The earliest artistic pieces I remember from my childhood are Ray Bolger's narration of The Churkendoose and a performance-I assume at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago-of a dramatized version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes." In addition to a comically Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics in ovo among domestic fowl-the Churkendoose is a chimera of chicken, turkey, goose caused by different birds incubating the egg-The Churkendoose taught tolerance of differences and that an evaluation of people "depends on how you look at things." "The Emperor's New Clothes" teaches the solidly empirical and commonsensical lesson I'll paraphrase as "I see what I see-and will speak my truth to power." I find it disconcerting to realize how much of my approach to the world is contained in the tension between "It depends on how you look at things" and the occasional necessity (for me anyway) to yell out that figurative emperors just are buck, bare-arse naked. We need not resolve this philosophical issue here nor dig into my psychology. I raise the point to give you what support I can for my assertion that I have not studied children's literature, but I take it very seriously.

Ursula K. Le Guin's picture books for children are not propaganda; they do not indoctrinate. Indeed, they are far subtler and "open" in their teaching than, say, the propagation of Christianity in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch{,} and the Wardrobe or Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time-or even the manners lessons in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (see Stevens and Stevens 62-65). More significantly, perhaps, they are generally more subtle-with fewer openly didactic statements-than Le Guin's fantasy and science fiction for older children, young adults, and grownups. Part of the explanation for the subtlety may be Le Guin's maturation as an artist: most of her picture books come late in her career (1988 f.); part, though, may be just Le Guin's good manners. A picture book is a kind of guest in a child's room, and Le Guin's Shevek, as a house guest, "kept out of the ethical mode with some scrupulousness; he was not there to propagandize his host's children" (TD 120; ch. 5).

A study of children's books, though, is a good way to learn what a culture, or an author, thinks most important for getting across to children: not necessarily propagandizing them or indoctrinating them with, but teaching them-with room open for interpretation, for arguing with the texts. A study of Le Guin's picture books gives a useful index to much of the continuity and change in her writing. ² It shows her in a theater of the Kulturkampf where the competition for hearts and minds can be intense but gentle.

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Possibly the most explicit of Le Guin's teaching in her picture books is in Fish Soup, and the main lesson is the generally feminist, or simply sensible, one that children are "shaped by the . . . expectations" held by significant others "of what a child should be."³ There are also more subtle lessons about expectations, reader expectations.

In the story there is a man, the Thinking Man of Moha, and a woman, the Writing Woman of Maho, who are good friends. And that is the entire opening cast: a man and a woman. They live in any world sophisticated enough to have bridges, books, domesticated animals, dishes, dishcloths, shoes, socks, fishing rods, butterfly nets, chess, and caramel pudding-and the illustrator is undoubtedly correct in showing them in clothing and a generalized rural setting appropriate for the USA in the late twentieth century. The Writing Woman lives and makes her books-including binding them-in a "messy house, where the mice flew through air," literally, "and the cats collected furballs as big as pillows in every corner," but do not hunt the flying mice. The Thinking Man lives in a house he keeps "neat and clean," with no cats, no mice, and "only an old cow in the garden, and she was a clean cow" (1-4 & passim). The woman makes a decent enough fish soup; the man is competent to make a full meal. The two friends meet frequently and engage in animated conversation (2-6).

The «inciting action» for the story is a conversation in which the Thinking Man tells the Writing Woman that he thinks "that it would be nice if we had a child." She wants to know "Whatever for?", and the man replies that "It{sic} could run back and forth between our houses and carry messages for us when we're busy." The woman notes she's quite competent to carry on her own communication with the man; so the man suggests that "A child . . . could finish the caramel pudding," which the Woman can also do, and does. But "The man paid no attention. His mind was fixed on the flutter of a child's dress as she ran, and the twinkle of her feet" (7-8).

The woman leaves the man's house without offering to help him with the dishes "knowing that he did not like the way she did it" and preferring "to wash them himself." On the way home she sees, or almost sees, "the flutter of a little red dress before her on the road," and a child's footprints; and at home the cats and the flying mice tell her "She's here . . . she's here!" What "she" is, though, is just "a little red dress" and "two little shoes and socks." The woman asks where the rest of the child might be, and is answered with only a sigh (8-10).

Within the next couple of days, the woman's friend comes to Maho to see her, and the woman tells him, "The kind of child that might be useful is a boy," giving the man the chance to ask "Whatever for?" and the woman the one, very utilitarian response, "He could go fishing for us . . . . We never have enough fish soup." The man «harumphs» back, "I'll fish for myself . . . thank you!" and leaves without offering to help with the dishes, "knowing that she only washed them when all the bowls and spoons were dirty." On his way home, he sees "a small, quiet person with an angling rod for the trout and a butterfly net for the flying fish"-but he pays no attention to the child (13-15).

When the Writing Woman next comes to visit the Thinking Man, the man tells her how he was fishing and saw "The boy that fishes" fishing, and catching three more than the man. "I was writing this morning," the woman responds, "and that girl kept sweeping up the dust, till the cats all hid and the mice sneezed." The man doesn't want the boy catching the man's fish; the woman doesn't want the girl "fussing about" her house. He suggests they trade (16). The woman suspects a trade won't be very easy, but doesn't argue against it; and when she comes home the cats inform her, "He's here . . . he's here!" She soon spots the mice in a birdcage hanging from the rafters, "eating barley and murmuring happily." After some thought, the woman acquiesces to caging the mice but states the rule that pet flying mice must be fed daily, and their cage cleaned out once a week. She is answered by a giggle from the pantry (19).

Meanwhile, back at the "neat and tidy house at Moha," the Thinking Man is finished very carefully cleaning up his kitchen and enters his other room-to find it very untidily rearranged to be the proper mise en scène for a story of how "brave people crossed the sea to go exploring in the wild mountains." After some thought, the man acquiesces to the disorder, but states the rule that after play everything must be put "back just so" (20-22).

The next morning, the Writing Woman finds a new room to her messy house, with a boy coming out of it. She wishes him good morning, and he returns the words, asking if there is any "soup for breakfast." There is none in the pot, so the boy goes out fishing. He returns with fish, which the woman cooks into fish soup, while the boy washes dishes, clears a spot on the table, and sets it for their meal. Allowing the possibility of such a good little boy, the only unusual thing here is that "as he ate the soup, he began to grow, and he grew to quite enormous size . . . . And the house seemed to be quite full of him, so that the woman felt there was hardly room for her" (23-24). Over the next little while, his growth slows but continues, distracting the woman and making it inconvenient for the boy to move around (25).

The boy is about to "go do something useful," as the rather exasperated woman asks him to, but before he can leave for fishing, the Thinking Man of Moha shows up, with an animated "little red dress and a pair of shoes and socks." He asks concerning the girl, "What's wrong with this child? . . . Why isn't there more of her," and notes with some frustration, "There's certainly enough of him!" And then the climax of the story:

Which brings them to the girl, about whom the man said he didn't expect too much.

At which point the girl appears (28-29), and there is a brief dialog on whether or not the girl can fish. She can but doesn't like fishing; she likes to climb trees, and climbs a nearby apple tree "right to the top"-well, almost to the top, as drawn-and tosses down an apple for each of them. The adults think the kids will do, and the kids think the same of the grownups. "So they all lived at Maho and Moha, in and out and back and forth across the hills{sic}. The woman's house got a little neater, and the man's house got a whole lot messier." The story closes by telling us all four of the human characters "learned how to cook excellent fish soup" (31-32).

Necessarily left out of my account have been the illustrations, and that is unfortunate: at least two of them catch very nicely the tone of Fish Soup. This is important. Part of what keeps Le Guin's work almost always teaching works and not Sister Ursula Explaining It All is a sly sense of humor, the mature comic sense that comes from having an idea of one's place in the universe. This comedy is caught especially well in an early illustration (2-3) of the Writing Woman and the Thinking Man sitting and talking and "waving their spoons at passing mice"-although the Writing Woman is relatively sedate at the moment pictured. Mice are in the air, except for one, either checking out a narrow space or trapped between books, and a second who sits like a miniature gargoyle at the top of a stack of books watching the Thinking Man gesticulate. The table is piled high with books, whose titles include the Oxford Elvish Dictionary, Thpeaking Thornish, Kitty Lit: A Treasury of Cats' Favorite Bedtime Stories, Little Mouse [on the Prairie], Logic Made Difficult, and Lorenzo Bean Goes Boating, this last one named after Le Guin's cat. The final illustration doesn't show any humans, just four mice-as much characters in the story as the humans-performing a tight-rope walk in their circus, watched intently by an audience of very innocent looking cats (32).

The MORAL of Le Guin's fable is, of course, what is identified in the Summary on the copyright page: children are "shaped" by the expectations of their care-givers. Much less than in this story, of course, and much less than many adults flatter ourselves by thinking-but children are shaped by our expectations quite enough that we must be careful and mindful in our expectations for them. But the story also plays nicely and far more subtly with other expectations, and I wish to emphasize them.

First, note that the Thinking Man is from Moha and the Writing Woman from Maho. The place names associated with the characters should not, but may, violate our expectations: "All female names," as Ramchandra reminds us in "The Pathways of Desire" (1979), "end in 'a.' That is a cosmic constant established by H. Rider Haggard" (CR 183). Rationally, there is no more reason to associate a male with Maho and a female with Moha than to assume the male lead in a realistic story should come from Chicago and the female lead from Atlanta; but some of us, quite unconsciously may so irrationally assume, and this initial minor reversal is useful. Whether readers, especially young readers, associate thinking with men and writing with women is more serious, but much of the rest of the story involves fairly straightforward and highly useful «gender benders» and reversals.

The messy house-keeper is the woman; the neat one is the man. The relatively messy child who tells a story of heroic exploration is the girl; the neat, relatively quiet child is the boy. The directly useful child is the fishing boy; the less domestically useful child is the tree-climbing girl. The woman doesn't scream at the sight of a mouse, not even many flying mice. The man is a competent cook; the woman can make fish soup, but that seems about it. The woman works with her hands binding books as well as writing them; the man's work, thinking, is less manual. The man wants a child, and a girl-child at that; the woman is not very keen on the idea at first, but then prefers a boy. And the whole group learns to cook fish soup. Domesticity, readers are taught, is a major concern of human life-immanent living in the world-but domesticity is not encoded on the sex chromosomes, nor is the desire for children. Simple observation and common sense ought to teach us that parenting isn't an inherited trait in humans, but experience and common sense are not sufficient for a lot of us to learn, so presenting the idea in a story and pictures is a good idea. We don't have the extreme here of Shevek's careerist mother, Rulag, and parental father, Palat (in The Dispossessed), and this is appropriate; still, a child can learn from Fish Soup that a father might want a daughter, and that a good woman might not be enthusiastic about the idea of having any children, and, if she must choose, might want a son.⁴

Also of interest, the mother and father figures are «just friends» and emphatically not married or romantically or erotically involved, or living together. Within the conventions of most children's literature, the point would be muted, but still it is clear that one possible and good female/male relationship is friendship and that the "just" in the adult expression «just friends» may underrate friendship. In Fish Soup, friendship is a strong enough bond for a kind of two-house but two-parent family. And from the tests, so to speak, of the caged mice and the messed up room, it looks like the two adults will make good parents: they think before they react to what the kids have done; they lay down reasonable rules that let the kids do what they want, within limits. In any event, the kids accept the parent-figures even as the parents accept the kids, and we can assume they'll all live and love happily ever after, or until they die. Properly understood, traditional family values can be achieved in nontraditional families, and parents don't need to be married. Whether or not nonmarital sex producing children is a good idea just isn't covered: the creation of the kids in this story is totally asexual.

In addition to the central moral of not expecting too much of boys and too little of girls, there is important imagery with the boy becoming a giant and the girl remaining invisible. In The Food of the Gods . . ., H. G. Wells generally privileges the huge size of the new race of young giants (Elkins 808-09), and the usual view I've encountered in American society is that parents generally and mothers in particular should be happy to be overshadowed by any children they have (especially sons) who become figurative «giants on the Earth». The Writing Woman, on the other hand, is realistically not pleased to have a house quite so "full of him" (my emphasis) "that the woman felt there was hardly room for her" (24). In The Beginning Place, Le Guin problematicizes kids' sacrificing themselves for their mothers, and in Big Man in Always Coming Home, Herman Macmilan in Eye of the Heron, and Bill Kopman in "Pathways of Desire," Le Guin presents very negative versions of male figures filling the world. ⁵ In Fish Soup, Le Guin suggests mothers ought not to sacrifice themselves for their sons: such altruism is a bad idea for the mothers, and it can be very uncomfortable for a son (24-25).

The girl's invisibility relates to Alice Sheldon's "The Women Men Don't See" (1973), which Le Guin and Brian Attebery anthologized in The Norton Book of Science Fiction.⁶ The motif also relates to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952). In all these cases, part of the idea is that some people count and others don't, and that people who don't count in the world-have no clout or importance-are figuratively and sometimes literally invisible to those with power and status. In Fish Soup, the Thinking Man wanted a child and a girl child, but had not-either consciously or unconsciously-expected enough of her. He had to be reminded that he wanted more than "the flutter of a child's dress . . . and the twinkle of her feet" (8), even as the woman wanted both more and less than a perfect fisherboy.

Little boys should not be expected to be godlike giants in training; they should be small enough to hug. Little girls should be expected to be whole human beings, and should be encouraged to follow their own bents and knacks, not conform to stereotypes. And everyone should learn basic cooking skills and learn to fit into a world where cats and fantastic flying mice have an important place in the story, and the inhabitants of civilized Cities of Men do not.

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Le Guin's first published science fiction story was "written in 1963, published as 'Dowry of the Angyar' in 1964 and as the Prologue of . . . [her] first novel, Rocannon's World, in 1966" (WTQ 1). It is "Semley's Necklace": a science fiction version of a Nordic-style fairy tale, where a beautiful, young, golden-haired noble woman, of more courage than wisdom, against advice goes on a quest for the great treasure of her family. Her quest takes her on the back of a tiger-sized winged cat to see her old, alcoholic father, and from there she goes among elf-like creature (the Fiia) and among troll-like troglodytes (the Gdemiar, or clayfolk). The industrial, acquisitive, hierarchical, oligarchic-if somewhat colonial/telepathic-sexist troglodytes take the young wife on a strange overnight journey. She comes to a museum of a high-tech culture and gets back her family's necklace and returns to the cave of the clayfolk and her windsteed, she thinks, the next day. And returns home-to arrive, of course, many years later: the Gdemiar took her in a Nearly As Fast as Light space ship to another star system, and the folk motif of one night = many years is rationalized by the time dilation experienced at relativistic speeds.

In her headnote to "Semley's Necklace" in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Le Guin says she used that story to open her collection "because I think it's the most characteristic of my early science fiction and fantasy works, the most romantic of them all." She finds her stylistic progress, even as of 1972, to have "been away from open romanticism . . . from this story to the last one in the volume," "The Day Before the Revolution." Le Guin notes, though: "I'm still a romantic, no doubt about that" (WTQ 1). In Roland Duerksen's term, Le Guin is among the "Critical Romantics," in the radical tradition of William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats: Romantics who saw poetry working in the world and politically relevant, for whom imagination could shape the world. In Le Guin's development that stance remains consistent, as do some story elements.

In Le Guin's 1992 picture book A Ride on the Red Mare's Back, a father takes his son hunting for the first time, and the son is stolen by trolls. The father despairs, and, as the flyleaf note puts it, "because there is a baby to mind," the mother "must stay in the cottage." So the third child, the oldest, the daughter, went on a quest to find her brother, walking through the winter of the North. As in many children stories (as my colleague, Anita Wilson assures me), a heroic child will venture where adults cannot or will not, even as children, in tales for children, are often smarter than the grownups.

The girl takes with her in one pocket "the scarf she had made for her brother, and the wooden knitting needles that her father had also made for her, and the rest of the ball of yarn. In the other coat pocket she put the end of a loaf of bread that her mother had baked that morning." And in her hand she carries "the only toy she had, a wooden horse that her father had carved and painted for her" (13-14; § 1). The girl asks the horse directions and goes the way its head points. Fearfully walking onto a bridge, she encounters her first troll: ". . . over the side of the bridge, from underneath it, a great, long arm came reaching, and a great, wide hand groped toward her" (19; § 2). The girl invokes aid from the toy horse and it transforms, in a familiar motif, into "a real horse, full size, bright red, with a bridle and saddle of flowers, and bright, fiery eyes!" (20-21; § 2). In answer to the troll's question, "Who's that stamping on my bridge?" the horse names herself: "Me! The red mare!" (22; § 2). The little girl asks the troll, "Where did your brothers take my brother"-no troll sisters mentioned-and the troll demands payment for the information. The little girl gives the troll her "mother's bread," and the troll tells her "The boy's in the High House" (22-23; § 2).

"'I know the way to the High House,' the red mare said. 'But it's a long way. We must come there tonight and bring your brother away before the dawn, for I have only this one night with you" (23; § 3).

They arrive at the High House, a mountain, wherein dwell the trolls. The red mare diverts most of the trolls, getting them to chase her, while the girl slips into the mountain; she must bring out her brother before dawn because the trolls "will all go back underground at the first light . . . lest they be caught in sunlight and turned to stone." And, again, the red mare has only this one magical night (27; § 3).

"The room was huge, like a cave," where the trolls live; and it is a mess, with troll-children of various sizes running around, smashing toys and furniture and playing, significantly, King of the Mountain. "And far across the room four or five troll-children were fighting over a toy of some kind, or perhaps something to eat. . . . She looked at them and saw that one of them was not a troll-child, but her brother" (31; § 4). An asexual or androgynous old troll-the singular pronoun throughout for trolls is "it"-challenges the girl, and there follows a serio-comic brief episode where the little girl first intends to stab the troll's hand with a knitting needle if it tried to grab her but ends up giving the troll the knitting needles and yarn. The girl tries to teach the troll to knit, "but the old troll was too stupid and impatient to listen to her," growling "I know how!" (34; § 4).

The adult guard diverted, the girl goes to rescue her brother, telling him that their parents grieve for him. He doesn't want to be rescued: "I like it here. I can do anything I like here. I don't ever go to bed. I can eat rats! I can kick people! I'm going to be a troll when I grow up, and be stronger than anybody, and kill things!" (34; § 4). On her way out, the girl remembers the scarf she'd knitted for her brother and gives it to him. He takes it, says he's cold, and asks to go home; his sister may have managed to communicate with him better than their parents communicate with each other (Wilson). In any event, the girl carries her little brother out, nearly at dawn (36; § 4).

Outside, the trolls have roped and managed to get the reins of the red mare. They avoid her hooves and teeth, "But the biggest troll came closer to her from behind, holding a long stone knife" (37; § 5). The girl cries "Look out!" and the red mare moves to attack the big troll-when day dawns and the trolls are turned to stone. "In the midst of the stones a little red thing lay on the snow. . . . Its paint was chipped and one shoulder was battered, but . . . [the red mare toy] was not broken" (40; § 5).

The girl knows they "must go home," but the boy asks "Where is home?" All they can see is "white snow, grey rock, black forest." Plus "a thin, fine, silvery thread, delicate as a spiderweb" (41; § 5)-a thread Wilson suggests we equate with parent/child love. The thread leads them home, ultimately, but most directly to the bridge, where the troll-grateful for the bread-lets them pass without incident (42-44; § 5); the girl has made a friend.⁷

Arriving home, they are welcomed with quiet joy by their sleepless parents. The father had been whittling and gives her a toy: a small, as-yet-unpainted little horse, the red mare's colt (46; § 5).

I was taught in graduate school that "The first duty of a critic is to state the obvious," but I'll try not to belabor it. In "Semley's Necklace" we have a heroine on a quest, involving trolls-the Gdemiar are called "trolls" by the politically incorrect Ketho (WTQ 18)-and the heroine gets what she wants, at a price. The story is a beautiful exercise in irony and the science-fictionalization of folk motifs, but, like its folk ancestors, it teaches some lessons. Headstrong youngsters should listen to good advice; headstrong noblewomen should avoid quests; and headstrong people generally should avoid quests motivated mostly by pride; plus more recent ideas about the unintended effects of using technology (and old cautions against trusting trolls). In A Ride on the Red Mare's Back, the young and poor heroine does what she must do and, in league with the forces of nature and magic, she does it successfully.⁸ She does get home; which is important, since Le Guin, in some moods, is competitive with both E.T. in the Los Angeles suburbs and Dorothy of Kansas and Oz in stressing "There's no place like home": "True journey is return." Still, the girl gets home after an adventure and profits from her adventure. The costs are some bread, a pair of knitting needles, and some yarn. The profit is getting back her brother, her parents' gratitude, and a toy colt for the toy red mare.

Semley gets her necklace, has a great adventure, and demonstrates determination and courage that are admirable. She loses a big chunk of her life, her family, and possibly her mind (WTQ 22). Semley mostly loses; the young heroine of A Ride on the Red Mare's Back mostly wins. Semley, I'd say, teaches in part the good, conservative, folklore message of Caution, especially for girls and young women. A Ride on the Red Mare's Back teaches having the courage to do what one feels one must do, the necessity for small sacrifices for larger goals, and that even a troll can become one's friend, if one will share and give gifts and not hold fast to possession s. The story also teaches that trolls are mostly nasty and that little boys might well find the freedom of troll-life highly attractive. Especially the parts about being King of the Mountain and eating rats and hurting and killing people. But that's just a little boy's thing, and with some kindness (and maybe a gift), he can be brought around to a more loving attitude and brought home. The story teaches little girls to trust their abilities, to trust the natural order of things, their luck. And it teaches little boys that a male-bonding hunting ritual with dad might have its dangers.

*

Solomon Leviathan's ... Trip. . . tells the story of two friends and philosophers-a giraffe and a boa constrictor-who live on a forest-covered "runcible island" far from "the coast of Kansas." I.e., they live in a fairly typical Le Guinian arboreal world, just more clearly fantastic than most. Kansas has no more coast than Bohemia outside of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and if, as I, you looked up "runcible," you found it's a nonsense word coined by Edward Lear, but one that sounds decorous in a world inhabited once by such intellectual talking animals as Le Guin's boa constrictor and giraffe (7).

For no particular reason I can spot, the giraffe decides that the sun's being "halfway to noon" is the proper time to go down to the sea. So they do, and I think even grownup readers accept their going: as Joseph Campbell has shown in great detail, that's what the Hero does; he leaves his mundane palace or village or whatever and goes off to find a portal to the world of adventure, where he might find himself (Hero ch. 1, esp. §1; also pp. 245-46). There are some significant differences here between the boa constrictor and the giraffe versus the usual fairy-tale hero. First, we have two central characters starting out, not one, and «Who is the sidekick to whom?» is not a relevant question; they are equals. Second, they are both vertebrates, but otherwise the giraffe and boa constrictor don't share much biology with each other, and they-or the boa at least-differ from human readers more than we get in most fairy tales. We adults are certainly used to talking animals in folklore and more realistic stories (Le Guin's own City of Illusions for one example), but they are usually Helpful Animals, not our hero. Even "The Frog King" begins from the point of view of the human princess, not that of the frog, and the frog is, of course revealed to be "no frog but a king's son with kind and beautiful eyes" who "had been bewitched by a wicked witch" (Grimm's [20]). Third, the hero is usually a hero, gendered male; only some occasional pronouns indicate the genders of the giraffe and boa constrictor, and they are male and female respectively (10, 14). And finally, the boa and giraffe are both well-bred intellectuals. When the giraffe asks the boa "Where does your tail begin?", he asks politely and briefly justifies the question. The boa constrictor responds, intellectually, "I am an indivisible entity to which such hypotheses are irrelevant" (8). And just a bit later the giraffe explains that, contrary to folklore, he can talk rather better than he can see (or walk) because he is "an intellectual giraffe" (10).

Arriving at the sea, the giraffe sees the horizon and thinks of the boa constrictor's tail: even as it's difficult to tell where a boa constrictor's tail starts and stops, so it is difficult to determine "where the sea stops and the sky starts, or the other way round" (10). They find a boat, and the giraffe wants to go to sea; the boa is less enthusiastic but goes along, apparently out of friendship (12). The boa likes the boat, called Serendipity in the picture on p. 13, and the two friends float off with some parody of sailors' jargon. And then stop, or, more exactly, go back and forth with the waves and backwash, "not getting anywhere in particular" ([14]). So the boa bites the boat, lowers herself into the water, and begins "to whirl herself rapidly," except, of course, for her head, as the Narrator is careful to tell us. The Narrator solemnly adds that "This is how all big ships move themselves, although instead of a boa constrictor they use a rotary screw" (15).

There is nothing ahead of them "except that mist where the sky and sea meet," so the two greet the horizon. "Ahoy, horizon!" they yell. And, as adult readers will guess, "The horizon did not answer" (15). The hawk's flight is bright "on the empty sky," the Creation of Éa says in the Earthsea headnotes (my emphasis); "Heaven and Earth are not humane" as Lao Tzu gets to teach us in the headnote to The Lathe of Heaven, ch. 8.⁹ The friends do not take well to the silence of the horizon, nor to its staying always ahead. "We shall pursue it," the boa constrictor replies "grimly." The giraffe wants to know what they'll do with the horizon when they reach it. "Order it to strike sail," the boa replies, "Board it. Conquer it!" Sex and gender go deep, but speciation goes deeper: the hunter-killer female boa constrictor is more aggressive than the herbivorous male giraffe. And such hubris will bring its nemesis in stories, even in stories in worlds without gods: the delightful day at sea is interrupted by a storm (16). Not being able to bail, the friends must drink the saltwater that sloshes into the boat.

After the sea calms and all is going well-except for the discomfort of having swallowed all that bilge water-the friends and their boat are swallowed by a sperm whale.¹⁰ They recognize that it's a whale because the giraffe knows a relevant whale Rune (with a capital "R"), and with a little empirical investigation they figure out they've been swallowed. Having analyzed their position in the world, they reassert their identities as philosophers and determine on action: their duty as philosophers is "to wait philosophically for whatever may happen" (22). They wait. The whale goes to the Arctic, and then south and whatever direction takes whales "within sight of the coast of Switzerland," where he-it's a male whale-sounds. The whale goes very deep, down to the realm of photoluminescent fish, who speak a language unknown even to whales, though the boa constrictor claims to know it (24). Readers of Le Guin might picture this place under the sea as an area quite like that from which arose Atlantis in The New Atlantis. In terms of plot the (relative) silence of the depths of the sea is significant because the whale hears the two friends talking and eagerly greets them (25).

The whale is, naturally, Solomon Leviathan, who has been host, moving backward in time, to "a whole boatload of sailors," in a story I don't recognize, "a little wooden puppet fellow" (Pinocchio), a baron whose name Solomon Leviathan "didn't catch," but probably Baron Munchausen, and "that fellow who started it all-the one who argued so much," who is the one name Solomon Leviathan remembers: Jonah. This name leads to others; Solomon introduces himself, and we learn that the giraffe is Damon and the boa constrictor Ophidia.¹¹ And the exchange of names leads to Solomon's question of where Damon and Ophidia were going.

The giraffe and the boa constrictor are silent for a short while. At last the giraffe said, "Mr. Leviathan, you are older than anyone in the world, but because even you have never reached the horizon does not mean that it cannot be reached" (26). Solomon denies being the eldest: there's a much older redwood tree, and "an elephant in India who is the first elephant that ever was. Adam named him. Lord Buddha rode him. He might know about the horizon" (27-28).

Taking an unnarrated shortcut through the Suez Canal, the friends arrive in India and Solomon makes his presence noisily known to the Eldest, who is known simply by the Adamic form: Elephant (28).

Solomon explains the situation, and Elephant explains, with what sounds to my ear as Ekumenical exactness, that the horizon "is an effect formed by the curve of the earth, the mist on the sea, and the beholding eye. The horizon is not a place. It does not exist. I do not know how to get there. If I were you, I would simply go ahead. It seems the best way." Solomon objects that "The horizon must exist," in the sense that it's their goal: "If we want to get to it, why then, it is the thing we want to get to"-which only reinforces Elephant in his view that they should just keep going. And, in case they run into fog-which would keep them from perceiving a horizon-just imagine a horizon (29).

The upshot of the story is that "The three friends have already been around the world; they have not caught up with the horizon yet, but they are having such a good time trying that they intend to go right on" ([32]).

*

It's going to sound like a parody of presentation titles at academic conferences, but I'd like to stress in Solomon Leviathan a bit of ontology and intertextuality, plus a couple variations on some romantic themes generally and Le Guinian in particular.

I suggest above that Solomon Leviathan fits in with Le Guin's atheism in making the obvious and incontrovertible point that if you hail the horizon you will get no answer. There need to be no agency or transcendence in the universe besides the fondness of authors for irony that Damon and Ophidia's dismissal of storms as "Childish stories" precedes, but does not cause, a storm at sea.

But there is in Solomon Leviathan's world, Jonah.

Looking from the outside into the world of Solomon Leviathan's ... Trip, few fundamentalist Christians would be happy. In the world of this story Jonah was swallowed by that "great fish"-or aquatic mammal-Solomon Leviathan. Still, Jonah has the same ontological status in Solomon Leviathan's ... Trip as Pinocchio. Even as a great fan of the Book of Jonah, I have no problem with Jonah as a fiction. In our world's history, it seems that there was a prophet named Jonah, son of Amittai, and he was important enough to rate mention in the Bible (2 Kings 14.25). There may also have been a historical King Arthur or a King Lear (or Lir), and I'm quite certain there was a historical King Richard III. For critics and children, though, the main or only existence of these characters is in stories, plays, movies-art. If the Book of Jonah is factual, then God worked a great mâshâl in history in trying to teach Jonah a lesson in mercy. For us, though, two millennia and more later, what remains is the mâshâl of the story, The Book of Jonah. So, as a practical matter, Jonah does have the same ontological status as Pinocchio: the main character in a teaching story.

Just to point it out is to overread, but it is significant that to Solomon all Jonah is is "that fellow who started it all," the bad precedent of people allowing themselves to get swallowed by Solomon, and Jonah is "the one who argued so much" (25). In any event, Solomon Leviathan has no memory of being "appointed" by God to swallow Jonah, sound, and eventually vomit him up on dry land close to Nineveh. As biblical missions go, Jonah's is, arguably, the most worthy: bringing salvation to Nineveh with no blood spilt at all. The mission from God, if it happened, though, is eminently unmemorable.

A great journey to reform a world city isn't what you have in Solomon Leviathan's ... Trip. Salvation isn't the goal. Indeed, neither is the goal that of Ulysses in Tennyson's version: the Romantic Quest by the Romantic Hero who (a) thinks he might actually find something Out There, and (b) just can't stay still. Solomon Leviathan suggests that a more proper goal for people (including all philosophical animals) is a horizon: a goal given form by human perception as much as anything Out There, a goal given meaning totally by human beings giving it meaning. "If we want to get to it, why then, it is the thing we want to get to." More important, the journey of the three friends is a true journey because, first, it necessarily returns to its starting point-a feature of traveling full-circle around a globe-and, second, because the three friends in their quest are enjoying not only a macrocosmic immanence in their cyclical movement (and in their being embedded in Solomon) but a microcosmic one as well, in their domesticity. Long ago the three friends started their journey in and on the sea (a good symbol of immanence) and they continue with their routine:

* * *

A Visit from Dr. Katz (1988) is described on the flyleaf as "a fun and gently soothing book, just right for the child who knows the boredom of a day sick in bed." It is also as close to Ars gratia Artis as Le Guin gets in the books I've looked at, and the one aimed at the youngest audience; or, more exactly, it is "Art for the sake of fun" and cheering up a sick child: a worthy goal.

Marianne is a little girl, not described in the text but imaged in Ann Barrow's illustrations as young school-age, well under ten, and the book itself seems suitable for a pretty young audience: the longest and most problematic word is "machine-gun," and the book would work best read aloud, with the pictures resolving for a young child the riddle of Dr. Katz. Barrow draws Marianne's mother as a blond woman, briefly seen at the beginning of the book, and draws Marianne in a style that reminds me of the Fun with Dick and Jane books when I was a child, just drawn with more skill. Marianne as pictured is neither fat nor thin; she is cute but not what adults "Ohh" and "Ahh" over as "a beautiful child." She has a room of her own, and a nice room, and looks to me in the illustrations as a "generic White girl," upper-middleclass, Germanic or English in "extraction," as people used to say.

Marianne is sick with the flu and upset almost to crying by having to spend the day in bed. Her mother tells her to "just lie down" (she's already in bed), and she, the mother, will "see if Dr. Katz will come in and see you." Marianne "lies quietly waiting" and is rewarded with the arrival of Dr. Katz.

"Dr. Katz came in on eight white paws, and goes two different directions. Dr. Katz has long white whiskers." If the child is being read to, the riddle here is, What sort of doctor has eight paws, long white whiskers, and can walk in two different directions? Showing the picture reveals that Dr. Katz is two tomcats: a long-hair and a short-hair. The older and more affectionate is Philip, the long-hair; the younger and more active is Lorenzo, called The Bean. Marianne gets Philip and then The Bean up on the bed with her; they warm her and wash each other; and then Marianne goes to sleep. The story ends with a picture of Marianne and Dr. Katz from the mother's point of view: "After a while Marianne's mother looks in. Marianne and Dr. Katz have all gone to sleep. One of them is still purring."

Again, this is a narrative without much of an agenda, but it still teaches; and it teaches parents as well as children.

First, the opening assumption is that "The healthy animal is up and doing," as the ethologists say-and even sick young animals will want some action. Marianne doesn't want to stay in bed: it is a given that a girl wants to act, not just be still. But as Ai and Estraven agree, "Sick men take orders" (LHD 218; ch. 15)-and so do (good) sick children. They take orders, don't cry at an inevitable inconvenience, and can punctuate their activity (in good Daoist fashion) with occasional stillness and wait quietly. Good children also don't need mother with them all the time, not even when they're sick; and they learn how to deal with pets. When Marianne wants The Bean, she doesn't get out of bed and grab him but wiggles her toes under the covers. Fanatically consistent theorists might chide Marianne for colonizing cats by learning that they're «hard wired» to pounce on such wiggling motions; most adults would be thrilled that a kid has learned that you don't have to force cats to come to you.

Mothers as well as children learn a lot from what is not in this story: no doctors other than the cats, no medicines, no vaporizers, no special treatment except rest and sleep. Aside from wanting the mother to have left some water for Marianne, my physician would be happy with the omissions here. Even as the child can learn to work with the cats and not force them, so mother and child can learn to deal sensibly with a problem like a mild flu: basically, no high-tech attempts to force nature. We can note that such a sensible approach to dealing with-not fighting-the flu is something of a luxury, but the lesson to be learned from that is that it is a messed-up society that encourages people to go to work sick and sometimes forces them to send their children to school when those kids should be in bed.

*

Fire and Stone (1989) fits more obviously into Le Guin's canon because it features a rather realistic country "Once upon a time" and a beautifully drawn village that could be on Sattins Island in "The Rule of Names": your basic old-world village, but with a dragon. There are also two wise children-a chubby girl and a short boy-and a stubborn, somewhat dense (male) mayor. The two children, Min and Podo, have learned cooperation in the water avoiding the dragon's fiery breath: plump Min helps keep short Podo from sinking; short Podo helps keep plump Min mostly under water.

The dragon attacks the village crying out "in its dreadful voice-'RRRAAAHHHX! RRRAAAHHHX!" And our two featured children work out between them that it might be calling for "rocks! rocks!" Mr. Goose, the Mayor, wants them to keep quiet; instead the children bravely throw rocks "straight up in the air." The dragon catches and eats the rocks. "DO NOT FEED THE DRAGON!" The Mayor shouts, but everyone does. The dragon lands and the villagers feed it rocks and more rocks until "Podo fed it one last, tiny pebble." Then "The dragon closed its mouth and closed its eyes. It slept. All its fire and hunger had been filled up, and it was only stone." So the dragon becomes "Dragon Hill," and the villagers and have learned that what looks like an enemy may not be; as with the troll in Red Mare, our apparent enemy may be just hungry.

The last lines of the story are the words of the sunrise song of the village:

The story, then, teaches not only tolerance as in Red Mare or but implies in the final song a universe in which the apparent and perhaps real antitheses of fire and stone, light and dark, society and nature, old and young come together to form a larger unity. This is a good Daoist lesson that fits in with the anarchistic idea (well liked by tellers of kids' tales) that two kids may know better than the mayor.

*

Catwings (1988), Catwings Return (1989), and Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings (1994) all feature winged cats like the windsteeds in Rocannon's World, only much smaller. We might say Rocannon's World is to the Catwings series as a windsteed is to a catwing as a tiger is to a domestic house cat. Alternatively, we could fit Catwings into the canon in the sense that Wonderful Alexander is to the first two Catwings books (though to a lesser degree) as Tehanu is to the Earthsea trilogy: same world, same premises, but with a more emphatically feminist emphasis.

Catwings is the story of an escape from an inner-city dumpster life by a litter of four winged cats out of Mrs. Jane Tabby.¹²

Mrs. Tabby is ready to mate again and so she sends her four flyers away. First, she wants them to take advantage of their wings and leave a bad neighborhood. As in The Beginning Place, The Eye of the Heron, "Omelas," and other Le Guin stories, sometimes the best thing we can do is get out: if you can't reform a place, leave it. Second, "My work is here," their mother tells them. "Mr. Tom Jones proposed to me last night, and I intend to accept him. I don't want you children underfoot!" This eviction notice causes the kittens to cry, "but they knew that that is the way it must be, in cat families. They were proud, too, that their mother trusted them to look after themselves." So they fly away, their mother watching, with "Her heart . . . full of fear and pride" (7-8).

The catwing kittens eventually find a wooded area and are very happy. "They knew they had come to a much better place than the alley, but they also knew that every place is dangerous, whether you are a fish, or a cat, or even a cat with wings" ([17]). The local birds are not happy at all, but mostly "had to learn to get along with the Flying Tabbies," even as mice had learned to deal with predatory birds. "Most of the birds, in fact, were more frightened and outraged than really endangered, since they were far better flyers than Roger, Thelma, Harriet, and James," the four flying kittens. However, the birds "were alarmed, and with good cause, about their fledglings." Catwings isn't Disney: the kittens hunt, kill, and eat their prey. "It took a while for the Owl to understand" the danger. "Owl is not a quick thinker. She is a long thinker" (20), rather like George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven. Very much unlike George Orr, Owl is an armed predator, and in a suggestive scenelet, as scary in its spareness as the murder of Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey-James chases bats near Owl's nest, and Owl slowly thinks "'This will not do ....'" Then ". . . softly Owl spread her great, gray{sic} wings, and silently flew after James, her talons opening" ([21])-and then a quick cut to the catwings' nest and the discovery of James "crouching under the bushes, all scratched and bleeding, and one of his wings dragged upon the ground" (22).

Now they "know how the little birds feel" as Thelma grimly says, but that knowledge can't stop them from being cats. They must hunt to live, and that becomes a problem with Owl outside their nest: "From then on they had to hunt in the daytime and hide in their nest all night; for the Owl thinks slowly, but the Owl thinks long" (25). Cats hunt best at night, and Owl's vigil seriously limits the catwings' hunting. At their low point, Harriet spots a human, and the kittens consult. Their mother had taught them "'that if you found the right kind of Hands, you'd never have to hunt again. But it you found the wrong kind, it would be worse than dogs'"; they guess these "Hands" are "the right kind" because the person knows not to try to grab a cat and knows to put out food. And wait. The point of view shifts slightly to the "Hands": the human children Hank and Susan, who had put the food out for the kittens. And who wait. The kittens come to them. Susan promises Harriet she will never "catch you, or cage you, or do anything to you you don't want me to do," and Hank promises, too, adding that they'll never tell people about the winged cats, "Ever! Because-you know how people are" (38). Harriet may or may not understand Susan's promise, cats and humans speaking different languages (Wonderful Alexander 29).¹³ But whether she understands are not the promise is binding, and so they are all married-bonded-the catwings and the human children, and they'll all live happily ever after, at least to the sequel.

Note here again the commonsense lessons for children about animals, how to deal with animals, and about nature. Flying cats, are a definite maybe; they are the "What if . . ." premise of the book. Vegetarian cats-no. The book also teaches the importance of patience and working with cats, not trying to force them to obey your will. And Catwings also teaches the hard lesson that a meal for feral kittens may mean an empty nest for an Owl, and that a new litter for a queen cat means that the last litter is shoved out on its own. "Heaven and Earth are not humane"; nature is. And the book teaches that a promise is a promise, whether made to a fellow human or an Other who may not even speak your language, even a radically different Other not even of one's own species.

In the sequel, Catwings Return, the kittens are well into adolescence and have personalities of their own, personalities somewhat conditioned by their genders. "Hank liked to toss kibbles in the air and watch Roger catch them, and Roger liked to catch them. Susan liked to hold kibbles in her hand while James ate them . . . . Thelma and Harriet took their breakfast seriously, preferring not to play games with it" (4-5; ch. 1). The human children (and their mother) still keep the winged cats a secret; "They feared people"-adult people anyway-would try to put the catwings "in cages, in circuses or pet shows or laboratories, to make money by owning them or selling them" (5; ch. 1). The children seem well aware of the capitalist threat; the more gothic threats of vivisection or dissection do not occur to them (they have not, apparently, seen E.T. or Starman). Nor do the children or Le Guin consider here the more benign possibility that some ethologist might want to just observe and study winged cats. In any event, the kids have no qualms or second thoughts: their mother can know about the catwings, but no other adults.¹⁴

The children obviously love the catwings, and the catwings have become very close friends with the children. This friendship is important because the catwings have something of an ethical dilemma. James and Harriet want to return to the old alley of their kittenhoods to see their mother; Roger and Thelma think it a bad idea, in part because the children would be very sad if they found all four of the catwings gone. More important perhaps, they remember the city as a very bad place: "Too many people in the city-it's dangerous." And their mother had told them to use their wings "to escape" (6; ch. 1). The catwings come to an obvious conclusion: Harriet and James will go home to visit their mother; Roger and Thelma will stay at Overhill Farm with Susan and Hank.

With trust in their Homing Instinct, and following the stench of garbage, Harriet and James fly to the city and find their old neighborhood in "the narrowest, dirtiest alley in the oldest, poorest part of the city" (12; ch. 2). Home itself, though, their dumpster, is gone, and so is their mother. And the neighborhood is going: "A couple of city pigeons flew by to see what the cloud of dust was. 'Knocking down another slum,' one pigeon said, and the other said, 'That's progress'" (16). "Progress" is described in terms of men and large machines, with emphasis on the machines, knocking down buildings. Inappropriate technology here, in the service of a problematic ideal-Progress-literally moving people and things around, apparently without even a "By your leave" to the local inhabitants.¹⁵ In one of the buildings, Harriet and James find a black kitten, that usually says "Me! . . . Me! Meeeee!", but, when angry (or frightened?), yells "HATE! HATE! HATE!" (17-23; ch. 3). It's a scared, dirty, very hungry kitten. A kitten with wings.

Harriet and James save the kitten from death by wrecking ball and the collapse of the building it's in; and with the help of a rather rude starling they locate another cat on a roof (33; ch. 4). The cat on the flower-potted roof is Mrs. Jane Tabby, mother of Harriet and James and of the black kitten.

Mrs. Jane tells her older children how Mr. Tom Jones, her last mate, "was called by business to another part of town" (37): Le Guin cleans up a bit feline sexuality and omits the sometimes deadly behavior of tomcats toward kittens.¹⁶ Tomcat morality is less the point than keeping Mr. Tom offstage for a crucial scene in Mrs. Jane's narration. While Mr. Tom is out of town, "a dreadful thing happened." Mrs. Jane's dumpster is "taken away"-passive voice deleted agent, but necessarily by humans, probably men. With the dumpster gone, humans "saw the kitten-saw her trying out her wings . . . . They ran to catch her," and Mrs. Jane runs to save her. "The poor baby, given strength by her terror, flew straight up and into a broken window high on a roof. I could not follow her," Mrs. Jane says, and "The people could not enter the building; it was locked." Angry, the humans pursue Mrs. Jane, separating her even farther from her kitten. Mrs. Jane searches, is chased by dogs and finally, when she is exhausted, friendly hands pick her up, carry her indoors, and put her in the roof garden. Since Mrs. Jane is "too old to enjoy street life any more," she was relatively content in her elevated garden-world, living with a kind human, just very sad for the loss of her kitten. The kitten's return with Harriet and James completed Mrs. Jane's happiness (37, 39; ch. 4).

One thing remains: Mrs. Jane wants Harriet and James to take the kitten back to their home in the country. Mrs. Jane tells her grown children the kitten "must go": "Now that I know she is alive and well, and is with those who will look after her, all I wish is that she be safe. And there is no place in this city for a winged cat to be safe." Mrs. Jane will "lie in the sun in my roof-garden and dream of her flying with you, in freedom. And that will be my happiness" (40; ch. 4).

The city seems huge, and the first night of flying endless, but Harriet and James, if they do not exactly trust their Homing Instinct at least hope it "knew what it was doing" (43; ch. 5). Finally, they find a familiar church roof and use it for a landmark-as nice a role as Le Guin has given a Christian institution-and James can tell the kitten truthfully, "It's all right . . . . We're going home!" (43-45; ch. 5).

Laia Asieo Odo's tombstone says, "To be whole is to be part; / true journey is return" (TD 68; ch. 3), and on a grave marker the immediate meaning is that one is part of one's planet and of the earth of one's planet, and at the end of life's journey one returns to the earth.¹⁷ Still, in The Dispossessed and in Le Guin more generally, the truest journeys have approximated the full circle of the quest return: to "There and Back Again."¹⁸ In Catwings, the kittens get out of a bad situation they cannot help to improve. In Catwings Return, Harriet and James as part of a whole litter can responsibly leave home (Overhill Farm) and return home to the old neighborhood, which is being torn down, the old dumpster, which is gone, and to their mother, who waits. In Le Guin's ongoing dialog with Le Guin, escape and freedom have been balanced by return. The demand for risk-taking and the dancing always "above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss" (in the Earthsea formulation [FS 121; ch. 8]), is balanced against a rational attempt to find safety, however much the world may be radically unsafe.

And we get Le Guin's pretty constant Romanticism: machines and cities usually bad (under Capitalism, statism, patriarchy, and visions of Progress, anyway); country better. And a farm with friendly, generous, and discreet kids is ideal, for cats. Harriet and James return to the farm, and introduce the kitten to her feline family and to Hank and Susan. The kitten says "Me?", and Hank thinks her name might be "Mimi"; Susan thinks not: "I think ... I think her name might be Jane" (48; ch. 5 unspaced dots indicate an ellipsis mark in Le Guin's text).

So at the end of Catwings Return, we have a moderately happy ending, with the catwings not only united and augmented with a new kitten, but that new kitten apparently brought into the world of discourse by receiving from a girl what sounds like the kitten's true name: her mother's name. The one very big exception to the happy ending, is that the kitten has said nothing else besides "Me!" and "HATE!" She has used language to assert her selfhood and in defense, but for no "I-You" relationship. "To be whole is to be part," including being part as an active participant in a speech community.¹⁹

This major problem is resolved in Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings. Significantly, it's resolved by a point-of-view character who is a nonflying, over-privileged, male kitten who comes into relationship with young Jane.

Wonderful Alexander is Alexander Furby, a Feline American Prince with a self-esteem problem: it's much too high. Alexander is "the oldest kitten" in his family, "the biggest, the strongest, and the loudest," also the only male in the litter (1; ch. 1). Hovering as he does between cat and human, he's the first-born of the litter (the inverse of the "runt") and both the eldest and the boy in a family. Amateur students of human birth-order might predict Alexander to be intelligent, assertive, and confident. If he's overconfident-and he is-Le Guin suggests that that's because he was raised that way. Alexander bosses around his sisters and plays with them more roughly than they like. "But Mr. and Mrs. Furby and the Caretaker and the Owner [of the country home he lives in] looked on and laughed and said, 'Alexander's all boy! Nothing frightens Alexander! . . . Alexander is wonderful!" And, of course, "Alexander was sure they were right" (2; ch. 1).

In the hands of a satirist and moralist, young Alexander would have become an overindulged kitten going wrong (those familiar with the work of Anthony Burgess might picture A Clockwork Hairball ); having been created by a very late Romantic like Le Guin, Alexander goes on a quest, going "out the cat door all by himself" and setting off "to explore the world."

Alexander thinks the world ends at the fence around the garden, but he learns to his surprise "that there was another side to the fence" (2-3; ch. 1). Very much like Shevek in The Dispossessed going through the opening in an emphatically two-sided wall to the spaceship that will take him to Urras, somewhat like Irena or Hugh going through the gate into the twilight land in The Beginning Place, and like any generic quester from Odysseus going down to Hades in the Odyssey to the SF characters played by Kurt Russell and James Spader going through a super-technological portal in Stargate (1994)-Alexander slips through the fence. And then he encounters his first real obstacle: "Slipping under another fence, he found himself on a narrow, dark plain that stretched as far as he could see to the left and to the right. The trees were just on the other side of it, and he trotted bravely forward," onto that "narrow, dark plain" (4; ch. 1).

The illustration makes clear that the "narrow, dark plain" is a highway. Still, I recommend that adult readers of Wonderful Alexander simultaneously picture both that highway and a Sartrian plain with only alienated men, plus Matthew Arnold's "darkling plain / * * * / Where ignorant armies clash by night." Amidst the beautiful world of Wonderful Alexander, adults should picture a very narrow Existentialist strip-or "One of the holes" in the world-between Overhill Farm and the woods, and while on that strip they should momentarily picture the image in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus of the entire universe as "void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility," just "one huge dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference to grind me limb from limb" (152; "The Everlasting No").²⁰ And then adult readers should see the strip again as a highway and note that the Existentialist vision may wrongly generalize to the universe and the human condition the very unusual situation of stubborn, civilized, egocentric, alienated Man Alone.²¹

Such philosophical exercise are too ponderous for Wonderful Alexander, but the image from Sartor Resartus is appropriate for this moment in Le Guin's story. Alexander hears

Alexander crouches down, and the truck rolls over him, bruising him, half-blinding him, and sending him scrambling for the relative safety of "the dark shelter of the trees" ([5]; ch. 1).

In the woods, Alexander is chased up a tree by two hounds and is afraid to climb down. He both assumes and hopes that the Caretaker or his Father or Mother will find him. What he is found by is Owl, and Alexander bravely "puffed himself up . . . and hissed at her." The Owl chuckles and flies off (6-10; ch. 1). After a night in the tree, Alexander just wants to go home, but "He did not know where his home was." And then, at this low point, he sees "a bird flying straight towards him . . . . He knew that a cat shouldn't be afraid of a bird. But last night he had seen the Owl." It's not a bird, but young Jane. Alexander introduces himself, and Jane responds with "Me!" (13-15; ch. 2).

Alexander asks Jane if she can talk, and in response she just "lashed her tail a little, looking sad," and Alexander responds with "Well . . . I can't fly" (16; ch. 2), a nice introduction for kids to the idea of people's being, if not exactly "differently abled," at least differently disabled. Jane helps Alexander get down the tree. Alexander wants to go home because his family will be upset at his absence and his sisters will cry and be lost without him. Alexander finally just admits he's lost, and Jane says "Me!" and pounces on his tail and then trots off. "Alexander followed her" (17-18; ch. 2).

Alexander is adopted by the catwings and human children at the farm, and, since he has no wings, he can be most centrally adopted by Susan and Hank's mother. To perfect the situation, Alexander's Owner stops by and is pleased to locate Alexander and is even more pleased to entrust him to the children's mother. When the Owner visits he brings Alexander's parents, although Mr. Furby, Alexander's father, usually sleeps through the visits (21-31; ch. 3). Alexander finds no featherbeds or sardines laid out for him on the farm, and he's expected to be a barn cat and a working hunter of mice. Hank and Susan's mother thinks Alexander a wonderful kitten, and Alexander therefore thinks her very smart, but they cannot discuss his wonder or her intelligence or anything else: ". . . cats and human beings don't speak the same language" (29). More disappointing is that Alexander can't talk to Jane. During the exposition of chapter 3, Thelma tells Alexander that Jane "has never said a word, except Me, and when she is frightened, she says, Hate!"-which is indeed the case we see with Jane and, if generalized, introduces the very common idea that fear yields hatred. The older catwings "think something terrible happened to her when she was a young kitten, separated from our mother." Alexander responds that Jane is "very brave. She rescued me" (25; ch. 3).

Alexander is happy and grows fast (33; ch. 4), bothered only by the memory that he had gone off on his quest to do wonderful things.

Alexander-in his human aspect-is caught in immanence and desires a project, and we're supposed to approve. Alexander seeks a taste of the "rapturous consciousness of life beyond self" (Eliot 3; "Prelude"). At least he wants to do something. What he thinks of is the obvious: He will play psychiatrist to Jane and get her to talk. The therapy is very straightforward and probably within the competence of an intelligent talking cat. Alexander knows that young Jane and Mrs. Jane got separated, "And then machines tore down the building." Alexander knows the experience had to have been terrible for young Jane. "But there must have been something even worse-something so bad you can't talk about it-something so bad you can't talk at all. But if you don't talk, Jane, how will we ever know what it was?" (35; ch. 4). And then, in spite of some growls and a series of HATE!s and a bite, he stands on her tail until she talks (36-37; ch. 4).

What Jane fears and hates is rats, and Jane tells her story of being threatened by rats, rats that "whispered" to each other, planning her destruction (38-39; ch. 4). Aside from humans' usual bad feelings about rats, the whispering is disconcerting and fits in with negative uses of whispering in the Earthsea trilogy: the gebbeth whispering to Ged thoughts of despair (WE 108; ch. 6), Cob's whispered promises of eternal life and "the whispering of the souls of the dead" (FS 166; "Selidor," ch. 11)-or the whispering of the Shing in City of Illusions (ch. 8). Jane hides her face in Alexander's "warm, furry side," and then Alexander washes her and reassures her. Jane finally says "I love you, Alexander"; and Alexander responds, "I love you, Jane" (40; ch. 4).

So Jane is talking again and explains to the rest of the feline family that she had been afraid: "I was afraid that if I talked, the only thing I could say would be the bad thing-the rats. And then they'd be real again." Now, though, Jane is no long afraid she might conjure up rats with her words: "But I know it's all right, and I can talk. Because Alexander showed me" (41; ch. 4).

The end of Wonderful Alexander raises the possibility of a sequel, where the catwings will return to their mother to show them young Jane can talk: "It will make her so happy when you talk to her, Jane," James says. Roger tells Alexander that Alexander is wonderful, and Jane agrees. "'I know,' said Alexander"-and so ends the book ([42]; ch. 4).

Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings is the most feminist of the catwings trilogy and most philosophical. The story accepts as a given that young sentients will and should want to do something "wonderful," something heroic. What is at issue is how we'll define "heroic," and what sort of heroic actions might be decorous for the different genders. Wonderful Alexander is quite clear on this issue: true heroism is helping others, and the gender stereotypes just do not apply. Young Jane gets Alexander down from the tree; Alexander nurtures Jane and with some «tough love» helps her break through to her fears, and helps her face and overcome her fears. Not exploring the world, not scratching a dog, not even trying to defeat an Owl: true heroic action is getting someone to where they can say, "I love (you)."

It is well for Alexander to leave the Owner's country house and its decadence, where he could have ended up slothful like his father, or a spoiled bully. He did well to cross the dangerous highway, get back to the more natural world of the woods, and then arrive at a compromise between decadence and the wild: a farm, where he can earn his keep catching mice and still have humans feed him. But most important, he can do his one needful thing: do what he ethically must do and get Jane to talk. And then he can accept her love and the admiration of his new family, and fall back into the immanence and feline domesticity of a true home.

* *

William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) is both great children's theatre and a moving meditation on art, nature, and the artist; even so with Ursula K. Le Guin's Leese Webster (illustrated by James Brunsman), except it is a picture book, not theatre, and so, in our time, less likely to attract the attention of critics.

One critic who did not miss Leese Webster was Charlotte Spivack, who notes the story's high quality and its relationship to both the Arachne myth and the Earthsea trilogy: "the spider as an image of the master-patterner in the Earthsea trilogy" and the spider in Leese Webster as "the figure of the artist" (151), even as the trilogy is a Künstlerroman of the life of Ged as an artist of magic.²² In Earthsea and elsewhere, however, spiders are at least bivalent: good as images as artists, possibly bad as creators spinning traps out of their own guts. Leese Webster, though, the protagonist of this book, is definitely good. In Le Guin's first picture book, Leese's story is "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Spider"-to repeat the inevitable joke-and it is Le Guin's apologia for all artists who bring their art out into the (commercial) world, and it is her Romantic affirmation of the necessity to return art to nature.²³

Leese is born in the deserted throne room of a deserted palace (deserted by humans, that is) as one of "a family of spiders," with the "family" definitely figurative: "As soon as they had all said 'Hello' to one another, they all said 'Goodbye,' and each went off to find a place to spin a web," as is, indeed, the nature of spiders in our world, except the part about their talking.²⁴ Leese wanders about the throne room and finds it too crowded-all the corners are taken-so she goes off "exploring." She finally locates "a comfortable room, the bedroom of a princess long ago. She found that she had the room pretty much to herself"-"A Room of One's Own," in arachnid terms-"which was the way she liked it; so she settled down there."²⁵ And she began to spin the traditional, very elegant web of the Websters, which we're told is "The family Leese belonged to," and which I take to be the "orb weavers," or "sheet-web" weavers.²⁶

We're told that the Websters' web is "beautiful and practical" and that all family members know "how to weave it without giving it a thought," i.e., in ethological terms Le Guin does not use, the Websters' weaving is literally inborn: one of the "innate skills" of the species, an inherited "fixed action pattern" (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 15). Leese weaves her webs unthinkingly for the first two nights in her new room. And, as the products of fixed, species-specific, fixed action patterns-again, all ethological terms I am applying, not Le Guin-each web is "exactly the same," which is Le Guin's formulation. "The third night," Leese says to herself, "'I wonder why a web can't be a little different now and then?'" So Leese Webster begins to experiment.

At first, the experiments aren't successful. But she keeps at it, "learning and practicing, thinking out new ways to connect the threads, now patterns and new shapes." She studies and copies patterns she sees in the carved wood and an old painting and the carpet in the room, thinking about her night's weaving during the day, when spiders rest.

Le Guin beautifully pictures the art of Leese Webster and of weaving spiders generally, and of artists as active and athletic, risk-taking, and many-faceted: an act of building and creation, a dance of Shiva over the abyss, one of the songs of god.

Spiders common in the United States are not social, and so it is in Leese Webster: "Spiders are not sociable people. They mostly let one another be." Still, Leese Webster gets an occasional visit from a family member or someone from other spider families, and they look over her work. "Usually they sniffed, and traveled on." One comments that the web Leese is working on is remarkable and asks "Will it catch flies?" Leese must admit "Not very well . . . . The old pattern works better for that." The utilitarian spider responds with "Waste of time." The remark offends Leese and makes her feel "a little ashamed," but she improves "her designs after that, so that her fancy webs would catch flies as well as the old kind. For that is the purpose of a spider web, after all, and spiders have to eat, like anybody else."

Le Guin here very elegantly formulates a crucial relationship between art and economics, art and the world. Spiders and artists must eat: literally or figuratively they must catch flies to earn a living. On the other hand, there is the question of the esthetic dimension of the practical. It is easy enough to dismiss the utilitarian concerned totally with whether or not the web catches flies-in which case the obvious imperative is to stick with the traditional formulas for web-spinning; but the philistine spider we briefly see and hear raises an esthetic point Leese Webster recognizes and deals with: the function of a spider web is to catch flies (and other insects), and, a philosophical spider from the Bauhaus school of Weimar, Germany, or Chicago, Illinois, might insist that web-form should, on esthetic grounds, follow web-function. This is an important point. Any imaginative and talented architecture student can design a clever, unique, and perhaps even beautiful building. Genius is when you can design such a unique and beautiful building and get it built and have it stay up and function as a good place for people to live or work or play.

Leese Webster succeeds at getting beautiful webs that will still catch flies. Still, as Spivack stresses (151), Leese Webster doesn't get to eat very often-few flies go to the old room-and Leese isn't totally happy with her art. In Le Guin's words: "Leese was used to going hungry; she liked her lonely room; she would have been quite content, but for one thing. She was never quite satisfied with the webs she wove." Back in the throne room of her hatching, "there had been jewels" on that empty throne, jewels that shone in colors: "In her memory those jewels were more beautiful than anything she could weave, for there was light inside them," whereas all of Leese Webster's weaving, even her weaving of "jewel-shapes" and "jewel-patterns in her web," was still done in thread of grey. 'How do they do it?' she wondered."

Immediately thereafter, Leese's closed world is violated by two women. For the first time in a hundred years, a human enters the room-and almost immediately utters an obscenity: "'More cobwebs,' said a disgusted voice. Bring in the brooms!'" For Leese Webster, "The word 'broom' was the worst word she knew." The old palace was to be "cleaned up and made into a National Monument, a museum where people could come and see how kings used to live." The two women look at Leese Webster's work, and the first thinks the "tapestries" beautiful-

The two women tell the "Authorities," who call in the experts, and the one thing all agree on is that "the Room of the Silver Weavings (which is what the cleaning women named it) should be kept exactly as it was, so that visitors to the Palace Museum could see the remarkable tapestries." The experts further agree "that the weavings," delicate as spider webs as they are, "must be kept under glass." So Leese Webster's work is immortalized for the ages and all, but she is not pleased: "'Stop that! If you cover my webs with glass, how can they catch flies?' Leese shouted. 'I'll starve!'" Understandably enough, since they could not hear a spider, "The workmen paid no attention."²⁷

The cleaning women return and walk around the room admiring the beautiful web pictures. "They were proud of what they had found and happy to have saved it, and Leese was proud and happy to have her work admired at last." The women find Leese, and since it's bad luck to kill spiders, they put her outside. One of the women gently shakes "her duster gently out the open window. 'There, let go, little creepy. You'll catch more flies outside!'"

Leese takes the longest fall of her life "and landed on a broad, sunlight-speckled leaf. 'I'm dead! she cried, and lay there in a tiny ball . . . her eyes all shut."

Evening comes and Leese opens one of her eight eyes and sees "the evening star, reflected in he water of the lily pool." Leese, rather nearsighted for all her eight eyes, infers that she sees a jewel and (therefore?) is not dead. She is impressed by the size of the room she's now in: "It seems not to have any walls at all." It's also "splendidly decorated" without her webs, and she doesn't know what to weave for it. The point is moot however; she is very hungry. What with her hunger and fatigue and having now to contend with wind and moving branches, Leese Webster's web is not even neat, let alone great art.

Inside the palace, tourists visit the Room of the Silver Weavings and admire tapestries with threads "as fine as spiderwebs." "But Leese, swinging joyously from leaf to branch in the endless garden, wove her wild webs every night, and every morning found them shining with the jewels of the sun."

I find Leese Webster a beautiful story, and a beautiful statement of some Le Guinian themes.

Clear to readers of Le Guin's works for older people, are the motifs of the artist and the function of art, plus such memorable motifs from romantic art as the empty throne in the deserted palace (cf. The Tombs of Atuan) and a fascination with jewels and the play of light in them. More central is the romantic theme of getting back to nature, with the twist of the image of "unbuilding walls" (The Dispossessed) or the idea in "An die Musik" that art generally-Kunst-and music more particularly "denies and breaks down all shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky" (Orsinian Tales 145). Among human beings, in a tale set in Europe in 1938, there are problems with the destruction of shelter: a lot of houses will soon be destroyed in World War II. But for a spider thrown out (gently) into a literal garden, the exit from an old palace museum is right and proper. Leese is no delicate Lady of Shalott; she's a working artist, not a lady at all, so reality won't kill her; it nourishes her. For Leese, the proper place is outside walls; the proper shelter is the sky.²⁸

Within a few years, the newest philosophies would put nature inside of art, as a rather more expansive sort of human text; but Leese Webster could persuasively presents a situation in which the artist can leave her transcendent artistic work to human culture and sink into a very glorious immanence in a world of nature that can produce beauty far beyond any creature's art. The irony is imaged very effectively: in the transcendent project of doing art within the palace of human culture, even with a room of her own, Leese is trapped. And her art is put under glass and rendered museum pieces, incapable of nourishing Leese literally; and, figuratively, her museum-enshrined art may be of only limited nutritional value to its human observers/consumers. In the immanence of nature and the garden, Leese is truly free and produces art that she feels, with some justification, is her best.

We have in this story a highly satisfying open-ended ending; and it is an ending we should find even more satisfying with a mild irony pointed out to me by Anita Wilson: Leese can appreciate her dew-jeweled webs fully precisely because she has seen jewels within the prison/palace/museum of culture.

At the end of The Tempest, the Europeans return to Europe, leaving the magic island to Ariel and Caliban and nature. The happy ending, for civilized humans (all male save Miranda), is moving out of nature back into culture. Leese Webster goes in the opposite direction, into nature, as appropriate for an artistic and cultured spider created by an author who, in some moods, is one of the last of the Critical Romantics.²⁹

1 My thanks to my colleague Anita Wilson, an expert in children's literature, for discussing with me my ms. for this chapter.   

2 In the following sections I cover almost all of Le Guin's picture books, but I am quite certain I miss at least one.  OhioLink interlibrary loan service notes In the Red Zone by Le Guin, illus. Henk{sic} Pender (Northridge, CA: Lord John P, 1983), with a first edn. press run of 150 numbered copies, with one at the U of Cincinnati, "ARB Rare Books."  Since I'm privileging readers in Coyote, I decided against handling a book few would get to read, unless there is a trade rpt.   

3 Quoting "Summary" in Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data, copyright page of Fish Soup. 

4 This is, of course, another stereotype, but one with a kernel of truth to it: fathers often want and appreciate daughters; mothers often want and appreciate sons.  (My sister and I agree this was the case in our family.)   

5 See Big Man in "Big Man and Little Man" (ACH 157), Luz on Macmilan in EoH (103; ch. 7), and Bill Kopman in Tamara's dream-vision in "PoD" (204, 206).   

6 Under year and Sheldon's pseudonym, "James Tiptree, Jr."   

7 See also "the thread of way" in the poem "Torrey Pine Reserve" (1973) coll. BG (76).   

8 She consults her toy horse as if it were an oracle and gets her way pointed out, for a combination of a faith in magic (and her luck), intuition, and following an animal's lead—a wise idea in folk tales.   

9 The headnote cites "Lao Tse: V"; the full opening sentence of this section of the Tao te Ching reads, in the Chen translation, "Heaven and earth are not humane (jen), / They treat the ten thousand beings [i.e., everything realized in the world] as straw dogs (ch'u kou)" (64).   

10 See and contrast Campbell ch. 5, "The Belly of the Whale." 

11 Some plausible the Greek possibilities for "Damon" include the suggestion "daemon" or "daimon" in the sense of "genius" or "intellect" or Damon the Pythagorean, friend to Phintias, usually confused with Pythias (Smaller Classical Dictionary).  "Ophidia" is another name for the biological suborder Serpentes: snakes.   

12 Le Guin dedicates Wonderful Alexander . . . "To the Bean"; S. D. Schindler, the illus., adds a dedication to three "visual reference cats."  Le Guin and Schindler know cats: four is exactly the average size of the litter of a domestic "queen" cat ("Cats" 998)     

13 In conversation with me on 13 May 1996, Le Guin mentioned that she took care to ensure it was unclear whether or not the catwings were «bilingual» and understood English.   

14 So far in the catwings stories, Susan and Hank's father has been absent or invisible.   

15 I've tried to keep my tone here light, appropriate to a work with a happy ending, but the point by Le Guin is highly serious: see esp. ACH for an extended meditation on appropriate technology, and consulting with all the "local inhabitants," including rivers and nonhuman animals, before making changes (33-35; Stone Telling 1 [and passim]); see "Buffalo Gals" in BG for looking at «Progressed», places, inappropriately built up and paved over, as dead and deadly, outside the world.   

16 Le Guin also downplays territoriality and somewhat overstates cats' generosity, feline solidarity, and family feeling for nonlittermates (see "Cat" 997).   

17 I think Odo's saying also hints at a resolution to the more problematic portions of the postmodern idea of the fragmented, uncentered, nearly-abolished self.  People can have the wholeness possible in our places and times by consciously participating in, being truly part of, webs of relationships. 

18 "There and Back Again" is the subtitle to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937 f.).   

19 Cf. and contrast Spark's limited language abilities in Tehanu.   

20 The hole in the world allusion is to "Buffalo Gals, "Won't You Come Out Tonight" (BG 40-41), q.v.; see also the places out of the world in ACH: what we'd call "civilization."    

 

21 I allude to Eric and Mary Josephson's anthology, Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (1962).   

22 Kunstlerroman: "artist's novel"—the story of the development of an artist.  Anita Wilson notes the continuing popularity of E. B. White's Charlotte's Web (1952), and suggests putting "Leese Webster" into dialog with that book.  

23 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a much-taught Künstlerroman in the mid-20th century.   

24 Leese Webster is not paginated, and I will not be supplying page numbers. 

25 I allude to A Room of One's Own (1929), an extended essay by Virginia Woolf.   

26 "Webster" is an old word for "weaver."  The Micropaedia entry in the 1974 Encyclopaedia Britannica lists as common spiders the sheet-web weaver, taxonomic family Linyphiidae (order Araneida); the Macropaedia entry for "Araneida" uses the style "orb weaver" and gives the family as Araneidae (Argiopidae).  See Levi and Levi 1073.   

27 Le Guin in conversation (13 May 1996) indicated to me that here she intended just a little joke: humans are much too big to hear the speech of spiders.   

28 In response to a rather angry statement of my reaction to unbuilding walls and roofs in "An de Musik," Le Guin raised the question, "What if the sky is the shelter?"   

29 For a recent variation on the theme of the picture book, see Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight (1994): the 1987 story by that name printed separately as an art book with illustrations by Susan Seddon Boulet.  Note, though, that "Buffalo Gals . . ." is not a story for young children.   

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