| Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre. New York and London: Routledge 2005. Review by Marek Oziewicz,
Institute of English Studies, Mike Cadden’s central claim in this book is that Le Guin uses different genres as different metaphors for her ideas. If this observation, for readers of Le Guin’s fiction, may not seem to break new ground, I would insist that the book merits attention both for the structure of Cadden’s argument and for the expertise he brings to bear on his study. In terms of the book’s structure, Cadden traces the various continua informing Le Guin’s writings. In Chapter he explores One The continuum of sentience which spans animals, aliens, dragons and humans, creating, as Cadden argues, a sense of spectrum of identities in which each species retains a space between self and the other but—due to Le Guin’s use of anthropomorphism as the metaphor of dialogic difference—no species is fully divorced from the others. In Chapter Two, Cadden focuses on The continuum of connections possible among characters by looking at Le Guin’s use of narrative and focalization strategies by which she makes her characters connect with others and succeed, or remain isolated and fail. The continuum of the pursuit of home theme that Cadden investigates in Chapter Three leads him to claim that in Le Guin’s fiction home is achieved when a character, journeying in connectedness with others across time and space, finds a sense of purpose. The multiple generic, implied audience and thematic continua in the Earthsea sextet and Always Coming Home, explored in Chapters Four and Five respectively, imply, Cadden says, that Le Guin’s fiction may be seen as an expansive movement of making connections among genres and readers. Indeed, as he argues in Chapter Six, Le Guin’s entire oeuvre forms an ethical continuum of hope, stretching from her “consistently hopeful” children’s and young adult fantasy, through “predominantly hopeful” science fiction, and to “rather bleak” realism. Most themes touched upon in the chapters reappear in the interview Cadden conducted with Le Guin in 2001 and attached as a 16-page transcript at the end of the book. The continua Cadden explores do add to reinforce his claim that Le Guin’s work forms the continuum of hopeful fiction in which various forms of dialogic connectedness, including genre crossing, serve important aesthetic and ethical functions. If this sounds like merely reiterating the fact that Le Guin is difficult to compartmentalize, some of Cadden’s arguments are new contributions: discussing the consequences of balkanization of Le Guin criticism Cadden adds to what was said on this issue in Donna R. White’s 1999 Dancing with Dragons; exploring continua in Le Guin’s lines of vision, he broadens what was the focus of Warren G. Rochelle in his 2001 Communities of the Heart. What I found most compelling, however, were Cadden’s arguments in his capacity and expertise as a children’s literature specialist. Rightly insisting on co-positioning Le Guin’s children’s and young adult fiction at the center of her literary output, he offers a persuasive narratological reading of Le Guin’s children’s picture books in Chapter Two (pp. 44-48), an extended analysis of home motif in those books in Chapter Three (pp. 66-78), and then remains preoccupied with issues of the crossover character of Le Guin’s fiction in Chapters Four through Six (pp. 79-146), which I think may be the best in the book. Earlier on I was also convinced by Cadden’s insightful comments, for example, about isolation as representing “the ultimate failure” in Le Guin’s fiction (23), about the examination of what it means to be connected or isolated as “a strong subtext throughout Le Guin’s work” (47), and about the search for home—“the shared center that is relative, dynamic, purposeful” (51)—as underpinning much of Le Guin’s fiction. Cadden’s arguments about Le Guin’s movement from epic to novel conventions in the Earthsea series (Chapter Four), about her crossover strategies in Always Coming Home (Chapter Five), and about her use of fantasy as ethical guide for defining the boundary between children’s and adult literature (Chapter Six) are skillfully constructed and convincing. The chapters are well organized, with clear intros and conclusions, separate discussions of the novels, the suites, and children’s picture books. The book, however, leaves something wanted, as if it said the right things but said them not quite right. In the narratological Chapter Two Cadden does not arrive at any conclusions about how the point of view translates into connectedness or isolation in Le Guin’s fiction: if Le Guin can use the same strategy, for example character narrator, to highlight isolation (as in Searoad) or connectedness (as in The Left Hand of Darkness), if her single focalizers can work as multiple focalizers (as in the Forgiveness suite), and if, as Cadden eventually admits, “no form of narration limits Le Guin’s ability to accomplish [character connectedness]” (45), I am not convinced about the usefulness of the focalization criterion Cadden adopts for determining the degree of characters’ connectedness or isolation. In the following chapter he introduces Bakhtinian chronotope to talk about the narrative continuum of time and space in Le Guin’s works, but again fails to convince that the category is particularly helpful for examining the journey/search for home motif: the two major types of chronotope Cadden employs—deductive chronotope meaning “a journey from the broad to the narrow” (56), and dream/threshold chronotope meaning “the journey into the dream or other-time world” (56)—clearly overlap (for example, some of Le Guin’s stories, such as The Word for World Is Forest, are chronotopic in both ways), and I do not quite see how these categories shed new light on the journey home motif beyond reiterating Cadden’s initial claim that home, for Le Guin, is “the condition of purposeful movement” (52). The introduction of inductive and single site/time chronotopes, somewhere by the end of the chapter, does not help either. Although he gets more lucid from Chapter Four onwards, Cadden’s style throughout feels strained and unnecessarily abstruse for the argument. This is not an objection to Bakhtinian or narratological terminology—useful as it may be—but merely my idiosyncratic impression that literary criticism written in this idiom more often than not reads like operating instructions of a dishwasher. Specifically, Cadden overuses focalization and its derivatives where simpler “point of view” or “perspective” would be just fine. He says “subtext” when he means “theme,” “chronotope” and “chronotopic” when he means journey through time and space, “analepsis” and “prolepsis” for narrative flashbacks and flash forward, and so forth. This makes the book at times verbose (when Cadden uses the specialist term embedded in its descriptive definition), and at times repetitive (when Cadden defines and redefines narratological terms whenever they appear in new chapters). Fortunately, Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre contains enough intelligent insights to redeem this. It is a study conducted in Le Guinian frame of mind which resists closure and does not insist on synthesis or reconciliation of many-voicedness and many-facetedness of Le Guin’s fiction, and yet suggests important ways in which her output can, indeed, be seen as forming a number of recognizable continua. Marek Oziewicz |