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Fantasy/SF Micro-essay #9: Le Guin
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 08:10 pm[This time I was being a little mischievous, portraying Ursula Le Guin as a conservative. My problem was that I could write a whole book about The Left Hand of Darkness, but I was stumped for something to say in 320 words! I would have loved to have written more about the Handdara and Le Guin's Taoism (which I only hinted at) and to have brought in images from A Wizard of Earthsea too, not to mention all the snow and shadow imagery.]
Le Guin is that rarity, a left-wing conservative. While she is certainly not a political conservative in either the American or European senses, she shares a distrust of the idea of progress through rationally planned change with Edmund Burke.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, the obvious, even corny parallels with Soviet Russia, from labour camps ("voluntary farms") to vodka ("lifewater") may blind us to Le Guin's real critique. She has no problem with Orgoreyn's economic collectivism (after all, The Dispossessed shows sympathy for its anarcho-communists). The problem with the Orgota is their certainty, a certainty which comes from their prophet Meshe's gnosis, which according to them a is supreme knowledge of the whole of time and according to the old religion of the Handdara, a botched fore-telling.[1] Although expressed in religious terms, this reminds us of the certainty of the Enlightenment revolutionaries that Burke criticised.[2] The Orgota believe that all questions have answers and all problems have solutions. Unlike Star Wars' Dark Side, they are the excessively light side.
In contrast to Orgoreyn, Karhide is presented neither as a utopia nor a failed utopia: Karhide simply is. This does not make it immune to change: there is potential for disastrous change from Tibe's nationalism and for positive change from Genly and Estraven. But even this change is not sought: when Genly reminds Faxe that he has foretold that Gethen will change, he replies "And I'll change with it, Genry. But I have no wish to change it."[3] The Handdarata accept change but do not seek it; they acquire knowledge but value ignorance, "the ground of thought"[4]
Like The Telling, this novel seems to champion traditionalism against modernity, but it is not a knee-jerk reaction. Le Guin's conservatism is in a tradition that runs from Lao Tsu, through Willam Cobbett to J.R.R. Tolkien.
[1] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Walker & Company, 1994) p. 62.
[2] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Bartleby, 2001). Retrieved from http://www.bartleby.com/24/3/ 25 Sep. 2012.
[3] Le Guin. p. 70.
[4] ibid. p. 72.
Le Guin is that rarity, a left-wing conservative. While she is certainly not a political conservative in either the American or European senses, she shares a distrust of the idea of progress through rationally planned change with Edmund Burke.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, the obvious, even corny parallels with Soviet Russia, from labour camps ("voluntary farms") to vodka ("lifewater") may blind us to Le Guin's real critique. She has no problem with Orgoreyn's economic collectivism (after all, The Dispossessed shows sympathy for its anarcho-communists). The problem with the Orgota is their certainty, a certainty which comes from their prophet Meshe's gnosis, which according to them a is supreme knowledge of the whole of time and according to the old religion of the Handdara, a botched fore-telling.[1] Although expressed in religious terms, this reminds us of the certainty of the Enlightenment revolutionaries that Burke criticised.[2] The Orgota believe that all questions have answers and all problems have solutions. Unlike Star Wars' Dark Side, they are the excessively light side.
In contrast to Orgoreyn, Karhide is presented neither as a utopia nor a failed utopia: Karhide simply is. This does not make it immune to change: there is potential for disastrous change from Tibe's nationalism and for positive change from Genly and Estraven. But even this change is not sought: when Genly reminds Faxe that he has foretold that Gethen will change, he replies "And I'll change with it, Genry. But I have no wish to change it."[3] The Handdarata accept change but do not seek it; they acquire knowledge but value ignorance, "the ground of thought"[4]
Like The Telling, this novel seems to champion traditionalism against modernity, but it is not a knee-jerk reaction. Le Guin's conservatism is in a tradition that runs from Lao Tsu, through Willam Cobbett to J.R.R. Tolkien.
[1] Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Walker & Company, 1994) p. 62.
[2] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Bartleby, 2001). Retrieved from http://www.bartleby.com/24/3/ 25 Sep. 2012.
[3] Le Guin. p. 70.
[4] ibid. p. 72.
