Nathan "N.R." Gaddis's Reviews > Always Coming Home

The Millions discusses Always Coming Home ::

"The Utopias of Ursula K. Le Guin"
by Kelly Lynn Thomas
https://themillions.com/2018/01/ursul...

Again, me saying things I'm not authorized to say :: If you've not read Always Coming Home you've not really read LeGuin's vision.



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Okay and then so for a few scrambled thoughts and reflections and impressions and way=off course remarks.

This is, true, only the second Le Guin I've read. It may be the last.

Most possibly so because I suspect that this may be her masterstroke, the iceberg cap, the little tassel on the mortar board swung to the other side upon a stroll cross the stage. But don't take it from me.

I mean of course specifically in what she has done here with the form of the novel. And that's really what's going to hold my interest. I've not caught wind that she's done more or similar elsewhere.

I'm not interested in what she does with genre tropes ; sci=fi and fantasy. She may do all that stuff veryvery well but that one other of Le Guin I read didn't raise itself above the water line of the genre.

This one did. This one rose right up into the realm of the Novel. And what a novel can do. And what you can put into a novel. And how wide the waistband of the novel is. Stuff it all in like a bagful of jelly (tis the season still!) [I saw someone say it's not even a novel!]

This isn't it but I once thought (and still do) that Benjamin's Arcades Project would make an excellent formal model for a novel. Le Guin did something very similar here.

In other words, there is a reason this volume has such a miserable gr=score -- 2,232 Ratings · 166 Reviews -- relative to the Le Guin readership. Because there is much more here than story.

And as to the story, like with that famous Hopscotch, you are invited to (freely of course) decide which path to take ; the novel path or the story path. If story is all you are in for, just read the three parts of Stone Telling. But if you want Novel, read the rest and even The Back of the Book.

There is a cassette of Kesh music included with the first editions pb/hd.

Of course this novel may be read as more than in-itself. I was rather impressed how closely it could be (I won't) described as a precursor to the Seven Dreams--from all the formal (and superficial) elements (all that back matter! all those illustrations!) right down to the clash of cultures and imperialisms and things of this nature. Either as a prequel volume or sequel, depending how you signify what's here.

And too Tom LeClair, in his The Art of Excess, places this novel at the end of the Rainbow, as the epilogue of the Systext ::
Gravity's Rainbow
Something Happened
J R
The Public Burning
Women and Men
LETTERS
Always Coming Home
in such a way, so LeClair, that Always Coming Home provides a kind of wholeness of human existence which at first, at the beginning of the rainbow arc, is found torn asunder by Control. Let's quote a bit ::
"The novelist Le Guin is both White and Sun Clown, but Always Coming Home is the most reconstructive work in the systext, more explicitly oriented to the subjects of home, children, and future. A masterful combination of bildungsroman and ecological model, Always Coming Home joins human part and cultural whole, is simultaneously a psychological study that offers an active alternative to Heller's regressive self and a systems novel that provides a steady-state alternative to Gaddis's runaway. As epilogue to the systext, Always Coming Home both circles backward--in time to a past before our civilization, in space to Pynchon's prologue--and casts forward to a time after our civilization, a time without excess." [204]

And--make it explicit--"I believe Le Guin intended Always Coming Home to be read as a direct reply to Gravity's Rainbow." So should we say, if you've not read Always Coming Home, you ain't yet read GR?

And further making it explicit. Always Coming Home is not a model is not a map is not a program for us. It cannot be "applied" to our situation. It is not the politicalsocialeconomic solution to our situation. Nor are the Amish. But, like the Amish, Always Coming Home is an exercise of the imagination which goes towards evidence, towards 'proof', that the way things are now is not inevitable and necessary. It is an exercise in imagination which would invite us to exercise our own imagination in building a world for our selves in which we can live as we dream, freely and justly.

I recently saw a comment which to me epitomizes our chains. The sense of it is this--don't bring me a problem if you don't first bring me three solutions. Thus is criticism cut off before it begins and things continue as they were. And so most of the Systext does indeed bring you three criticisms and complaints and diagnoses but no solutions. Not their job. That's your job. In rare exception however, Le Guin steps up to the rare plate of offering an imaginative path one might trod. All the more beautiful because impossible.

Remember, always dream impossible.