Introduction

Since Ursula K. Le Guin at fifty-five is still at the peak of her writing career, a critical overview of her literary achievement is not yet possible. As her most recent publications, The Beginning Place and Hard Words, clearly demonstrate, she is also still experimenting with new forms, so that another new book is likely to be not simply an addition but also an innovation. Whether she will, as some have speculated, turn to mainstream fiction or whether she will, as others have predicted, create yet new and richer forms of fantasy, remains to be seen. What is possible at this time is to survey the critical response to her published work so far, noting the directions in its development, culminating in her current reputation as an outstanding writer.

Survey of Criticism

Le Guin’s first books did not attract any serious critical attention. The Hainish trilogy received only brief notices in SF magazines and quickly went out of print. Her first works to merit acclaim were A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), followed shortly by The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972). All of these novels were award winners: A Wizard of Earthsea, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; the Tombs of Atuan, The Newberry Honor Book; The Farthest Shore, the National Book Award; and, most dramatically, The Left Hand of Darkness, both the Hugo and Nebula awards for the best science-fiction novel of the year. In 1974 the double honor was conferred on The Dispossessed, making Le Guin the only writer to win both of these prestigious awards twice. In addition to the novels, three short works were award winners during this period: The Word for World Is Forest (1972) and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), both Hugos, and “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974), a Nebula.

Along with these stunning awards—all, however, in fantasy and science fiction, a disadvantage from the viewpoint of the critical establishment Page 153  |  Top of Article—came a delayed critical recognition. In general the Earthsea trilogy received more attention in England, where fantasy is a highly respected genre, and the SF novels more in this country, where science fiction has a vast following but still remains a marginal genre in the academic world. When the New York Times somewhat belatedly reviewed the Earthsea trilogy, it called upon the English poet Robert Nye to do the job. In contrast the Times Literary Supplement published full reviews of each volume by Naomi Lewis, who praised the whole for its “total realization of place, time, customs, laws of behavior, of magic.”¹ Serious discussion of Le Guin’s science fiction, however, followed quickly upon success of The Left Hand of Darkness. The widespread acclaim afforded this novel in effect conferred retroactive value on the earlier Hainish trilogy, which was subsequently reprinted in hardback and reviewed adequately for the first time over a decade after its initial appearance.

Although Le Guin’s reputation as a science-fiction writer was definitely established after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness, discussion of that novel involved considerable controversy. A major challenge to its international acclaim was voiced by fellow science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, who objected that the theme of androgyny is not sufficiently integrated into the plot of the novel. A further, somewhat related, objection was expressed by feminist critics, including Joanna Russ, who complained that the androgyny theme fails because the inhabitants of Gethen all seem to the reader to be exclusively male, rather than bisexual.² In this controversy a major champion of the novel was Canadian critic Darko Suvin, who described it as a “truly civilized fable on human love and trust independent of (though deeply concerned with) maleness or femininity.”³

Le Guin’s next double winner, The Dispossessed, also provoked a lively controversy among reviewers, which helped to enhance her already firm reputation. The Times Literary Supplement, which had praised the Earthsea trilogy, found The Dispossessed a disappointment.⁴ American critics have debated the work’s merits and shortcomings, their opinions ranging from Suvin’s appraisal of “masterpiece” on the dust jacket to Russ’s complaint that the novel displays too much telling and not enough showing.⁵ The mere fact of this controversy is important, for it reveals that Le Guin has to that extent escaped the science-fiction ghetto and entered the realm of serious academic consideration. In 1975 she received recognition in both camps, with both a special issue of Science-Fiction Studies devoted to her work and Page 154  |  Top of Articlea seminar of the Modern Language Association concerned solely with her fiction.

In spite of this recognition in 1975, Le Guin’s fiction is still not adequately reviewed. The short stories in particular have been neglected. Even the two collections, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and Orsinian Tales, have received little attention. Thomas J. Remington’s article relates three of the stories—“Nine Lives,” The Word for World Is Forest, and “Vaster Than Empires”—to themes in the novels, and James Bittner’s essay offers the only substantial exploration so far of theme and form in the Orsinian collection.⁶ Only one major review article appeared in connection with The Language of the Night. S. J. Edelheit’s review in the Boston Review is an extended and sensitive statement about that work in its relationship to the fiction.⁷ As for The Beginning Place, token reviews in Time and Newsweek were content with mere plot summary followed by routine praise.⁸ Apparently the main problem inhibiting reviewer response to this latest novel is the question of genre, which has been a stumbling block for Le Guin throughout her career so far.

The Problem of Genre

Le Guin’s earliest difficulties in achieving publication were caused by the genre problem. Her first stories were set in the imaginary country of Orsinia, but were neither fantasy, nor science fiction, not realism. As a result they were repeatedly rejected. She learned that in order to be published in this country, one has to write pieces which are easily categorized.⁹ When she aimed deliberately to write a clearly definable science-fiction story, she found a ready market for it.

Although the publications continued steadily once they had started, the genre problem returned to plague Le Guin in a different way at the height of her success. The problem afflicted even her greatest triumphs, that is, the Earthsea trilogy, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed. The Earthsea trilogy was labeled not only fantasy, which in this country was not regarded seriously in the late sixties, but also children’s literature. As a result it did not receive proper critical attention. The special issue of Science-Fiction Studies, for example, neglects the trilogy altogether. The case of The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed was not a matter of neglect because of genre but of misinterpretation based on genre. While their recognition as science-fiction novels gained her both awards and an international reputation, it also narrowly categorized her as an SF writer.

Much of the negative commentary that met both of these novels was based on generic assumptions. Rather than extending the definition of science fiction to include her richly innovative techniques, several commentators attacked the novels for not adhering to an accepted narrow definition of science fiction. What is especially significant about both of these novels is that they have in fact extended the limits of science fiction. Fortunately a few excellent interpretive essays have opened the way to future reading of Le Guin’s fiction as “literature,” not merely as science fiction.

A few critics deserve special attention for their perceptive treatment of individual works in ways that transcend generic boundaries. The first serious recognition of the Earthsea trilogy as more than children’s literature was Eleanor Cameron’s article on the work as “high fantasy,” which recognizes Le Guin’s sophisticated use of anthropology and psychology in developing the major themes of names and shadows.¹⁰ Peter Nicholl’s review of The Farthest Shore in the British journal Foundation also argues that the trilogy transcends the category of juvenile fiction and compares Le Guin’s work favorably with that of Tolkien and Lewis.” He finds her morality subtler than Tolkien’s and her metaphysic more convincing than Lewis¹¹ . With praise for style as well as content, he considers the trilogy her finest achievement to date.

After much debate about the relative merits and shortcomings of The Left Hand of Darkness, Martin Bickman’s essay on form and content in the novel marks a significant break-through.¹² He points out that several of the earlier readings of the novel fail to take into account Le Guin’s use of point of view. According to Bickman, Genly Ai functions as the structuring consciousness of the narrative, channeling the reader’s response accordingly. He also indicates that although this kind of unity in form and content is expected in the traditional novel, it has been overlooked in this case because of the science-fiction label.

Similarly The Dispossessed is redeemed from its generic labels by George Turner’s interpretive essay on pattern and meaning.¹³ Turner compares the novel’s structure with that of a literary classic, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, thus avoiding the SF category altogether. Concentrating on the relationship between the structural pattern and the thematic content, he then shows how Le Guin’s and Eliot’s novels are alike in their parallel presentation of contrasting societies. Like Bickman’s, this essay demonstrates the critical validity of approaching the Le Guin novel as novel.

Recent Trends in Criticism

During the flurry of critical activity that followed Le Guin’s novels winning prestigious awards, for the first time a few attempts were made to see her fiction as a whole. Along with the pioneering articles which considered her novels as works of literature rather than as examples of formulaic fantasy or science fiction, a few critics chose to deal with themes and techniques in all of her published fiction to date. To do so was in itself to regard her as a novelist rather than a science-fiction writer, to approach her work as one might approach Dickens or Forster rather than Asimov or Dick. Some of these essays dealing with her work comprehensively were written in languages other than English, a testimony to the international standing she had achieved by about 1975.

Douglas Barbour’s essay in Science-Fiction Studies (1974) was the first to consider Le Guin’s fiction as a whole, apart from the Earthsea books, noting themes and images that appear throughout.¹⁴ As his title “Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin” indicates, Barbour is concerned with the overall influence of Taoism, but he is also concerned with the quest theme, the imagery of light and darkness, and ability to create whole cultures convincingly. His study ranges over the six Hainish novels, but he deals with the Earthsea group of novels independently.

Also in 1974 Robert Scholes undertook a careful scrutiny of Le Guin’s fiction in his article “The Good Witch of the West.” Although beginning with a comparative study of the Earthsea trilogy with Lewis’s Narnia books, Scholes moves on to consider The Left Hand of Darkness. Unlike some of the critics of this novel, he sees it as a unified achievement focused on the relationship between the main characters. He also finds the Earthsea books as much of a classic as the Narnia chronicles. His praise of Le Guin is in terms of the traditional novel as well as science fiction. Not only is she “the best writer of speculative fabulation” in the country today, but she also “deserves a place among our major contemporary writers of fiction.”¹⁵

In 1975 two articles dealt with an overview of Le Guin’s fiction to date. Rafael Nudelman, a Russian theoretical physicist, offers a subtle analysis called “An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin’s Science Fiction.” Using the methods of semiotics and structuralism, he studies the relationships between part and whole and between time and space in her fiction. He focuses on the structural principle he calls Page 157  |  Top of ArticleIconicity: “the ‘lower’ level of the narrative form is a similarity, an image, the isomorphic sign of a more general or ‘higher’ formal level.” According to this principle the narrative structure, usually in the form of a journey, is isomorphic with the textual structure, in which the “scattered elements strive toward oneness.”¹⁶ The overall structural pattern in Le Guin’s fiction is thus a dynamic movement away from fragmentation and toward unity. Structure and content are an organic whole.

Somewhat similar in its optimistic conclusions about Le Guin’s open universe although it is not based on structuralism, Darko Suvin’s essay “Parables of De-Alienation: Le Guin’s Widdershins Dance” is focused on The Dispossessed and “The New Atlantis” but clearly has implications for all of her works.¹⁷ Suvin explores two kinds of alienation, external and internal. External alienation is imposed by oppressive government and society, but internal alienation is brought about within the individual psyche. In The Dispossessed he finds Shevek’s theories of time a correlative to the political revolution. Shevek’s alienation is both external and internal, and his temporal theory together with the revolution attempts to overcome both forms. In “The New Atlantis” the alienation of the individual and the society in a contemporary setting is juxtaposed to the emergence of a new collectivist and harmonious society. Alienation is in itself a contrary movement (a “widdershins dance”) but it leads in turn to a new harmony, a pattern that applies to the early trilogy as well as to the later novel and short story.

In 1976 George Slusser’s pamphlet, The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin, included the Earthsea trilogy in its survey of the novels to date. Because of his emphasis on moral themes, such as the nature of evil, his focus is quite different from other assessments. He regards Taoism as a major influence although he neglects The Lathe of Heaven. In tracing Le Guin’s development through the nine novels from 1966 to 1974, he finds certain definite directions. He notes a movement away from heroes to complex protagonists, away from straightforward narration to experiments with points of view, and away from external to internal evil. Slusser disagrees with critics such as Suvin in that he finds the tenor of Le Guin’s fiction growing more pessimistic. The experiment on Urras betrays “unregenerate human nature” and in both “The Day Before the Revolution” and “The New Atlantis” he finds that “the individual life ends in death, the collective existence in annihilation.”¹⁸

In 1977 Science-Fiction Studies carried a two-part essay ttanslated from the French, written by Gerard Klein, an economist and science-fiction writer-editor.¹⁹ In the first part Klein assesses the pervasive pessimism in American science fiction, and in the second explains how Le Guin manages to avoid it. Assuming the Marxist position as formulated by Lucien Goldmann, that is, that the real subject of a work of literature is the current situation of the social group the author belongs to, Klein delves into the attitudes of the social group of American SF writers. He finds that they are the middle class, technologically oriented group who feel threatened by recent changes in the world economic and social structures. Because of their concern about these threats to their own values, their fiction is dominated by a tone of pessimism. Le Guin, on the other hand, as Klein goes on to explain in the second part, does not belong to that group. Her own background is intellectual and academic, focused on anthropology and history. As a result her values are rooted in cultural diversity and relativity rather than in technological progress. She also avoids the trap of identifying the future of the world with the future of her own social group, as so many SF writers seem to do. An underlying optimism therefore pervades Le Guin’s ethnological science fiction. Her created worlds illustrate Levi-Strauss’s theory in Race et Histoire, that is, that cultural diversity is a natural phenomenon and civilization is a process not a linear progress. Klein also attributes Le Guin’s worlds of cultural diversity to the fact that she is a woman, freed from the obsessive male urge toward aggression. This view is in keeping with the ideas about war as rape expressed by Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness and “The Eye of the Heron.”

Opposed to Slusser’s sense of pessimism in the fiction and closer to Klein’s recognition of her optimism is Susan Wood’s vision of Le Guin’s celebration of life in her 1978 essay, “Discovering Worlds: The Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin.” Wood stresses the creative imagination and applies Le Guin’s journey motif to the evolving form of her novels. These works are a series of voyages of exploration, journeys into the creative unconscious where new worlds are discovered and given shape through language. Since discovery is the focus, the novels celebrate the diversity of life and accept the possibility of ever new worlds. For Wood there is a definite decline in the later works, such as The Word for World and The Dispossessed because there moral ethical patterns are imposed rather than discovered, a process contrary to Le Guin’s own convictions expressed in Dreams Must Explain Themselves. Wood also views the Le Guin protagonist, whether scientist, or Page 159  |  Top of Articlewizard, or traveler, as a figure of the creative artist, also in accord with Le Guin’s own assertions about wizardry as artistry as they occur in the Earthsea books. On the whole Wood’s essay is balanced and perceptive, wisely based on the author’s own ideas about her fiction.

The essays of Barbour, Scholes, Nudelman, Suvin, Slusser, Klein, and Wood are valuable both for drawing attention to pervasive facets of Le Guin’s work and for suggesting possibilities for future study. Although they deal with her fiction as a body rather than with individual works, however, they are still limited in scope, partly because of the growing body of work available for study. Now that several additional novels, short stories, essays, and poems have been added, there is rich and complex material awaiting further critical attention.

Present and Future

Although a critical overview is still premature, a progress report is very much in order. At mid-career Le Guin has already made major contributions not merely to contemporary fantasy and science fiction but also to contemporary American literature. The Earthsea trilogy ranks with the acknowledged fantasy masterpieces of Tolkien and Lewis; The Left Hand of Darkness stirred critical acclaim and controversy in Europe as well as the United States, establishing Le Guin as an SF writer of international rank; and The Dispossessed which she labeled “an ambiguous Utopia” has engaged the concern of Utopian critics who conclude that its brilliance will obviate the need for further Utopian writing over the next several years. In addition to these three achievements in three separate areas of fiction, she has written award-winning short stories in still different genres, such as “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a philosophical parable, and “The Day Before the Revolution,” which, although about the founder of an imaginary world, is in itself a mainstream story about old age and death. A poet and essayist as well, Le Guin has also written an historical novel and a variety of entertaining short pieces covering the gamut of realism, fantasy, science fiction, and combinations thereof. Ursula K. Le Guin is a literary presence, a major voice in American literature, who cannot be circumscribed in any generic literary ghetto.

What are the distinctive traits of this versatile and gifted writer? First and foremost is her myth-making ability. As reflected in the title of one of her early interviews—“Meet Ursula: She Can Shape You A Universe”—she has the ability to create a completely coherent and Page 160  |  Top of Articleconvincing secondary world, with authenticating details of language, history, myth, climate, geography, calendar, flora, and fauna. The authenticity is confirmed by much more than superficial details of landscape. Drawing on her anthropological background, Le Guin is able to create cultural concepts for her imaginary societies. Concepts such as “kemmer” and “shifgrethor” on Gethen, the stone-pounding ritual on Werel, the worship of the Nameless Ones on Atuan, and “mindspeech” as it occurs throughout the Hainish works, give depth and inner configuration to her invented worlds.

Le Guin’s mythopoeic imagination is gracefully fulfilled and embodied in her elegantly precise style. In her hands language is a flexible instrument, and she is equally adept at humor, vivid description, straightforward suspenseful narrative, stream-of-consciousness, and nuances of dialogue. Her flair for the apt metaphor spices her expository as well as imaginative prose, as when she predicts that the child whose imagination is neglected will “grow up to be an eggplant.” In total contrast, the epic description of the flight across the Gobrin Ice has sustained power and magnitude, modulated with delicacy in handling the sensitive human relationship involved. An added feature of her stylistic prowess is her ability in naming. Characters, places, and alien concepts all seem to have exactly the right original name, affirming the author’s contention that she “discovers” rather than “invents” names.

Characterization is also unusually strong in Le Guin’s fiction. Her gallery of fictitious portraits is filled with memorable characters: Wold and Odo as portrayals of old age, Shevek as a sensitive, troubled intellectual, naïve Genly Ai as one struggling for understanding, the proud youth Ged and reluctant priestess Tenar, the alienated adolescents Owen and Natalie, Hugh and Irene, and—not to omit the nonhuman world—the superbly ancient dragon Kalessin, with a glint of humor in his cold, yellow eye. Neither flat nor static, Le Guin’s characters experience both internal conflict and moral growth. To do justice to either Ged or Shevek, to cite just two examples, one would have to recite their development in full, for they mature through experience. As a result many of her characters are convincingly contradictory: courageous and fearful, humble and proud, lonely and gregarious. In short, they are real.

Narrative structure is also a distinctive feature in Le Guin’s fiction. Almost none of her novels falls into a pattern of simple linear plot. Even in her early fiction, she experiments with the circular journey as Page 161  |  Top of Articlestructure as well as theme. She later tries basing structute on point of view (e.g., The Left Hand of Darkness), and she creates parallel and double structures (The Dispossessed and “The New Atlantis”). All of these structural experiments involve to some extent manipulating point of view, and all are at the same time exact manifestations of theme. Never simplistic, Le Guin’s fiction aims at an organic interweaving of plot, theme, character, and structure. The use of musical motifs in several of her works, especially in “The New Atlantis,” The Beginning Place, and “An Die Musik,” hints strongly at a structural analogue in musical form. The parallel and mutually affective worlds in The Beginning Place and “The New Atlantis” are instances of contrapuntal structure.

Still another striking feature in her fiction is Le Guin’s use of imagery, both verbal and nonverbal. The verbal imagery is, of course, a molecular unit of her writing style. The nonverbal images, however, tend to resonate in the reader’s memory long after finishing the novel. Like C. S. Lewis, who began his Narnia stories when he envisioned a fawn carrying an umbrella, Le Guin often begins her novels with a concrete image. The genesis of The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, was her vision of two people dragging a sled across the ice. Other evocative images are the heron at the pool (“The Eye of the Heron”), the rowan tree at the center of the grove (The Farthest Shore), the daisy growing in the cracks (The Lathe of Heaven), the patterning frame (The City of Illusions), the stone of power (A Wizard of Earthsea). Certain images are precisely associated with character, for example, the hawk with Ged; some function as thematic setting, for example, the tombs of Atuan. Most radiate meaning from their own center, transcending any of the separate components of the work in which they appear.

Mythopoeic imagination, character, style, imagery, and structure are all qualitative features of Le Guin’s fiction. Yet they do not add up to the sense of the whole. There is in her fiction a vision that transcends even these distinctive elements. Le Guin’s fiction offers a thrilling personal vision of a universe, a whirling, expanding infinitely peopled universe, with harmony in its vast movement and unity in its complex diversity. Her personal voice, like that of all great writers, resonates from its roots in tree and stone to its ultimate reach beyond the stars. She has already created a galaxy with profoundly human relevance, and her reading public can only wait with soaring expectancy for what will follow next.