An obvious difference between Brunner's TSLU and LeGuin's TD is narrative technique. Not surprisingly, given my earlier comments, as a critic I appreciate what Brunner was trying to do but as a reader prefer LeGuin. TD allowed me to enlist in the fictive world and figure out, a la Moylan, its "absent paradigm" by stages.
Then, too, I said before how much I enjoy LeGuin's writing and that her Earthsea cycle is a personal favorite. What a tribute to LeGuin that she could equally capture my imagination as well in the sf genre as in her fantasy.
But I want to write here about another difference between TSLU and TD that Jameson (p. 271) cites. While Brunner takes an idea and projects its ultimate extrapolation, LeGuin takes an idea and reduces it to essentials. Thus world projection versus world reduction.
Which works best? Or does world projection work with dystopias and world reduction with utopias (even "ambiguous" ones)?
> Think of dystopias: Wells projected class conflict into the far-future dystopia of the Eloi and Morlocks. Huxley projected eugenics and consumerism into the dystopia of Brave New World. Orwell projected totalitarianism and Stalinism into the dystopia of Oceania. Many classic sf films of the 1950s and 60s project the Cold War into the dystopia of post-nuclear devastation.
> Now think of utopias: Does Gilman's Herland use the device of world reduction? Does More's original Utopia? Does Bacon's New Atlantis (which I described in my report)? Does Fourier? I'm inclined to think so.
Any other thoughts out there?
II. THOUGHTS ON "ANTINOMIES"
Jameson (chap. I.10) offers an interesting discussion of "Utopia and its Antinomies." And this got me thinking along some different lines:
1. If utopias and dystopias are (by definition) ultimate cases, do they inherently establish a duality between "what could be" and "what is"? In other words, must the utopian author think in binaries?
Or can we take Giddens' strategy on dualisms and turn them into dualities? Usually we think that social rules constrain individual behavior. But Giddens theorized that individual action and social structuration are not binary opposites. Instead they are a duality.
That is, social structuration is both the medium and the outcome of individual action. Yes, social structuration guides the rules of individual action. But it is also through individual action that social structuration is produced and reproduced. One cannot exist with the other.
Similarly, could we say that "what is" and "what could be" are a coexistent duality? "What is" is equivalent to structuration and "what could be" is equivalent to individual action. Thus, although present reality establishes the rules, present reality is simultaneously the medium by which future alternatives are viewed and an outcome of the alternatives chosen.
2. Jameson (pp. 147-148) flatly states, "Crime, war, degraded mass culture, drugs, violence, boredom, the list for power, the lust for distraction, the lust for nirvana, sexism, racism—all can be diagnosed as so many results of a society unable to accommodate the productiveness of all its citizens."
Thus the issue of labor is, in the final analysis, said to be the basic crux of Utopia. Achieve full employment and—voila!—you've got Utopia.
Yet I must strenuously disagree here. And my point goes to heart of my argument about cultural variation. Just as all cultures are not equally oriented to the future, not all cultures believe that people are basically good.
Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck, in an important 1960 text, note that all cultures must answer the question: What is human nature? Some cultures believe people are basically evil, some basically good, and some a mixture of good and bad.
Samovar and Porter (2004) argue that American culture, founded in Puritanism, historically sees people as basically evil but in recent generations has mixed that outlook with a consensus that people are also perfectable.
The American evangelical and fundamentalist culture I have studied through ethnography very definitely endorses the doctrine of original sin. To them (and most conservative-leaning Americans) the notion that evil will disappear if everyone had a good job is ludicrous.
So I cannot agree with Jameson that labor must be the foundational issue of Utopia. Instead, his assertion is based on the premise that people are basically good—and that premise is ultimately a cultural belief, not an incontrovertible fact.
3. Thoughts regarding human nature also brought to my mind the different world religions, which are "deep-structure" institutions for transmitting cultural values.
We might categorize world religions thus:
> Religions that believe in an eternal afterlife following the end of time
> Religions that believe life is continually reincarnated in an eternal wheel of time
> Religions that believe individual existence is ultimately annihilated and thus finds release
Here's food for thought: The idea that history has a conclusion is, as Jameson has noted, a legacy of Christianity to the West. Does Utopia have the same allure for non-Western cultures whose historic faiths see time as a wheel? Or who see their nirvana, their release, in nothingness?
III. THOUGHTS on "SCHISM"
Though I read the journal articles on LeGuin, most engaged in too much plot summary. But of the half dozen pieces I read, I found the Watson piece most interesting. The chart on page 68 that ties together LeGuin's Hainish cycle is quite helpful.
And since the Earthsea cycle is such a favorite of mine, I was interested in Watson's discussion (p. 69) on how Earthsea fits into LeGuin's overall corpus:
First, does not the Earthsea trilogy represent a . . . conscious separating of fantasy from SF? There is much in Earthsea about dreams, the minor magical powers of illusion, on the one hand, and the major magical powers of altering reality objectively through "renaming" of the world on the other.
But then Watson points out how Earthsea has
much emphasis on the vital importance of equilibrium . . . and equilibrium is a social/ecological concept to be taken up again in quite a different vein in The Dispossessed, carefully distinguished from static conservatism by its dynamic concept of a constant, complex remaking of the world, without overloading any variables.
So here, in the examples of LeGuin's Earthsea cycle and The Dispossessed, we saw Jameson's "Great Schism" between fantasy and sf in action.
Fantasy, says Jameson, is "organized . . . around the binary of good and evil, and the fundamental role it assigns to magic" (p. 58) and is "generically wedded to nature and to the organism" (p. 64). This we see in LeGuin's Earthsea cycle.
SF, on the other hand, has a bent toward historicism (the notion that history proceeds according to natural laws). The sf hero "stands as a symptom of that historical era and as the expression of a sense of impending well-nigh Utopian change" (p. 59). This we see in The Dispossessed.
Yet there is also in LeGuin the unity noted by Watson. Thus Jameson aptly writes,
[In LeGuin] there visibly reappears that mysterious bridge that leads from the historical disintegration of fantasy to the reinvention of the Novum, from a fallen world in which the magical powers of fantasy have become unrepresentable to a new space in which Utopia can itself be fantasized (p. 71).
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