The Beginning Place:Le Guin's Metafantasy Brian Attebery (bio) Most writers of fantasy reach a point where they start to defend what they have written against charges of irrelevance or meaninglessness. There are essays by George MacDonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and many other fantasists that say, "This is real. It matters. My stories are born from and reflect back upon the outside world of perception and action." The impulse is understandable: many readers and, unfortunately, a few writers mistake fantasy's alteration of reality for an evasion of reality. Such readers fail to note how carefully the best fantasists order their creations—how they limit the magical possibilities and bind them to a stringent moral order. Ursula K. Le Guin, in one of these defenses of fantasy, says that "fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living."1 Le Guin's best known fantasy is the Earthsea trilogy: three tales of wizardry and self-discovery set in a world of islands inhabited by men, dragons, and lesser beings. The high quality of these stories has been recognized in a number of critical essays, in major awards—a Boston Globe—Horn Book Award for A Wizard of Earthsea, a Newbery Honor Medal for The Tombs of Atuan, and a National Book Award for The Farthest Shore—and in the response of the children and adults who read them. What kind of response? The same kind that Le Guin, in another essay, tells of having arisen in her upon reading, at age ten, a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen: ". . . It was to that, to the unknown depths in me, that the story spoke; and it was the depths which [End Page 113] responded to it and, nonverbally, irrationally, understood it, and learned from it."2 But having located the truth of fantasy in the unconscious, how can we act consciously in accordance with it: what is the use of a dream upon awaking?3 That is a question that Le Guin and her predecessors have skirted in their essays. However, Le Guin's most recent fantasy novel, The Beginning Place, is largely about the relationship between fantasy and ordinary, daylight reality. It tells, in a sense, what happens when we close the book and drift back from Middle Earth or Narnia or Earthsea. Le Guin explores this relationship by establishing not one but two fictional realms, one fantastic and one modeled on the world we live in. Her protagonists, Irene Pannis and Hugh Rogers, cross from one world to the other, like fictional representatives of the reader as he picks up a work of fantasy and puts it down, adjusting his eyes and his expectations each time to a new order of being. In their actions and reactions Le Guin embodies her notion of the ways fantasy can be used either to evade or to achieve psychological growth. The Beginning Place opens in a setting that is sharply detailed and yet impossible to locate, for it is set in standardized American suburbia. Its supermarkets, freeways, and apartments, its Kensington Heights, Pine View Place, and Raleigh Drive might encircle virtually any medium-to-large city in America. All is bland, uniform, ersatz. It is a horrible place, but no one in the story seems consciously to recognize the horror, not even the hero, Hugh, a young supermarket checker. Hugh's unconscious, though, is at work. Unruly and fertile, as our unconscious minds tend to be, it protests one evening as Hugh sits at home heating a frozen TV dinner and waiting for his brittle, demanding mother to come home. Choosing as its defense not neurosis but escape, Hugh's unconscious stirs him to panic, drives him out the door, and sets him running: Right down Oak Valley Road, left onto Pine View Place, right again, he did not know, he could not read...