SOURCE: “‘Only in Dying, Life’: The Dynamics of Old Age in the Fiction of Ursula Le Guin,¹” in Modern Language Studies, Vol. XIV, No. 3, Summer, 1984, pp. 43-53.

[In the following essay, Spivack examines the unconventional portrayal of elderly characters and old age in Planet of Exile, “The Day Before the Revolution,” and the Earthsea trilogy. According to Spivack, Le Guin challenges common stereotypes of the elderly as feeble-minded, inert, and weak.]

Falstaff and the Wife of Bath meet at the local pub. Their conversation over ale turns to reminiscence. “Whan it remembreth me upon my youthe and on my jollitee, it tickleth me about mine herte rote,” remarks the “gode Wyf,” winking at her companion. “Ah, yes,” replies Falstaff, his voice husky with nostalgia, “We have heard the chimes at midnight.” Although this aging pair are among the great individual characters in English literature, their conversation is stereotypical. The aged are typically given to reminiscing. They are also typically garrulous, forgetful, irascible, stoop-shouldered, and hard of hearing. Or are they? Are literary stereotypes of the aged based on actual observation of typical traits, or are they the more arbitrary products of social and literary conventions? Are vigorous and clear-headed elderly people as characters in literature relegated to the same unconvincing category as lovable mothers-in-law, generous landlords, and professors with presence of mind?

In most modern fiction elderly characters tend to have relatively minor roles which encourage stereotyping. As in the lament of the ancient servant Adam in As You Like It about “unregarded age in corners thrown” all too often literary portraits of the elderly remain in the corners in their books, not so much delineated as outlined; hence the few usual brushstrokes—garrulous, forgetful, irascible, stoop-shouldered, and hard of hearing. But there are notable exceptions. One such exception is the science fiction of Ursula Le Guin.

Since science fiction has not been traditionally considered strong on characterization, one might not expect to find outstanding portrayals of the elderly within its speculative covers. In recent years, however, much SF has become issue-oriented, with many major writers expressing significant social themes in that genre. Ursula Le Guin, one of the most important contemporary writers of SF and one of the most gifted in character portrayal, has been especially concerned in her work with the need for breaking down both social and sexual stereotypes. Twice winner of the top Hugo and Nebula awards for her novels,² Le Guin has brought to science fiction the viewpoint of the anthropologist toward other and alien cultures. Daughter of famous anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Le Guin was brought up in a milieu where cultural anthropology was a way of life, and this remarkable background has enabled her to make her own writing a medium for exploring various non-traditional attitudes toward human nature and human society. In addition, her own father, who lived to be 85, was for her a living model of non-stereotypical old age, a man of tremendous vitality to the end. “A gray man, / All my lifetime, with a short gray beard.”³

In her science fiction, then, Ursula Le Guin explores several kinds of social structure as well as several kinds of human beings, including a few memorable examples of aged characters: three particularly vivid and touching types. These figures are not even garrulous, forgetful, or stoop-shouldered.

One male and one female, two of these characters are dynamic portraits of old age. Both Wold, the patriarch in Planet of Exile, and Odo, the anarchist in “The Day Before the Revolution,” are distinguished by a dynamic ambivalence. At the heart of each characterization is a dramatic tension of opposites, giving depth and resonance to their portrayals and conferring on both Wold and Odo an unforgettable individuality. This tension of opposites is manifested both outwardly and inwardly. It is demonstrated both in the relationship between the individual and his or her society and in the relationship of the individual to his or her own sense of self. In respect to their relationship with society, Le Guin reveals the tension between participation and antagonism, and between leadership and rebellion. Both Wold and Odo are at once leaders and outcasts, surrounded and alone. In respect to the inner relationship with self, tension exists between vitality and decrepitude, between anticipation and recollection, and between involvement and detachment.

Most important of all, perhaps, from the viewpoint of society, there is tension between what the aged are and what they can do. The elderly can initiate change even when they are personally unable to change. They can act as an effective force in significant social achievement, as both Wold and Odo do, although both are unable psychologically to participate in the results of that achievement. Both Odo and Wold bring about dynamic developments in their society, but both are at the same time limited by those forces in the past which controlled their youthful development. Odo and Wold make crucial decisions which change the future of their respective worlds, but both die on the eve of that new dawn. Each story ends with the death of the aged protagonist. At the approach of death, each character is at one and the same time full of life and ready to die. The tension of opposites marks their moment of death as it had their period of age.

The short novel Planet of Exile is the earlier of the two Le Guin works under consideration.⁴ Written in 1966, it is the middle volume of a SF trilogy set in outer space on other planets. This story is set on the harsh planet of Eltanin, where winter lasts for fifteen years. The events of the novel grow out of the cultural antipathy between a native primitive tribe and their more technologically advanced neighbors, “farborn” descendants of settlers from another world. Caught in the crossfire of the opposed races are two young lovers, Rolery and Jakob Agat, who act out their Romeo and Juliet roles to an ultimately happy ending. An important figure in their destiny is the aged man, Wold. He is both Rolery’s father and, as the eldest, the leader of their nomadic tribe. Rolery’s love for the alien Jakob is in direct defiance of his authority in both cases.

Although Wold, as the eldest, still functions as the acknowledged leader of his people, his leadership is strained by the fact of his advanced age as well as by the imminent threat of invasion. Not only is the long strenuous winter about to begin, but also barbarian hordes from the north are about to attack. Wold is well aware of his ambivalent role in the tribe at this time. He has long prided himself on his complete and unchallenged control, but he realizes that his young warrior son will soon become the new leader. In this moment of personal and tribal crisis, Wold makes a decisive and heroic choice, namely to join the “farborns” in fighting off the barbarian attackers, but he knows that this decision will inevitably deprive him of his ruling position.

He knew also that it was the last decision he would ever make. He could send them to war: but Umaksuman would come back, the leader of the warriors, and thereby the strongest leader among the Men of Askatevar. Wold’s action was his own abdication, Umaksuman would be the young chief. He would close the circle of the Stone-Pounding, he would lead the hunters in Winter, the forays in Spring, the great wanderings of the long days of Summer. His Year was just beginning …

（p. 40）

When the attack comes, this proud old man finds himself relegated to the ignominious position of escaping to a safe place with the women of his tribe. Once again, however, it is not a clear-cut alternative for him, whether to go or to stay behind and fight, but rather a tension of opposites. Wold does indeed agree to join the women who are fleeing in the battle, but before he leaves, he proves himself a real warrior one more time. He feels the shame of not being able to fight: “He knew he was no longer chief; but was he no longer a man? Must he stay with the babies and women by the fire, in a hole in the ground?” （p. 61）

In rebellion against his sense of shame, he seeks out a favorite weapon, the spear with which he long ago single-handedly killed a snow-ghoul, and holds it in readiness. His recollection of this heroic deed in the past stands between him and his anticipation of future retirement from the field of battle. An opportunity to recapture that past glory appears, however, and this old man, left behind and ignored by the young warriors, drives his six-foot iron-headed spear into the body of one of the invaders. This heroic action helps to salvage his self-respect, and he consents, albeit a bit reluctantly, to accompany the women to a safe location. His sense of shame in regard to his image of himself is mitigated by this final heroic action. Ultimately his shame and his glory prove inseparable.

In both his physical movements and his mental attitudes, Wold also embodies the dialectic of opposition. This aged man displays at times tremendous vitality and at others total decrepitude. As he gives orders for his warriors to pursue the invading Gaal, his voice is “loud and deep, free for a while from the huskiness of old age” （p. 39）. Yet right after this, when his men leave and he sits alone by the fire, the picture is one of aged weakness: “He sat crouched on his stiff hams by his fire, staring into the yellow flames as if into the heart of a lost brightness, summer’s irrecoverable warmth” （p. 49）. Similarly, although his movements tend for the most part to be slow and bent—he walks with a “stiff, ponderous shuffle” （p. 60）—he can walk erect for the sake of impressing his wife. （“She was a cross old woman, he was a foolish old man, but pride remained.”）

Wold’s character is effectively internalized, for as he displays all of these contradictory traits, he is also fully aware of them. He knows that physically he acts old. “When he saw how his feet shuffled on the stones he knew that he should obey Agat and go with the women to the black island, for he would only be in the way.” （p. 85）. But in the depths of this grim awareness, he also feels a surge of optimism. It is an optimism tinged with irony, however, and evokes from the old man a wry laugh:

Wold suddenly cackled out loud, and turned from the darkening window. He had out-lived his chiefdom, his sons, his use, and had to die here on a rock in the sea; but he had great allies, and great warriors served him—greater than Agat, or any man. Storm and Winter fought for him, and he would outlive his enemies

（p. 88）.

With his sense of perspective restored by this realization of his powerful natural allies, storm and winter, Wold turns on the women with a bellowing voice of authority: “Well, women! Is the slop ready?” （p. 88） No longer leader of his tribe, he is at least leader of its womenfolk. No more the active warrior, he can at least resist being passive about his meals. And although his glorious achievements are now all behind him, he can even look forward to a future “elder statesman” status.

Even in death the dramatic tension in the portrayal of Wold persists. His body on the funeral pyre is described as “age-deformed and powerful.” The “and” is significant, for in this depiction of an aged figure, the static and stereotypical are avoided through rejecting “either-or” in favor of “both- and.” In death as in life, Wold is strong and weak, a victim of age and a tribute to an old man’s irrepressibly youthful spirit. And finally, although Wold does not live to see the results of it, his heroic and self-effacing decision to join the farborn race will alter the whole future of his planet.

For the portrayal of Laia Asieo Odo, we come back to earth. Odo’s story in “The Day Before the Revolution” is actually the prologue to the novel The Dispossessed, although the story was written after the novel.⁵ Like her creator, Odo founded a world. The anarchist settlement of Anarres （the moon） described in The Dispossessed is the outgrowth of the revolutionary ideology of Odo, expressed both in her influential writings and in her own politically active life. At the time of the story, the revolution which will produce the moon colony is about to take place, and Odo, its spiritual mentor, is now a woman of 72.

The old woman is introduced to the reader as a young woman in her dream. Odo dreams of her former lover and “partner” （in Odonian revolutionary parlance marriage gives way to partnership） only to waken and rediscover her aged body as if it were a deteriorating possession. “Disgusting. Sad, depressing. Mean. Pitiful” （p. 262）. Her waking thoughts are spasms of contradiction, as she vacillates between past memories and present observations. As the woman whose theories have given her name to a revolutionary movement, she sees herself as both a part of and apart from that movement. As a good Odonian, for example, she should say “partner” not “husband” as she recalls him in a dream, but she asks, “Why the hell did she have to be a good Odonian?” （p. 264） Her attitude toward her own radical political system is at once one of participation and antagonism.

Odo is similarly ambivalent toward her activities. On the one hand, she wants to dictate letters to her secretary, Noi, in order to show that she is still in full control, but at the same time she repeatedly leaves the decisions concerning exact wording to him. When Noi reminds her of a scheduled meeting with a group of foreign students, she is at once pleased and dismayed.

She liked the young, and there was always something to learn from a foreigner, but she was tired of new faces, and tired of being on view. She learned from them, but they didn’t learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They must come to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Roderrad, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument

（p. 271）.

She resents being a monument, yet not without a certain satisfaction in this passive new role. The revolutionary has become a “dear old lady” （p. 272）.

Throughout the story the use of graphic physical detail vivifies the fact of old age. When Odo gets out of bed in the morning, she looks down at her feet with loathing:

The toes, compressed by a lifetime of cheap shoes, were almost square where they touched each other, and bulged out above the corns; the nails were discolored and shapeless. Between the knob-like anklebones ran fine, dry wrinkles

（p. 262）.

But even this description of aged skin is marked by ambivalence:

The brief little plain at the base of the toes had kept its delicacy, but the skin was the color of mud, and knitted veins crossed the instep

（p. 262）.

Similarly, the effects of a stroke are clinically delineated to show the ways in which Odo’s body has deteriorated and the ways in which it has not. Only the right side is afflicted:

Her right hand tingled. She scratched it, and then shook it in the air, spitefully. It had never quite got over the stroke. Neither had her right leg, or right eye, or the right corner of her mouth. They were sluggish, inept, they tingled. They made her feel like a robot with a short circuit

（267）.

Most of all, however, the dynamic ambivalence of Odo’s characterization is reflected in her relationship to her own role in the impending revolution. Odo has been the center of political activity all of her adult life and now fears becoming peripheral to it. “It’s not easy,” she said to herself in justification, laboriously climbing the stairs, “to accept being out of it when you’ve been in it, the center of it, for fifty years” （p. 265）. To her devoted followers she is still in the center of it, at least as a symbol, or a model, but for her the laborious stairs pose a threat to that centrality. Her own self- image is strained in opposite directions by self-pity and self-esteem.

The tension of opposites within Odo is focused on her role in the precise moment of time referred to in the title. She has worked her whole life to bring about a world revolution. She has worked and fought and written books. She has spent years in jail and has become the guiding spirit of the revolution which is just now about to take place on a large scale. Tomorrow. But her opposed feelings concern her own part to play on the eve of that crucial event. She feels both involved and detached. She surrenders to a deep but irrational desire to walk out into the streets although she knows that she is physically too weak to do so. Her recent stroke has debilitated her to the point where her own body seems to flop about her like a ragged garment. When she takes the walk, her fatigue forces her to sit on a doorstep in the slum, too weak to go on. As she sits there, inert, she wonders at her own identity. Who am I? she asks.

She was the little girl with scabby knees, sitting on the doorstep staring down through the dirty golden haze of River Street in the heat of late summer, the six-year-old, the sixteen-year-old, the fierce, cross, dream-ridden girl, untouched, untouchable. She was herself. Indeed she had been the tireless worker and thinker, but a blood clot in a vein had taken that woman away from her. Indeed she had been the lover, the swimmer, in the midst of life, but Taviri, dying, had taken that woman away with him. There was nothing left, really, but the foundation. She had come home. She had never left home. “True voyage is return.” Dust and mud and a doorstep in the slums

（pp. 275-6）.

With the help of an acquaintance who happens to walk by, Odo is able to go home, but there her attitude toward her companions seems suddenly aloof, and her response to their questions cryptic. She is asked by them to speak on the morning of the revolution, but she asserts simply that she will not be there. The remark has a deeper meaning than they realize. As she sardonically puts it to herself, with a grim private joke, the “general strike” must yield to the “private stroke.” Her laborious climb upstairs to her own room is in reality an ascent to her own death. “She was dizzy, but she was no longer afraid to fall.” （p. 277）.

Odo will not see the revolution she brought about. But the irony without reflects the tension of opposites within. Capable both of self-pity and self-praise, she has vacillated between action and surrender, between aggressive involvement and passive detachment. She is not as many people see her, merely a dead monument, nor is she altogether as people have known her to be in the past, a hard, fighting rebel. She is neither because she is both, at one and the same time, her stroke-ridden body declines, yet mounts the stairs; and her rebellious spirit soars, yet savors rest. The irony of this double vision of herself does not escape her own mordant awareness: “a drooling old woman who had started a world revolution” （p. 265）.

Odo will not see the revolution she brought about, nor will Wold, the eldest, see the coexistence and intermarriage of his native tribe with the farborns, a new era which he has made possible. The achievements of these elderly figures are essentially spiritual, and their aging flesh cannot partake of them. As Odo remarks of the young people who have put her ideas into practice, “they had grown up in the principle of freedom of dress and sex and all the rest, and she hadn’t. All she had done was invent it. It’s not the same” （p. 263）. For the elderly their lifetime habituation to the old ways has in a sense become as stiff with age as have their limbs. But as Le Guin’s sensitive characterization makes clear, this is not the whole story. Odo and Wold, even on the edge of death, are creative and dynamic thinkers, strong individuals who can change the future of their worlds. In their last moments of life they are not reminiscing about the past by looking ahead to the morrow. For them old age is a dynamic interplay of opposites, and their deaths herald new beginnings.

Whereas both Wold and Odo are introduced as already aged characters in their respective stories, a third example of Le Guin’s dynamic portrayal of age involves a character whom the reader sees develop from boyhood through early manhood to advanced age. This character is Ged, archmage of Earthsea and protagonist of a fantasy trilogy: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore.⁶ The first volume is focused on Ged’s adolescence and coming of age; the second finds him on a quest for a magic talisman; the last, however, concentrates on an aging Ged, not only visibly gray but very preoccupied with what it means to be old. Once again the focus is on the dynamism of opposites, but in this case, the portrayal is more symbolic, more “mythologized,” hence less dependent on the immediate social situation. As a result, this fantasy figure of an aging wizard offers a universalized rather than a particularized portrayal of old age.

The plot of The Farthest Shore is a variation on the quest narrative. Ged is accompanied on his quest by the young prince Arren, a lad of about seventeen. Their object is to find the source of the evil which currently afflicts the world of Earthsea with a devastating spiritual plague of joylessness, with a corresponding failure of magic, blurring of distinctions, and loss of meaning. “There is a hole in the world, and the sea is running out of it. The light is running out” （p. 154）. The evil seems to be associated with a widespread rejection of mortality, and there are ominous whispers and mutterings about the opportunity to live forever. Ged sees in this apparently unmeasured desire for life on the part of human beings a threat to the balance of nature. As he sees it, death is the price we pay for life, and he sets out with Arren on the journey westward in an effort to restore the balance of nature by reestablishing mortality.

As they move westward, the direction of the setting sun as well as the direction traditionally associated with death, the old man and the boy reflect on the differences between age and youth. As Ged explains to his young companion, “When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself, and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are” （p. 34-35）. Arren is impatient for action, but Ged compares himself to the ancient dragons, who are both the oldest and the wisest of all beings, who have stopped acting in favor of simple being. “They do not do; they are” （p. 37）.

Although Ged may in theory ally himself with existence as opposed to action, in fact he is at once both active and contemplative, both involved and detached. He acts many times in the course of their adventurous journey westward. He acts decisively, he acts courageously, and he acts imaginatively. He dons a disguise in order to go about asking questions undetected; he risks ambush in a lonely room on a dark night in a dangerous part of a drug-ridden town; he daringly rescues his young companion who is captured by brutal slave-traders. Such activities are scarcely those of a person who has entirely given up on activity. Ged thus demonstrates that dialectical tension between participation and withdrawal that we noted in Odo and Wold. On the one hand, he clearly prefers being to action and offers as advice to the future king: “do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way” （p. 67）. On the other hand, however, he obviously can and does act forcefully when he determines what action is required.

The climactic events of the book occur when Ged and Arren complete their journey westward in the “dry land” of the dead. At the very edge of that grim, gray landscape they meet their enemy, the source of the evil which has brought Earthsea into a state of despair. There, before the stone wall which separates the living from the dead, they meet the former sorcerer, Cob, who has surrendered his humanity to his overpowering urge to cling to fleshly existence. It is Cob’s magic which has opened the door between life and death, turning the living world into a world of living death, where the sun is dimmed and life lacks joy. Cob’s body is killed in an attack by a self-sacrificial dragon, but Cob’s spirit climbs over the wall into the land of the shadows, where Ged and Arren must follow. It is a dismal journey through that land where stars shine but do not twinkle, where shadows meet but do not speak, and where there is only dust to drink. But the old man and the boy persist until they come to the fatal door that Cob’s misguided magic has opened between that world and ours. Ged then uses all the magic he can muster, asserting a superhuman strength in the weakness of his age, to close that door. Shaky yet strong, he sways a little, then stands erect. He commands in a clear voice: “Be thou made whole!…And with his staff he drew in lines of fire across the gate or rocks a figure: the rune Agnen, the Rune of Ending, which closes roads and is drawn on coffin lids. And there was then no gap or void place among the boulders. The door was shut” （p. 184）.

In the difficult journey back to the world of the living, age and youth need each other. The old wizard is able to act as guide, but his physical strength is unequal to the challenge. The young prince, however, musters an endurance even beyond hope, and he carries his mentor safely over the edge of darkness and back to the light. But that is by no means the whole story. It is not simply a matter of youthful vigor supporting the weak limbs of age, for the young boy vitally needs the wisdom that comes only with age. Although Arren carries Ged to safety over the wall, both men are at that point totally stranded on a deserted beach far west of the nearest human habitation. By themselves, they would perish. But there on the beach they encounter a superbly ancient and wise dragon, Kalessin, and through Ged’s own wisdom they are able to communicate with him in the Old Speech. Ged learns that Kalessin is offering to fly them back to civilization, and both men are able to escape, riding on the rough-mailed neck of the great creature.

One particular detail in this escape scene graphically illustrates the dialectic of age in the portrayal of Ged. As the companions mount the dragon, Arren suddenly sees the wizard’s staff of yew lying on the beach, half-buried in the sand, and reaches down to get it. The wizard stops him, however, explaining that he has spent all of his powers in the dry land of the dead. The staff can no longer help him: “I am no mage now” （p. 193）. But the loss is also a gain. Although Ged as mage has lost the ability to perform feats with his staff, he is actually wiser than before. The staff served as a medium between the wizard and the things of the earth, but now Ged is more closely related to the airborn dragons. In his eyes there is now “something like that laughter in the eyes of Kalessin …” （p. 196）. This is not to say that Ged has lost all contact with human responsibility. Indeed Ged is yet to undertake the very important duty of establishing Arren on his rightful throne. But in his somewhat transcendental nature, he influences human endeavor without actually being part of it. Like Odo and Wold, who were able to bring about actions although they could not participate in them, Ged is able to restore the prince Arren to his throne although he will not stay to watch him rule. Ged’s spiritual guidance has made possible the fulfillment of an old prophecy: “He shall inherit my throne who has crossed the dark land living and come to the far shores of the day” （p. 17）.

The final scene, showing Ged’s solitary departure on the dragon Kalessin, also illustrates the tension between anticipation and recollection on the part of this aged wizard. Throughout the long dangerous quest Ged has been concerned with both the need for a king to unite Earthsea and with preparing Arren to become that king. From his first meeting with the young prince, he has felt that Arren inherited the kingly spirit of his ancestors. In their first interview he reminds the young man of his royal destiny and throughout the story he addresses him with the respect due to a king. From the viewpoint of both Arren’s coming rule and the need to close the door between living and dead, Ged is totally concerned with the future. At the same time, however, he is also full of memories of his won past, and at several points in the narrative he expresses a nostalgia for those individuals who were important in the earlier stages of his own development. In a meditative mood on their westward drifting boat, he had reminisced about Tenar, the young woman who figures centrally in The Tombs of Atuan, and about his early mentor, Ogion. Now memory and anticipation meet and mingle in this final scene. Ged kneels to the future king, wishing him a long and successful rule, but his own urge to return to the haunts of his youth leads him elsewhere.

The novel ends with Ged’s flight on the dragon, which is at once a death and a new life. His physical energies are spent, and he has passed beyond doing, but his mythic flight is both forward and upward. Although his staff lies abandoned in the sand, his spirit soars in the air. As the young king Arren perceptively describes the difference between himself and the elderly mage: “He rules a greater kingdom than I do” （p. 197）.

Since Ged is a symbolic figure, a fantasy wizard, his implied death is also an apotheosis. But at the same time it is the death of an old man, a universal experience. And just as Ged the living is neither garrulous nor irascible, so Ged the dying is neither pathetic nor distraught. Like Wold welcoming the winter and Odo climbing the stairs, Ged in the moment of impending death looks forward. For him as for them, age has been a dynamic period and death is a positive experience.

In all three of Le Guin’s portrayals of old age there is thus a tension of opposites that remains until the moment of death. Wold, God, and Ged are all at once leaders and outcasts, gregarious and solitary individuals who are both openly involved in social action and passively withdrawn in reflective silence. They are also on the physical level at once healthy and declining in health, lively and listless, towers of strength and figures of frailty. Even as they move from recollection of their past to anticipation of their future, they move almost imperceptibly from dying in life to living in death. In each case their respective societies learn that even in their final stages of life these aged people are able to make important contributions, to initiate change, to establish new meanings. As they leave doing in favor of being, their very being makes doing impossible for others. In the fantasy and science fiction worlds of Le Guin there is no concept of retirement, mandatory or voluntary.

Science fiction as a genre has always been concerned with creating new worlds and offering alternative futures. As a result of this speculative projection outward in space and forward in time, it is uniquely qualified for detached commentary on our own spatially and temporally limited life here on earth. For a science fiction writer who is also knowledgeable in cultural anthropology, the genre offers an opportunity for thoughtful speculation about social attitudes in general and for refuting social stereotypes in particular. Ursula Le Guin is an anthropologically oriented writer of science fiction, and her experimental worlds offer socially unconventional portrayals of human nature. Three of her characters under consideration here exemplify an attitude toward old age that is challenging in its total rejection of a popular stereotype.

All too often in fiction the elderly person is depicted as wandering in mind and weak in body, living in the past and neglectful of the present. Too often also elderly characters are relegated to the corners of their fictional worlds where they repose in stereotypical neglect. In contrast Le Guin’s portrayals of an aged wizard in Earthsea and of two elderly social leaders in their respective communities on Earth and on the planet Eltanin introduce a new image of the elderly. Old age in the fiction of Le Guin is both dynamic and ambivalent. The dynamics of old age are as vital as those of youth, both to the aged themselves and to their societies. Furthermore, the dynamics of age are unique and irreplaceable, not a mere extension of those of youth. Arren needs Ged just as the young revolutionaries need Odo and the young warriors need Wold. The deaths of Wold, Odo, and Ged are not the mere culmination of aging years spent dozing in the sun. A crescendo heralds the silence. “Only in dying, life.”

Notes

1. The quoted phrase is from A Wizard of Earthsea. I have added a comma for the sake of clarification out of context.

2. Both The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed won both awards.

3. From the poem “Coming of Age” in “Wild Angels,” The Capra Chapbook Anthology （Santa Barbara, CA, 1979）.

4. Planet of Exile （New York, 1966）.

5. “The Day Before the Revolution” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters （New York, 1976）.

6. A Wizard of Earthsea （New York, 1968）; The Tombs of Atuan （New York, 1971）; The Farthest Shore （New York, 1972）.

The material concerning the character of Odo on pages 46-49 is quoted from my book Ursula K. Le Guin with the permission of G.K. Hall and Co.