Ursula K. Le Guin's work to date has
been remarkable for its overall thematic consistency—both in
the "outer space" of the Hainish cycle and in the inner
lands of the Earthsea trilogy (to quote a distinction she herself
makes in an autobiographical essay).1 The Lathe of Heaven (1971) at
first sight seems to represent something of an anomaly—a sport
from the true stock—as though in this one particular instance
she has been becharmed by that master trickster of false reality states,
Philip K. Dick. Not to write a poor book, I hasten to add, for Lathe
is splendid—but let's say a tour de force in the Dick mode, something
out of key with the rest of her opus; perhaps even, the suspicion
lurks, contradicting the general drift of it? It is as though while
writing of those inner lands with her left hand, and of outer space
with her right, a third hand has mysteriously intruded on the scene,
attached to Palmer Eldritch's prosthetic arm, and it is this hand
that has tapped out Lathe on the typewriter. Obviously good writers
only break new ground (delighting or horrifying their readers, as
the case may be) by changing, growing, "pushing out toward the
limits—[their] own, and those of the medium," to quote Le
Guin again; and I've no wish to fit her with a straitjacket in the
guise of a critical essay. But equally clearly an important question
of internal consistency arises here with Lathe: that deeper consistency
of aims and method which is the hallmark of the great, as opposed
to the merely good, artist. It is the question of the authentic "voice,"
which Sartre finds Tintoretto—who could paint anybody's pictures
but his own—so tragically deprived of.2 This hallmark appears
with increasing clarity from Le Guin's earlier, slighter novels through
to the triumphant Dispossessed. And Lathe seems anomalous. But is
it really so? Let us try to locate Lathe in the context of Le Guin's
progression as a writer, and see what happens.
Lathe is about paranormal3 events impinging
on an initially realistic Earth of the near future—about a dreamer
whose dreams can change the whole fabric of reality. They replace
history with false histories that become objective truth, only to
be overthrown and modified by further dreams as his well-intentioned
yet power-hungry psychiatrist manipulates him, and the whole objective
world along with him, trying to steer it away from pollution, overpopulation,
social evil, yet only producing successive devastations as a consequence:
plague, "citizen arrest" of the sick, alien invasion. And
all along the irony lurks that we have been in a "false"
world from the very start; for, before ever being referred to a psychiatrist
for illegally obtaining drugs to stop himself dreaming, George Orr
had "effectively dreamt" a nuclear holocaust out of existence;
there is in truth no way to go homeward.
It's perhaps easier to see how Lathe
meshes with the magic-regulated world of Earthsea than to bring it
into line with the Hainish books and stories (with the apparent exception
of "The Word for World is Forest," which is also concerned
with dreams). But if we plot the chronology of events depicted in
the Hainish stories, and the development of the use of the paranormal
there, against the order in which the stories were written, an interesting
pattern emerges. A chart then for Hainish history and for Le Guin's
concern with the paranormal:
Put into words, Le Guin
works forward chronologically in her first books and opens up increasingly
enlarged possibilities for paranormal experience; then, after Left
Hand, begins to head backward through time toward the present, in
an increasingly political, sociological, "normal consciousness"
mode. The basic orientation of "The Word for World is Forest"
is, in fact, political/social/ecological; the paranormal—dreams
magically altering reality—is shunted off into Lathe, which can
thus in a sense be said to constitute a "goodbye to all that"
to the material with which the four early Hainish books seemed increasingly
preoccupied.5
The particular danger inherent in SF
treatment of the paranormal—and particularly in adopting a time
scheme for a "future history" which indicates increasing
prominence of paranormal talents as an index of increasing human wisdom—is
that this can too easily become a quasi-mystical escape route from
real problems: ethical, psychological, epistemological, and practical.
A seductive nonsense supervenes. The meaningful pole in SF is represented
by Philip K. Dick, and the nonsense pole by A.E. van Vogt. Dick invariably
subsumes the paranormal within a zone of genuine social concerns,
and thus avoids mystification. His pre-cogs, time-shifters, and other
characters with "wild talents" are presented with tact,
zany wit, and, most important of all, in an organically structured
relation to society—whether this society is human, quasi-human
(android, robot), or alien. Van Vogt's use of the paranormal, on the
other hand, is a bag of conjuring tricks, amounting to a negation
of any society—alien, human, or "post-human." The climax
to Le Guin's City of Illusions, with the "double-minded"
hero leaping out of telepathic ambush, is redolent of the Vanvogtian
Superhuman; and though there is no such occult bravura in Left Hand,
this element nonetheless remains embedded in the Hainish cycle, built
into its dynamics—lying in ambush somewhere ahead down the time-line,
tempting towards false solutions.
Positing Lathe in this way as a summation
and discharge of a particular theme that has been gathering momentum
in tandem with the forward movement of the Hainish cycle—the
movement which Le Guin is now negating chronologically—we can
perhaps usefully read the books as a use of the Dickian mode to discharge
this particular accumulation of energy.
Two objections might be raised from
Le Guin's publishing history against such a reading. First, does not
the Earthsea trilogy represent a definite branching in Le Guin's work:
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. There is also much
emphasis on the vital importance of equilibrium (ignoring which provokes
the disasters of Lathe)—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. Thus, it might seem that Le Guin has already adequately
sifted the two strains, the paranormal and the "normal,"
by the invention of Earthsea and magic as a workable proposition—leaving
Lathe, again, as a sport. Yet Earthsea does not exactly discharge
the accumulated energy vested in the paranormal theme. With the completion
of the trilogy, in The Furthest Shore, balance is conserved—yet
still within a world of magic. In this context it is hardly possible
to effect a full discharge of what, adopting a term from Gregory Bateson,
we may call "schismogenic tension"13—the increasing
emphasis on the paranormal, fed by the flow of Hainish history itself.
For that, we must look to Lathe. Its image of "The Break"
(the popular name for the discontinuity between Old Reality and New
Reality, once affairs have been tidied up and balance restored) is,
in a sense, an image of the break in the Hainish cycle between "early"
Le Guin and "mature" Le Guin—a break that occurs when
the arrow of time is reversed, while simultaneously social and psychological
depth increases massively.
Second, it could also be objected that
"The Word for World is Forest" is a post-break story in
the Hainish cycle, dealing largely with dreams (as well as with the
politics of ecology). So is there not some considerable osmosis of
the paranormal here? A further eruption of Lathe material? Not so.
For reality is not altered by the power of dreams in "Forest"
in the way it is in Lathe, falsifying a whole world-line retrospectively.
The world of the dreamers never experiences such a "false-reality"
dislocation. But rather, the dreamers are simply in conscious rapport
with their dreams; the dream is principally a heuristic tool and—in
time of crisis—a decision-making apparatus which permits the
total individual to be involved in shaping his destiny. The tragedy
of "Forest" is that the dream that has to be dreamt, the
new psychological trait that has to be generated (dreamt into being)
in response to Terran deforestation and enslavement, is the art of
killing one's fellows. Principally, this is an extension of Hadfield's
concept of the dream as teaching aid, problem-solving device, and
governor of our conscious lives (on a principle of positive feedback:
the maximising of a dubious situation in order to discharge awareness
of danger and self-deceit across the interface between subconscious
and conscious).7
Theories more pertinent than Hadfield's
or Dement's to the dream situation imagined in Lathe, and more in
key with a "false reality" premise, can be found collected
in Charles Tart's Altered States of Consciousness;8 and the dream
background of Lathe is today best approached via Tart's book.9 The
temporal setting of Lathe, A.D. 2002, seems almost unnecessarily far
in the future when we read Tart's speculations on techniques of dream
control by post-hypnotic suggestion and other means and in addition
learn that the UCLA Brain Information Service already publishes a
weekly Sleep Bulletin for researchers and that the Association for
the Psychophysiological Study of Sleep already convenes yearly meetings.
Particularly pertinent are Tart's investigations of the "lucid
dream" (the waking to full consciousness of a dreamer within
a dream) and the technique for evoking such dreams and for manipulating
the fake world.
Also germane to the psychology of Lathe's
central character is Tart's observation that "we have no 'choice'
about dreaming."10 To be sure, he is here referring to the proven
necessity for dream sleep. Studies of dream deprivation have shown
the dire effects of preventing dreaming. Yet, twist this vital concept
of the role of the dream through an axis of the imagination—for
this is the art of speculation—blend it with Le Guin's ethic
of Balance, and we have the given character of her dreamer George
Orr: a man who consistently falls in the median range of every personality
test and whose prime characteristic is his inability to "choose"
in conscious waking everyday life. He is a quiescent-acquiescent type,
whose character aligns him with the Joe Normal heroes on whom Philip
Dick's false realities characteristically impinge. Barney Mayerson
in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Joe Chip in Ubik, Seth Morley
in A Maze of Death (though this book was most probably too late to
exert any stimula on Lathe)—these heroes are all failures in
one way or another, foundering in their attempts to manage their lives,
yet genuinely heroic for all their mistakes, and achieving, or being
involved in, the transcendent (with a devilish twist in Ubik). Their
very inertia contains a potential for strength and heroism—as
does George Orr's (in keeping with Le Guin's Taoist dialectic of strength
and weakness). Inertia—the tendency of a body to preserve its
state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line—may appear
like passivity, but is in fact a powerful force. Joe Chip's dogged,
nightmare battle to get upstairs to his hotel bedroom while the masquerading
Jory drains his body of energy (Ubik §13) is almost a mirror
image of George Orr's dogged, nightmare journey through a decaying
reality to switch off Haber's dream machine (Lathe §10); the
restoration of vitality as soon as Joe Chip reaches his bedroom, finds
Glen Runciter there, and gets sprayed with Ubik, is echoed by George
Orr's restoration of vital solidity to the world. Similarly, Barney
Mayerson's decision to continue as a colonist on barren Mars and accept
its dull reality (Three Stigmata §13) seems like defeat, but
is really an act of strength and commitment; earlier (§§11-12)
Palmer Eldritch traded on this very desire of Barney to become a static
object such as a stone or wall plaque, to trick him—only to have
his trick rebound. Inertia is strength. Pat Conley, who changes time
lines—initially in her dreams (Ubik §3), prefiguring Le
Guin's George Orr, but subsequently by conscious choice (§5)—also
has "unbelievable power" (§5) yet at the same is an
"inertial" who feels distressed by her own apparent negativity:
" 'I don't do anything; I don't move objects or turn stones into
bread.... I just negate somebody else's ability. It seems—' She
gestured. 'Stultifying.' " And Joe Chip's response to this remark
is a very Le Guinish one: "'The anti-psi factor is a natural
restoration of ecological balance.... Balance, the full circle...'
" (§3).
In Lathe Le Guin is certainly exploring
the Dickian mode; yet she is not exploring it in a contingent, happenstance,
tour de force way since she is discharging the schismogenic thematic
tensions generated by her reversing and deepening the Hainish cycle.
On the contrary, Lathe fits logically into the set of her ideas as
a pivotal work, working out a tension that clears the way for The
Dispossessed. Moving on from particular details to the general ethos
of the two writers, then, what sea-change does Le Guin work on the
Dick model?
If we take as representative of this
model in its mature form the three Dick novels already mentioned,
one rule of Dick's false realities is the paradox that once in, there's
no way out, yet for this very reason transcendence (of a sort) can
be achieved. The religion of A Maze of Death is a construct imposed
on the crew of a starship during a voluntary trance state by a computer
originally provided as a toy to while away the long years in space,
which has become their only form of mental "salvation" once
their ship is crippled. Yet the godlike figure of the Intercessor,
invented as part of the false reality, reaches into the reality of
the ship objectively, to offer salvation of a kind. (Seth Morley's
salvation is to be reborn as a desert plant on a world where no one
will bother him, where he can be both conscious of life, and yet asleep,
enjoying a vegetable dream consciousness [§16]). Thus the human
generates God. In Three Stigmata, while it's arguable whether any
objective reality persists after Leo Bulero enters the primary Chew-Z
hallucination, the dominant probability is that while objectively
reality is hopelessly contaminated with false realities induced by
a godlike alien, yet the human is divinized nonetheless, in opposition
to the manipulations of this (pseudo-)God. Ubik constructs an even
more devious maze in a post-death mind-storage unit, the sting in
the tail being that the live helper of the inmates from outside may
have been dead, and inside, all along. Yet the struggle of mind (the
battle between the "Mentufacturer" and "Form Destroyer"
in Maze of Death terms) is carried on, and the Ubik substance which
has passed through so many consumer product formats during the course
of the story finally declares its divinity, and would certainly seem
to be the invention of the trapped, and dead, Glen Runciter. Once
in, never out; and yet....
The same rule applies to Lathe. A nuclear
war has already been averted by effective dreaming when the book opens;
so the characters are committed to the false reality from the start
(else they perish). Subsequent fluctuations in population size, skin
colour, and urban geography, due to Dr. Haber's programming of George
Orr's dreams, are vast enough, yet all are basically quantitative
changes in the structure of Earth reality. The qualitative change,
and the haunting mystery of the book, comes with the dreaming into
being of the aliens—initially as invaders, later as compassionate
if enigmatic friends. Conceivably George dreamt a hostile invasion
into a peaceful one; yet the dominant probability is that the aliens
are, as they maintain, "of the dream-time" (§10), that
their whole culture revolves round the mode of "reality dreaming
itself into being," that they have been attracted to Earth like
the Waveries in Fredric Brown's story, only by dream-waves rather
than radio waves.
Arguably, there is an essential difference
between Dick's false realities and Le Guin's, in that Dick's warping
of reality is quite Machiavellian in its tricksterism and involves
the reader himself ultimately in a dissolution of the sense of reality;
whereas Le Guin proceeds from change to change far more definitively,
ending up with a solid, unambiguous conclusion (a process that paradoxically
makes her book more precarious, since the initial premise has to be
swallowed whole, whereas with Dick it's difficult to pin down an initial
premise as such, and by the time the reader starts wondering, distortion
has metastasized wildly). Yet this doesn't really seem to me to be
the case. Consider the thread of continuity-awareness that persists
through all transformations of colour and temperament wrought upon
Heather LeLache (and compare this slender thread with Joe Chip's equally
tenuous intuition of what Pat Conley has brought about, in Ubik §5,
which provides a kind of inverted kinship model of George's love for
Heather). But, particularly, consider Le Guin's aliens. If they are
not indeed vectored to Earth, Wavery-like, from an actual Aldebaran
dream culture but only seen as manifestations of George Orr's human
subconscious, they have still become objective realities in the universe
and can set up shop—actually, as well as metaphorically. Dream
and reality are inextricably interwoven henceforth, by their agency—whatever
agency was responsible for their origin. It also follows the Dickian
pattern of ultimate, if equivocal, transcendence: both in the sense
of a dialectical supersession of a previous state, and also in the
luminous sense.
"Everything dreams," George warns Haber,
as the psychiatrist prepares to produce effective dreaming in himself:
"The play of form, of being, is the
dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes....
But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution
speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You
must learn the way. You must learn the skill, the arts, the limits.
A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully—as
the rock is part of the whole unconsciously." (§10)
When the mind becomes conscious....
Matter is therefore immanent with consciousness, with godhood, teleologically.
Dr. Haber's effective nightmare ruptures time-lines disastrously and
is only suppressed when George Orr wills the route to the dream machine,
and its OFF switch, back into existence. Yet the "real"
world remains a chaotic melange of different continua; and the aliens
of the dream time are still with us objectively, their knowledge available
to us. The question whether they "actually" arrived, Wavery-like,
from Aldebaran remains as open-ended as any riddle set by the "conclusion"
of a Philip Dick novel. Thus, as in Dick, once in, never out, yet
transcendence occurs: "'Take evening,' the Alien said, 'There
is time. There are returns. To go is to return'" (§11).
The words "True voyage is return"
will appear on Odo's grave, in The Dispossessed, which can now be
written. For the thematic tension has been discharged. Lathe, superficially
an uncharacteristic pièce de résistance, is logically
validated as mediator by accepting this discharge. For the book mediates
structurally, just as its alien characters mediate, between the real
and the parareal.
Lathe, too, might seem to represent
a warning against overmuch "scientific meddling" in the
world about us, since Dr. Haber demonstrably ends up as the archetypal
"mad scientist"—from an initially well-intentioned,
albeit ambitious, egoistic stance. However, if we contrast his role
with that of the scientist Shevek in The Dispossessed, and take into
account the suggestion that Lathe represents a discharge of tension,
then we will see that Haber has to be as he is: both benevolent scientist
and malign anti-social force. For his is the wasteland to which the
paranormal as false solution leads.
In The Dispossessed Shevek fights to
remain in balance with social necessities and values—he is no
"egoizer." His search for a scientific method runs hand
in hand with his search for a social method. Consequently, his is
a genuine dialectic of science and society—which Haber disastrously
attempts to short-circuit. This short-circuit is a pitfall inherent
in the SF of the paranormal—responsible for the ridiculous, if
pyrotechnic, excesses of a van Vogt: the "brainstorm" solution.
Shevek does not fall under the same curse: the curse has been lifted.
Yet it could only be lifted effectively, and honestly, by the catastrophic
release of thematic tension that Lathe so strikingly embodies. The
Hainish faultline was under strain. It took a worldquake to set the
matter right.
NOTES
1"A Citizen of Mondath," Foundation
#4 (July 1973), pp. 20-24.
2Jean-Paul Sartre, "The Venetian
Pariah," in his Essays in Aesthetics, tr. Wade Baskin (London
1964), p. 41: "But this is precisely the thing that arouses suspicion.
Why would he need to play their game and submit to their rules if
he could outshine them all by being himself? What resentment in his
insolence! This Cain assassinates every Abel preferred over him: 'You
like this Veronese? Well, I can do much better when I imitate him;
you take him for a man and he is nothing but a technique.' And what
humility. From time to time this pariah slips into the skin of another
person in order to enjoy in his turn the delight of being loved. And
then at times it would seem that he lacks the courage to manifest
his scandalous genius; disheartened, he leaves his genius in semi-darkness
and tries to prove it deductively: 'Since I paint the best Veronese
and the best Pordenones, just imagine what I am capable of painting
when I allow myself to be me.'"
3The term "paranormal" is
taken as referring to phenomena/events outside our current consensus-reality
view of the universe—phenomena which negate our present concepts
of cause and effect and the material nature of the universe, and drive
a wedge through the causal, material mind-body interface, to split
off "mind" as a force in its own right; or which seem to
do so, since a material base for these postulated phenomena is as
yet unproven (though not necessarily unprovable, in part, if not in
whole). Conjectural mental powers such as telepathy, precognition,
clairvoyance, teleportation, and psychokinesis all fall within this
"mind over matter" zone. George Orr's effective dreaming
in Lathe—the refashioning of entire world-lines by the force
of thought—is an extreme instance of this, as is the "effective
magic" of Earthsea.
4This chart is based on internal dating
in the stories with two provisos. Firstly, League years, Ekumenical
years, Terran years, etc. (but not the Werelian Great Years of Planet
of Exile!) are all assumed to be roughly equivalent. Secondly, the
baseline date of AD 2300 for The Dispossessed is taken from the description
of Earth in that book (§11) as having passed through an ecological
and social collapse with a population peak of 9 billion to a low-population
but highly centralized recovery economy. Earth's old cities are still
visible everywhere, in ruins: the concrete crumbles, though the plastic
lingers on, non-biodegradable. There were centuries of mismanagement.
(But starting when? With the industrial revolution? Or did the mess
continue through the 21st century—and recovery take proportionately
longer?) The reader who disagrees with my 2300 dating as wrong by
a century or two is invited to alter my chart accordingly, but I don't
think it's so far out—and it does establish a baseline. The Dispossessed
is dated 50 years before the League of Worlds came into being, since
the ansible (instantaneous transmitter) theorem would have to be transported
physically, or transmitted by conventional radio, at no faster than
light speed from Tau Ceti to Earth and Hain, then considerable R &
D engaged in (if early ansibles cost the equivalent of a "planetary
annual revenue") before the meeting of the ambassadors mentioned
in "The Word for World is Forest" (§3) could take place.
The latter story is located in League Year 18 (not, as Douglas Barbour
says in SFS #3, in LY 1) by the statement "The League of Worlds....
has existed for 18 years" (§3). Rocannon's World is given
the date mentioned in the Prologue (the "League Mission of 252-254"),
with eighty years added on for the time the necklace has been missing
(lost before Semley's father was born, some time during her great
grandmother's life). Planet of Exile is exactly dated by two systems
in §3: it is the "Year 1405 of the League of All Worlds"
and also the "45th moonphase of the Tenth Local Year of the [Terran]
Colony" on Werel. The Werelian year is equated with 60 league
years in this chapter and to 60 Terran years in §7 of City of
Illusions; in the latter book (§9) we also learn that a Werelian
moonphase is approximately equal to a Terran year; which all adds
up to LY 820 or AD 3170 for the establishment of the Terran colony
on Werel. The events of City of Illusions are then dated LY 2020 or
AD 4370 by numerous references to 1200 years having passed since that
event—or since the coming of the Shing (the "Enemy")
five years later. City of Illusions ends with Falk-Ramarren's setting
out for Werel, 142 light years away, in hope of finding there whatever
is necessary to free Terra from the Shing; if we allow him 300 years
for this mission, and assume that its success brings the end of the
Age of the Enemy, then we can date this last event LY 2320, AD 4670.
The events of The Left Hand of Darkness can then be dated LY 2520,
AD 4870 by Genly Ai's putting the Age of the Enemy "a couple
of centuries ago" (§10). Since Left Hand is explicitly assigned
to Ekumenical Year 1491-92 of Hainish Cycle 93 (we are not told how
many years are in a cycle), we are now able to equate EY dates with
LY dates and, of course, AD dates. Having said all this, we must grant
that Le Guin has left her options wide open with the change from LY
to EY dating: the end of the Age of the Enemy could be made to occur
not only (as in our chronology) 300 years after the events of City
of Illusions but also immediately thereafter—or any number of
centuries or millenia thereafter. On the other hand, Genly Ai's statement
that Terrans "were ignorant until about three thousand years
ago of the uses of zero" (§18), while giving us a date a
thousand years too early by our chronology for Left Hand (i.e., AD
3850 rather than our AD 4870), still suggests that we are right in
dating Left Hand a few centuries rather than many centuries after
City of Illusions. Certain dates in Hainish history can now be tabulated,
with asterisks to mark those given in Le Guin's text, as follows:
5"The Word for World is Forest"—in
Harlan Ellison's anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions (1972)—was
in fact written about three years earlier than publication date, at
the same time as the research leading to Lathe (Le Guin's personal
communication). However this does not substantially alter my thesis,
as the story clearly postdates Left Hand. Simply, the release of thematic
tension was already under way in the dynamics of Le Guin's creative
thought culminating shortly thereafter in the actual physical writing
of Lathe.
6Gregory Bateson, "Bali: The Value
System of a Steady State," in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(1972). The term "schismogenesis" is used by Bateson to
describe a broad range of potentially harmful human activities—such
as boasting, commercial rivalry, arms races—where the actions
of group/individual A either generate a symmetrical reaction in group/individual
B, which provokes a symmetrical or stronger response from A (of the
form boasting/more boasting, and so on), or alternatively a complementary
opposite reaction (of the form: dominance/submission) which also initiates
a new round. The tension between A and B, produced by an interaction
from which neither side can withdraw, can only generally be resolved
by a release through total involvement, of catastrophic or orgasmic
character. In Bateson's view, war, commerce, and even the process
of mutual falling in love all betray certain schismogenic features.
Thus the phenomenon should by no means be localized within a purely
"social anthropology" frame of reference, but rather be
located within a general "ecology of mind." In the context
of Hainish history, the schismogenic circuit is as follows: the arrow
of time (a sequence concept of the universe that Le Guin is only able
to supersede, after Lathe, in The Dispossessed) enforces a progressive
revelation of paranormal powers—which leads the action (in a
positive feedback circuit) further on into the future in search of
even wider paranormal powers, since these seem to represent an inevitable
evolutionary progression. (Yet at each stage consensus "reality"
is in fact receding further.)
7J.A. Hadfield, Dreams and Nightmares
(Harmondsworth 1954).
8Charles T. Tart, ed., Altered States
of Consciousness (2d edn. NY 1972). Hadfield and Dement—the sources
cited by Le Guin in her Afterward in Again, Dangerous Visions—serve
well enough for an interpretation of "The Word for World is Forest."
Even so, there is in Tart an essay by Kilton Stewart, "Dream
Theory in Malaya," which tells of the Senoi of Malaya, a people
who traditionally practiced dream interpretation on a remarkable level
of sophistication; and even engaged in lucid "waking-dream"
states while not asleep. Stewart comments: "Observing the lives
of the Senoi it occurred to me that modern civilization may be sick
because people have sloughed off, or failed to develop, half their
power to think. Perhaps the most important half" (p. 168). The
Senoi mirror Le Guin's Athsheans, even to the balance of male/female
status in a dreamer culture, quite remarkably (but coincidentally!).
Since Tart (p. 117) confesses that he has "not been able to locate
any other literature on the Senoi other than Stewart's," interested
readers may usefully be referred to Robert Knox Denton, The Semai:
A Nonviolent People of Malaya (NY 1968), a volume in the series Case
Studies in Cultural Anthropology, which predates Tart's first edition
of 1969 and contains a useful bibliography, recommending inter alia
H.D. Noone, "Report on the Settlements and Welfare of the Pre-Temiar
Senoi of the Perek-Kelatan Watershed," Journal of the Federated
Malay States Museums, Vol. 19, Pt. 1, 1936. That H.D. Noone was reporting
on precisely the same group as Kilton Stewart is indicated by Richard
Noone, Rape of the Dream People (L 1972), which refers in some detail
to the dream psychology researches of Stewart and the elder Noone,
though this particular book is a ghost-written war memoir in dubious
taste. Confusion as to the correct naming of the Senoi arises since
the word senoi simply means person in the Senoi language, and semai
refers to people who speak dialects of Semai, which is closely related
to Senoi (if not, in fact, simply a variant group of dialects!). Together
the Senoi-Semai form a linguistic enclave among tribes speaking non-Austro-Asiatic.
An ethnic way of dividing the group is to call them all Senoi, and
describe the southerners as Semai, the northerners as Temiar. It is
this northern group that Stewart and the elder Noone were working
with; consequently, adopting Noone's classification, the Malayan dreamers
described in Tart's Altered States are properly Temiar, or Pre-Temiar
Senoi.
9Tart is useful as highly relevant information
about the current state of the art of dream research (with an invaluable
bibliography) rather than as a direct primary source. Le Guin, according
to a personal communication to me, was unacquainted with Tart's work
as such at the time of writing Lathe—although well aware of other
areas of this research field, such as the work of Aserinsky, Berger,
Oswald, Hartman, et al (Lathe §2), all of which Tart surveys
concisely.
10Tart, "Introduction to Section
3, Dream Consciousness," in Tart (Note 8), p. 115.