On Violence, Utopia, Ethic and Sex:

It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undiscovered life which, in the spiritual part of our being, we share with the divine Ground. This new-found life is "more abundant" than the other, and of a different and higher kind. Its possession is liberation into the eternal, and liberation is beatitude. Necessarily so; for the Brahman, who is one with the Atman, is not only Being and Knowledge, but also Bliss, and after Love and Peace, the final fruit of the spirit is Joy. Mortification is painful, but that pain is one of the pre-conditions of blessedness. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (106; ch. 6)

From 1969 through 1985, Ursula K. Le Guin published several important works that deal significantly with large-scale violence: "Winter's King" (1969), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Word for World Is Forest (1972), The Eye of the Heron (1978), Stone Telling's story in Always Coming Home (1985), and, to a lesser extent, The Dispossessed (1974). For one of the bases of violence, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) is useful, as is "Nine Lives" (1969). And "The New Atlantis" (1975) and Tehanu (1990) are important for smaller-scale violence and for Le Guin's rethinking the question in more feminist terms. In this chapter, I wish to look at Le Guin's extended investigation of the roots of war and lesser forms of highly organized mass murder dystopian topics; and, true to Le Guin's frequent use of comparison and contrast, I'll examine also Le Guin on the opposite of dystopia ("bad place"), eutopia (a "good place").

Violence was a pressing topic in the United States of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Putting the matter crudely, human beings in general and Americans in particular were running out of excuses. Most of us, most of the time are peaceful enough, but a fair number of Americans every generation or so marched off to kill large numbers of other human beings, ordinarily to the applause of the fellow citizens of the killers.

Why?

Utopia was not a hot topic through the 1960s. The Right and Center in the American-led West have been militantly antiutopian for much of the twentieth century, and, as one radical in the late 1960s put it, the New Left was also very reluctant to talk about what things would be like the morning after the Revolution: "The two great utopians of the twentieth century were Hitler and Stalin ... ."¹ "Second wave" feminism seems to have changed that; whatever the cause, the early 1970s on have been a major period of utopian writing, especially works that include feminist utopias, often contrasted with masculinist dystopias: for notable examples, Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" (1972) and The Female Man (1975), Suzy McKee Charnas's "diptych" Walk to the End of the World (1974, dystopia) and Motherlines (1978, utopia), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Samuel R. Delany's Triton (1976). ² Triton, subtitled "A Heterotopia," is most directly a response to Le Guin's The Dispossessed, "An Ambiguous Utopia," but all these works, and others, may be usefully seen, or heard, in a multi-voiced dialog occasionally, an argument. I'll suggest here only the obvious point that Le Guin until recently generally offered the liberal (feminist) ideal of integration, symbolized in the androgyne (and Daoist Yin-Yang), while Russ and Charnas preferred thought experiments using (and therefore making thinkable) more radical, separatist, women-only utopias.

SHORT STORIES: "Nine Lives" (1969 [again briefly]), "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971 [first pass]), "Winter's King" (1969 [first pass])," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973)

"Nine Lives" has no human-against-human violence, nor does it analyze any societies, either utopian or dystopian. But "Nine Lives" makes one of Le Guin's most explicit statements about evolution and deals very elegantly with the problem of the stranger and our dread at meeting the stranger. Both points are important.

In Le Guin's future history, the near future of us Terrans is (generally) not good: it is a time of ecological disaster, of famine, plague. In "Nine Lives," the worst is famine:

Following Peter Kropotkin in Mutual Aid (1902) and putting the matter in more orthodox Darwinist terms, it is the fit who survive (by definition); and, in times of stress, the fittest social animals are those who are most sociable, the most cooperative as we civilized people are pleased to flatter ourselves, the most civilized (P. E. Smith 80-83; Bittner, Approaches 149 n. 49). In Le Guin's future worlds, White Americans and our descendants are rarely among the survivors. As a culture, the great White West has usually prized competitiveness over cooperation; when under grave pressure, we aren't in the habit of queuing up. In truly lean times, then, we are far less likely to survive than peoples who practice solidarity and mutual aid.^{[ 3]}

The question of the stranger is crucial for the problem of violence. For human violence, there must be an "I" and an "Other" an Other the "I" sees as both similar enough to be a competitor and different enough to be a threat. One temptation for utopia is to reduce the likelihood for violence between people by radically reducing differences: "There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger" any stranger (WTQ 121). A false utopian possibility, then, is to eliminate strangers. Within itself the John Chow tenclone accomplishes exactly that. The ideal of the melting-pot has been realized in the ten genetically identical and phenotypically very similar men and women of the self-sufficient clone: "Always to be answered when you spoke; never to be in pain alone. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.... That hard old problem was solved. The neighbor was the self: the love was perfect" (126).^{[ 4]}

Pugh's thinking here of the teaching on love of neighbor in the Holiness Code (Leviticus 19.18), quoted with approval by Jesus (Matthew 13.39). It is unfortunate that Jesus did not quote further: "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt . . ." (19.33-34). An even harder assignment than love of neighbor, someone like you: an injunction to love someone different. In any case, the clone eliminates differences, within the clone; and it eliminates active hostility toward those outside the clone: a self-sufficient entity can usually just ignore outsiders (WTQ 129-30).

If "Nine Lives" were a philosophical essay, Le Guin would have to justify why cloning "is all wrong" beyond the practical problem of a higher fatality rate if they all tend to do the same wrong thing (142, 134-36) and the social utility problem cited in Martin's rhetorical question, "What are a lot of duplicate geniuses going to do for us when they don't even know we exist?" (142). "Nine Lives" is not a philosophical essay, and homogenized humanity comes across as wrong because lack of difference eliminates sympathy (130), love (146-47), and manners (142). Manners are not more important than love but they are important. A. L. Kroeber comments on the Luiseño specifically, and (California) Indians more generally: "The Indian, beyond taboos and cult observances, centers his attention on the trivial but unremitting factors of personal intercourse;{sic} affability, liberality, restraining of anger and jealousy, politeness. He . . . sets up an open, even, unruffled, slow, and pleasant existence as his ideal. He preaches a code of manners rather than morals. He thinks of character, of its expression in the innumerable but little relations of daily life, not of right or wrong in our sense. It is significant that these words do not exist in his language" (Handbook 684; ch. 47). A. L. Kroeber's daughter, rejecting absolutes of "right" and "wrong," agrees (see Chuang Tzu ch. 23 [Giles 229]). .

For Le Guin circa 1969, the simplest model for a utopian community is not the tenclone but Martin, Pugh, and Kaph as we last see them: lonely individuals, whose pain in isolation is their motivation to reach out to one another, to attempt, in the darkness, human touch (147).

*

"Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) takes a situation similar to that of "Nine Lives" a small group on an isolated, threatening planet but keeps in general shape close to old SF formulas. ⁵ Instead of a tenclone, we have ten literally mad scientists on a planet two lightcenturies beyond human exploration (WTQ 174), one where "All lifeforms were photosynthesizing or saprophagus, living off light or death, not off life. Plants: infinite plants . . ." (175). And then the isolated humans are threatened by something, something large and dangerous, where there are no intelligent creatures, no dangerous animals, nothing with voluntary movement no possible threats! A familiar enough SF premise, even one presented with some psychological sophistication in Forbidden Planet (1956), a film whose Monster from the Id lurks in the speculations about "psychic projections" and "Dark Egos" by "Vasters" mad explorers (182). The movement of the plot of "VEMS" identifies the threat as the planet's forest, one vast semi-sentient. The forest has sensed the fear and aggression of the humans and projected it back upon them, frightening them more and contributing to a vicious cycle. The forest is not conquered in the story but contacted by the human explorers' "Sensor," Osden, the hypersensitive empath of the group.

"'As Jean-Paul Sartre has said in his lovable way, 'Hell is other people'" ("A Trip to the Head," WTQ 160) and this statement is literally true for Osden, who has no "skin," so to speak, to keep other people out, so "touch" becomes for him a violation. Osden is most sensitive to the fear of his fellow humans, and to that of the forest. Osden resolves his own problems and those of the group, when he takes "the fear into himself, and, accepting, had transcended it. He had given up his self to the alien," to the forest, "an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self" which "is not the vocabulary of reason" but is the language of the Perennial Philosophy, and is the resolution of this story (WTQ 199).

As a teaching story, "Vaster than Empires" makes explicit some important Le Guinian points on the human Shadow, Being, macho, aggression, and the one, the desperately egocentric individual man.

"What one fears," the Narrator tells us, "is alien. . . . not one of us. The evil is not in me!" (187). In "Vaster than Empires" the forest is radically alien, but it is not evil or a murderer. The forest is, on the contrary, associated symbolically with connectedness and identified with the ground of all connections. The forest is described as "Presence without mind. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nirvana" (191) and explicitly called "the forest of being" (198). Indeed, what initially terrifies the forest is recognizing the mere existence of the humans: in its wholeness, the forest had never before encountered an Other. The forest is not conquered by the humans and hardly could be; the relatively happy resolution of the story comes in contacting, getting in touch with, the forest. Like City of Illusions, "Vaster than Empires" takes a standard sort of tale and retells it with radically different values, climaxing in a different idea of victory than defeating the Other; as in A Wizard of Earthsea, such victory as is possible comes not from conquering the apparent enemy, but the "mortification" of embracing the enemy.

This is a very unmacho idea, supported by some aspects of "Vaster than Empires." The Surveyors who go out exploring "Where no man has gone before" (in the classic Star Trek formulation) are "escapists, misfits" and "nuts" (WTQ 167), described early in the story as "wriggling through the coupling tube one by one like apprehensive spermatozoa trying to fertilize the universe" (167-68). So much for the Daniel Boone tradition and the central SF ideal of expansion into the Galaxy and for the image of the phallic rocket ship penetrating and impregnating space! (As in, for a highly relevant example, Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.) ⁶ On a more personal level, Osden tells one of his women colleagues that his "choice is to be hated or to be despised. Not being a woman or a coward, I prefer to be hated." Osden is at his sickest here, and in case we especially a male "we" miss that point, Le Guin goes on to undermine Osden by having him immediately go on to deny his humanity: "But I am not a man. . . . There are all of you. And there is myself. I am one" (177-78). ⁷

Osden has set up false oppositions, a false dilemma, and a false association of "woman" or the feminine with cowardice or weakness. He has identified himself against the group as a God-like One. He has yet to live the paradox of victory in "unreserved surrender" (WTQ 199), "losing the egocentric life." I will discuss the nature of that surrender in the discussion of "Vaster" in its context in Buffalo Gals. Here I wish to caution readers that Le Guin's self-description as an "unconsistent Taoist and . . . consistent unChristian" is somewhat modest; she is more consistent than most of us. ⁸ So we should be careful not to think of Osden's surrender as Christ-like sacrifice and Christian paradoxical triumph over an adversary. Osden is not imitating Christ, and he is not sacrificing himself; Le Guin does not approve of sacrifices in any religion, or self-sacrifice as an ideal. ⁹ Osden fulfills himself by finding in solitude relationship with the forest: with Nature, Being, the Dao.¹⁰ "Vaster than Empires" is not a story of Christ-like love, nor is it one of the analyses of the late 1960s and early 1970s that would find the solution to all problems in better communication or more sensitivity. Osden's problem is that he is too sensitive. The standard-issue human being is far from "a well of loving-kindness" (177), and "Vaster than Empires" makes even clearer than "Nine Lives" that some aggressiveness is a standard part of human interaction. Mannon, "the Soft Scientist," tries to explain Osden's obnoxiousness:

This speech gives us an approximate statement of Le Guin's position that aggressivity (as at least mild hostility to strangers) is a normal human trait: aggressivity the capacity for anger, even violent rage is part of the human repertoire. As with any trait, discounting for a moment free will, different people will be for aggressivity to greater and lesser degrees; as with any trait, aggressivity will be expressed in ways determined by the environment, most specifically for humans always and necessarily our cultures. The question then becomes, What are we going to do about it? What in human societies increases the probability of actual violence, especially large-scale violence? Can we build better and saner societies if not utopias, where violence is rare and war unknown?

*

Again, one way to such a utopia would be to eliminate the biological and cultural bases for violence: the differences that make people strangers to one another, the masculinity that provides the anatomy, hormone systems, and indoctrination that support macho violence. We know from The Lathe of Heaven that Le Guin dislikes a grey world without racial problems because it is without racial differences, but race is a minor matter genetically and by itself determines nothing culturally; there are other ways in which humanity could be homogenized. In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Le Guin's writing about it, Le Guin deals at length with the more ancient question of gender. What if that were eliminated? Before getting to the complexities of Left Hand, however, it will be well to look briefly at "Winter's King," written, Le Guin says a year before she began The Left Hand of Darkness but published the same year, and then revised for The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) to change the pronouns for the Gethenians to the feminine, while keeping masculine titles, as one way to suggest their androgyny (WTQ 85). I will discuss "Winter's King" more completely in the context of Le Guin's three visits to the Karhidish city of Rer.

"Winter's King" is a Hainish story, set far into the future, two generations after The Left Hand of Darkness, which is itself set on the planet Gethen ("Winter"), ca. 4780 CE and long after the League of All Worlds has evolved into the Ekumen ("household") of Known worlds. ¹¹ The narrative's plot involves a political plot. King Argaven XVII of Karhide is kidnapped and brainwashed: "An induced paranoia. You might well have become a remarkably vicious ruler . . . . Not overnight, of course. . . . It would have taken several years for you to become a real tyrant . . ." (WTQ 100). To avoid this plot, Argaven leaves Gethen and goes to the Ekumenical world of Ollul and is cured of her incipient paranoia and then goes to school. Argaven's child, Emran, becomes king, and a bad one. When Argaven returns to Karhide, she comes to lead the rebellion against her child and regains her throne.

Three points here.

First, Argaven returning from her kidnapping has "Abdication, suicide, or escape" as "the only acts of consequences" she could choose of her own free will. Argaven's physician on Hain notes that her kidnapper's "counted on your moral veto on suicide" a major taboo on Gethen "and your Council's vote [veto] on abdication. But being possessed by ambition themselves, they forgot the possibility of abnegation, and left one door open for you" (101). That is, Argaven can renounce her rights to kingship and does (abnegation) and goes to Ollul for treatment as simple "Mr Harge." Such renunciation of egotistical demands for status and power is beyond the mindset of people possessed by ambition, by the desire for power, and it is the right answer for Argaven. She turns her back on kingship and walks away from dominion, and this path leads her to true power and proper usefulness to her people (103).

The second point is in a dialog between King Argaven and Mr. Axt, the Mobile of the Ekumen on Winter. Axt tells Argaven of ancient Hainish seeding of the galaxy with humans, and alludes to loss of contact among the worlds during the Age of the Enemy. Argaven asks, "The dream of the Ekumen, then, is to restore that truly ancient commonalty; to regather all that peoples of all the worlds at one hearth?" Axt agrees, saying, "To weave some harmony among them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives and bodies on them together they would make a splendid harmony." Young Argaven replies, mostly correctly, "No harmony endures"; Axt responds, "None has ever been achieved . . . . The pleasure is in trying" (97).

In 1960s sociological language, Le Guin's ideal is integration, not assimilation. She wants to bring the (human) family together in our "commonalty," not in some sort of homogeneous unity. She wants "a splendid harmony" a figure of speech from music, where harmony requires at least two different notes.

And she's willing to allow some dissonance. Less figuratively, there is violence among the humans on Gethen, much of it in this story lead by Le Guin's hero, Winter's true King; and this violence is no less in the version of the story Le Guin revised to make the Gethenians androgynous. People will fight to put down a tyrant, especially an incompetent tyrant; people will follow Argaven against Emran; under enough political pressure, a mother will pursue the child of her body even to the child's dishonorable death (WTQ 107-08). Putting the matter more positively, "when our sense of justice is offended," as Hannah Arendt argued in On Violence (1969, 1970), we may react with rage and with violence. Such violence "is neither beastly nor irrational" but possibly legitimate when we are "confronted with outrageous events or conditions," when violence "is the only way to set the scales of justice right again" (Arendt 63, 64). Such violence is simply never good.

*

Gethen during the struggle between Argaven XVII and Emran is far from utopia; Omelas is a utopia: a place of almost perfect peace, of high art and science, profound kindness, natural religion (and no clergy), a place without guilt, of pleasure, happiness, joy ("The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," 1973, WTQ 252-55). Having established this beautiful place, at the Festival of Summer no less, Le Guin's Narrator asks us, "Do you believe? do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing" (265) and she describes the cost of this utopia: the scapegoat, one child kept miserable in a locked room. "It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually." We are never told how the child's misery allows the happiness of Omelas how its mortification and pain allows Omelas's joy but we are told explicitly that this is the case. All the people of Omelas "understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery" (257). Now that the Narrator has made Omelas more credible, she has only "one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible." Sometimes adolescents who go to see the child, sometimes older adults, "go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas . . . . into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas" (259).

This "psychomyth" (WTQ 251) is among my favorite short stories and has been immensely popular among anthologists and critics, and that may represent a failure of faith by many of us: a failure to believe in the possibility of "the city of happiness," our insistence that there must be a catch somewhere. Indeed, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (or free pizza delivery, to bring the saying up to date) but there are free gifts, starting with the universe and one's life, and large-scale human happiness, pretty-good societies, may be possible. ¹² However readers resolve the question of eutopia, it is clear Le Guin intends for us to consider seriously the philosophical question the story raises in the manner she raises it, as the parenthetical description under the title puts it, "Variations on a theme by William James." ¹³

In The Wind's Twelve Quarters headnote, Le Guin quotes from James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," most relevantly James's idea that James and his readers would find it "hideous" if utopian happiness for millions were achieved "on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment" (251). Le Guin follows James in reducing to its most radical case the Utilitarian doctrine of "The greatest good for the greatest number," and she attacks the "hard-headed" notion that in a nasty world one must sometimes use evil means to achieve good or, to multiply slogans: "The end justifies" or "will justify" "the means."

Le Guin suggests for etymologies for "Omelas," initially, "Salem, O[regon]," read backwards, but also "O melas," and "Homme hélas" ("Man, alas!"; WTQ 252). I will add to the possibilities, French homme plus Latin Hellas, for "man of Greece," and relate the name to the "Rationalist" part of the reference in The Lathe of Heaven (1971), to the "Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West." Dr. Haber, after all, was, in that novel "a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity" (82-83), which means, ideally, finding an Archimedean point outside the world from which to see the world objectively and analytically, and push it around rationally: giving it a shove toward an abstract, transcendent Good, finally to utopia (cf. "The New Atlantis" 88).

If its basic rationalism is one possible problem with Omelas, another is that the Omelites, however much they are "mature, intelligent, passionate adults" (254) might be gravely mistaken or, as Rebecca Adams suggests, a little crazy (41). Either way, we can help privilege Those Who Walk Away from Omelas by noting Le Guin's counting Odo among them (WTQ 260), and by associating them with a line of Le Guin's people who, if they could not be part of the solution where they were, at least walked away and ceased being part of the problem, or, if very lucky, went to better places to be: Lif and the widow and child in "Things," Luz in The Eye of the Heron, and Eve in "She Unnames Them" plus, in different ways, Leese Webster (the exiled, dispossessed spider) and "blank" in "A Trip to the Head." If will and reason have created a transcendent project in Omelas, then it might be well to leave Omelas. If some "transcendental power" has dictated the "sacrificial 'terms'" shown in the story (Adams 41), then it would be even more imperative to leave Omelas: Le Guin rejects the "Judaeo-Christian" and all similar transcendental powers.

I'll suggest that this far, if no further, we should put "The Ones Who Walk Away" in the tradition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and also Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729): More's Utopia should shame Europeans by showing how much more ethical Utopians are with only reason than Christian Europeans with both reason and revelation (J. H. Hexter, More's Utopia, 1952). The final turn of "A Modest Proposal" shows us that the Projector is a monster who would sell human baby meat to solve Ireland's economic problems and that he is more ethical than his rich Irish and English readers. Even so, we may, and should, identify with those who walk away from Omelas until we're "ambushed" by the thought that those who stay in Omelas are better people than Le Guin's generally privileged readers. ¹⁴ The Omelites live well from the suffering of only one child, and they are all conscious of the child's suffering (WTQ 257). The economy that sustains most of Western prosperity is based on the exploitation of many more, and those who suffer are virtually invisible to the privileged (see Le Guin's "Non-Euclidian View" 83-84).

Exploitation is one form of and one reason why there is violence among real-world humans, although in Omelas violence is limited to the victimization of one child. However mad the bargain of the Omelites, within the terms of the bargain, this is rational victimization, if we note that "rational" and "reason" come from ratio, "reckoning," and a simple calculation might indicate that the good of very many could outweigh the good of the one (to paraphrase a central thematic concern of the Star Trek movies). ¹⁵ Among those who believe in immortal souls of infinite value, the salvation of one such could outweigh all of human life. Would the goal of utopia, if achieved, justify violence against even one child? "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," in a rigorously constructed teaching story, says it would not.

Still, the dissidents on the road from Omelas exiles, émigrés do not try to overthrow the "city of happiness." They do not try to rescue the child. They do not resort to violence, perhaps because they know the anarchist teaching "that the means you use to attain your object soon themselves become your object" (Berkman 113) or "The means justify the end." It's unclear just what the Omelite exiles are going toward, although they "seem to know where they are going" (259). What is clear is that they reject the terms of Omelas's bargain: violence as a mysterious but rational price for utopia, even violence against one, the idea that good intentions can justify evil actions. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven writes, "To oppose something is to maintain it" and quotes the saying of a foreign people s/he is now among that "all roads lead to Mishnory." S/he continues, ". . . if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road" I assume even while on the road away from Mishnory or away from Omelas. We will see below more of the possibilities of minimally turning and walking away from evil, and the possibility of, perhaps, even finding a new road, to "go somewhere else, and break the circle" and go free (LHD 153; ch. 11). ¹⁶

*

Let's begin with some jargon useful for discussing science fiction: "foregrounding the background" and "textualizing the subtext." In "realistic," down-to-Earth stories ("mundane fiction," in Samuel R. Delany's formulation), our main interest is in the characters and what they do; the setting is background. In what Northrop Frye called the modes of Romance and Satire, the characters and their doings must compete for our interest with the settings. So, in the modes where we usually find SF and emphatically in utopias and dystopias what is background in Comedy and Tragedy, the mere settings of narratives, may get a good deal of attention, be drawn, figuratively, into the foreground. Add to this the idea of the subtext of a play as all the things the director and actors have to know that the playwright doesn't tell us. For a classic instance, Shakespeare's script tells us nothing about Hamlet and Ophelia's sex life, if any; the actors playing Hamlet and Ophelia, however, must know the subtextual details; whether or not they have been physically intimate is important for how they react to one another. Similarly, SF authors need to know a great deal about the worlds they create that they don't have to tell us directly: history, geography, myths, customs all the things we usually teach aspiring writers to sneak in and not present in big, undigested, expository lumps.

Not as much as in Always Coming Home (1985; a downright future ethnography), but still to a great extent, The Left Hand of Darkness foregrounds the background and textualizes subtexts, expanding a simple plot to twenty chapters and an appendix by insisting that we look very closely at the world Le Guin has made and which Genly Ai presents to us in his "Report."

The plot falls into three parts correlating with the story's three main settings, followed by a brief conclusion. In the beginning of the story, Genly Ai is in Erhenrang, the capital of Karhide, a country on the planet Gethen, nicknamed Winter because it is at the cold end of the range in which human societies can survive. Ai's status is First Mobile of the Ekumen ("Household," League) of Known Worlds, and his mission is to invite the Gethenians to enter the Ekumen, re-establishing contact with the other known human species of the Galaxy. Ai believes he is about to have an audience with King Argaven XV, ruler of Karhide, to present the case. The audience has been arranged by Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, prime minister to Argaven and a supporter of Ai's mission. Ai has dinner with Estraven, who implies strongly that Ai might want to leave Karhide for Orgoreyn, the other country on Gethen's Great Continent. To just advise Ai to leave would be to insult him: adults do not advise other adults in Karhidish culture. ¹⁷ Ai gets his audience with King Argaven, but they meet only moments after Ai hears the announcement of Estraven's banishment, in part for trying to help Ai but more for becoming "Estraven the Traitor" for attempting the peaceful resolution of a border dispute with Orgoreyn (29-30; ch. 3 [and ch. 9]). Ai's audience with Argaven does not go well, and he soon goes off to see the countryside of Karhide -and see if there was anything to tales of Gethenian Foretellings; and then Ai crosses over into Orgoreyn, hoping his offer will be better received by the Orgota.

Estraven also has gone to Orgoreyn, just ahead of assassins sent by Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe, Estraven's successor as "King's Ear." Ai's mission soon becomes urgent. Tibe is pressing Karhide's claim in the border dispute, and Karhide and Orgoreyn are approaching a breakthrough in Gethenian history: war. Entry into the Ekumen by one of the countries would drag in the other, and it would be necessary for the two to cooperate in bargaining with the Ekumen. The Orgota leadership lacks the insight and courage to go a new way; so they go a very old way and have Ai arrested and sent to a "voluntary farm," a forced-labor camp.

Estraven rescues Ai, and the two of them attempt to return to Karhide the only way they can, across the Gobrin Ice that separates and connects Karhide and Orgoreyn. It is a long trip: the third section of the novel.

Surviving the journey on the Ice and arriving back in Karhide, Ai calls down his colleagues in their ship in orbit; and Estraven is betrayed by a person s/he has aided and has asked for help and skis into the guns of Tibe's agents. Since the Orgota had announced Ai's death, his arrival, alive, in Karhide is sufficiently embarrassing to require a rearrangement of the Orgota leadership, bringing into power those more in favor of peace with Karhide and entry into the Ekumen. Tibe resigns after learning of Estraven's death; Ai's ship lands safely; Karhide prepares to enter the Ekumen; and Argaven refuses at least just yet to revoke the order of exile on Estraven and rehabilitate Estraven's reputation. The book ends with Gethen at peace and Ai leaving the Karhidish capital and visiting Estraven's family and telling them his and Estraven's story.

What I have left out of this plot summary is that the Gethenians are androgynes: neither male nor female five-sixths of the time; either male or female when they go into kemmer: estrous, heat, rut and, of course, remaining female through pregnancy and nursing if they enter kemmer as female and get pregnant. ¹⁸ The key goal of the protagonists, Genly Ai and Estraven, is to prevent a war between the great nation-states of Karhide and Orgoreyn; and androgyny is second only to the climate among the reasons the Gethenians as yet have had no wars. Commenting on The Left Hand of Darkness in "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1976/1987), Le Guin says "At the very inception of the whole book, I was interested in writing a novel about people in a society that had never had a war. That came first. The androgyny came second. (Cause and effect? Effect and Cause)" (DEW 11). ¹⁹ Gethenian androgyny is not necessary and probably not sufficient for their lack of warfare, but it is the biological basis for much in their culture that has made warfare unlikely.

Warfare anywhere on our Earth is a biological luxury item, possible only among peoples who have surpluses to destroy. As Ong Tot Oppong, an Ekumenical Investigator notes, "The weather of Winter is so relentless, so near the limit of tolerability even to . . . [Gethenians], that perhaps they use up their fighting spirit fighting the cold. The marginal peoples, the races that just get by, are rarely the warriors. And in the end, the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world. Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself" (LHD 96; ch. 7). On Gethen, humankind have a constant reminder, that "Heaven and Earth are not humane." ²⁰

Androgyny by itself might not have been sufficient to prevent war; the severe climate certainly helped limit large-scale violence, as did the relatively small numbers of Gethenians (96): mass violence requires masses. Also, Gethenian technology, like that of the Chinese, developed at a slow rate, their Machine Age having started up "gradually, without any industrial revolution, without any revolution at all. Winter hasn't achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid" (LHD 99; ch. 8). ²¹ No industrial revolution suddenly and blatantly put a nation far enough ahead of the climate that warfare made sense. No industrial revolution made one Gethenian nation suddenly superior to another technologically. And androgyny by itself wouldn't preclude war any more than the production of a subspecies of XYY, testosterone-crazed supermales would guarantee war; warfare is not an instinct or behavior. As Konrad Lorenz argued in On Aggression (1966), war is an institution (275). Still, human beings are biological creatures, and (spiritual matters aside?) everything we are and do has to have biological bases. On Gethen, the biological basis for the cultural constellation that has prevented war and made for a rather good place in Karhide has been androgyny. Everything in Gethenian society "is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle" of sexual latency and rut. "Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart," as the Ekumenical Investigator Ong Tot Oppong, initially saw and elegantly expressed it. "The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex" (93; ch. 7). And where there is sex among Gethenian humans, one's role might be female or it might be male; the Masculine and the Feminine, as defining categories, simply wouldn't exist and the "tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking" and is reinforced by Female/Male divisions is somewhat "lessened, or changed, on Winter" (94). ²²

Le Guin makes her points about gender, violence, and war in Left Hand by explicitly foregrounding background and textualizing subtexts. In Planet of Exile (1966), Le Guin had divided her narration among three point-of-view characters; but in The Left Hand of Darkness we not only have Ai and Estraven getting different chapters but the remainder going to still other voices, making explicit a good deal of what is usually implicit background and subtext. Of 20 chapters, Ai gets 10 (50%), Estraven gets 4 (20%), and miscellaneous others get 6 (30%) plus the appendix on "The Gethenian Calendar and Clock" (302-04). Of the "other voices," two of the chapters are identified as tales (chs. 2 and 9), and one as a story (ch. 4). Of interest to me here are the scientific report on "The Question of Sex," the theological piece "On Times and Darkness," and "An Orgota Creation Myth" of great antiquity.

Each of these chapters provides a transition in, and interruption of, the plot. "The Question of Sex" (ch. 7) is central in the section getting Genly Ai to Orgoreyn and the Orgota capital of Mishnory and rather more abruptly getting the exiled Estraven safely to Orgoreyn (chs. 6-8). "On Time and Darkness" (ch. 12) is central to the sequence of chapters moving Ai from Mishnory to the labor camp "Down on the Farm" and then his rescue by Estraven and their movement "To the Ice" (chs. 10-15). "An Orgota Creation Myth" (ch. 17) is told as Estraven and Ai move "Between Drumner and Dremegole," a geologically active area, and then "On the Ice" on their way home to Karhide and the resolution of the plot (chs. 16-19).

I will state directly what I see as Le Guin's answer to The Question of Sex, and Violence and War her basic answer from 1969 to at least 1985. As on Joanna Russ's Whileaway (1972, 1975), or among Suzy McKee Charnas's Riding Women in Motherlines (1978), violence is indeed possible in worlds without men, but it will tend to be direct, emotional, personal. What is specifically manly is not violence but warfare, which tends to be indirect, unemotional, impersonal: indeed, ideally, professional (see Arendt 62 n. 83). ²³ Alternatively, zealous soldiers, fighting for a cause, are willing to kill huge masses of total strangers as a means to the end of the kingdom of God or utopia or some abstract, ideal whatever so long as their zeal lasts. What is necessary for war is the mobilization of a large numbers of men to do the job of killing large numbers of strangers. For modern total war it is necessary to mobilize at least one entire society.

In "The Domestication of Hunch" (ch. 5), Genly Ai observes that Prime Minister Tibe

This is clear enough, and it is a theme upon which Le Guin will work variations for at least the next sixteen years. For the variation in The Left Hand of Darkness, picture Karhide and Orgoreyn on the Great Continent of Gethen as a giant geographical Yin-Yang symbol, with Karhide more toward Yinnish darkness and Orgoreyn more in Yangish light (see Barbour, "Wholeness" 167). Now picture the movement of Yin-Yang (and the Dao behind it) affecting or effecting obscurely all that happens on Gethen, right down to the Yin-Yang balance in Gethenian androgynes: "On Gethen, the two polarities we perceive through our cultural conditioning as male and female are neither, and are in balance . . . . and at the moment of the novel . . . [the balance] is wobbling precariously" (Le Guin, "Gender . . . Redux" 12); and this time, as the balance wobbles toward what we perceive as male, the civilized people of Gethen have the wherewithal for war.

Insofar as the question of warfare in The Left Hand of Darkness is a question of sex which is a great amount the placement of The Question of Sex" (ch. 7) is significant.

In chapter 5, "The Domestication of Hunch," Ai leaves Erhenrang for the countryside in contemporary American terms he goes to see "the real Karhide," beyond the Karhidish equivalent of the Washington, DC, Beltway. ²⁴ There Ai gets to experience Karhide at its economic roots, in its anarchic splendor at the old capitol of Rer (53), and at its most impressive: the ancient Fastness of Otherhord, where he attends a Foretelling. Ai asks the Weaver and the foretelling group whether Gethen will be part of the Ekumen in five years. ²⁵ The climax of the Foretelling shows Faxe, the Weaver, "in the center of all darkness," appearing as "a woman, a woman dressed in light. . . . And she screamed aloud in terror and pain, 'Yes, yes, yes!'" (66) "not so much a prophecy as an observation," and Ai is certain the "observation" is correct (67).

Chapter 6 gives a less good impression of Karhide: it is Estraven's first turn at narrating, and we get the story of Estraven's escape from Karhide and entry "One Way into Orgoreyn."

And then, chapter 7, the field notes of Ong Tot Oppong on Gethenian sexuality, giving us a large expository lump and repeating that the Gethenians "have never yet had what one would call a war. They kill one another readily by ones and twos; seldom by tens or twenties; never by hundreds or thousands" and asking, Why? (96). One possible reason: the Ancient Hainish colonizers had planned it that way, deliberately setting up a fairly elegant experiment in which they seeded Gethen with normally competitive humans but made them androgynes. But the experiment got sloppy over time when the Hainish had to withdraw and a new ice age came on.

Finally, as I'm dividing the chapters: chapter 8, significantly called "Another Way into Orgoreyn." The literal meaning of this title refers to Genly Ai's physical movement from Karhide to Orgoreyn important in the symbolic journey in the novel. More important, though, is Ai's description of the Karhide he's leaving and the Karhide coming into being under the regency of Tibe during King Argaven's pregnancy (100-01). ²⁶ Karhide is not a nation, not "a social unit, a mobilizable entity" (100); Tibe intends to make it one. Besides acting in the Sinoth Valley, Tibe propagandizes the people. Somewhat oddly for a Gethenian politician, Tibe did not talk about shifgrethor: "personal pride or prestige," etymologically and metaphorically, the shadow one casts, related to one's status, one's clout. ²⁷ Tibe "was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind, He wanted to stir up something which the whole shifgrethor pattern was a refinement upon a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. . . . He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, 'cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.'" Ai denies that there is a veneer of civilization, denies "that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness .... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth," perhaps, I'll add, part of human evolution, "and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war" and the peoples of Gethen had long ago chosen against war. Tibe wants a nation-state to rule, one like Orgoreyn, an "efficient centralized state," and s/he wants one now. One "means of mobilizing people rapidly and entirely is with a new religion; none was handy; he would make do with war" (102-03), although, of course, Tibe lacks both the word and a firm concept of what a war might be.

Tibe's way into Orgoreyn toward a modern authoritarian or totalitarian state is through the human Shadow: a sense of national superiority, hatred of the alien, fear disguised as courage, brutal anger rhetorically transmuted into something noble (102; ch. 8). But what justifies such a poor opinion of Orgoreyn, and how did Orgoreyn get to be what Orgoreyn is?

Politically, Orgoreyn is soon revealed as a nasty blend of oligarchy and bureaucracy, with a typically nasty secret police. Also, older readers might superimpose over the struggle between Karhide and Orgoreyn a historical model. Tibe comes across like Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi propaganda for the Third Reich. If that makes Karhide parallel to Hitler's Germany (1933-45), then Orgoreyn can be cast as Stalin's USSR and the Stalinist-Russia analogy holds when we finally see Orgoreyn, starting with the scene of docile people imprisoned by their own government in a cellar (111-112; ch. 8). Still, younger readers would probably do better seeing Tibe as a more generic demagogue, scaring the hell out of the people and making them feel brave to go off killing strangers with whom they have no quarrel.

How Orgoreyn got that way is handled by a couple of very direct satirical maneuvers and one subtle one. The Orgoreyn section of The Left Hand of Darkness is "Conversations in Mishnory" from Genly Ai's point of view and "Soliloquies in Mishnory" from Estraven's journal (chs. 10-11), and then "Down on the Farm," where Ai recounts his capture, transportation, and imprisonment in the Orgota forced labor camp, and "The Escape," a straight narration by Estraven of his rescue of Ai (chs. 13-14).

The first satirical move is having the Orgoreyn sequence begin with Ai in a cellar with Orgota refugees with no papers, then betrayed in tidy, sunny, Mishnory, sent to prison in a slow truck full of other prisoners, and then end up the sequence getting rescued from death in the "Pulefen Commensality Third Voluntary Farm and Resettlement Agency." Now, in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," we probably should accept the festival and the good sex, good drugs, and good life as real and significant, and balance against them the child kept miserable in the room. Le Guin balances the good of Omelas against the evil done to the child. She is not so fastidious in The Left Hand of Darkness. As George Slusser said in 1976, the real reality of Orgoreyn is the dark cellar and the truck (24) and slow death in the labor camp.

The subtle maneuver is preparing for the opening of the sequence (Ai's strained meeting with Estraven in Mishnory) with a visit to Ai from Estraven's ex-kemmering, Foreth, who wants Ai to bring money to Estraven in exile (104-06; ch. 8). Foreth asks Ai if Ai feels in Estraven's debt for Estraven's having supported Ai's mission. Ai replies that he does feel indebted, "in a sense. However, the mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties." Foreth responds, "If so . . . it is an immoral mission." Foreth not only presents a view that might be expressed by "an Advocate of the Ekumen," but formulates a basic principle of Le Guin's moral system. The lesson here is that no abstract Mission, no transcendent project, should override the personal. To get people to allow loyalty to abstractions, particularly patriotic loyalty to the abstract State, routinely to override personal obligations, requires that they be rigorously trained in abstraction and conditioned to place value upon transcendence.

The second satiric move is the placement of chapter 12, "On Time and Darkness." In chapter 12 we find an excerpt from "The Sayings of Tuhlme the High Priest, a book of the Yomesh Canon, composed in North Orgoreyn about 900 years ago." In chapter 13 we have Genly Ai's arrest and mistreatment in Orgoreyn. Preeminently, we have the "Voluntary Farm," with its grotesquely euphemistic name, chemical spaying/castration of its prisoners, and slow attempted murder of Genly Ai and, for Le Guin, or any anarchist, the central damning fact of the "Farm" as a prison. The juxtaposition of "On Time and Darkness" and "Down on the Farm" (chs. 12/13) is significant. The juxtaposition is a post hoc: After this, therefore because of this a fallacy in logic but a standard device in literature. Accept the world-view of the Yomesh, the chapter order implies, accept their ideas on time, darkness, and epistemology, and you are only a few hundred years away from a mobilizable, patriotic Orgota State, the obscenity of the Sarf (the Orgota secret police), and prison farms.

From Goss at the Otherhord Fastness, we have learned that the Lord of Shorth had forced a group of Foretellers to attempt to answer the unanswerable question, "What is the meaning of life?" The Weaver of that Foretelling group was Meshe (60; ch. 5), and, according to the Yomeshta, the result of trying to answer that question was Meshe's enlightenment, Meshe's being placed "in the Center of Time":

Such a look, Le Guin has warned us, may be very dangerous: "Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios{sic}, every now and then" (Introd. to 1976 edition). ³¹ And the problem is not with just rationalist, pagan Apollo. God's first line in the Jewish creation myth is "Let there be light" and God sees "the light was good" (Genesis 1.3-4); and in The Revelation to John we learn that in the New Jerusalem "there shall be no night" (21.25).

If it were true that we really did live in a world without darkness, without shadows, with total certainty, action would be impossible; life would be impossible. So Faxe, the Weaver, who knows so much about the "eternal present," has told Genly Ai (71; ch. 5). So we see during the days of white weather, when Ai and Estraven "need the shadows in order to walk" on the Ice (260-61, ch. 18 ; 265-67, ch. 19). The Yomesh philosophy gives its followers a pernicious half-truth. With all that light they can think themselves certain of their knowledge, sure of their "way." They can know the ends and need not take much care in selecting means. As Eric Hoffer argues in The True Believer, such certainty is the foundation of the fanaticism of True Believer leaders and followers (75-82). With perfect rationality and calm, they can order and carry out atrocities. Unlike Terran anarchists and Le Guin's Ekumen and opposed to Le Guin's urDaoists, the Handdarata such people readily adopt "the doctrine that the end justifies the means" (259; ch. 18 [see Berkman 113]).

"Meshe is the Center of Time. . . . And in the Center there is no time past and no time to come. . . . The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the Seeing of Meshe, and are in his Eye. . . . Our doing is his Seeing: our being his Knowing" (162-63; ch. 12).³² For Meshe and all who see through his "Eye," there is no change: no history and no sequency; all is simultaneous.³³ Being and doing are not balancing and reinforcing aspects of mortal life but are conflated together in the purely rational Seeing and Knowing of Meshe. Such a view can greatly simplify politics. Given such a vision, people can set up a rational, orderly, efficient state, such as Orgoreyn. Anyone with views differing from Truth does not deserve to be heard. Anyone who cannot or will not fit into such a perfect institution is obviously a "defective" or an enemy of the people. Such a view of things, Le Guin suggests, is a step toward the dark cellar in which "nameless" people are imprisoned by their fellow citizens, and accept their imprisonment without complaint or protest (111-12; ch. 8) and toward the Sarf truck, where light has again given way to darkness and the perfect "commensality" is achieved: where naked prisoners have nothing left but their pain and a terrible kindness and merge into "one entity occupying one space" (170; ch. 13 [see also 109; ch. 8]). Most emphatically, we move toward the Voluntary Farm, with its "excess of light," where "social purpose" is achieved through the dehumanization of one's fellow human beings (174, 176-77; ch. 13).³⁴

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin has used not merely post hoc ergo propter hoc but also but the subtle, satiric, indirect "proof" of reduction to the grotesque. If Meshe is correct, Le Guin strongly implies, then we have no logical complaint if the Orgota embody Meshe's Truth in their New Epoch regime. If the New Epoch regime sickens us, we would do well to reject Meshe's view as a species of dangerous insanity.

*

The center of The Left Hand of Darkness, however, is not in Orgoreyn or Karhide but on the Ice between the two countries. It is time then to turn to the Ice and to the straightforward fact that chapter 17, "An Orgota Creation Myth" falls in the center of the story of the winter journey, in the balance point of chapters 15-16 and 18-19. In these chapters, Le Guin brings together in a series of significant juxtapositions her views on Being and becoming, patriotism and friendship (and treason), manhood and humanness, time and darkness (rightly understood), epistemology, ecology, evolution, death, pain, and ethics.

The origins of the Orgota creation myth "are prehistorical; it has been recorded in many forms. This very primitive version is from a pre-Yomesh written text . . ." (237; headnote to ch. 17). The creation myth, then, is part of the common cosmological heritage of all Gethen. For my purposes, there are four significant statements in it: (1) The ice-shape that says "I bleed" creates from the excrement of the sun "the hills and valleys of the earth." (2) The ice-shape that says "I sweat" creates in one act "trees, plants, herbs and grains of the field, animals, and men." (3) The ice-shapes sacrifice themselves to produce milk to wake the sleeping humans. (4) The entire last paragraph:

In creating hills and valleys, especially if we imagine the hills in sunlight and valleys in shade, "I bleed" has created two of the most primitive manifestations of Yang and Yin. In creating all living things in one act and from one source (soil plus sea-water), "I sweat" has established the interconnectedness of the web of life, including (in a way that would please Luz in Eye of the Heron) making people of mud. In sacrificing themselves, in allowing the sun to melt them to form milk, the three ice-shapes enact a little allegory of the sacrifice involved in the rise of consciousness. Human consciousness, since the myth informs us that ". . . milk is drunk by the children of men alone and without it they will not wake to life" (238). And the words to Edondurath of the nameless "younger brother, the father" point our way to the proper understanding of shadows and shifgrethor and several key images and themes in the journey on the ice.

In terms of this myth, we can say in general that the relatively young doctrine of the Yomeshta manages to get just about everything wrong; the really old-time religion of the Handdarata not only manage to understand the myth correctly but to improve upon it. As Tuhlme, the Yomesh High Priest, tells us, the Handdarata recognize that the darkness is "Source and End," that the world will not only fall into darkness at the end of time but also arose out of darkness in the beginning. In Daoist terms, the Handdarata recognize that beyond the Named Dao (Being) there is the darkness of the Unnamed Dao, Unbeing, the Void, in a continuing dynamic of creation and dissolution.³⁵

The Yomeshta do not err in valuing human consciousness, the consciousness for which the ice-shapes sacrificed themselves. Their error comes from valuing consciousness, the light, exclusively, and in failing to see that consciousness has its costs. If all we were were pure being, like the ice, then we would be eternal. To differentiate into individuality, to awake into consciousness, however, is to enter time, to become mortal. And to be mortal is to be part of the web of life. Here Meshe and his followers make their gravest error: they are blind to humanity's place as part of the scheme of things, blind to the true significance of our living "in the middle of time."³⁶

Estraven comments that "The Yomeshta would say that man's singularity is his divinity." Ai replies, "Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. Orgoreyn is the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing things around" (233; ch. 16). On the other hand, the Handdarata, as Estraven tell us, "are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more preoccupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part" and then Estraven goes on to quote Tormer's Lay, the "source" of the title for The Left Hand of Darkness (233-34; ch. 16). The Yomeshta, seeing humans as "Lords of the Earth," misinterpret totally the basic fact of human existence. We are indeed in "the Center of Time" but that means that we are mortal, subject to pain and death.³⁷ Our mortality is the shadow that follows us, and it is that shadow that gives substance to our lives.³⁸ Moreover, each of us (even clones) must die individually, moving beyond the touch of our closest loves; and, as stressed particularly in The Dispossessed, it is that loneliness and pain of mortality that moves us to join with others. And in joining with other people (and with the world), we can perhaps move through pain to joy or at least reduce the pain enough to remain sane.³⁹

*

The themes of the Orgota creation myth are worked out and expanded in the winter's journey in The Left Hand of Darkness chapters 15-16 and 18-19. These five chapters, taken together, give us an insight into the ethical norms of Left Hand and of Le Guin's early canon in general.

Chapter 15 is narrated by Genly Ai and is parallel to the first part of Estraven's journal in chapter 16; the rest of chapter 16 is parallel to Ai's narration in chapter 18. The sequence begins with Ai's awakening and seeing Estraven "as he was" really seeing Estraven, in a kind of James Joycean "epiphany," especially seeing Estraven's face (200; ch. 15).⁴⁰ The movement of the sequence is toward Ai's and Estraven's acceptance of each other and their touching in what may be the only way possible for them (or possibly for Le Guin at that stage of her development) through love and through mindspeech, not sexually.⁴¹ Ai's vision of Estraven leads to his growing insight into Estraven's wholeness (202 and 203). Estraven is like a Daoist sage, like Ogion in the Earthsea series, George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven or like Faxe of the Handdarata: the simplicity of an uncarved block, the completeness of an animal (71; ch. 5). To be whole requires being part, and to be as whole as Estraven requires being in close touch with the universe. Genly Ai surprises us a bit by telling us that Estraven saw Estraven "so slow-thinking" s/he "had to guide his acts by a general intuition of which way his 'luck' was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him. . . . the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of Foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole" (203-04; ch. 15).

With such temporary vision, as opposed to Meshe's permanent Enlightenment, Estraven can see (feel?) what s/he must do, right down to he "vile crime" of theft, when s/he and Ai need food (205; ch. 15). Even so, Ai will later break custom and teach Estraven mindspeech and call his ship before he can be sure the Karhidish government will allow it to land in safety.⁴² All we can get is a "general intuition" of how our "luck" runs, of how the great wheel turns, but following this intuition, against convention or even law, is of crucial importance. It is how noncontemplatives can find the Dao and not have to depend upon abstract theories. If we deceive ourselves in the Yomesh fashion and hold that the wheel doesn't turn and that we can know with certainty what is, then it is just a step to a masculinist, Platonic, Apollonian True Belief of the sort that Le Guin shows us in Orgoreyn. But there is another way to go, a more utopian possibility shown in Estraven in him/herself and in the love that develops between Estraven and Ai (see Slusser 26).

When Estraven takes up the narration in chapter 16, the first point of discussion is Time and exile (221-22). Disjunction in time has alienated Ai from his homeworld. This alienation establishes the esthetic appropriateness for Ai's name as "a cry of pain" (229; ch. 16).⁴³ Disjunction in time, then, leads to isolation and pain; and, as in "Nine Lives" and The Dispossessed, and, allegorically, in The Farthest Shore, pain leads to the possibility of human touch, relationship (Remington, ". . . Suffering"). More immediately, the timejumping discussion leads to a couple of brief allusions to geological evolution and from there to organic evolution and the contrast and relationship between singularity and isolation. Out on the Ice, Estraven and Ai are both "singular, isolate," cut off from their societies and social rules. Estraven writes that they "are equals at last, equal, alien, alone" (ch. 16, p. 232). Ai speaks of the "isolation and loneliness," of themselves and of Estraven's species. He is especially impressed that the Gethenians developed a theory of evolution given the "unbridgeable gap" between them and "the lower animals" (233; ch. 16). This mention of evolution moves the discussion on to the differences between the Yomeshta and the Handdarata on ecology, and then on to Tormer's Lay.

Time and loneliness, evolution and ecology, wholeness and dualism, "myself and the other," "I and Thou" all come together in chapter 16 and are repeated in part in chapters 18 and 19 (from Ai's point of view). In chapter 18, Ai looks upon Estraven in kemmer in kemmer necessarily as a woman, since Ai is a "Pervert": in his case always male. Ai looks at this woman and does not deny the (now) obvious: "And I saw then again, and for good, what I had been afraid to see . . . in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was." A few minutes later they consummate their love by symbolically marrying, communicating in mindspeech (248-53).

When they are close to Karhide, to home, Ai will symbolize his union with Estraven, without totally realizing it, in the figure of Yin and Yang: "Light is The Left Hand of Darkness ... how did it go?⁴⁴ Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow" (267; ch. 19). Yin-Yang also symbolizes Estraven and Ai Female and Male when Estraven was in kemmer, two human beings who have reached enough unity in themselves to be able to balance each other, and thereby achieve further unity, wholeness, and balance (Barbour).

In the central philosophical chapters of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin posits a universe based on nonbeing, Darkness in Western mythology, Chaos and Old Night. Out of this ultimate Darkness comes the primal Light and the Ice; out of nonbeing comes Being, the Dao that can be called at least, "the Way," the world of the eternal now. Out of Being come shadows and balance, Yin-Yang: the world of becoming, of "Mutabilitie," life, death, history, process, change, and evolution.⁴⁵ As Ged has assured Arren in The Farthest Shore, there is no danger in the flux itself including the evolution and acts of unconscious species (66; ch. 4, "Magelight"). The only potential problem is with conscious creatures, with human beings (cf. LoH 161; ch. 10). We do have moments in which we can see or feel past the flux to the roots of Being, and these moments are important: they are the moments that allow us individual wholeness and the brief fullness of the I-Thou relationship. These are, however, only moments, and we have neither the power nor the right to take a subjectively eternal moment and turn it into a permanent insight into the workings of the Whole. We have no right to attempt to freeze or deny time and stop change to deny flux and death and darkness and attempt to set up a New Epoch society of (anti-)utopian perfection.⁴⁶ We also have no right to try to push things around and try to consciously force change, to force the world, and other people, to obey our wills.⁴⁷

Which brings us back to the questions of war, violence, aggression, utopia, dystopia, and sex.

No Gethenian "is quite so thoroughly 'tied down' . . . as women, elsewhere, are likely to be psychologically or physically" by childbearing and child raising. More important for my concerns, no Gethenian is "quite so free as a free male anywhere else" (93-94; ch. 7 [see Russ, "Image" 39]). Anyway, no Gethenian is as free as a privileged Terran male from what Simone de Beauvoir discusses, quite negatively and at length, as the immanence of the life of women. Gethenians cannot give themselves totally to masculine transcendent projects because normal Gethenians go into kemmer every month (more or less), and all who are healthy have the privilege and risk of pregnancy, birthing, and nursing. Less so than Hainish-normal women but much more than Hainish-normal men, Gethenians are embedded in the world. And when you are in the world, it is hard to picture pushing it around. Gethenian anatomy and physiology did not determine the philosophy of the Handdarata but it made it easy to think that philosophy. And it took someone "blinded by the light," Meshe, to think transcendence. And with transcendence, large-scale violence is possible. People can then think abstractions like The State, The Nation, National Honor abstractions that dwarf our puny little existences and are worthy of dying for (see Trumbo, ch. 10). People can then dream up schematic utopias and push around others to try to build them.⁴⁸

The Yomeshta started playing such a wide-scale push-and-shove game some 2202 years before the action of The Left Hand of Darkness. But from their most ancient times the Gethenians have known they "were born in the house of flesh" and "death follows at their heels" (239; ch. 17); they know they are mortal and part of the world. And they are reminded of the flesh frequently. They may, indeed, be mobilizable for war. Tibe almost succeeds; the Orgota have established a real nation-state. But their violence is, so to speak, of the flesh, and it proves hard to idealize it and turn it toward warfare. More immediately important, there is the underlying basis for Karhidish culture in the views of the Handdara, especially as embodied in their "Old Men" at the Fastnesses: "It was an introverted life, self-sufficient, stagnant," from Genly Ai's rather American kind of view, "steeped in that singular 'ignorance' prized by the Handdarata and obedient to their rule of inactivity or noninterference. That rule," like wu wei for the Daoists is the Handdarata nusuth: "no matter," which "is the heart of the cult." Ai won't "pretend to understand it. But I began to understand Karhide better, after a halfmonth in Otherhord. Under that nation's politics and parades and passions runs an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent, the fecund darkness of the Handdara" (60; ch. 5). Gethen may find an Ekumenical peace because war, however rationally conducted, is always somewhat mad, and deep in the culture of Gethen lies a very ancient sanity.

*

In most of her canon, ethical action for Le Guin moves toward contact with the Dao, multiple integrations, and away from hatred and war. Ethical action in Le Guin's early and middle works is fairly explicitly based upon a vision of the world that accepts both simultaneity and sequency, Being and becoming and it is based upon a vision of reality that sees more than just one country or race or world. In short, ethical action with a lot of luck will move toward an Ekumen: a human society in which we can fulfill the Dao of Humanity and of nature a society in which we can be fully human. A society, perhaps, in which we "follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution" (TD, ch. 7, p. 177). A society in which we can consciously extend "the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being" (LHD, ch. 15, p. 211). Which thought, after I finish discussing Le Guin's work of the 1960s, will take us to The Dispossessed (1974).

* *

In a 1979 review-essay for Salem Press, I called The Left Hand of Darkness "one of the best literary works to come out of America in the late 1960's," and I stand by that assessment, although I will now admit that I've read far too few of the works of the 1960s to make so broad a statement.

Le Guin's major SF novels are clearly teaching stories and political works, and one criterion for judging them is whether or not the politics are correct, not "politically correct" but correct: right, decent. The Left Hand of Darkness, I think, is almost completely right: it promotes peace and freedom and attacks betrayal, autocracy, warmongering, authoritarian oligarchy, and bureaucracy. It offers an elegant analysis of war as an institution. It is an excellent book for helping male readers accept women as adult human beings and helping girls and women readers learn that they can be active, competent adults.

Still, there was sufficient controversy of The Left Hand of Darkness that Le Guin wrote "Is Gender Necessary?" (1976) and then reissued that essay with glosses as "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1987).⁴⁹ I shall very briefly epitomize that debate so that younger readers will have some idea of what the fuss was about. This is important to do. First, the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first seem likely to combine capitalist triumphalism with nationalistic and fundamentalist-religious reaction. In such a context, and from such a distance, liberal and radical feminists of the 1970s and 1980s may look indistinguishable. Second, Le Guin has accepted much of the criticism and has modified (arguably radicalized) her writing accordingly and, simultaneously, the women's movement has moved to accommodate a range of feminisms and welcome more enthusiastically heterosexual, married, liberal feminists. Third, the debate is significant for changing definitions of, or at least changing focuses for, politics in the United States, as the saying "The personal is the political" shifted from advice against hypocrisy, the injunction to live one's politics to an assertion of the political dimensions of issues in people's personal lives, especially the lives of women.

Let's examine, then, the 1976 Ace re-issue of the text.

The front and back covers feature what seem to be ice versions of Caribbean androgyne statues rising out of a glacier. Such imagery was probably unexceptionable with most feminists in 1976: in that year Pamela Sargent could hope that as more women write science fiction and "as more men deal thoughtfully with their female characters," SF will "become a more androgynous and human literature" (13). By 1978, however, Mary Daly had argued against androgyny as an ideal (Gyn/Ecology 386-88 and passim; ch. 10). Few feminists moving into the 1980s would be offended by the cover, but after Daly's book, some might not be reassured. The front blurbs announce that The Left Hand of Darkness has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as has Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Joanna Russ won her first Hugo for a novella in 1983, and women, other than Le Guin, did not start winning Hugos regularly under their own names until the 1980s. The situation is somewhat different for the Nebula Russ's "When It Changed" won the short story award in 1972, and Suzy McKee Charnas's "Unicorn Tapestry" won in 1980 but the pattern is the same. Especially before "James Tiptree, Jr." revealed herself as Alice Sheldon in 1977, it could seem like the major awards in SF were won by Men, Misc. Women, and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Ency. of S.F. "Hugo," "Nebula" and passim).⁵⁰ The dedication for Left Hand is "For Charles, sine quo non." The book is dedicated to Charles Le Guin, Ursula Le Guin's husband, "without whom, not; an indispensable requisite or condition." This is a loving and poetic thought, and readers familiar with Le Guin's work would recognize the valorizing of marriage, in a very wide sense. For a major relevant example, readers familiar with The Lathe of Heaven (1971) will know that little condemns Dr. William Haber as much as his being "a lone wolf," who wanted neither "marriage nor close friendships," prizing far too highly his unfettered will and "independence" (112; ch. 8). A suspicious reader, however, less immersed in Le Guin's canon than in the historical moment of the late 1970s through the 1980s, might see in this dedication to Charles Le Guin an unfeminist degree of dependence.

Moving into the text, one might ask, "Where are the women?" Genly Ai, whose point of view we get in half the chapters, is a man; and the Gethenians aren't women. They're androgynes, but they tend to come through, as Joanna Russ pointed out, as men: "It is . . . a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called 'he' throughout, but put that together with the native hero's personal encounters in the book [primarily with Foreth], the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men."⁵¹ One might also ask, "Where are the Black people?" since Genly Ai is as much <<ethnized>> White for most White readers as Estraven is gendered male, but Terran ideas of ethnicity are far less immediately relevant than gender on a planet of androgynes.

Coming to Chapter 5, we get the Foretelling at Otherhord, which includes, in a formal role, a "Pervert." That Hainish-Normal people, like us, would be perverts in Gethen is a very useful suggestion, but note the analogy Genly Ai uses. Gethenian perverts "are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies" (64). In the year 3850 CE, at the earliest, Genly Ai is aware of many societies in which homosexuals are contemned, behavior Ai might better know about from his "criminal ancestors," not from current events in the Ekumen. And Ai's use of "bisexual" for sexually dimorphic (basically two-sexed) societies eliminates a handy word for people who like sex with both men and women, and may be seen as an ignoring of that category of twentieth-century Terrans.⁵² In the 1987 re-issue of "Is Gender Necessary?", Le Guin notes correctly that she "quite unnecessarily locked the Gethenians into heterosexuality. It is a naively pragmatic view of sex that insists that sexual partners must be of opposite sex!" ("Gender . . . Redux" 14). At the Foretelling itself, the Pervert is a male; therefore the Celibate in kemmer becomes female, and their part of the Foretelling, with the Pervert importuning the Celibate for sex, can be read as one long scene of sexual harassment. And the rest of the people at the Foretelling perceive this extended interaction as intentional or inadvertent voyeurs (64, 65-66); and we, figuratively, watch them watching.

When we get to ch. 7, "The Question of Sex," we learn that Le Guin is serious about biology: the climax word in the chapter title isn't "Gender" a word from grammar in the 1960s, not politics but Sex. Some feminists of the 1970s and 1980s may still have had qualms about biology: Betty Friedan and others worked hard in the 1950s and 60s attacking "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud" (ch. 5 of Feminine Mystique) and the whole idea that biology, if not strictly anatomy, was destiny. We also learn in this chapter that Karhidish culture privileges socially enforced heterosexual marriage just with changes in who is male during kemmer this month and who is female. Good anarchist fashion, there are no legal marriages; but still, "The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains" is built upon the institution of monogamous marriage as we are told by Ong Tot Oppong; we do not see the Clan Hearths at work in Left Hand (92; ch. 7). We do see them, in "Coming of Age in Karhide" in 1995, where we see a hearth with a clan that does not vow kemmering and raises its children without fathers and, to a great extent, communally. Looking back, the Gethenians in 1969's Left Hand of Darkness do seem locked into what Adrienne Rich called "compulsory heterosexuality," and gays, lesbians, and the asexual (outside of the Handdarata) do not seem welcome.

Which gets us back to homosexuality and to the question, just why don't Ai and Estraven physically make love? They are intimate in their conversations on the Ice, and that comes through even in the audio cassette version of the story, where Le Guin cuts their mindspeech communication. Why not consummate their love in the flesh, however much they might feel at the moment that "to meet sexually would be" for them "to meet again as aliens" (248-49; ch. 18). The decision not to couple is plausible enough, but in context, Patricia Lamb and Diana Veith have found it suspect (229). If Lamb and Veith (et al.) are correct, Le Guin and her readers may be picturing Estraven as a man even when she is in kemmer with Ai in their tent and it might have been too daring, ca. 1969, to show or suggest a quasi-homosexual sex scene (248-49; ch. 18). Le Guin, as critic, notes that the sex here "would have been heterosexual after all" and as author says "that it was ultimately an aesthetic choice" to avoid sex here. "To 'marry' them" on the Ice "would have defused the story . . . . The story-energy would have gone into that story; and it wasn't the one I had to tell" (personal communication).

More basic problems for some readers would be Le Guin's anarchism and Daoism. In "Is Gender Necessary? Redux," Le Guin notes that anarchy "has historically been identified as female. The domain allotted to women 'the family,' for example is the area of order without coercion, rule by custom not by force" (12). Part of the radical feminist project has been resisting the traditional family precisely as an area of coercion and force, and many recent feminists have approved of using State power in support of that project. Additionally, feminists who wish to use the police powers of even the patriarchal State against rapists, pornographers, and other abusers of women, who wish to use the courts to force child support payments such feminists should feel at least ambivalent about ideals of anarchy. And the Daoist ideal of unaction is going to seem very problematic to women who have resisted the Freudian idea of "the male road of exploit" versus "the female road of nurture," the idea of "feminine passive" and "masculine active."⁵³ Le Guin's Daoism privileges much of the traditional feminine over the masculine, but the basic Daoist categories of Yin and Yang themselves reinforce division into "two polarities we perceive through our cultural conditioning" that make for a mischievous dualism ("Gender . . . Redux" 12). And moving into the 1980s, poststructuralist academics would be increasingly upset by any theory involving binary opposites, seen as basic to "the hierarchical relations that ground capitalist notions of power, desire, and value."⁵⁴

My last point on Daoism I will make quite tentatively.

Daoism is among the least "totalizing" and most dynamic of belief systems, but it is a total system: all that is is produced by the action of the Dao and the waxing and waning of Yin and Yang. And in the 1970s and 1980s "totalizing" and "closed system" were used as criticisms by many academics in the humanities, sometimes even smear words. Total systems and binaries were stressed in Structuralist teaching of the 1950s and 1960s and were out of date and, postStructuralists argue, politically dangerous. A major symbol of Daoism and the controlling symbol of The Left Hand of Darkness is the Yin-Yang: a closed circle containing that most famous of binary (if dynamic) opposed pairs.

We should note, though, that Le Guin was well aware of the problem of total systems she showed one very negatively among the Orgota and did not limit herself to the Yin-Yang symbol. In The Dispossessed the image became the unclosed circle of The Circle of Life; in Always Coming Home, the organizing symbol is the hinged spirals of the heyiya-if. As Le Guin's character Stone Telling will put it in Always Coming Home: "We must . . . remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void" (29).

*

The Left Hand of Darkness, and other early works by Le Guin, may indeed be "Feminism for Men," as Craig and Diana Barrow say, but "The Women Problem," is, at its core, a problem among men. Moreover, The Left Hand of Darkness is also feminism for nonfeminist women, and the generation I teach includes many women who begin sentences "I'm not a feminist, but." The Left Hand of Darkness was pretty radical stuff for nonfeminist readers in 1969, and for the generation raised in the Reagan-Bush years for students of mine who find The Song of Songs rather daring (with its very active female protagonist and extramarital love) it is still radical. To rephrase, then, my own conclusion on this book: of the works with which I'm familiar, The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the best and most important novels to come out of America in the late 1960's.

*

A Note on Mindspeech:

The condensation of The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin herself read for the audio tape of the novel, and the play based on Left Hand both quietly dropped mindspeech, and Le Guin has not used the trope of mindspeech in her SF or fantasy since the late 1960s. She may prove me wrong by returning to it later, but I think I can suggest some straightforward reasons why we should note but not make too much of the lack of mindspeech after Left Hand.

Into the 1960s, those of us trained in scientific method could say that the proper attitude toward moderate claims of telepathy was an open-minded skepticism.⁵⁵ Moving into the 1970s, however, matters had changed. Several of the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine's "best performers were ultimately exposed as frauds" ("ESP"); and it was getting around that the idea that we humans used only 10% of our brains leaving a lot of spare capacity for telepathy and other paranormal skills was based on seriously flawed research: anesthetized rats used perhaps 10% of their brains, not waking, undrugged humans, and the whole idea of percentage of usage was losing meaning as memory and other brain functions were thought of increasingly less in metaphors of filing cabinets and more in terms of holographic pictures. After the 1960s, telepathy and other psi powers became more and more the province of Scientology and others who wished humans not to fulfill humanity but to transcend humanity, an occult association Le Guin seems unlikely to like.

Additionally, mindspeech had come across as a method of and metaphor for honest and direct, almost transparent communication, a communications system in which only the Shing the Enemy could lie. As literal telepathy became less plausible as a scientific concept, the metaphor of nonproblematic communication became more problematic. Men and women may speak "In a Different Voice," at least on ethical issues, as Carol Gilligan's book title suggests; and Gilligan may herself oversimplify by leaving out "perspectives such as class, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity" i.e., to the extent she had women <<speaking>> in "a different voice," from men, even just in terms of moral development, Gilligan herself may greatly oversimplify (Fraser and Nicholson 32). Communication between two individuals of the same gender may never be anywhere near transparent; even communication between two monozygotic siblings ("identical" twins et al.) may be far less than transparent; and so telepathy as a metaphor for unambiguous, true communication may include in itself a bit of a lie.

Perhaps more important, the period between the 1960s and 1990s saw what we might call <<a crisis in relationship(s)>> in the United States. Among my friends, anyway, a commonsensical and often-suggested first step toward resolving this crisis was summarized by joking about <<a failure in telepathy>>. I.e., we mockingly assigned blame in a relationship to person "B" for failing to read person "A's" mind when person "A" seemed to expect such mindreading. The joke was a reversal: people are not telepathic, and the fault here lay with person "A" for not speaking his or her mind. Some people really are close enough to others that they can anticipate the other's thoughts and desires very accurately; most of us are not, and you really loved me, you'd know what I want without my having to tell you! came to be seen, by my group (and some recovery groups), as a useful joke but a very bad idea in earnest.⁵⁶ Further, anticipating needs and desires is a virtue for servants, and it became an increasingly open question whether men should be good chivalric servants to mistresses (as in courtly love), and increasingly objectionable to say that women should be socialized to be sensitive servants to anyone.

In any event, between the late1960s and the 1990s, telepathy as fact, symbol or metaphor became problematic in biology, linguistics, politics, and everyday human relations. And during this period Le Guin dropped mindspeech from her Hainish universe.

* * *

THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972)

Le Guin returned to questions of violence and war, treason and patriotism in The Word for World Is Forest. The plot of The Word for World begins near the end of the story, with a massacre of Terran colonists at a location they call Smith Camp on a planet they call New Tahiti. In chronological order, the story goes like this.

Not very long from now, our Earth is in the midst of an ecological disaster, and we Terran humans are saved by the humans from Hain-Davenant, who, among other things, give us Nearly As Fast As Light (NAFAL) ships to allow colonizing other worlds. Some twenty-seven lightyears from Earth is World 42, New Tahiti. The Terrans plant a colony, almost all males, under military organization and authority, to prepare the world for permanent settlers. The planet is mostly water, and the land is heavily forested. Preparation of the land for farmers means clearing the forests at great profit since wood is more prized on Earth than gold (7; ch. 1).⁵⁷ Aiding the Terrans is "The Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Corps" (63; ch. 3) enslaved men and women from the native species of humans: literally little green men (and women), who call their world Athshe, "Forest."

One of the Terran officers, Captain Don Davidson, rapes Thele, an Athshean woman, a rape from which she dies. "[A]cting without argument or speech," or only a bit of speech, Selver Thele, her husband, attacks Davidson and attempts to kill him: an act we may see, in Hannah Arendt's words, as "the only way to set the scales of justice right again" (On Violence 64 § 2). Davidson is a big "euraf" (WWF 79; ch. 4) from Cleveland and a professional soldier; he is hurt and scared by Selver's attack but defeats him in the fight and prepares to kill him. He is stopped by Raj Lyubov, an anthropologist who had worked with Selver, with Selver as a native informant. Selver leaves for the North Isle and lives on the coast of Kelme Deva where he sees the Terrans destroy the city of Penle, enslave some hundred of its inhabitants, and cut open the world (30; ch. 2). Commanding the Terrans at Kelme Deva Smith Camp is Captain Davidson. Selver organizes the Athsheans, and "after long talking, and long dreaming, and the making of a plan, we went in daylight, and killed the yumens of Kelme Deva with arrows and hunting-lances, and burned their city and their engines," killing some two hundred of the Terrans. Davidson gone to colonial headquarters at Centralville, mostly to get laid by one of the newly arrived women returns to find his camp destroyed. Selver attacks Davidson and is wounded by Davidson, but brings down the Terran and sings over him (19-20,ch. 1; 30-32, ch. 2).

There is an investigation at which we learn Athsheans are supposed to be "intraspecific nonaggressive" and have no real history of violence. The Terrans learn from visiting Cetian and Hainish officials that there is now a League of worlds, communicating by ansible, an instantaneous communication device. The brutal ways of Terran exploitation of Athshe are over.

Davidson is sent off to a distant outpost where he organizes a quiet atrocity against the local Athsheans. Lyubov continues his work, eventually encountering Selver at the Athshean town of Tuntar. Selver tells Lyubov to leave Centralville two days hence (96), and Lyubov forgets that advice and semiconsciously omits mentioning Selver in his report on his trip to Tuntar (109-10; ch. 5). Selver leads the Athsheans against Centralville, killing all the women thus "sterilizing" the Terrans and capturing most of the men. Lyubov is killed in the battle and Selver sees the body and/or the dying Lyubov (117-18; ch. 6).

Davidson kills his local commanding officer and refuses to stop fighting the Athsheans. Finally his position is over-run, and his men are killed. Selver and his comrades capture Davidson and handle him as they would an Athshean psychotic: they isolate him on an uninhabited island. Plot and story end with the return of a Terran ship and League representatives to pick up the remaining Terrans; the ship's commander and a League representative tell Selver that, in large measure because of Lyubov's work, Athshe "has been placed under the League Ban" and will no longer be subject to Terran colonizing or any other alien interference (165-67; ch. 8). Ironically, the least conventionally heroic of the trio of potential heroes in this book, the intellectual Dr. Lyubov, turns out to be highly effective; Lyubov's "inactive action" of anthropological scholarship is crucial for the long-term survival of the Athsheans.

*

The Word for World Is Forest might be seen as Planet of Exile (1966) shifted out of Romance and into the modes of Tragedy and Satire. Both stories use third-person, limited narration from the points of view of three main characters. In Planet, old Wold does what old people are supposed to do in Romances: he shuffles off on "his last foray," leading the women and children to a well-protected fort (87; ch. 10) and then shuffles off this mortal coil (123-24; ch. 14), leaving the stage clear for the (relatively) young couple of Rolery and Jakob Agat to consummate their marriage in fertility, and for a new and better world to coalesce around them: a world in which the native humans and the Terrans will integrate and prosper.⁵⁸ Jakob Agat looks around in joy at the end of the story and sees "his fort, his city, his world; these were his people. He was no exile here"; and he says to "the alien, the stranger, his wife" (122) the last words of Planet of Exile, "come, let's go home" (124).

The Word for World emphatically does not end in joy, integration, and coming home.

Selver in The Word for World corresponds to Rolery in Planet of Exile: the point of view nonTerran, native human; Davidson corresponds to Agat: a leader among the Terran colonists; and much less exactly Lyubov corresponds to Wold: the third member of a triangle. In Planet, we have a love triangle with the key apex occupied by Rolery, daughter to Wold and later wife to Agat, with Wold coming to love both his Summer-born daughter and son-in-law. In The Word for World, we get two love-hate triangles, with Selver emphasized. The first triangle is Selver-Thele-Davidson. Again, Davidson rapes and (indirectly) murders Thele, for which Selver tries to kill him. Lyubov saves Selver, earning Davidson's enmity. When the action of the plot begins, then, Selver and Davidson hate one another; Lyubov and Selver have come to love one another; Lyubov intensely dislikes Davidson, and Davidson despises Lyubov. To make The Word for World into a kind of Romantic Comedy would be easy enough: the "marriage" of the Athshean Selver and the Terran Lyubov would be central to a plot moving toward the conversion or defeat and expulsion of Davidson and reconciliation and friendship between the two peoples. We get a hint of this possibility in a savior motif in the central triangle. Lyubov saves Selver; Selver tries to save Lyubov by warning him of the attack on Central, and Selver does save his people; and Davidson consistently sees himself as a Messiah for the Terrans on Athshe. Which fits his name: Don, "world ruler," plus Davidson, "son of David" suggesting a descendent of King David, as a Messiah should be (see Matthew 1.1-17).

The plot moves away from integration and toward alienation and isolation: Lyubov is killed in the attack on Central; Davidson ends up isolated on an island; and the Athsheans will be isolated by the League for generations. And that is as happy an ending as we are going to get.

In her introduction to The Word for World Is Forest, Le Guin tells how she wrote the story under the title of The Little Green Men in 1968, while in England, "a guest and a foreigner" with "no outlet" for her anger at the war in Vietnam (LoN [1979]:151). I have suggested that Le Guin's inability to demonstrate directly her anger with her government and people led her take action in the old-fashioned Prophetic way of writing a mâshâl (plural: mâshâlim): "a likeness; . . . 'taunt,' or 'satire.' Whatever the translation, the 'likeness' in question is either the aptly stated analogue of a previously experienced reality, or it is the quasi-magical, verbal prefiguring of reality in the shape, for good and for ill, in which the utterer would like to encounter it" (Rabinowitz 320). The Word for World Is Forest is, in part, a mâshâl of the war in Indochina in the late 1960s. It is also the aptly stated analog of a long series of encounters between people sophisticated in the technology and political organization of violence (civilized people) and people with far fewer means for killing other people ("primitives"). In the physical and psychological territory of "Frontierland," we meet the Others and "the normal defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting" can get very bloody (Erlich, ". . . Le Guin and . . . Clarke" 111). Le Guin's Narrator places an early scene in the book in a pretty clearing that "might have been Idaho in 1950 . . . . Or Kentucky in 1830. Or Gaul in 50 B.C." (see Siciliano 76). Or, I will add, the upper waters of Mill Creek in California, a few weeks after 15 August 1865, where White men under the command of R. A. Anderson ambushed one of the few remaining groups of Yahi Indians.⁵⁹ The limited action in the scene in the clearing in Word for World includes a distant bird saying, "Te-whet" (9; ch. 1). Kentucky and Gaul are among the many places where Terran tribal peoples were slaughtered by the civilized, and the immediate response to thoughts of Kentucky and Gaul is what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has assured us is the one decorous comment on massacres:

The best Le Guin can see for Indochina is, in a geopolitical sense, about what happened: that the United States would lose the war, and we would have to go home.

Where Le Guin proved optimistic was in the suggested body counts: Le Guin's imaginary war was far less bloody than the Terran reality (over 58,000 Americans killed, over two million Vietnamese and others). Where Le Guin was highly optimistic was in her utopian vision of the Athsheans, and in her Anarchistic faith that such a utopian culture could defeat a high-tech army. The Vietnamese did, indeed, defeat the U.S. military, but, as Le Guin well knew, they had a good deal of experience fighting off invaders. The Terran commanding officer in Word for World, Col. Dongh, a Vietnamese, mentions his people's spending "about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one after the other in the twentieth century" (133; ch. 6): the Japanese, the French, and then the USA, 1940s on.⁶⁰

*

Athshe is like an Earthsea where the Immanent Grove has spread out over the Archipelago to create a huge Yin-Yang symbol: "Ocean: forest. That was your choice on New Tahiti. Water and sunlight, or darkness and leaves" (7; ch. 1). And the people there are peaceful; like the Gethenians, they've never had a war. Unlike the Gethenians, they additionally don't have "assassinations, feuds, forays"; Athshean murders are committed only by extraordinarily rare psychopaths; even fights are rare and usually limited to adolescents ("Gender . . . Redux" 10; WWF 58, ch. 3). Most important, the Athsheans are Hainish Normal in their sexual anatomy and physiology: our Terran standard-issue, sexually dimorphic human beings.⁶¹ A bit more than the Gethenians, the Athsheans are sane and relevant.

With the Terran conquest, we see on Athshe a pattern of opposition Le Guin began as early as A Wizard of Earthsea" (1968) and continued into Always Coming Home (1985). The Athsheans are technologically primitive and organizationally simple, anarchistic, "communal . . . and somewhat introverted."⁶² Their populations are stable in size and stay put. "They have no nomadic peoples, and no societies that live by expansion and aggression . . . . Nor have they formed large, hierarchically governed nation-states" that can be mobilized for war. "Competition is ritualized, and, when ritual breaks down, the resulting violence does not become mass violence, remaining limited, personal." The Terrans are from a "hierarchically governed" world-state and are under military law and discipline.⁶³ And the Terrans are heavily armed and dangerous.

What the Terran officials have done is familiar enough and takes little interpretation: they have sent men (mostly) organized militarily and have given them rules, regulations, and orders. They are like US Army units on the Western frontier during the Indian Wars, the period my US military history book called the "nadir" of US Army history. One cause for some US war crimes in the Indian Wars was units operating independently under ambitious commanders, with George Armstrong Custer as the best-known example.⁶⁴ But the telegraph came through fairly early on in the American West, and Lyndon Johnson "micromanaged" US warfare in Vietnam; even so Le Guin introduces the ansible and Le Guin supplies a League government that is competent (as LBJ was), but also moral, relatively peace-loving, and well-intentioned. In the mâshâl of Vietnam, the League can be read as a wish for something like the United Nations to attempt to undo US damage in Indochina. In political terms, the point may be that a strictly political analysis is insufficient: even if the Terran military were absorbed into a good system with sane, ethical people giving orders from Earth the frontier and/or military culture would undermine the new system. More concretely, a charismatic traitor like Don Davidson could get enough support to cause a lot of trouble; and, of course, in Word for World he does. Whether 1849ers going to California for gold or future loggers going to New Tahiti for lumber, men who flee civilization and strike out for riches are not going to let native peoples stand in their way; as they think necessary, the invaders will destroy inconvenient natives through "disease, malnutrition, forced removal, massacre, aggravated rape . . ." (Buckley 438). Military organization and armaments mean that when an intelligent psychopath like Don Davidson takes over a group, he has a group organized and equipped for carnage (84; ch. 4).⁶⁵ And, finally, militarism, macho, and racism ("speciesism" here) can be mutually reinforcing. Davidson, anyway, believes that "The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man" (81; ch. 4). A macho mind, tightly compartmentalized, can feel both manly and guiltless raping human females not seen as really women and killing human males not seen as really men. In Davidson's head, such a mind can allow him to disobey orders and thereby endanger the Terran colony, assassinate his commanding officer, lead armed men to massacre a village generally engage in murder and treason and atrocities and still feel himself the only true patriot, the only truly sane, morally, and manly man.

And here I will stop discussing Don Davidson and the Terrans, whom Le Guin anatomizes in great detail. That's the dystopian satire in Word for World. The violated utopia of the Athsheans is equally interesting.

How do we get decent behavior out of human beings, a genus not notably "primitive, harmless, and peace-loving" (63; ch. 3)? One answer, as we've seen in The Left Hand of Darkness, is to be sure that they organize themselves anarchistically. In Left Hand, however, war was prevented (as things worked out) by the presence of outsiders: Ai and the Ekumen. War on Gethen would have been between two Gethenian peoples with sufficient sense of identity to have "two polarities we" and the Gethenians "perceive through our cultural conditioning" as patriot and traitor ("Gender . . . Redux" 12), and two polarities that the Gethenians through their cultural conditioning and we through reading Le Guin's novel perceive as Karhide and Orgoreyn. Genly Ai knows "the love of one's homeland" but beyond that he's not sure, from his own experience, what patriotism is. Estraven, soon to be exiled for treason explains it to him: "No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression" (19; ch. 1).⁶⁶ In the United States ca. 1969, Estraven's comments were highly relevant: lack of patriotism was a standard charge against the Peace Movement, the people trying to end US military adventures in Indochina; since antiwar actions were necessarily "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" in time of war however undeclared by Congress movement people were also traitors. The Left Hand of Darkness as a whole goes even further than just problematicizing words like "patriotism" and "treason"; as a whole, Left Hand emphatically puts personal loyalties and love of home over attachments to any abstraction (true treason is to betray a friend), but Le Guin gives us technologically sophisticated people on Gethen, living in a complex civilization: there is on Gethen the possibility for conflict between personal loyalty or loyalty to home and the loyalty patriotism requires to the State.

The Athsheans have not had to deal with conflicts in loyalty between concrete people and abstracts commonwealths because they have never had abstract states to be loyal to; they are not civilized people: i.e., they don't have cultures based on cities in the ways ancient Terrans developed civilization from city life.⁶⁷ What Athsheans call cities we'd call villages or towns, and the Gethenians might call Hearths; and no conqueror or other consolidator has come along to bind the villages into a confederation, set up his royal seat in a city, and continue expanding until he or a successor ran into another royal thug with similar ideas.⁶⁸ So: the immediate reason the Athsheans don't have big wars is that they can't; their social groups are too small. But those groups are small because they have no history of consolidation, and one reason they have no consolidation is they have no history of feuds and forays that could be organized into rational warfare for the purpose of large-scale theft. Apparently, it has never occurred to Athsheans to organize into groups to murder, maim, wound, and (thereby) terrorize others in order to steal the property or labor of those others. Put in such terms, this hardly appears a mystery, but it is a mystery. In Le Guin's Hainish universe, warfare has been fairly common; and the Hainish universe is a legitimate extrapolation from and fabulation upon human history on our Earth where, I believe, warfare began as highly organized theft with violence (see discussion of ACH). Why are there no feuds and forays on Athshe? Why are even fist fights uncommon? Why are they really nonviolent, really peaceful? Putting the matter formally: As human beings the Athsheans have as a trait aggressivity; to a greater or lesser degree they all are capable of getting very, very angry, so angry they desire to lash out. Further, "The Athsheans are carnivorous, they hunt animals" and can hunt in groups; and they have their rare psychotics and the concepts of rape and murder (61; ch. 3) and weapons. Why then is there so little aggression?⁶⁹

One reason is that politics among the Athsheans is controlled by old women, the Head Women of the villages: ". . . old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think" (98; ch. 5). In Earthsea terms, politics on Athshe are conducted in a True Speech. A second reason is that fights will not move into deadly violence because the Athsheans have "aggression-halting gestures and positions" (WWF 60) like those of Terran wolves and jackdaws (Lorenz 123-28). And it is highly unlikely a conflict would ever get to physical combat. Among men, anyway, they have a custom like Terran Inuit and use ritualized "singing to replace physical combat." Any Athshean man can, when angry, sublimate aggressivity into art and sing a song against his opponent a very literal mâshâl, in the sense of "taunt," "satire" the quality of the song depending upon the man's talent. Like the appeasement gestures, the singing contests also "might have a physiological foundation . . . ." However deep their roots (and there has to be a biological basis somewhere), Athshean aggression-halting and aggression-ritualizing customs make "an effective war-barrier," especially since there is relatively little positive motivation for warfare (60-61; ch. 3). The Athsheans have little wealth, so there is little to steal. The Athsheans also have no tradition of hating outsiders and are slow to learn group enmity. They are literally in touch with one another, with an entire grammar and vocabulary of "touch-exchanges" filling that vast gap in Terran culture (US culture) "between the formal handshake and the sexual caress" (94-95; ch. 5). Possibly most important, the Athsheans are incredibly well integrated into their world. They can go with the unconscious, with the Dao. To a remarkable degree, they are sane. Athsheans can take their dreams and, according to their abilities, shape, analyze, react to, and reshape them. As a folk art they can dream while awake and "balance . . . sanity not on the razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance of reason and dream" (99; ch. 5).⁷⁰

Bright water and dark forest balance on Athshe. Even so, intellect that clear light of reason balances the maze-like, forest-like unconscious among Athsheans (25-26; ch. 2). "They're a static, stable, uniform society" from Lyubov's somewhat limited point of view, "Perfectly integrated and wholly unprogressive. You might say that like the forest they live in, they've attained a climax state" but they can adapt and apparently have adapted rather spectacularly to the Terran colony with their massacring the Terrans at Smith Camp (61-62; ch. 3).⁷¹ Lyubov notes that the Athsheans have "recognized us as members of their species, as men. However, we have not responded as members of their species should respond. We have ignored . . . the rights and obligations of non-violence. We have killed, raped, dispersed, and enslaved the native humans, destroyed their communities, and cut down their forests. It wouldn't be surprising if they'd decided that we are not human." The Cetian, Mr. Or, completes the logic: "And therefore can be killed, like animals . . ." (62; ch. 3).

What it takes a long time for Lyubov to figure out is the mechanism for change among the Athsheans. He has to be told directly and then mull it over: "Selver is a god," he's told (97, [100], 105; ch. 5). Then he thinks, Selver is "a link between the two realities, considered by the Athsheans as equal, the dream-time and the world-time . . . . A link: one who could speak aloud the perceptions of the subconscious. To 'speak' that tongue is to act. To do a new thing. To change or to be changed, radically, from the root. For the root is the dream." Selver was such a link, a literal translator, one who carries over. "He had done a new deed. The word, the deed, murder. Only a god could lead so great a newcomer . . . across the bridge between the worlds" (106-7; ch. 5).⁷²

When Selver tells the story of the Smith Camp massacre to the old Dreamer, Coro Mena, Coro Mena replies, "Before this day the thing we had to do was the right thing to do; the way we had to go was the right way and led us home. Where is our home now? For you have done what you had to do, and it was not right. You have killed men" (33-34; ch. 2). From a Daoist perspective, and for Le Guin, these are powerful lines. A classical Daoist talks little of right and wrong but of following the way and, in Le Guin's formulation, doing as one must do which is right.⁷³ Coro Mena here admits the Western paradox that sometimes one must do evil which makes evil unavoidable, but no less evil. And Coro Mena has, all together, an optimistic view of Selver (47-48; ch. 2)! The more pessimistic possibility is suggested by Lyubov's asking himself whether Selver was "speaking his own language, or . . . Captain Davidson's" (107; ch. 5). Selver may not be a god; he may just be a charismatic man who has learned that a possible political means to desirable ends is massacres. Either way could fit into the story. The point of view characters are a trinity of two saviors and Davidson as Messiah-manqué. There are also two clear traitors: Davidson and Lyubov (110; ch. 5). Selver could complete the threesome of traitors. Selver's gift to his people is guerrilla warfare, which requires group enmity. Athsheans must think of themselves as Athsheans, with a cause to press against the Terrans; this sets up the possibility for Selver of a conflict of loyalties. In attacking Central, Selver endangers his friend Lyubov; in warning Lyubov, Selver endangers the cause of his people and the lives of those who have chosen to follow him in the attack. Selver fails to save Lyubov, which may be a betrayal. It would elegantly reinforce the theme of treason if Selver were to betray his own nature in learning murder from Davidson and teaching mass murder to his people. But this is not my reading. The Change Selver brings the Athsheans is, I think, a true Change, just deeply, and appropriately, problematic.

At the end of the story, Selver tells Lepennon, from Hain, that a god "brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. . . . He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another" (168; ch. 8).

The book ends with Selver with the memory of Lyubov they remain in touch and the knowledge that Davidson is on an island, still alive. It is not a totally tragic vision of isolation, but its vision of Athshe figuratively walled off from the galaxy is decorously bleak for the years of war and reaction in which it was written (1968) and published (1972).

**

The teaching of The Dispossessed, its thematic content, complements and balances The Lathe of Heaven but fits in more closely with The Word for World Is Forest and The Left Hand of Darkness. In Lathe it is the villain, Haber, who says that "Life evolution the whole universe of space/time, matter/energy existence itself is essentially change" and the hero, Orr who corrects with, "That is one aspect of it. . . . The other is stillness" (135; ch. 9). In the debate between the active and contemplative life, Lathe comes down sturdily on the side of meditatively and carefully dealing with things as they are and mostly just leaving them be. The Dispossessed gives more than equal time to that other aspect life, and the Way as change (ACH 485), evolution, and, indeed, as the Human Way, revolution.

Left Hand takes place in the far future, in the days of the well-coordinated and highly evolved Ekumen of known human worlds colonized by the ancient Hainish; Word for World and The Dispossessed are set in the near future, when just a League is getting started. Word for World, Left Hand, and The Dispossessed all deal with conflict, violence, and warfare and with ways to organize human societies to keep conflict more or less nonviolent.

Again, in Word for World, the overarching symbol for integration is the world-wide Yin-Yang of Athshe before the arrival of the Terrans: "Ocean: forest. . . . Water and sunlight, or darkness and leaves" (7; ch. 1). That symbol remains far in the background, however, replaced by the forest vs. the deserts of the lands clear-cut by the Terran loggers: and this is decorous, since there is no integration in Word for World. In Left Hand, the thematic symbol is the androgyne, explicitly connected with the Yin-Yang symbol (267; ch. 19). The major symbol in the plot of Left Hand is the arch. At the beginning of Left Hand we see the King of Karhide mortaring a keystone into an arch, with the mortar pinkish from the traditional blood and bones mixed in. "Without the bloodbond the arch would fall, you see," Estraven tells Ai. At the time of the story, the blood and bones are those of nonhuman animals, but at one time it was "Human bones, human blood" (5; ch. 1).⁷⁴ Estraven's death at the end of Left Hand provides the bloodbond that will bring together his world.⁷⁵ In The Dispossessed, there is the double Ioti arch (like a complete or partial McDonald's arch), but the thematically significant image of integration is that of the double planets Urras and Anarres themselves the "Cetian" planets forever circling about each other as they revolve about their common center of gravity.⁷⁶ Tightly associated with the planetary image is the image of the circle of life: the almost-complete circle that is the symbol of the Odonian anarchist movement and which is the shape of the wall around the Port of Anarres, given much stress at the opening of the novel and with walls used for an important figure of speech throughout. This is also the shape of the quest of Shevek, the hero of The Dispossessed, as we see it in The Dispossessed: the novel is "open ended," leaving Shevek just before he completes a circular journey back home to Anarres, a return that may result in his death, the closing of Shevek's individual circle.

Placing The Dispossessed with Word for World and The Left Hand of Darkness is also useful for putting the works very tentatively into the context of broad-scale political discussion in the USA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Word for World and Left Hand were salvos in the Kulturkampf associated with the war in Vietnam; The Dispossessed has to do with "the Revolution."

As the War continued, and as the war-fighting American government had little time nor inclination to deal with domestic problems, preeminently the long unanswered demands of Black Americans, more radical elements split off from the mainstream peace and civil rights groups ("the Movement") and called for a second American revolution, this time a truly radical one. Looking back from even the middle 1970s, it was obvious that the Movement, let alone the Revolution, had been mortally wounded in Chicago in 1968 and 1969 and finally killed by gunfire at Jackson State and Kent State Universities in May of 1970, had twitched for a couple of years, and then received indecent burial in a landslide: Richard Nixon's victory over George McGovern in the Presidential election of 1972.⁷⁷ Still, in 1968 revolution had been possible though unachieved in France and had seemed plausible to many people in the USA into the early 1970s. And by 1973, with the war "winding down" and the Nixon administration teetering, people began to look forward to 1976 and the Bicentennial of the American Revolution of 1776.

The Dispossessed, then, may be read in historical context as an immediately relevant meditation on revolution, one of many such meditations at the time. The Dispossessed is a rather indirect meditation and speaks very cogently to a couple of questions not considered sufficiently in the 1960s and 1970s and then forgotten as "revolution" once again became a taboo word in American political discourse. The first question was, "What do you want the world to be like the day after your revolution?" In The Dispossessed, Le Guin pictures a utopia worth struggling for. The second question is, "Why another revolution What went wrong with the first American Revolution?" In The Dispossessed, Le Guin endorses the political accuracy of Thomas Jefferson's reckoning "that one rebellion in thirteen States in the course of eleven years, is but one for each State in a century and a half. No country should be so long without one." Shevek says the Anarresti have enjoyed a fully-functioning anarchy "for one hundred and fifty years now" (183; ch. 7); the Odonian colony on Anarres has been recognized under the Terms of the Settlement with the Urrasti governments for 170 years (275, ch. 11; 286, ch. 12); and the demonstration Shevek attends in the Ioti city of Nio Esseia occurs on the 200th anniversary of the Insurrection that began the Odonian Revolution (239-40; ch. 9 [also 188; ch. 8]). By Mr. Jefferson's schedule, the Cetian planets are due for an uprising. Even in Odonian society on Anarres, a communist anarchy conceived as a permanent revolution, there must be some revolutionary anarchist activists every now and then, acting like anarchists and waking up the social organism. "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing," in the Jeffersonian view of things, and probably a necessary thing if people are to stay free.⁷⁸

*

The plot of The Dispossessed gives us the biography of Shevek, a physicist, parent, and Odonian of Anarres, from infancy through his journey in middle age to the capitalist archist county of A-Io on Urras where he develops the General Temporal Theory bringing together Sequency and a Theory of Simultaneity, which allows the ansible and the instantaneous transmission of data over interstellar distances (276; ch. 11) and, finally, his return home, almost to his landing on Anarres (ch. 13). As in most SF, much is at stake: the ansible is necessary for the formation of a League of Worlds, so Shevek's work ultimately helps in the creation of the Ekumen. As in The Left Hand of Darkness, there is conflict, but in The Dispossessed it is good to move into that conflict, and to try to move it onto a nonviolent and productive path. And also as in Left Hand, Le Guin complicates her narration by refusing to tell her tale from the beginning through the middle to the end. Here, though, the narrative voice and point of view remain constant; Le Guin appropriately rearranges the time scheme.

Shevek is a student of time, and in a central discussion in the central chapter of the novel and that's both metaphorically and literally central Shevek explains how time is both linear and circular (ch. 7). As James Bittner has very elegantly demonstrated, Le Guin uses a similar structure for her novel (Approaches 121-25). The novel has thirteen chapters: six set on Anarres, five set on Urras, two involving both; in ch. 1 Shevek goes from Anarres to Urras; in ch. 13 he leaves Urras to return to Anarres. The arrow of time takes Shevek from infancy to what may be his death at forty or so (244, ch. 9).⁷⁹ The circle takes him on a typical quest journey, in this case, to Urras and back again, with some oscillations. If we follow Bittner's schema and see chapter 1 as a fictional present, chapter 2 is a long flashback taking us to Shevek's infancy and early youth; except that it is the kind of flashback where we don't return any time soon to the present. Instead, the succeeding even-numbered chapters move us forward in time from Shevek's youth until Shevek decides at the end of chapter 12 that he is not going to Urras, and Takver (his partner in a monogamous heterosexual reproductive relationship) tells him in a spousal way that he is, too, going to Urras, and will return. From the end of ch. 1 on, the odd-numbered chapters move from Shevek's arrival on Urras, through his adventures there, to his trip from Urras almost to Anarres in ch. 13: moving us from the present of chapter 1 into the future. Past, present, and future, all exist simultaneously in the physical book, The Dispossessed; and we encounter past, present, and future (though not necessarily in that order) as we read and yet what is happening in The Dispossessed, as we first read The Dispossessed, is always happening "now." This is the case with any book, but Le Guin's time-switches defamiliarize the experience and should make us recognize how all written narratives exist both simultaneously (in the volume) and in sequence (as read).

*

To repeat a cliché from Shakespeare criticism: from A Midsummer Night's Dream to As You Like It and Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare perfected his technique of doing variations on a comic pattern. To put the same statement into popular culture terms, Shakespeare worked out his versions of the formulas of the genre of dramatic romantic comedy. By the early 1970s and The Dispossessed, Le Guin had her formulas worked out.⁸⁰

Corresponding with the balanced symbolism mentioned earlier, there's the balance and contrast between the "Yangish" archists of Urras and the "Yinnish" communist anarchists of Anarres. Viewed from a metaphorical distance,

Urras/Anarres = Terrans/Athsheans = Orgoreyn/Karhide.

But, as always, Le Guin offers variations on themes by Le Guin. To start with biology, this time around, all the people involved are "Hainish normal": exactly like us, as far as we're told, with only the trivial difference of having more body hair than even White Terrans. And this time around Le Guin spends little time attacking the USSR. We hear of the Stalinist country of Thu and see a Thuvian agent or two, but the one country on Urras we see is A-Io, which is strongly capitalistic and clearly modeled on America ca. 1970: just more sexist, nonracist (apparently lacking racial differences), more efficiently organized, less republican in origins, and more responsible in preserving the natural environment.

Like America, A-Io is a highly centralized and powerful state with a capitalist economy on Urras, with that planet's magnificent, complex environment, great natural wealth, great beauty. Culturally, A-Io is also very similar to the United States, e.g., in having a university system, radio and newspapers (with intellectuals getting their news from the Ioti equivalent of NPR), and in their combining excessiveness and endemic vices combined with observance of strong taboos. Early in his stay, the rather puritanical Shevek had noted "that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit" (120; ch, 5).⁸¹ Urras, however, is also like Europe: the Old World, with a long history, and a real aristocracy. And Anarres is also like America, at least the Americas as viewed by Europeans: the New World, but truly empty this time, lacking human inhabitants or any animal inhabitants above the level of fish; and on Anarres the Odonian colonists from Urras have founded a new society, formed in revolution and accepting the revolutionary values the French formulated as Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or, to phrase the matter in more properly anarchist terms: freedom, equality, solidarity, responsibility, and mutual aid. The Odonians on Anarres have created a good society, but even they might have done better to have stayed home on Urras and ensured the Revolution on Urras. Even as the American and other colonies, and later the United States, provided a home for trouble-makers and relieved the European ruling classes of troublesome opposition, even so with Anarres and Urras. And, again, the Anarresti and Urrasti in the political fable in The Dispossessed have a much simpler ethical situation: the success of a Cetian colony on Anarres did not rest upon the twin evils of slavery and the extermination of native peoples.⁸²

Alongside the beauty of A-Io and Urras not beneath it and denying it, but alongside it is the military force of the Ioti State: force we see used in an attack upon political demonstrators (Odonians, Syndicalists, Socialist Workers) at the climax of The Dispossessed (241-46; ch. 9). Along with the wealth and beauty of A-Io is a capitalist system that alienates people from the products of their labor, from the truth, other people, honest sexuality, and themselves (e.g., 105 ch. 5). On Anarres we have a radical alternative to any polity we've ever had on Earth: a long-functioning, high-technology, communist anarchy. On Anarres, then, we get "The ABC of Communist Anarchism" (to use a title from Alexander Berkman); and we also get an analysis of the threats to communist anarchism or any utopia, or even to a modest republican experiment like the United States of America. It is much to give people a vision of a world the day after the revolution; it is a great gift to political analysis to deal with problems arising some 170 years after establishment of Odonian society, as utopian a revolutionary society as theorists have pictured.

*

In Odo's theory and initially among the Anarresti, there was no government of people by other people but only the administration of things (136; ch. 6).⁸³ No hierarchy of rank, and no hierarchies of property since no one on Anarres can own anything: even use of the grammatical possessive case is limited in their invented language, Pravic. With the exception of personal items, everything is held in common. There is no money, no property: when Shevek gets to Urras, he arrives "like a good Odonian, 'with empty hands'" (56; ch 3), and if they want Anarres, the future, he tells potential revolutionaries, "you must come to it with empty hands" (241; ch. 9).

Religion for Odonians "is one of the Categories: the Fourth Mode." Few people use every Mode, but the Modes are intrinsic to "the natural capacities of the mind," and Anarresti, have a "religious capacity" need one to do physics, in fact, since religion is "the profoundest relationship man has with the cosmos" (12; ch. 1). Anarresti religion, however, is invisible in Shevek's narrative: not in churches, nor established, organized, ritualized, nor prayed. The Odonian stress on coming "with empty hands" can be taken in this context as a rejection of any transcendental religion requiring sacrifices or material support. The slogan of the sky gods has been "none shall appear before Me empty-handed," at least when they got houses for themselves: ceilings, walls, and attendant priests, expenses, property, and hierarchy.⁸⁴ If we like, what (un)religion we see in The Dispossessed we can interpret, applying Fritjof Capra's title, as "The Tao(ism) of Physics," for Shevek, especially, but also for him the Perennial Philosophy in trying to work through pain to Joy. And Takver is a kind of natural Daoist as well as good Odonian and biologist in her relationship with the world.

Jobs among the Odonians, called "postings," are requested at and assigned by "Divlab," the Division of Labor office (121; ch. 5); resources are divided up by the "PDC" (Production and Distribution Coordination) among syndicates, partnerships, individuals, or other combinations of people working together (61; ch. 3). And people do work: as the Daoists observed, ". . . men are always doing something; inaction to them is impossible" without a lot of training (Chuang Tzu ch. 23 [Giles 237]); or, in the formulation of modern ethologists, "The healthy animal is up and doing." The Anarresti are "Hainish normal" aggressive and status-seeking, and we see plenty of conflict and one fist fight (41; ch. 2) but no lethal violence and certainly no warfare. There are no states to establish armies and no reason to form gangs: there is no property to steal nor the sort of authority physically weaker folk can be forced to submit to (see 120-21; ch. 5). Leadership is provided by people with "inherent authority," emperors, so to speak, who "actually have new clothes" (45; ch. 2).⁸⁵ The development of bureaucratic machinery, of an apparat, is prevented, in theory, by democratic structuring of PDC and other possible hierarchies, but primarily by the sort of public vigilance that Thomas Jefferson noted as the price (the minimal price we know today) of liberty: Jefferson, however, said "eternal vigilance" and eternal is much longer than 150 or 170 or 200 years (136; ch. 6).

Could Odonian anarchism work? The great advantage to the writer of a utopia is that she can point to her imaginary world and say, "Can it? Look; it does work!" What we can demand of a utopian writer is that the better new world work plausibly and instructively, and Anarres does.

In addition to handling the objections to utopias alluded to above, Le Guin just eliminates three major objections to an anarchist society. The first she expresses through the comments of Shevek's Urrasti colleague Demaere Oiie that the Anarresti could get by as "primitive populists . . . because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbor states" (163; ch. 7). Not recognizing Shevek as an anarchist from a working anarchy is Oiie's problem, but the rest of his objection is valid. Anarchy's main problem might, indeed, be "the neighbors," but it is relatively easy to be anarchists on a world without nation-states, or even armed city-states. There are no guns or states on Anarres, and everyone has been raised an Odonian. The second objection is the idea I learned through folklore and which Oiie may allude to that anarchy might work well on Tahiti or some other abundant place but would be in major trouble amid scarcity. Anarres is a rather harsh planet, poor in resources; but, contrary to folk belief, that is exactly where we should expect anarchy to work.

That anarchy would work amid relative hardship will not seem odd if we recall Owen Pugh in "Nine Lives" and that he is alive to star in a story because the English could cooperate even during a time of famines. And more is working than a kind of racial altruism or Affirmative Action (ER 12) in Le Guin's having her future heroes generally people of color: White folks are currently a minority on Terra, and Western White folks belong to cultures that work against solidarity and mutual aid. It is consistent for Le Guin to believe that when the biological going gets tough, tough-minded, competitive cultures will be going, dying out more quickly than some of the currently marginal, but cooperative, cultures. More immediately relevant for Anarres, consider the beasts of a coral reef or any of the biologically abundant places Charles Darwin examined for his idea of the origin of new species by natural selection of the fittest. In such rich, crowded areas, the fittest can well be the most competitive indeed, the most aggressive and Darwin might be forgiven for stressing competition. Petr Kropotkin studied animals in the stressed environment of Siberia and Northern Manchuria. The one law Shevek and the Anarresti follow is that of human evolution, and the "law" of evolution for social species is solidarity and mutual aid, a point very clear in stressed environments in which individuals in social species either aid one another or die (see TD 6, 177; chs. 1, 7).⁸⁶

The third objection Le Guin deals with is that anarchism and other philosophies of what has been called "the soft-hearted school" (vs. "hard-headed") are both unrealistic and unmanly. Oiie puts the raw power struggle on Urras between A-Io and Thu in terms of "the politics of reality" (164; ch. 7) and the old aristocrat Atro comments significantly that "The trouble with Odonianism . . . is that it's womanish. It simply doesn't include the virile side of life [i.e., warfare]. . . . It doesn't understand courage love of the flag" (230; ch. 9). That is, for now, Odonianism and other idealistic creeds might work, but only if people were essentially altruistic, nice.

Le Guin goes to some length to establish that she is not so naive to build a utopia upon a premise of human niceness. On Urras she notes territoriality and primitive possessiveness in birds (166; ch. 7), and the culturally evolved human behaviors based on such traits; and on Anarres she shows us that even in utopia there are some fairly firm givens, and not all of them the impulse to solidarity and mutual aid. In an important chapter of the book, Bedap, a close friend of Shevek's, tells him how power centers develop on Anarres, "anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution." For any stability in an institution gives scope to the authoritarian impulse:

Eternal vigilance is always the first installment payment on liberty in part because of "The Iron Law of Oligarchy": experts tend to hang on to jobs and make themselves indispensable as they monopolize both knowledge of how things are (traditionally) done and also dominate the means of communication: finding out what's going on from the rank and file and communicating to (not with) the rank and file (Nicos 489). Shevek comes to agree with Bedap's analysis: ". . . every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic machinery within PDC . . . " (264; ch. 10). Famine on Anarres almost pushed Odonian society to violence when there wasn't enough to share (206; ch. 8), but things did not get very violent. The greater dangers were more subtle.

The first danger is somewhat personal and personalist: during crises where severe rationing is required, lists must be made of who gets what, including who gets food and who gets to starve. Shevek had such a job, and he quit it. "But someone else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There's always somebody willing to make lists" (TD 250-51; ch. 10). Figuratively, Shevek joined Odo and the ones who walk away from Omelas and refused to benefit from other people's being sacrificed (Finch 42), or even other people's sacrifices. There is, however, another "but": but at a moment of high tension in the debate at PDC over the plan for Shevek to go to Urras a visiting delegate from a miners' syndicate, and a person who has obviously suffered during the famine, quotes Odo on how ". . . we each of us deserve everything" and nothing because we have "eaten while another starved," nor can people claim virtue for having starved while others ate. Odo's point is "Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning . . . " (288; ch. 12), and the quotation, in retrospect, should make it difficult to judge Shevek's walking away from list making, and to judge the person who replaced him (see Benford, "Reactionary Utopias" 16).

The second subtle danger from social stress is also richly problematic. The urge to solidarity itself, the carefully reinforced trait that allowed Odonian society to survive even the famine solidarity itself can be a danger (109; ch. 5). Where there are no official hierarchies, no state, and no law, one is left with one's own "private conscience" and "the social conscience," then "the opinions of one's neighbors becomes a very mighty force" (121; ch. 5).⁸⁷ Shevek believes, and he's at least half correct, that some 200 years after the Revolution the Anarresti social conscience "completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate we obey" (265; ch. 10). Shevek and his friends start the Syndicate of Initiative to continue the permanent revolution of Odonian society: to be anarchists, to change things that must be changed if the society is to remain anarchistic. And this is where the personal comes together with the professional, and the professional for Shevek the study of Time is profoundly political.

But how do you change things in a permanent revolution? How do you rearrange the mechanism of government when there is (in theory) no mechanism but only the social organism? Indeed, how does one dare "tinker" with the social organism at all when the organic image is so useful to conservative thinkers precisely because it is so dangerous to tinker with living organisms? Which returns us to the Le Guinian theme of true change: In a world without a transcendent god to set up means-justifying goals and moral laws, how can people achieve ethical, responsible change? Le Guin's answer in The Dispossessed is connected slightly with dreams (as in WWF) but mostly with time.

Among the Greek philosophers before Socrates, Pythagoras taught "All is number." Parmenides taught, "Nothing changes"; and Parmenides's student Zeno (of Elea) pushed the point logically to "Nothing moves," and came up with Zeno's Paradox, where rocks never hit trees and fast runner Achilles never passes tortoises (see TD 23-27; ch. 2). And Heraclitus, profoundly disagreeing, insisted that "All is change," "All is flux." In a world of Simultaneity, Parmenides is right: nothing changes, all is constant, all is Being. We don't toss a stone and watch it hit the tree because the stone has already hit the tree when we tossed it (182; ch. 7) indeed, we have already been born and have died, as has our species; all is now. In a world of Sequency, all is becoming, and change is continuous. Either way, there is little possibility for ethics or politics.⁸⁸ When finally developed, at an epiphany in the novel (224-26; ch. 9), Shevek's General Temporal Theory brings together Simultaneity and Sequency: dream-time and world-time, natural cycles and natural evolution (179-80; ch. 7). And it bases ethics solidly in physics, in number our dual sense of linear and cyclical time and this basis in number (if C. G. Jung is correct) relates ethics to a primary human instrument "to bring order into the chaos of appearances," an essential "instrument for either creating order or apprehending" a pre-existent order in nature, perhaps a true archetype.⁸⁹

At a party on Urras, drunk, Shevek explains the importance of our everyday sense of linear time:

Sober and on Anarres, in bed with his beloved partner, Shevek talks with Takver about his old friend Tirin, a satiric playwright and Odonian anarchist driven insane by people who couldn't stand a real rebel.⁹¹ The conversation moves on to the ethics of Shevek's having allowed his book to be edited and presented to the worlds as by Shevek and Sabul, Shevek's boss in a society where, in theory, there are no bosses. "It did get the book printed," Shevek notes, and Takver responds, "The right end, but the wrong means!": which gets Shevek thinking here the ends/means problem and Takver's belief that she made the decision for both of them on compromising with Sabul. Shevek handles the second assertion first, declaring that neither of them made a real choice on publishing the book. "We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being free!" (266; ch. 10).⁹² Shevek notes that "Those who build wall are their own prisoners" and asserts his "proper function in the social organism": "to go unbuild walls," eventually having a go at unbuilding the wall between Anarres and Urras, and between Anarres and the rest of the galaxy. Huddling together with Shevek under the blankets, Takver says, "It may get pretty drafty" (267).⁹³

With Takver asleep, Shevek begins a meditation in a section that repeats some variation on "responsibility" at least four times in two pages, and one that begins and ends significantly with the idea that "one must work with time and not against it" (267; ch. 10 [see 269, 249]).

What this might mean is suggested by Shevek's thought that for Takver and for him, and for Odonians, Daoists, and anarchists in general, there can be no separation of ends and means. There can be "no end. There was process: process was all," which suggests to me time's circle and cycles, as opposed to time's arrow, which we must picture with a beginning and direction, and usually picture with an end (a shot arrow more or less hits or misses).⁹⁴ That's not what Le Guin intends however: the next line is "You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration" apparently life-long duration. This open-ended obligation is much of what Le Guin means by "responsibility," and she says here exactly what she means. To Le Guin as to Odo, a promise is a promise, even a "promise of indefinite term," and it is promises that bind past, present, and future and which make freedom meaningful. "A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other" (197; ch. 8). Indeed, Le Guin assigns meaningless circularity to what Hedonists and Utilitarians and other practical sorts have seen as rational, goal-seeking, linear behavior: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. As what Aldous Huxley has called "The Perennial Philosophy" teaches (106), evading suffering means also evading "the chance of{sic} joy," the chance for fulfillment. "The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive . . . . [and] always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room," and, repeating an important image in The Dispossessed, "a cell," as in prison cell. Opposed to such end-seeking is "promising" action: "Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings" a landscape in which one can "know what it is to come home," which seems to be the one goal or end Le Guin unequivocally accepts. "Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it" (268-69; ch. 10).

The relationship of individual to society is reciprocal, with society offering literal "security and stability" and figurative warmth and stillness, and the individual offering the "power of moral choice the power of change." In The Dispossessed, part of Dr. Haber's view is favored over George Orr's: change is "the essential function of life." Change is also the metaphorical essence of revolution, and Odonian society is supposed to be "a permanent revolution," with revolutionary activity seen in theory and in the plot of this novel as individual (267, ch. 10; see also 135, ch. 6). Le Guin has Shevek think here ". . . revolution begins in the thinking mind." Later in the story, though earlier in the book, Shevek tells a demonstration, "You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution" (242; ch 9). Granted, but, What are Odonians to do?

A good, eclectic Daoist might respond to that question with the Buddha's wu (or mu) short-form translation, "Wrong question" and note the doctrine ". . . the Quiet of the Taoists produces . . . a power 'that could shift Heaven and Earth' . . . . For 'to a mind that is "still" the whole universe surrenders'" (Waley, 58).⁹⁵ A good Daoist does not make big plans, but acts spontaneously: ". . . from inaction comes the potentiality of action" (Chuang Tzu, chs. 5, 6, 13 [Giles 67, 71, 132]).⁹⁶ If one is the Revolution, one will do what must be done at the right time. Such an idea requires a lot of faith, but it gets support from a surprising source, the very nonmystical, very European political theorist, Hannah Arendt:

Coups can be accomplished with a small, elite, vanguard; the Revolution bubbles up from the masses who produce a "revolutionary situation," where "power is already in the streets." What is needed then is conscious people "prepared to seize power and the responsibility that goes with it" (Arendt 50) and give direction. Or, as I think Odo and Le Guin would prefer, allow oneself to be seized by power and take responsibility for how one directs that power (see TD 152; ch. 6). Meanwhile, what one does is what Shevek and his friends do: they organize and educate.

Le Guin isn't going to start favoring Dr. Haber over Mr. Orr generally, and her Revolution, in 1960s terms, is more Countercultural than narrowly political: relational more than goal-seeking. At the center of her Revolution, central even to the Syndicate of Initiative, is the inaction that allows potential right action, and the loyalty, fidelity, "marriage" that allows time-binding through human promises.⁹⁷

If we are to picture Shevek and Takver in bed when Shevek has his long interior monolog to decide to unbuild walls, then at the very center of the vision of The Dispossessed is a pair of a life-bonded, child-producing, child-rearing people. In a variation on the comic romance theme, a new and better world will (probably) coalesce around them at the end of the novel. In any event, Shevek is central to the plot, and Shevek and Takver are established as central symbolically when Shevek returns from the famine years in the Dust and he and Takver make love: ". . . the third time they were both half asleep, and circled about . . . each other's being, like planets circling blindly . . . about the common center of gravity, swinging, circling endlessly" (258; ch. 10). If one can talk of an Odonian duty, it would be to be like Shevek and Takver, living complex lives of partnership and parenthood, domestic jobs and political work: Takver as partner, biologist, and mother; Shevek with more stress as "not only a physicist but also a partner, a father, an Odonian, and finally a social reformer. . .  [H]e had not been sheltered, and had expected no shelter" (104; ch. 5).⁹⁸ Beyond that, one can modify the arrow analogy by putting the bow in the hands of a Zen adept one loyal to spouse, family, and friends! There is no target; the archer works with time and Being and knows where to shoot and, more important, when (see Tehanu 175; ch. 11).

The artistic merit of The Dispossessed is, I think unquestionable. What has been questioned is parts of the politics, and here I'll express some of my own political reservations. Then, with political reservations earnestly expressed, we can move on. Le Guin did.

First, again, I find The Dispossessed vague about how to bring change to societies, especially societies like that of A-Io, where even peaceful demonstrators are likely to get machine-gunned by military establishments ideal for such uses.⁹⁹ If the idea is to just Be It and Do It!, we still need more details. Shevek and the Syndicate of Initiative do pretty much just do it on Anarres, but we never learn how or what plans they have if PDC had refused to assign resources to activities perceived by many of their Odonian sibs as dangerous, subversive, counterrevolutionary, and/or unOdonian.

Second, taking "politics" more generally, there are a number of attacks in The Dispossessed against moralizing, puritanical hardness, and narrow-minded, second rate, moralistic people, including the young Shevek (e.g., 78-81, 96 in ch. 4; 126, 128 in ch. 6). Indeed, part of the ambiguity of the ambiguous utopia of the Anarresti is how unnecessarily harsh they've made parts of life by applying Odo's dictum, "Excess is excrement" on the biologically poor world of Anarres (80; ch. 4). Getting specific, and dealing with sexual politics, we're told that Odo "provided better for the promiscuous than for those who tried long-term partnership" (198; ch. 8). She certainly provided better than we have in America in the 1970s or today. There are no laws of any sort, of course, and no social disapproval of any "sexual practice of any kind, except the rape of a child or woman" and both heterosexual and homosexual partnerships are accepted (198; ch. 8). Well, perhaps "statutory rape" should have some meaning and social enforcement even where there are no statutes, and rape is a bad thing, even if the victim is a man. Still, my feeling is that the surface level of The Dispossessed is antipuritanical, while much of the text is pretty severe. Vokep is the one man we see with the sexual philosophy of "Touch and go," and he has a low opinion of women and one small scene on two pages of a novel of over 300 pages (42-43; ch. 2). The one promiscuous woman we see on Anarres is Beshun, and she is treated fairly sympathetically in bringing Shevek "into the heart of sexuality" (42), but we're told that Shevek now and then during sex felt he possessed Beshun, "And she had thought," for a while, that she "owned him" (43). In a society where "propertarian" is an insulting epithet, what little we learn of Beshun does not speak well of her.

In terms of the treatment of homosexuality, and of a single, socially dedicated life, there are problems. We see no lesbians, and we do see one gay man: Bedap. Bedap is important to the plot, highly visible and has a brief, fully-adult sexual relationship with Shevek and helps change Shevek's life (138-40; ch. 6); and in some ways Bedap is more important even than Shevek in establishing the Syndicate of Initiative and renewing utopia on Anarres. Such treatment of a gay man is progressive even today watching the immensely popular film Independence Day (1996) will drive home that point and more progressive in 1974. And Thomas Remington has correctly pointed out in a discussion of Planet of Exile that "homosexual devotion . . . represents the yearning for a 'bond of sameness' rather than one 'of difference'" ("Other Side" 157), which would help justify Le Guin's privileging of heterosexual bonds. Still, some readers are legitimately troubled by the treatment of Bedap.

During the agitation over the Syndicate of Initiative, Shevek and Takver's daughter is tormented by other children and ends up crying in Shevek's arms. Bedap is present but leaves almost immediately, not wanting to intrude on "the one intimacy which he could not share . . . the intimacy of pain. It gave him no sense of relief or escape to go; rather he felt useless, diminished." And then he has his mid-life crisis, asking himself at thirty-nine years "What have I done? What have I been doing? Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people's lives because I don't have one." And he reaches his recognition "that all his hope was in that understanding that if he would be saved he must change his life" (298; ch. 12; see Bedford 17).¹⁰⁰ Now a gay can certainly become a workaholic "political" and mess up his life; but we see only one adult gay, and arguably only truly political person in the novel, and that's Bedap; and he is not partnered and is not happy; and in utopia, even a highly ambiguous utopia, readers may well see this as his fault. Bedap seems to see it as his fault, and we do not learn how he goes about mending that fault. Rulag, Shevek's mother (as we shall see) is also unpartnered, unhappy, politically active, and dangerous. Odo may have indeed "provided better for the promiscuous than for those who tried long-term partnerships" Shevek and Takver undergo long separations but The Dispossessed, like the Karhidish Hearths, privileges partnership: from what we see, it comes down in favor of monogamous, heterosexual marriage (Lefanu 141). In its explicit ideology and in the maturing of Shevek, The Dispossessed is antipuritanical; in the sum of its incidents, readers seem to be told to change our lives, take responsibility, marry, have kids, work hard and that pain, damn it, is good for you, including the pain of trying to make a partnership work on Anarres (48-50, ch. 3; 140, ch. 6; 269, ch. 10).

Shevek discovers for himself the First Noble Truth of the Buddha that "Suffering is the condition on which we live" in Shevek's words and he and his friends recognize that small "p," individual pains and pain, is one of the roots of society. And he comes close to the idea that one should get through pain to the "place where the self ceases" (48-50; ch. 2). As Aldous Huxley says the Perennial Philosophy teaches: "Mortification is painful, but that pain is one of the pre-conditions of blessedness," if it leads to "losing the egocentric life" (106; ch. 6). What blessedness we see in terms of the plot of The Dispossessed, though, on Anarres and on Urras, is purified but fairly traditional family life. And for some readers, memories of their families may suggest not blessedness, just pain.

Which brings me to my third reservation. I find Sarah Lefanu's harsh tone unfortunate and unfair, but she has some legitimate points in her section on The Dispossessed in the 1988 book Feminism and Science Fiction (132-33, 140-43; ch. 12). I do not have a problem with The Dispossessed's appeal to liberal male readers or with its binary oppositions (Lefanu 140-41); or with Le Guin in general having male central characters in her early work Lefanu does not mention anything later than "The Diary of the Rose" (1976). Nor do I mind that Le Guin writes in "the tradition of the bourgeois novel with its construction rather than deconstruction of the subject as hero" (Lefanu 143, 142). Le Guin has good insights into male perception, and I enjoy seeing with the kind of double vision one gets looking through a male's eyes as a woman and brilliant writer Le Guin imagines the view. And if the subject or Self is a mere myth of middleclass culture, it is a myth useful for ethical behavior: establishment of "I-Thou" relationships require an "I"; and I-Thou relationships are a good starting point for ethics, however unfashionably Structuralist they must be.¹⁰¹ Lefanu is highly suggestive and useful though in dealing with Le Guin's treatment of her political people and with The Dispossessed's three major female characters, "the treacherous temptress," Vea, who is "part of the evils of capitalism" (Lefanu 132), Shevek's career-woman mother, Rulag, and Shevek's partner, Takver "the token strong woman, [who] keeps the home fires burning while Shevek is off changing the future of mankind . . ." (141).¹⁰²

I wish to go father than Lefanu on Shevek's encounter with Vea at that highly stressed party on Urras (ch. 7).

At Vea's party, Shevek gets to expound his theories on time to a lay audience. More, when he tries to intimidate a know-it-all with physics jargon, Vea stops him: "'Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk,' Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin" (178) so we get Shevek's cocktail-party lecture in language we can understand. We also see Shevek's first experience with alcohol, and his getting drunk. After the discussion of time and philosophy, after a profound comment on Anarres vs. Urras (184) Shevek gets dizzy and goes with Vea into a bedroom. Vea says "I've got to kiss you for that!" and does kiss Shevek, lifting "herself on tiptoe, presenting him her mouth, and her white throat, and her naked breasts." Shevek misunderstands. Le Guin notes, as a critic, "They can't read each other's cultural signals" (personal communication).

Shevek returns groggily to the party and vomits on a silver pastries platter on a fancy table.

Shevek is drunk; he does misunderstand Vea's intentions; but there is a problem with this scene similar to the problem with the Pervert and the kemmerer in the Foretelling scene in The Left Hand of Darkness (64-66; ch. 5). If one wishes to complain on feminist grounds about The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, one need not get into such subtleties as objecting to the "attempted syntheses of binary oppositions" in "romances of integration" (Lefanu 139, Jackson 154) or a "subject-centered view of the novel" (Lefanu 136) or "Man" for humankind and the generic "he." In Left Hand Le Guin was too casual with the imagery of sexual harassment; in the scene in Vea's bedroom she is too casual with what most of us would understand, after Vea's "No," as a sexual assault.

That said, there I will stop my own criticism of The Dispossessed and shift into another mode.

Lefanu is bothered by Vea as "the treacherous temptress" (132); more exactly, we have the presentation of Vea as an informal government agent (TD 186; ch. 7), and more importantly as a "body profiteer" (TD 256; ch. 10): "'A body profiteer,' Takver called women who used their sexuality as a weapon in a power struggle with men" and, of course, Vea is "the body profiteer to end them all" (171; ch. 7). That Vea would use her sexuality any way she can among the sexist, capitalist, objectifying, and commodifying Ioti is no criticism of women or The Nature of Woman; it is not even much of a criticism of Vea. The problem would be that Takver has the concept of body profiteering: one may feel that the Odonian utopia should be free of any sort of prostitution or use of sex or sexuality for power or advantage in some war of the sexes. I don't see a problem in this, unless one thinks a war of the sexes inevitable, which Le Guin does not. If there is a flaw in this aspect of The Dispossessed, it is in limiting "body profiteering" to women and to "sexuality" unless we understand "sexuality" very broadly. Men and boys in our world learn early and well whether or not their bodies can be exploited for sex as well as for money and power (e.g., as athletes).¹⁰³ I expect in utopia much less exploitation, period, in every sense; of the residue that remains, utopia should allow both men and women to take their advantages equally. If we wish to avoid binary oppositions, and especially hierarchical binary oppositions, where it is "A" vs. "B", hence "A" superior to "B" then one opposition to be avoided is "mind"/"body." As Odo thinks, "A proper body's not an object, not an implement, not a belonging to be admired, it's just you, yourself" ("Day Before," WTQ 262); it is a fault, not a virtue of "'Civilized Man'" to go "climbing up into his head" and cut himself off from other animals and the world (BG 11; Introd.), and from his body. If smart people have a right to use our brains to get status, then graceful, beautiful, athletic, and sexy people have a right to use their gifts.¹⁰⁴ In utopia the gifted in any way and like everyone else just may not use their gifts to gain power over other people.

But in critiquing the critique of Lefanu et al., there is an "on the other hand" to recognize in The Dispossessed's presentation of women, its general politics, and its teaching about teaching.

(1) Takver does indeed make a speech on "pregnant women have no ethics. Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse . . . " (266; ch. 10), but Takver makes this speech; it is not a series of aphorisms from the Narrator, and I take it as a general warning against the "sacrifice impulse." The Narrator has told us early in the novel that "However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture" (75; ch. 4), and we know from elsewhere in The Dispossessed and Le Guin's canon generally that she is well aware of the dangers for any him and his or her society from impulses toward sacrifice, self-sacrifice, and even altruism. (2) The Dispossessed is dedicated "For the partner": Le Guin is a married woman; she believes in marriage; and she has the right to celebrate her decision and her way of life. (3) The partnership between Takver and Shevek is utopian in that it is significantly better than most people, especially most female people, get in our society. Takver is a scientist; she travels; and she has daycare and a male partner who really shares rearing the kids. Indeed, in terms of Le Guin's overarching norms, Takver is rather like Tenar in Rosemarie Arbur's observation that Tenar reaches Ged's "goal in life that of being rather than doing about two decades before he does" (Proceedings 151). Indeed, Shevek recognizes Takver as one of those "souls . . . whose umbilicus has never been cut." Changing the metaphor, he thinks Takver and people like her "never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy" but, as the Daoist philosopher Chuang Tzu advised, "look forward to rotting and turning into humus" (TD 150; ch. 6).¹⁰⁵ The legitimate complaint here is that The Dispossessed is not Takver's story; Le Guin has not yet written an "Affirmative Action" story for Takver as she has written Tehanu for Tenar. (4) Last: Rulag, Takver, and Vea are not the only women in The Dispossessed.

There is Sewa Oiie, sister-in-law to Vea (157; ch. 7) and pretty much neutral: a good mother in Ioti society. There's Bunub, "Mother Envy" a rather paranoid, selfish, envious person, but a very nicely drawn minor character and comment on the limits of utopia; like aggressivity and the authoritarian impulse, envy and some other bad traits are human givens (261, ch. 10; 208-10, ch. 8). One may disagree with the givenness of such givens or any human givens, but Bunub's faults are more than balanced by worse faults among men, and the argument here would not be with her gender. Finally, as Shevek tells the physicists on Urras, his teachers Mitis and Gvarab were women and, as all the characters know and we should not forget, so was Odo (60; ch. 3). This point is important, and ambiguous: three of the central people in Shevek's life, in the formation of his character, were women and teachers; and one of them, of course, founded his society.

On the one hand, these women are definitely minor characters in The Dispossessed: they are important in the story primarily because of their effect upon Shevek; on the other hand, any feminism that excludes teaching and nurturing as honored activities loses many women supporters and a fair number of men fellow-travelers. Odo was the teacher to a whole society, and from Moses of the Exodus unto Moses Maimonides unto Odo the revolutionary, teachers have been important. Education and teachers, in fact, seems central to Le Guin's theory of revolution (see "A Woman's Liberation" in FWF, esp. 197 f. [and FWF 125 f.]). Mitis was "a splendid teacher" and Gvarab, also, just unfortunate to have lived too late to develop the General Temporal Theory (58; ch. 3) on her own: Gvarab's work lived on in Shevek's. Our usual hierarchizing of achievement puts the mere teachers Mitis and Gvarab far below Odo and puts Sewa Oiie even lower, or Takver in her role as mother. But, then, such hierarchizing puts Ursula K. Le Guin's "partner" down pretty far as a college teacher (plus much of the rest of Le Guin's family) plus Ursula K. Le Guin in her role as housewife and mother and I also am pretty far down on the status chain, among Le Guin's other critics with academic jobs. The point, I would hope, is to value all sorts of achievements on the way to eliminating such arranging of people into hierarchies.

And on that point, Ursula K. Le Guin was very much ahead of the curve by 1974.

Whatever flaws recent critics have or future critics will find in The Dispossessed, I recall it in 1974 offering a vision of an alternative to two pernicious hierarchies: both class-ridden, authoritarian capitalism and centralized, authoritarian Communism. It offered and still offers particularly to Americans an analysis of the ways revolutions get stopped or rolled back. At a time in which the bicentennial of the American Bill of Rights went by with hardly a word in celebration, approaching a new millennium in which the United States may go from a secular republic to a Christian nation, that analysis is still highly relevant. With that analysis in a work of such elegant structure, The Dispossessed earned its Hugo and Nebula in the 1970s. During times in which respectable discourse in much of the world excludes not only anarchists -who are used to it but even democratic socialists and liberals, The Dispossessed continues to be an important book and an important book on the political Left.

"THE DAY BEFORE THE REVOLUTION" (1974)

In the headnote to her story, Le Guin describes as "one of the ones who walked away from Omelas" Odo, the anarchist philosopher whose theories are shown in The Dispossessed (1974) and whose last day is narrated in "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974 [WTQ 260]).

At least in terms of the works I'm stressing, "The Day Before the Revolution" can be seen as a (figurative) hinge, recapitulating important themes that proceeded it and foreshadowing developments to come.

For one thing, so positive a revolutionary should give us pause in privileging immanence over Simone de Beauvoir's transcendence, Daoist unaction over heroic striving. What could be a more transcendent project than a utopian revolution? Few things, actually, but I would raise three points on the Le Guinian favoring of immanence that critics since Douglas Barbour (1974) have stressed in pointing out Le Guin's Daoism. First, at least into early 1970, the utopian question was, "What will things be like the day after the Revolution?" i.e., what are the goals of the Revolution? Le Guin's story is about a fairly ordinary day, the day before the revolution. Second, the story is about Odo, "the famous revolutionary," except it is not that, in part because Odo is not just that. She is also a wife and lover. She was her life, which included being, a "swimmer in the midst of life" (WTQ 275). Third, Odo is the theoretician of people on the bottom, at "the foundation, the reality, the source"; her wisdom comes from knowing people are, at bottom, mud (274), part of the Earth.

The plot of "The Day Before the Revolution" may be summarized thus: On the day before the Revolution in A-Io, as news arrived of rebellion in Thu, Laia Asieo Odo had a dream, awoke, dressed, ate breakfast, fixed her hair a bit and answered letters (with some help), spoke with visiting students, went out for a walk, returned home (with help), and died. If you know Le Guin's The Dispossessed, you know that A-Io and Thu are on the planet Urras; if you don't, you don't. If you know Le Guin's early SF and fantasy, you know she has always been quite capable of telling stories with many physical incidents and you know that in "The Day Before the Revolution" Le Guin has chosen to keep the world-shaking events offstage. As she says in her introduction to "Vaster than Empires and More Slow," her interest "is in what goes on inside. Inner space and all that. We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone" (WTQ 166). I.e., in dream, where Le Guin begins "The Day Before the Revolution," as she had begun The Lathe of Heaven (1971). And Le Guin deals here with an old person on the edge of death, as she had dealt with Wold in Planet of Exile (1966) a book that also uses an image much like the Circle of Life (WTQ 272). Both Odo and Le Guin note the dangers of "Dualizing" (267) and altruism (270) deal briefly with marriage, touch (contact with the Other), doing what one must do, names (273), freedom, liberty, discipline, and responsibility constants in Le Guin's writing and maybe in much of Odo's. In "The Day Before the Revolution," Le Guin makes explicit her intuition into her use, at least, of the Return as a human imperative: "If you wanted to come home you had to keep going on, that was what she meant when she wrote 'True journey is return,'. . ." at least that was what she, Le Guin as well as Odo, meant to the extent that one can "rationalize" meaning out of an intuition (266).¹⁰⁶

Old Wold, however, was a man, and Odo is a woman: the point-of-view character and protagonist in what is emphatically and wholly her story. And Odo is an unambiguously attractive character (if hardly perfect), clarifying in Le Guin's fiction that Le Guin means what Le Guin says about anarchy: she's for it. Not anarchism as terrorism nor "the social-Darwinist economic 'libertarianism' of the far right; but anarchism as prefigured in early Taoist thought" the advice to the Emperor to do nothing "and expounded by [Percy Bysshe] Shelley and [Petr] Kropotkin, [Emma] Goldman and [Paul] Goodman." That is, she disapproves of "the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist)," and she approves of anarchism's "principal moral-practical theme" of "cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid)" (WTQ 260).¹⁰⁷

But Le Guin is not so concerned with any over-arching philosophy that she privileges it over the thoughts of a rather rough-edged "drooling old woman" (if one "who had started a world revolution" [265]) moving toward her death at seventy-two, never having learned the names of the one set of flowers we see in the story (277); "The Movement was not strong on names" (273). Dead center in the story is Odo as individual. Odo is "the famous revolutionary" (275), but also the sexual being who still cares how she looks to a young man who attracts her. She's the troublemaker who once "kicked policemen, and spat at priests, and pissed in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square" and who rejects the role of "sweet old monument" and "Big Sheltering Womb." Most especially she is "The one who loved Taviri," her husband, long dead, but that's not enough either (275). She is her history, as the Existentialists have said; and finally, there is what she is at her foundation, sitting in a doorway in the city, asking who she is. "There was nothing left, really, but the foundation. She had come home; she had never left home. 'True voyage is return.' Dust and mud and a doorstep in the slums" (WTQ 268, 271-72, 275-76).

Odo is an anarchist, "One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice" (WTQ 272). Her choices in life were very different from those of her fellow author, Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin accepts and accepts responsibility for the choices she made and does not repudiate them. But her work evolves. Odo is a hinge in Le Guin's canon, simultaneously separating and connecting the works through the early 1970s with the later works. These works are still Daoist: Odo is in touch with her world (270), follows the Dao of revolution. But Odo regrets "Dualizing again" (267), setting up mind/body as binary opposites or perhaps any binary opposites and is a woman moving toward defining a new kind of heroism: with her Le Guin moves toward works more explicitly informed with contemporary feminism.

1 Quoting from memory a man who talked to my Rhetoric 108 class at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), ca. 1969.  The unspaced dots indicate that his voice trailed off. 

2 Charnas has continued but not completed her story in The Furies (1994).  For Le Guin and the renewal of the American utopian tradition, see A. I. Berger 548-49.   

3 It took Le Guin a while to realize fully that "civilization" is too problematic to use casually in a complimentary sense.  In terms of large-scale violence, it's usually been city folk—civilized people—who have done the most damage; we have the technology, organization, philosophy, and discipline.   

4 Unspaced dots represent ellipsis mark in original.   

5 I discuss “VEMS” below, as collected in BG.

6 The apprehensive spermatazoa of Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex . . . weren't released into popular culture until 1972, a year after "VEMS." 

7 Cf. Shakespeare's formula for a villian, pronounces by Richard of Gloucester, later to be King Richard III:

         I have no brother, I am like no brother;

         And this word "love," which greybeards call divine, 

         Be resident in men like one another,

         And not in me.  I am myself alone.  (3 Henry VI 5.6.80-83)  

8 Le Guin's self-characterization is from SFS #6 = 2.2 (July 1975): 139, her comments on David "Ketterer on The Left Hand of Darkness."   

9 See my discussions of ". . .  Omelas" (1973), EoH (1978), and BP (1980)

10 Cf. Le Guin’s much later story, “Solitude” (1994). 

11 For Hainish history date for LHD, see Briggs, "Hainish Chronology" 18.  For "Ekumen," see Kroeber, Cultural Patterns . . . § 175 231: "The Greeks had a name for the central area of higher civilization: oikumenê{^ = macron} . . . .  the region in which people lived in cities in organized states . . ." (231; ch. 19).  By the late 1960s, however, "ecology" and "ecological" had come into general use among the educated, and many knew their etymology from oikos, the Greek word for "house"; see, e.g., in J. T. Fraser's Voices of Time [1966], JTF's reference on 280, and J. L. Cloudsley-Thompson's section title on 308.  I will stick with "household" for "Ekumen," but see Bittner, Approaches 103, 107, and also Joseph Needham’s reference to “the Chinese oikoumene” (“Time and Knowledge . . .” in Fraser's Voices 115; see Bittner, Approaches 148, n. 45).  In "Dancing to Ganam" (1993), the (anti)hero Dalzul juxtaposes to "Ekumen" the phrase "the household of humankind" (FIS 112).   

12 See the debate centering around Kenneth M. Roemer's essay, "The Talking Porcupine . . ." in Utopian Studies 2.1 &2.   

13 In her headnote in WTQ, Le Guin says that the scapegoat idea comes up in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov—but she hadn't read any Dostoyevsky in a long time and "had simply forgotten he used the idea" (251).  Some readers add to the list of "sources and analogs," Shirley Jackson's scapegoat story, "The Lottery" (New Yorker, 1948, coll. 1949; rpt. Just an Ordinary Day [NY: Bantam, 1996]).  For a literal ritual of the scapegoat, see Leviticus 16.   

14 "Ambushed" from R. Silverberg's "Happy Day in 2381" (1970).

15 See my discussion of BP for sacrifices and bad bargains. 

16 See A. L. Kroeber §247 for a discussion of cooperation and competition as two poles on the axis of interpersonal relations; societies such as the Inuit and the Ojibwas neither affirm nor deny competition but take a different path, individualism, and so avoid this dichotomy (Biology and Race, esp. 184).   

17 This rule of shifgrethor (see below) is implicit in LHD and made explicit in Le Guin's "Coming of Age in Karhide" (481); cf. her "Solitude" (143). 

18 For the possibility of kemmer as "an ironic comment on male sexuality," see, Lamb and Veith (223), who are themselves extending a suggestion by Barbara Bucknall (77).   

19 I retain the italics, indicating that this is a comment added in 1987 to Le Guin's 1976 essay "Is Gender Necessary?", or a revision of a statement already there.  Note that the time of the "inception of the whole book" would have been during US warfare in Indochina.  The 1995 production of a dramatized Left Hand of Darkness by the Lifeline Theatre in Chicago eliminated the consideration of war, an important datum for students of SF in theatre, and for cultural studies.   

20 "Lao Tse: V," quoted as the headnote to LoH ch. 8 (110). 

21 For the "leisurely rate" of Chinese technological advance, see Needham, "Time and Knowledge" 120.   

22 Human biology includes more than sex., and the biological bases of dualism go beyond sex.  Our bodies are far more bilaterally symmetrical than radially symmetrical, and this make it easy to think of left vs. right and on the one hand and the other; our "encephalization" makes it easy to think of head vs. tail.  Our constant struggle against gravity as upright terrestrial creatures makes it easy to think of up vs. down, higher and lower.  Etc.  For the necessary duality of I/Other, see LHD 234; ch. 15 .   

23 As Stanley Kubrick drives home very effectively in Full Metal Jacket (1987)—tap into a persecuted recruit's "killer instinct," and he'll kill his drill instructor, not total strangers half a world away.

24 Cf. Havzhiva's trip to Hayawa Tribal Village in "A Man of the People" (1995; in FWF 131 f.).  Note the slogan in that story, "All knowledge is local" and the conversation between Shevek and the Terran ambassador on the "real" Urras in TD ch. 11.  For a real-world anthropologist on one's not finding "the real article" of real-world cultures, see Heilman, xv-xix.  v

25 Foretelling involves nine people, with Ai perceived as the tenth when the empathic and "paraverbal forces at work" draw him into the circle.  Cf. "Nine Lives," the Nine Masters of Roke—or ten with the Archmage and the Doorkeeper (WE)—and the ten members of the expedition in "Vaster than Empires and More Slow."  My best guess for "nine" is a reference to Chuang Tzu's association of water, the abyss, and nine (ch. 7).  Le Guin wrote me, "I just like the number 9" and points out that nine is "one of the central organizing devices in ACH, too."  In addition to the number of human fingers, and toes (hence, base-10 for our numbers), ten is the number of days in a Chinese week (Needham, "Time and Knowledge" 100), an Anarresti decad (TD), and a décade in the French Republican calendar.   

26 Two women in my classes have stated strongly that they would not like gender-free titles and pronouns in LHD and the commentary thereon if that meant losing lines like "The king was pregnant" (LHD 100) and "unless he's pregnant" ("Gender . . . Redux" DEW 12; see italicized revised text, top of 13).   

27 In all its complexity, shifgrethor is similar to "face" in Japanese and, more so, Chinese usage; see Mao, esp. 460-61.  Since shifgrethor is significant to Gethenians in somer, not kemmer—i.e., when they are not sexed—it is presented as relevant for humans generally, not just for men or women: humans as status-seeking, face-maintaining female and/or male animals.   

28 Le Guin has a note to the all-bright sky referring to "one of the theories used to support the expanding-universe hypothesis."  See Whitrow's comments in Voices that a theory of an expanding universe "enables us to resolve Oblers' paradox concerning the background brightness of the universe" (572). 

29 Note the Handdarata blessing "Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished" (LHD 246; ch. 18).  In 1990, Le Guin provided the balancing Handdarata blessing: "Praise also the light, and creation unfinished" ("Shobies' Story" [FIS 99]); note also, "In the act of creation praise" ("Coming of Age in Karhide" [481, 482]).   

30 Cf. the triplets: Justinian's "One empire, one church, one law" (Swain 2.613), and the Nazi slogan "One people, one Leader, one empire."   

31 Students looking up "Dionysios": look under "Dionysos" or "Dionysus," and note that there is more to him than just "the god of wine and revelery," as my desk dictionary identifies him.  Dionysos is one of "The Two Great Gods of Earth," the male complement to the goddess Demeter (see Hamilton, ch. 2).   

32 "Meshe is in the Center of Time," includes Meshe’s having "lived on earth thirty years" up to the Seeing, "and after it he lived on earth again thirty years": cf. Dante character in the Inferno opening his story with "In the middle of the journey of our life{,} I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost" (I.1).  Le Guin might have advised Dante to stay in the woods. 

33 For my discussion of Time in LHD I am esp. indebted to Nudelman, "Approach to the Structure . . . ."  See also Fraser, "Note Relating to a Paradox of the Temporal Order," Voices 524-25, and its hypothesizing a world of logic and being, where "the unexpected cannot happen."  My discussion of chapter placement in LHD is from my "'Praise then Darkness'" essay, which I wrote while consulting with Jenkins on her essay on LHD for our course in College Composition.   

34 For "excess of light," cf. the Ministry of Love as "the place where there is no darkness" in Orwell's 1984 (24-25, 87, 147, 189). 

35 For the Last Days in the Orgota Creation Myth, cf. image in Norse vision of Ragnarök of the sun darkening and stars falling from sky (Hamilton, Mythology 313).  For Ragnarök, creation, and dissolution in D. H. Lawrence—for a highly intriguing comparison and contrast with Le Guin—see Erlich, "Catastrophism and Coition . . . ."  

36 In commenting on A. L. Kroeber's collection of Yurok Myths, the folklorist Alan Dundes comments that "the 'middle' in [the] Yurok worldview," esp. as reflected in the myths and tales Kroeber collected, is of "paramount importance," as both a "place of distinction" and "also a place of danger" (xxxxvi).  Cf. use of "central" in Pravic language on Anarres in TD; contrast Urrasti and Terran use of "higher" for "better" (12; ch. 1).  

37 The First Noble Truth of the Buddha is the Truth of Suffering: "Existence is pain" (Ency. of Religion "Buddhist Terminology," "Buddhism" I [p. 95]).   

38 Cf. Ged's Shadow in WE, esp. 197-81; ch. 10, recapitulated Tehanu 72; ch. 6.  

39 See Remington's discussion of "The Other Side of Suffering."  See below, the Athsheans in WWF and the Kesh in ACH as sane societies.   

40 For the continuing importance of faces in Le Guin, see the descriptions in Tehanu, esp. those of Flint and Spark, and in TD Shevek's line at Vea's party on Urras, "Everything is beautiful, here.  Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces" (184; ch. 7).  In John Keats's The Fall of Hyperion, "those 'who feel the giant agony of the world' and 'Labour for mortal good' . . . 'seek no wonder but the human face'" (I.162 f., qtd. Duerksen 15).   

41 For the significance of touch and pain, see Remington, "A Touch of Difference" and "The Other Side of Suffering."  For sex and gender in this scene, see Russ, "Image" 39.  For the lack of sex between the always-male Genly Ai and Estraven in kemmer, see Lamb and Veith 224-31.   

42 For the importance of telepathy in Le Guin's early works, see Darko Suvin's "Parables of De-Alienation: Le Guin's Widdershins Dance" (269). 

43 Ai is both envoy and exile: see Spencer.  For "Ai!" as an emotional exclamation, cf. and contrast A. L. Kroeber's explicit exclusion from language animal sounds and "a man's moan" (§20, "Animal Communication," Biology and Race rpt. 41).  See also Abberkam's "crying like an animal" in "Betrayals" in FWF (11-12),   

44 Cf. Chuang Tzu ch. 22, in Giles trans. "Light is born of darkness" (213).   

45 For evolution and revolution in Le Guin's work, see Suvin, "Parables" 271.   

46 For "the collision between the processes of history and utopianizing," see Theall 261.   

47 See Heinlein's Sgt. Zim on "The purpose of war": to make your enemy "do what you want him to do" (Starship Troopers 52; ch. 5); this is standard military doctrine.  Cf. Bertrand de Jouvenel and Francoise Voltaire on Power (Arendt, On Violence 36; § I).   

48 There is one exception to Le Guin's dislike of transcendence, indicated by the opening of Susan Wood's "Discovering Worlds": "Ursula K. Le Guin makes maps" and the reference to the worlds "she presents," necessarily after first creating (Bloom 183).  The privileged, transcendent overview of worlds Le Guin allows is that which authors can give readers.  We have godlike vision of worlds we cannot affect.   

49 Russ's criticisms in "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" (1970) were early, respectful, and very sensible.  Susan Wood says that "The criticism 'that the Gethenians seem like men instead of menwomen' was raised most notably by Polish critic Stanislaw Lem, in an essay published in the German journal Quarber Merkur and translated, revised, and published in the Australian fanzine SF Commentary 24 (November 1971)," to which Le Guin replied in SF Commentary 26 (April 1972)—Introduction to part III of LoN (1979): 131.  For a discussion of Le Guin as "this female writer who" up to the mid-1980s "seem[ed] to appeal to everyone—with the exception of feminists," see Marleen Barr's 1987 review of Bittner's Approaches . . . (112-14).   

50 The same could be said for literary criticism and prominence of reviews.  E.g., in literary criticism, note the Special Le Guin issues of SFS (Nov. 1975) and of Extrapolation (Fall 1980), for two out of two of the major academic SF journals at the time in North America.  For rough comparisons, note also the sheer physical size of Elizabeth Cummins Cogell's Ursula K. Le Guin: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography in the G. K. Hall series Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy, compared with the volumes on other authors. 

51 Russ, "Image" 39; see "Gender . . . Redux" 15.  See "Winter's King" in the WTQ version, and, especially, "Coming of Age in Karhide" for responses in fiction to these criticisms. 

52 Benford (17) contends there is "unconscious condescension" toward Bedap in TD.  Priority for Le Guin on homosexuality may go to Samuel R. Delany, whom Bedford cites, "To Read The Dispossessed" in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977).  See also, though, Remington on Huru Pilotson's "homosexual devotion to Jakob" Agat in Planet of Exile ("Other Side" 157).  See below for Bedap in TD.   

53 Freudian formulations quoted by Friedan 120-21 (see all of ch. 5, "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud").   

54 Sobchack, Screening Space 302; see also 300; ch. 4.    

55 My basic information on Psi Powers and ESP in SF is from Nicholls and Stableford, "ESP" and "Psi" in the Ency. of S.F. and my own casual reading of SF and in Extrapolation and other journals. 

56 This joke is used in Greg Howard's Sally Forth  cartoon for Sun., 9 Feb.: 1997.  Sally explains to her husband, Ted about the "process" involved in finding out what's bothering someone else.  The dialog includes, "First I give you some obscure hint that you miss entirely.  Then I expect you to read my mind."  When Ted asks if it wouldn't be easier if she just told him what was bothering her, Sally responds "Then you wouldn't get a chance to show me you love me by reading my mind."   

57 For readers familiar with what Carol D. Stevens has called "Le Guin and the Family Business," the gold reference, within a page of "Conquistador" (6) should be a cue: crucial to the destruction of the Californian Indians studied by Le Guin's parents were Spanish, Mexican, and US conquest, Christian missionizing, White American ranching and farming—and the 1849 Gold Rush.  See esp. T. Kroeber's Ishi books and A. L. Kroeber's Handbook ch. 57, "Population," esp. 883, 886-90.   

58 I use here and elsewhere N. Frye's theory of Modes in Anatomy of Criticism—and his idea that at the end of a Romantic Comedy a better world forms around a central couple: concluding the comic action, "a new society crystallizes on the stage around the hero and his bride" (44; see also 163).   

59 See Heizer and T. Kroeber, Ishi the Last Yahi, 123-26: in their rpt. of T. T. Waterman's "The Last Wild Tribe of California (1915)," from Popular Science Monthly (March 1915): 233-44; Heizer and Kroeber 142-43: in their rpt. of Waterman's "The Yana Indians (1918)," from University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 13.2 (1918): 35-102: the section The Yahi Meet Disaster, excerpting from the account of Anderson.  See also Maslen 69, who reminds us of this massacre.  See Heizer and T. Kroeber, Ishi the Last Yahi, 123-26: in their rpt. of T. T. Waterman's "The Last Wild Tribe of California (1915)," from Popular Science Monthly (March 1915): 233-44; Heizer and Kroeber 142-43: in their rpt. of Waterman's "The Yana Indians (1918)," from University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 13.2 (1918): 35-102: the section The Yahi Meet Disaster, excerpting from the account of Anderson.  See also Maslen 69, who reminds us of this massacre.   

60 The local superpower in historical times has been China, so the Vietnamese came to the 20th c. with a tradition of armed resistance going back to at least to 39 CE and the revolt under the Ladies Trung Trac and Trung Nhi ("Vietnam, History of" 122).   

61 We learn almost nothing about the sexual behavior of Athsheans, and most heterosexual readers will unconsciously "fill in the blank" by generalizing from Thele and Selver's idealized marriage to a straight Athshean culture contrasted with the (mostly negative) Terrans, where the rule is male homosexuality and heterosexual prostitution.   

62 See Needham, "Time and Knowledge . . . ," 11-12 for Daoist reverence for "a Golden Age of primitive communalism," an "ancient paradise of generalized tribal nobility, of cooperative primitivity, of spontaneous collectivism" before social differentiation into "lords, priests, warriors{,} and serfs" (Tao te Ching ch. 80).  On introversion vs. extroversion as part of "National Temperament or Types," see A. L. Kroeber § 244 (Biology and Race 171-72); for folk/tribal culture vs. sophisticate/urban culture see Kroeber § 121 (Culture Patterns and Processes esp. 89-91).   

63 WWF 4; ch. 1.  See "Gender . . . Redux" (DEW10-11), "Gender" in LoN (1979): 166; Erlich, "Le Guin/Clarke" 115.   

64 The US is far from unique here.  Examples of massacres by other imperial peoples are easy to find, e.g., the Romans' producing impressive body counts by all except the most rigorous Early Modern and modern standards for slaughter.  For more recent examples, see Arendt, "Race and Bureaucracy," Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 7.   

65 Maslen instructively compares Davidson with "an earlier manifestation of American colonialism, a man called Anderson who was the most prominent of the Indian killers in Kroeber's narrative" (69)—i.e., T. Kroeber's Ishi in Two Worlds 63-68 and passim.  Maslen refers to R. A. Anderson, "sometime sheriff of Butte County" and author of the 1909 pamphlet, "Fighting the Mill Creeks," and one whom an early commentator indicated was among the "very considerable proportion of our 'Indian fighters' in this state [who] deserved, in strict justice, to be hung" (quoting T. T. Waterman, in Heizer and Kroeber 126, 124).  For Anderson's account of a crucial massacre, see Heizer and T. Kroeber 142-43.  

66 For more on patriotism and treason in LHD, see ch. 3, pp. 30-39; ch. 9; ch. 15, pp. 211-212; ch. 19, pp. 278-82.   

67 For Le Guin's more positive view of "The City as goal and Dream," see "Introduction to City of Illusions," LoN (1979): 147, and "Coming of Age in Karhide."   

68 See my discussion of ACH.  Also note that my speaking harshly of kings should not imply an idealized vision of more democratic constitutions.   

69 For more on aggressivity and aggression, see Erlich, "Le Guin/Clarke" 114.   

70 For Athshean sanity, cf. the Kesh in ACH—and see Barbour, "Wholeness" 172.  For dreaming, cf. "the Senoi people of Malaysia," whom Le Guin hadn't even heard of when she wrote WWF; see Synchronicity Can Happen . . . section of Introd. to WWF (LoN [1979] 152-54).  A. L. Kroeber had a lower opinion of cultures that put high value upon dreams: "Backward peoples assume as actual certain phenomena to which we grant only a mental or subjective existence . . . .  Certain things we classify as unreal the primitive considers superreal . . . " (§ 127; Culture Patterns . . . 107; ch. 7.   

71 Cf. and contrast the "unprogressive" native peoples in California and Australia.  Among both groups the pattern for all times was set in the mythic past: the primordial Dream Time among the Australians (Eliade 40) during the time of the Ixkareya among the Karok, of the woge among the Yurok  (e.g., A. L.  Kroeber, Karok 263, Yurok 18, 271-81, 289-91; see Erlich, "Le Guin and Clarke" 113).  To the Mohave-Yuman peoples along the Colorado, "dreaming is moving back in time and in understanding to the beginnings of things when gods walked the new earth" (T. Kroeber, Inland Whale 193).  See Franz, 221-23 for primordial time, dreams, and "synchronicity" in significant dreams.   

72 I eliminated the phrase "as Death."  Lyubov got excessive in the last sentence: Death was no newcomer among the Athsheans.  What Selver had introduced was mass murder.  Note "link" for hinge imagery in ACH. 

73 See Chuang Tzu ch. 6 (Giles 74). 

74 In response to my query of what work is alluded to in the blood-bonded arch—guessing, on the basis of James Bittner's work, it might be a poem of W. H. Auden's—Dennis McGucken sent me by e-mail the message (1 Nov. 1996) that “The allusion is to the last lines of Auden’s poem ‘Vespers’ from the sequence Horae Canonicae.  * * * ‘For without a cement of blood (it must be human it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand .’  [See] W.H. Auden, Collected Poems  (Random House, 1976 (pp. 482-485)."  McGucken is correct, but students of the question of allusions should note that Le Guin said she didn't think she had read the poem (personal communication).   

75 This is a standard interpretation: see e.g., Cummins, Understanding . . . Le Guin (86; ch. 3). 

76 For a later handling of two-planet relationships and the exploitation of a nearby planet, and of people, see Werel and Yeowe in the novellas collected in Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995).  For the imagery of the circling planets, see Erlich "On Barbour . . . ."  

77 Chicago, 1968: Violent confrontations and police riot at the Democratic National Convention; Chicago, 1969: police killing of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.  Jackson State/Kent State: in violence associated with student strikes in May of 1970, two students were killed by police at Jackson State University in Mississippi, and four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio, plus other significant student casualties (Miller 309-11, Herring 232, memory).   

78 The quotations on rebellion are from Jefferson's correspondence with James Madison (30 Jan. 1787).{For 143 yrs also? &.980?} The phrase "permanent revolution" is usually associated with Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik revolutionary and commissar for war under Lenin.   

79 The phrase "time's arrow" is attributed to Sir Arthur Eddington by Richard Schlegel in "Time and Thermodynamics" in Voices of Time (1996): 505, citing Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World (1929), ch. 4.  For time's arrow and other symbols of time, see § 8 "The Symbolization of Time" in Meerloo, esp. 248.  For more on the "arrow of time," see Voices of Time, Index 692.   

80 Le Guin herself has spoken against the formulaic as writing in obedience to external standards, or for a market: "On Theme," Those Who Can 206, and "The Stone Ax and the Muskoxen," LoN (1979): 232-33.  PostRomantic moderns have tended to rate quite highly originality, novelty, and individual, "self-sufficient" achievement, which is a legitimate preference but only a preference, or but one criterion for artistic quality. 

81 In the Odonian saying, "Excess is excrement," not "shit": Pravic, their invented language, lacks body-reference taboos.  "Pravic was not a good swearing language.  It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist" (TD 208; ch.8).  See and contrast A. L. Kroeber on how "retarded cultures seem infantile both in their unabashed preoccupation with bodily functions and in their disregard of other human lives" (§ 128, Culture Patterns 109; ch. 7, my emphasis).   

82 For endorsements of getting out, as opposed to staying and resisting, see Le Guin's ". . . Omelas," BP, and EoH.  See also in her Introd. to The Norton Book of Science Fiction (42), the praise for the story that ends the Norton: John Kessel's "Invaders."  For endorsements of getting out, as opposed to staying and resisting, see Le Guin's ". . . Omelas," BP, and EoH.  See also in her Introd. to The Norton Book of Science Fiction (42), the praise for the story that ends the Norton: John Kessel's "Invaders."   

83 Chuang Tzu may have priority on the anarchist ideal of the management of things, not people: ". . . man . . . must not be managed as if he were a mere thing; though by not managing him at all he may actually be managed as if he were a mere thing" (Chuang Tzu ch. 11 [Giles 114-15]).   

84 Exodus 23.15; see also Ex. 34.20 and Deuteronomy 16.16-17 (Tanakh).   

85 Le Guin alludes to the fine story by Hans Christian Anderson, "The Emperor's New Clothes" (ca. 1835).   

86 For Kropotkin's influence on TD, see P. E. Smith, "Unbuilding Walls . . ." esp. 80-83; Bittner, Approaches 149 n. 49.   

87 Good opinion is necessary for what an Anarresti can hope for.  Even as traditional Chinese built "beautiful votive temples dedicated not to Taoist gods or to Buddhas . . . but to ordinary men and women who conferred benefits upon posterity" (Needham, "Time and Knowledge . . ." 119), even so among the Anarresti: a Shevek from the early years of the Settlement earned a "good immortality" by designing "a kind of bearing they use in heavy machinery, they still call it a 'shevek,'" naming it after her (160; ch. 7).   

88 For simultaneity and sequency, see Franz, esp. 220-22: time's arrow vs. "primordial time"—Eliade's illud tempus (similar to Australian or Athshean Dream Time).  The Simultaneous view and its ethical implication of Quietism is critiqued in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).  Like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Dispossessed offers a gentle antidote to Transcendent views (such as the Tralfamadorians' god-like simultaneity) that kill compassion.  For a Daoist view of cyclical time, see Chuang Tzu ch. 25 (Giles 257): "Exhaustion leads to renewal.  The end introduces a new beginning."  

89 I quote here Franz, 231, paraphrasing Jung's The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, in Collected Works (1960), vol. 8: 456.  See Also Franz's notes, Voices of Time 633-42: Franz is highly useful for Le Guin's work in the 1970s.   

90 Cf. Le Guin's poem "Tenses" (Wild Oats [1988]: 81) where madness traps the Speaker in the "cage of the present tense," where part of the "interminable pain" is a life of "No promise kept." 

91 Cf. Tenar and Ged's thematically significant kitchen conversation in Tehanu, 195-201 (ch. 12). 

92 Cf. Vea's remarks on Shevek's having a royal tyrant, "a Queen Teaea inside you" (177; ch. 7).  Note Escape from Freedom (1941) as the title of a well-known book by Erich Fromm and later a cliché (a powerful, true, and useful cliché) among mid-century analysts of totalitarianism.   

93 Unbuilding walls is a positive thing in TD and getting outside of walls a major motif in Le Guin, a Romantic and Daoist return to nature, the Way: from "An die Musik" (1961) through Leese Webster (1975) to "Solitude" (1994); walls and safety within a good City are valued in "Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995).  For two in bed, cf. and contrast Ishmael and Queequeg at the end of ch. 10 of Moby Dick, "A Bosom Friend," significantly juxtaposed with Father Mapple at the end of ch. 9, "The Sermon" (for relationship vs. transcendent projects).  Le Guin indicates Moby Dick wasn't a source for her ("Response to the Le Guin Issue" 46), but the image is an obvious one and goes back at least to Koheleth:  ". . . if two lie together, they are warm; but how can one be warm alone?" (Eccl. 4.11). 

94 "The means are the end.  Odo said it all her life" (TD 238; ch. 9). 

95 The Way and Its Power . . . ; Waley is bringing together the Confucian Mencius and Chuang Tzu ch. 13 (opening).  See also Welsh's trans. of Tao te Ching ch. 43, in the section on water, on the value of "action that is actionless"—and how difficult that teaching is to get across to people (Waley 197). 

96 Also Welch, Parting 15 (ruler's wu wei), 33 (returning to roots to practice wu wei and save the world).

97 For time-binding, see Meerloo 237-40, section 2, Evolutionary Time and Time-binding Processes. 

98 Cf. image of unsheltered male "artist" in "An die Musik"; cf. image of radically unsheltered female author in Le Guin's essay "The Fisherwoman's Daughter." 

99 TD 245; ch. 9.  See Lefanu 141. 

100 "You must change your life" is what Rainer Maria Rilke said a statue of Apollo said to him—quoted by Le Guin in "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction," LoN (1979): 77-78.  The line is used at least twice elsewhere in TD: rather ironically on p. 126 (ch. 6) and as part of a tribute to Bedap for changing Shevek's life: 140; ch. 6.  See also, "The Child and the Shadow," LoN (1979): 59-71.  For Bedap's sex life outside of his relationship with Shevek, see 44; ch. 2. 

101 Again, binary oppositions are central to Structuralism, a major approach to anthropology and other academic subjects in the 1950s-70s; from the mid-1970s on, cutting-edge thought in the humanities and social science moved toward a PostStructuralist (postmodern, postcolonial) paradigm. 

102 For Rulag, see TD ch. 4, esp. 100, her line, "The work comes first, with me"—i.e., she chooses work over her family.  Cf. Stone Telling's father in Always Coming Home, when he leaves North Owl and Willow, following his military "work"; contrast Shevek's balancing of family, physics, and politics.  Lefanu usefully notes Tom Moylan on Shevek and sex: Lefanu 141, quoting Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1986): 110. 

103 See below, discussion of "The Matter of Seggri." 

104 Note Bob in "Pathways of Desire," whose physical beauty is part of his kingliness (CR 189). 

105 Chuang Tzu ch. 6, Giles 79. 

106 Especially an intuition by someone not overtly spiritual: More cosmologically, Return is the action of the Dao: ACH 485—the last word under THE WAY as a "Generative Metaphor" is "return"; also Tao te Ching ch. 40: "In Tao the only motion is returning" (Waley 192).

107 For TD's principles as "feminist, communal, centrally coordinated, anarchist and Taoist" (as opposed to Robert A. Heinlein's anarchist but also masculinist, individualist, Capitalist, and ultimately Christian (?) revolutionary society on the Moon in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress [1966]), see Williams, "The Moons of Le Guin and Heinlein."