Le Guin and god: quarreling with the one, critiquing pure reason

Extrapolation, Winter, 2006 by Richard D. Erlich

  Did you hear?
  Mrs. Le Guin has found God.
  Yes, but she found the wrong one.
  Absolutely typical.
  --UKL "Epiphany," Hard Words

In her introduction to "The Good Trip" collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975), Ursula K. Le Guin refers to her "infallible talent for missing whatever boat all the fashionable people are on [...]" (109). In terms of her religious interests, Le Guin was indeed out of sync with most of the fashionably high modern and postmodern folk of the 1970s and following, but she was definitely in touch with some deep currents in the West as the various monotheisms cycled into yet another Great Awakening. She did not pay enough attention to Islam, I think, and missed the rise of a Hindu nationalism far from Mohandas K. Gandhi's--but she brilliantly performed the artist's Vonnegutian function of canary in a coal mine in her continuing critique of, in Dr. William Haber's words, "The Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" (LHD 82; ch. 6). (2) Indeed, in lumping together monotheists as a set, and adding zealous rationalists, Le Guin went against the particularist "spirit of the age"--not to mention some of her own assertions on local realities--and in doing so managed to deal with one of the most important phenomena in the United States and elsewhere in the latter part of the twentieth-century and early twenty-first: the rise of an interdenominational, indeed inter-religious fundamentalism, with connections with other systems that allow potentially fanatical certainty, and are in competition to become our "cultural dominant." (3)

Sometimes obliquely, often using a non-linear, circling, gyring, strophe-antistrophe--somewhat "carrier-bag"--technique, I deal here with Le Guin's critique of "The Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West" and with part of Le Guin's description of herself, not as unfashionable, but as an "unconsistent Taoist and a consistent unChristian" ("On Ketterer's ..." 139). The Daoist part has been discussed profitably and thoroughly from Douglas Barbour's downright ovular articles in 1973 and '74 through the work of James W. Bittner (1979) and Elizabeth Cummins Cogell (1979), Robert Galbreath (1980) to Sandra J. Lindow's "[...] Decision Making and the Tao [...]" in the Spring 2004 issue of Foundation. Le Guin consciously uses much of the critique of Holmes Welch (1957), which sets Lao Tzu and classical Daoism explicitly against "the giant of Americanism" and the American "instinct [...] to play the male," and a macho male at that. According to Le Guin, "The central image/idea of Taoism is an important thing to be clear about, certainly not because it's a central theme in my work. It's a central theme, period." (4) The Daoism, though, gets complex, including--if I'm correct in my analysis in Coyote's Song--the destruction/creation of the Dao poetically replaced by Shiva and Kali in Le Guin's poetry, and by the Goddess and dancing "god/dess" in the film script for King Dog. (5) In those works, "Mrs. Le Guin has found God," but not the right one; especially not the right One. Here I wish to stress the negative of Le Guin as "a consistent unChristian" and a critic of "The Judaeo-Christian Rationalist West"; with tweaking, those phrases become highly useful for Le Guin's critique of, with various emphases and orders, immortality, hierarchy, idealism, monologism, separation, egotism, sacrifice, making the crooked too straight, and walls.

In referring to "the Judaeo-Christian Rationalist West," Dr. William Haber in The Lathe of Heaven (1971), places himself and tries to place the novel's hero, in an activist tradition opposed to "the Eastern mysticisms" (82-83; ch. 6). Haber's omitting Islam is esthetically decorous: appropriate to the character and context. However much Dr. Haber's medieval history teacher might have hit him over the head with Islam's importance for the making of the West--imagining for a moment a back-story in which Haber studied European history--Haber isn't likely to have remembered that. (6) And Haber and most of Le Guin's readers inherited and built upon Orientalism, in Edward S. Said's sense: America as a European culture, with European culture defined against the world of nonEuropeans, starting with--although the geography gets tricky--the "Orient" of Islam (Said 7, and passim). When Ursula K. Le Guin said that she was an "unconsistent Taoist and a consistent unChristian," the remark was totally decorous for her context: a reply to David Ketterer's treatment of the (Christian) theme of apocalypse in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness ("On Ketterer's ..." 139). In larger contexts, however, these key phrases require some "unpacking."

There are Christians in Le Guin's canon (as I'll get to below), though only a few; but we shouldn't make much of that scarcity: there are few literal Christians in most modern narrative art and popular media. All art is selective, or, more specifically put by Le Guin, "Story is a collaborative art," wherein writers' imaginations work "in league" with those of readers "to fill in, to flesh out, to bring their own experience to the work" ("The Question [...]" 276). Fiction is selective (and poetry more so) and mostly gaps, and most respectable fictions concentrate on humans as social animals and leave out the rest, omitting humans as animal animals and as spiritual animals. (7) We don't see bathrooms on the starship Enterprise--or even on the industrial, funky Nostromo in Alien--and the Enterprise's chapel gets used only for the occasional wedding and perhaps a funeral. If we do see washrooms, there is a good chance we are in a satire; and outside of the TV or radio religious-broadcasting ghetto, prayer is as invisible as urination. With secular, mimetic art, most readers fill in the gaps with washrooms and religion, and the "default setting" for religion with many authors, although not Ursula K. Le Guin, is often some sort of white-bread Christianity. (8)