UN/EARTHLY POWERS

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CHAPTER TWO POLITIFICTION

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life … . Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative soc:t:~y. an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
(Le Guin 1993b: 154)
This chapter examines Le Guin’s famous novels, The Left Hand ofDarkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974),1 in the context of political and social dissent which chara~terized the 1960s in America. 2 Many critics have read the novels in a decontextualized way. 3 In contrast, I intend to juxtapose essays by thinkers and social critics from the 1960s with the strategies used in the novels. My project is similar to Florence’s investigation into the links between speculative tabulation and the empirical environment. Florence writes:
What, then of the closer relation to the mimetic in feminist SF that I’m suggesting? I’m not, of course, saying that SF is closer to realism or naturalism than to fantasy. The point is to move towards reconstructing the basis of these classifications. Thus though what may be called ‘realist’ elements are appropriated, they are used to different ends.
(1990: 70)
Florence does not claim that science fiction is realistic; she claims that it is related to mimesis, and that it modifies the criterion for classifying texts as ‘realistic’. Nor do I claim that Le Guin’s fictions are transparent versions of dominant understandings of self and society in the 1960s.
Rather, I propose that the two discourses are related in their shared scepticism towards established culture. They may be read side by side in a way that qualifies and relativizes received views of non-fiction and speculative tabulation, or, to put it another way, of ‘reality’ and ‘art’.
Goodman writes that the 1960s were dominated by a perspective which saw American culture, not as ‘the family of the family’ (Estes 1992: 68), that is, as a larger self. Rather, it had taken on alien characteristics: ‘America is the unknown country; it does not cohere; no one yet knows what it is’ (1970: vi). This estranged outlook among left-wing thinkers was partly a response to the devastation wrought by the Vietnam War,4 including the American government’s conscripting nearly an entire generation and sending them to almost certain death in lndo-China.
The cultural movement that followed was wider in scope than its inceptors could have imagined. Capra, whose work in scientific metatheory Le Guin admires (1989: 89), describes the period as
follows:
In the sixties we questioned society. We lived according to different values, we had different rituals and different lifestyles.
The era of the sixties, which had the most decisive impact on my view of the world, was dominated by an expansion of consciousness in two directions. One was toward a new kind of spirituality akin to the mystical traditions of the East, an expansion of consciousness toward experiences that psychologists began to call transpersonal. The other was an expansion of social consciousness, triggered by a radical questioning of authority.
(1988: 13-14)
In 1969 Joseph Berke, an ardent opponent of State education and advocate of a ‘Free University’ system in New York, published ‘The Creation of an Alternative Society’ (1969: 13-34). The title of Berke’s essay strongly evokes speculative tabulation’s most commonly used device.
Following his lead, I argue that Le Guin’s speculative novels also articulate a wish for a world ‘nearer to the Heart’s Desire’ (Fitzgerald 1970: 693). Berke explores the broad base of the trend towards an ‘expansion of social consciousness’. According to him, the goal of social critique is nothing less than the replacement of the old order by a new one:
The destruction/DESTRUCTURING of America has begun. At this moment many cracks in the monolith are evident. Their presence has been announced by the spontaneous development of MICRO-REVOLUTIONARY groups throughout the West – ‘COUNTER’ INSTITUTIONS whose existence subverts the social-economic-political roles prescribed by advanced bourgeois society for itself. These will lead to the creation of an ALTERNATIVE and COUNTER CULTURE.
(1969: 14)
Among the social evils which Berke sees as the products of a repressive and insane social order are violence and the misuse of money. He writes:
The relations of people(s) toward one another are characterized by the uninterrupted and highly organized application of violence and destruction.
The prime function of wealth is its use as an anaesthetic against the circumstances of living.
1969: 14)
These ills are so widespread that nothing but total social and ideological revolution will cure them:
We can only conclude that the WEST – its structure – has to be dismantled piece by piece, not only in the United States, but wherever Western hegemony exists.
This work has already begun … . It is rooted in innumerable projects of social erosion and practical self-survival which are decentralized, heterogeneous, self-supporting and non-participatory in the parent system. It is exemplified by the tens of thousands who have ‘dropped out’ and begun to engage in spontaneous social experiment: the commune and community, collective living and working
(1969: 17)
In a climate where many people perceived their own society as Other, there was a need to imagine alternative social arrangements. It is not surprising, then, that The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, which explore such alternatives, gained great popularity. Power and difference play central roles in these fictions, possibly because the author found herself differing from the style of government in her own culture. In The Left Hand ofDarkness and The Dispossessed, difference is figured as a complex system of discursive and political articulations between familiarity and unfamiliarity, heimlich and unheimlich, self and other.
As I shall show, the novels address contemporary conditions and ideas in America in a way that intertwines political conservatism and revolutionary radicalism. The impulse to refashion society coexists and intersects with a drive to preserve certain conditions unchanged. Their re/presentations of ideology thus resemble Althusser’ s discussion of the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis:
… the « dominant » ideas, in this case, were playing their « dominating » role to perfection, ruling unrecognized over the very minds that were trying to fight them.
(1984: 143)
The ambiguous response to dominant ideas that I have identified in Le Guin’ s fictions is also a feature of political dissent in the 1960s. Goodman puts his finger on this quality in his introduction to The Movement Toward a New America: The Beginnings of a New Revolution.
On the one hand there is the revolutionary impulse:
I see the people of the Movement as New Americans, who recognize that the old America is destroying itself, and that in its paroxysms of fear, greed and hate it may destroy the whole earth. They see the necessity, then, to make a new culture: « Forming a new society within the shell of the old » ….
(1970: viii)
On the other, there is a wish to retain some aspects of the discarded culture:
Yet something remains: remnants of a religious tradition, some feeling for brotherhood and equality, resourcefulness, expansiveness, generosity, and a stubborn determination not to be ruled. Usable pieces of the technology ….
Black culture. Street culture. A language that William Carlos Williams called the American idiom – full of energy, still a language of experiment, of discovery.
(1970: viii)
The coexistence of revolutionary and consenative elements in Le Guin’s fiction may be illustrated by an examination of the modes of government that she imagines. In The Left Hand of Darkness, there is a constitutional monarchy in Karhide, where the subunits of social organization are Hearths and Domains. These loose groupings conform to Berke’s description of nexuses of revolution as ‘decentralized, heterogeneous, self-supporting and [to a large extent because their members are sceptical towards the insane monarch] non-participatory in the parent system’. The bureaucracy of Orgoreyn, on the other hand, is held up to criticism as an example of centralized government where no one dare risk being caught without papers. What Berke refers to as ‘commune and community, collective living and working’ is embodied by the Ekumen of Known Worlds, an association of worlds for the exchange of ideas. This ideal is even more faithfully executed in the Syndics of the anarchist society on Anarres in The Dispossessed, where the members do not own property and thus exemplify the benefits of living without individual ownership. Le Guin’s critique of a capitalist society where ‘[t]he prime function of wealth is its use as an anaesthetic against the circumstances of living’ (Berke 1969: 14) is strengthened by the depiction of Anarres ‘s twin world, Urras. The members of the free enterprise society of Urras live in mutual isolation because of the envy and insecurity which arise from private property. Both novels experiment with systems of government in ways that typify the ‘expansion of social consciousness’ identified by Capra as an important trend in the thought of the 1960s.
Suvin identifies two possible literary mechanisms for responding to prevailing states of affairs in science fiction: extrapolation and analogy (1979: 27-30). Extrapolation imagines and embodies changes which might take place in the future and lends itself to the creation of utopias and dystopias: it portrays the world as it might become. Analogy is based on similarity with the world as it is and hence reflects empirical data. Both of these methods lend themselves to socio-political critique. The societies depicted in The Left Hand ofDarkness and The Dispossessed offer four versions of social structure, by which institutional power is wielded through the channels of government. A fifth is implied in the references to the Ekumen. Of these five arrangements, three can be seen as defamiliarized re-presentations, that is, analogues of Earth societies: capitalist Urras in The Dispossessed, the parliamentary monarchy of Karhide and the bureaucracy of Orgoreyn in The Left Hand of Darkness. The Hearth arrangements, of ‘two hundred to eight hundred people’, which are ‘communal, independent, and somewhat introverted’ (Le Guin 1993b: 161-62) are peripheral considerations since they are never encountered directly. While employing defamiliarization in creating extra-terrestrial environments, Le Guin has paradoxically shown a preference for the science-fiction strategy of analogy by depicting societies which are strikingly familiar. The sense of known parameters, to some extent, defuses the subversive qualities of the novels.

INTRODUCTION: READING POSITIONS
CHAPTER ONE: UN/EARTHLY POWERS
CHAPTER TWO: POLITIFICTION
CHAP »fER THR.EE: SEX/ID ENTITY
CHAPTER FOUR: RE-INVENTING H/hISTORY
CHAPTER FIVE: DISEMPOWERMENT
CHAP »fER SIX: (PROSE AND) POETRY
(NO) CONCLUSION/S
APPENDIX
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
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