SOURCE: Barr, Marleen. “Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand as a Pathway toward New Directions in Feminist Science Fiction: Or, Who's Afraid of Connecting Ursula Le Guin to Virginia Woolf?” Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, no. 60 (spring 1994): 58-67.

[In the following essay, Barr cites the apparent strategies for marketing Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand as “mainstream literature,” and asserts that the book “explores new directions for feminist science fiction which point the way toward ending the sharp distinction between denigrated feminist science fiction and exalted mainstream literature.”]

She was eating the color, devouring it, she craved it, even while she was thinking that they would call such a craving soft, fanciful, unreal … They don't know what people live on! she thought … [T]hey were the givers of wrong names.

(Le Guin, p. 108)

We have the same name, I said.

(Le Guin, p. 190)

As Ursula Le Guin points out in “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?”, people's craving for stories is called soft, fanciful, unreal. In other words, as we are all aware, fiction is positioned low on the totem pole of social priorities. As we are also all aware, many people who value literature denigrate science fiction. This denigration rears its head in the marketing strategies applied to Le Guin's Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand. The poet Carolyn Kizer's dust-jacket blurb makes three points: (1) Le Guin is the only science fiction author Kizer reads, (2) Kizer no longer reads science fiction, and (3) Le Guin has “transcended” the science fiction genre. Echoing Kizer's comments about Le Guin's separation from science fiction, the dust jacket summary proclaims that Searoad is Le Guin's “first completely mainstream book of fiction”. This assertion is fanciful. “Mainstream” is most certainly a wrong name for this collection of short fiction which begins with a story about foam women and rain women. I, for one, have not lately noticed any mainstream foam women and rain women. Foam women and rain women hold more in common with Sally Miller Gear-hart's Hill Women and Suzy McKee Charnas's Riding Women than they do with Nancy Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. No completely main-stream departure from science fiction, Searoad reflects Le Guin's thoughts about her position as a writer who presently engages in a dialogue between the real and our craving for the fantastic. Searoad explores new directions for feminist science fiction which point the way toward ending the sharp distinction between denigrated feminist science fiction and exalted mainstream literature.

Searoad does not reject the fantastic and embrace the mainstream. The work, instead, combines the fantastic with the mainstream. One of the foam women resides in a real Klatsand house (Le Guin, p. 189), for example. Searoad is about feminist fabulation (says the giver of the right name for new directions in feminist science fiction).¹ This essay explains why Searoad, like the representation of Searoad on Le Guin's map of Klatsand, represents a line marking the interchange between the fantastic and the real.

Le Guin indicates that the ocean is the source of the fantastic liquid foam and rain women. Klatsand, a real-world town inhabited by foam and rain women, merges the fantastic and the real; it is a space for feminist fabulation. Le Guin's map pictures this interchange. Searoad forms the dividing line between the ocean and the uninhabited shore (the purely fantastic abode of the foam women) and the juxtaposed real and fantastic (Klatsand, the real-world town where foam women reside). The map shows that Klatsand, which I describe as a place of feminist fabulation, is almost completely surrounded by water—the fantastic location of the rain and foam women. According to the map, the ocean is on the left and its tributaries, Klatsand Creek and Winter Creek, respectively form the town's top and bottom borders. Winter Creek and Klatsand Creek very significantly do not flow together to enclose Klatsand within a fantastic watery circle. No science fiction ghetto, Klatsand is accessible to the mainstream outside world. Loop Road, which is a direct link to Coast Highway, bisects the center of Klatsand. Searoad bisects Loop Road. Searoad provides the best vantage point for observing foam women and rain women in their pure fantastic form—and it is a direct path to Coast Highway. The map of Klatsand pictures feminist science fiction at once retaining its own characteristics and possessing a direct link to the information superhighway that constitutes the realm of mainstream literature.

Why is the relationship between Searoad and Coast Highway analogous to the relationship between feminist science fiction and mainstream literature? Both highways and mainstream literature are imbued with greater importance than searoads and feminist science fiction. But people do not wish solely to “live on” highways and mainstream literature. Travellers crave scenic roads; readers crave fantastic stories. It is the unfortunate traveller who never deviates from super highways. It is the unfortunate reader who never ventures toward supernatural fiction. Readers and travellers benefit from veering off the beaten path. Although highways provide the most efficient means to drive from point A to point B, they are not the best places for strolling. Although mainstream fictions provide the most efficient means to reach literary respectability, they are not the best places for conducting “thought experiments” (Le Guin's term). People who crave neither strolls nor thought experiments are unfortunates who eat colourlessness.

Le Guin does not castigate the highway. The highway provides the means for Rosemarie, the protagonist of “The Ship Ahoy” and “True Love”, to extricate herself from her loutish husband. A truck driver—an individual who comes from the highway in the sense that foam and rain women come from the ocean—runs over Rosemarie's husband: “he [the husband] didn't get out of the way. And the truck just pushed him down and went over him … [H]e was a horrible old man … And the truck driver must be a horrible young man” (Le Guin, p. 78). The highway enables Klatsand citizens to bid good riddance to horrible men. But Le Guin is no separatist who categorises all men as horrible. Good men such as Bill Weisler, who has a story named for him, reside in Klatsand. Within the Klatsand world, a highway makes it possible to nullify a horrible man and the ocean makes it possible for a good man to make a living. Weisler is a potter—a man who generates art from sand, the foam women's realm. In an other example of Le Guin's efforts to deconstruct the fixed definitions separating the marginal from the mainstream, she stresses that the ocean (the source of the fantastic foam and rain women) is, like the highway, a part of the commercial world. The ocean is a manufacturer: “If making sand was the purpose of the breakers … at least they were good at it. They did a good job” (Le Guin, p. 62). The ocean is a factory which provides Bill Weisler with a means of production. It is at once fantastic for foam and rain women and utilitarian for a nonhorrible man who is an artist. In the manner of feminist fabulation, then, Le Guin advocates an interchange between the real and the fantastic. Her highway liberates a woman; her ocean provides a man's livelihood. Both the highway and the ocean are integral parts of Klatsand. The motel Rosemarie runs benefits from their mutual presence.

Through Rosemarie, Le Guin addresses the point that feminist science fiction needs new directions—that it has been given the wrong name. Rosemaries sometimes reads “science-fiction books or magazines from the secondhand paperback book store in Astoria. She had never liked what they called women's books” (Le Guin, p. 7). Because of the categories “they” designate, Rosemarie—like many readers—does not recognise that some science fiction books are women's books. “They” create a situation in which women readers, because they are estranged from science fiction, do not wish to read feminist science fiction. Rosemarie would have an enhanced reading experience if she disregarded the inappropriate distinction between science fiction books and women's books. She craves the fantastic: while cleaning motel rooms, she “looked out at the edge of the land” (Le Guin, p. 8) toward Le Guin's fantastic ocean. Her gaze yields “another world” (Le Guin, p. 8). In order to engage with this world—a place which satisfies her desire for fantasy and defies categories “they” establish—Rosemarie becomes a writer. She invents a character who is her imaginary friend: the “energy person” (Le Guin, p. 8) who can “handle the curtains” (Le Guin, p. 9) and who seems to have emerged from central casting for the Mr. Clean detergent television advertisement.² Rosemarie's supernatural friend does not conform to science fiction rubrics “they” establish:

“When she read … about Space Aliens and flying saucer visits, she enjoyed the stories, but they were just like the science fiction … Her friend was different, because he was only a kind of game of make-believe or a gift to her, and because he needed her. It wasn't like the saucer people … Although he helped her in her daydreams, it was because he needed her help, because he was in trouble.”

(Le Guin, p. 9)

Because typical science fiction does not fulfill her needs, Rosemarie invents something different: a character who diverts her while she works and who, in turn, needs her help. The energy person resides in a world which empowers Rosemarie. While conjuring this world, she acts as a feminist fabulator, a constructor of an alternative to patriarchy where it is possible for a woman and a male entity to enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. Rosemarie's fantasy world solves Bill Weisler's real world problem: “The trouble with women was he did not know how to talk to them” (Le Guin, p. 61).

Rosemarie also encounters real world conversational difficulties. In “True Love”, a librarian who is most comfortable discussing books finds it difficult to discuss them with Rosemarie. These women who have “everything in common … except books” (Le Guin, p. 86) position Star Trek as a social lubricant. Their conversation about Kirk and Spock is “media babble” (Le Guin 86) which retards their efforts to communicate. Attention to genre science fiction, then, prevents them from experiencing meaningful self-revelation. When they fail to communicate, Rosemarie and the librarian allegorically represent the relationship between science fiction and mainstream literature and women critics and women readers. Rosemarie is the science fiction enthusiast, a “marginal” person who “lived on the edge”; the librarian does not consider her able to generate discourse about books (Le Guin, p. 86). The librarian is a female critic who scorns science fiction—a Carolyn Kizer. This librarian discerns that she and Rosemarie “would not become friends.” “Our ways led apart” (Le Guin, p. 86). Instead of joining together under the feminist fabulation rubric, Rosemarie and the librarian represent the schism between women science fiction writers and those women critics who insist upon cleaving to the mainstream. At the conclusion of “True Love”, the librarian leaves Rosemarie and returns to her Klatsand house where she “read[s] a book till twilight” (Le Guin, p. 87). She is not reading feminist science fiction; a foam woman is not her housemate. The librarian is missing something.

Her reading experience would be richer if she were willing to transcend the wrong names “they” use to remove authors of feminist thought experiments from literary canons. Rosemarie herself epitomizes transcending generic classifications. Readers automatically assume that this no longer young motel room cleaner is neither sexy nor romantically inclined. Readers become a “they” who give Rosemarie a wrong name: sexless older woman. Although Rosemarie and the librarian do not share an interest in similar books, they share the same lover (named Antal) (Le Guin, p. 86). To return to my allegorical classifications, the love triangle existing between Rosemarie, the librarian, and Antal represents a fusion of the mainstream woman critic, the woman science fiction writer, and the nonterrible male (or good guy). This fusion pictures feminist fabulation. The new direction for feminist science fiction involves moving toward feminist fabulation as the common ground between the groups which Rosemarie, the librarian, and Antal represent. Feminist fabulation positions these groups as overlapping categories rather than as separate entities who fail to communicate effectively.

Searoad, in addition to presenting three seemingly realistic people who function as a science fictional “overmind” representing feminist fabulation, includes fantastic writing. Johanna, the protagonist of “Texts”, describes this unreal writing:

“The sand lay as firm and even as a pad of pale brown paper, and on it a recent wave at its high mark had left a complicated series of curves and bits of foam. The ribbons and loops and lengths of white looked so much like handwriting in chalk that she stopped … to read what people scratched in the sand in summer … But these foam words lying on the brown sand now had been written by the erasing sea itself … Do I want to know what the sea writes?”

(Le Guin, p. 120)

As a critic of fantastic texts, it is my business to know what the sea writes. Le Guin's map of Klatsand charts an answer: the loops (the foam women) walk from Searoad to Loop Road, to Coast Highway—to mainstream recognition.

Le Guin creates a character who is also in the business of wanting to know what the sea writes: Professor Virginia Herne, a Virginia Woolf scholar. According to Herne, the sea writing is feminine rather than female:

“Each foam-billow, foam-pillow shivers under the wind, shakes, quivers like fat white flesh, inescapably feminine though not female at all. Feeble, fatuous, flabby, helpless mammocks of porous lard, all that men despise and paint and write about in woman shudders now in blowsy fragments on the beach, utterly at the mercy of the muscular breakers and the keen, hard wind … [E]ach blob, peak, flake of foam is an entity: a brief being.”

(Le Guin, p. 145)

Professor Herne's description indicates that the sea foam text emanates from the bodies of foam women. Le Guin, then, depicts her own version of Hélène Cixous's “écriture féminine”—woman writing her body. The foam women's text/body pictures Cixous's words: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing … Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (Cixous, p. 224).³ Le Guin emphasizes that foam women's movement makes their appearance as foam writing ephemeral: “How we fly along the beach, all air and a skin bitter wet and whitish in the twilight, not to be held or caught, and if touched, gone!” (Le Guin, p. 145). This fleeting textual presence reflects the ultimate fate of all human undertakings—the fact that all human constructions are ultimately impermanent. The givers of false names, in other words, construct canons which will eventually become as impermanent as foam texts. Unlike the “they” who derive a false sense of their importance from including and excluding particular texts from canons, Virginia's grand-mother Jane Shawe Herne is comfortable with the fact that nature is more enduring than humanity and its texts: “I write my name in the burning sand. The wind will blow it away, the sea will wash it away, and I like that” (Le Guin, p. 130).

Jane's acceptance of impermanent texts is applicable to feminist science fiction. It is necessary to consult Virginia Herne's story about Persephone's daughter to explain why this is so. Persephone's daughter “reached up and touched the King of the Sea and he turned to foam, sparkling white, that's all he ever was” (Le Guin, p. 155). All the kings, all the fathers—the whole kit and caboodle of patriarchs—are impermanent: foam texts. Ditto for the social structures men and men's text make. Feminists can write their bodies, write their world—remake patriarchal reality. The best new direction for feminist science fiction is for this literature to proceed in a way which nullifies marginalizing the feminist thought experiments which articulate sea changes for patriarchal constructions. The “daughter of the dust of stars” (Le Guin, p. 155) Virginia Herne describes—the feminist science fiction protagonist—needs to join with the daughters and sons who star in the canonical limelight. Feminist fabulation is a road which can enable them to do so. Feminist fabulation positions feminist science fiction beyond the borders of Klatsand Creek and Winter Creek and on Coast Highway—the fast lane away from ghettoising boundaries.

When Virginia Herne encounters difficulty attempting literally to follow her own words, she faces a situation analogous to establishing a communicative link between feminist thought experiments and mainstream literature. She reaches a dead end: “I follow them … In a clearing in the woods a dark, short, old woman stands … She cannot speak to me, for her language is dead. She is silent. I am silent. All the words have gone” (Le Guin, p. 176). The Virginia Woolf critic encounters a rain woman, a fantastic citizen of “mist into forest” (Le Guin, p. 1). Like Rosemarie and the librarian, they cannot speak. A scholar of a canonised woman writer is silenced in the presence of a fantastic female character. Rain women—women's imaginary language—has no place within the patriarchal symbolic order. So Le Guin invents an alternative reality: Klatsand, a combination of the fantastic and the real where rain women and their sister foam women respectively reside in forests and houses. Le Guin's move announces that, in order to communicate with rain women and foam women, it is necessary to vacate patriarchal reality—to turn to the alternative realities feminist science fiction depicts. Since words form the foundation of social worlds, this move toward the fantastic can impact upon reality. This move can enliven the rain woman's dead language. Despite such good intentions, we cannot, of course, expect totally to obliterate the patriarchal symbolic order. When Virginia receives “a cup, a nest, a basket” (Le Guin, p. 176) from the rain woman she is not sure exactly what she has been given. Despite the prevalence of the patriarchal symbolic order, it is important for feminist literary scholars to be open to interpreting symbols which emanate from women's imaginative spaces.

Hence, Searoad appropriately concludes with Virginia Herne's story about a woman breaking out of the patriarchal symbolic order—men's myths (Le Guin, pp. 187-190). According to Virginia's story, a foam woman-to-be counters the current of men's myths by commanding a boatman to row her out of the patriarchy from hell. When the boat sinks—when rewritten versions of usual myths fail her—she plunges into the water, becomes foam, and walks to her house in Klatsand. No character from the male-centered rewritten myths collected in John Barth's Chimera, this foam woman is part of a new metafiction—a new feminist postmodern literature defined as fiction about patriarchal fiction (i.e. feminist fabulation). She escapes from men's myths. She deconstructs these old myths, writes her body as a new womanist myth, and enters the real world. Instead of completely abandoning the fantastic, she combines her version of the fantastic with the real, positions herself within a real place which is accessible to transportational modes leading to the mainstream. This position provides a space in which feminist science fiction can be at once respected on its own terms and included within prevailing canons. Words which patriarchy wishes to silence are a part of this space. When the foam woman says “‘I divorce you, King of Dung’” (Le Guin, p. 190)—when she separates herself from men's words and stories—she articulates a truth Carol Hill describes in The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer: patriarchal power systems are “a huge cumbersome stink-filled, wartcovered mess” (Hill, p. 367). The foam woman says what patriarchy does not want to hear.

Her story concludes with a question pertinent to the makers of canons, the givers of false names: “Whose story will be told?” (Le Guin, p. 190). Le Guin answers this question by alluding to the story of her own life and professional reputation. The key to hearing her answer is imbeded within the words which form the conclusion to Searoad: “We have the same name, I said” (Le Guin, p. 190). This statement signals that Le Guin is writing herself, alluding to the body of her own work. Searoad is at once Le Guin's real-world book and the title of Virginia Herne's poetry collection published in 1971 by the Vaston Press. Searoad blurs the distinction between the real and the fictitious.

Le Guin continues to blur this distinction to inscribe herself further within Searoad. Gret, a student who appears in “Hand, Cup, Shell”, encounters this comment: “I suppose having such a distinguished grandfather, people always just expect. Your mother's an educator, too, isn't she?” (Le Guin, p. 21). The question addresses the point that Le Guin must routinely encounter people who laud her famous father and treat her mother's achievement as an afterthought. Le Guin even further places herself in Searoad via the detail that both she and Virginia Herne are writers born during 1929. I read the Le Guin/Virginia Herne connection as another tripartite allegorical commentary resembling the one I establish between Rosemarie, the librarian, and Antal. Who is the third member of the Le Guin/Virginia Herne juxtaposition? Le Guin, when forging a commonality between herself and Virginia Herne, very rightfully insists upon what she holds in common with another Virginia: the subject of Herne's scholarship—Virginia Woolf. Le Guin, Herne, and Woolf—the woman science fiction writer, the woman critic, and the canonised woman writer—merge to form a representation of feminist fabulation.

Virginia Herne “went down to the beach to walk down to Wreck Point and back, walking by the waves thinking about The Waves, walking through the morning thinking about The Years, singing nonsense to the sea” (Le Guin, p. 165). According to the map of Klatsand, during Virginia Herne's walk, she crosses Klatsand Creek and Winter Creek—the boundaries which do not completely enclose the at once real and fantastic Klatsand community. Le Guin has opened herself to the space beyond the science fiction ghetto without—counter to what Carolyn Kizer and the dust jacket say—leaving behind science fiction. Searoad tells stories of the waves and the years: generations of Herne women looking out to the ocean—the place of origin for foam women and rain women. The fantastic elements of this work and, in turn, the entire feminist science fiction genre, are not marginal examples of singing nonsense to the sea. Virginia Herne, the scholar of mainstream literature, walks the same path as the foam women and gazes at the ocean: “Then she walked or drove up the dirt road to the house on Breton Head … that looked over the sea where the sun went down” (Le Guin, p. 165). Le Guin specifically states that Herne is walking or driving along the dirt road from Wreck Point to Breton Head. But the Klatsand map indicates that no road connects Wreck Point to Breton Head. Herne, the mainstream critic, walks or drives along a fantastic path. Although the sun of respectability never sets on the mainstream literary empire, feminist science fiction can strike back. Feminist critics can reset their penchant for overlooking the fantastic. They can see fit to agree with my opinion that Le Guin is the Virginia Woolf of our day.

Searoad tells the story of juxtapositions—combined characters and dialogues between the fantastic and the real. This text urges us not to stop short at observing that science fiction benefits from fraternizing with the mainstream—that science fiction has been improved because Atwood, Lessing, and Piercy have contributed to it. Searoad signals that the mainstream has benefited from science fiction because of contributions from writers such as Le Guin.⁴ Literature is enlivened by interchange; literature is made moribund by fixed definitions—the false names which imply superiority and inferiority. The foam women's body/text, after all, does have a more enduring place than its position at the water's edge. It is etched in shells: “Light brown and dark brown in rows, neat and firm, the marks on shells … Orderly, like writing” (Le Guin, p. 128). These shells are found intact along the marginal searoad rather than along the mainstream highway. This is not to say, though, that shells are not part of highways. Concrete, the material which forms highways, is made from mixing cement with “sand, pebbles, gravel or shale [and] water” (Random House Dictionary). Shells can show up in this mixture; the water can come from Le Guin's fantastic ocean. We sometimes lack concrete proof of exactly what constitutes the real. Since what is thought to be real often proves to be fantastic, it is important not to silence “the shell [which] is full of sound that sounds like the sea but is something else” (Le Guin, p. 36). This “something else”—the fantastic feminist alternative story which is Other than a patriarchal story—needs to come out of its shell and be heard by a wider audience.

To accomplish this objective, it is necessary to recognise exactly what Le Guin holds most in common with Virginia Herne: Le Guin and Virginia Woolf also share the same name: feminist fabulator, eminent writer. Who's afraid of Ursula Le Guin? Who's afraid of feminist science fiction? Answer: the givers of wrong names. These givers of wrong names fail to notice that, like Klatsand Creek and Winter Creek, the main(stream) can flow into Le Guin's fantastic ocean. It is time to place rain women and foam women on the map of literary respectability.

Notes

1. For further information about feminist fabulation please see my Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, University of Iowa Press, 1992.

2. Rosemarie behaves in the manner of the readers Janice Radway describes in Reading the Romance. This character turns to a fictional world in order to escape from her powerless position in mundane reality.

3. In her poem, “For Hélène Cixous”, Le Guin writes: “I'm there where it's talking Where that speaks I am in that talking place.” I position the “I” in this poem as a foam woman responding to her place within Cixous's “The Laugh of the Medusa.” (A manuscript version of Le Guin's poem appears as the frontispiece of Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Textual Intervention/Psychoanalysis, a 1989 University of Illinois Press anthology edited by Marleen S. Barr and Richard Feldstein.)

4. In Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale links science fiction to mainstream literature when he states that science fiction is an integral part of postmodern fiction. McHale, however, does not make such claims for feminist science fiction.

Works Cited

Barth, John. Chimera. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1972.

Charnas, Suzy McKee. Motherlines. New York: Berkley, 1978.

Charnas, Suzy McKee. Walk to the End of the World. New York: Ballantine, 1974.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” A Reader in Feminist Knowledge. Ed. Sneja Gunew. London and New York: Routledge 1991, pp. 224-230.

Gearhart, Sally Miller. The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1979.

Hill, Carol. The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1979, pp. 39-45.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.

Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language. Ed. Stuart Berg Flexner. New York, 1987, p. 424.