I'll repeat here some of what I've inferred to be the basic patterns for Ursula K. Le Guin's SF and fantasy.

First, there is the pattern of two philosophical views of the world: transcendence vs. immanence (in its Eastern, "Perennial Philosophy" form): most generally the argument over whether Ultimate Reality is Out There in some transcendent God or Ultimate Truth reached through a semi-divine Reason, or is within the world, to be felt out inside things-immanent. Le Guin has come out for immanence in terms of this philosophical debate, but she has also been willing to endorse immanence in more worldly, political ways. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir uses "immanence" and "transcendence" as central terms for her analysis of women's current situation and proposals for women's liberation, and finds that the "domestic labors that fell to [woman's] lot . . . imprisoned her in repetition and immanence" a clearly bad thing. For Beauvoir a human couple "is the original Mitsein" (friendly society), but still, nowhere is "woman" more trapped in immanence than reproduction and marriage.¹ Le Guin may deny church and state and the sanction of either for personal relationships, but she can speak well of friendship, love, commitment to a promise and, in those senses, speak well of "marriage."

Which leads to the pattern of Romantic Comedy. ² In the Shakespearean form that permeates English-speaking culture, Romantic Comedy moves toward a new and better world younger, more flexible, more hopeful, more joyous coalescing around a central couple. The Shakespearean pattern also allows for variations, even such extreme variations as the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet and the trashing of Romance in love and war in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. The Shakespearean precedent also includes the contrasting of two worlds as in the « dream-time » forest vs. the orderly palace of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the green world of the Forest of Arden vs. the authoritarian Court in As You Like It or the golden world of Belmont vs. the early-capitalist world of Venice in The Merchant of Venice. Two worlds in instructive contrast are also common in utopias and dystopian satires; as the anti-hero says in Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, " . . . things are invisible except against a contrasting background" (173; ch. 14). In Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) there is Utopia vs. "all the other states which flourish today," which seem to Raphael Hythloday (the voyager to Utopia) to be "nothing but a conspiracy of the rich, who pursue their own aggrandizement under the name and title of the Commonwealth" (Hythloday's closing speech). In Yevgeny Zamiatin's We (ca. 1920), it is the anti-Christian, Scythian-like rebels the "Mephi" vs. the over-rational, Euclidean, "Taylorized" City-dwellers of the United State.³ In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), there is the Savage Reservation vs. the civilized lands of the World State. In E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909), the contrast is between machine-using subterrestrials and surface-dwellers closer to nature.⁴

As Le Guin, I, and others have noted, Le Guin's variation on this common pattern has the good society in the story in some sense anarchistic: "communal, independent, and somewhat introverted." Their populations are stable and they tend not to "move in large masses, or rapidly. Their migrations have been slow . . . . They have no nomadic peoples, and no societies that live by expansion and aggression . . . . Nor have they formed large, hierarchically governed nation-states, the mobilizable entity that is the essential factor in modern war." Competition is ritualized, and, when ritual breaks down, the resulting violence does not become mass violence, remaining limited, personal." Bad societies are organized into "hierarchically governed nation-states" or their future analogs, which Le Guin sees correctly as "the mobilizable entity that is the essential factor in modern war" and, I'll add, premodern war ("Gender . . . Redux" 10-11, "Gender" in LoN [1979]: 166). If religion is an issue in the story, the good people favor an immanent, noninstitutionalized spirituality, putting them into the world and connecting them with the world; the bad people favor transcendence and immortality and organized religion as we have seen in The Left Hand of Darkness, and which can be inferred from The Dispossessed: one of Shevek's first lines to the Urrasti is "You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws" (TD 12; ch. 1).

With these patterns in mind, I wish to examine here five of Le Guin's works from the mid-1970s to 1980 and point out variations on these themes from the work of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (1976)

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else is a mundane ("realistic," "mainstream") novella telling, according to the front cover blurb on the Bantam 1978 edition, "A Different Kind of Love Story." The story is set in our world, on the west coast of the USA, and covers some six months of fictive time and one basic "action" (1).

Owen Thomas turned seventeen "last November," and the plot kicks in five days after his birthday, a birthday on which Owen's father gave him a car (6-7). Owen is a contemporary American intellectual with strong interests in biology and psychology, and the protagonist-narrator of the novella. For college he wants to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology, or Princeton (in that order); his mother very much wants him to go to "State" (see 22-23). Shortly after getting the car, Owen, still walking to and from school, guiltily takes a bus to get out of the rain and meets Natalie Field, a fellow student, about a year older than he. Natalie is also an intellectual, and an artist. Owen and Natalie become best friends. Owen clowns, doing an ape act for Natalie; Natalie lets Owen stay with her while she practices the viola. ⁵ Natalie tells Owen about her desire to become a composer and lets him know she feels insecure in that ambition an insecurity that contrasts with her confidence as a performer and her rock-steadiness (18, 33, 41-42). And, when Natalie tells Owen about the Brontë family, Owen tells her about the land of Thorn he invented, his own country, "a very long way from anywhere else" (49). All goes well until Owen decides he must desire sex with Natalie, hence must love her (43-45). At an outing to Jade Beach, Owen makes a sexual advance upon Natalie and is rebuffed (52-57). Having dropped Natalie off at home, Owen drives away, drives around, and drives his new car off the road, "totaling" the car and giving himself some serious bruises, a dislocated shoulder, and a concussion (58). Fortunately, the car is completely insured; unfortunately Owen avoids Natalie, cuts himself off from people, lives in a figurative "fog," and starts lying about small things (67). This goes on until spring, when Owen sees an announcement of an evening of music with the civic orchestra that will include performances by Natalie and others of her settings for three poems (65). Owen goes to the concert, is greatly moved (69-71), and he and Natalie reconcile and become friends again. At the end of the novella, she goes off to Tanglewood, and he will soon go to MIT. Their "touch" is relatively chaste kisses mostly, but they are now going beyond the six-second limit they thought decorous for friends (85-87).

At the start of his story, Owen tells us, "Sports are neat to do, but dull to talk about. Anyhow there won't be much about sports in this" (1). Nor is there any coming of age through sex or violence or going through basic training or cruising with the guys or spectacular car chases or getting drunk, getting high, or rescuing the heroine. Instead we get a young male protagonist on the border of manhood making some points about relationships. Very Far Away offers a different kind of romantic comedy or romance: one that ends in friendship strong enough to stand separation, one that examines very deeply the complexities of young love.

Very Far Away is interesting in itself in its participation in the "debate" on the possibility of boy/girl and woman/man friendship, and on sex.

Michael Moffatt, an anthropologist who has studied college students only slightly older than Owen and Natalie, repeats some true clichés about friendship in America:

According to Moffatt's studies, norms for male/female relationships had changed enough by the late 1970s and 1980s, at least among young people, that "over a third of hundreds of reciprocated close friendships reported . . . by students in the Rutgers [University] coed dorms were cross-sex relationships" (45). But such relationships were still sufficiently problematic into the 1990s to be material for television situation comedies like Seinfeld and Friends and for theatrical films such as Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally (1989). Very Far Away in 1976, then, was dealing centrally with a topic important for its Young Adult target audience and beyond. Also significant is the question of sex. Moffatt notes that "The direct sources of the students' sexual ideas were located almost entirely in mass consumer culture," from films and television to Penthouse, Playgirl, Harlequin romances (females only), and occasional pornography (Moffatt 194). All together, these sources produce what the Leftist British critic Stephen Heath calls

So says a professional anthropologist studying students at Rutgers University. It is more effective with young readers, I suspect perhaps with readers generally to have similar views expressed by a credibly presented seventeen-year-old boy: ". . . the way a lot of people talk, and the way a lot of movies and books and advertising and all the various sexual engineers, whether they're scientists or salesmen, tell you the way it is is all the same. Man Plus Woman Equals Sex. Nothing else." But Owen goes a bit beyond the idea of popular culture's sexual orthodoxy to get to an older orthodoxy; the person who most got him thinking about sex with Natalie Field was her father, the rather fundamentalist, church-going Mr. Field (32, 42-43). After their fashion, puritanical sorts, too, are obsessed with sex. Further, Owen honestly responds to Natalie as exciting: "Physically, and mentally, and spiritually exciting." And from this excitement he draws a conclusion: "But what I thought, because of what everybody, even Freud, says, was that it must be Love. They all say that sex is the real thing, and Love is what you call it when you are slightly more civilized than a gorilla. Sex isn't something you do when you're in love, love is what you call it when you want sex," which, of course, "the toothpaste commercials and the cigarette ads and the porno movies and the art movies and the pop songs, or Mr. Field" all agree you do (44).

In Very Far Away Le Guin is getting into a major debate on sexuality and endorsing "Just Say 'No'" in a very nuanced way. Locating in popular culture and (ironically) in conservative religion some of the motivation for "Just Say 'Whoopee!'" is one tactic Le Guin uses here. A second is Owen's observation that he "had decided that I was in love with Natalie. I hadn't fallen in love with her, please notice that I didn't say that; I had decided that I was in love with her." Owen goes on to allude to the work of psychologists who stress "front-back differences" in the brain "rather than left-right differences." In this case his decision to love Natalie "would be an example of the frontal lobes trying to run the whole show, and fouling up the poor old hind-brain. This is a foul-up intellectuals are liable to. At least, stupid mixed-up intellectuals like me" (44-45). Owen is getting his ideas from Robert Evan Ornstein's work, but Le Guin could have found them in also D. H. Lawrence or other very late Romantic celebrants of the power of passion and "the blood" and suspicion of the intellect. Or from Daoist reversals of the clichés of most civilized folk in valuing the spontaneous and intuitive and «animal» over planning and scheming.

Of more interest to me is why Natalie just said "No." One reason is straight-forward: a bad experience with a (male) oboist (77-78). The other reasons will get us into the relationship of Very Far Away with other works in Le Guin's canon.

Owen is quite exact in his description and analysis of Natalie's "No"; a little after he "took hold of her really hard and kissed her" there is a crucial dialog, with Owen beginning, brokenly:

Le Guin rightly recognizes, and says in her own voice, that "Sex is a great mana" and therefore "there is always a code" for sex in any society.⁸ An "immature society" or immature individual psyche will set "great taboos about it. The maturer culture, or psyche, can integrate these taboos or laws into an internal ethical code," with true maturity allowing "great freedom" but forbidding "the treatment of another person as an object" ("Is Gender Necessary?" LoN [1979]: 166). But what about Natalie? She is a very mature eighteen-year-old living in a society that is radically conflicted about sex. She is "a religious person" with a "grim, fundamentalist type" father who is "a very churchgoing man," "extremely Biblical about young men who cast their eyes upon his daughters" (32, 38-39). Natalie goes against much of the social flow, but she goes with "rale" (CI), the Way, the Dao, the music: music as "another way of thinking, or maybe thinking . . .  [as] another kind of music" (28), music from "the silent half of the brain" (42). And going consciously, intentionally, in good anarchist fashion, with the real Way of things, she can make proper decisions for herself and recognize, perhaps paradoxically, that "People make the real choices together" (57).

Music and dance have been a Le Guinian theme since her first published story, "An die Musik" (1961) and continue through her poetry and fantasies to "Dancing to Ganam" (1993) and "Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995). So especially when we look at Very Far Away's near contemporary, The New Atlantis (1975) and its handling of music, a music/Dao association will seem very familiar. There is more though, and a re-reading of Very Far Away shows it to be a very elegant brief compendium of Le Guinian themes from Orsinia and her science fiction and fantasy and certainly from her surrealist philosophical exercise "A Trip to the Head" and its attack on the more philosophical formulations of ". . . sex is real, . . . really real-it's having and acting in its intensest form," the manly way of proving his masculine being (WTQ 163).

Owen's invented country of Thorn is not only a fictional parallel to the Brontë children's "long, involved romances about [the] non-existent countries" of Angria and Gondal but also to Ursula K. Le Guin's Orsinia. And Owen's development of Thorn's "flora and fauna . . . landscape and . . . cities . . . economy and the way they lived, their government and history" closely parallels SF's worlds and world-building (48-50).⁹ There is a brief defense of housekeeping in Very Far Away and of being "a good wife and mother" as a legitimate choice for an intelligent woman (Owen's mother), but with a warning against being "afraid of doing anything else, of being anything else" (19): which could serve as a defense of Takver in The Dispossessed (1974) as partner, mother, biologist, and social activist. But Owen also offers some comments on his parents' views of "woman's work" that indicate things to come in Le Guin's canon (20-21). On their first trip to Jade Beach, on "the day before New Year's Eve," in the "Heart of winter," Owen and Natalie "talked about life" and "decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer." The "sea was there," and "it was cold, and it was the high point of my life," Owen says. He'd had other high points, including once "out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis," but he'd always been alone. "This time I was not alone. I was on the high mountain with a friend. . .  . there is nothing that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once" (41).¹⁰

The climactic epiphany in Very Far Away occurs when Owen hears Natalie's setting of an Emily Brontë poem (70) and starts crying: "There was a glory in it.  . .  And it was partly love. I mean real love. In the song I had seen Natalie whole, the way she really was, and I loved her. It was not an emotion or desire, it was a confirmation, it was a glory, like seeing the stars" (71). Owen finally sees Natalie as Genly Ai finally sees Estraven (LHD 248; ch. 18), Heather Lelache sees George Orr's wholeness (LoH 95; ch. 7) or Mary Pannis had seen her husband, Nick (BP 102; ch. 4).¹¹ Also clear are the more casual connections with Le Guin's more popular science fiction and fantasy: the motifs of introversion / extroversion (30), loneliness, pain, touch (61), useful methodicalness (50), mechanical philosophies and psychologies (36), taking risks, plain speaking, coming home (62), and speaking one's mind as old women do in The Word for World Is Forest and small children are said to do in Very Far Away (3) and an attack (similar to the one in The Dispossessed) on "leveling," including the male-chauvinist sort that made it necessary for women to be first-class to get as far as third-class men: "Anti-intellectualism seemed to be part of it," Owen argues, "but not all of it; it was this sort of pulling things all down to the level where everybody is the same, like ants, that I called leveling, although these days it gets called by some fancy names like anti-elitism, and some really out of place names like democracy, names you shouldn't even say unless you're willing to think about them" (35).

We have, then, in Very Far Away from Anywhere Else a "Different Kind of Love Story" indeed: one that postpones sex and of marriage in any sense, an unpopular ending since Shakespeare tried it with Love's Labors Lost. A love story from the boys point of view commercially risky with girls as the target audience for romances a story for ordinary kids, defending the right of other kids to be intellectuals, talented, and chaste.

The Beginning Place (1980)

As Charlotte Spivack says in her excellent analysis of the book, "The Beginning Place in effect takes the central situation presented in Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, the alienation of two contemporary adolescents, and imposes on it the allegorical narrative of the Faerie Queene" (123). Or an allegorical form of some sort.¹² At first readings, Very Far Away and The Beginning Place seem quite different. The central characters are only a little older in The Beginning Place, but they are working class, not middle class, and they are both currently out of school; and the kids in Very Far Away come from far more functional families. Perhaps more noticeably, if there is any secondary or alternative world in Very Far Away, it must be the imaginary country of Thorn or the future country, so to speak, of MIT, Tanglewood, and the Eastman School of Music in "the East." With The Beginning Place, we get a much more substantial alternative world and in it a psychological allegory that makes for a very interesting variation on other of Le Guin's patterns (see Spivack 118).

The plot of The Beginning Place is straightforward.¹³

Hugh Rogers, the male hero and male point-of-view character, is a fairly tall, overweight checkout clerk at a suburban grocery store; at twenty-one years old, he has no life outside of his work and making sure that he is home most of the time so that his mother does not return from work to an empty apartment, especially at night.¹⁴ Hugh's father deserted his mother and Hugh long ago, and Hugh is unwillingly the dependable man of the house. Hugh's mother is all he has, but she abuses him, not physically which she couldn't do but emotionally, still angry at her desertion by Hugh's father (see though 18; ch. 1). Hugh would like to hug his mother or pat her head or show her some sign of affection, but "she hated to be touched . . . " (30; ch. 1). In the course of the story, Hugh's mother makes a friend we never see and becomes quite interested in spiritualism. As far as we can see, Hugh starts the story with no friends beyond Donna, a middle-aged fellow-worker at Sam's Thrift-E-Mart, who calls him "Buck" after "Buck Rogers in the twenty-first [sic] century," adding "I bet you're too young to remember the real one" (20-21; ch. 1).¹⁵

The female hero and point-of-view character is called Irene by everybody in the everyday world except her mother, and Irena by her mother (Mary) and by the people in the twilight world: the secondary world of the novel. In the world of the American suburbs, ca. 1980, Irene's life is even worse than Hugh's. She works as an "errandperson," delivering mail and memos, blueprints and "stuff" (226; ch. 8). Irena's father (Nick Pannis) died of leukemia when she was two years old and her brother Michael three months old. Irene's family lived with her father's sister until the aunt retired to Florida, leaving a farmhouse and a half-acre of tree nursery to her sister-in-law, Mary. Soon after that, Mary Pannis married Victor Hanson, bringing into the family a real "ogre" of a step-father (Spivack 119). Vic is a ne'er-do-well who apparently deals in stolen bicycles, definitely had a small-time drug-dealing business, and currently has an alcohol problem. He beats his wife, hits his younger children, and molests Irene, on one occasion nearly raping her (97, 99; ch. 4). "Victor was a big, well-made, handsome man, much concerned with his body and its functions and appearance  . . . [against the] central reality of which the rest of the world and other people were mere reflections without substance: the self-concern of the athlete or the invalid, though he was neither, being strong and inactive" (97; ch. 4).

Mr. Hanson is like Mrs. Rogers in disliking darkness -he works on the car outside at night, by floodlight -but he contrasts with her and balances her in other ways. Mrs. Rogers's problem is associated with spirit; Vic's problems are associated with that nice looking but ill-used body of his, plus his highly ill-used mind. Vic is a theorist of macho: "Victor had theories about many things, including sex, and liked to expound them to people: "See, if the man doesn't get rid of the fertile material, you understand what I mean, the fertile cells, they back up and cause the prostrate gland [sic]. That material has to be cleared out regularly or they make poison, same as anything doesn't get cleared out regularly. Same as clean bowels, or blowing your nose" (97; ch. 4). After four pregnancies in five years, and three of them ending in miscarriages, Mary was "on the pill" but kept that from Victor because he thought that contraception, also, "'blocked the fertile material up in the glands" and did not want her using contraceptives; but Irene got her to by making "a woman's mystery of it" (100; ch. 4).

As children, Irene and her younger brother Michael had been close; but when he was eleven or so he started rejecting her, and "as he came into full adolescence his rejection of her had become absolute. He spent his time with a male clique, adopting all their manner and rhetoric of contempt for the female, and sparing her none of it" (99; ch. 4). So Irene feels she cannot tell her brother about Victor's advances and the rape attempt, since Michael would blame her. "Michael already despised her for . . . being a woman, therefore subject to lust, therefore unclean" (100; ch. 4). So Irene's brother would be no help if he were around, and he is not around, having left home a couple of years earlier (99; ch. 4).

And Mary, although a positive character, can give Irene little help. Her life centers around her family, and to destroy her family bonds would destroy her (100; ch. 4). And Mary's loyalty is not some mere neurotic attachment but based in part upon her experience in her previous marriage to Nick: a true Le Guinian marriage of being whole through being part, a participation in glory. But all that glory "can happen and be done with by the age of twenty-two," and Mary Hanson is thirty-nine (102, 97; ch. 4).¹⁶ As a practical dilemma for Irene, if her mother had to choose, was "forced to it," she would side with Irena rather than Vic, and then Vic would "have all the excuse to punish her he wanted." After Michael had gone, Irene's only way out was to just get out, too, but she cannot being herself to make the break. "Her mother had to have someone around to depend on" (100; ch. 4). A little short of half-way through the novel, Irene summarizes her view of her situation in one highly emotional but succinct thought-paragraph:

The parents in The Beginning Place, then, are mostly what Irena and Hugh are striving a bit too strenuously not to become: Irena trying too hard to "clear out" and be free of men; Hugh trying too hard to be dependable and stay with his mother (83; ch. 3).¹⁸

At the start of the novel, both Hugh and Irene feel they can never find love, feel alone and isolated, desperate to escape but trapped. And then they find the beginning place.

Irene found the gate long before Hugh had, and had gone through the gateway and the beginning place into a changeless land of continual evening twilight what she calls her "ain countrie," her own country. She got as far as Tembreabrezi, "Mountain Town," a place she felt accepted, at home (57; ch. 2). She had learned the language, made friends, and most important, had found a father figure in Sark, the mayor or "Master" of Mountain Town, and master of Irena: "He was her law"; "If she had spoken at all"- could speak to him intimately Irena could only have said, "'I have always loved you,' but she could not, and there was no need to. He knew his power. He was the Master" (57, 55; ch. 2).¹⁹

The action of The Beginning Place begins with Hugh's fleeing home and finding the gateway into the twilight world. Here he drinks pure water, gets naked, swims, and is free to think and just move about unthinking in a world where there are no clocks, and where all time except the metabolic runs at 1/24th the speed of clock-time. It is a world in which he can find Romantic Love infatuation with a fairy-tale princess, the daughter of Horn, Lord of the Manor of Mountain Town. And it is a world in which he can be the Romantic Hero in a quest: the people of Mountain Town and the land generally are subject to a great fear (a curse?), and the people cannot travel their roads. As Stephanie Bradford noted in one of my classes, most significantly the people of Mountain Town cannot take "the road north, the road that led down to the City" (164; ch. 6).²⁰ The people think Hugh is their hero, their savior.

For Irena, Hugh is an affront: a thief, a stranger, an intrusion into her changeless world. What one of Le Guin's characters describes as "the normal defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting" is very strong when Irena meets Hugh.²¹ She wants to stay in the grey, twilight world, but has trouble finding her way into it; annoyingly, Hugh cannot always find his way out but can quite reliably find the gateway in. After Hugh's getting to Mountain Town and his acceptance there, Irena feels she's been reduced to a translator, and a barely necessary one at that: translating between her friends and newcomer Hugh.²² She sees him as a minotaur (129; ch. 4), and orders, "Don't ever touch me!" (151; ch. 5).

Before they leave Mountain Town on the Quest to end the fear, to free the roads, there is a ceremonial moment when Master Sark asks Lord Horn, "What will you give him to take, my lord?" and Lord Horn offers "The sword I was given, if he wants it." Hugh takes the sword. The next question is "What will you give him to give, my lord?" And there follows a confrontation between Sark and Horn, on an issue of long standing (169; ch. 6). In context of the chapter (161-63) and still more clearly later on (173; 194, ch. 7), the "to give" can refer to a sacrifice, a human sacrifice. Sark's great-grandfather had been a Master of Tembreabrezi and had struck the bargain, "with the price in his hand" (162), apparently giving his daughter in sacrifice to some monster; Sark believes the bargain should be remade, the price paid yet again.

In the context of Le Guin's canon generally, this confrontation repeats and very elegantly epitomizes an important Kropotkinesque point made at length in The Left Hand of Darkness. For all the potential and actual tyranny of the Kings and lords of Karhide or most of medieval Europe, each of their "seeming" nations "was a stew of uncoordinated principalities, towns, villages . . . a sprawl and a splatter of vigorous, competent, quarrelsome individualities over which a grid of authority was insecurely and lightly laid" (LHD 100; ch. 8). In the microcosm of Mountain Town, Lord Horn reflects hazily traditional, quasi-feudal, aristocratic ways, and Master Sark a more modern, utilitarian, capitalistic approach to life: what I've called in discussing Job and King Lear, the double-entry bookkeeping view of the world. The more loosely-structured medieval system, explicitly based in personal loyalty in its feudal part, associated with one's land and lord in the manorial, is rather favored by anarchists in Petr Kropotkin's tradition, and favored by Le Guin over theories of rationalized, systematic exploitation. In terms of The Beginning Place itself, the confrontation between Horn and Sark helps mark Hugh and Irena's disillusionment with their loves in Mountain Town, especially Irena's love for "the Master." When Hugh and Irena leave town on their trek north and their monster-quest, they leave behind them their infatuations. They need to depend upon one another to survive.

After much hard travel, described in some detail, Hugh and Irena come to the place they seek on the mountain: "not ground but stone, a shieldlike expanse of rock. . . . Iron rings were bolted into the stone, four of them, making a rectangle several feet long." On one of the rings, there remains a "strip of rawhide thong" still knotted (194; ch 7). But "This was the wrong place" (195). In the forest there is a crying, and they move toward it, going through the forest's maze when they glimpse and hear the monster and are too terrified to move on (195-97). Hugh weeps; in his own eyes he's run away again (202), lacked courage. Hugh and Irena debate Hugh's going alone (201). They stay together and do what they must do, "toiling" up the mountain to a cave: "There it was, of course; this was the place. . . . At last. Again. He had been coming here all his life and had never left it in the beginning" (208; ch. 7). Hugh moves toward the dark cave: "Not twilight: darkness. From the beginning of time until the end"-and Irena rushes past him, daring the monster to come out. Which the monster does, and is dispatched by Hugh in one short paragraph, and the traditional sword-thrust "upward into the white, wrinkled belly" (209; ch. 7) of the ambiguous or androgynous dragon: male to Hugh, female to Irena.²³

There are two remaining chapters of the book, for nine chapters. In chapter 8, Irena must get Hugh out from under the dragon-beast (211), get them off "the dragon's way" (223), the clear way that seems the fastest way back, and go east, not west, through the forest, toward increasing light and the beginning place and the gateway to the everyday world (224-25). And in chapter 8 Irena goes back on her "never touch" order, and she and Hugh make love, somewhat perfunctorily the first try, but with richly symbolic description throughout:

A little later, Hugh touches Irena's hair and kisses her (231).

The last chapter of The Beginning Place has Irena lead Hugh (237) into the daylight world, except it is not a hot, bright summer's day they return to but "across the threshold into night and rain" (240). And Irena needs help. She gets it from an anonymous man she simply thinks of as "Redbeard" (242). The rain is significant water imagery, cleansing, the Daoist element of constancy and change and so is the help from Redbeard. Irena's biological father "deserted" her by dying; her step-father is an abusive brute, her brother a worse than useless sexist. She's even had a close woman friend raped by a gang of men (104; ch. 4); and Rick, the male of the couple she's been living with is no major villain but still a loser putting the make on her (94-95; ch. 4). Redbeard is like the Portuguese sea captain, Pedro de Mendez, who befriends Gulliver at his return from his "Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms" in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726, 1727). The Portuguese sea captain represents simple human decency when we may have lost hope for it, and Gulliver certainly has. Even so, Redbeard, a male with a pirate's appellation, turns out to be a decent human being; but, unlike the crazy Gulliver with Mendez, the sane and now regenerate Irena can appreciate him.

The end of The Beginning Place has Hugh's mother rejecting Hugh, and Hugh and Irena finding an apartment in the city to start their alawful marriage.

The beginning place is a place to begin; for Irena and Hugh, the city and life in the everyday immanence of everyday things is the immediate goal at the end of the book, with a strong hope of library school for Hugh and a more adult job maybe teaching, maybe nursing, "Or kids" for Irena (226-27; ch. 8). The book ends with the line, "There is more than one road to the city" (246), in this case, I think, The City of Man viewed positively, as against the suburbs or dysfunctional families, or as opposed to St. Augustine of Hippo's City of God. This is "The City as goal and dream" as opposed to the grey changelessness of the twilight world beyond the beginning place or most of Le Guin's cities, as opposed to towns or forests or icy wastes or mountains.²⁴

*

I find in The Beginning Place three basic jobs for a critic; in order of increasing importance, they consist of one riddle, one central question for The Beginning Place itself, and one overarching question.

" The riddle is, Why can Hugh easily get into the twilight land and not out (dependably), and Irena can get out but not in?

" The central question for this novel itself, I'd formulate this way: In a story that seems to have strong didactic statements to make, what might those statements be? What should we learn from The Beginning Place?

" The overarching question is the place of The Beginning Place in Le Guin's canon.

I'm not very good at riddles, but I think the answer to the one in The Beginning Place is this: Hugh can find the gateway in, and Irena can find the way out because Le Guin wanted them to have complementary talents, and the binary opposition of IN vs. and OUT pretty well limits the choices to the ones Le Guin used. That Owen can get them in and Irena can get them out is necessary if Le Guin wants to show for the climax of the novel Irena leading. If we want to see in The Beginning Place something of a reworking of the Earthsea trilogy, and I'll soon make clear I want to do that, then Irena here is in structural position parallel to Arren's in The Farthest Shore: the leader to the lair of the monster, the one who gets the hero home, and the hero for the future. So her specialty needs to be exits.

The teaching agenda of The Beginning Place I find in the ethical/theological issues it raises and in its family and gender-politics.

Recall Charlotte Spivack's comment (123) that The Beginning Place uses the allegory of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book 1. In paralleling The Beginning Place to Faerie Queene, Book 1, Hugh -who is explicitly (though comically) compared to St. George (182; ch. 6) -corresponds to the Red Cross Knight slaying Error and, eventually the Satanic dragon; and Irena corresponds to Una (One), who "represents truth, true religion, and the true church. Her name . . . implies the qualities of truth and of the true church; it admits of no contradiction and no relativity" (Kellogg and Steele 15, 16, 44-45). Opposed to Una is Duessa: "As one (Una) represents truth, goodness, beauty, order, and whatever is perfect and eternal in Platonic thought (Timaeus); so two (Duessa) represents all that is imperfect, chaotic, earthly, and evil" (Kellogg and Steele 20). Red Cross falls away from Una and goes with Duessa to the House of Pride, which Kellogg and Steele identify as "St. Augustine's City of Man as opposed to the City of God" (26). At the House of Pride, Red Cross must also fight Sansjoy, another old lover of Duessa's: i.e., allegorically, he must fight Joylessness, despair. There are other parallels, including forests, but I think we should modify Spivack on The Beginning Place this far: The Beginning Place is to The Faerie Queene even as it is to the Buck Rogers story and C. S. Lewis's second book in the Narnia series, The Lion, the Witch{,} and the Wardrobe: a "gentle antidote to," a critique of, prime examples of a world-view Le Guin has problems with.²⁵

My student Ian D. Bäby's observed that the greyness of Le Guin's twilight land parallels the winter-world of Narnia under the witch's curse in The Lion . . . .²⁶ Both the world of Faerie Queene and the world of Narnia are undergirded by the central Christian myth of the Sacrifice, and there is a very explicit sacrifice of the Christ-figure Lion, Aslan, in The Lion, on a "Stone Table" very like Le Guin's "shieldlike expanse of rock" (Lewis 150-55, ch. 14; Le Guin 194, ch. 7). And, in the background, the Christian vision of the Apocalypse, presided over by "the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan" (Revelation 20.2, RSV) except that the dragon in The Beginning Place "is a dragon of the psyche," not some cosmological, apocalyptic force (see Minkowitz 26). Also in the background, behind even the Christian myth, is the pattern of the masculinist Hero: "quest, contest, and conquest as the plot, sacrifice as the key" (ER 13). In Le Guin's Beginning Place, the twilight world in its changelessness is a necessary place to visit and a place to begin from, but not a place for adult humans to live.

These large issues have implications for ethics and family politics. If part of the moral of The Faerie Queene, The Lion, The Witch{,} and the Wardrobe, and Christian sermonizing generally is to encourage the imitation of Christ, including self-sacrifice, part of Le Guin's intention in The Beginning Place is to discourage such sacrifices. The theological point of The Beginning Place, so far as it has one, and a strong ideological point, is that one should not make such sacrifices: not as Christ-like sacrifice, nor in the Jewish form of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac in The Binding of Isaac story (Gen. 22.1-14), nor in any other form.²⁷ Self-sacrifice is a very bad idea in politics, and for Le Guin, the political is the personal as well as the personal, the political: sacrifices whatever the religion, whatever the ideology are problematic, period (see Hoffer, Part Three).²⁸

Hugh overcame guilt sufficiently to keep returning to the twilight land the land of the unconscious, perhaps the collective unconscious (McLean 132-33) and gets a bit of a life independent of his mother and against his mother's will (143; ch. 5). In the twilight land, Irena calls forth an eminently killable dragon-monster, which Hugh kills. Not Error in Spenser's Christian allegory, but Horrible Parent in a psychological allegory. And it is Hugh and Irena together who kill the dragon, not the Christ-figure Aslan, helped by the boys defeating the White Witch, as in Narnia (with Lewis's featured girl character, Lucy, getting to nurture, not kill). In The Beginning Place, though not as much as in the Christian stories, the magic works (see Attebery 118). Hugh comes back to the daylight world with a woman, and his mother rejects him, freeing him to leave her (243, 245-46; ch. 9). And Irena overcomes guilt enough to "clear out" and leave her mother and stepsiblings in an abusive relationship. Such desertions are not good things; they are also not what unselfish, self-sacrificing, good boys and girls do.²⁹ But that, I think, is Le Guin's point: Given their powerlessness to cure dysfunctional relationships, "Clear out" may be the least bad choice Hugh and Irena can make. And their living together and trying to find suitable, adult work are positive goods.

The powerlessness of Irena, in the everyday, "realistic" part of the novel stems from the mindless macho and misogyny of her stepfather and her brother; there isn't even any explicit sexist doctrine to attack. Irena's family is sick from a complex disease endemic in our culture, sick in ways Irena cannot hope to cure. Mrs. Rogers is also sick, and her illness is both common (perhaps also endemic to technological civilization) and one to which both Hugh and Irena would be very susceptible: "a kind of getting out of gear, out of synch. The engine made a noise but no power got to the wheels. They were stuck. They got nowhere." Pulling up roots and changing towns doesn't help: ". . . the oftener she moves" Hugh thinks, "the more she doesn't get anywhere" (79-80; ch. 3). "Sick is when you drove the car in neutral. The place she couldn't get away from was home"-one of Le Guin's rare uses of "home" in a negative sense the more Mrs. Rogers "left it the worse she was stuck; could not bear to be alone in the house . . . lived in terror of waking up at night with no one else there." And for good reason: her husband deserted her, and Hugh is well aware of the effect on himself of that desertion and intuits the effect on her, and he knows his duty: "There's nothing I can do. She hasn't got anybody but me" (79-81; ch. 3). There is also nothing he can do for his mother, and it is a relatively happy ending, given the options, when Mrs. Rogers rejects Hugh.

*

As much as Mrs. Rogers finds happiness at all, it is making friends with Durbina and researching their "previous lives," usually as "princesses or high priestesses" in interesting places like Ancient Egypt (80; ch. 3); and Mrs. Rogers's hobby can help us place The Beginning Place in Le Guin's canon, establish its relationships with other works and to Le Guin's basic patterns. Starting from the hint of Mrs. Rogers's spiritualism, we can see that one obvious relationship is with The Tombs of Atuan, where Tenar is "eaten" and made into Arha, the reincarnation of the "One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan" (10; ch. 1 [see McLean 140]). It's hard to take Mrs. Rogers's reincarnations seriously, but Irena's life in the evening land is both quite similar to and different from Arha's situation in Atuan. Arha leads what is nominally a women's religion, the worship of the Nameless Ones, and Irena practices a kind of Earth religion in a changeless place. Entering her "ain country," Irena

Like Arha, and Le Guinian characters from the Earthsea trilogy through "Coming of Age in Karhide," Irena dances; unlike Arha, Irena doesn't even chant (TA 24; ch. 2). Both Irena and Arha are mostly alone; but, unlike Arha, Irena can leave her changeless, evening land without help it's just that she has only the hot, dry, Wasteland suburbs to go to, no real home. Both girls are ready for something different; and in both works, the new thing Le Guin gives them is a man, and a crossing over into womanhood via a variation on the pattern of Comic Romance.

Le Guin returns to the romantic comic pattern in The Beginning Place strongly: as Spivack points out, one of the analogs here is Shakespeare's As You Like It, especially the idea that "there is no clock in the forest" of Arden (see Spivack 118; I quote AYL 3.2.300-01). As You Like It is a kind of Shakespearean experiment in pure Romantic Comic form: seeing how much play one can get out of the Romantic pattern with just about no plot using, highlighting, mocking, undermining, and (paradoxically) reinforcing romantic comedy. In both The Beginning Place and As You Like It, the movement is from a corrupt place of civilization into a changeless forest world and then back to the everyday. The very everyday, entirely mundane, "moral" of both works may be that young people can use a kind of natural-world time-out between childhood and adulthood: time to just be, get their heads together, and find an appropriate partner and appropriate work ideas Le Guin makes explicit in The Farthest Shore (1972) and Always Coming Home (1985).

The "time-out" worlds in The Beginning Place and As You Like It, though, are more different than similar.

Shakespeare's Forest of Arden is, mostly, a bright, happy place, full of music especially songs and life. The evening, twilight land in The Beginning Place is without song, without visible animal life, and emphatically grey. And however much Le Guin personally likes grey and book publishers find grey appropriate for paperbacks of her books, grey is often a negative « color » in Le Guin's work.³⁰ As in the world of "Darkness Box" (1963), the twilight land is under a kind of curse, and color and music and change must come to it for it to be an appropriate place not just to visit at the end of youth, but to live. In "A Trip to the Head" (1970), the forest is a better place to be alone and avoid the true Other than to find partner; in The Beginning Place, the forest is a place to find a partner, then go home.

More politically and symbolically in Atuan, more mythically in The Beginning Place, the source of the greyness of the worlds is related to sacrifice. And the theme of the sacrifice in turn relates both works to Omelas and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973). The Omelites' bargain is one intelligent people can argue about, and have argued about at length at a conference of the Society for Utopian Studies and in its journal. The sacrifices in Atuan and the twilight world of The Beginning Place are simply bad. In The Beginning Place, the sacrifice, whatever its details, made the inhabitants, "The children of fear." They are "bound," their "right hands useless," sold; so says Lord Horn (169; ch. 6). More significantly, when Irena talks of "A scapegoat" and looks for the word "sacrifice," Hugh interrupts with "They're stuck," his image of mental illness, his mother's problem, and much of the wrong of the world (79-80; ch. 3). As Simone de Beauvoir has stressed, people can get stuck in immanence; if there is no way out, a woman is stuck at home.

Le Guin habitually contrasts two societies, and she usually favors the more "Yinish," less active society; and, possibly, she does so here: the American suburbs, ca. 1980, are hardly a world of positive transcendent action. Also, there is silence in the twilight world, "the silence that gave words meaning, the center that gave the world a shape" (BP 76; ch. 3), and we know from the Earthsea trilogy that such silence is necessary.³¹ Still, it is difficult to get too caught up with the problems of the twilight world, and I think Le Guin discourages overly enthusiastic identification with the twilight town. Consider just the imagery. Ordinarily, Le Guin wants balance, often black/white balance, not greys. The only place of symbolic balance in the twilight world is at the cave of the dragon: the blackness of the darkness of the cave-an image of the womb of Mother Earth against which stands the whiteness of the dragon. And then there's the extraordinary muting of the heroic dragon-slaying. Irena summons the dragon, and Hugh succinctly kills the dragon-with no reveling by the Narrator whatever in the details of the fight and we see no regeneration of the twilight world in consequence: no spring thaw, no rain on the wasteland, no loosing of the waters: none of the action and flowers and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana that John Boorman gives so spectacularly in the healing of the King sequence in his exuberantly romantic film, Excalibur (1981); more immediately relevant here: no speeding up of time and movement toward nightfall. At the climax of The Beginning Place there isn't even the pro forma political restoration of As You Like It.³² The magic does work for Irena and Hugh; but it is a very low-key and slow regeneration if the magic works for the twilight world.

What we get for narrative are two working-class kids making love and getting out, with much effort and pain: first getting out of the twilight world out into the reviving dark and rain of our world then getting out of dysfunctional homes. No Buck Rogers-style heroism here. The heroism is the stoic, relatively "feminine" heroism of determination and active endurance, and appropriate action (wu wei), a form of quiet, toiling heroism Le Guin has celebrated in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Eye of the Heron (1978) and will celebrate again in "Sur" (1982) and, in a different way, in "Coming of Age in Karhide" (1965).³³ We get two kids saving a fantasy world indeed, but more importantly each other: two kids finding each other, marriage, and a way to home in the city.

Some time after the year 2027 (16; ch. 2), and 111 years before the start of the story of Eye of the Heron, "the Government of Brasil-America{sic} sent several thousand people" to a penal-colony world called "Victoria." Fifty-six years before the start of the story "the Government of Canamerica sent two thousand more" (37; ch. 3). The first group were criminals and their families, and they founded "the City"; the second group were peace-movement activists in the tradition of Mohandas K.{sic} Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and they founded "the Town": Shantih, a set of villages with a central Meeting House. The City has about 8000 inhabitants, Shantih, 4320; all are necessarily exiles from Earth, permanent exiles.³⁴ The two communities have remained distinct but are "deeply interdependent" (37; ch. 3): the Town supplying agricultural goods and the City providing the Town with "tools and machinery made by the Government ironworks, fish caught by the City fleet, and various other products which the older-established colony could more easily provide. It had been an arrangement satisfactory to both." As Heron begins, the arrangement is strained. The Town has kept its part of the bargain; the City has taken more and given less (53; ch. 4). The Town has continued "communal . . . somewhat introverted," egalitarian, nonsexist, anarchic; the City has remained macho (and nominally Christian?) and has become "hierarchically governed"; and, as the story begins, the City is developing a military.³⁵

The City, of course, will produce "the bad guys," and the Town the good, but with intriguing variations. Indeed, Heron offers highly significant variations on familiar Le Guinian themes.

*

Under the leadership of Councillor{sic} Luis Falco ("falcon") the ruling men of the City plot to establish "latifundia": "Big farms; large fields, planted in one crop, for efficiency. . . . an estate . . . peasants to work it." To get the cleared land and the peasants, they will provoke into rebellion against the "government" of the City the people of "Shanty Town," and put down the rebellion with "a troop of elite soldiers," the Black Guards under Herman Macmillan: armed "young aristocrats, brave intelligent, and properly commanded. Men who love fighting, like our brave ancestors of Earth" (65-67; ch. 5). In a sense, Falco wishes to continue what Yevgeny Zamiatin's character D-503 tells us was "the Great Two Hundred Years War . . . between the city and the village," what Zamiatin sees as a deeply-rooted struggle between literally civilized people, living within city walls, and what such urban and urbane sorts see as "primitive peasants" (We 21; 5th Entry). In another sense, Falcos plan would reenact "Earth's oldest conflicts on the soil of an alien world" (Back cover blurb of 1984 Bantam edn.). The political givens at the opening of Heron recapitulate and epitomize produce a mâshâl of-some crucial moments in human history: the transition "from the wholly rural, hamlet-dwelling, undifferentiated society and self-sufficient economy of the Near Eastern Neolithic of 5000 B.C. and before" to the city-states and proto-empires of early Mesopotamia and Egypt (Kroeber, Anthropology 705; § 286), the creation of the great latifundia in the late Roman Empire (Swain 2.512), the Spartan division into aristocrats, resident semi-aliens (perioikoi), and helots-public slaves (Swain 1.315-16), the reduction of free peasants to serfs with the establishment of feudalism and manorialism in early medieval Europe (Thompson & Johnson 326-29). Closer to home, Heron refers to the establishment of the hacienda and peonage system in much of Spanish America, the estancia and fazenda in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil a system that lasted in some places into the 1990s.³⁶ For their part, the people of Shantih have already planned to settle a new area and move a large part of their population out of danger from the City. In one historical analogy, the People of the Peace resemble some California Indian tribes. A. L. Kroeber notes that the area of "the lower Colorado [River] almost exactly parallels the Nile in valley, flood, silt, and climate; but the historical Cocopa, Yuma, and Mohave tribes, though they regularly farmed the overflow bottoms, never multiplied, urbanized," or grew so urbanely sophisticated that they renounced their "egalitarian primitive democracy" (Anthropology 708; § 287). In perhaps a closer analogy, James W. Thompson and Edgar N. Johnson find it "highly significant that whenever pioneer conditions existed in medieval Europe . . . the peasants stoutly, and generally with some success, resisted manorial organization" (Thompson & Johnson 328).³⁷ Or, most closely

At the beginning of the story, an expedition from the Town has returned with news of a good area to settle in the north. A Town meeting is interrupted by Falco, who commands the Shantih Towners to submit their plans to the government. Lev Shults, a young leader in the Town, says "No," but the Town will send a delegation to the City to negotiate. When the Town delegates try to negotiate rather than just submit information, they are arrested. Among the delegates is Vera Adelson, who is held at Casa Falco under a loose house arrest: i.e., her promise not to escape. There she meets Luz Marina Falco Cooper, Luis Falco's daughter, and the two women become friends. In terms of their given names, "sea light" (Luz Marina) has met "truth" (Vera), and they've gotten along.

Luz is a privileged aristocrat, slated to marry well -probably Herman Macmillan and continue a life of genteel femininity. Looking at her life, she sees "A prison. All Victoria was a prison, a jailhouse. And no way out. Nowhere else to go." And then she thinks of her childhood friend Lev, who has said "No" to her father (29-30; ch. 3).

Luz comes to thoroughly detest Herman Macmillan, but what gets her out of that prison is overhearing her father telling Macmillan the plot to subjugate Shantih and reduce the Shantih Towners to an agricultural proletariat or serfs (65, 91-93; chs. 5 &7).³⁸ Vera refuses to break her promise and escape the City, not even to bring to her people word of the plot against them (93-95; ch. 7). Instead, Luz walks out and brings the news to Shantih and stays with the Townspeople. Falco comes to get his daughter, who refuses to return with him to the City. Macmillan leads his Black Guards toward the Town, and the People of the Peace meet the armed forces of the City in a great demonstration of nonviolent resistance.

Then Macmillan shoots Lev, killing him; Falco grabs a rifle and clubs Macmillan to death; and, in the ensuing melee, seventeen People of the Peace are killed, eight people of the City (138-41; ch. 10).

This is the climax of the novel and the end of Lev's story; if we apply Søren Kierkegaard's definition of the phrase, Lev dies a tragic hero, following the "universal": honorable ideals.³⁹ The rest of the story works out the results of the confrontation and killings. Falco is arrested for killing Macmillan, and the City and Town begin painful and ambiguous negotiations: compromises and more compromises, threatening betrayal of the Town's ideals and "permanent bondage to the City" (144; ch. 10), but promising also that "There won't be forced labor, or 'estates' and all that" (153; ch. 10). We do not learn the results of the negotiations, since the final chapter follows Luz and others from Shantih as they take up again the "Long March" of the People of the Peace and find a place where they can start a new settlement, far from the City.

The narration of The Eye of the Heron is similar to that of Planet of Exile (1966), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), and The Word for World Is Forest (1972). We are told the story from the points of view of the major characters, alternating among Lev (chs. 1, 4, 6, 8), Luz (chs. 2, 7, 10, 11), Vera (chs. 3, 9 [shared somewhat with Falco]), and divided: Luz and Falco (ch. 5), Lev and Luz (ch. 8). But Heron does not move toward the romantic happy ending of the integration of two people in Planet of Exile, nor even the chasten romanticism of Lathe; Heron moves toward the separation of The World for World Is Forest. As in the earlier stories, one of the major point-of-view characters drops out: old Wold dies in Planet of Exile; Haber goes mad from his power-dream in The Lathe of Heaven; Lyubov is killed in the attack on Central in The Word for World Is Forest. But in Eye of the Heron, Le Guin kills off her one male hero: a young, attractive, revolutionary hero. The act of "heroicide" in Heron is significant. Lev dies; Luz and Vera survive, and the future will be with the women and what they represent, and what they represent both complements and opposes what Lev represents.

Lev's death is part of a hard teaching in The Eye of the Heron, and I'm going to ease into the topic with a slightly easier teaching, with a key passage on imperialism Roman imperialism in ancient Britain here from Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness:

Reading Heart of Darkness in 1902, a genteel, white Englishman could balance the "abomination" of Roman (and Belgian and British) imperialism against "the idea" and might be willing to "offer a sacrifice" to that idea, perhaps to the ideal of Western Civilization fulfilled, of course, in a genteel, white Englishman ca. 1902. Nearly a century later, such balancing is itself an abomination. European imperial adventures in Africa "resulted in the most terrible massacres in recent history . . . and finally . . . it resulted in the triumphant introduction of such means of pacification"-mass murder "into ordinary, respectable foreign policies" (Arendt, Origin of Totalitarianism 185; ch. 7). Looking back over the holocausts of the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries, it is clear that the "idea at the back" of imperialism or racial purity can be very dangerous to "sacrifice to."

This is the easy part; what Le Guin asks us to deal with in the life and death of Lev Shults is the danger of good ideas and noble ideals, of the danger in the best in the masculine tradition of striving to heal, improve, perfect the world.

After the arrest of their delegation to the City, the leaders of Shantih prepare for a mass meeting of the Town.

Having grown up in "the Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (LoH 82; ch. 6), most of Le Guin's readers will view positively here acting according to "the spirit, the reasons, and the rules" and will not notice the military metaphors embedded in "campaign" and "tactics," nor object to the idea of reverencing such true hero-philosophers as Gandhi and M. L. King. Middle-aged, sensible, indeed, normative Vera had talked about the stubbornness of the People of the Peace, "And when that meets up with another stubbornness, it can make a kind of war, a struggle of ideas, the only kind of war anybody ever wins" (44; ch. 3). Still, from Rocannon's World on, Le Guin has insisted upon the price of the heroic gesture, and the explicitly Daoist works should get us a little suspicious of spirit, reasons, rules, and conscious technique.

Subtlety being an overrated virtue in art, Le Guin soon gets more explicit.⁴¹ Vera, as in "Truth," has a long conversation with Luz. They start with Falco, the best of the men of the City: "He's a king, a real one," Vera says, "strong of soul," but he's trapped "inside walls that he's been building stronger and higher all his life."⁴² He's also trapped within "the roof and walls of this City that his fathers built as a fortress against the unknown" (Spencer 40). And Luz is "part of that City, part of his roofs and walls, his house, Casa Falco. So is his title, Senhor, Councillor, Boss. So are all his servants and his guards, all the men and women he can give orders to. They're all part of his house, the walls to keep the wind off him." Falco, then, and the men of Victoria City generally, "made a bad mistake." They refuse to "come outside into the rain" (73-74; ch. 5).⁴³ Lev and the men of the Peace have made no such mistake the Town is not "gathered in, walled, protective, like the City" (98; ch. 7), but Vera sees a problem with even such obviously good men, perhaps with all men:

Shortly before the story reaches its violent climax, there is a debate among some of the young people in the Town. Luz wants an end to the talk and rules and fighting and advises flight. "Go north, to the valley you found. Just go. Leave. It's what I did" (113; ch. 8). Now just going was probably a bad idea for the Odonian ancestors of the Anarresti in The Dispossessed; it was probably a bad idea for the European ancestors of Americans: all us "wretched refuse" probably would have done better to stay home, raise hell, and foment an effective revolution. But Luz's advice is followed by a comment by the Narrator indicating why Luz's counsel will not be followed: "They all thought of the same thing: the wilderness. It was as if the wilderness came into the cabin, as if the walls fell down, leaving no shelter" (113). Since "An die Musik" Le Guin has liked the idea of getting those walls down; more relevantly, Luz and Vera have effectively "poisoned the well" on walls: they're prisons, traps; they're what make Falco become a villain; as will become absolutely clear in Always Coming Home, such walls are essential for the evil incarnation of City of Man (see Spencer 40-41).

Luz is eventually answered by a woman, Southwind, whose lover died in the wilderness during the exploration trip north. "'Freedom's won by sacrifice,' Southwind said." And Luz responds, significantly: "I hate that idea, sacrifice!" (115). Lev implies Luz sacrificed herself by coming to warn them of the impending attack. Luz says she has "Not sacrificed myself for any idea! I just ran away don't you understand? And that's what you all ought to do!"⁴⁵ Southwind surprises Lev by agreeing with Luz: "'You may be right,' she said. 'So long as we stand and fight, even though we fight with our weapons, we fight their war'" (115; ch. 8).

Lev is shocked by Southwind's saying "something irresponsible" and "an affront to their perfect unity." He responds by starting a dialog that leads up to his truly seeing Luz and feeling confirmed by her, but one in which Lev is generally wrong and Luz is right:

And Lev stammers and stops, seeing "Praise" in Luz's eyes. Still, on a world named by Luz "Mud," in a life immanent in mud, there's much to be said for denying ideals, rejecting sacrifice, and, when necessary, lighting out for the wilderness (110, 116-17; ch. 8).

Lev holds fast to his ideals and so leads his people to the confrontation with Herman Macmillan's armed thugs. In Luz's words, ". . . Lev stood up there facing the men with guns and defying them and got killed" for the same reason Luz's father killed Macmillan: "Because he was a man, that's what men do. The reasons come afterward" (143; ch. 10). Fighting is fighting and a problem even if one tries to "fight" for peace. Lev and what he stands for will not be at the center of Eye of the Heron as a whole. No man will.⁴⁶

The end of The Eye of the Heron has a group of Towns-folk walking away from both Town and City in a very antiMacho escape. The escape motif here is important. Their jobs done, cowboy heroes can ride off into the sunset or Mad Max can walk and still remain heroes. A hero in Northrop Frye's "second phase of comedy" doesn't transform his "humorous society but simply escapes or runs away from it" (Anatomy 180 "Theory of Myths," essay 3). And from Henrick Ibsen's Nora in A Doll's House (1879) to George Bernard Shaw's Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion (1912) to Gary Trudeau's Joan Caucus (1970s f.) to Thelma and Louise (Thelma & Louise, 1991), at least male authors and auteurs can imply that brave women did well to just walk away from unsatisfactory situations they can't change. Still, both the macho and macha ideal is to stand and fight, or at least return to kick ass, like Rambo or Charnas's free fems (all ironies admitted) in The Furies (1994). Le Guin is doing gutsy cultural work in Eye of the Heron, and elsewhere, getting us to take seriously the option chosen by those who walk away from Omelas. Positively stated, the people of the Peace, as Lev reminds us are "outcasts" and "the children of outcasts," and, as "the Founder" said, "the outcast is the free soul, the child of God." At his most connected with the world, Lev knows that being again outcast, going on yet another long march going north, into the wilderness is the one way his people will be free (14; ch. 1).

In the world of Eye of the Heron, Luz's escape plan is a better idea, but not, emphatically not, a universal truth or ideal. An exodus is an option, a true way in certain times, certain places, not a cure-all. Immanent in the world, one finds only specific courses of action or inaction in specific situations specific ways to go with the Dao; there are no universal rules; all ethics are contextual.⁴⁷

*

At the end of the escape sequence, the Towns-folk find what Luz calls, "a new place . . . . a beginning place." When Andre responds "God willing," Luz answers back, "I don't know what God wants" and takes up some "damp, half-frozen earth": "'That's God,' she said, opening her hand on the half-molded sphere of black dirt. 'That's me. And you. And the others. And the mountains. We're all ... it's all one circle" (176; ch. 11). Luz comments that she really doesn't know what she's talking about here a good Daoist observation; I'll say Luz is talking about mud and immanence, and using an unChristian figure of speech.⁴⁸ In the city of the Lamb, ". . . nothing unclean shall enter." There are no seas or forests or night in the New Jerusalem, and where cleanliness is next to godliness, there will be no mud (Revelation 21.27, 21.2-22.5). The symbols in Heron are very different.

Most generally, as Jewel, "a beautiful, dark woman, tells Lev, Victoria is "a world of shadows" (14; ch. 1), especially the shadows of the wilderness. A more specific symbol is that of the title. After recalling his grandmother's story of her cat, Lev sits on the root of a ringtree and looks at the Meeting Pool, thinking of Lake Serene in the lands of the north he'd helped explore, thinking of mountains he would like to climb, through the mists and rain "into the brightness of the summits." Lev thinks in images of transcendence, and he thinks too much; he is not good at stillness, and "Only for a moment did he find quiet"; but in that moment, "One of the herons walked silently out into the water . . . . Lifting its narrow head it gazed at Lev. He gazed back, and for an instant was caught in that round transparent eye, as depthless as the sky clear of clouds; and the moment was round, transparent silent, a moment at the center of all moments, the eternal present moment of the silent animal" (50-51; ch. 4). In a small epiphany, Lev touches the Dao, sloughs off ego; for a moment he comes "into animal presence"; and "An old joy returns in holy presence."⁴⁹

The other, connected controlling symbol for most of Heron is the ringtree, a tree with a "double life." It begins "as a single, fast-growing seedling," that matures quickly and flowers. The flowers get fertilized, and fold into seeds, all of which drop off, apparently dying, "leaving at last one single seed on a high central branch." The tree withers, and then, some hot autumn afternoon , the seed explodes, sending out "several hundred seedlets" in a circle, and plant competition working until "Ten years later, and for a century or two after that, from twenty to sixty copper-leaved{sic} trees stood in a perfect ring about the long-vanished central stem. Branch and root they stood apart, yet touching, forty ringtrees, one tree-ring." Where the trees of the tree-ring are numerous enough to touch, and live a long time, they "so exhausted they central ground that it might sink and form a hollow, which filled with ground seepage and with rain, and the circle of high, old dark-red trees was then mirrored in the still water of a central pool.⁵⁰ The center of a tree-ring was always a quiet place" (46; ch. 4). It is at such a pool that Lev sees and is caught by the eye of the heron.

The ringtree in Heron corresponds to the rock-pounding circle in Planet of Exile (1966), the Yin-Yang in Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the Circle of Life in The Dispossessed (1974), the heyiya-if in Always Coming Home 1985). It is clearly a symbol of individuality and wholeness; it can have water the favorite element in "the Perennial Philosophy" and among some Native Americans in a still place at a center, a center specifically said to be hollow: the Daoist nothingness, lack, like the hole in the center of a wheel allowing the existence of the wheel. And the Meeting House ringtree is old enough to have at its center the Meeting Pool, with herons: imaging wholeness, an appropriately anarchic society within the world, in touch with nature, the Dao, and animals.

Luz's symbol is mud. She is in good company, and such views are significant for a very important debate one scene of Kulturkampf in our world.

Le Guin sees "Civilized Man" as "climbing up into his own head" and talks of the "soul-fortress" Church "towering over the dark abysms" of all which is not soul: all that can be associated with the complex, "bestial/mortal/World/Hell" (BG 11; Introd.). In Le Guin's correct summary of antiSocial-Gospel Christianity, "The world has no value except as a sort of waiting room or testing ground for the soul of Man, a passage from eternity to eternity" ("Legends " 8). Humans = Man = "the soul of Man." There is another tradition in the West. In the J-Code version of creation, after bringing forth water to "well up from the ground and water the whole surface of the earth the Lord God formed man [ adam] from the dust of the earth [adamah]. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being" (Genesis 2.6-7; Tanakh). I.e., Man = dirt/breath, one thing. Le Guin here stresses the dirt, and adds water.⁵¹

In The Tombs of Atuan, a character describes the people outside of Atuan as "the color of dirt" (TA 18; ch. 2). In The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr tells Heather Lelache that she's brown, and she snaps back, "Shit color." Orr responds with "The color of the earth" (LoH 103; ch. 7). In the Orgota creation myth that is chapter 17 in The Left Hand of Darkness, the ice-shape that creates all life uses soil plus sea-water. As Le Guin's writing career was getting started, other authors had taken earth and added Daoist water rather than the J-Code's air to get humans. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in Cat's Cradle (1963) has as the first foma of The First Book of Bokonon i.e., the initial harmless lie that God got lonely and so made "living creatures out of mud," of which one was man. "Man as mud alone could speak" and asks "What is the purpose of all of this?" God didn't know everything has to have a purpose, but man insists. "'Then I leave it up to you to think of one for all this,'" said God" and went away (117; § 118). In the section "Dyot meet mat" ("God made mud", § 99), the first human gets to sit up and look at creation and says, "Lucky me, lucky mud" and gets to feel pretty insignificant compared to God but mildly important when thinking "of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around." Le Guin might agree that if we must feel superior, an acceptable form might be the expression of gratitude: "I got so much, and most mud got so little" (Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle 149-50). Finally, in Brian Aldiss's The Dark Light Years (1964), Sir Mihaly Pasztor says, "To our way of thought . . . civilization is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta" (44; ch. 5). The statement is made more exact a bit later when Sir Mihaly has it "that civilization was the distance man had placed between himself and everything else . . . ." A minor character offers comfort to a rattled Sir Mihaly by telling him that we humans are "coming away from the mud, away from the primeval slime, away from the animal, towards the spiritual." Since what's rattled Pasztor is the death by torture of one of the wise, dirty aliens of the novel, we sympathize when Pasztor asks "Oughtn't we to have stayed in the mud? Mightn't it be more healthy and sane down there?" (99; ch. 10).

Luz's stress on mud, just before the climax of The Eye of the Heron (117; ch. 8) and almost at its end (176; ch. 11), makes clear what this novel is up to right down to its recurring symbolism. The Eye of the Heron denies even the best forms of masculinist, transcendent idealism in favor of a feminist-inflected immanence, including the necessity, now and then, to get down into the mud.

"Pathways of Desire" (1979)

"Pathways of Desire" enters "into the midst of things" some forty-one days into an anthropological expedition by three Terrans of the Ethnographic Corps of the Space Service to the Ndif people of the planet Yirdo (a moon actually, of the gas giant Uper [CR 180-81]). The story is set in an indeterminate future, but we're told it is eight years after an interstellar Exploratory Survey visited the system containing Yirdo and thirty years after the development of Faster Than Light (FTL) space flight (198). FTL or no, however, the anthropologists are pretty much Terrans like us, and the Ndif are, in several ways, "natives" no different from us.⁵² Incredibly not different biologically: miraculously, totally improbably no different from us biologically. This remarkable biological similarity is not remarked upon by anyone in the story, and that is significant: either (1) we're in the Hainish universe or (2) Le Guin has gotten sloppy with world-building or (3) "Pathways of Desire" isn't SF extrapolation but fabulation. There's no indication we're in the Hainish universe, and Le Guin is firmly in control of her material; and "Pathways of Desire" is indeed the stuff of fable.

The story features the Terran anthropologists: Tamara, a twenty-eight year old dark-skinned "configurationist" (CR 178,188, 190); Ramchandra ("Ram"), a forty-year old male Brahmin linguist from a suburb of Calcutta (181, 207); and Bob: "big, beautiful blond Bob, lean tanned tough Bob, perfect hero of male wish fulfillment {sic}"(176) Bob, God of Ohio, in the formulation I'll offer the student of myths in the group (CR 185). Narration is third-person limited from the point of view of Tamara, giving the vision (and some thoughts) of a woman trained in anthropology, but still willing to judge a youth-based, masculinist culture from the point of view of a "Middle-Aged Woman."

The plot involves a death, a mystery, and a love story, more or less in that order. The death is Bob's. He's been "Sleeping with informants and stuff" and has been challenged to a duel (187). He fights the duel and throws and knocks out his opponent, but not before his opponent stabs him with a poisoned knife. The mystery is how the culture on a planet thirty-one light-years from Earth can be so totally un-alien generally less alien to Bob and Tamara than Ramchandra is alien to them (188-89) and, more specifically, how the Young Ndif language can be a "direct derivation . . . from Modern Standard English" (196). The solution to the mystery is that "Man made the world * * * In his head, between his ears" (192), and "Man," in the case of Yirdo and the Ndif, is Bill Kopman::

So Ramchandra tells Tamara, ending with, "Bill Kopman dreams . . . and the God dances. And Bob dies, and we make love"; for that is the final part of the plot: the romance and love of Ramchandra and Tamara (CR 205).

So, in our universe, the author Ursula K. Le Guin dreams up a universe where young, horny, bored Bill Kopman of, say, Topeka, Kansas, dreams up the moon Yirdo and the Ndif people and develops a language and culture for them, and, lo, they come to be. And three Terrans go to this world and work and solve a mystery, one dies and the remaining two find love.

The plot in "Pathways of Desire" is interesting but not really the point. The point is about story-telling, culture, and teenage boys, about science fiction as a genre, about old women; plus lot about ontology, theories of reality.

I'll start with ontology and work backwards. "Pathways of Desire" is a Hindu version of what Brian W. Aldiss has called a "Shaggy God" story (S.F. Ency. 500). As Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance, the God Shiva brings movement into the cosmos, dancing the worlds into existence.⁵³ Or perhaps the worlds are dreamed, by Indra, or perhaps Krishna or Brahma. Ramchandra asks the question: "Who dreamed the Earth?" He answers only, "A greater dreamer than you or I." In "Pathways," the immediate world is dreamed by a kid in Topeka (or wherever), who created Yirdo "between his ears." This much is a joke, based on the idea of the Universe as a dream of God. But Ramchandra adds a "but" and goes on: "but we are the dreamer, Shakti, and the worlds will endure as long as our desire" (207). Shakti (also Sakti), is the divine mother, sometimes seen as wife to Shiva.⁵⁴ Ram sees himself and Tamara as Shiva and Shakti. As in The Lathe of Heaven (1971), humans are the gods, and, somewhat like George Orr, we can dream worlds.

Part of what's going on in "Pathways" is use of contemporary (capital "T") Theory in which world-creation is mental. Ramchandra says that the Old among the Ndif "seem to be engaged in creating the world. Humans beings do this primarily by means of language, music, and the dance" (197). I.e., we do at least semiconsciously what the god Bill Kopman does mostly unconsciously. This "creating the world" can mean that human beings organize our sense perceptions in culturally determined ways to create the cosmos the ordered universe we deal with; or it can mean that we humans individually or collectively create the universe in our minds precisely in the manner of George Orr. Such world creation is a possibility made plausible by, among other ideas, the "Whorfian Hypothesis" in linguistics and by the idea in quantum theory "that quantum states are not definite until they are observed." As a couple of Greg Bear's characters put it, such quantum states

Fortunately, however, we don't need to get into any modern theories or postmodern / poststructuralist Theory for "Pathways of Desire"; old Indian philosophy is quite sufficient. I shall justify this cop-out from serious Theorizing with a reference to two quotations.

One of the aliens Orr dreams up in The Lathe of Heaven tells him "Speech is silver, silence is gold. Self is universe. Please forgive interruption, crossing in mist" (138 [also 139]; ch. 9). "Self is universe" is the Hindu "Brahman = Atman" equation read from right to left ("Indian Philosophy" 9.316). More immediately relevant, one of the Old Men of the Ndif tells Ram and Tamara, "Nothing is wood, nothing is stone, nothing is water, nothing is blood, nothing is bone; all things are sanisukiarad" (192), where "sanisukiarad" is, I think, the "Not this . . . not that" of Brahman: Being is what's left over after all creation is removed. The "mist" in the Lathe quotation may be the "relative" world of appearances: maya in Indian philosophy, and in the original introduction to "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" (1971).

Indian philosophy is varied and difficult, so I'm going to defer here to a work cited by Le Guin in her "Introductory Note" to King Dog: the Bhagavad-Gita (The Song of God), specifically Lord Krishna's primer for his friend and student Arjuna. Krishna tells Arjuna that Brahman is constant and uncaused, totally Itself. Within an individual, Brahman is the Atman. Brahman as creative energy caused and causes all "existences" to exist.

i.e., the necessary but necessarily delusion-causing forces/matter of the perceived world. It is possible to take "refuge" in Krishna, and "pass beyond Maya," but this passing beyond can be difficult. As embodied Brahman, Krishna describes himself as "veiled" in Maya and hard to recognize. "All living creatures are led astray as soon as they are born, by the delusion that the relative world is real. This delusion arises from their own desire and hatred. But the doers of good deeds, whose bad karma is exhausted, are freed from this delusion * * * [A]t the hour of death, their whole consciousness is made one with mine" (73-74; VII). By following the proper yoga people can "break the chains of desire" and get free "from the terrible wheel of rebirth and death," no longer "a prisoner, / Enslaved by action" and dragged about by our desires (39; II). Krishna denies that God deludes humans. The delusion is our dreams: "You dream you are the doer, / You dream that action is done, / You dream that action bears fruit." The problem is our ignorance and the delusion built into the world that gives us these "dreams." To do right in this system is to strive for the time "When the light of the Atman" in oneself "Drives out our darkness," to "find the place of freedom, / The place of no return"--i.e., the merging with the Real so that one need never again return to the karmic wheel. In being "Absorbed in Brahman" one "overcomes the world" and becomes "Changeless, untouched by evil." Krishna asks of personified Brahman, "What home have we but Him?" (59-60; V).

It may be dangerous to answer a rhetorical question posed by God, but Le Guin has not been shy these last three decades in replying to a transcendent God; among other things, "Pathways" is her more polite answer to a mostly absent transcendent god, and to Ultimate Immanence.

Tamara dreams of Bill Kopman, "Standing in front of me. Sort of filling everything, taking up all the room, so that I couldn't get past him or around him"; she tells Ram the dream, and he has immediate enlightenment. Tamara asks him if anything is wrong, and he responds that nothing is wrong; "Go back to sleep. You talked to God." She asks if "God's name is Bill?", and Ram names God: "Bill Kopman, or Kopfman, or Cupman," anyway, "Bill Kopman, who made this world through his desire" (CR 204). Ramchandra understands this desire very well. He was raised in "The great teaching tradition of the Brahman caste" and knows "Nothing is real" in the world of perception, that all is Maya (181); he is a hunter of "peremensoe"-"Understanding" (191, 195)-and knows that desire is to be transcended. The goal of a Brahmin should the Understanding that allows him to be "Absorbed in Brahman," to never return to the wheel, to go home to God. Not in a story by Le Guin, though.⁵⁶ A widower, Ram returns instead to human love, going to Tamara: "Listen, Tamara, you set me free, your hands free me. And bind me. Tighter to the wheel, never in this life now will I get free, never cease to desire you, I don't want to cease." "Confusion" he finally whispers, "Illusion," and he will yield to it (203). He sees the better wisdom of going with the folly of human relationships. In the speech ending the story, Ramchandra tells Tamara, "I speak my native tongue, because you have brought me home" (207), not home to God, but to a Le Guinian marriage.

Le Guin's concluding gesture in favor of desire should condition, I think, our reading of this whole story.

Tamara's final vision of Bill Kopman is a very negative one: his "blind yearning face before her, filling the world, no way around it, no path"; the last references to him are Ramchandra's reminder that it is highly unlikely he will awake to reality--"Once in a thousand thousand years does a soul wake up"-and a reference to "Bill's wet dreams" (206). Not very dignified in the mind of any reader, and such a description should be especially unsettling for people familiar with Le Guin's work. Victor Hanson fills his world, and is a very negative character in The Beginning Place, as is the world-filling Big Man in the Kesh story "Big Man and Little Man" (ACH 157). Especially in The Lathe of Heaven, a work with obvious connections to "Pathways of Desire," "no way," implies the loss of the Dao. James Bittner, a reader very familiar with Le Guin's work, takes Kopman as an intentionally stereotyped SF fan and relates him to Le Guin's possibly feeling "in the late seventies that her path/way/tao was blocked, and chose then to go on exploring by paths other than science fiction" ("Serpent" 2).

Again, though, Bill Kopman isn't the only one with sexual desires in this story, and the image of the blocked way has been undercut a bit by the entrance of Bob: "The light of Uper haloed his thick fair hair; the importance of his return filled the entire biosphere as the bulk of his body filled the doorway. 'I just got back,' he announced" (186). Again, in my formulation: Bob-God of Ohio, with whom, I think, Le Guin is having some fun. Le Guin may also be having a little bit of fun when Ramchandra tells Tamara solemnly, and thematically, "You must take words seriously. They are all we have" (182); "Words are all we have" is an important idea from modern philosophy, but it's also a line from George Carlin's seriously philosophical and very funny comedy routines on language (most famously "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television").

With these warnings against over-earnestness, let us look at the world Bill Kopman made, and the reactions to it of the three adult Terrans.

The world itself is beautiful: bright sunshine, no rain until after sundown (as in Camelot in Camelot [film version 1967]), consistent warm weather. Food is readily available: "boneless poro meat and the mushy sweet fruit of the lamaba tree," a kind of ready-made "hot dogs and milkshakes" (CR 175). Disease is rare. Socially there is no war, and violence is limited-entirely, as far as we see-to formal knife-duels (one-on-one) among the young men (187), plus some wrestling (188). Social structure is simple: male dominance and division into sex/age groups. I assume infants and girls. We learn of the formal groups of Juvenile Males: nine- to twelve-years old, Young Women: 12-23, Middle-Aged Women: 23-40, Young Men: 13-40. Old Men/Women: anyone over 40. The Juvenile Males run around and play. The Young Men hunt poro, watch the Young Women dance, and have sex with the Young Women. The Young Men also get together and brag about their hunting and sex. The Young Women dance and have sex with the Young Men; they do not have children, because becoming fertile makes one a Middle-Aged Woman (179). In addition to child-bearing, only briefly discussed in the story, the Middle-Aged Women cook and clean and serve communal meals. The Old are mostly invisible, but they have their own house and are developing their own language and dances and myths about "Bik-Kop-Man."

And that's pretty much it. No art. No history. No legends. No family life, no affiliation patterns, just about no customs. Indeed, Bob ends up engaging in sex with quite so many of the Young Women because he looks "just like" the Ndif and he'd be offending local custom to refuse, and "It's practically the only custom they've got" (187). Sleeping around, plus any duels that develop from sleeping around: Bob feels he must reject Tamara's excellent advice to "Beg off" on the knife fight--"We can just move on"--because there is at least the sense of local honor, and a desire for entertainment (188-89). The Ndif also have no manners.

All together "It's a teenage society" of "Locker-room aliens!" (188-89), where ". . . they all talk like Hemingway characters" (185). The most severe judgments of the Ndif are made by Tamara:

Bob objects, "That's missionary talk!" and suggests that the Ndif have become stagnant from lack of environmental challenges, "and they don't have sexual hangups-" Tamara interjects, here, to Bob's annoyance, "That's inhuman" (198-99).

If it is true that we learn to be human, then one might ask at what age most people have learned enough to be judged human, and living in a college town, around the corner from a high school, I'm willing to consider the suggestion that teenagers, especially teenage boys are, ordinarily, "subhuman." Still, the subhumanity of teenage boys is a necessary assumption of the war-making classes (who usually really regret, I think, killing women and children and old people), and I think we should find any judgment of cultural subhumanity suspect. Le Guin problematicizes the "culturally subhuman" issue not only by having Bob (who may be ignored as male wish-fulfillment) object to Tamara's view but also by having Tamara earlier raise the issue herself, "'Why shouldn't there be a South-Sea-Island world?' she argued with herself. 'Why does it seem too simple--phony? Am I a Puritan, am I looking for original sin?'" (181).⁵⁷ The Ndif culture is phony, in a sense, and Tamara's is not just being a Puritan. What is troublesome about Ndif sexuality is not that it is promiscuous but that it's so damn simple. As Le Guin says in "Is Gender Necessary?" (and does not change in the "Redux" version), "Sex is a great mana," and "there is always a code" (166). Even high-school cliques and college dorm floors and fraternities have codes, and it very strange that the Ndif mostly lack one.

And here, I think, we come to Le Guin's serious critique of the Ndif. It's not evil that they lack a sexual code; it's boring. They have a sexist society, but, as patriarchal societies go, they are not an evil people: almost no crime and punishment, no hunger, no war, no domestic violence, no prisons, no genital mutilation, no rape, no incest, no prostitution, no pornography or taxes, no slavery, no economic classes, no capitalist exploitation, no state tyranny, no destruction of the environment, no alienation from one's body or one's community, no loneliness-they're not a people most Americans should criticize on moral grounds. Tamara gets it right when she finds the Ndif "like a stage play, a movie, the island paradise," except it is a movie she doesn't like: "But I don't like them!" she finally asserts. "They're boring! No kinship systems, no social structure except stupid age-grading and detestable male dominance, no real skills no arts . . . once they grow up, they're bored" (184). Boring, however, is only marginally an ethical category. If people have the opportunity to make their lives more interesting--and the Old among the Ndif are doing that quite nicely (rediscovering the Perennial Philosophy)-being boring is only a minor cultural failing.⁵⁸ Degree of interest, however, is a crucial esthetic category. To say a human or a culture is boring is no major accusation; to say that a work of art is boring is to damn it utterly. Bill Kopman isn't a bad boy-we see nothing of his life on Earth-just a lousy author.

"Pathways of Desire" is a relatively "gentle antidote" to the varieties of SF that takes readers thirty-one light-years to find a culture No Different from macho wish-fulfillments that could be set on any southsea island on Earth-or southsea battlefield or Chicago southside street for those who want to Make War, Not Love and romanticize violence.⁵⁹ A classic example of such bad SciFi would be one of the original Flash Gordon movies, where Flash and Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov land on Mongo or Mars and find the Hawk Men and the Lion Men and the Shark Men, but very few significant women and almost no Old Men or anything except White Men.⁶⁰ And everyone speaks English, without even "You wonder how I can speak your language." All that way to Mongo or Mars, and "no difference"! One might conclude from that lack of difference that the culture of the USA in the 1930s (for Flash Gordon) is, in its basics, literally universal. Worse, the imaginative creation of a world without some human group can be a wishing away of the existence of that group; and the imagined subordination of a group can work similarly. In America we lack the word mâshâl, but many writers can still produce "quasi-magical, verbal prefiguring[s] of reality in the shape, for good and for ill, in which the utterer would like to encounter it" (Rabinowitz 320). "Pathways" reminds us of the wishing-away in much SF of non-Whites, the invisibility of the Old, and the reduction of women to servants and playthings.⁶¹

Such SF is not so much conservative as small-minded and imaginatively timid, and it may be "filling the world" of the imagination of many readers and viewers of SF. In that sense there is "no way around it, no path" for SF as an esthetic experience or endeavor. Whether such stories are good or is not the point here; they're legitimately "detestable" to a conscious woman like Tamara; and a truth-telling Old Woman like Le Guin insists they're (eventually) just plain boring to any conscious adult.

*

As in Lathe of Heaven (1971) and in the stories of what I'll present as The Churten Group in Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994), Le Guin in "Pathways" plays seriously with the "strong" version of constructed reality. But this may be the final meaning of "Ndif": It makes no difference how the moon Yirdo or the planet Terra and their cultures got structured; the world is, and the human job is to live in the world: responsibly, consciously, lovingly, and joyously. Tamara and Ramchandra do right to accept and love each other, and, generally, let the world they find be. Where "Pathways" offers a critique it is of the wet-dreams of nerdy adolescent male humans-when, and only when, those wish-fulfillment's are written by grown people, who get them published and/or filmed and receive money for them and thereby profit from providing role models and paradigms for imagining highly destructive realities. When stories go out into the world and encourage boys to live the macho fantasy, and not grow up, and for girls to accept a world ruled by such boys, they are spreading a figurative poison in need of an antidote.

5. "The New Atlantis" (1975)

"The New Atlantis" repeats the Le Guinian pattern of two worlds separated and in communication, but with major differences.

The primary world of the story is a very dystopian West Coast of the United States in the near future: a world that is poor, environmentally degraded, totalitarian, linguistically corrupt-a world edging toward George Orwell's Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), or the more explicitly named United States in Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952) or in John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up (1972; see Suvin 268). The second world of the story is the world of the rising continent, which I'll call "Atlantis"; but note that the story posits "the emergence of new--or, possibly, very old-continents in the Atlantic and Pacific," not just the Atlantic (NA 67-68), plus Charlotte Spivack's correct observation that "the new Atlantis" is also the sinking United States (Le Guin 88). The West Coast world is presented in first-person singular ("I") narration by Belle, the protagonist of the West Coast sections, whose journal we are reading; the Atlantis portions are narrated in first-person plural ("we") by the citizens of the rising Atlantis: what Elizabeth Cummins perceptively labels "the first-person collective voice" (173). Spivack (87-88), and Darko Suvin note the similarity between the alternation between the US and Atlantean sections of "The New Atlantis" and the alternation between Anarres and Urras in The Dispossessed (1974), adding that thematically and politically the associations are between Urras and the US, Anarres and Atlantis (see Suvin 268). Cummins f