THE READING RHEUM: A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA (1968)

 I probably first read A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA and its two sequels no later than the 1970s. Within the last ten years I re-read them all for a book-group. I confess that despite that re-read I remember little about the sequels. I emphasize this reading history to underscore the fact that even though I seem to remember liking Ursula Le Guin's ambitious, arguably anti-Tolkienian trilogy, I don't think I tended to re-read the series, as I did with similar serials by Frank Herbert and the aforementioned Tolkien.                                                                                       

 I won't chart the loose plot of the novel here. What LeGuin presents to the reader are a loose series of incidents in the life of an islander in the fantasy-world of Earthsea: Ged, who comes from humble origins but who advances, sometimes in spite of himself. to become one of the foremost wizards in the world. I'm more concerned with pinpointing the major themes and tropes found in EARTHSEA. I find these to be "anti-Tolkienian" in that LeGuin is not concerned with the major good-vs-evil conflicts characteristic of most epic fantasy, but with an exploration of interiority, of what some call "the self."                                                                                                             

The defining problem Ged faces in his youth, and in his early years mastering the skills of wizardry, is that of his own pride. His pride leads him to unleash upon himself a pursuing Shadow, a form of "second self" which provides much of EARTHSEA's narrative drive. Roughly halfway through the book, while Ged is fleeing his personal demon, he takes refuge with his teacher Ogion, who tells him:                                                                                                                          

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”                                       

     Passages like this one demonstrate that LeGuin, in contrast to the Judeo-Christian focus found in Tolkein and Lewis, advocated the monistic approach of Taoism, at least as she understood it. This is not to say that Ged is a non-combative protagonist. EARTHSEA includes fascinating sections where the young wizard, once he's gained greater control of his own psyche, forces a powerful (and intelligent) dragon to yield to Ged's will, and overcomes the temptation of an archaic evil spirit. (To be sure, there's the suggestion of a Faustian trope, but by this time in the novel Ged, unlike Faust, has advanced beyond worldly temptation.)                                               

While I enjoyed my third reading of EARTHSEA, I concluded that I find the morality of LeGuin too arid. I noticed on this reading that although two or three of Ged's teachers seem to intuit the great mistakes he's going to make, none of them ever proffers any advice to guide him away from those errors. Had any of them done so, of course, that might have prevented Ged from bringing about the book's central conflict, which could have been a major problem for LeGuin. But I still find her actual approach overly schematic, as if she wants to put Ged under a microscope to observe the things he does. Though EARTHSEA probably has a much better literary reputation than the 1970s teleseries KUNG FU, I find that the better scripts of that program more involving that this fantasy-novel, particularly with respect to how the hero Caine is advised by his perceptors. The hero's Shaolin teachers are always seen in flashback, rendering bits of abstruse philosophy to Young Caine, which insights Modern Caine reflects upon in order to draw current conclusions about how to act in a current situation. Caine's absent teachers don't do his thinking for him, but they pass on their knowledge so that he can take advantage of it later. Ged is like one of the many islands that make up the world of Earthsea, isolated from his fellow humans even though he chooses to perform good deeds on their behalf. In both her non-fiction and her fiction, LeGuin abjures the visceral in favor of the intellectual-- which doesn't always make for the ideal re-reading experience. Incidentally, the first EARTHSEA book is definitely a candidate for a category of proposition/postulate I discussed here: one which "includes a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates."        

AN URSULINE, ULTRAFEMINIST FANTASY-DEFENDER

I don’t want to take a lot of shots at the late author’s ultrafeminism. I will note that it’s curiously more intense than most Second-Wave feminism, and often resembles the later waves, particularly the current one, in which male priorities and fantasies are ceaselessly attacked. “Is Gender Necessary?”  reads like a very current screed, excelled only by the rhetoric of the short-lived 1970s organization “Women Against Pornography.” And although LeGuin apparently hated sword-and-sorcery with a passion, space opera was at least her second favorite thing to hate.  In “A Citizen of Mondath” the author chronicles her early repugnance at the male-centered nature of most SF magazines:

If I glanced at a magazine, it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery.

She also showcases her animadversions to the genre’s supposed penchant for “pointy breasted brainless young women” throughout LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT.  Nowhere in the collection does LeGuin entertain the notion that the genre might be reformed to become more woman-friendly, as arguably happened not only with later prose serials like THE EXPANSE but with movies like STAR WARS (which LeGuin reviled in a non-LOTN essay).

Most of LeGuin’s anti-male rhetoric is shallow, but “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” manages to dovetail her feminism with her defenses of the interlocked genres of fantasy and science fiction. Given that I’d been forced to defend the metaphenomenal genres more than once, I’m sure that in my initial reading of LOTN I enjoyed her attack on the tendency of Americans to validate only realistic works of literature, so I had to agree when she claimed that, “We tend, as a people, to look upon all works of the imagination either as suspect or as contemptible.” And I have to admire the concision of her rebuttal: “Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time.”

However, as I reread the way she tends to blame this tendency on “the men who run the country,” I believe that her defense is based in false premises. Often she seems to talking less about the actual tastes of actual persons, and more about some “Puritan work ethic” boogieman. It is also, it seems, a boogieman that infects only men with a lack of imaginative vigor, which leads to their disinterest not only in Tolkien but also in Tolstoy, as well as to their preference for “sterile” works like “bloody detective thrillers on the television” or best-seller fiction.

Although one might assume that American women would become just as influenced by something as pervasive as the “work ethic,” the ladies get a pass. LeGuin tells us that even women read material no less imaginatively impoverished, like “soap operas” and “nursy novels,” they simply haven’t been given the chance to nourish their imaginations, living as they do in a sort of “Femiinine Mystique” America.

The main problem of the “Dragons” essay is that LeGuin is entirely too dismissive of the appeal of verisimilitude in itself, whether it appears in a Tolstoy novel or in a “bloody detective thriller.” Throughout most of its history, American students were raised, as were students in many European cultures, to value naturalistic works of art above those dependent on “imagination.” I’m sure LeGuin would hold Tolstoy blameless insofar as his accomplishments provided support for the position of the “naturalism-first” crowd. I, however, consider WAR AND PEACE to be just as guilty of encouraging the marginalization of the metaphenomenal as any best-seller or “nursy novel.”

LeGuin’s antipathy for the commercial side of book-selling lies at the roots of her skewed rhetoric. She can’t conceive that the naturalistic form of artistic fiction might have a deleterious effect upon Americans’ ability to dream of dragons; it has to be the work of those evil fiction-factories and their soulless hacks. In truth, though, there’s no one to blame. As Northrop Frye wrote, all of literature aligns itself along a spectrum ranging from the purest “verisimilitude” to what Frye called “myth”—which, for him, included beings who could do anything, in contrast to mortal limitations. A critical viewpoint unable to recognize how much the reader of Harold Robbins has in common with a reader of Tolstoy and Zola remains, in the final analysis, no more sophisticated than that of an Edmund Wilson who rejects hobbits and dragons as a matter of course.

Elsewhere in "Dragons," LeGuin cites a definition of the imagination that seems to borrow from both Kant and Tolkien:

By imagination, then, I personally mean the free play of the mind, both intellectual and sensory. By "play" I mean recreation, re-creation, the recombination of what is known into what is new. By "free" I mean that the action is done without an immediate object of profit-- spontaneously.

Philosophically, I have no serious problem with this statement, but only with LeGuin's elitist application of the position. She immediately hedges her "sponteaneity" argument to claim that "the free play of an adult mind" can be something as sophisticated as Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE. Okay, but Tolstoy was a landed aristocrat; he had a lot of free time for his free play, and though he didn't need to write for a living, he certainly wanted his work to have some effect on society. To say that only the object of "profit" invalidates an author's intentions for his work strikes me as special pleading as defined thusly:

Applying standards, principles, and/or rules to other people or circumstances, while making oneself or certain circumstances exempt from the same critical criteria, without providing adequate justification.  Special pleading is often a result of strong emotional beliefs that interfere with reason.

In the process of LeGuin's project to defend imaginative art, she has chosen to blame Americans' supposed preference for realistic art on their seduction by Puritanism and the Protestant work-ethic. But the work-ethic came about in large part because America had few or no aristocrats; almost everyone had to work for a living. And thus a lot of people don't want to "work" for their entertainment as well as for their daily bread. If they reject both Tolstoy and Tolkien in favor of current bestsellers, it may just be that they have a taste for verisimilitude because they don't want to work too hard to be amused. I don't mind challenging such tastes. But I think LeGuin merely sought to create a new aristocracy of taste to replace the more plebeian version she opposed-- and that, for all her highflown rhetoric about imagination, she herself failed to imagine the position of her perceived opponents.

AN URSULINE ELITIST

Years ago, during one of my many forum-arguments, I made some comments about the elitist mentality, and an opponent demurred at the use of the term, claiming that the word I ought to have used was “snob.” I countered by saying the word “snob” was too imprecise. After all, though snobbery is more often associated with elitism than with its conceptual opposite “populism,” I’ve encountered my share of “populist snobs,” by which I mean persons who are validated only by their association with works that have proven themselves popular in the marketplace.

“Elite” stems from a Latin word meaning “choice,” the usual connotations being that to be of “the elite” is either that one is “chosen,” or that one has such developed good taste that he/she can make better choices about what is good than can the average consumer.

Many of the essays in Ursula LeGuin's LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT are full of fulminations against hackwork in many genres, though she seems to have taken particular pleasure in assailing the then-popular sword-ands-sorcery genre. Yet, unlike many elitists of her time, she also takes aim at authors whom she considers “earnest snobs,” which would seem to indicate that LeGuin did not consider herself guilty of snobbery.

Who were these “earnest snobs?” LeGuin never specifies, either in the essay where the phrase occurs, the aforementioned “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction,” or in any other part of LOTN. In "Archetypes," LeGuin responds to the question of whether science fiction can be a “modern mythology,” and her response is framed in terms that are, if not snobbish, are certainly elitist. After defining all the tropes in science fiction that she doesn’t like as “Submyths,” she resolutely excludes all of them from even deserving to be called science fiction:

The artist who deliberately submits his work to [the Submyths] has forfeited the right to call his work science fiction; he’s just a popcultist cashing in.

In other words, to submit to the Submyths is the modern equivalent of prostrating oneself to the modern devil known as Commercial Hackery. Thus, by a rather accomplished sleight-of-hand, LeGuin affirms the idea of calling science fiction “modern mythology,” but only if it fits her elitist vision of the way true art works. 

However, at the time LeGuin wrote this essay, there were stirrings of pluralism even within intellectual circles, in which some artists and critics asserted that even popular art contained “myths” worth studying. LeGuin rejected this viewpoint by claiming that such persons were not aware of the true breadth and depth of mythic meaning: “they mistake symbol (living meaning} for allegory (dead equivalence). So they use mythology in an arrogant fashion, rationalizing it, condescending to it.”

To be sure, it’s hard to keep track of what “they” LeGuin refers to, since in the previous paragraph she starts talking about would-be writers learning the wrong lessons from uninspired academics. Her basic point is certainly undeniable: writers and critics who over-rationalize myth do exist. However, LeGuin weakens her case by conveniently not naming any of these offenders against true myth, and so these unnamed academics are treated the same as the nameless hacks: infidels who whore after the wrong gods.

The closest she comes to naming an offender of sorts, at least in the “Archetypes” essay, comes toward the end, when she proposes  this odd equnivalence:

There are never very many artists around. No doubt we’ll continue most of the time to get rewarmed leftovers from Babylon and Northrop Frye served up by earnest snobs, and hordes of brawny Gerbilmen ground out by hacks.

The sudden and unjustified mention of Frye in this context raises some interesting flags. It’s true that Frye’s fame had endured for the past twenty years, since he published 1955’s ANATOMY OF CRITICISM. But though he had a degree of influence in academia, I find it very hard to believe that any “earnest snobs” sought to find rationalizations of mythology in the ANATOMY, or in any other Frye work. Frye was at heart a pluralist, able to appreciate many different genres (certainly more than LeGuin), and he even gives SF an approving nod once or twice in the ANATOMY. It’s true that LeGuin doesn’t call Frye an “earnest snob,” but her loose association implies that there’s something in his work that would appeal to rationalizers. Or—is it just that Frye doesn’t insist on the type of high-toned myth that LeGuin prefers?

This hypothesis finds confirmation in one other LOTN essay, “Escape Routes.”  Prior to the essay proper, LeGuin identifies the piece as “an amalgamation and summation of several talks” that she gave to “teachers of SF.” In keeping with its name, “Routes” goes in more than one direction, lacking the focus of LeGuin’s more organized essays. But only one passage concerns me here: her slam, again unjustified, at another critic known for defending popular culture.

…outside the [SF] ghetto, there are critics who like to stand above SF, looking down upon it, and therefore want it to be junky, popcult, contemptible… and it’s one of the many games Leslie Fiedler plays.

As with Frye, there’s no telling what critical crime LeGuin thinks Fiedler committed, nor any attempt to clarify what he said or why it affronted the author. As I’ve read most of Fiedler’s writings, I would say that any “contempt” she thought she perceived existed in LeGuin’s own imagination. Fiedler was as much a pluralist as Frye, even though the two critics followed extremely divergent methodologies, and Fiedler devoted far more attention than did Frye to defending popular culture. That said, I don’t see in Fielder any of the “ha, ha, this is so bad it’s good” attitude that one can find, for instance, in Jules Feiffer. Fiedler is usually careful to map out the intellectual qualities that distinguish canonical “art” from pop art—but apparently, that wasn’t enough for LeGuin.

In the “Archetypes” essay, LeGuin accuses the rationalizers of myth as “arrogant.” The real truth of the matter, though, may be that LeGuin didn’t like Fiedler or Frye because, by offering even mild apologias for popular fiction, they didn’t validate her screeds against what she deemed as “bad art.” Thus she comes across as being not as a wise soul who wanted the best in art and literature, but as an arrogant elitist snob able to appreciate myths only if they shared her own high-toned themes.

AN URSULINE PRELUDE

I dimly remember reading the 1979 edition of Ursula LeGuin's LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT (henceforth LOTN) sometime in the 1980s, probably as soon as I found a copy at some public library. At the time I think that  I liked certain essays in the book better than any of LeGuin's much-heralded fiction: THE DISPOSSESSED HAND OF EARTHSEA and all that. Even the best of the late author's works I found characterized by a certain intellectual hauteur that didn't resonate with me, even when I recognized the general quality of the style and content.

Still, for the most part I had good memories of the essays, even if I didn't care for the way LeGuin took unjustified pot-shots at comics characters, referring in one essay to "the Superman and Batman dope," showing little originality in her comparison of superheroes to addictive drugs. And then there's "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction," whose wholly inadequate definition of "myth in literature" irked me for many years before I finally blogged my answer to LeGuin in the 2008 essay THEMATIC REALISM PART 2.

Still, it's possible that LeGuin was a partial influence on me in terms of my desire to come up with a better and more pluralistic understanding of the interactions of myth and art. I've now recently re-read the original essays once more, and in my next two essays I'll cover many of the flaws in LeGuin's logic. At no time do I deny LeGuin the right to have had tastes that don't align with mine. But the ways in which she justified her tastes are, as always, open to debate.

A "NULL-MYTH" PREFACE

Before I print the first of my series of "null-myths," I want to ramble on a bit about the contrasts between "mythicity" and its alleged opposite.

I first suggested the use of "null-myth" in this essay. With this term I wanted to introduce a term that would be more elastic than "false myth," a term which Ursula LeGuin made up out of whole cloth and little logic, and applied rather high-handedly to the character of Superman. As a hardcore comics-reader-- something I'm sure LeGuin never was-- I was aware that there had been many super-stories that had strong mythicity (defined elsewhere as "the symbolic complexity comparable to that of archaic myth")--

--as well as many more than did not possess more than mythic potential. Such stories would be "null-mythic" because whatever potential they had was not fulfilled.

About three years later, I got around to reading Philip Wheelwright's book THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. In a handful of essays, such as this one,  I asserted a basic similitude-- though not identity-- between my concepts and Wheelwright's continuum of language-forms, primarily described as "steno-language," in which linguistic representations are largely denotative and have only the simplest connotations, and "poeto-language," in which there is theoretically no limit to the connotative associations of the representations. In ONLY AN ARCHETYPE CAN BEAT ANOTHER ARCHETYPE PART 1  I made the similitude between my system and that of Wheelwright explicit:

It's my contention, then, that stereotypes are static representations in tune with Wheelwright's "steno-language," while true archetypes are dynamic representations in tune with his concept of "poeto-language."

Thus, Superman as a concept may have high or low mythicity in any given iteration. All fictional characters and "focal presences" have this potential, though it's fair to observe that some characters have so few "high-mythic" moments that one can easily designate them as "null-myths" in a statistical sense. Thus, Ebony of THE SPIRIT-- whom I mentioned in ONLY AN ARCHETYPE-- has this potential as much as Superman. But since the potential is only infrequently (if ever) realized with Ebony, one can speak of him as a "null-myth" as well as a stereotype. It should be noted that Ebony is not a stereotype because many modern readers don't like what he represents, while the contemporaneous readers of THE SPIRIT found him unobjectionable. It is the lack of symbolic complexity that makes a character stereotypical, not his or her political correctness.

I didn't stick with the term "null-myth" very long, but in 2011 I conceived this essay as a way of working Susanne Langer's concept of an "unconsummated symbol" into my system, where it occupied the position of "praxis of language" alongside the Wheelwright "theory of language." I wrote:

In earlier essays I've spoken in symbolic discourse in terms of *mythicity,* through which concept it's possible to detect differing degrees of symbolic complexity within a range of literary works.  This remains the cornerstone of my theory, but Langer's terms are useful for determining the processes behind the articulation of complexity. In this essay I formulated the term "null-myth" for a given element in a narrative that did not happen to be complex in a particular iteration, with the explicit statement that no such element was beyond a high-mythic transformation elsewhere. In yet another essay I conjoined my Frye-influenced theories of symbolic complexity with those of Philip Wheelwright, who employed the terms *plurisignative* and *monosignative* for differing levels of symbolic expression.

And finally, of late I've been adapting both "consummate" and "inconsummate" as terms to be applied to the discrete potentialities of a given work, with the idea that such terms might be more precise than the more frequent "doesn't suck" and "sucks." The four "null-myths" that I've retroactively identified here are all inconsummate with regard to the mythopoeic potentiality, but this says nothing about any other potentiality for entertainment. The two Jack Kirby works cited-- BLACK PANTHER 1-2 and the "Challengers" story in SHOWCASE #6-- display Jack Kirby's mastery of comic-book kineticism. In this same kinetic sense the "faux Captain-Marvelisms" of MAGICMAN don't come close to touching Kirby's work even at its weakest, but in the right frame of mind it might be enjoyed on that level too. Only Mark Millar's work is one I consider "practically inconsummate in every way."

Thus, when I present my examples of "inconsummate comics," I would reiterate that I'm only assessing them in terms of their mythopoetic potentiality. I've often enjoyed various comics for any of the other three reasons-- didactic, dramatic, and kinetic-- and it may be that some, or all, of the examples I choose may be strong in these departments.

DISTANCED RELATIONS

"So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I'll give you that. Refuse me and I'll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek's career, like the existence of his society,depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?"-- the character of Shevek in Ursula K. LeGuin's THE DISPOSSESSED.


I've not quite finished my rereading of the LeGuin book, in which the author posits two cultures that substantially reproduce the ideological oppositions of capitalism (represented by the planet "Urras") and socialism (embodied by "Anarres.")  The latter planet is the homeworld to Shevek, and in the quote above he meditates on the incongruity that on his world, despite its ideals of "mutual aid and solidarity," the "exploitative relationships" characteristic of capitalism pervade his society in camoflagued form, as per the one he shares with his academic superior Sabul.  Later, when Shevek journeys to Urras, he's often surprised as how well the society functions despite the "basic dysfunction" of its capitalistic orientation.  LeGuin carefully structures her two worlds so that no thinking critic could accuse her of simply finding one system superior to the other; rather, it's evident that each society has its weaknesses, and that those weaknesses are an expression of the weakness in human nature rather than in the systems as such.

Nevertheless, the answer to Shevek's puzzled question-- particularly with regard to the subject of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby collaboration of the 1960s-- would seem to be "yes," with very few qualifiers.  Over and over Lee's editorial control over Jack Kirby's art and story has been critiqued as inequitable, unfair, injurious to the superior artistic talents of Kirby, etc.

And yet, out of this dysfunctional relationship, we have "true function" in the form of a host of comic-book features that even most bloody comic book elitists validate.  There are a number of Kirby fans who believe that his non-collaborative work exceeds any work he did with Stan Lee or anyone else.  Such is their privilege, but I've rarely seen a critical defense that went beyond the Kantian level of "the agreeable" (i.e., I like this and no one can tell me differently).

As I noted in INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 2, Marguerite Van Cook quoted Louis Althusser:

Ideologies are perceived-accepted–suffered cultural objects, which work fundamentally on men through a process they do not understand. What men express in their ideologies is not their true relation to their conditions of existence, but how they react to their conditions of existence; which presupposes a real relationship and an imaginary relationship.

Van Cook follows Althusser's Marxmallow logic by asserting again and again that in producing professional comic books for their audience, Lee and Kirby did not have a "true relation to their conditions of existence."  Rather, they merely "reacted" to the ideological underpinnings of their society.

The first objection to Van Cook's restatement of Althusser is that while Althusser may or may not have given an example of an author with such a "true relation" somewhere in his writings, Van Cook merely accepts his statement as a given and does not choose to present her take on such a "true relation."  But without such a positive counter-example, Van Cook's negative analyses of Lee and Kirby are utterly meaningless.

How might Van Cook had chosen an example of a "true relation?" Given the rigidity of Marxmallow dialectic, the only possible "true relation" to an artist's "conditions of existence" will inevitably reflect Marxmallow views of truth.  Thus an artist who references, or seems to reference, such concepts as "commodification"-- Daniel Clowes, perhaps-- would be assumed to have such a "true relation" while Lee and Kirby were mere cogs in the ideological machine.

Even with a positive counter-example, however, Lee and Kirby make poor examples of the monolith-like nature of American mass culture, with which Van Cook implicitly agrees as she quotes Terry Eagleton on the subject:

‘Mass’ culture is not the inevitable product of ‘industrial’ society, but the offspring of a particular form of industrialism which organizes production for profit rather than for use, which concerns itself with what will sell rather than with what is valuable.

In PART 2 I pointed out that Lee and Kirby were responsible for originating one of the first black featured heroes in a commercial American comic book.  I do not know if either Eagleton, Althusser or Van Cook would find this a "valuable" contribution to society.  However, even if they all considered American pop cultrue to be insignificant by virtue of its inadherence to Marxist truth, I should imagine that the debut of a character such as Gabriel Jones would have to be considered marginally more progressive than the many times both Lee and Kirby attacked Communist societies as "evil" in the early 1960s.

One might agree that anti-Communist rhetoric, especially as simplistic as it appeared in such Lee-Kirby comic books as FANTASTIC FOUR #13, may have been put there to sell the books:

And yet-- was it "true" or not, that in some Communist countries, citizens were "enslaved" by their leaders?  As in LeGuin's novel, the real sins of capitalism don't negate the real sins of socialism; both spring from human weakness.  Moreover, can one be certain that Lee and Kirby merely "reacted" in making this negative characterization of 1960s Communism?  That neither man ever read anything about real abuses in real places, and that therefore they characterized Commies as the enemy just to make a buck?

Conversely, there is one thing about the "progressive" introduction of a black character like Lee & Kirby's Gabe Jones that is manifestly "untrue:" American troops in World War II were segregated.  Thus Lee and Kirby distorted real history for the purpose of making a progressive point: that loyal black Americans *should* have been able to serve their country without having to observe the "color line."  And yet, this willful distortion might have backfired on the company's ability to "make a buck" had there been some conservative backlash against the Gabe Jones character.

I've pursued this line of reasoning purely to expose the superficiality of Van Cook's adherence to Marxist views of monolithic mass culture.  I don't want to give the impression that I personally would define any narrative work as having a "true relation" to an author's "conditions of existence" purely in terms of whether or not it contains progressive concepts, or even a mix of progressive and conservative concepts.  Literary truth cannot be defined by politics, for no form of literature, no matter how "high" or "low," is ever purely about politics.  All art, as Suzanne Langer observed, is inherently "gestural:" it reminds us of things in our real lives but is quite obviously not "real life," even in the most "kitchen-sink" types of art.  

LeGuin's hero Shevek has to grant the capitalist devil his due by admitting that "mechanical"
contracts may lead to "true function" as readily as do "organic ones."  However, in art the oppositions of "organic" and "mechanical" become much more multifaceted than they can ever be in sociopolitical discourse.  The fact that Marxists remain so unaware of the plurisignative nature of literature remains one of the great marvels of the last century, given that said Marxists are so sedulous about ferreting out Other People's Myths.

THEMATIC REALISM PART II

I noted earlier that much of what we deem to be “real literature” can be distinguished by its thematic commitment to what Freud famously called “the reality principle,” no matter whether the narrative in question portrays a “realistic” version of the world (Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE), outright fantasy (Ursula LeGuin’s WIZARD OF EARTHSEA), or something between the two (Pynchon’s CRYING OF LOT 49). The same principle obtains with those works that fall squarely within the category of “thematic escapism,” which is oriented on what Freud calls “the pleasure principle” and wish-fulfillment. One may envision a middle-ground between the two categories for works that may strike a balance between these opposed themes, but it would seem beyond question that there are notable works that are polarized enough to belong far more in one camp rather than the other.

However, both thematic orientations are entirely confined to the sphere of literature, and do not apply to the ancestor of all literary endeavor: mythic narrative. (For simplicity’s sake here I conflate “myth,” “religion,” and “folklore” under the rubric “myth,” as all concern narratives that have literary relevance but are not literature as such.) Some commentators have suggested an easy equivalence between archaic myth and modern pop culture. I myself have been accused of making such an equivalence, which is one reason I adopted the term “mythicity,” to emphasize that a given narrative (BLONDIE, PEANUTS, JUSTICE LEAGUE) may be “myth-like” in certain respects without being myth. But there are more uncritical assertions out there, such as this unattributed quote—“Science fiction is the mythology of the modern world”-- against which the aforementioned Ursula LeGuin reacts in her noted 1976 essay, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction.” And while I do disagree with that quote because it is an easy equivalence, I also disagree with LeGuin’s essay, which makes the opposite mistake of trying to claim the territory of myth in the name of “real literature.”

In this essay LeGuin begins by defining myth’s heuristic significance to literature in general (with which account I don’t substantially disagree). Naturally, her notion of literature includes quality science fiction, since she writes that herself, but bringing in the formal literary notion of “quality” means that she must also define “lack of quality.” This LeGuin does by making a distinction between “true myths” and “fake myths,” which she buttresses with a reference to an incident in the life of the German poet Rilke:

“The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. ‘You must change your life,’ he said. When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”

This statement troubled me when I read it many years ago, having become a regular SF/fantasy reader in the late 1960s. Did LeGuin mean that, following the example of Rilke, one should change one’s life every time one encountered a genuine myth, be it of archaic or recent vintage? The notion is easily reducible to absurdity. If Rilke changed his life one day because he beheld a statue of Apollo, does that mean that he should change it to something else the next day because he beheld a statue of Artemis?

In all likelihood, the “change” that LeGuin is concerned with is one of perspective, since in her next paragraph she extols the “way of art” as one of connecting the disparate aspects of humanity’s experience: “to connect the idea with value, sensation with intuition, cortex with cerebellum.” Her use of the word “art” is telling, for it shows that she is not particularly concerned with the nature of archaic myth as such, with whether or not such stories as Apollo’s slaying of the Python is some sort of message to “change your life.” Her concern, rather, is with modern “true myths,” as exemplified by the majority of her examples of such myths, ranging from Cordwainer Smith to Arthur C. Clarke to Mary Shelley.

I’ve noted elsewhere that the emphasis on the privileging of “real literature’s” orientation upon thematic realism can lead to the mistake of seeking meaning in terms of allegory. LeGuin, both in this essay and others, asserts that the mythic visions she seeks are not reducible to simple allegory, which by itself is laudable, though whenever she seeks to put into words the potential meaning of a given text, her statements do take on an allegorical ring: “Tarzan is a direct descendant of the Wolfchild/Noble Savage on one side, and every child’s fantasy of the Orphan-of-High-Estate on the other.” The statement is not so much untrue as banal, and it may be that it’s impossible to state any potential meaning of a text without verging on the allegorical. However, the Tarzan example shows one of the weaknesses of LeGuin’s literary classifications. By my lights, Tarzan is no more a “true myth” by LeGuin’s criteria than one of the “fake myths” she rejects, Superman, of whose parentage she remarks, “His father was Nietzsche and his mother was a funnybook.” I view both Tarzan and Superman as wish-fulfillments first, and only secondarily (if at all) attempts to “connect the idea with value, sensation with intuition.” (The last phrase is fraught with some significant Jungian undercurrents to which I hope to return later.)

I rather doubt that LeGuin’s curt dismissal of the Superman character in this and similar essays is based in anything but vague recollections of childhood reading, though certainly LeGuin grew up at a time when she could have partaken of the greatest growth of the “Superman mythology” of the late 50s and early 60s, had she cared to examine same. Incidentally, the editor of all the Superman features, Mort Weisinger, used the term “mythology” for the hero’s adventures, though it can be argued as to whether the word applies any better to Superman than to Arthur C. Clarke’s works. My position is that both “thematically realistic” and “thematically escapist” works can be profoundly “myth-like” in ways that I don’t think Ursula LeGuin would appreciate, be it the LeGuin who wrote this essay in 1975 or the current incarnation. I think she lists Tarzan (and for that matter, Arthur C. Clarke) among the “true myths” because despite her appreciation for the polysemous qualities of myth, she is a little too impressed with the patina of intellectual respectability, and sees some such quality in the creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs but not that of Siegel and Schuster. And this is a fundamental mistake on her part, despite her laudable goal of trying to call forth in audiences an appreciation for the many-sided nature of what we call “myth.”