Abstract
The form of “Ether, OR” invites comparison with Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of narrative. In this short story, a woman named Edna meditates on age, sex, work, childcare, and death. Her efforts to connect the disparate experiences of her life illustrate Le Guin’s assertion that all individuals need both to tell and to listen to stories because, when they fail to make what she calls the narrative connection, they then perceive their lives as being disjointed, aimless, or meaningless. Edna’s words also echo the debates that animated the feminist discourse of the time when the story was written, and thus permits us to draw connections between the text and the ideas of two major figures associated with third-wave feminism, Rosi Braidotti and Teresa de Lauretis.
An inability to fit events together in an order that at least seems to make sense, to make the narrative connection, is a radical incompetence at being human.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
This is a revised and updated version of a text that was published in French as “Subjectivités mobiles dans ‘Ether, OR’ d’Ursula K. Le Guin.” In Le sujet à l’œuvre: Choix formels, choix politiques dans les arts, la littérature et les sciences humaines, eds. Daniel Argelès, et al., 127–140. Éditions de l’École Polytechnique, 2018. My sincere thanks go to Daniel Argèles, as well as to Lucile Anglés and Dominique Rossin at the Éditions de l’École Polytechnique for permission to reprint this material.
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Notes
- 1.
The novel is therefore a transitional one, or, as Brian Attebery puts it in the first chapter of this collection, it is the “hinge” in Le Guin’s writing career: “Everything prior winds not down but in toward it. Everything she wrote afterward expands out from it” (2021, p. 15).
- 2.
In a review of Clarke’s study, Sandra J. Lindow takes issue with the label of post-feminism, because it suggests that the feminist movement and the struggle for gender equality are things of the past. It should be noted, however, that Clarke makes a distinction between two types of post-feminism: the reactionary kind advocated by Camille Paglia and propagated by the conservative media; and another, more progressive and academic type that reacts to the limitations of the second wave of literary feminism, but also continues the struggle (2010, p. 26). That said, a less contentious strategy would be to adopt the more common term of third-wave feminism. The word “wave,” moreover, is a metaphorical one that Le Guin herself has employed and expanded upon in discussing the impact of feminism on her writing: “the feminism of the ’60s and ’70s and feminist reading, feminist criticism, came along in the middle of my life and lifted me on a great wave, away from the ever dryer desert of male-centered fiction and male-directed reading that I was getting lost in. I, and my writing, have been borne up by that wave ever since” (Ramola D 2002).
- 3.
Le Guin’s ideas here invite comparison with the aesthetics of Jacques Rancière and notably his concept of the distribution of the sensible (2006).
- 4.
- 5.
Brian Attebery discusses the importance of interconnectedness and collaboration in Le Guin’s writings; see “Always Coming Home and the Hinge in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Career” (2021, pp. 19, 21).
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Robinson, C.L. (2021). Making Narrative Connections with Ursula K. Le Guin, Rosi Braidotti, and Teresa de Lauretis. In: Robinson, C.L., Bouttier, S., Patoine, PL. (eds) The Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82827-1_3
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