Green Planets (15 page)

Although
The Telling
lacks the narrative experimentation of
Always Coming Home
, it also explores the non-narrative (and ambiguously historical) situation of being all middle, as the title suggests. Again we see world reduction, as Sutty retreats from political complexity throughout the novel; she first flees dystopian fundamentalism on Earth and then the totalitarian industrialization of Dovza City until she arrives at the “backwoods” of Okzat-Ozkat and finally at the library at Silong, a virtual monastery in the mountains. The precious “telling” represented by the library entails a focus on the local, on small stories, on the process of telling stories as the human way to “tell the world,” and on maintaining the enchantment of local life as opposed to the systematic disenchantment enforced by the world state. Sutty struggles to understand the telling and what it represents in rational terms, but discovers (like Pandora) that “a telling is not an explaining.”
⁵⁸

However—unlike
Always Coming Home
—the novel's plot and form raise this lesson of “the telling” into a narrative whole: the power of the Ekumen, it is implied, trumps the Akan corporate state and finds a way to preserve the books. Ironically, this preservation of the library at Silong contradicts the impermanence that the worldview of the telling insists upon.
The Telling
explores the Daoist eco-logic of embracing unreason and avoiding confident narrative explanations, but it also presents a narrative that fantasizes a deus ex machina political victory.
Always Coming Home
is more radical in both form and content. At the archive maintained by one of the Kesh lodges, even preservation of cultural treasures is subordinated to the recognition of impermanence. As the Archivist explains, they have annual “destruction ceremonies,” because “books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.” This living attitude is contrasted to (but also somewhat supplemented by) the inhuman “City of Mind,” where
the machine-logic goal is to keep “a copy of everything.”
⁵⁹
But while
The Telling
offers its readers narrative compensations that
Always Coming Home
does not, the utopian goals of the novels are similar: to challenge egoistic perceptions, including comprehensive narratives, in terms of ecological frameworks.

ECOLOGY AS LIMIT

Given the extent of Le Guin's deployment of yin utopianism, I would argue that Suvin and Jameson were mistaken to consider her Daoism an insignificant framework and to assume that it implies only static balance, ahistorical mysticism, and contemplative passivity. On the contrary, Daoism contributes to the dynamic balance that Suvin admired and to the cognitive effects that both theorists explore in their work on
SF
and utopia. Rather than being a mistaken framework, Le Guin's yin utopianism contributes strategically toward goals that are in many ways similar to those of critical theory. Indeed, both critics noted political affinities between their outlooks and Le Guin's work. Suvin argued that her “political position can be thought of as a radical critic and ally of socialism defending its duty to inherit the heretic democratic [and] civic traditions,” and that her anarchism “can [either] be malevolently thought of as the furthest radical limit at which a disaffected petty-bourgeois intellectual may arrive, a leftist Transcendentalism, or benevolently as a personal, variant name for and way to a truly new libertarian socialism.”
⁶⁰
Jameson acknowledged similar possibilities for reading Le Guin's work as radical, noting that if it is “the massive commodity environment of late capitalism that has called up this particular literary and imaginative strategy” of world reduction, then it would “amount to a political stance as well.”
⁶¹
Le Guin's Daoist ecology contributes as much to these political effects as any other cognitive framework. Within a historical period that dreams of endless growth despite mounting examples of ecological limits, both ecology and Daoism have the potential to provide critical cognitive reframing.

Of course, Suvin and Jameson were correct to think that Le Guin's ecological frames of reference represent challenges to the conventions and priorities of critical theory. As revealed by their cautious assessments of her work, frameworks that imagine forms of self-limitation are not generally appealing to critical theorists, who understandably associate them with the imposition of bourgeois morality and historical restrictions on freedom. They also regard any visions of materially reduced lifestyles to be ahistorical given the economic realities of industrial modernization and the ever-increasing complexity of late capitalism.
Similarly, frameworks that emphasize philosophical changes (such as Le Guin's strategy of emphasizing eco-logic over ego-logic) strike critical theorists as a nonpolitical focus on thoughts and attitudes, as opposed to collective and material political action. These are important concerns when attempting to assess the real political effects of cultural texts in our ideologically and materially constrained world.

By the same token, however, the reluctance of Suvin and Jameson to consider Le Guin's ecological framework highlights how critical theory subtly relies on the industrial vision of endless growth. Ideologically, critical theory finds it hard to reconcile its view of freedom with any real limitations on individual desire or action, even while celebrating Le Guin's “radical disbelief in the individualist ideology.”
⁶²
Suvin himself suggested that the non-Marxist traditions that she draws on might provide a “precious antidote to socialism's contamination by the same alienating forces it has been fighting so bitterly in the last century—by power apparatuses and a pragmatic rationality that become ends instead of means.” By comparison to critical theory's ideal of endless revolution, Le Guin's Daoist ecology asserts that real limits exist, that knowing those enduring limits and relationships is wisdom, and that “ruin and disorder” result from forgetting or ignoring the limits. Reading Le Guin's ecological concerns and world reduction primarily as symptomatic reaction ignores the real limits that the ecological framework raises.

Le Guin's characteristically optimistic narratives don't presume that wholeness and balance will occur, or examine how systemic world reduction would occur, but they do envision characters and cultures where the wisdom of “knowing what endures” can be practiced and tested. This yin utopianism combines the cognitive and material critique of critical theory with a radical form of world reduction that attempts to envision healthy limits on egoism. In both its cognitive and material aspects, her yin utopianism attempts to return us to the root. Challenging egoism is undoubtedly a utopian goal, given the psychosocial ecosystem of global consumer capitalism. But in a very real sense, the way of the ego is not the real ecosystem, and not what endures.

Notes

1
. The phrase “wholeness and balance” comes from Douglas Barbour, “Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin,”
Science Fiction Studies
1 (1974): 164–73. The seventh issue of
SFS
(vol. 2, no. 3, November 1975) was devoted entirely to Le Guin's work. In addition to Barbour's “Wholeness and Balance: An Addendum” (248–49), essays in
this special issue that referenced themes of balance included Donald F. Theall, “The Art of Social-Science Fiction: The Ambiguous Utopian Dialectics of Ursula K. Le Guin,” 256–64; Ian Watson, “The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: ‘The Word for World Is Forest' and ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,'” 231–37; and David L. Porter, “The Politics of Le Guin's Opus,” 243–48.

2
. The phrase “non-capitalist habitat” is from Darko Suvin, “Parables of De-Alienation: Le Guin's Widdershins Dance,” 136. The essay was first published in
Science Fiction Studies
2, no. 3 (November 1975): 265–74, and republished (among other places) in Suvin,
Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988), 134–50. My citations refer to the latter.

3
. The term “mythopoetic” was widely applied to Le Guin's work; see for example Rafail Nudelman, “An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin's
SF
,” trans. Alan G. Myers,
Science Fiction Studies
2 (1975): 210–20.

4
. I use the pinyin system of transliterating Chinese, which has become the international standard. Le Guin and most previous critics of her Daoism use the older Wade-Giles system, which transliterates the word as “Taoism.” For details of the two see
http://pinyin.info/index.html
. To facilitate continuity with earlier scholarship, I provide the Wade-Giles equivalent in parentheses for terms that are different in pinyin.

5
. Stillman, “
The Dispossessed
as Ecological Political Theory,” in
The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's “The Dispossessed,”
ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 55.

6
. Joel Kovel,
The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
(London: Zed Books, 2007), 233.

7
. Ibid., 234.

8
. Ibid., 233.

9
. Ibid., 230.

10
. Examples of prominent critical theorists whose work on Le Guin follows in the path of Suvin and Jameson would include Tom Moylan and Carl Freedman. China Miéville overtly questions Suvin's assumptions in “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of
SF
Theory,” his afterword to
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction
, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 231–48.

11
. Le Guin and Suvin have given conflicting accounts of Suvin's involvement with and influence on
The Dispossessed
. Le Guin says that Suvin was the novel's “first reader and first critic” and influenced the ending of the book; see for example “A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti,” in Davis and Stillman,
New Utopian Politics
, 308. Suvin denies any major involvement; see “Cognition, Freedom,
The Dispossessed
as a Classic,” in
Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 513n.

12
.
Science Fiction Studies
2, no. 3 (November 1975).

13
. Suvin,
Positions and Presuppositions
, 134.

14
. Ibid., 135.

15
. Ibid., 136.

16
. Ibid., 143.

17
. Ibid., 149.

18
. Ibid., 138.

19
. Ibid., 145. Porter's essay, in the same issue, made a similar point about Daoism as a temporary phase of Le Guin's work.

20
. Ibid.

21
. Ibid., 138.

22
. Darko Suvin, “Afterword: With Sober, Estranged Eyes,” in
Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia
, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 239.

23
. See
Part 1
, “The Desire Called Utopia,” in Fredric Jameson,
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
(London: Verso, 2005), 1–233.

24
.
Science Fiction Studies
2, no. 3 (November 1975): 221–30. Jameson's essay was subsequently reprinted as “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative,” in
Ursula K. Le Guin: Modern Critical Views
, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 57–70, and with its original title in Jameson's
Archaeologies of the Future
, 267–80. My references are to the latter.

25
. Jameson,
Archaeologies of the Future
, 271.

26
. Ibid., 269.

27
. Ibid.

28
. Ibid., 275. For example, Jameson notes the “Tao-like passivity” (275) of George Orr in
The Lathe of Heaven
—a reading he developed at length in “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” published in 1982 and republished in
Archaeologies of the Future
, 281–95.

29
. Le Guin,
Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
(New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 90.

30
. Ibid., 88, 90.

31
. Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue,”
Science Fiction Studies
3, no. 1 (March 1976): 43–46.

32
. Le Guin,
Dancing at the Edge of the World
, 90. Le Guin notes that the quoted passage is from bk. 2, chap. 38 of the
Daodejing
.

33
. Le Guin had long been experimenting with her own translations of the
Daodejing
; see her introduction and “Notes” to her
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
(Boston: Shambhala, 1998).

34
. Le Guin,
Lao Tzu
, 22.

35
. Le Guin,
Dancing at the Edge of the World
, 93.

36
. Ibid., 85.

37
. André Gorz,
Ecology as Politics
, trans. Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 16.

38
. Ibid., 13.

39
. Ibid., 16.

40
. Of course, this strategy is far from infallible. Gorz notes that “ecology, as a purely scientific discipline, does not necessarily imply the rejection of authoritarian, technofascist solutions” (17), and even the desire to break from capitalism and the way of the ego can
itself be easily commodified and rendered impotent. Ultimately, however, “ecological concerns are fundamental; they cannot be compromised or postponed” (20).