Jellyfish, Aliens, and a Cycle?
I’m going to try to elaborate on my comments tying the beginning and ending together. Hopefully I can keep this all clear, bear with me I’m working off 2 hours of sleep. . .
Jellyfish- I think the idea of the Jellyfish extends beyond just Orr to also include Haber and the Aliens. I see the Jellyfish as the dreamer. The jellyfish is described as having given up control to the sea. As a dreamer you do give up control of your thoughts to your dreams. But in the case of Orr and Haber they give up a little more. Orr has given up control initially to emotions which affected his dreams, then to Haber. Haber don’t give up control but is not able to gain control over his dreams in the first place. In this way, both are pulled by external forces.
However, only one really ends up on the rocks. The aliens approach Orr and help him to find a sort of balance in the “mist”. He’s able to find his “happy place” and though he might still be under the control of Haber, he is able to regain a sense of rightness in his life.
He tries to pass this experience to Haber before Haber looses control, but Haber cannot control anything, much less find comfort in the mist. He becomes both literally and figuratively stranded.
The question then is, what do aliens and the ending have to do with this? It’s interesting that the alien in the end views the humans leaving like an animal in an aquarium. While imitating the sea, an aquarium is controlled and less violent. It is less likely to control the jellyfish, there is no possibility of being thrown up onto the sand. Orr is viewed as leaving into the mist, the aliens refer to the dream state as the mist.
So what I was trying to say about social evolution is that the ideal is to end up in the aquarium like the aliens, having some control over dreams, or at least sanity. This is successfully passed on Orr who now understands what the mist is. He has gone from the possible danger of dying on the sand, to no longer being exposed to danger through a combination of blocking off his dreams and getting help. Unfortunately, Haber isn’t able to reach this state, like states that never reach certain levels on Marx’s development chart thing. . . (not really sure how it works, I just understand that it’s a progression from one form of society to next till ultimately socialism is accomplished? I think?) He is not able to change the sea around him to an artificial one, he becomes subject to the waves and dies on the sand.
A question along a different line of interpretation: if Orr is jellyfish in the sea and the alien is in the mist, is Orr leaving in the mist, the alien being in an aquarium at the end significant? has Orr, by dreaming the aliens into existence trapped them while he free to leave? or is he, by wandering into the mist becoming a lost part of the aliens dream? Maybe this reading is reading a little too much into things, but I’d like opinions on both interpretations. . .
pink martini wrote:
I don’t think that Orr is leaving in the mist; as the Alien remarks, “to go is to return.” I feel that the mist is a continuation of the sea, a modified, mollified version of the element of the jellyfish, the dreamer (or his mind, my first thought). By developing throughout the book and fulfilling his purpose, Orr achieves a more stable state in which he does not yield all control but retains some and, in the balance, feels safe and secure. In this sense, he is still a wanderer in the mist, it is all around him, but he is not completely immersed in it. He can survive on the sand.
Posted 31 Oct 2007 at 7:08 pm ¶
campagnolo wrote:
I like your reading but I don’t think it makes enough room between the almost diametric life-views taken by Orr and Haber.
In my currrent reading I see Le Guin as making the case that in a way all reality is dreaming; that the creation of self is a dream, and that in graduating to consciousness the human race has accrued an increased responsibility along side its increased powe, and Orr’s affective dreaming is taking this power to metaphorical levels.
This idea is an expansion particularly this passage: “The playing of the form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams and the earth changes…But when the mid becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the skills, the arts, the limits. A conscious mind is part of the whole intentionally and carefully–as the rock is a part of the whole unconsciously.”
The opening epigraph reiterates this idea in a sense, all creation as dreams, and if you don’t think that is one of the most carefully selected passages in the book then your are fooling yourself.
It also seems to fit with her comparisons of Eastern and Western thought. Orr espouses an explicit Taosist viewpoint. Haber exposes an explicit Rousseau-ian viewpoint (speech on 88). These are classic judeo-christian protagonist vs eastern viewpoints.
Which also fits with the zeitgeist. She’s writing as troops are being pulled from Vietnam. There is quite the backlash in the coutry against the politics of formation. The idea that we have any ability to mold the world in our image is being strongly contested.
Which is the premise of Lathe.
As for the jelly fish I am not sure. Here are a few of my thoughts.
One of my favorite lines in the book is in the opening passage when the jellyfish drifts onto “…that dry and terrible outerspace of radiance and instability.”
Clearly Le Guin sees some validity in the idea of the unconscious life, ceding most of your control to a greater power, in this case the inevitability of existence and dreaming which seem to be one and the same.
Inherent in this exposure to the light, to power, and to knowledge is instability.
Mist is almot a mixture of sea and land. Literally water vapor in the air. A mix of the two elements you might say. I might say that the mist is the balance between control and ceding control. It is a mix of the two metaphors earth and water. And you can’t see in the mist, so as you walk on the land youj give your foresight to the dream element, or unplanned existence.
Orr seems to perhaps some sort of power over the water, which makes me want to say that the jelly fish is humanity, who he controls almost unintentionally. When he stops affective dreaming his dreams lap the shore like harmless waves, or some language like that.
But Orr is undeniably linked to the jelly fish when it his eyes that burned with eyelids torn off after the jelly fish leaves the ocean for land, exposed to the light.
My resolution would be that he is of course part of humanity, as the average perhaps the heart of it. So he could be part of the jelly fish.
I don’t have my mind made up on the
matter, and almost guarantee you I’ll have changed my mind by class today.
Posted 01 Nov 2007 at 12:55 am ¶