Mrs Brown and the Revolution: The Taoist Humanism of Ursula K. Le Guin
‘Mrs Brown’ was the name Virginia Woolf gave to an old lady who sat opposite her in a railway carriage in the train going from Richmond to Waterloo, her example of the character who appears to the novelist, inside a railway carriage or inside the mind, and from whom a novel grows. In 1975, giving a lecture in London, Ursula Le Guin talked about Mrs Brown and about science fiction, and whether the writer of science fiction could sit down in the corner opposite to Mrs Brown and put her into a story, could deal with character, could write (in Woolf’s sense) a novel. For Le Guin, this was the whole point; unless Mrs Brown could be somehow included aboard the gleaming faster-than-light space-ship then imagination and invention were in vain. “If Mrs Brown is dead, you can take your galaxies and roll them up into a ball and throw them into the trashcan, for all I care. What good are all the objects in the universe if there is no subject?”[1]What sort of science fiction writer says that? The sort whose parents were a leading anthropologist and a writer. Le Guin was born in 1929, youngest child of Alfred and Theodore Kroeber, and absorbed anthropology “by osmosis” in that stimulating family. Her brother Ted taught her to read, having got fed up with having an illiterate five-year-old sister about the place, and she read Lady Frazer’s Leaves from the Golden Bough “like Peter Rabbit”, as well as Norse and Indian myths. She and her brothers read science fiction, but in the late 1940s it “seemed to be all about hardware and soldiers ... starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery”;[2] so she moved on to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky instead. It was not till 1960, after the death of her father, that she found her way back to science fiction and into print. Fifteen years later, she was a leading writer in the genre, and giving a lecture of ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’.
By regarding character as the essential feature of the novel, Le Guin immediately sets herself apart from the mass of science fiction, and she finds in it much to complain of. At a conference in 1974, overstating deliberately to start a discussion, she singled out American science fiction’s treatment of The Other - the being who is different in sex, in class, in culture, or in race; typically, she said, we find gormless women, faceless masses and imperialists, and monstrous aliens. The Other is wholly alienated.
If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself ... you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.She has a similar contempt for the sword and sorcery tradition, and was therefore delighted by Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, which presents a ‘heroic fantasy’ story written by Adolf Hitler. It has all the familiar features: the virile Hero; the Hero’s Friends; the vile, subhuman enemies; the Hero’s Sword; the usual tests, quests, battles, victories; but “in reading it, reading all the familiar things about the glory of battle, the foulness of enemies of the truth, the joys of obedience to a true leader, the reader is forced to remember that it is Hitler saying these things - and thus to question what is said, over and over.”[4]
... In general, American SF has assumed a permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious, aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor, the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women....
Is this speculation? is this imagination? is this extrapolation? I call it brainless regressivism.[3].
The paperback publishers, however, know their market, so that even Le Guin’s books commonly appear making them out to be action-packed adventure stories, and the Penguin edition of the Earthsea trilogy has on its cover the picture of a demented-looking punk rocker with sparks shooting out of his fingertips. Yet her stories are not about power and conquest, but rather the failure of power, “the essential wastefulness and futility of aggression and the profound effectiveness of wu wei,”[5] the Taoist concept of ‘actionless action’ or ‘action through stillness’. They are not stories of success in any usual sense; as the narrator of one of her novels says, “if you’d like a story about how I won my basketball colour and achieved fame, love, and fortune, don’t read this.”[6] Le Guin’s books do not, as a result, have a traditional, victorious, “happy ending”.
For instance, A Wizard of Earthsea is the story of a young wizard named Ged, who in a fit of supreme arrogance and jealousy tries to summon a spirit of the dead, thus unintentionally releasing a shadow-beast which hunts him through the world. Desparately he tries to learn the shadow’s name, for knowledge of its true name will give him power over it. One might expect the story to end with the destruction of the shadow, for in the familiar Manichaean or Christian mythology, light is good and darkness evil and light ultimately prevails; but in the Taoist philosophy, light is not at war with darkness and does not destroy it. All Ged’s efforts to bring wizardly power against his shadow end in disaster; he does not destroy it.
A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else is a short realistic novel set in contemporary America. Owen Griffiths is a seventeen-year-old loner, on the verge of a breakdown because his father has just given him a car for his birthday - when the one thing he knows about himself is that he is not the car-loving all-American-kid which he is expected to be. On the bus, he meets Natalie Field, eighteen months older than him, whose ambition it is to be a composer; and in unthinking desperation he starts clowning with her, going into an imitation of an ape. They start to meet and talk together a lot, and their friendship flourishes, though Owen can never understand why Natalie becomes helpless with laughter whenever he goes into the ape-act. But this is not a love-story; they do not get married; they do not sleep together; what happens is that Owen feels pressure all around him to make their friendship into a love-affair, and when he tries, it all goes to pieces. The book ends with Natalie leaving town to go to Tanglewood music college.
Malafrena is set in an imaginary central European country in the revolutionary years of the early nineteenth century; it is Le Guin’s homage to Tolstoy, her War and Peace. The young Itale Sorde leaves his family’s estates in Malafrena for political activity in the capital, Krasnoy. Before he leaves, he affectionately gives his cousin Piera a copy of Dante’s Vita Nova, inscribing inside: “‘Here begins the new life.’ Piera Valtorskar from Itale Sorde, 5 August 1825.” In Krasnoy, he meets other intellectuals, including the poet Estenskar, and they start a radical paper which they call Novesma Verba. But the domination of the Hapsburg Empire continues, Itale is imprisoned for subversive journalism, and when Estenskar returns home he sees the farewell message which he carved on a tower wall many years earlier: “vincam”, I shall conquer; and confronted by his proud, youthful boast, he commits suicide soon afterwards. Itale is released from prison, barely alive; he is on the barricades in the uprising of 1848 where he sees the revolution effortlessly suppressed; and he returns to Malafrena, where Piera, who has meanwhile made a career for herself in running her father’s estates, gives him back the Vita Nova. “I’ll write something in it, if you like, to make it more of a present.... Here ends the new life. With affection, from Piera Valtorskar. Would that do?” The collapse of Itale’s ambitions is hard to bear; there is no victory in Malafrena.
The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s best-known work, already something of a classic in certain left-wing circles, and said to be Ken Livingstone’s favourite book. [Postscript 2018: when this was written, Livingstone was the radical leader of the Greater London Council.] It is set partly on the planet Urras, partly on its sister planet Annares, on which the followers of the anarchist philosopher Odo have set up a Utopian society. There is no state, no social hierarchy, no money, and most important of all no private property; even the language is reconstructed so that one would not normally say “my handkerchief” but rather “the handkerchief I use”. Existing at subsistence level on a barren and infertile planet, they survive by an ideology of sharing - both work and commodities. Shevek, an Annaresti physicist, travels to Urras where he encounters its affluent capitalist society, and is first puzzled then repelled by it. He sees that the Annaresti have nothing, except one another, and possessing nothing they are free; that the Urrasti are rich, they own, and by possessing they are themselves possessed, each alone in prison with a heap of what he owns, and walls are all that he can see in their eyes. If The Dispossessed were a different sort of book, it would end with the revolution of the Urrasti proletariat and the vindication of Odonian anarchism; but Annares is, as the subtitle says, ‘an ambiguous Utopia’, and the revolutionary state is itself in need of revolution. There are supposed to be no rules, but children are being taught to parrot the words of Odo as the new orthodoxy; there is supposed to be no police and no punishment, but when one of Shevek’s friends writes a supposedly anti-Odonian play he is ostracised, keeps getting manual-labour postings, and is driven into applying for a place in a lunatic asylum; there is supposed to be freedom of thought, but though Shevek is manifestly the most brilliant physicist on Annares, all his original ideas are condemned as ‘egoising’, and it is this which drives him into undertaking the voyage to Urras. And though on Urras the underground movement takes Shevek’s arrival as a signal for the revolution and organises a general strike and mass meetings, the crowds are mown down by machine-gun fire from helicopters and armed troops. But not before Shevek has addressed them; and some of his words are the key to Le Guin’s Taoist humanism.
If it is Annares you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands.... You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.To a Taoist, even an inconsistent on (all that Le Guin claims to be), “you can only be the Revolution” is a simple basic truth. ‘Revolution’ does not just mean an overturning, as in a political revolution, the Marxist revolution; it also means a continuous turning, in the way that a wheel revolves, or the universe revolves, or Nature revolves, cycles, changes, is always made new. According to the Taoist philosophy, the sage does not dominate Nature, seeking to rule it from above, in the way that Confucians and Legalists sought to impose law and morality on society; instead, they follow Nature, they submit to it and thus rule it from beneath, in the way that the anarchic society is ruled from beneath. And as the universe is at balance, is whole, is complete, so the sage who follows Nature’s way is whole and complete. You (as human person) can only be the (Taoist) Revolution.
The final effect given by “so much of the old Man-Conquers-Cosmos sf” is, says Le Guin, depressing. “When you’ve conquered the cosmos all that’s left to do is sit down, like Alexander the Great, and cry.”[7] Her writing, though not cheerful and upbeat, is not depressing in its final effect. Ged names his shadow with his own name, and in doing so makes himself whole: “a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.” Owen Griffiths hears some of Natalie’s songs performed, and at that moment sees Natalie as she is; and when she leaves for Tanglewood he does not do the ape act: “I stood there and did the human act as well as possible.” Itale Sorde gives back to Piera the Vita Nova which he have her when he first left Malafrena: “I didn’t know why I left till I came back - I have to come back to find that I have to go again. I haven’t even begun the new life yet. I am always beginning it. I will die beginning it. Will you keep it for me, Piera?” And Shevek returns to Annares, without possessions, as he left it; “his hands were empty, as they had always been.” In the last few words each story comes whole, comes complete, comes true: like the universe or a human life, like Mrs Brown or the Revolution.
References
[1] ‘Science Fiction and Mrs Brown’[2] ‘A Citizen of Mondrath’
[3] ‘American SF and the Other’
[4] Science Fiction Studies, vol 2, p. 142
[5] Planet of Exile, introduction to 1979 edition
[6] A Very Long Way from Anywhere Else
[7] Nebula Award Stories, Introduction
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