Archaeologies of the Future: Deconstruction, Fantasy, and the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (Fall 2019)

Abstract

In a 1989 essay entitled “Of Lunacy and Laundry Trucks,” Kath Filmer castigates Derridean deconstruction as “the deluded intelligences of a philosophical cloud-cuckoo-land,” against which she posits mythopoetic fantasy fiction as an alternative form of deconstructive writing that initiates transcendence by simultaneously affirming and unsettling the familiar. Although her oppositional argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Derrida, Filmer’s characterization of fantastic worldbuilding as deconstructive activity also inadvertently highlights the homologous structures and radical potentiality shared by fantasy and Derridean deconstruction, and suggests that a re-evaluation of the two disciplines’ relationship to each other is overdue. This essay will posit that despite its conservative reputation, fantasy fiction, like Derrida’s philosophical project, carries the potential to disrupt received wisdom, unifying grand narratives, and binary hierarchies not by disavowing them, but by, in Derrida’s words, “[i]nhabiting them in a certain way” and “constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed.” The fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin embodies a deconstructive endeavour to contend with radical alterity and the religious, political, racial, cultural, gendered, and sexual difference(s) located in the margins, silences, and traces of myths and grand narratives. With particular attention to the Earthsea novels, I will demonstrate how Le Guin’s writing draws attention to deconstructive movements at work in her mythmaking through her embrace of polyvocal storytelling and her emphasis on magic and religious practice as the continual making and unmaking of worlds through speech acts. In Le Guin’s hands, mythopoetic writing is not the re-inscription of a unified grand narrative, but an affirmation of fragmentary and plural mythologies as openings toward (im)possible sites of encounter with difference and the advent of a justice which is yet-to-come.