Order vs. Chaos…A Draw? – American Postmodernism

Early in his book entitled “The Condition of Postmodernity,” David Harvey addresses a key identifier of the movement from modernism to postmodernism. Paraphrasing from McHale, Harvey explains that the postmodern novel “is characterized by a shift from an ‘epistemological’ to an ‘ontological’ dominant. By this [McHale] means a shift from the kind of perspectivism that allowed the modernist to get a better bearing on the meaning of a complex but nevertheless singular reality, to the foregrounding of questions as to how radically different realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate” (Harvey 41). While reading this section of Harvey’s argument (and a number of other parts), I was continually brought back to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Indeed, her novel deals with the very basic concept of reality, and its subsequent manipulation. George Orr, the appropriately named protagonist, has dreams, and these dreams tend to alter his and the world’s reality (or perhaps the world is stuck in a cycle of Orr’s dreams). Whichever the case, Le Guin is reasserting the common question of dream vs. reality. What is reality, and what is dream? If these dreams alter reality, then is the new reality merely a dream? etc…until confusion ensues for both the reader and the characters in the novel.

The juxtaposition between George and his psychiatrist, William Haber, further illuminates the postmodern qualities in Lathe of Heaven. If George Orr’s mind represents a sort of fragmentation and chaos, Dr. Haber serves as the overarching orderattempting to ‘right’ the ship. According to David Harvey, however, “postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is” (Harvey 44). Quoting Foucault, Harvey’s argument suggests that postmodernism “prefer[s] what is positive, and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (44). And indeed, it is with a representative image of this ‘nomadic flow’ that Ursula K. Le Guin chooses to begin the novel: “Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. […] in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways;” (Le Guin 1). When re-reading this opening passage, I am reminded of George (or perhaps more specifically, his world-altering dreams). Throughout the novel, George and his ‘power’ are continuously at the mercy of Dr. Haber, whom strives to use Orr’s dreams as a tool (or lathe) for sculpting a sort of Utopian society. George opposes Haber’s manipulation of his dreams, and also opposses Haber’s desire for perfection. Perhaps this opposition is better understood through George’s role as a postmodern character. George (chaos) rejects Haber’s plans (order) because his Utopianism is a kind of meta-theory, and this “broad interpretative schema” like all meta-based ‘pratice’ is rejected by postmodernism.

Thus, in the end, does Le Guin suggest chaos over order? I don’t believe so. Consider George’s life pre-Haber; he was unable to function. The chaotic dreams had consumed his life and affected the lives of those around him. Instead, George settles for (or is given) a compromise through synthesis. As Harvey might suggest, this synthesis comes in the form of collage, or a jumbled patchwork of the varying realities created by Haber through George’s dreams, and at the end of the novel, both George and Heather are left to live life in this synthesized reality.

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