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The Politics of Difference in the Writings of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

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The Politics of Difference in the Writings of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin SELVES AND OTHERS: THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE IN THE WRITINGS OF URSULA KROEBER LE GUIN by DEIRDRE CASSANDRA BYRNE submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY in the subject ENGLISH atthe UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA PROMOTER: PROF I A RABINOWITZ NOVEMBER 1995 to Garth ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I received invaluable help in thinking about and writing this thesis from my promoter, Prof. I.A. Rabinowitz, who could not have been kinder or more insightful. I owe him an immense debt of gratitude. My colleagues in the Department of English at UNISA supported me by reading, offering useful comments on, and proofreading sections of the thesis. My thanks go to Karen Batley, Myles Holloway, Sue Kroger, Christine Marshall and Margaret Orr. I am especially appreciative of the help of Joanne Cannon and Lesley Robertson for their willingness to use their computer facilities and expertise to format and print any number of pages of my thesis at any time. I am also very grateful to Dawie Malan, the English subject reference librarian at UNISA, for cheerfully going out of his way countless times to unearth valuable, interesting and unusual material for me. John Barrow supported me by giving me a copy of his writing programme, Super Text, which saved me hours of frustration while I was revising the thesis. My cousin, Biffy van Rooyen, generously gave up hours of her time to help me check my references. I thank her for her kindness. Finally, my spouse, Garth Mason, has provided me with encouragement, brilliant ideas, understanding and a model of balance and serenity for six years. Without these things, this thesis would not have been possible. SUMMARY Selves and Others: The Politics ofDifference in the Writings of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin has two founding premises. One is that Le Guin's writing addresses the political issues of the late twentieth century in a number of ways, even although speculative fiction is not generally considered a political genre. Questions of self and O/other, which shape political (that is, power­ inflected) responses to difference, infuse Le Guin's writing. My thesis sets out to investigate the mechanisms of representation by which these concerns are realized. My chapters reflect aspects of the relationship between self and O/other as I perceive it in Le Guin's work. Thus my first chapter deals with the representations of imperialism and colonialism in five novels, three of which were written near the beginning of her literary career. My second chapter considers Le Guin's best-known novels, The Left Hand ofDarkness (1969) and The Dispossessed (1974), in the context of the alienation from American society recorded by thinkers in the 1960s. In my third chapter, the emphasis shifts to intrapsychic questions and splits, as I explore themes of sexuality and identity in Le Guin's novels for and about adolescents. I move to more public matters in my fourth and fifth chapters, which deal, respectively, with the politicized interface between public and private histories and with disempowerment. In my final chapter, I explore the representation of difference and politics in Le Guin's intricate but critically neglected poetry. My second founding premise is that traditional modes of literary criticism, which aim to arrive at comprehensive and final interpretations, are not appropriate for Le Guin's mode of writing, which consistently refuses to locate meaning definitely. My thesis seeks and explores aporias in the meaning-making process; it is concerned with asking productive questions, rather than with final answers. I have, consequently, adopted a sceptical approach to the process of interpretation, preferring to foreground the provisional and partial status of all interpretations. I have found that postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory, which focuses on textual gaps and discontinuities, has served me better than more traditional ways of reading. KEYWORDS Literary studies; Ursula K. Le Guin; science fiction and fantasy; difference; di.fferance; the Other; the politics of discourse; deconstruction; power; poststructuralism. Student number: 670-921-4 I declare that Selves and Others: The Politics ofDifference in the Writings of Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is my own work and that all the sources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. r•---<- --1·10> ........c).JA.Ja ......... L. t. -'':' ' .• SIGNATURE DATE (MS DC BYRNE) TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: READING POSITIONS..•.......•.......•.••••......•••.•...•.••..•.•.•.•.•••....••••••..••.•. 1 CHAPTER ONE: UN/EARTHLY POWERS.........•...............•.•.....••..•..••...••.•.•.....•••••••...•.•• 34 CHAPTER TWO: POLITIFICTION.......................................................•.........•........•.•.... 81 CHAP"fER THR.EE: SEX/IDENTITY............................................................................... 123 CHAPTER FOUR: RE-INVENTING H/hISTORY•••....•....••••..•..••......•••••..•..•.•••.•....•.•••• 171 CHAPTER FIVE: DISEMPOWERMENT......•••........•••......•••••....•••...•.•••••••.•..••••••••••.•.•.• 209 CHAP"fER SIX: (PROSE AND) POETRY•........•••.•.•...•••••.•..•••••....•.•••.•.••.•.•.••••...•.•••••••.• 253 (NO) CONCLUSION/S•....•...•..•.....•.•....•..••.•..........•••.........•.........•.•......•••...•.•..•.••••...•.•••••••.• 302 APPENDIX•.•••..•....•.•..••..•••.•......•.•.•..........•••.•..........•••••.....••••.•....•.••.•....••••••.•.••.•.••••••••.•••••••. 318 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY..••••••••..•...•..•........••••........••••.••..•••••..•...•••••.•.•.•••••••.•.••••.••••.•..•• 324 1 INTRODUCTION READING POSITIONS Poetry has a form, the novel has a form; research, the research in which the movement of all research is in play, seems unaware that it does not have a form or, worse still, refuses to question the form that it borrows from tradition ... But the manner of conveying what is in question in research remains, generally, that of exposition. The scholarly, academic dissertation is the model. (Blanchot 1993: 3) Writing of any kind fixes the word outside time, and silences it. The written word is a shadow. Shadows are silent. The reader breathes back life into that unmortality, and maybe noise into that silence. (Le Guin 1989: 180) In this thesis I draw out the main features of Le Guin's response to power, as revealed (and often concealed) in her writing. But in saying that, making a statement of intent, the mark of acquiescence to established conventions of academic thesis writing, I inevitably raise more questions than I answer. Which form of power am I dealing with? And which theoretical model of power am I invoking? Above all, why should a study of Le Guin, in an era when comparison and dialogue between voices is valued more than a 'monological'1 single-author study, shed any light on the complex nature of power in the late twentieth century? This introduction aims to pursue these problems, not, as I shall explain, with a view to resolving them, but rather in order to discover what useful problems they raise in their tum. My strategy in this thesis is emphatically not to seek single or final interpretations of Le Guin's work. There are several such accounts, some of them by very able critics and scholars; and yet they all leave me feeling that something has been missed. To take only one example, Bucknall neatly sums up Le Guin's writing as follows: 2 Le Guin is a romantic, and as a romantic she values love, nature, adventure, marvels, dreams, the imagination, and the unconscious. Like the romantics [sic], she is aware of the dark side of things and is attracted by it, even when she prefers the light. She values the individual and his or her struggle for personal liberation. (1981: 154) This, of course, is the kind of resume literary criticism is made of. It slots the writer into a category ('Le Guin is a romantic') and then proceeds to outline unequivocally the main qualities of the category. It finishes by indicating the author's contribution to humanistic values ('She values the individual'). I do not wish to denigrate Bucknall's account, or the kind of criticism she represents. On the contrary, I agree with her findings - as far as they go. I cannot fail to see them, however, as an attempt to get unruly or undecidable aspects of the writing firmly under control of a critical summary that authoritatively delineates the author's most important concerns. I argue, in opposition to Bucknall, that statements of this kind are a surer index of the critic's own theoretical allegiances (in this case, to a Leavissian thematic model of analysis) than they are of what 'exists' in the text/s. Cummins's summary of Le Guin's work, in the first chapter to her book, revealingly entitled Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin, is less overt in its theoretical affiliations. The chapter opens with a biographical sketch of the writer, then progresses to an overview of her work. It ends with a thematic summary similar to Bucknall's: ... "getting there" is a journey for both artist and reader. The journey may occur within the expansive worlds of Earthsea or the Hainish planets or within the restricted worlds of Orsinia or the American West Coast. An individual journey may become an exploration of the coming-of-age process that lasts a lifetime, or of alienation and connection, or of the difficulties of identifying one's inheritance, or of the nature of utopia. Whatever world, whatever journey, the reader will be immersed in a new "there," which will lead to a better understanding of
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