One of best literary criticism statements on the old topic of theme is Damon Knight's contribution to accompany his story "Masks" in the anthology Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader. Knight refused to write much on the abstract subject of theme in his story because he thinks "that 'theme' is an academic shibboleth, an imaginary entity that is read into a work by the teacher in order that the student may be required to read it out." Knight maintains that the theme of "Masks" or of any work is, "Life is like this." Knight insists that a story is not "a kiddy-car containing a message," but instead "a formal structure which the author builds around you; in the process you learn to see some portion of the world in a new way and you experience certain esthetic responses . . . " (230). Actually, Knight does write about the theme of "Masks," and writes very well, but his contribution to Those Who Can is "An Annotated 'Masks,'" and his major statement on theme is, precisely, the set of his annotations of "Masks."

Ursula K. Le Guin did contribute a formal essay "On Theme" to accompany "Nine Lives" in Those Who Can, but Le Guin at least partly agrees with Knight. In responding to the 1975 Le Guin issue of Science-Fiction Studies, Le Guin noted that the ideas in her Earthsea trilogy "are more totally incarnated, less detachable from the sounds, rests, and rhythms, less often stated as problems and more often expressed in terms of feeling, sensations, and intuition" than in some of her other, arguably less artful work. "If you dissect the ideas out of" the Earthsea trilogy, "you get things like Don't Meddle. Keep the Balance. Man is Mortal.-Fortune-cookie ideas" (45). The implication I draw is that when Le Guin succeeds best she produces a work that is a "formal structure" built around us, and "in the process" of experiencing the work, we "learn to see some portion of the world in a new way." Hence, my method in Coyote's Song is "close reading": to a large extent sticking to the works themselves, their "sounds, rests, and rhythms," and supplying a system of annotations that I hope will help readers see the world in a new way by helping them do their part in constructing the meaning of the story by making connections. Most important, for me in Coyote's Song, the connections are with Le Guin's other works; the canon of Ursula K. Le Guin is a primary context for the works of Ursula K. Le Guin.

My general method, then, is close reading. My central conclusion and starting point is the inference that within the canon of Le Guin's works there is a large subset where theme is very strong. These are works that indeed "mean intensely" (as Robin Scott Wilson and Robert Browning's Fra Lippo put it)-and mean intensely in terms of some of the great debates of the twentieth century, what has been called, melodramatically, a Kulturkampf or "the culture wars." ¹ Le Guin's intention, I believe, is always a story (poem, film script): a work of art. The frequent upshot is a work of high art that is a teaching story, one that says "Life is like this" very explicitly.

And here I had better pause and explain myself, especially explain myself to those for whom "didactic" is a term of mild contempt, among whom even "teaching story" and "explicitly" are suspect. Short form (if a mildly pretentious form)-Ars gratia artis is not the only Latin formula around; there is also utile et dulce. Indeed, it has only been relatively recently (say, since the late nineteenth-century Decadents) that it has been widely fashionable to believe that capital "A" Art exists and exists for its own sake. The more usual idea was that art (small "a" art production and appreciation) is something human beings do and earns its keep by instructing and entertaining, and instructing all the more effectively by entertaining at the same time. Alternatively, one can say that the wheel of fashion has turned and-or philosophical esthetics have progressed to a point that-the idea of autonomous art is untenable. One can see all art existing in a historical/cultural matrix in which art reinscribes hegemonic values and/or resists them. In that case, if consciousness is a virtue, then consciously didactic art (when it teaches good lessons) should be valued. The works I examine in Coyote's Song teach in ways that are politically conscious, complex, relatively open, and useful; hence, these works should be valued. To which assertion I will add the personal point that I come out of traditions in which teaching is valued and that I define my public self as a public intellectual and teacher. And if I flatter myself in this self-definition, the point still remains: a vision of myself as public intellectual and teacher is self-congratulatory only insofar as I value and believe others value teaching, teachers, and writing that teaches.

In a substantial body of her work, Le Guin says "Life is like this" and includes in "this" complexity and contradictions. In a passage I find quite useful, a Le Guin character says his religion is "godless, argumentative, and mystical" (FIS 175). So is, for the most part, Le Guin's. ² The immediate point is the word "argumentative." so far as the central concern of religion is ultimate things, Le Guin is often a highly religious writer who sees central to religion (in the Eastern tradition) the mystical experience of the absolute individual losing individuality, opinions, and desire in the Absolute. "But the mystic is a rare bird" ("VEMS" 1971: 88), Le Guin asserts; the rest of us, who are not adept at mysticism, argue about the world. Le Guin argues. She argues with other authors, with her culture, and with Le Guin, and sometimes contradicts Le Guin. In much of her work Le Guin is a philosophical auteur, returning to a limited set of topics and examining them from a number of different angles-like William Shakespeare on political calculation vs. magnanimity, Stanley Kubrick on male violence, or Terry Gilliam on Romance. In Le Guin's argumentative religion, opposites are inseparably joined, affirming and denying inherently related. Le Guin in her works is presenting her contribution to what Aldous Huxley called "the Perennial Philosophy," combining different aspects in her own version of a magnanimously syncretic Eastern Mysticism. ³ In the metaphor of my title, the Coyote's song is a many-track chorus, and (occasionally) a richly, joyously dissonant chorus.

*

So Le Guin is a Daoist and a great respecter of the Compassionate Buddha who put off Nirvana to return to the karmic wheel to bring all of us out of multiplicity to Oneness with the Absolute-and Le Guin usually finds one not only the loneliest of numbers (as a bad old song has it) but a very dangerous number: the monotheist number for the One God ("Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one"), the number idealized by totalitarians with one single, simple totalizing Truth, rationalists with one utilitarian motto or one mold for all to fit into. ⁴ Or the vision of "the one true God, immanent in all things. Everywhere, forever" that torments the protagonist in "The Field of Vision" (1973) and is not something of which Le Guin approves.

"To be whole is to be part," as Odo's tombstone has it in The Dispossessed (1974), "true journey is return" (68; ch. 3). To be whole is to be part of a human society and culture, and Le Guin spends a good deal of time showing her readers anthropologists looking at human societies, or just showing us, without literal anthropologists, relatively good societies we can find eutopian, or bad ones we should find dystopian. ⁵ But being humanly whole and part is not just participation in a decent society and culture; to return is to return home, and what home is is both complicated-a good society for being in the world-and the simplest thing in the universe. Literally the simplest thing. "Return is the movement of DAO" (Tao te Ching ch. 40 [Wilhelm 45]); therefore true journey is return and return home: return to the One of being and beyond the One to the unnamable Dao of nonbeing.

In the response mentioned earlier to the SFS 1975 Le Guin issue, Le Guin said that "The central image/idea of Taoism is an important thing to be clear about, certainly not because it's a central theme in my work. It's a central theme, period" (45). In responding to David Ketterer on The Left Hand of Darkness in SFS #6 (1975), Le Guin described herself as "an unconsistent Taoist and a consistent unChristian" (139). Le Guin, I think, is a quite consistent syncretic Daoist if we allow a gloss from The Lathe of Heaven and an emphasis from the ki'O people of the planet O in "Another Story" (1994). In Lathe, Le Guin sets up as an norm "people without resentment, without hate . . . . People who never go cross-grained to the universe . . . . [who] recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it . . . . [who] have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, . . . who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it" (99; ch. 7). In "Another Story," Le Guin values the ki'O: good Daoists in practice though not name, but Daoists for whom "The name of our world is the first word of its first prayer. For human beings" on O, religion's "vehicle is the human voice and mind" (FIS 175). Le Guin is very much a low-church, really-big-vessel Daoist who places people into the world, onto the Karmic wheel of everyday. That which truly is is the Dao, the Way, the river of (non)Being. "But," again, "the mystic is a rare bird," and most of us everyday pigeons and sparrows and noisy woodpeckers will not be transcending the world of illusion (maya in the Hindu formulation) or sinking into the Dao but live in the world, with, with luck, occasional contact with the Absolute, the Dao, the truly Real. Le Guin is philosophically a mystic but of the practical, worldly Chinese variety: a mystic who might figuratively hit you with her handbag as part of her teaching, or seem very somber while making a sly joke. ⁶

From this basically Daoist ontology-idea/image of what the universe really is-follows a highly relativist epistemology, a theory of knowledge. If that which is is immanent in all things, to really touch reality is not to transcend the world and get a God's-eye view but to feel connected to all of the world. The early Greek physicist Archimedes is said to have said that if you gave him a place to stand and place his machine he could move the world. Archimedes knew there was no "Archimedean point" to rest his machine on: you cannot get physically outside the world. In the Daoist view (agreed with on this point by Jacques Derrida and the postStructuralists), you cannot get outside the world even to just take a look. ⁷ So: one cannot physically get outside the world to push things around, and one cannot even get outside the world to see where one should push things if one could. There is no avoiding "the immanence of all critique" ("Knowledge" 260). Hence, there can be moments of insight, but no final, fixed certainty, no overarching theories of which way lies God's Kingdom or the proletarian paradise or even Progress (LoH 82; ch. 6 & passim). ⁸ More exactly, there can be and are such theories, but such theories are dangerous, as is any idea of a single transcendent God or principle or "metanarrative" to justify such theories. Le Guin is a consistent critic of the Judeo-Christian-Rationalist West primarily because monotheists and rationalists have potentially dangerous ideas about what they-or we-can know about the world and what can be done in the world.

*

From this ontology and epistemology follows a politics and a politically significant theory of ownership.

If there is no Archimedean point or mystic mountain on which to stand to get long-range, long-term visions, if the best we can hope for is an occasional flash of insight or feelings of what we must do right here, now-in that case, there is very little to be said in favor of what President George Bush once called "the vision thing." No place to have the visions, then no person or class can consistently and reliably claim to have such visions and obtain from them the mandate of heaven to impose such visions. Hence, no reliable, permanent aristocracy claiming privileges because they claim leadership. Hence no leaders for life, no permanent kings, no fully reliable codes of Law. Very logically (although they did not particularly approve of logic), the early Daoists became the first formal anarchists. What the Emperor can best do is wu wei, action through stillness, and let his people do their things, with leaders arising as needed, or not (see Tao te Ching ch. 43). This theory of leadership-do without hierarchical, can-do, let's get moving leaders-made the early Daoists political birds becoming in our time almost as rare as mystics: conservatives. As Aldous Huxley wrote in 1946, with useful hyperbole, "For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left"-and he helpfully identifies the "last conservative statesman" he knows of as the fifth Marquess{sic} of Lansdowne, who attempted to get published a suggestion for ending World War I with a compromise (Brave New World Foreword xi). Le Guin speaks very positively of change, but it must be true change, radical change: bottom-up, from the roots change, mediated by some person or people in touch with the Dao. In traditional, Aboriginal Australian terms, such changes are changes only in the everyday world; rightly understood, they are already-present ways brought into everyday life from the timeless Dream-Time. In more Western, if ancient, terms, such changes were brought by word from a reliable oracle or a true prophet and strongly contrasted by the Prophet Samuel with the rule of a king, pushing things, and people, around regularly, systematically (1 Samuel 8.10-21).

The Daoists went further: no oracles at Delphi, no God or gods that sent the Word. The truest Oracle would be one older than Daoism: the I Ching to indicate what one should do to go with the Dao at this moment, throwing the yarrow sticks to see what course might prove lucky. This all means, by our standards, very infrequent change, very little action.

Le Guin usually values everyday complexity-the texture of the ten thousand things, "'thick' description," "thick planned" richness (FIS 88, 173); still, her theory of ownership is very simple. In a world where Ultimate Reality is like a river, and you are ordinarily on the surface of the river, all is flux, and ideas like "permanent address" or "real property" or "ownership in perpetuity" make no sense. You came into the world with empty hands; you will leave the world with empty hands; and in the meantime you can and will use all sorts of things (and plants and animals and people) but cannot legitimately or really possess them, own them. We have not been dispossessed but are dispossessed in the sense that we can not firmly possess anything (see TD 22; ch. 2). Le Guin's writing is informed with Daoist-inspired and thoroughly modern communist anarchism. ⁹

*

Also implicit in a syncretic Daoist vision of the world are some of Le Guin's key images, two highly stressed words, a system of tolerance and solidarity, and a value judgment.

The most obvious images are the verbally described symbols in Le Guin's stories and the printer's marks in Le Guin's short story collections. The circle apparently completed is a central symbol in Planet of Exile (1966); the circle almost but not quite completed is the Odonian Circle of Life in The Dispossessed (1974) and is the shape of the story of its hero, Shevek. In the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters, the printer's mark is the Yin-Yang symbol in the Yin-on-top configuration. ¹⁰ In Always Coming Home, the central symbol is the heyiya-if: an open-hinge, a far more open-ended variation on Yin-Yang. And in Buffalo Gals and Other Stories (1987), the printer's mark is a dancing woman icon: what may be an American Indian woman or a more generic Woman, dancing the world. The more subtle images are of water generally (as an "element") and streams and rivers and oceans more particularly. ¹¹ As an element, water can be associated, and is associated in much Chinese thought, with Yin as the yielding, the tranquil, the female principle, and water is associated with earth and the immanent as opposed to (and complementing) heaven and the transcendent Yang of the Yin-Yang dynamic (Wing-tsit 419). Water is both changing and quite constant, depending on whether you look at the surface or the depths. Water appears weak because it moves where you put it, but it is, of course, very strong: water cannot be destroyed; water wears away rock. ¹² As ocean, water easily symbolizes Dao as source and place of return, like earth, the symbolic Mother. As stream or river, water also symbolizes Dao: the flowing Way, churning up the ten thousand things of the everyday world but remaining always itself. So Ogion suggests in his stream image in A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968; so we see with the River Oro in "Another Story" in 1994.

The words I shall draw attention to are "pain" and "joy," "risk," "safety," and "home." Most famously in Buddhism, pain is an unavoidable consequence of the fall from Oneness into multiplicity, i.e., into life in what most Westerners, most of the time, consider the world. Our separation from the real reality of things into empirical experience is the ultimate source of our pain. This initial Fall, though, is succeeded in history by subsequent falls moving us farther and farther away from life in nature into lives in cultures that alienate us from who we are, from human community, from the reality of things. So of course we are in pain, as fragments in a fragmented world: a pain underlying and augmented by all the everyday pains human flesh is heir to, plus the additional ones we-individually, in groups, as cultures-inflict upon others and ourselves. To move back into relationship moves us toward joy; achieving relationship gives us (for a moment) joy; ultimate relationship (for a moment) with All, gives us (for a moment) pure joy: in J.R.R. Tolkien's formulation, "a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world. ¹³ " To return to true relationship, though, almost always involves risk, leaving the apparent safety of houses, cities, and the high-tech cultures we think of as home, back to truer homes in nature. Repeatedly in Le Guin's canon, one may find most joy, most of a heimlich, "home-ly" sense of joy, dancing the dance of Shiva, but without being an immortal god: "The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss" (FS [1972] 121; ch. 8), "Dancing on the brink of the world" ("World Making" [1981]: DEW 48). As with many Romantics, Le Guin feels we may be most at home when most outdoors, in nature-exposed.

Among people who cannot find one absolute Truth, among people in pain, it is sensible to be tolerant of others and, as much as possible find solidarity with others. Still, a number of value judgments follow from these ideas and I shall stress one: a judgment on the traditional Hero. As Joseph Campbell and his predecessors and followers have documented in detail, one of the great stories of the world is the Monomyth of the Hero. Often it is a story of bringing great and apparently permanent changes, of conquests or resisting conquests-in any event, actively making things happen. In much of her canon, Le Guin presents an anti- or unMonomyth. ¹⁴ In "An die Musik" (1961), Rocannon's World, and Planet of Exile (1966), we have fairly traditional (male) heroes, but from at least The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and The Word for World Is Forest (1972), Le Guin has been interrogating and critiquing the Hero myth with insight and, especially in Word for World and some of her recent works, with strong feeling. In classic mysticism, warriors are important metaphors (Capra 27; ch. 2), and there are Eastern incarnation of the Hero with a Thousand Faces; but Heroes cannot push around water very successfully or for very long, and Daoism values far more the quiet Way of the Sage, the contemplative. One of the ways in which Le Guin has been a feminist from early on is her questioning of traditional male heroism and her attempt to find a different model, from anatomically and physiologically androgynous Estraven in The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969 to "My Hero" in 1994 (in Peacocks), to the fully androgynous hero in "Coming of Age in Karhide" in 1995.

So, in good Daoist fashion, nothing has changed in Le Guin's work in all these years, and much has changed. Her style has gotten more colloquial, lower-flown, so to speak, if, for example, one compares the language of Tehanu with the language of the Earthsea trilogy, or the voice of Sov in "Coming of Age in Karhide" to most of the voices in The Left Hand of Darkness. As I have indicated, her heroes have changed-they are now often women; the men are more domestic-and Le Guin's language is now more openly and sometimes angrily feminist: Le Guin as an "aging, angry woman laying mightily about" with a "handbag, fighting hoodlums off" ("Carrier Bag," DEW 168). The fact of Le Guin's using the voice of an "aging, angry woman" is significant (see Cummins, 1993: ch. 6, "Recent Fiction"). It is important for young women to hear as an authoritative voice the voice of a woman, and the voice moreover of a woman free to get both old and angry; it is also important for boys and men to hear such voices; the embedded lessons are liberating ones.

Le Guin has also come to accept more fully the Way of tolerance pretty much required by the logic of Daoism, and to move toward a celebration of the "ten thousand things" that includes celebration of human diversity implicit in Le Guin's Ekumen and stressed in recent feminisms. If there is no one transcendent, spiritual, and rather puritanical god to allow and forbid, if there is no immortal soul separate from the body and living in the body like a god in a temple-then it is odd at best to condemn simple bodily pleasures. ¹⁵ So Le Guin's stories from, say, The Dispossessed in 1974 to "Another Story" and "Seggri" in 1994, have come to deal more regularly and sympathetically with lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and women who want sex, but not particularly marriage in any sense, or love and sex, but not "the institution of monogamous marriage" (LHD 92; ch. 2). In The Dispossessed, Bedap, the one gay character, concluded he had to change his life; in "Dancing in Ganam" (1993) and "Another Story," homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships are both good (and far better than heterosexism), and to be praised.

*

The times have changed a bit, and Le Guin has changed with them. But the times have only changed a bit. If Le Guin repeats basic themes in her stories, that repetition is justified by United States society's reproducing itself quite accurately over the generations-and repeating our mistakes. ¹⁶ If Le Guin keeps embodying a basic myth in a large part of her canon, she deals with other, more literally mundane issues in the substantial body of more mundane (or mainstream) works not covered in Coyote. If Le Guin frequently writes works embodying her world-view and a basic myth, so do all those works using The Hero with a Thousand Faces; so did a large hunk of the vast literature of medieval Western Christianity; so do most of the texts produced and consumed every day in the Judeo-Christian-Rationalist West, in works ranging from John Updike's Rabbit books to a film like Independence Day (1996). For Le Guin's art that can mean one basic world-view, myth-"metanarrative"-embodied in many forms: until there is a change, a radical one, from the roots. And such changes are infrequent. The Monomyth of the Hero and the sky-gods-or, more exactly, their hegemony-has had a course of over 4000 years; we need in the West other voices, with other, equally powerful myths. Le Guin has such a myth, and in a large number of works she has embodied it and given it life beautifully. Perhaps most eloquently, up to the mid 1990s, she has embodied it in "Coming of Age in Karhide," a quiet story of a sexual rite of passage. In this story, Le Guin combines an anthropological view and Daoist myth so completely with a new kind of hero that we may miss-consciously-the lesson taught: that we can tell stories without the old Hero, without the sky-gods, mostly without conflict. We, or Le Guin anyway, can tell a story of very ordinary people in their world, who are extraordinary to us, and so accomplish, perhaps, another artistic coming of age for Le Guin, and aid the coming of age of American SF.

As one of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's less reputable characters says at his moment of recognition and conversion, "It is an axiom of my trade"-the advertising business-"that things are invisible except against a contrasting background" (Space Merchants 173; ch. 14). Even for those who see themselves rebelling against Western culture, the contrast Le Guin offers is useful and probably necessary. There is a Judeo-Christian-Rationalist culture, and we, even communist-atheist feminists among that "we," are embedded in it. To be confronted with a consistently unChristian, unJewish, unWestern, unPatriarchal, intellectual, reason-respecting but Romantic and antiRationalist position-that, for most of us, is highly educational. ¹⁷

*

Le Guin's argument with monotheists, militarists, machismo, and tunnel-visioned rationalists is straightforward. Less clear but equally interesting is what, in a review of Le Guin's Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) for New Scientist, Ian Watson talks of as "a subdialogue with feminist critics"; or what Le Guin refers to in Earthsea Revisioned (1992) as her wrestling "with the angels of the feminist consciousness" (11). Or what Marleen Barr referred to when she spoke of Le Guin, in malo (in an aspect Barr does not like) as "this female writer who seems to appeal to everyone-with the exception of feminists . . ." (112). Indeed, in Four Ways to Forgiveness, there is a "subdialogue" with those who "have chided Le Guin for presenting men as the doers and women as the more passive founts of being" (Watson 48)-with Le Guin answering their objections with women in the Four Ways novellas doing and being in the world, men being and doing. And, since the 1980s, Le Guin has found her own voice as a woman and has given us girls and women as primary protagonists in some works, and has gotten over her mild case of heterosexism. There may still remain, though, some residual hostility in the "subdialogue" coming from some feminist critics, and this is the unclear part. Part of the problem stems from the use of unmodified "feminists" as a mass-noun and Le Guin's "the feminist consciousness" as a simple singular. For even a first-approximation oversimplification, I think we still need to get more specific. Most of the complaints about Le Guin's work come not so much from feminists generally but with some academic feminists fairly specifically. (Or these complaints did come until some time around 1989, when Le Guin won the Pilgrim Award from the academics of the Science Fiction Research Association.)

Briefly, and as that first-approximation oversimplification, I think Le Guin has had her most basic problems with feminists who are also secular, Leftist, more or less Frankfort-School, Gramscian academics (Di Leonardo 35), unused to seeing the Enemy as the religious Right or wealthy Republicans or wealthier Democrats or militarists and capitalists or fascists (neo- or otherwise) but in a variation of the Great Satan of the Sixties: Liberals and, later, White, Euro-American liberal men and our female fellow-travelers. And still later, among academics in literary studies, seeing as basic to the struggle, "the opposing interests of the dissident literary left and the status-quo-perpetuating literary right" (Barr 112). For these critics, I will suggest, the problem was and perhaps still is Le Guin's celebration of marriage and Le Guin's related celebration of increasing integration, ultimately a joyous return home: integration into the world.

Obviously, there were problems early on with a celebration of literal marriage: literal heterosexual marriage is crucial for patriarchy. Moving into the 1980s, however, Le Guin's work acknowledged that the "central glory" to a life of even a good literal marriage "can happen and be done with by the age of twenty-two" (BP 102; ch. 4). Still "marriage" for Le Guin is metaphoric as well as literal, as nicely stated in James W. Bittner's assertion (quoted in part by Marleen Barr [111-12]) that when Le Guin "says that marriage is 'the central, consistent theme' of her work, we can understand her to be referring to any complementary, correlative, or interdependent relationship between what we may perceive as opposites or dualisms, but which are in reality aspects of a whole, or moments in a continuous process." Since such "complementarity, represented by the yin-yang circle, encompasses Le Guin's theme of marriage, being both more general and abstract than the idea of marriage, yet also more specific and concrete" Bittner uses it "to define not only Le Guin's central theme, but also her fictional techniques, her modes of thought, and{,} ultimately, her world view" (Approaches x-xi).

In much of her canon, Le Guin is engaged in a "subdialogue" over marriage and over the potential for joyous being at home in the world. This idea is crucial for Le Guin and has been problematic for some-at least three major-feminist critics. ¹⁹ For two quite respectable examples: Marleen Barr in her insightful 1987 review of Bittner's Approaches and Rosemary Jackson, in her still influential and impressive Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981).

Barr limits herself to Le Guin's works covered in Bittner's Approaches, except for Always Coming Home, which she adds to note an important change and improvement. Barr quotes a justly well-known passage in Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), where Jeannine Nancy Dadier claims that all she did was

-plus several lines from Female Man Four.XI to the same effect. Barr is not referring to Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, "Leading the pro-family movement since 1972," as their very professional home page slogan puts it. She is talking about Le Guin's use of male protagonists and "the oppressor's language." Barr's discussion is under the general rubric of Le Guin as "The good witch of the west," who "waves her literary wand, unites magic and science and fiction-and, poof, she eradicates reality's oppositions and conflicts." Alternatively put, Barr found in Bittner's analysis "that Le Guin embraced a stance which opposes the objectives of feminist discourse," primarily the objectives of eschewing the language of male oppressors and developing a women's language. "Feminist writers, particularly feminist SF writers who imagine separatist societies, advocate that women should learn the Truth about themselves and their world by moving towards the female self; Le Guin arrives at this Truth by moving away from herself. Feminism, then, is Le Guin's other hand, which remains outside her marrying of left and right hands, her universal appeal and complementarity" (Barr 112-13).

Barr goes on to agree with Bittner that Le Guin quite early moved from Isaac Asimov as literary father to A. L. Kroeber, her biological father-and finds this a radically dual act. On the one hand, Bittner, Barr asserts, "in effect suggests" that Le Guin "ignores half the ground from which she sprang: her mother." On the other hand, it is major progress for Le Guin to go from Asimov to Kroeber: "a crucial step for the development of SF in general and feminist SF in particular," especially since Le Guin then goes from Kroeber to Odo in "The Day Before the Revolution" to Always Coming Home-and a return to Theodora Kroeber's work in The Inland Whale. Barr suggests we see Always Coming Home as Le Guin's "rejection of the Father and her return to the Mother," and here Barr can use "marriage" positively. In Always Coming Home (and thereafter), Le Guin "can finally marry her own right (in the sense of 'correct') revolutionary views with the left views of feminism" (Barr 114-15).

Revolution in a correct cause married with feminism-fine; marriage in the sense Bittner identifies as "complementarity," however, is problematic or worse for Barr. Suspicion of complementarity is even more strongly the case with Rosemary Jackson, who in addition strongly objects to Le Guin's mystic home-comings. So Jackson may still be here a better example than Barr, except she is not so careful a reader as Barr.

Jackson discussed the Earthsea trilogy, City of Illusions, and The Left Hand of Darkness in the same figurative breath as the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, T. H. White, George MacDonald, and Charles Kingsley of The Water Babies ("a classic text of repression," in Jackson's phrase, and an antirevolutionary, snobbish, and racist one to boot [Jackson 151]). In her brief section on Le Guin (154-55), Jackson (1) sees "a dark 'other'" in the Earthsea trilogy "magically defeated" in traditional romance manner, (2) objects to the combining of two into one in Falk and Ramarren in City of Illusions, and (3) objects even more strongly that "The Left Hand of Darkness synthesizes male and female, light and darkness, life and death," and has Le Guin insisting in that book "that left and right are synthesized, are as one." Not exactly. In the Earthsea trilogy, the one "other" defeated is Cob in Farthest Shore, and Cob is associated with grey and with the light of immortality as much as with darkness, and the way he opens between the worlds is "void": "Through it was neither light nor dark, neither life nor death" (183; ch. 12). The Nameless Ones in The Tombs of Atuan lose their tombstone symbols and get some of their real estate trashed, but no human defeats the Old Powers of the Earth, and Ged in Tombs does not defeat them; he robs them. Nor could Ged defeat his Shadow in A Wizard of Earthsea. In his encounter with his Shadow, Ged "had neither lost nor won" but had become "whole," and Jackson can complain legitimately that the process certainly sounds like synthesis. Ged and the Shadow say "Ged" simultaneously, and ". . . the two voices were one voice," and when Ged and the Shadow reach out for each other, "Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one" (179-80; ch. 10). But Ged and his Shadow are one as the Yin-Yang is one: light/dark, black/white, like Ged's face after Ged was wounded by his Shadow (and like Tehanu later, as girl and dragon); they are a balance, not a synthesis in the sense of mixture or even compound. As Douglas Barbour insisted and James W. Bittner developed at some length, the issue is always "Wholeness and Balance"-a Yin-Yang balance, not synthesis (see Le Guin's "Response").

Jackson is only mostly correct, then, in seeing Le Guin's works up to 1969 as "romances (of integration)" as opposed to "fantasies (of dualism)" such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or much of the canon of Charles Dickens. As Estraven explains to Ai, Gethenian androgynes live in biological wholeness, but they "are dualists too. Duality is an essential . . . . So long as there is myself and the other" (LHD 234; ch. 16). ²⁰ Jackson's emphasis upon synthesis in Le Guin's works reinforces Jackson's placement of Le Guin among the Christians and leads Jackson to place Le Guin to the right of not just mildly-liberal reformer like Dickens but also to the right of Edgar Allen Poe and Franz Kafka.

Jackson sees "fantasies (of dualism)" allowing the interrogation of "the cost of constructing an ego, thereby challenging the very foundation of symbolic cultural order"; whereas Le Guin's and other's "romances (of integration)" leave "problems of social order untouched" (155). Again, not exactly. Egos aren't constructed cheaply by Ged, Tenar, Arren, or other of Le Guin's early characters, and in the Earthsea series a social order is being constructed; for good and for ill, Earthsea is being united under a king. In City of Illusion, humans live a "good life" in the Forest, but not a life chosen; the Shing "took choice and freedom from men." City of Illusion deals with Shing imperialism and the forcing of people into eschewing "the great machines," and preventing them from gathering "in groups or towns or nations to do any great work together" (18-19; ch. 1). And Left Hand of Darkness, of course, contrasts rather anarchic Karhide, under a King (and the brief rule of a protofascist prime minister), with Stalinist Orgoreyn, with Karhide coming through as the more promising.

It is not fair to say the early Le Guin habitually left "problems of social order untouched"; she dealt with political questions rather more directly than Poe or Mary Shelley in Frankenstein but in ways other than Sigmund Freudian or Jacques Lacanian. I don't want to put words in Jackson's mouth-I wouldn't want the psychoanalytically inclined to even begin to deal with the imagery of that expression!-but I think the most useful formulation of Jackson's brief against Le Guin is that Jackson sees the psychologically, esthetically, and politically best fantasy-the fantasy worthiest of the name-as that which deals with the uncanny, das Unheimlich.

Instead of giving us dualisms which "dis-cover," for example, "bestial elements within the human," Le Guin and other practitioners of "Modern 'faery' literature," Jackson asserts, give us "miraculous unities": "myths of psychic order which help to contain critiques of disorder. Their utopianism does not directly engage with divisions or contradictions of subjects inside human culture: their harmony is established on a mystical cosmic level" (154). And it is here that Jackson offers one prooftext from Le Guin, from City of Illusions: "for there is in the long run no disharmony, only misunderstanding, no chance or mischance but only the ignorant eye" (189, n. 9 [quoting the London edn.]). The full quotation is significant. I quoted it in my discussion of City and will repeat it here, with some key lines emphasized. Ramarren, the intellectual, a high-born leader among an elite civilization,

Ramarren thinks the lines quoted by Jackson; Falk, the Narrator, and Le Guin take a rather more nuanced view. Jackson was and is right, though-and Barr, too-that Le Guin believes in harmony, and believes that harmony has a cosmic basis and spiritual significance for which "mystic," in its denotations, is correct. Falk has a sense of that harmony, and he feels at home in the world. From Estraven to George Orr in the early Left Hand and Lathe of Heaven to Serenity in "Solitude" and Sov in "Coming of Age in Karhide" (1994-95), Le Guin's heroes typically get in contact with the universe, sometimes before important social action, or, with Serenity, as important social action. Quite consistently, Le Guin has suggested we should feel at home in the universe and, when that is what one must do, act in the universe.

But, living in a decade of tell-all tabloid journalism, I see nothing necessarily radical in any dis-coveries of a psychologically juicy nature. Living in a century where alienation and atomization cause daily anguish and frequent apathy, I see nothing good in itself in reinforcing them. And living in the late twentieth century, I will assert that really alienated people, almost totally unable to find true homes, can find substitutes in nationalistic mass movements, militant fundamentalist churches, and Aryan militias. With a nicely grotesque irony, Eric Hoffer may have become a True Believer and apologist for horrors during U.S. warfare in Indochina in the 1960s, but his 1951 analysis of fanaticism in The True Believer makes some sound points, relevant unto our day. What he calls "frustration"-severe alienation-can be a precursor of mindless absolute commitment to a transcendent cause far more often than it leads to radical (and immanent) social critique. Reading E. A. Poe or H. P. Lovecraft is not likely to make alienated people into social democrats or Greenpeace activists or politically active feminists. Helping them feel more at home in the world could make it easier for alienated people to ask radical questions of our cultures and societies.

Le Guin's great contribution to this Kulturkampf on the Left is presenting an alternative ideology that is heimlich, that suggests ways of living in the world. That it is an alternative ideology very unlike Christianity, Capitalism, Marxism, and most of the fashionable academic ideologies, makes it useful just existing: the mere existence of an accessible Daoism (more generally a syncretic Perennial Philosophy) contrasts with and highlights-makes visible-some of the ideological presuppositions in even highly sophisticated political consciousness and certainly sloshing around in most of the political unconscious.

In the myth behind the Judeo-Christian-(Islamic)-Rationalist West, in the beginning was chaos and the Void, and the Word of a transcendent God brought cosmos out of that chaos. As in the beginning, even so today-for some 40 percent to perhaps two-thirds of US adults, if Cornel West has his numbers correct-"A mighty fortress is our God," holding off chaos and evil. And as in the heavens, so on earth: our Kings, rulers, and magistrates keep godly order, holding off "chaos and even anarchy"-and, often enough, equality and democracy. ²¹ From the point of view of such a tradition, only God and the "eternal consciousness in a man," prevent a universe where, "at the foundation of all" there is "only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced" and/or produces "everything that is great and everything that is insignificant." And from such a view, Søren Kierkegaard asks rhetorically, "if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all-what then would life be but despair?" (Fear and Trembling [30]; "A Panegyric Upon Abraham"). Le Guin answers this myth directly, following the part of the Perennial Philosophy that gets rid of God and the Word and has the eternal Void, not "writhing with obscure passions" but flowing rather serenely: NonBeing producing Being, the Dao producing Yin-Yang, producing all beings. To an alienated ego, without a personal God who loves me, there is only Chaos and the Abyss, and my existence is suffering while dangling over the Abyss. Le Guin says we should stop being alienated egos and try being our Selves, and join the dance over the Abyss. Live a while in the world, responsibly, consciously-suffer and enjoy-and then die and lose selfhood in Sheol or Hades or the Dry Land or whatever more or less poetic metaphor we choose for dying and being dead-or, and better, rejoin the Dao or Brahman and dissolve in the sea of (non)Being. Meanwhile, though, live in the world as part of the world, at home in the world.

That Le Guin offers a nearly complete, but not totalizing, heimlich ideology-one that includes the religious (or spiritual) mode-makes it a strong alternative to the ruling ideologies in all their alienation. For readers as unconsciously at home in the universe as many of my students, Le Guin's more gentle works are a good way to get into the habit of seeing the arbitrariness and strangeness of Western society. For those of us sufficiently alienated that we find Kafka's stories mostly just realistic, Le Guin offers a truly countercultural approach to living, the possibility for a critique of society both immanent and radical, and a Way home. This makes Le Guin a challenging and inspiring teacher in her works, and, to restate that assertion, a highly subversive author. Coyote's song, if we will listen, will act in the world.

Conclusion: Endnotes

1 Robin Scott Wilson's section on theme in Those Who Can is titled, "Theme: To Mean Intensely."  Browning's dramatic monolog "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1853/1855)has it that the world to the artist Fra Lippo "means intensely, and means good" (lines 313-15 [see also lines 286-309]).

2 The gods Kali (female) and the dancing Shiva (male) figure strongly in Le Guins poes collected Hard Words and Other Poems (1981).  See my discussion of Le Guin's poetry. 

3 Huxley borrowed the phrase from Leibniz: the Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, also spelled "Leibnitz."  

4 I quote the usual English translation of Shma (Deuteronomy 6.4 quoted by Jesus with approval in Mark 12.29).

5 For Le Guin and anthropology, see Bittner, Approaches 88 and passim (see Barr 114). Note Carol D. Stevens's insightful joking reference to anthropology as "the Family Business" in the title to her 1989 SFRA presentation (q.v. in the biblio. at the end of this volume).

6 Zen masters, as Le Guin reminded me, will concentrate the attention of disciples by the Wordless Teaching of quite literally hitting them on the head (see Tao te Ching II.43; Wilhelm 47, Waley 197).

7 In a review that arrived while I was drafting this chapter, Andrew M. Butler says that Derrida found inadequate the Structuralist idea of everything as system, holding, on the contrary "that system is not enough, that there is no point outside of the system from where the structure [of the system] can be seen as a structure" (113).

8 For A. L. Kroeber on progress as a bad principle in anthropology, see Anthropology § 5, “Evolutionary Processes and Evolutionist Fancies,” Anthropology: Biology and Race (6-7). 

9 Those new to the study of politics and Le Guin, might do best to take the word "anarchy" literally and only literally: "an-archy": no government, no state.  That the absence of a state would lead to violent chaos is a point to be argued, but not assumed; the historical anarchies of Native Australians and the Indians of California were quite sedate.  Similarly for "communism": take the term literally, radically, and unscientifically by Marxian standards, as just the possession and control of the means of production and administration by the community, no private property whatever, with people having rights of use.

10 The Yin-Yang symbol can also be drawn with a vertical axis and arranged so that "Light is the left hand of darkness / and darkness the right hand of light" (Tormer's Lay, LHD 233; ch. 15).  That is also the configuration given in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia, 1974: "yin-yang."  The flag of the Republic of (South) Korea has the horizontal configuration as in WTQ, with red-orange on top (yin) and azure-blue on the bottom (yang).

11 In the West, from the time of Empedocles in the 5th c. BCE through the 17th c. CE, the usual elements were Fire, Air, Water, and Earth (for the dates, Encyclopædia Britannica Micropædia, "elements, prescientific").  Chinese theory had it as Fire, Water, Earth, Wood, and Metal (Encyclopædia Britannica Macropædia "Chinese Philosophy," diagram of Chou Tun-i, 4.419).

12 Tao te Ching ch. 43 (see Waley 197).  See "Legends" 5.

13 Tolkien's Tree and Leaf (1964), quoted in Jackson 154-55.

14 See &quot The Carrier Bag Theory of Fictionquotcoll. DEW.

15 For a rhetorical question implying that there is no god to allow and forbid, see FS 137, ch. 9.  For "Nothing is immortal," most especially including "the gift of selfhood," see FS 122, ch. 8.

16 From many points of view, the USA of the 1980s and early 1990s is not all that different from the USA of the Gilded Age or the 1920s; more people have been brought into the system (an important improvement for many, including me), but the system itself has been quite stable.  It was and is monotheistic—Judeo-Christian now, not merely Christian (and Islam coming in)—Rationalist, Western, hierarchical and patriarchal (though more subtly so), imperial when we can do it cheaply, always capitalist.

17 See Le Guin's "Response" 45.

18 Swift alludes to a historical incident: "During the siege of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus, who captured and destroyed the city in a.d. 70, the city was torn" by murderous fighting among Jewish factions (Norton I.2150 n. 5).  The joke about ally-destroying Leftists is also told (with equal truth and equal falsehood) about the Right.

19 The third is Sarah Lefanu, and some might add to the short list Joanna Russ.  See my discussions of LHD and TD.

20 Hence, it was not philosophically a big deal when Le Guin came to celebrate single-sex marriage: "myself and the other" is all that is necessary for a duality; different sex is just «to boot»—additional difference.

21 The Progressive  61.1 (Jan. 1997): 26.  I quote from memory the first line and title of Martin Luther's "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," in English, and a phrase implying that anarchy is worse than chaos, used by a student of mine, and which I have seen in the work of professional journalists.

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