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eBook details
- Title: Le Guin and God: Quarreling with the One, Critiquing Pure Reason (Ursula K. Le Guin) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 253 KB
Description
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.
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