and she still cannot act against the power of Kossil, the Priestess of the Godking. More important, Arha finds it impossible to not act when Kossil presents her with prisoners accused of plotting against the Godking and says it is Arha's choice how they will die (see Crow and Erlich 210). Arha chooses to have them die of thirst and starvation (31-33; "The Prisoners," ch. 3), faints at the conclusion of this episode (35), and has bad dreams (38; "Dreams and Tales," ch. 4). As time slowly passes, all Arha has to do she does, primarily learning her domain: the Undertomb and the Labyrinth, which she explores almost entirely by touch, since light is forbidden in the Undertomb, the heart of the realm of the Old Powers, whom she thinks her "Masters."

And then something happens. Change is introduced with the arrival of Ged, who momentarily brings light to the Undertomb with his wizard's staff, revealing the underworld as an exquisite cave (58-59; "Light Under the Hill," ch. 5). Ged brings change and a possibility of beauty that includes Arha's own when Ged creates an illusion showing her as Tenar, in a beautiful dress (88; "Great Treasure," ch. 7).⁶⁴ Arha captures Ged and then saves his life, a politically dangerous move that Kossil discovers. Ged has half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and the other half is buried in the Great Treasury of the Nameless Ones. Arha has a choice: accept her name back from Ged and escape with him and the Ring to the Inner Lands, or return to being Arha and let Ged die. She takes back her name; Ged unites the Ring and they escape, eventually bringing the Ring to Havnor, the central city of Earthsea. During their escape, however, Tenar momentarily repudiates the pain of her freedom and considers killing Ged (139-40), and Ged promises to take Tenar away from Havnor to Ogion on Gont, so she can live quietly and decide whether or not to enter the larger world beyond Gont (145; "Voyage," ch. 12).

In terms of Ged's Jungian individuation, Tombs tells the "rescue of the Anima," where the Hero takes his missing feminine portion from some representative of the Great Mother. In terms of restoring balances and closing doors, the key part of the story is Ged's bringing light to the Undertomb, which eventually results in an earthquake from the angered Nameless Ones, an earthquake that causes the fall of the monoliths that mark the Tombs, and the destruction of their temple. Most important, there is the rejoining of the Ring and the symbolic marriage of Ged and Tenar: Ged's masculinity balancing Tenar's femininity, Ged's dark skin balancing Tenar's white, Ged's associations with light balancing Tenar's associations with darkness.⁶⁵

All these themes, however, get a very different twist from being told from the point of view of Tenar as "a feminine coming of age" story with the subject of "sex."⁶⁶ Viewed this way, the imbalance is in the life of Arha; in Simone de Beauvoir's terminology, Arha is trapped in immanence and in very great need of a project (see Crow and Erlich 205). And this imbalance is corrected when Tenar accepts Ged's offer of her name (her being) and with it true choice, true action, and, most important, escape. Together Ged and Tenar escape from the underworld and get away from the forces of darkness, dryness, and sterility when they reach a very literal door, and Ged uses his magic, a word, and his phallic wizard's staff to blow the door open (121-22; "The Anger of the Dark," ch. 10). As a critic of Tombs, Le Guin stresses the escape together: Tenar cannot "get free of the Tombs without him," but then "neither can Ged get free without her. They are interdependent," with Le Guin redefining her hero to be more part of, in balance with, the world and other people: "dependent, not autonomous" (ER 9), half of "the original Mitsein" (friendly society), a human couple (Beauvoir 35).

For Tenar, personal balance is restored when she gets out of a constricting, terminally boring life without sex and enters the wider world of men, women, freedom, and significant action. Contrary to the macho theory of "No retreat, no surrender" and self-sacrifice as an ideal (especially for women) Le Guin frequently endorses walking away: from a doomed world in "Things" (1970), from the finally corrupt utopia of Omelas (1973), from dysfunctional relationships in The Beginning Place (1980), from the threat of serfdom in Eye of the Heron (1978). What sort of life Tenar can find on Gont or in any of the Inner Lands, given the low status of women in Earthsea, is a question that waits for Tehanu (Littlefield 249-50), but it will be an improvement over the life of a priestess at Atuan even the highest of priestesses serving real powers but very false gods. Giving her highly personal view, Tenar's friend Penthe says she would "marry a pigherd and live in a ditch," if she could, rather than stay "buried alive" as a priestess (40; ch. 4), and, however unraised her consciousness, Penthe has a point. Expressed in consciously political terms, Le Guin as critic says her "view is that the Place in the desert is a community of women (and eunuchs) totally controlled by men a subservient element in the totally male-dominant regime of the godkings. Ged's society is also male-dominant, but not so repressive, and so he can offer her a (relative) freedom" (personal communication).

The Farthest Shore returns to more explicit dealing with the Balance and doorways, but it reverses much in The Tombs of Atuan (Crow and Erlich 206-07).

In Shore, Arren, Prince of Enlad, has been sent by his father to Roke to seek the counsel of the Archmage Sparrowhawk and his colleagues. There has been a loss of magic in the remote areas of Earthsea. Later Ged and Arren will learn of increasing piracy and slave-taking, drug use, and a decline in the arts and crafts. More generally, joy, vividness, and light are draining from the world. Arren and Ged set off to discover why. Ged believes that one man is responsible for this strange contagion, what he sees as a radical imbalance, outside of the natural order. Ged is correct. A sorcerer named Cob has found a way to immortality by dying and returning, opening a door between the realms of life and death.

To search for Cob, Ged needs a guide: Ged is satisfied with the power of his art and has long been reconciled to his own death. For Ged it is well that his body will return to the natural cycles (as Chuang Tzu taught) and that the being the acts and choices of his life have created will go to the Dry Land.⁶⁷ Arren, though, hears Cob very well, and the temptation for him is to become a servant to Cob, serving the Anti-King. The appeal, Ged tells Arren, is made "In our minds," an appeal to "The traitor, the self; the self that cries I want to live; let the world burn so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in . . . . all of us. But only some understand him. The wizards and the sorcerers. The singers; the makers. And the heroes, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be one's self is a rare thing and a great one. To be one's self forever: is that not better still?" (135; "Orm Embar," ch. 9).

Ged, then, needs someone who can hear Cob's appeal and resist it. Arren is a good candidate: he fiercely wants to live, but will listen to Ged's lesson that "Nothing is immortal" and that our mortality is the source of our selfhood. Ged tells Arren the Perennial Philosophy "That selfhood . . . does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea" and asks rhetorically, "Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?" (122; "Children of the Open Sea," ch. 8).⁶⁸ Conveniently for Le Guin's teaching purpose, but very plausibly, Arren is hard to convince and demands to know why he shouldn't desire immortality. Ged is pleased that Arren argues seriously and allows that Arren should desire immortality, but he should beware lest he get his desire and the world suffer even worse.

Arren objects that if so much depends on "the Balance of the Whole," surely "it would not be allowed" and here he stops, but we can fill in that surely one mere human would not be allowed to disturb the Balance. Ged pounces on the passive voice, deleted agent and asks rhetorically, "Who allows? Who forbids?" Arren does not know, and neither does Ged. There are no transcendent gods in the universe of Earthsea to allow or forbid, no God or gods to command. Ged is sure that he was able to upset the Balance greatly: "I have done the same evil, in the same folly of pride. I opened the door between the worlds just a crack, just a little crack, just to show that I was stronger than death itself. . . . Oh, the door between the light and the darkness can be opened . . . . But to shut it again, there's a different story" (137; ch. 9).⁷⁰ It is the story of almost all of the rest of their quest, and of Shore.

Ged and Arren go to Selidor, as far west as Earthsea goes, and then go in spirit to the Dry Land of death. At the climax of Shore, Arren and Ged confront Cob at the Dry River (176-84; "The Dry Land," ch. 12). There is an agon at the Dry River: a struggle in words, a physical struggle (though in spirit), and a magical struggle as Ged strives to close the door between the worlds. In a significant paraphrase of a graffito attributed to Percy Bysshe Shelley, that door was "a way that led nowhere" (183; ch. 12).⁷¹ Shelley, the story goes, was expelled from Oxford for painting "THIS WAY TO HEAVEN" on the wall forming the end of a dead-end alley. Any religious way promising immortality, including the Christian Way, Shelley and Le Guin hold, is a way going nowhere. Arren and Ged succeed: Ged closes the door and gives Cob back his true name, and a real death. The cost of this victory to Ged is all his power as a mage, and most of his physical strength. Arren—or Lebannen, now, the King who goes by his true name must carry Ged over the Mountains of Pain. They arrive on Selidor and the Eldest dragon Kalessin flies them back to Roke.

On Roke, Ged kneels to Lebannen, acknowledging him King of All the Isles. And then Kalessin takes Ged back to Gont. Again, Le Guin offers alternative endings. The heroic Deed of Ged has Ged go to Havnor for the coronation and then take his boat, Lookfar, "from harbor and from haven, westward among the isles, westward over sea; and no more is known of him." That is, when he has spent his power and has reached old age he makes a heroic exit and— like a combination of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses and a hero in a Western movie sails off into the sunset. They tell the story differently on Gont. In that version the King comes to Gont to seek Ged but learns he's gone off to the "into the forests of the mountain." The King forbids seeking Ged out, saying, "He rules a greater kingdom than I do." That is, Ged takes the route of a Sage and leaves the life of doing for a forest, Le Guin's favorite image for Being (196-97; "The Stone of Pain," ch. 13).

Tehanu goes with the version told on Gont, but corrects it. Ged returns to Gont and finds Tenar, and in old age finds love and a domestic life— and, for the first time, a sex life. Yin-Yang can symbolize the balance of Life and Death and cosmic Equilibrium, or the human and dragon in Tehanu. Le Guin insists in her last book-length visit to Earthsea that the image for the mystic Yin-Yang (re)creation of the world is also the mundane but complex intertwining of dark and light as Ged and Tenar make love.

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