A long reply from the lurker shadows ---
Ah, Rudy, you've hit a real chord for me with the question of time in Le
Guin's work -- _The Dispossessed_ especially, but lots and lots of the
other parts of her oeuvre as well. Absolutely with ethical and life-view
implications for me too.
I've just been rereading some of her early work, and was struck by the use
of "long years" (of different sorts) in both _Rocannon's World_ (800-day
years, with a "warmyear" and a "coldyear," each of which begins at an
equinox, at least in the "outlandish," "midmannish" calendar of the
Northern Angyar) and in _Planet of Exile_ (400-day "moonphases" in
60-moonphase long Years, with almost all children born in Spring or Fall
and with massive tribal migrations from the Summer lands to the protected
Winter cities).
I was also struck by how the story of "Semley's Necklace," the opening
chapter of _RW_, is similar to the Japanese folktale of Urashima that
underlies/parallels "Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea," and
to the time-return narrative in "Winter's King." The cruelties and abysses
of time (tragic or redeemed) stand out sharply in all of these, and no
doubt other of her stories. I wonder if what I've been told was a fairly
significant age-differential between Theodora Kroeber and Alfred Kroeber
might have any relevance to this recurrent motif. And I also wonder how
the churten-theory stories of the last few years, with their interest in
the experience of sequence, time, narrative, and meaningful coherence, play
in here.
Your comments certainly got me thinking more coherently about these
relatively recent observations, though I don't have anything like a grand
unified interpretation on them yet, except for thinking about what
difference time structures make to people culturally and about how
important being "in time" or "being in time" is in Le Guin's thinking. But
you also reminded me (thanks!!) of some of the many passages from Le Guin's
work that have been carved into my mind's heart for years, because of the
way they crystallized a whole set of related values for me -- perhaps
already implicit in my loose and baggy worldview, but in no way as well
articulated before I found them in Le Guin's works.
Here are a few of the most unforgettable ones to me (which I think support
your thesis very well, though the second one is a "hard saying"):
>From _LHD_: "It is always the Year One here. Only the dating of every past
and future year changes each New Year's Day, as one counts backwards or
forwards from the unitary Now."
(And then she goes on to tell a tale that takes a year, and returns us with
the public quest completed to the season of year where we began -- late
spring, the end of the month of Tuwa -- and on in early summer, perhaps
almost moving out of time, into the private quest to Therem's family
hearth. Shades here to me of the fairy tale "year and a day" structure:
cf. _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ for one of its most powerful medieval
uses.)
>From "Direction of the Road" (this one is about Eternity, I suppose, and
mortality, but how can one think about either without some notion of time
playing a role too?) -- the oak tree narrator speaks, having just killed a
man who has driven headlong into it at high speed:
"If it is necessary to the Order of Things, I will kill drivers of cars,
though killing is not a duty usually required of oaks. But it is unjust to
require me to play the part, not of the killer only, but of death. For I
am not death. I am life: I am mortal.
If they wish to see death visibly in the world, that is their business, not
mine. I will not act Eternity for them. Let them not turn to the trees
for death. If that is what they want to see, let them look into one
another's eyes and see it there."
And, of course, from _TD_, just my favorite one of many many remarks about
time therein:
"Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for
pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal....It comes to the end and has
to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a
locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may,
with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads
and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and future
that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and
future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is
no good to be done without it.
So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but
as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives.
The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is
that it is not wasted. Even pain counts." [End of Chapter 10]
I'm looking forward a lot to hearing thoughts from other people on this
topic too, having already enjoyed Janice Dawley's reminder of the
connection to Taoism. Since I'm reading in Digest form, there may well be
a whole bunch of things waiting for me early tomorrow morning -- a little
asynchronicity of our own, like Hideo's time-wrinkled message in "Another
Story," eh?
Thanks for the stimulating question --
Tess
P.S. Rudy, I've done some work in the past on the metaphor of temporal
physics in _TD_, which you may have run into already if you've done a
literature search (perhaps useful to you, perhaps not). If you haven't run
across it, feel free to drop me a private note and I'll send you the biblio
cite for it. Also, in connection with the religious dimension of your
analysis, another passage from _TD_ that has shaped how I articulate my own
sense of the world is the place in Chapter 1 where Shevek is explaining
that the Anarresti have religion (albeit not established religion) -- "No
religion? Are we stones, on Annares?" and "Of course, it is one of the
Categories: the Fourth Mode. Few people learn to practice all the Modes.
But the Modes are built of the natural capacities of the mind, you could
not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity? That we could do
physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship man has
with the cosmos?"
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