Parables of De-Alienation: Le Gum’s Widdershins Dance

Abstract

O. Why, of all the numerous interesting US SF writers, focus on the opuses of Philip K. Dick in the preceding essay and of Ursula K. Le Guin in the following one? No doubt, the first reason is my personal limitations of time, money, etc. But given that I was only writing on two of them, I shall put forward a justification adopted from Rafail Nudelman’s remark (in the SFS issue on Le Guin) that Dick and Le Guin seem to be the two extremes among the significant English-language SF writers of the 1960s and early 1970s: the dominant movement in Le Guin’s possible world(s) is toward oneness as the natural condition of the world, while in Dick it is toward disintegration of order and unity, toward destruction of all forms as the condition of his world(s). I would translate this general syntax as follows: both of these leading writers write out of and react against a historically identical — psychological and sociopolitical — situation: the experience of the terrible pressures of alienation, isolation and fragmentation pervading the neo-capitalist society of the world of the mid-twentieth century. But while Dick is a ‘romantic’ writer, whose energy lashes out in a profusion of incandescent and interfused narrative protuberances, Le Guin is a ‘classical’ writer, whose energy is as fierce but strictly controlled within a taut and spare architectural system of narrative cells.