The snow white good guy; the mad evil scientist; the noble attorney; a doomsday future-present, now the past, who’s predictions have yet to come to pass—stop me if you’ve heard this one before. This book, ostensibly about Taoism, follows the same moral line that just about every other Sci-fi story ever has—namely that helping always hurts, rationalizing leads to disaster, and good intentions always breed bad results. Whether this fact is true to life is, quite frankly, completely meaningless in terms of art. I have personally learned this lesson so many times now that I actually encourage the opposite to happen—I pray that one day the evil scientist gets everything he desires while the good, earnest people scratch their heads at the breakdown of their clichéd logic. “Lathe,” however, is hardly a tragedy
As close as I can guess, Le Guin must have been reading Lao Tse and “1984,” eaten a tad too much granola, and fallen asleep to the indigestion that inspired this nightmare of a book. Lathe is nothing more than a stale allegory. What might pass for postmodernism is heaped under a sheet of cliches as old as fiction itself. Orr, who represents the Taoist ideal of the uncarved block (see: The Tao of Pooh by Hoffman) runs up against a not so well-hidden Republican (he’s admittedly pro-life, and pro-population growth) in the form of Doc Haber. Haber is little more than a cartoon bad guy, who we are expected, unlike actual cartoon bad guys, to take seriously. As in all melodrama, the bad guy here gets what’s coming to him in the end, and the good guy gets the girl. Hurray!!! There’s also a neat little lesson where we learn, that one about life not being perfect, but if we try to perfect it, it will be even more imperfect. Then the Taoist alien imparts a little wisdom about coming and going, and we feel all gooey inside. Hurray!!!
Forgive me a moment of self-contradiction so that I can mention that a great streak of cartoon villainy certainly runs through our current Head of State and his self-appointed staff, who seem Hell-bent on becoming the cliché that writer’s of Le Guin’s type clamor for. Nixon, naturally, fit the same bill when the book was written. But there have always been buffoons in leadership positions, indeed, that might be the defining characteristic of leadership positions. After all, Haber becomes a powerful leader by being a buffoon. Anyway, what I really mean to say is: this is a book of ideas, and is really nothing more than liberal propaganda.
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If there are cliches at work in The Lathe of Heaven (and I’m not convinced yet that there are), then a more productive question for a graduate class in literature and culture is how do these cliches work for or against the other tensions in the text?
As other students have commented, the novel seems ambiguous about itself. There are far more contradictions, anxieties, and dissymmetries in The Lathe of Heaven than you allow, and to dismiss the novel as “propaganda” seems disingenious, and short-circuits any nuanced discussion about how the novel strains at the edges.