SOURCE: “Visions of Nature in The Word for World Is Forest: A Mirror of the American Consciousness,” in Extrapolation, Vol. 30, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 84-92.

[In the following essay, Hovanec examines Le Guin's symbolic portrayal of American environmental consciousness and opposing attitudes toward the natural world in The Word for World Is Forest.]

In a chapter entitled “Nature: Dynamism and Change” in Lois and Stephen Rose’s study The Shattered Ring: Science Fiction and the Quest for Meaning, the authors point out that “space travel in science fiction provides the most obvious avenue to an expanded perception of nature, both in terms of distance and of the visions of very different natural environments” because it “plays on the theme of transferability of energy and matter, the possibilities of other dimensions, other space- time complexes.” However, these critics admit that they will not attempt to resolve what they call the “riddle of nature” whether the term means matter, energy, space—is subjective or objective, friend or enemy （72-73）. Indeed, science fiction, which Ursula Le Guin calls “the mythology of the modern world,”¹ does not attempt to define nature as much as to warn of ecological catastrophe, often using other planets in other galaxies to offer theoretical case studies of what might happen in the future if humanity continues to exploit the environment. This is certainly one of Le Guin’s purposes in a brief, yet stunning, work which she wrote in 1972, The Word for World is Forest; for she says in the introduction:

It was becoming clear that the ethic which approved of the defoliation of forests and grainlands and the murder of non-combatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP and the murder of the creatures of the earth in the name of “man.” The victory of the ethic of exploitation, in all societies, seemed as inevitable as it was disastrous. It was from such pressures, internalized, that this story resulted.²

She also states that this work was an outlet for her feelings about the American involvement in Vietnam and that it “must stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and despair, toward justice, or wit, or grace, or liberty” （152）. Not only is the novel political, but Le Guin admits elsewhere that it is also Taoist and implies it may be Jungian.³ Its particular distinction, however, lies in the complex vision of nature which appears; for with great succinctness and consistency, this author presents a future world in which the collective consciousness of the protagonists and antagonists contains the major American attitudes towards the environment, from the early explorers to the present. Le Guin’s ability to integrate these philosophies into a swift-moving narrative with a shifting point of view, a completely detailed setting, and a pervasive theme of illusion versus reality is a major achievement.

Set sometime in the future, The Word for World is Forest tells the story of New Tahiti, a planet which “might have been Idaho in 1950.… Or Kentucky in 1830. Or Gaul, in 50 B.C.” （16）. It has been invaded by “Yumens” seeking lumber for Earth （Terran） which has been denuded of plants and animals （even hunters must now track “robodeer”）. Most of the loggers and officials sent to this new world have no understanding of the local inhabitants, the Athsheans, small, green-furred, peace-loving forest dwellers who have perfected conscious dreaming to an art. Because the Yumens enslave and kill them, these natives are driven finally to rebel and destroy their captors. The principals in the action are the brutal, amoral Captain Davidson, the sensitive, concerned anthropologist Lyubov, and the intelligent, resourceful Athshean, Selver. Their composite reactions to New Tahiti mirror the American ecological experience which has ranged from rapture to fear to coexistence.

The first explorers to the Western Hemisphere described what they found in idyllic terms. Columbus called Hispaniola “marvelous.… most beautiful” with inhabitants who were “guileless and so generous,” displaying “much love” （Jones 14-16）. Similarly, Verrazzano said the place was delightful with air “salubrious, pure, and temperate” （Jones 50）. One hundred years later, an Englishman, Arthur Barlowe, spoke of being in “the midst of some delicate garden” with “incredible abundance” and “handsome and goodly [natives] … as mannerly and civill as any of Europe.… such as live after the maner of the golden age” （Hakluyt 287-93）. This image of the golden age was a popular one, for Michael Drayton in his “Ode to the Virginia Voyage” spoke of “Earth’s only paradise … to whose the golden age / Still nature’s laws doth give” （220）. These comments confirmed the European tradition that an earthly paradise lay somewhere to the west. But, “anticipations of a second Eden quickly shattered against the reality of North America” （Nash 25） where the Puritans found “a hideous and desolute wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men” （Bradford 62）, a “howling desart” （Miller 156） where the Indians acted “like wolves” （Demos 313）.

The Puritans quickly moved to subdue this hostile environment, which was one of their strongest symbols of evil and displacement; for they felt “by the command of God man had been made master of the whole visible creation” （Morgan 13）. As Roderick Nash notes in Wilderness and the American Mind, “if paradise was early man’s greatest good, wilderness, as its antipode, was his greatest evil” （9）, a place which the Judeo-Christian tradition⁴ had for centuries regarded as the abode of demons and spirits, where “the limbs of trees became grotesque, leaping figures” （Nash 10）, a representation of “the Christian conception of the situation man faced on earth.… a compound of his natural inclination to sin” （Nash 17）.⁵ Later, Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown encapsulates this concept when he speaks of the “lonely” and “gloomy” forest with “a devilish Indian behind every tree” （90）.

This enmity towards wilderness remained dominant in the centuries that followed, and accounted for the obsession to clear and cultivate the land; for Leo Marx says in The Machine in the Garden that the pastoral ideal was “used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery” （3）. A few intellectuals did begin to associate nature with religion （in Deism and later transcendentalism）, and when romanticism and the sublime became popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many writers and explorers seemed to appreciate those qualities which had formerly been vilified. Bartram and Jefferson spoke in awe of mountains and vast landscapes. Bryant praised nature’s solace in his “Forest Hymn” “let me often to these solitudes / Retire, and in thy presence reassure / My feeble virtue” （24）, and Emerson speculated in Nature that “in the woods, we return to reason and faith.… an occult relation between man and the vegetable” （10-11）. However, Nash notes that these feelings were often ambivalent, for “while appreciation of wild country existed, it was seldom unqualified” （66） and much fear remained locked in the subconscious of even the most avid lovers of natural scenery.

This fear was unleashed again as the industrial revolution swept over America, manifesting itself in severe environmental damage when plants and animals became valued only for what they could contribute to the wealth of nations. Melville’s leviathans were reduced to oil for factories, the latter changing the forest into numerous consumable products （such as the envelopes in “The Tartarus of Maids”）. Nature became an indifferent, deterministic antagonist, perhaps best represented in symbols such as the ocean in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and the prairie in “The Blue Hotel.” A few decades later in the 1920s and 1930s “landscapes of ruin” were expressed by images of devastation—the “dead trees” and “dry stones” in Eliot’s The Wasteland and the “ashheaps” of Queens in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example. However, the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s reversed this trend to some extent, and Conron says we have arrived at a period of coexistence, even celebration of nature （xx） which Leopold in A Sand County Almanac calls “the salvation of the world” （133） and which has Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek going “in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise” （279）.

It is important to remember that these various impressions of the landscape always contrasted with the harmonious animism of the American Indians whom Stewart Udall has said were “bound together by the ties of kinship and nature.… with an emotional attachment for his woods, valleys, and prairies [which] was the very essence of life” （29）. Tecumseh is often quoted as replying to the demands to sell land with these words: “Sell the country? … Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea?”, and a line from a Navaho chant beautifully summarizes this philosophy by describing the horizon as a “house made of evening twilight” （Cronyn 94）.

In The Word for World is Forest, the three main characters are symbolic representations of these major ideologies. When Davidson, the captain of the security forces, speaks of New Tahiti, the reader is reminded of the explorers and the Puritans; for he constantly broods about the former, “You mooched along thinking about conquistadors, and destiny and stuff” （16）. “It’s Man that wins, every time. The old Conquistador” （12）. He and his men are frightened by the omnipresent forest which they call “dark,” “meaningless,” and “endless.” Like the Plymouth colonists who felt themselves soldiers of God, Davidson says that when they had come here “there had been nothing … but men were here now to end the darkness” （13） to tame the planet: “For this world, New Tahiti, was literally made for men. Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth” （10）. Ironically, the new world already has the qualities of a paradise, but Davidson cannot comprehend what he sees: “There was something about this damned planet, its gold sunlight and hazy sky, its mild winds smelling of leafmold and pollen, something that made you daydream” （15）. To him, destiny is conquest and destruction, and his words seem to be a crude restatement of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian policy of the domination of nature: “When I say Earth, Kees, I mean people. Men. You worry about deer and trees and fibreweed, fine, that’s your thing. But I like to see things in perspective, from the top down, and the top, so far, is humans” （11-12）. Davidson regards the natives as animals, calling them “beetles,” “fish,” “rats,” and using them not only as slaves but for hideous “recreational” raids during which he and his men incinerate their villages. His philosophy might be summed up in these lines: “Primitive races always have to give way to civilized ones. Or be assimilated. But we sure as hell can’t assimilate a lot of green monkeys” （19）. In his desire to destroy the forest and convert it to products useful for Terran, he also resembles the deterministic industrialists who saw the environment as an expendable commodity. Davidson is the antagonist, the enemy of nature, like all those who have sought to subdue it in the name of God and mammon.

In stark contrast to Davidson, but with an equally extreme position, is the anthropologist Lyubov, who sees the natives as “noble savages” with no capacity for evil “a static, stable, uniform society, perfectly integrated, and wholly unprogressive. You might say that like the forest they live in, they’ve attained a climax state” （72）. His inability to view the Athsheans objectively renders him unable to accept actions which do not fit his initial characterization: “Nearly five E-years here, and he had believed the Athsheans to be incapable of killing men, his kind or their kind. He had written long papers to explain how and why they couldn’t kill men. All wrong. Dead wrong” （62）. Also, his feelings about the new wilderness are ambivalent:

At first on Athshe he had felt oppressed and uneasy in the forest, stifled by its endless crowd and incoherence of trunks, branches, leaves in the perpetual greenish or brownish twilight. The mass and jumble of various competitive lives all pushing and swelling outwards and upwards towards light, the silence made up of many little meaningless noises, the total vegetable indifference to the presence of mind, all this had troubled him, and like the others he had kept to clearings and to the beach. But little by little he had begun to like it.

（102-103）

Clearly, he has never completely understood what he has been observing on the planet, either its people or its surroundings. In addition, his friendship with Selver and the other Athsheans has been superficial, and he cannot bring himself to take a meaningful stand:

It was not in Raj Lyubov’s nature to think, “what can I do?” Character and training disposed him not to interfere in other men’s business. His job was to find out what they did, and his inclination was to let them go on doing it. He preferred to be enlightened, rather than to enlighten; to seek facts rather than the Truth. But even the most unmissionary soul, unless he pretend he has no emotions, is sometimes faced with a choice between commission and omission. “What are they doing?” abruptly becomes “What are we doing?” and then, “What must I do?” That he had reached such a point of choice now, he knew, and yet did not know clearly why, nor what alternatives were offered him.

（122-23）

In a conference investigating an attack on a Yumen camp, he is humiliated when his theories are shown to have been erroneous—and he cannot defend himself or the natives. As a result, he is closed out of both societies and dies in a subsequent raid. His reactions to the new world have been idealized; and his actions, like those of the romantics, have had no lasting effect.

The natives to whom both men have such different responses live in perfect harmony with their environment, considering themselves simply an extension of nature not a separate entity: “The substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood” （103）. They live in houses built beneath the roots of trees, from which they take their family names: “Selver is my name. Of the Ash” （35）. So attuned are they to their surroundings that they consider it to have the same animate qualities they do; for when he sees trees cut down, Selver envisions that “a little blood ran out of the broken end” （46）. All of their images relate to this vast forest world, an old man saying, “I have had my whole life. Days like the leaves of the forest. I’m an old hollow tree, only the roots live” （57）. They practice conscious, controlled dreaming, which again Lyubov does not completely comprehend; for Selver says that he “understood me when I showed him how to dream, and yet even so he called the world-time ‘real’ and the dream-time ‘unreal’, as if that were the difference between them” （43）. At the end of the novel, Selver has managed to conquer the Yumens, and the officials who have read Lyubov’s reports and conducted inquiries decide to ban further colonization, saying they’re “not coming back. Your world has been placed under the League Ban” （185）. Although Selver has, in effect, won, the Athsheans have learned to kill, and his final words are a grim reminder that that lesson will have permanent repercussions on their society: “Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will” （189）.

The limited omniscient point of view in the novel shifts back and forth between Davidson, Lyubov, and Selver with three chapters each for the Captain and the Athshean, and two for the anthropologist, arranged in this pattern: Davidson / Selver / Lyubov / Davidson / Lyubov / Selver / Davidson /Selver. The action begins in Davidson’s consciousness when he is in a position of power—and ends with a reversal when Selver has taken the dominant role, Lyubov having died and Davidson having been exiled to an island he has defoliated. Le Guin’s device of changing her viewpoint in this manner not only enables her to retell the American experience in the new world and to present a more comprehensive view of New Tahiti, but also it underscores her theme of illusion versus reality.

This underlying message is developed with particular clarity by her detailing of the Athshean dream control. They feel that they can change what they perceive by concentration, an ability Selver says that the Yumens do not have: “none of them are trained, or have skill in dreaming …” （43）.

A realist is a man who knows both the world and his own dreams. You’re not sane: there’s not one man in a thousand of you who knows how to dream. Not even Lyubov and he was the best among you. You sleep, you wake and forget your dreams, you sleep again and wake again, and so you spend your whole lives, and you think that is being, life, reality! You are not children, you are grown men, but insane.

（142）

After Lyubov is killed, Selver dreams him alive: “Lyubov came out of the shadows of Selver’s mind and said, “I shall be here’” （189）. Thus, he has trained himself to alter experience to his own liking.

This merging of the conscious and unconscious, the concrete and the illusory, adds considerable psychological and mythic complexity to the novel. Symbolically, Selver is nature, both plant and animal, resembling the forest in his color and name, representing many evolutionary stages and all primitive tribesmen.⁶ Davidson is the warrior and merchant, city dweller and even farmer, who through the centuries has felt that his mission was to use the environment for his own self-interest. Lyubov is the intellectual, the poet and dreamer who idealizes nature but never has a realistic or in-depth understanding of its relationship to his world. Their conflict on New Tahiti condenses in a few years several centuries of struggle on the American continent, as natives with an instinctive harmony with nature encounter settlers with a conditioned fear or a romantic idealism. At the end of the story only Selver and Davidson remain: “We’re both gods, you and I” （180）. Even though Selver seems to have won the war and banished Davidson to Dump Island, the Yumen is not dead. Throughout American history it has been the Davidsons who have had staying power and consistently returned to pose a significant threat to the environment. Perhaps Ursula Le Guin’s meaning in this novel is that the current “coexistence” with nature may also be ephemeral and like Lyubov die off, leaving the enemies of nature again in the supremacy.

Thus, Le Guin’s accomplishment in less than two hundred pages has been more than to present an interesting adventure story or a disguised Vietnam war novel or even a warning of ecological catastrophe. In addition to all these, she has been able to define nature as an essence which is both physical and mental, a vital element, not only in the American experience, but in the consciousness of all humankind. If we are going to discover new Edens, then we must come to realize that preservation is essential to self-knowledge and to survival. As she says in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, “Obviously my intent is in what goes on inside.… We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending” （149）.

Notes

1. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction.” The Language of the Night: Essays in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Susan Wood. （New York: Berkley, 1985） 73. All subsequent references to Le Guin’s non-fiction are from this recent anthology of her essays and lectures.

2. The Introduction is not included in reprints or subsequent editions; therefore, the best source is The Language of the Night.

3. Douglas Barbour in his article “Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin.” Science Fiction Studies 1 （1974）: 164-173 interprets the novel as Taoist. Elizabeth Cummins Cogell in “Setting as Analogue to Characterization in Ursula Le Guin.” Extrapolation 18 （May 1977）: 131-141 and Ian Watson in “The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: ‘the Word for World is Forest’ and ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’,” Science Fiction Studies 2 （Nov. 1975）: 231-237 present psychological interpretations. Le Guin herself in “The Child and the Shadow” （The Language of the Night 59-71） discusses Jung as an inspiration for many of her themes.

4. Lynn White Jr. has an excellent survey of the Judeo-Christian philosophy of dominance over nature in his article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” in Science 155 （March 10, 1967）, and for more detailed studies there are Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the Present （Berkeley: U. of Cal. Press, 1967） and William Leiss, The Domination of Nature （Boston: Beacon, 1972）.

5. One of Conron’s designations in The American Landscape.

6. Carl Yoke in his article “Precious Metal in White Clay,” Extrapolation 21 （Fall 1980）: 200 has noted the similarity of his name to “sylvan.”

Works Cited

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