OGWiseman Reviews!
Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven" - Human Connection and the Power of Dreams
(NOTE: Minor spoilers follow. I’ve tried hard to leave enough out that reading the book will still be worthwhile and fun.)
No (hu)man is an island. Those who insist on being so succumb to either despair or megalomania. This is the central theme of “The Lathe of Heaven”, by Ursula K. Le Guinn, but it’s hardly the only one. This short (184 small-ish pages) yet powerful novel speaks to the difficulty of using language precisely, the hidden danger of wishes fulfilled, and the dehumanizing nature of large bureaucracies. In its most profound passages, it is positively Wittgensteinian (In the vein of Ludwig Wittgenstein, for my non-philosophy-major readers) in its deconstruction of language and reality. But it’s also really fast-paced and fun!
George Orr is a very normal man who one day realizes that sometimes, his dreams can control reality. He then seeks the help of a psychiatrist to help him stop doing so, as it has started to cause problems in his life and destabilize his mental state. The psychiatrist, upon realizing that George’s “delusion” is in fact real, and he can indeed control reality with his dreams, sets about to harness those dreams and use them for his own ends, rather than helping poor George as he had promised to do.
What ensues is a journey far beyond the scope I imagined when I sat down to read the story. This book’s premise and length provide only a small opening, yet Le Guin has dug so deeply into that opening that she has managed to create a vast space anyway, most of it hidden from a cursory inspection, waiting to delight the patient reader who is willing to climb down its winding crevasse.
Each of this book’s eleven chapters is preceded by an epigraph. The most salient of these comes from the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, and includes the line: “To let understanding stop and what cannot be understood is a high attainment.” On a similar note, Wittgenstein once wrote “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
These seem perhaps obvious or obscure wisdoms, but in this novel they are given profound incarnation as George seeks answers, seeks relief, and in time seeks to set right the wrongs his wild fumblings with his power have caused. He faces a dilemma that many of us seemingly never will: What if you had unlimited power, and the only helplessness you ever experienced was brought on by your own unwillingness to continue to hurt others and yourself on the way to the world you wish to create?
And yet we do, most of us, in smaller and more limited ways, face this dilemma on a daily basis.
This brings us back to the novel’s central theme: Human Connection. For it is these entanglements which serve as our measuring sticks for how and when to use our power. For what is it whereof we cannot speak? What is it which cannot be understood? Not the world, not money, not science. Only each other: The subjectivity and humanity of our fellow humans provides a level of unresolvable mystery that sets helpful limits on our power to affect the world, however frustrating those limits may be when success or relief seems tantalizingly close but just out of reach.
This is what George Orr understands about his own dreams, and what his psychiatrist fundamentally lacks—a calibrated sense of his own limitations brought on by intimate contact with his fellow humans. The psychiatrist is an island, and proudly that. What results from the intersection of such a man with functionally unlimited power is a cautionary tale for us all.
Plus, to be clear here at the finish, besides all the high-falutin’ stuff above, this book is FUN. As George changes the world again and again, we get flashes of Le Guin’s brilliant imagination at work in the background, dreaming up scenarios at which we can marvel. This novel goes places and includes ideas that are hard to fathom, even considering how much I’ve just set it up. Well worth your time and energy, highly recommended!
You can purchase the book here:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59924.The_Lathe_of_Heaven
Hope you enjoy, have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story. Thanks for reading!