Newton's Sleep (1991) Overview PDF

Le Guin, Newton’s Sleep (1991): OVERVIEW  A critique of rationalist, techno-scientific Utopia “It was what man had sought so long and never found, never could find, on Earth: a rational happiness. Down there, all they had ever had was life, liberty, and the pursuit. Now they didn’t even have that...

Le Guin, Newton’s Sleep (1991): OVERVIEW  A critique of rationalist, techno-scientific Utopia “It was what man had sought so long and never found, never could find, on Earth: a rational happiness. Down there, all they had ever had was life, liberty, and the pursuit. Now they didn’t even have that.” (Ike, p. 317)  … as an (impossible) fantasy of escaping the imperiled, perilous Earth  … where “Earth” signifies not only the planet but all the forms of dependency upon, vulnerability to, responsibility for, and entanglement with Other beings that being terrestrial entails {Whether Other in terms of race, class, gender, dis/ability, animality, materiality … ... and Earth-escape represents the climax of dream that (falsely) equates ... Earth-escape as the climax of a certain kind of freedom Freedom from dream: -- contingency, unpredictability, “Weather,” Ike said. “Weather “Sometimes I wish we could turn [the chance; was the worst! Just to get free of earth- monitor] off … it’s a lien, a tie, an -- from natural that stupid, impossible umbilicus. I wish they could start fresh. environment Absolutely clean and clear. The kids, I unpredictability.” (316) (from a context mean.” (315) you didn’t design Ike, re: removing the earth-like features of the “Ike looked from the holovid to the and don’t control) habitat: serene illusory New England and -- from history, saw the true shelter that lay memory, and the “It would—simplify. … It would turn us from behind it, holding them safe, safe and free, in haven. The truth shall past clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future … When there’s a cluster of make you free, he thought…” (316) --from dependency, esp. colonies at every optimum—or if they decide to build the Big Ship and cut free of the solar “He went into his studycube and got bodily, maternal to work projecting designs for the dependency system—what relevance is anything about the -- from debt, guilt second ship … No fake scenery, no Earth going to have to those people? They’ll be props; the curves and angles of the -- from complexity true spacedwellers. And that’s the whole idea structure exposed. The structural -- from —that freedom. I wouldn’t mind a taste of it elements were rationally beautiful in sentimental right now.” their necessity.” (322) illusion “Fair enough,” his wife said. “I guess I’m a little   “weird, long, The first revenant … hanging breasts” Recalls ethnographic “Hey, did you hear about this burned woman Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack say they saw? …she was like images of African burned all over, and sort of lurking along the side of the corridor like she was afraid of being seen” (321) women as cultural specimens circulating “She laughed and said yeah they really had absolutely seen this gut-wrenching woman and woman and she in National was really like burned all over, shiny, even her clothes burned off except a sort of rag thing. ‘Her breasts Geographic, e.g. well were just hanging there and they were really weird, really long,’ Treese said, ‘they were really gut, right? into the late 20thC. Hanging down. God! ‘Did she have white eyes?’ Dizzy superimposition ‘You mean like Punky Fort said she saw? I don’t know[…]” of racializing … ‘It was her teeth were white,’ Linda said, “…all white like a skull would be, right, and like she representations of had too many teeth.’ blackness, black ‘Like in those history vids,’ Treese said, “you know, all those people that used to live where that femininity was before the desert, right, Africa? That’s what she looked like. Like those famine people.” (324) --primitive, threatening, immodest/lascivious,  BURNED / the theme of  Bright white eyes  Africans as disgusting; Africans as sacrifice: & teeth; common “famine people”/ uniformly, “We chose,” he said, “we sacrificed, obsession in “history vids”; anonymously and we were spared. racist/minstrel 1980s U.S. media poor, suffering, caricature of saturated with victimized, -- Dual meaning of sacrifice: to give Blackfaces nameless victims victimizable something up, or to slaughter in of the Ethiopian -- “gut-wrenching” offering famine (1983-85) w/o compassion They weren’t stupid, Treese and Linda Alright, so maybe this burned …but they’d been born in the Colony. woman was a black woman. But They’d never lived outside. that didn’t explain how she got Esther had. She rememberd. The into 2-C … Roses had joined when she was seven. It’s just kids. She remembered all sorts of stuff about Playing ghosts, trying to scare the city where they had lived before each other and getting scared. they joined, Philadelphia; stuff like Getting scared of those old cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, and history vis, those black faces, her best friend in the building, Saviora, grinning with famine, when all who had ten million little tiny short the faces in your whole world braids, each one tied with a read thread were soft and white and fat. “The and blue bead. Her best friend in the Sleep of Reason engenders building and in the Building Mothers’ monsters,” Esther Rose said school and in the world. Until she had aloud … Goya, it was. The bat to … be decontaminated, things coming out of the man’s decontaminated of everything, the head while he slept at a table full germs and viruses and funguses, the of books, and down below were roaches and the radiation and the rain, the Spanish words that meant the read threads and the blue beads “The Sleep of Reason engenders and the bright eyes. monsters” in English, the only language she would ever know. Ike’s perspective vs. Susan’s “It’s OK, Ike …” “No, it’s not. It’s not OK. It’s not all right. It’s all gone crazy. It’s all ruined, ruined, wasted, wrong. Gone wrong.” Susan was silent for a long time, kneading and rocking his shoulders. She said at last, “It scares me when I think about it, Ike. It seems like something supernatural, and I don’t think there is anything supernatural. But if I don’t think about it in words like that, if I just look at it, look at the people and the … the horses and the vine by the door—it makes sense. How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are? All it is, is we brought ourselves with us … The horses and the whales and the old women and the sick babies. They’re just us, we’re them, they’re here.” (335-336) THE DUAL MEANING OF “SACRIFICE”: TO GIVE SOMETHING UP ONESELF … OR, THE SLAUGHTER OF ANOTHER AS AN OFFERING “WE CHOSE,” HE SAID, “WE SACRIFICED, AND WE WERE SPARED.” (314)  “Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May god us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep” -- William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, (1802) Ike [Isaac]: “Reason’s tough…How many people can stick to a straight course in a disintegrating world? Reason’s the compass that brought us through.” (313) “ ‘It would—simplify.’ … ‘Fair enough,’ his wife said. ‘I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.’” (316) William Blake, “Newton” – Isaac Newton, 1806 Ike, “Isaac,” the arch-rationalist: -- Story narrated mostly from his perspective, Le Guin uses free indirect discourse to ensure that we understand this as a partial, not omniscient perspective -- Constantly dismissing other’s insights as “emotional,” “sentimental,” “superstitious,” “delusional” -- Craves control. Esther: “It’s when he gets so, you know, like he has to control everything or everything will be out of control, I get sort of out of control…” (327) “El sueño de la razon produce monstros” [The sleep of reason produces monsters] Francisco de Goya, aquatint engraving, “His train of thought trailed off into c.1797/9 the incoherencies of advancing sleep. Just as he relaxed, a thrill of terror jolted through him, stiffening every muscle for a moment—the old fear from far, far back, the fear of being helpless, mindless, the fear of sleep itself. Then that too was gone. Ike Rose was gone. A warm body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object WHAT IS LE GUIN SHOWING US THROUGH THE SEQUENCE OF HUMAN APPARITIONS: - ”this burned woman” (321); “she was like burned all over, and sort of lurking along the side of the corridor like she was afraid of being seen” (321) - ”yeah they really had absolutely seen this gut-wrenching woman and she was really like burned all over’ … Her breasts were just hanging their and they were really weird, really long’ … ‘Like in those history vids,’ Treese said, “you know, all those people that used to live where that was before the desert, right, Africa? That’s what she looked like. Like those famine people.” (324) - “did you hear about the Hag? … She’s supposed to be real small and old, and she’s sort of Asian, you know, with those eyes like Yukio and Fred have, but she’s bent all over and her legs are weird. And she goes around picking up stuff off the deck, like it was litter, only there’s nothing there, and she puts it in this bag she has. … She has this real gut mouth without any teeth in it.” (328) ”Well, some women in Florida were having some committee meeting, and all of a sudden there were these other people sitting at the table and they were black.” (328) “all those people that were hanging around … they were like washing out a lot of clothes and wringing out the water. It was like some old tape in anthro or something. (332) “they were from some really primitive culture, they had on animal skins, but they were actually kind of beautiful … Well-fed and very alert-looking, watchful. I had a feeling for the first time they may be seeing us.” (332) THEN GOLDFISH (333), BISON (334), A VINE, WILD HORSES, WHALES (335), A ROCK (338) “The blue stripes ended at the door of the Health Center, or started there, ending and starting were the same thing … Nobody could be lost in Spes. All the corridors led to known places. You came to these places following the arrows and the colored stripes. If you followed every corridor and took every elevator you would never get lost and always end up safe where you started from. And you would never stumble, because all the floors were of smooth metal polished and painted light gray, with colored stripes and white arrows guiding you to the desired end. Ike took two steps and stumbled …under his hands was something rough, irregular, painful. A rock a boulder … dark, brownish-gray, veined with white, pocked and cracked; a little scurf of yellowish lichen grew near his hands. ” Solid ground beneath your feet. (337-338) The only roads are those that offer access. Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here with branches disentangled since time immemorial. The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It. -- Szymborska, Utopia The End … He had grazed his skin falling on the rock. He licked the tiny film of blood from the graze. Squatting there, he looked at the rock and then past it. He saw nothing but the corridor. He would have nothing but the rock, until he found her. The rock and the taste of his own blood. He stood up. “Esther!” His voice echoed faintly down the corridor. “Esther, I can’t see. Show me how to see!” There was no answer. He set off, walking carefully around the rock, walking carefully forward. It was a long way, and he was never sure he was not lost. He was not sure where he was, though the climbing got steeper and harder and the air began to be very thin and cold. He was not sure of anything until he heard his mother’s voice. “Isaac, dear, are you awake?” she asked rather sharply. He turned and saw her sitting beside Esther on an outcropping of granite beside the steep, dusty trail. Behind them, across a great dropping gulf of air, snow peaks shone in the high, clear light. Esther looked at him. Her eyes were clear also, but dark, and she said, “Now we can go down.” EUGENICS OF “SPES”: IQ/DNA TESTING, SELECTIVE BREEDING, Anti-Affirmative Action “Then you’ll be my blue-eyed girl!” her father had joked to her, after the failure of the third operation when she was thirteen. The important thing was that the defect was developmental, not genetically coded. “Even your genes are blue,” Ike had told her. “Noah and I have the recessive for scoliosis, but you, my girl, are helically flawless. Noah’ll have to find a mate in B or G Group, but you can pick from the whole colony—you’re Unrestricted.” (312) It came down to what D. H. Maston, the “Father of Spes,” called the cold equations … “No dead weight on board!” was the moral of the story. Too many lives depend on every choice we make! If we could afford to be sentimental—if we could take the easy way—nobody would rejoice more sincerely than I. But we have only one criterion: excellence. Physical and mental excellence in every respect. Any applicant who meets the criterion is in. Anyone who doesn’t is out.” (322-323) “Maston had applied the cold hard equations to himself. ‘By the time Spes is built,’ he had said, I’ll be seventy. A seventy-year-old-man take up the place a working scientist, a breeding woman, a 200-IQ kid could fill?” (323) “There had been no way around the fact that in a closed community of eight hundred, every single person must be fit, not only genetically, but intellectually. And after the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training. There had been few black applicants, even, and almost none of them had passed the “Look at it,” Esther said, peering, pushing her glasses up. “It’s all dead. How come everybody isn’t up here?” “Money,” her mother said. “Because most people aren’t willing to trust reason,” Ike said. “The money, the means, are a secondary factor. For a hundred years, anybody willing to look at the world rationally has been able to see what’s happening: resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government. But to act on a rational understanding, you have to trust reason. Most people would rather trust luck or God or one of the easy fixes. Reason’s tough…How many people can “Man by his reasoning power, can only compare and judge of what he has already perciev’d.” “Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.” -- William Blake, from There Is No Natural Religion (c. 1788) Who is able to adapt to the unforeseen, aka, improve on the “excellence”:  Precisely those who are deficient or lesser according to known criteria: -- Visually disabled Esther, who is interested in the past, other languages and cultures --Children who have not yet reached the age of sixteen, which the story calls the “Age of Reason” {incidentally, the name the Enlightenment, the long eighteenth century, called itself} -- Women, whose tendency to include subjectivity and emotion in their thinking makes it complicated, and therefore not sufficiently objective and purely rational -- Particularly women with names like Larane Gutierrez (p.331), or the one name Helena who, “seemed to have taken over the Emergency Committee” (p. 334), and asks “What do you think of inviting some of our guests to sit in on this meeting?” (334) -- The uninvited “guests” themselves: “Some women … were having some committee meeting, and all of a sudden there were these other people sitting at the table and they were black. And they all looked at them, and they just like went out of sight” (328)  THE DIFFERENT THEORIES PROVIDED “It’s just kids. Playing ghosts, trying to scare each other and getting scared. Getting scared of those old history vids, those black faces, grinning with famine, when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat. ‘The Sleep of Reason engenders monsters,’ Esther Rose said aloud.” (325) “Dad got himself on this Emergency Committee with mostly psychologists, and they have it all worked out about mass hallucination and environmental deprivation” (328-329) “What I think it is, is our guilt,” [Laxness] said, looking back at whatever he saw across the Square. “But what are we supposed to do? I don’t understand.” (331) “The question is this: to what extent does the concept of illusion usefully describe a shared experience with elements of interactivity?” “You say ‘shared experience,’ but it’s not a shared experience; I don’t share it … If these phantoms, these ‘loguests,’ are impalpable, vanish when you approach, inaudible, they’re not guests, they’re ghosts, you’re abandoning any effort at rationality—” … “Call them hallucinations, then,” Helena said, “although I liked ghosts better. ‘Ghosts’ may be in fact quite accurate. But we don’t know how to coexist with ghosts. It’s not something we’re trained in. We have to learn to do it as we go along …” (334) “It’s going backwards, Dad,” Noah said, in his new husky voice. … “There were people first … and then their started being animals, and now plants and stuff…” (335) “They’re just us, we’re them, they’re here.” (336) Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed? Very elitist people. How could we be anything but?” “…What are you talking about?” “Well, look at us! Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century! I’m not complaining. I chose it too. I love feeling safe. I wanted the kids to be safe. But you pay for safety.” “I don’t understand your attitude. …These are the people who chose to leave the past behind, to start fresh. To form a true human community and to do it right, to do it right, for once! These people are innovators, intellectually courageous, not a bunch of gutbrains sunk in their bigotries! Our average IQ is 165—” “Ike, I know. I know the average IQ.” (320) “It’s not OK. It’s not all right. It’s all gone crazy. It’s all ruined, ruined, wasted wrong. Gone wrong.” … “It scares me when I think about it, Ike. It seems like something supernatural, and I don’t think there is anything supernatural. But if I don’t think about it in words like that, if I just look at it, look at the people and the … horses and the vine by the door – it makes sense. How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are? All it is, is we brought ourselves with us … The horses and the whales and the old women and the sick babies. They’re just us, we’re them, they’re here.” (336) “I don’t like the monitors. I don’t like to look down.” It cost him something to admit it, to say it aloud; but Susan only smiled and said, “I know.” He wanted a little more than that. Probably she had not understood what he meant. “Sometimes I wish we could turn it off,” he said, and laughed. “Not really. But—it’s a lien, a tie, an umbilicus. I wish we could cut it. I wish they could start fresh. Absolutely clean and clear. The “Working late kids, I mean.” that night (315) in his cube, Ike felt the soft electric thrilling along his arms and back, the sense of crowding, a murmur below the threshold of hearing, a smell of sweat or musk or human breath.” He puts his head in his hands and addresses the AI screen “You cannot let this happen,” he said, “This is all the hope we have.” (333) “My God! We can keep out every virus, every bacterium, every spore, but this—this gets in? How? How can it be? – I tell you, Susan, I think the monitors should be closed. Everything these children see and hear from Earth is a lesson in violence, bigotry, superstition.” “He didn’t need to listen to the monitors.” Her tone was almost patronizingly patient. (319) “There’s an interesting discussion going on now in E.D. Com [Environmental Design Committee]. Al Levaitis proposed that we don’t make any landscapes … If Spes is our world, let’s accept it as such. The next generation —what will these pretenses of Earth scenery mean to them? … Could you live with that? No expanse illusion, no horizon—no village church. Maybe no Astroturf even, just clean metal and ceramic—would you accept that?” (315-316) “Would you?” “I think so. It would—simplify. … It would turn us from clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future … When there’s a cluster of colonies at every optimum—or if they decide to build the Big Ship and cut free of the solar system—what relevance is anything about the Earth going to have to those people? They’ll be true spacedwellers. And that’s the whole idea—that freedom. I wouldn’t mind a taste of it right now.” “But that spire—what will it mean to spaceborn, spacebred people. Meaningless clutter. A dead past.” “Look at that,” he said. It was a graphic of the coastline of Peru in 1990 and 2040, the overlay showing the extent of land loss. “Weather,” Ike said. “Weather was the worst! Just to get free of that stupid, impossible unpredictability!” The new slang and the elimination of compassion (the with-feeling-body) “gut-wrenching,” adj. Causing mental or emotional anguish (Merriam- Webster) Terrifying, extremely unpleasant or distressing; that causes nausea or severely upsets the stomach. (OED)  Wrenching distress felt in the guts. “There was no anti-Semitism in Spes. Look how many colonists were Jews. He was going to count, but found that he didn’t have to; the number seventeen was ready in his mind … There had been no problem recruiting people of Asiatic ancestry, in fact it seemed the reverse, but the lack of African-Ancestry colonists had caused long and bitter struggles of conscience over policy, back in the Union. But there had been no way around the fact that in a closed community of only eight hundred, every single person must be fit, not only genetically, but intellectually. And after the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training. There had been few black applicants, even, and almost none of them had passed the rigorous tests. They had been wonderful people, of course, but that wasn’t enough … There was no time to train people who, through no fault of their own, had been disadvantaged from the start. It came down to what D.H. Maston , the ‘Father of Spes,’ called the cold equations… “If we would afford to be sentimental – if we could take the easy way – nobody would rejoice more sincerely than I. But