How to Walk with My People: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Futuristic Frontier Mythology

Abstract

Toward the end of the third novella in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) conflict is resolved once the hero has learned “‘[h]ow to walk. . . . How to walk with [his] people”’ (144). Who are those people? Are they simply the inhabitants of a science fiction world too remote to he of real concern to us worldlings? To say so would surely be too simplistic, for, as Le Guin has remarked, “The future, in [science] fiction, is a metaphor” (“Introduction” 159). And as Larry McCaffery has compellingly argued, the capacity of contem­ porary science fiction is precisely “to defamiliarize our science fiction lives and thereby force us to temporarily inhabit worlds whose cogColor photograph b y Nick Koudis ( w w w .kou dis.com ) 256 WAL 33(3) FALL 1998 nitive distortions and poetic figurations of our own social relations— as these are constructed and altered by our new technologies— make us suddenly see our world in sharper relief” (3-4). This possibly implies that where science fiction’s genre characteristics violate self-evident norms of probability and formal economy, its characters nevertheless act out scenarios that teach readers what kinds of behavior to emu­ late or shun. There is a lot of didacticism in the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin. Thus it is worth remembering that ever since the publication of Always Coming Home in 1985, Le Guin has habitually described her­ self as “a feminist, a conservationist, and a Western American, pas­ sionately involved with West Coast literature, landscape, and life” (Four Ways back flap). While she has indicated, “‘America’ is not a very clear concept or ideal to me,” she has at the same time claimed that “‘California,’ for example, is” (Letter). This is evident in “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” where she writes, “[I]f [utopia] is to come, it must exist already” and “[T]here are people there. They have always lived there. It’s home” (Dancing 93, 98-99). With the American West featuring so prominently in her writing, it seems appropriate to place Le Guin among western writ­ ers, even though many people would much rather describe her as a writer of science fiction and fantasy. Yet as David Mogen has demon­ strated in Wilderness Visions, there are many analogies between imag­ inative renderings of the frontier myth and science fiction. One of them regards the space opera, with its stereotyped bug-eyed monsters and its heroes with ray guns, as the science fiction equivalent of the horse opera, with its equally stereotyped Indians and its heroes with their six-shooters. In this respect, the interchangeability of the for­ mulaic plots— the captures, escapes, getaways, shoot-outs, the heroes walking off into the sunset with the pretty damsels— is less signifi­ cant than the fact that the West of the imagination informs America’s inherited cultural archetypes. In other words, the future, even the imaginary future, is deeply rooted in the national past. As on the frontier, Americans have for the last half-century or so realized their destiny, have regenerated their culture, and have reinvented them­ selves in the future. It is in new worlds that the opportunity to make a new beginning for human society presents itself.1 But just as there was always a dark side to the frontier past,2 there are those whose vision of the future is equally ambiguous. Perhaps those who, like Ursula K. Le Guin, live at the western edge of the United States are in a somewhat superior position to confront the Heinz t s c h a c h le r 257 central western myth with the most urgent dilemma: for them, there is literally no new frontier over the next horizon. Consequently, they may wait for the end or they can accept that they “make justice here, or nowhere” (Le Guin, Dispossessed 237).3 I was therefore most inter­ ested to read, in Four Ways to Forgiveness, that the people there, “despite their monstrous society . . . were full of vitality and pride,” much as they also were “full of dreams of justice” (120, emphasis added). Accordingly, in this essay, I will...