There's a paradox in Le Guin. One the one hand, she was seemingly an ardent believer in the communitarian ideals of anarchism. On the other hand, she was a libertarian-exemplifying individualist.
The first assertion might be false in the realm of belief. Perhaps she did not believe in anarchism, but wrote about it as a fictional ideal in which her characters did the believing (but not her).
The second assertion might be factually false. On the other hand it might be borne out by a gap between actions and words.
Writers are a pretty self-reliant lot, on the whole. The writing of fiction requires loads of self-directed time through the fog of which no boss looms; there's no external cracking of the whip except that which, perhaps, the paying of bills and generally bringing home the bacon provides.
So she was one of those. That doesn't make her a right-winger. Look at all those writers on twitter: they're a bunch of lefties, creating an online non-hierarchical community both like-minded and supportive (at least the ones I follow are).
But Americans are a pretty individualistic lot. Le Guin's ancestors, alluded to both in stories like The Dispossessed, and in her non-fiction, where she describes her settler grandmother out on the frontier in the late 1800s, they had to be self-reliant. At the same time, none would've made it on their own.
There's a dialectic at the heart of Le Guin's fiction, epitomized in her stories of Martian settlement, of weird sentiences in far-flung solar systems, of pyschologies abnormalized by isolation, fear, and God (in the case of the excellent "Field of Vision").
Where, before, reading Le Guin I was reminded of how much her anthropoligist father must have influenced her world-view and by extension her writing; now, in reading the short stories, see the influence of Le Guin's psychologist mother.
These stories are really disturbing. I do mean every single one of them, as well as the volume taken as a whole. It is truly a story made of stories, a short-story collection that surpasses both congeries and fixes to excel at a whole other level of discourse.
The discursive psychological function of these stories is to present the dialectic of the individual against God, the universe, and the whole; and to break it down. Once broken down, the revolution can occur, as it does in the dual-story structure of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and "The Day Before the Revolution", both award-winning stories.
I can't say a lot more beyond the existence of the individual/communitarian dialectic Le Guin performs in this collection; but I can say that naming performs a key function. One of the stories is explicitly about names. It is a fantasy story. The naming aspect has to do with not being able to tell others your real name (if they know it they know it, and that is fine), because to use the real name is to control the person/thing named.
An individual exists in this (fantasy) community for whom no-one else knows his real name. As it turns out, this should have been the first sign that something was amiss. Reading this story I am not surprised that Le Guin had rubbed shoulders at one point with Derrida. Her grasp of philosophy of language is unparalleled in what I have read so far within the SF genre.
The second set of stories immediately picks up this language-game thread, presenting a series of 'writings' by animals, as presented in a fictional academic publication "Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics." It's fascinating. I'm going to go read more now.
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