Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin by Elizabeth Cummins (review)

Reviews Understanding Ursula K. Le Quin. By Elizabeth Cummins. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. 216 pages, $24.95.) This contribution to the University of South Carolina Press’s Understand­ ing Contemporary American Literature series provides a perceptive and coher­ ent overview of one of our most important western American writers. Fulfilling the objectives defined by the series editor of providing a useful guide for “students aswell as good nonacademic readers,” Understanding UrsulaK. Le Guin also illuminates for more sophisticated readers Le Guin’s multi-faceted reflec­ tions on central cultural issues of our time. As Cummins’interpretation shows, Le Guin’s wide-ranging contributions in genres as apparently disparate as fantasy, science fiction, and personal essays all probe an underlying philosophi­ cal and cultural issue—the need to construct a worldview that can integrate the rationalist tradition of the Westwith other forms of knowledge and perception. By focusing on Le Guin’s artistic strategies as an architect of imaginary worlds, Cummins demonstrates how she employs non-realist settings to dramatize the dynamics of cultural conflict. The book’s sensible design reinforces Cummins’ basic argument, that within a variety of imaginative settings Le Guin dramatizes variations of arche­ typal stories involving encounters with the “other”and discovery of the true self. “Whatever world, whatever journey, the reader will be immersed in a new ‘there,’ which will lead to a better understanding of intelligent beings, the world, and the interaction between the two.” After a deft introduction that sketches in Le Guin’s background, Cummins focuses on her main theme, “the importance of [Le Guin’s] worldbuilding and the nature of the different worlds she builds.” Subsequent chapters explore the imaginative architecture of each ofLe Guin’s primary worlds—Earthsea (fantasy),the Hainish World (interplan­ etary science fiction), Orsinia (an imaginary East European country in our very real history), and a future West Coast (post-apocalypse western American sci­ ence fiction). This reader at least would have appreciated a more thorough description ofsome of the less major works (the early science fiction trilogy, the Orsinian novel Malafrena, and the interesting new collection, Buffalo Girls and Other Animal Presences). Instead, Cummins focuses almost exclusively on Le Guin’s major works within each setting: the Earthsea trilogy; the major inter­ planetary science fiction novels, The Word for World is Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed; Orsinian Tales; and the West Coast stories, The Lathe ofHeaven and Always ComingHome. And she successfully integrates analysis Reviews 129 of the aesthetic design of each of these “worlds”into a convincing and provoca­ tive interpretation of Le Guin’s major work to date. Most significantly, Cummins succeeds in revealing the range and depth of Le Guin’s achievements, illustrating how in accomplished hands the conven­ tions of so-called “genre fiction” can symbolically dramatize our deepest con­ flicts, as well as extend our perception of what is possible and “real.”Le Guin’s fantasy and science fiction explore multicultural frontiers of race, gender, and tradition in which we all, inadvertently or by design, must travel. Her otherworldly stories are complex fables about how to achieve, in Cummins’ words, “integrity and integration” while crossing cultural boundaries. In the midst of our increasingly contentious disputes about the values and meaning of “multiculturalism,”these archetypaljournies—weaving together concepts from areas as diverse as modern cosmology and theoretical physics, scientifically engineered utopianism, Taoism, and Native American studies-—provide insight into the philosophical sources of our conflicts, as well as visions of possible resolution and transformation. As this excellent introduction reveals, Le Guin interprets our most fundamental struggles here at “home”by extending arche­ typal stories of the heroicjourney into global and interplanetary dimensions. DAVID MOGEN Colorado State University Radical Imagination: Feminist Conceptions of the Future in Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Sally Miller Gearhart. By Margarete Keulen. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991. 122 pages, $30.80.) In this academic-oriented text, Keulen compares and contrasts the feminist “utopias”described in Marge Piercy’s Woman on TheEdge ofTime (1976), in Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground; Stories oftheHill Women (1979), and in The Left Hand ofDarkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin. She focuses on the...