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Influenced by the women’s movement, Ursula K. Le Guin’s controversial 1985 carrier bag novel Always Coming Home (ACH) depicts the Kesh, a dynamic, postapocalyptic, matrilineal, matrilocal culture that balances male and female qualities as well as human and environmental demands. Aside from her poetry, it is possibly her most personal work, reflecting the Northern California ranch that was an intimate part of her childhood experience, a place where she played in the red adobe dirt with her little houses, cars, and people (756). In early 2019, ACH was republished by the Library of America (LOA) in a high-quality authorized, cloth-bound edition as part of a series that reflects Le Guin’s status as one of the most influential creative geniuses of American literature. Edited by Brian Attebery, the book includes Le Guin’s original hand-drawn maps and illustrations by Margaret Chodos-Irvine; it adds “Chronology;” “Notes;” two more chapters of Dangerous People, a novel within the novel; a poem by a Kesh poet; “Kesh Syntax,” “Some Kesh Meditations”; and “Blood Lodge songs”; plus “May’s Lion” (1983) a short story told and then retold through a Kesh perspective. Seven previously published essays provide the essential theoretical concepts that inform ACH’s construction. Of these, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” (1982) and “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986) are particularly valuable when considering Le Guin’s work as a whole. “The Making of Always Coming Home” transcribes a panel from Mythcon panel 19 on July 31, 1988, where Le Guin interacts with collaborators regarding the maps, art, and music that came with the initial publication.
The LOA is a nonprofit cultural institution that works to preserve our literary heritage by publishing America’s most significant writing, promoting it, and keeping it permanently in print. Eventually LOA intends to release all of Le Guin’s major work in similar high-quality, authoritative volumes. Previous publications include The Complete Orsinia (2016) and a two-volume boxed set of The Hainish Novels and Stories (2017). The LOA edition of her young adult Annals of the Western Shore trilogy was released in 2020, also with added content.
Le Guin and the Critics
Always Coming Home was considered unconventional from the beginning, and Le Guin knew it would be. Initially published as a 525-page paperback in a boxed set that included a cassette tape of “Music & Poetry of the Kesh” with music composed by Todd Barton and words by Le Guin, the book was unapologetically different. (The music is presently available through Barton’s Bandcamp site, <ursulakleguintoddbarton.bandcamp.com/album/music-and-poetry-of-the-kesh>.) “Stammersong,” a poem on the final page, begins
I have a different way, I have a different will,
I have a different word to say.
I am coming back by the road around the side, by the outside way, from the other direction. (617).
In a 1986 interview with Michael Brayndick, she remarked:
I’ve taken the whole novel form and—oh, gosh—done terrible things to it. There is a novel in the book, just a straightforward linear story that moves along, but it’s surrounded by all this stuff which isn’t going anywhere, which is sort of descriptions or pieces of poetry, plays, short stories, and stuff so that what I’m trying to do, instead of taking the reader on a trip, is to say: “Look here, I built a house. Come into this house, and move around in it,” which is different from what we’re used to. A lot of people are going to hate it. (83)
Although ACH won the 1985 Janet Heidinger Kafka Award for fiction by an American woman and was a runner-up for the 1985 National Book Award, this midlife, midcareer novel was originally met with mixed critical response. Some readers, expecting a continuation of her award-winning fantasy and science fiction series, were initially confused and/or disappointed by the lack of a conventional plot. Most virulent perhaps was an Asimov’s column where writer/critic Norman Spinrad called Le Guin the “token nigger” of the literary establishment (9), suggesting that she had “lost the creative center, sense of irony, and intellectual discipline that every would-be visionary must retain if she is not to devolve into a hectoring guru” and then described the book as “an enormous act of ego-tripping self-indulgence” (12). Other critics, particularly feminists and others interested in gender, heralded ACH as a work of genius. In a 1985 review written for the New York Times, Samuel R. Delany called it her “most consistently lyric and luminous book” (np). In “Women’s Utopias: New Worlds, New Texts” (1990) Lee Cullen Khanna acclaimed ACH as Le Guin’s most brilliant work (White, 98). Although Pandora, the far-future ethnographer/narrator, who metaphorically opens the box of the Kesh, describes “smart-ass utopians” as “boring,” utopian scholars saw considerable insight in Le Guin’s thought experiment (371). Second-wave feminist work such as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Suzi McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978) had been critically acclaimed. Joan Slonczewski’s award-winning A Door into Ocean (1986) was soon to follow, but these were primarily separatist utopias. Le Guin wanted to go in a different direction, demonstrating more balanced male/female power structures for her Kesh. Throughout her career, she carried on a spirited dialogue with her critics that became an ongoing part of her thought experiments. Although The Dispossessed (1974) is subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia, she responded that ACH was not intended to be seen as utopian, “If it dawns slowly on people that the relationship between women and men in the book is somewhat different from the present one that obtains in our civilization, and that it’s kind of interestingly different, and that nobody is being supreme over anybody, I’ll be happy” (Brayndick 87). This dynamic of male and female balancing through conversation and negotiation is introduced earlier in The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Dispossessed and is further explored in later Hainish stories that were collected in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994), Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995), and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002). Recent twenty-first century criticism by Rochelle (2001), Cadden (2005), Clarke (2010), and Lindow (2012) view ACH as an intrinsic part of Le Guin’s development as a writer—an award-winning work that leads directly to further award-winning works. Thirty-five years from the completion of ACH, it is valuable to take another look, particularly in relation to the added material and how the novel creates a hinge, a stable but flexible center, for a door that opens to later work.
The Yin Yang of a Kesh Carrier Bag Culture and the Hinge at the Center
As a novel, Always Coming Home fits interstitially as a hinge between fantasy and science fiction, depicting a post-environmental-holocaust future where advanced technology and seemingly magical events exist side by side. Le Guin grew up reading genre, but as a writer, she did not want to be limited by genre definitions and constraints. Informed by Taoist concepts, her novels are structured using a yin-yang of opposing concepts: light/dark, male/female, militarism/pacifism. Rather than using a linear plot structure where action rises like an arrow and shoots straightforwardly to a climax, her plot structure tends to spiral, where an initial conflict between characters and cultures is introduced and then slowly resolved through a marriage of ideas. If violence occurs, it’s not a solution but a tragic failure of communication and a cause of future suffering. Instead of following one voice in a narrative arc, ACH follows a multiplicity of voices, human and animal, in a setting so clearly and lovingly developed that the land itself seems to speak.
In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin writes that “A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us” (729). The word “medicine” implies a cure, but within the context of a shamanistic tradition, it may not be an easy cure; rather, it is likely to be one that requires a change of lifestyle. The Kesh in Always Coming Home are a far-future culture that sometime in its past has consciously turned away from capitalism and industrial progress. The name Kesh sounds like the word “cache,” implying a collection of items stored in a hidden or inaccessible place, in this case a cache of stories found in an archive. Essentially, the Kesh choose to be provincial. They have rifles and electricity generated from solar collectors and windmills. There is a train that travels on wooden tracks but only one. Shared community computers are available to them, but technology is peripheral to their center of social interaction. With some effort, they can visit the City of the Mind with its “ethereal technology” and the possibly sentient Memory of the Exchange, but most of them don’t. Spaceships and deep space stations exist, but they are described as “mere nerve and gossamer” (447) rather than the heavy metal structures so valued in sf pulps. As a culture, the Kesh, who still suffer from illnesses and low birth rate related to past environmental pollution, are much more interested in their dance cycles and living in the now than in a system of public education, although apprenticeship and storytelling are valued. Their wealth is in giving back to community rather than accruing things. It is a world where trees, rocks, and animals are persons in themselves and have equal rights to humans. Le Guin’s intention when structuring ACH was to move away from the hero story to the heya story by valorizing community rather than independent action. The “translations” collected in the Kesh archive demonstrate the somewhat messy nature of community decision making, and for the most part, it works. The narrators of the tales are ordinary people who are sometimes thrust into difficult situations where they must struggle to figure out the right thing to do—whatever it takes to go on living in the carrier bag “belly of the universe” (730). Throughout the book, Kesh leadership is shown as a fluid, shifting process rather than a hierarchy. It is worthwhile to note that the line between yin and yang, action and inaction, is not a straight and narrow path but a curve, a hinge. When going forward, it is easy to err on one side or another; thus, it is important to make decisions from a place of stillness, which is probably the reason Le Guin included an explanation of Kesh meditation in her expanded material (669–71).
In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin interrogates the hero tale, describing her structure as “beginnings without ends ... initiations ... losses ... transformations, far more tricks than conflicts, and far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions” (729). The depiction of these snares and delusions is important because they become teaching stories that work toward clarification of cultural values, the moral center of community. She never intended the Kesh to be seen as morally perfect, merely more adept at living softly within their environment. In ACH, the nature of human conflict is spread out through various stories. This primary conflict concerns the effect of a military occupation on a peaceful, agrarian, matrilocal culture. The longest narrative is by Stone Telling, the daughter of Willow, a Kesh woman, and Terter Abhao, a Condor commander. Her narrative describes her early life and how she then lives for seven years in her father’s repressive, totalitarian culture until she is able to escape with her servant and her small daughter. Her story is separated into three parts by ethnographic information about Kesh mythology, language, and culture including recipes, poetry, and songs. Many of these additional stories such as the trickster tale, “Some Stories Told Aloud” and “A War with the Pig People” satirize the stupidity and loss of war. Others like “Dira,” “Old Women Hating,” and “Junco” are cautionary tales regarding the necessity of community action when domestic victimization or self-harm occurs. “The Trouble with the Cotton People” provides a template for peaceful and fair negotiation of a problem.
In ACH, the secretive Condor culture is male-oriented and industrially hot, rapidly using up its resources to the detriment of the health and well-being of its people, while the gossipy Kesh are matrilineal, agricultural, and technologically cool. Although the Condor men with their long black wings and “backwards” facing condor headdresses are clearly out of balance with nature, it should not be concluded that the Kesh have achieved a perfect balance within the natural world. The Kesh lifestyle with its emphases on manual labor, physical exercise, and open-minded acceptance of sexuality is likely to reduce the kind of moral rigidity and stress that leads to sexual perversion, alcoholism, and drug addiction; however, this easy-going approach can lead to problems, as indicated in Dangerous People (DP), a novel by the brilliant Kesh writer and social critic, Wordriver. When no one takes responsibility for locating a missing woman, tragedy follows. The original ACH contains only “Chapter 2” of DP, but the LOA edition adds two more chapters that were not included in the 1985 version due to the length of the book. These added chapters give this story more weight, particularly regarding the downside of Kesh parochialism. DP is a troubling tale of how a family’s poor communication, simmering resentments, and interpersonal dysfunction lead to a young mother’s disappearance and subsequently that of her three-year-old son. The lost son in this story works as a balance to the small daughter who is saved in the Stone Telling narrative. DP’s self-involved grandmother and the corresponding breakdown of family communication demonstrate a dystopian flaw within the fabric of Kesh culture. Like the anarchist culture on Anarres in The Dispossessed, Kesh culture contains the seeds of its own betrayal. In “A Note about the Novel” Pandora explains that the construction of Dangerous People by Wordriver of Telina-na is “exemplary” of a particular narrative pattern:
of two people meeting, or “hinging” or “turning apart,” one of whom is then followed to the next meeting with a different person, and so on (the pattern of the heyiya-if repeated). (373)
However, her academic analysis indicates Pandora’s limitations as narrator. She misses the subjective point of the novel and does not appear to recognize the truly “dangerous” process that occurs in this story. As in a game of “Telephone,” communication degrades as it moves from person to person. No one takes responsibility for the lost woman. As Rochelle suggests, the Kesh are neither patriarchal nor matriarchal (90), but that can lead to having no one in charge. If a murder has occurred, it is not officially investigated. There is no police force. Anarchism only works if everyone is self-disciplined and good, and that is not possible. Dangerous people exist who will take advantage of others. Toxic patterns exist in families that cause harm even if no actual crimes are committed. Pandora may speak for Le Guin throughout the book, but she is still a character in a culture that has its own blind sides and biases.
Always Coming Home as Postmodernist Text
Postmodernism is a late twentieth-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, and a general suspicion of objective reason. There is an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power. Correspondingly, postmodernist literature resists precise definition, working as a metanarrative that requires a kind of open-ended dialogue between writer and reader. Always Coming Home functions as a postmodernist thought experiment in the politics of power, but, as in Le Guin’s 1982 short story “Sur” its message is implied rather than shouted from a pulpit, what Amy Clarke calls “subtly didactic,” requiring reader response to construct. As Clarke (2010) suggests:
Home humorously and self-consciously disallows its own authority, inviting the reader to share in constructing its meaning, while subtly deconstructing the reader’s cultural biases. (106)
In “A Non-Euclidean View of California,” Le Guin defines utopia as “no place” and writes, “If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not the way” (717). “Stammersong,” the final piece in the original edition, contains mutually exclusive stanzas that describe the change that occurs when inspiration is embodied through what Elizabeth Cummins calls “consensus reality” (161):
There is a valley, there are no hills around it.
There is a river, it has no banks.There are people, they have no bodies,
dancing by the river in the valley.
...
There is a valley, high hills around it.
There is a river, willow on its shores.
There are people, their feet are beautiful,
dancing by the river in the valley (617)
Thus, the valley does not exist until it is imagined. Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson defines a postmodern text as one that does not represent authentic reality but exists as a simulacrum, “a copy without an original” (Butler 141). Correspondingly, Le Guin slyly calls her Napa Valley the “Na Valley,” suggesting the impossibility of its existence. The plethora of disparate informational points of reference in the book requires the work to be viewed holographically, but the overall holographic reality that is perceived changes each time the book is read, at least for this reader.
Constructing a Hinge for the Holiness of Everyday Life
The village of Sinshan has been built along the edge of Sinshan Creek. The shape of the creek is similar to the shape of the line that separates the parts of the yin-yang (214, 219). This central creek line functions as a hinge. In a personal e-mail to this author, Le Guin writes that the hinge is
a central concept/image with many connotations. (Including the center of a spiral, where going inward turns to going outward—and the double-spiral, the heyiya-if, also allows going outward to turn to going inward.
In Kesh heyiya means sacred or holy. The heyiya-if refers to the physical representation of the heyiya spiral, but adding the if adds the element of choice, a “choose your own adventure” in a world that is not dictated by a God but by the competing sacredness of everything. Le Guin’s description suggests the flowing movement of dance and of Moebius strips where continuing to turn sends one back to the beginning. Moving inward into alone-time is balanced with moving outward into society and nature.
Le Guin envisioned the Kesh as living on the edge of a frontier. Beyond the gardens and sown crops there are woods and wild lands on both sides. With the help of “geomancer” George Hersh, she redrew the topographical map of Northern California so that her Na Valley is carrier-bag-shaped and isolated by oceans and mountains. Similar to her mountain culture in The Telling (2000), this physical isolation allows the culture to remain somewhat stable and resistant to outside influences. Furthermore, there is wilderness within easy walking distance, allowing the Kesh to experience the liminality of the wild. In “On the Frontier,” a 1996 meditation, Le Guin constructs a representation of the frontier using the yin-yang: “A frontier has two sides. It is an interface, a threshold, a liminal site, with the danger and promise of liminality” (Words Are My Matter 28). The Condor represent the yang side of the frontier. Their rush is “forward like a stormfront, like a battlefront” (ibid.). The other side is the yin side “where you live” where you have “always lived” (ibid.). The suggestion is that daily life retains aspects of the frontier because the unexpected is always close. Human interaction always includes the dynamics of yin and yang. She further explains:
My fantasies explore the use of power as art and its misuse as domination; they play back and forth along the mysterious frontier between what we think is real and what we think is imaginary, exploring the borderlands. (Words 30)
The Kesh live on the edge of the yang frontier where political control is disputed. They inhabit the yin side of the frontier, which lies contiguous to a utopian vision, a vision that must be reconstructed daily by the Kesh and by readers for themselves. This utopian ideal is represented by the concept of heyiya-if, the holiness of everyday life. It is a world where “the spiritual and the commonplace are one” (749). In her essay, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” 1982, Le Guin suggests an alternative to our “hot,” “big yang motorcycle trip” consumerist culture:
Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.... We must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold. (713–14)
Reflecting her definition of a yin utopia as “yielding, passive, participatory, cyclical, peaceful” and “nurturant” (714), the Kesh live within the hinge—a stable but flexible yin center that opens outward to include the wild. As explained in the trickster tale, “Dried Mice,” Coyote is their neighbor and they live next door to “Coyote’s House,” which implies the unpredictability and messiness of nature (as opposed to plastic, concrete, AstroTurf, and exhaust). The concept of utopia exists for them as a state of holiness, but they are not fully there because they are fallibly human. As Skull explains in the Stone Telling narrative:
The lion is well, the hawk is well, the oak is well, they live and die in the mindfulness of the sacred, and need take no care. But from us sacredness has withdrawn care; in us is the mind of the sacred. So all we do is careful, and all our effort is to be mindful, and yet we are not whole. (452)
Pandora as the Postmodernist Hinge at the Center of the Book
In “Indian Uncles” (2001), Le Guin writes, “The idea that objective observation can be performed only by an observer totally free of subjectivity involves an ideal of inhuman purity which we now recognize as being, fortunately, unattainable” (782). Objective science is always informed by the cultural biases in which we breathe. Just because we can’t see them, doesn’t mean they are not there. The word “fortunately” is important here. Le Guin implies that imperfect subjective human experience is better than objectivity because objective purity would delete essential human empathy from the scientific process. Redacting the Pandora of Greek mythology, her far-future ethnologist Pandora functions as a stable hinge for the book as whole, but stable does not mean unemotional. In various places she intentionally breaks the fifth wall and steps away from her archival “translations” to address the reader directly regarding who she is, her own possible biases, and how she feels as a privileged representative of a culture that has damaged the ecological balance of the planet:
Am I not a daughter of the people who enslaved and extirpated the peoples of three continents? Am I not a sister of Adolph Hitler and Anne Frank? Am I not a citizen of the State that fought the first nuclear war? Have I not eaten, drunk, and breathed poison all my life ... ? (177)
Not much is revealed about Pandora’s life, but she shares our past as well as the possible future of the Kesh. At the beginning of the novel she imagines where in the valley Sinshan village might be, essentially where it might organically fit. As a child, I imagined the log cabin where my grandfather was born from the faint foundation lines I could see in the dry grass on the lawn near the well of the one-hundred-year-old farm where he was born, but Pandora adds the dimension of speculating far into her future and then backwards. Her process is a quantum physics sleight of hand that is as confounding as her grammar: “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California” (7). Never mind, sf fans, this is a work of speculation and imagination, not hard science; however, as Rieder (2018) suggests:
SF is not so much an identity to be staked out and named as it is an everchanging set of uses applied for different purposes by different groups to different texts. (339)
The rigor of futuristic thought experiment allows ACH to fall within the realm of sf, if not comfortably. Pandora explains that the reality of the Kesh
is in thin air, in the wilderness that lies beyond this day and night, the Houses of the Earth. My gold is in the broken pot at the end of the rainbow. Dig there! What will you find? Seeds. Seeds of the wild oats. (14)
Sowing wild oats implies youthful exuberance, exciting events, and sexual adventures, but Le Guin implies that her wild oats don’t need to be sown. They can be found by digging at the end of the rainbow (which is everywhere and nowhere). By telling her readers to look at the end of the rainbow, like the children in the Lucky Charms commercials of the ’60s and ’70s, Pandora is conveying the optimistic belief that with a little luck, future humans might be able to rediscover a wild and ecologically balanced alternative to the many past and present evils of civilization. Later, she reveals some of her life experience when contemplating a scrub oak, and she admits, “The shrub is not beautiful, nor even if I were ten feet high on hashish would it be mystical” (287). Such personal honesty could easily be seen as an insult to the ideal of the objective social scientist, one who apparently lives in a stainless-steel cupboard in a clean lab and just comes out to work, but Pandora suggests that scientists have real lives. In “Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction,” Gib Prettyman describes Pandora as “authorial consciousness playfully” challenging the conventual concept of authorial control
by confessing what is unknown and unknowable, by reinscribing herself in the text, and by embracing the world as “not accidentally but essentially messy” (Prettyman, 71, quoting ACH 287)
The natural world is messy because it needs to be that way. Le Guin implies via Pandora that the Kesh are direct descendants of a culture whose attempts to subdue and control the world caused an accumulating environmental holocaust from which they are slowly recovering. Like her Hainish culture, they have suffered and have learned from their suffering. (For more on the Hain, see Lindow, 2018.) Accepting responsibility is an important aspect of Le Guin’s concept of moral development. She makes it clear that the evils of modern civilization can be traced to a hierarchical pattern of entitlement. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has written that the main function of early writing was “to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (Diamond 235). Part of this facilitation of slavery involves belittling and scapegoating others as occurs in Hesiod’s famous misogynistic poem Works and Days where impulse-driven Pandora, the first human woman, opens a jar and releases all the evils in the world. (Le Guin demonstrates similar blaming and rationalization in her long poem, “The Third Child’s Story” [325–30].) When Le Guin’s Pandora opens the archive of Kesh culture, she releases an alternative, egalitarian lifestyle, an ecological approach to human suffering that works to diminish it, although does not erase it, for to do so would be to be complicit in a utopian lie similar to that depicted in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973). As Pandora transcribes the archive, she is touched by her own research, slowly moving from the objective stance of a social scientist to the subjective embrace of a culture she begins to adopt as her own:
PAN: I don’t know how to sing heya.
ARC: I’ll teach you, aunt.
PAN: I’ll learn, niece.
PANDORA AND THE ARCHIVIST SING:
Heya, heya, hey ... (372)
Stone Telling as Hinge
In “Old Body Not Writing” (2003) Le Guin describes writing fiction as a process of receiving a voice that speaks through her and adds, “But it’s more than voice. It’s a bodily knowledge. Body is story; voice tells it.” (Words, 288). Always Coming Home begins with Stone Telling’s childhood experiences. To indicate rites of passage, the Kesh change their names throughout their lives. Babies are often given the names of birds, and Stone Telling’s child name is North Owl, implying bird as messenger as well as Le Guin’s concept of yin utopia. Initially North Owl’s child voice pulls the reader into the narrative. She is believable as a child and fully embodied, reflecting childhood’s limited understanding, liminality, and willing acceptance of the unexplainable. Her story reveals the Kesh viewed from inside the culture but with the estrangement of someone not fully accepted. She is a partial outsider from the beginning because of her Condor father. Like the Yurok, described in Alfred Kroeber’s research, the Kesh are known by the houses in which they live. Other children tease North Owl by calling her “half-House” because her father comes from outside the culture (20). This makes it easy for her to temporarily reject her culture and to want to live in her father’s culture without really understanding what it is. Because she has always had freedom, it is easy for her to undervalue it until she loses it. The trauma of leaving her first life, attempting to adjust to another, and then returning home creates a mindset that makes her a particularly good “hinge” for talking about both cultures. She is able to turn inward and open outward.
Reflecting the developmental rites of indigenous cultures as well as the Campbellian monomyth, when North Owl is eight and in a “clear” time unconfused by adolescent hormones, she journeys alone outside the village, following the ridges of Sinshan Mountain. Her journey is a recognition of agency that is called “to go up in the tracks of the lion” (31). The mountains are within easy walking distance from the village and are intended to be “both real and mythical: they are the places where the dreamtime, the time outside of time, meets with and is one with daily chronology” (747). This close approximation to dreamtime is demonstrated throughout the book, a recognition and valuing of natural metaphor as it relates to personal decision making and rites of passage. For North Owl, the natural world is intrinsically holy:
Everything that came to me I spoke to by name or saying heya, the trees, fir and digger pine and buckeye and redwood and manzanita and madrone and oak, the birds, blue jay and bushtit and woodpecker and phoebe and hawk, the leaves of chamise and scrub oak and poison oak and flowering thorn, the grasses, a deer’s skull, a rabbit’s droppings, the wind blowing from the sea. (33)
Le Guin purposely includes poison oak and rabbit’s droppings as part of the holiness of the whole. Later, North Owl experiences a certain sensuality in sleeping outside under the stars:
The fog did not come in that night; the darkness stayed mild and clear, and all the stars revealed themselves. I felt light, lying at the side of a small clearing under the old bay laurel trees, looking up at the star patterns; I began to float, to belong in the sky. So Coyote let me come into her house. (34)
According to Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, eight is a concrete operational age where physical and emotional development is sufficient for a child to care for herself in well-understood circumstances but still be open to symbolic/mystical revelation. During this early vision quest, North Owl receives protection from Coyote and a boon from a water bug. She finds a stagnant pool where the water seems powerful, “heavy, like blood, and black” (34):
On the water something came towards me: the waterskater. It was a big one, moving quickly on its shining hollows in the skin of the water. I said, “I give you what blessing I can, Silent one, give me what blessing you can!” The insect stayed still awhile there between the air and water, where they meet, its place of being, and then it slid away. (34–35)
Afterwards she returns to her village, washes, and then hears Gahheya Rock speak, “Now touch me.” Le Guin’s spelling of the rock’s name is a homophone of Gaia, the feminine spirit of the earth. The Kesh view the earth as female, reflecting a holistic approach to living where all forms of life are interdependent. This view is similar to ecofeminism although Le Guin explains that when writing the book, she did not know of the movement (Lindow 200). (For more on ecofeminism as it relates to ACH, see Clarke, 109–15.) North Owl even at age eight has been thoroughly educated in her responsibilities to the earth.
So I did, and so came home. I knew something had come to me that I did not understand, and maybe did not want, from that strange place, the pool and the waterskater; but the hinge of my walk had been the golden hill; the coyote had sung to me; and so long as my hand and the rock had touched each other I knew that I had not gone wrong even if I had come to nothing. (35)
On her vision quest, North Owl has experienced a unity of elemental forces: sunlight, starlight, earth, air, and water. Some versions of the Pandora myth show insects flying from the opened jar. Here, however, the insect is seen as holy, and it provides a vision of North Owl’s life to come, offering meaningful insight into what she must do in order to survive adversity by slipping lightly across the dangerous power and blood that lurks below.
Soon after her vision quest, she meets her father for the first time and is impressed by his power and leadership as a Condor commander of three hundred. She is with him during a confrontation about soldiers building a bridge that the Kesh do not want: “most of the Valley people who had given thought to the matter had decided that it was a mistake to put a bridge across the River without consulting either the River or the people who lived alongside it” (50). The confrontation ends in compromise; however, the soldiers’ military respect for her father causes her to romanticize his life as a powerful person with an agency she would like to have for herself. Looking back, Stone Telling concludes:
We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless.... What is seen with one eye has no depth. (44)
In the second part of her narrative, she is an adolescent who now calls herself Condor’s Daughter. She develops a crush on her cousin Spear, a friendship that is discouraged because of their family relationship and because sexual attachment is discouraged during early adolescence. When her father returns, she demands he take her with him when he leaves, not knowing that she will be trapped and forced to marry in a repressive, paternalistic culture that is in the process of destroying itself. The focus is on the loss of her cultural innocence, her recognition of the true nature of power and powerlessness:
It is easy to learn to be a slave. The tricks of slavery are like fleas hopping from a dead ground squirrel onto your skin; you have the plague before you know it. And all the tools of slavery have two edges. (239)
(More on the nature of slavery can be found in “A Woman’s Liberation,” Four Ways to Forgiveness [1995] and in Powers [2007].)
In the third part, Condor’s daughter becomes the second or “pretty” wife of a rich middle-aged man. She has an abortion and then a daughter. (Both Kesh and Condor cultures accept abortion as a private, sometimes necessary option.) The Condor culture is crumbling due to its monomaniacal pursuit of political domination. Nothing is intrinsically heya. The only worship is for the leader who represents The One God. The Condor live in dark, cavelike houses, their red rugs, symbolic of blood, are considerably different from the bright, airy homes of the Kesh with their many porches and balconies. Women are required to be veiled in public. For the most part, women and men live separately, a social structure Le Guin is to explore further in “The Matter of Seggri” (1994), “Solitude” (1994), and “Wild Girls” (2002). Although warlike, the dystopian Condor culture isn’t entirely evil. Good people exist who find personal meaning in doing the right thing. Like Rega Teyeo in Le Guin’s 1995 novella, “Forgiveness Day,” Stone Telling’s Condor father, Terter Abhao or Kills, is a good man whose life has been shaped by a self-destructive paternalistic culture. Given his frame of reference, he does his best to protect his daughter, but the two do not fully communicate until starvation puts their lives at risk. The emotional resolution of the relationship between father and daughter occurs early in this section when she develops the voice, agency, and moral authority to convince her father to let her leave when he asks:
“Do you get enough to eat? You’re very thin.”
“My stomach can fast, but my mind is starving,” I said. “Father, we made half a journey together, once.” (417)
(For more on Stone Telling and exit and voice in human development, see chapter four of Dancing the Tao: Le Guin and Moral Development, Lindow [2012].)
What follows is a dangerous escape with her maidservant and her daughter from the Condor city of Sai. (Pronounced either Say, reflecting voice, or Sigh, reflecting despair, both possibilities have considerable significance within the emotional context of the story). They return to her home village of Sinshan, and she renames herself “Woman Coming Home,” recognizing that coming home is an ongoing process. The traditional hero tale ends with the return of the hero, but Stone Telling’s story continues because the real hero of the novel is the Kesh culture as a whole as it works through the moral conundrum of military aggression. Although as a young mother she has very little power outside of her family, Woman Coming Home observes peaceful conflict resolution within the Kesh community when Condor wannabes (both in the male Warrior Lodge and the equally essentialist female Lamb Lodge) are persuaded to disband through pacifist argument. Ironically, some of the most committed “warriors” leave and join the diminished Condor army they had previously wanted to fight. The conclusion within the community is that the tendency toward power seeking and violence is a sickness that requires vigilance to avoid.
The sickness of Man is like the mutating viruses and the toxins: there will always be some form of it about, or brought in from elsewhere by people moving and traveling, and there will always be the risk of infection. (454)
In the beginning of her narrative Stone Telling remarks, “I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone, in this ground, in this valley, I have come where I was going” (17). Stone Telling knows that stones can speak with the power of the earth, but in this section, the story winds down slowly, reporting the rhythms of daily life. Unlike the first section, the compelling animistic energy of the wilderness is missing. In a July 2019 panel at Convergence in Minneapolis, 1991 Tiptree winner Eleanor Arnason remarked that she believes this is the least effective part of the book as a whole, implying that Stone Telling doesn’t seem to do much with her well-earned agency. Perhaps, as Le Guin suggests in a 1986 interview, she was not yet “strong enough to use it” (O’Connell 36–37). (A similar breakdown of agency also occurs with Tenar in Tehanu [1990].) Stone Telling’s eventual love relationship with Alder, a healer, could allow her considerable fulfillment through community action. They change their names to Stone Telling and Stone Listening, a romantic reference to the balance power of the yin-yang, but Le Guin leaves the dynamics of power couple partnerships to later stories in her Hainish series, political action in Four Ways to Forgiveness, teachers in The Telling, and storytellers in her YA Western Shore trilogy.
As Oliver Scheiding argues, most of Stone Telling’s narrative takes place in the “between”—not only between cultures but also between passages of life (Cadden 120). Certainly, there is a sense of betweenness in Stone Telling’s story, a focus on her daily life as she moves from child to young woman and then from young woman to mature woman. Throughout, Stone Telling functions mostly as observer but one whose observational powers should be respected due to her double sightedness, her ability to see both cultures from inside and outside, a double consciousness originally explicated in 1897 by W.E.B. DuBois when talking about the aftereffects of slavery (a concept Le Guin later explores in her novella, “A Woman’s Liberation” [1995]). Most of the military and political action occurs offstage. Le Guin, who in the early 1980s believed that women were not equipped to be heroes, is still working on allowing her female protagonists to have agency equal to that of men. (Teenaged Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan [1970] has power, but she lacks the confidence and training to use it except in protecting the tombs. Ged essentially rescues her.) The modern hero in Stone Telling’s narrative is her father and his slow recognition of his own culture’s destructiveness although Le Guin allows the reader only snapshots of this process, and, as with many of Le Guin’s heroes, his life does not end well.
Ethnography as Hinge
Ursula, precocious and youngest of four Kroeber children, grew up in a rich intellectual environment that included her father’s colleagues and students as well as her father’s friends—Juan Dolores, a Papago, and Robert Spott, a Yurok—honorary uncles who visited them at the ranch. “Indian Uncles,” a 2001 lecture reprinted in this volume describes how these honorary uncles were treated as members of her extended family (781–89). As explained in her Mythcon Guest of Honor Speech, “Legends for a New Land,” ethnographic storytelling became part of her early mindset (756). ACH was written in an attempt to embody a future history for her childhood landscape, an area that by the ’80s had lost some of its wildness in favor of millionaires’ “tennis courts and gazebos” (753). In ACH, Pandora’s “niece,” the Archivist of the Madrone Lodge explains:
This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilization possible only to the civilized, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection.... (372)
Both Pandora and the Archivist are aspects of Le Guin’s persona, and, of course, neither they nor Le Guin are merely housewives. Pandora, whose name can be translated as Giver of all Gifts, transcends the story through her awareness that she is married to Hindsight (Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother). On one level, “niece” should be considered an honorary title: an older woman is recognizing a kindred spirit, but metaphorically, the Archivist could be considered the daughter of Prometheus, whose name means Foresight. She has the foresighted ability to see the future that Pandora wishes to see. The two are together in the Library at Wakwaha-na which is situated at the “Springs,” the source of the Na River, metaphorically the source of inspiration. They speak through time as Lavinia does with her creator, Homer, in Le Guin’s 2008 novel, Lavinia. Essentially Le Guin is once again critiquing herself and her mindset, but despite the metafictional transgression of time and space, “the dream dreamed” has a solid reality that is based on factual evidence. In an interview published in The Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, Le Guin explains further:
Nobody has to live the way we live now. We don’t have to keep on going the way we’re going. The book clearly, I think, says that. There is no need for us to go on and on and on doing the same things we’ve been doing for one hundred to two hundred years since the Industrial Revolution. I think we have pretty well run through, indeed, and to go on now is obviously increasingly dumb ... and fatal. But I’m just offering alternatives and celebrating this place I love very much—all the animals and plants and weathers of this little piece of California which I love deeply, as one loves a piece of ground sometimes. (88)
In constructing Always Coming Home, Le Guin creates a hinge between herself and her father Alfred Kroeber, who died in 1960, as well as with his colleagues and the Indian “uncles” who visited at the ranch. Kesh culture and mythology reflects Kroeber’s ethnographic research, Indian Myths of South Central California (1907) and the Handbook of the Indians of California (1925). Le Guin uses them as a hinge to a revisioned future. By doing so in the 1980s, she enters the forefront of Indigenous Futurism, a term coined by Dr. Grace Dillon of Portland University. The Kesh are a post-apocalyptic culture living in a place where aboriginal values have been reclaimed and reworked. The word apocalypse is interesting here. Although here it refers to a devastating ecological collapse, the word is derived from late fourteenth-century Church Latin word apocalypsis meaning “revelation” or “disclosure,” and from the Greek apokalyptein meaning “uncover, disclose, reveal,” the prefix apo meaning “from” and kalyptein meaning “to cover, conceal.” Kesh values have been uncovered from many cultures, including Taoism, which was beloved to Alfred Kroeber, and from the Papago, Yurok, Wappo, and Castanoan tribes, about whom he wrote. Furthermore, indigenous values revealed through his groundbreaking research are at the center of the novel’s worldbuilding, not included in the margins for effect. For instance, the Kesh disinterest in the world outside their valley reflects the Yurok who lived in the narrow, mountainous, densely forested Klamath River Valley in the Pacific Northwest. In Childhood and Society (1950), Kroeber’s friend and colleague, psychologist Erik Erikson, reiterates Kroeber’s earlier research and a visit they made together to a Yurok village. Like the Kesh, the Yurok lived in solid frame houses that were “half sunk in the ground” (Erikson, 170):
They considered a disk of about 150 miles in diameter, cut in half by the course of their Klamath River, to include all there was to this world. They ignored the rest and ostracized as “crazy” or “of ignoble birth” anyone who showed a marked tendency to venture into territories beyond. (166)
The sexual freedom of the Moon Dance celebration also reflects Kroeber’s depiction of the Yurok yearly salmon celebration which included “orgies of ridicule and of sexual freedom” (Erikson 168).
Nevertheless, the book as a whole is distinctly Le Guin’s, not her father’s. It is an act of speculation, imagination, and re-creation. Furthermore, it reacts to the tropes of a genre her father did not read (although her older brothers did). It is a reaction to the world in which she grew up, the idyllic nature of summers spent at the edge of a wilderness that she loved versus her anger regarding the near genocide of the American indigenous peoples and the military industrial complex that brought America into a series of seemingly endless wars. The name Sinshan may reflect the “Chen” trigram of the I-Ching; its animal is the dragon, and it indicates a fresh new perspective, a new outlook. The Pandora myth offers hope as being caught under the lip of the jar and remaining there after all the evils flew out. After years of protesting the Viet Nam War, Le Guin needed to find hope somewhere. In “Legends for a New Land” (1988) she relates the Navaho Emergence myth that informs Kesh culture and includes a circular map where Navaho holy places are shown in relation to present-day cities such as Flagstaff, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. She needed a world that had holiness at its center. The delicate ecology of the post-holocaust Na Valley often seems more like the American Southwest than the Pacific Northwest. In 1981, on a long car trip across America, Le Guin saw and imagined places where the Kesh would feel at home. “Place Names” (1981), a loosely structured and poetic journal of this trip, includes language similar to that in ACH. Of their day’s travel from the Texas panhandle to Santa Fe, she wrote: “A fourlegged god with yellow eyes/ is making the world over” ... “Sagebrush ahead and mesas, far as the eye/ can see, / under the sky of turquoise and white shell. / NEW MEXICO ... ” (Dancing on the Edge of the World, 70–71). The shape of Kesh villages with their underground kiva-like heyimas bears some resemblance to the New Mexican Pueblo villages such as the one at Bandelier National Park near Los Alamos, and the Chodos-Irvine sketch of Sinshan Mountain is reminiscent of the Sandia Mountains outside of Albuquerque (226). Nevertheless, although Kesh values reflect those of indigenous cultures, the Kesh are not specifically American Indians: they could be anyone in any time, which is why the book does not seem dated after thirty-five years. (Perhaps, due to the increased effects of global warming and water pollution, ACH is even more relevant than it was in 1985.) Like the Hain, the Kesh are aware that they are descendants of a culture that previously caused environmental destruction from which they are still recovering. Their wisdom is based on self-awareness.
Furthermore, writing the novel as a resource book creates a hinge between author and readers. Although it is not a self-help book, the discerning reader could use it as one. Le Guin takes what she has learned about mythology, ethnography, human development, and values clarification and swings it outward, presenting it in such a way that it becomes relevant to the average educated reader. Although the Na Valley may be no place, Le Guin has made it her place and proved that the lifestyle is possible by living it. The recipes are her recipes and represent a healthy, balanced diet and sustainable agriculture. Eleanor Arnason has remarked that she kept her copy of ACH next to her kitchen stove for years so that she could make them. In her interview “Coming Back from the Silence” Le Guin explains that the lifestyle worked for her:
One reason I hated to finish the book was that I had to wean myself from going through the year as a Kesh person. I enjoyed it, and felt very much at home in that kind of round. Living with a fairly consistent cycle of activities, ritual relationships, ceremonies, and festivals is the way most people in most cultures have lived throughout human history. (J. White 119)
Le Guin and the Midlife Hinge
The question remains, “Why did Le Guin structure a novel in a way that she knew some people would hate?” In her “Carrier Bag” essay, she describes herself as “an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off” (728). It would make sense then that she would use her carrier bag of a novel as a way to fight off those “hoodlums” who would deny her power as a woman writer, but writing it was also a way to discover who she was postmenopausal. A rite of passage becomes a “write” of passage, returning to her roots to rediscover who she was as a child in the landscape that informed her early awareness. It is fitting that the primary metaphor in Always Coming Home is the journey. In “Through (with) the Looking Glass: Revisiting Lacan and Woodward in ‘Méconnaissance,’ the Mirror Stage of Old Age,” Leni Marshall defines “méconnaissance” as a psychological response of unfamiliarity when a person no longer recognizes the image in the mirror as young, a circumstance that, in our youth-oriented culture, may result in estrangement from the Self. Marshall explains that although some individuals retreat into despair regarding their lost youth, others are able to use this time productively. To my mind, having just celebrated my seventieth birthday, “méconnaissance” can easily become me-connaissance, a time of personal reconnaissance, a journey into the uncharted territory of personal potential that may result in a renaissance of renewed creativity. Certainly, that happened for Le Guin when in her 60s she created some of her best work beginning with Tehanu (1990).
The expanded material in the new LOA edition demonstrates how Always Coming Home comes directly out of her life experience. In 1932, three years after she was born, her parents, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, bought the 40-acre ranch in the Napa Valley of California where they were to spend most of their summers. In an interview with Jonathan White, Le Guin explains,
I wanted to write about people living in the Napa Valley who used it a little more wisely than we do now. When I was a child, it was the most beautiful and diversified agriculture you ever saw. There were vines and orchards and truck gardens. It was the way a cultivated valley ought to be. But there was too much money in vines, so they pulled up the orchards and truck gardens. The only thing growing there now is money. (J. White 116)
More on the Napa Valley of Le Guin’s childhood can be read in evocative poems published in her earliest poetry collections: Wild Angels (1975), Wild Oats and Fireweed (1988) and Going out with the Peacocks (1994). Poems she wrote beginning in the 1950s reveal Le Guin attempting to express her “passionate love ... forever fulfilled and never satiated desire for a particular piece of California real estate” and dreaming of a “wild” culture that grows organically out of the natural world rather than attempting to mold it into something artificial (741). “Wild Oats and Fireweed,” a poem first published in 1982, works as a prequel, suggesting the emotional and metaphorical content of ACH. It begins with a dream of “Rabbit, jackrabbit and quail,” a dream inspired by a fragment of Native American poetry from the Castanoan, collected by her father and cited in her 1981 “World-Making” essay which concludes “To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly.... The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast” (702). This coastline, this edge of the world becomes a hinge for renewal. Le Guin’s poem moves from the animals to invoke the muse, first offering up personal unworthiness, then praying to be worthy of her task:
Weed and worthless foolsgold of the hills
of my childhood, my California,
let me be worthy
the stone: the pollen:
the word spoken where the water rises:
the four colors of earth.
Let me in life hold
and pass before dying
the pouch of the silent things
of the six directions. (Wild Oats, 56)
The next lines are descriptive of America, how the Rockies are like the “backbone of the black vulture/ nailed to the barnside” (56). Then the following lines suggest Le Guin’s own recognition of her own shadow, a recognition that her persona is both Kesh and Condor.
My body is nail
and condor.
My breath is bullet
and feather.
I return, I turn, I turn in place.
I am my inheritance. (56)
These lines suggest the turning of the yin-yang as well as dance. The next lines suggest concern for the future:
On the edge of the mountain a cloud hangs
and my heart
my heart
my heart hangs with it. (57)
The poem concludes:
Late I have learned the last direction
May I before death
learn some words of my language. (57)
Thus, Le Guin, who originally majored in French and Latin and learned to translate in Spanish and Chinese, created her own language for Always Coming Home, a language that cognitively restructures how to think about the world and human relationships. Her “Glossary” contains considerable insight into how language informs thinking and moral development (593–615) as does her explanation of the six different words for love (574). The words reflect an honest approach to personal desires and intentions. For instance, wenum means “want, desire” while lamawenum refers to “sexual desire” for “intercourse.” It can’t be any clearer than that.
Le Guin was 55 in 1984 when the first short stories of ACH were published, not old, but her early easy, energetic rush of writing was over. Her children were grown, allowing her to immerse herself in the process of what for her was an evolving kind of writing, a weaving in and out of research and story. She believed that she was freeing herself to write like a woman although she was not entirely sure what that was. Prior to the 1970s, little had been written about the advantages older women discover once their hot flashes diminish and their lives take on a new rhythm. Research now indicates that menopause can allow for a resurgence of creativity, what Gloria Steinem describes in Revolution from Within (1992) as “an increase in self-expression and freedom, whether it’s part of our work or not. Once again, it’s the importance of moving closer to the true self, regardless of our age” (247). In “The Space Crone” (1976), Le Guin announces that she has entered menopause, and although she had felt “so depressed” temporarily, she now feels “like herself” and is looking forward to “the opportunity to become a Crone” (3). Throughout her career, Le Guin uses the metaphor of the house as a place of security, stability, and community. Here she describes “Menopause Manor” as “not merely a defensive stronghold” but “a house or household, fully furnished with the necessities of life” (Dancing at the Edge of the World 4). She, like Steinem, realizes that in abandoning this house “women have narrowed their domain and impoverished their souls” (4). There are permissions available to crones that are not available to younger women. Crones can say things that younger women are not permitted to say. However, Le Guin adds that to achieve the powers of the crone, a woman must become “pregnant with herself” and “bear her old age, with travail and alone” (5). The rewards are a hard-won “stock of sense, wit, patience, and experiential shrewdness” which also can be perceived as “wisdom” (6). The cover of ACH shows Le Guin in 1985 looking both patient and shrewd, ready to craft another rebirthing.
Although Le Guin is reticent about personal sexuality, Gloria Steinem concludes that “the hormonal changes of menopause seem to have freed a part of my brain once preoccupied by sex—thus bringing a more relaxed ... attitude” (247). This relaxed attitude can be seen in personal permissions Le Guin grants herself in her midlife writing that she did not allow earlier: her respectful description of sexual coming of age in her 1980 YA novel The Beginning Place; the Moon Dance in ACH; and in later descriptions of gender fluidity and transgressive sexuality such as in “Coming of Age in Karhide” (1995). This relaxed attitude is also seen in the mature relationship between Stone Telling and Stone Listening, a deep, abiding love but not deep passion. Stone Telling is adamant that she wants to see clearly and not be caught up in a blind passion like her parents, “A dream woman, a god-man, and it was wasted, a gift to no one” (434).
It is apparent, at least to this reader, that the most passionate relationship in ACH is with the landscape, the wild poppies, wild oats, and scrub brush that are so lovingly described, her “forever fulfilled and never satiated desire” (741). In ACH landscape is embodied to the point that it becomes character (751). If, as Le Guin suggests in her 1978 “Introduction” to Planet of Exile (1966), the overarching theme of all of her fiction is “Marriage,” then the most powerfully depicted romance is not between Willow and Terter Abhao, North Owl and her cousin Spear, or Stone Telling and Stone Listening, but between North Owl/Stone Telling and the Valley in which she lives, a relationship so deep that it is difficult for her to discriminate the boundaries between herself and the landscape. That passion can be seen in her descriptions. For instance, an early foot journey with her mother and grandmother is described as follows:
... we went on past the barns, between the creeks, across Sinshan fields. The sky above the hills across the Valley began to be yellow and red; where we were in the middle the woods and hills were green; behind us Sinshan Mountain was blue and dark. So we walked in the arm of life. (21)
Later when Stone Telling leaves the Valley with her father:
I began to feel the Valley behind me like a body, my own body. My feet were the sea-channels of the River, the organs and passages of my body were the places and streams and my bones were the rocks and my head was the Mountain. (227)
In “Legends for a New Land” Le Guin writes, “if I was ever going to approach the center of the world in my writing ... I had, at last, and entirely, without reservation, to come home,” (751, 754). So, if Le Guin’s purpose in writing the book was to come home to herself, she comes home to a Self that is much bigger than her own physical body.
Conclusion: Houses and Homes as Hinges
In The Dispossessed, Le Guin writes that you can go home again as long as you understand that it is a place you have never been. It is not surprising then that when Le Guin comes home to herself, that home is not in outer space or Earthsea but the Northern California ranch where she spent a great deal of her early life. However, this fictional home now belongs to a self-acclaimed crone, an older woman with a clear-eyed agenda, not to create a home that is Better Homes and Gardens perfect, but one that fits comfortably within the natural world. Surely it has a cat; maybe it has goats and chickens. Maybe housekeeping can sometimes be a bit haphazard, but the language that is spoken there creates an I-Thou equal opportunity for personhood shared between humans, other living creatures, and the geographical landscape. Everything is heyiya or holy.
Houses and homemaking are extremely important throughout Le Guin’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and some of her most loving descriptions are of houses. The construction, airiness, and light of a structure subtly affect everyone who lives within, and this is demonstrated throughout the various stories in the novel as a whole. Stone Telling’s High Porch House is “well built, with large rooms; the beams and frame are redwood, the walls of adobe brick and plaster, the flooring oak, the windows of clear glass in small panes. The balconies ... deep and beautiful” (17). Le Guin has written that it reflects their house on the ranch in the Napa Valley. In “Living in a Work of Art,” an essay first published in 2008, she describes her family’s “Maybeck” house in Berkeley as built “entirely of redwood. Air and redwood. Light and air and redwood. And shadows,” ... “wide, sweet boards and beams” (Words Are My Matter, 55–56). The Chodos-Irvine illustration of the Four Madrones house shows a comfortable-looking house of lumbered wood with a shaded porch where a rocking chair or two might be placed (154). It is a house that is open to the world. There is a similarity to the soundness and simplicity of Amish building techniques. However, although homes represent stability, the sense of home is personal, and homemaking with all its domestic and psycho/social interactions is always an ongoing and fluid dynamic.
In her essay “Living in a Work of Art,” Le Guin writes:
When the relationship of everything in the structure around you is harmonious, when the relationships are vigorous, peaceful, and orderly, one may be led to believe that there is order in the world, and that human beings can attain it. (Words 60)
Recreating the sense of home through “harmonious” domestic detail occurs throughout Le Guin’s work. The beauty and stability of a home is usually established early in a story so that it stands in juxtaposition to the discord that occurs when home is lost either by distance, as in “The Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994), or when characters’ values and cultures clash as in her Western Shore Trilogy (2004–2007). This dynamic is part of what makes her fiction so powerful. At the end of The Dispossessed, Le Guin does not allow Shevek to get entirely home, and critics have considered how her text “resists the stasis of closure—of having protagonists rest without care in a final ‘home’ at tale’s end” (Cadden, 50), in other words, not arriving at a happily ever after (although final homes to me suggest cemeteries). Perhaps Le Guin was responding to her critics when she allows Stone Telling to find closure and reclaim her home but then not do much that is significant once she is there. Within normal human constraints she is living more or less contentedly ever after. Sometimes we grow beyond our adventures and relish simply enjoying uncomplicated human relationships. This reflects a truth of real life rather than some fictional trope. In any case, book endings are arbitrary. As long as individuals still live, their stories are always in medias res with domestic certainties up in the air.
In conclusion, Always Coming Home is a much bigger house than just the Stone Telling narrative. Two-thirds of this house consists of back stories, hidden staircases, alcoves, attics, and kitchen gardens. Le Guin brings herself home to the reimagined house of her childhood. The nursery and playroom may be the best parts of the house, but she abides in the whole. It is a house where she feels most herself, a house where she gets to air her anger about civilization’s most dangerous, self-destructive behaviors, a house where she gets to sing and dance a dance that hinges in and out of utopia and dystopia and forward and backward in time. She lives there not only as Kesh but also as Condor. She is Pandora, the observer and translator who worries about what she is doing, as well as the Kesh Archivist, keeper of records, who admits that her washing machine “is an old friend” (371). Coyote speaks through her. It is a distinctly post-colonial, post-modernist, possibly addictive process. Perhaps ACH is so long because Le Guin had difficulty ending her dance. When research rather than plot drives the dance, a work of fiction can become very open-ended, like the compulsive home builder who adds a porch, then encloses it, weatherizes it, and adds another porch, which then leads to the need to add a cupola.... After ACH, Le Guin returned to writing shorter work, particularly novellas, and more conventional narrative structures although the circular yin-yang marriage of opposites is maintained. The personal rebirthing evidenced in ACH worked as a hinge that opened outward to 20 more years of very productive writing. In 2000, she was named as a Living Legend by the Library of Congress, and in 2014 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. It is apparent, at least to this reader, that, despite its many odd and unconventional rooms, in its own way, Always Coming Home is a very well-constructed house, and it continues to look fresh and new even after thirty-five years.
Sandra Lindow lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin.
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