.jpg "The Lathe of Heaven Cover") |
| (Cover Artist: Ernst Haas) |
Generally, the way I've seen The Lathe of Heaven characterized is that Le Guin's novel follows the story of a man named George Orr, who believes that everything he dreams becomes real. Terrified of this power, George is ultimately assigned therapy with a psychiatrist named William Haber, who sets out to cure George of these (supposedly) delusional beliefs in his brain's ability to change the world. In time however Haber reveals himself to actually be a mad scientist with a god complex--a man obsessed with finding a way to manipulate the reality-bending power of George's dreams to remake the world in his own image. Soon, George realizes that he must do whatever he can to keep the power of his dreams from Haber's control, and in so doing protect the universe from harm.
Which is to say that The Lathe of Heaven is often characterized as a story about the dangers of seeking to change reality. The protagonist of this novel (George) is a character who strives to ensure that the universe continually remains the same, while the antagonist (Haber) is by contrast a person who is continually striving to use a supernatural power to change the world in a way that he thinks will make it better, with this ambition being something that Le Guin is using this book to (supposedly) warn against. As the plot summary at the back of my copy of the novel reads:
"The Lathe of Heaven is a dark vision and a warning--a fable of power uncontrolled and uncontrollable. It is a truly prescient and startling view of humanity, and the consequences of playing God."
The problem that I have with this statement is that, while it is in a sense a faithful characterization of the literal events of this book's plot, it's also a description which I think obscures the most important aspect of Le Guin's writing. Rather than being a book about a protagonist with a supernatural power who learns to resist an evil psychiatrist, The Lathe of Heaven is instead a much more subtle work that starts out as a very frank depiction of mental illness, and then without ever abandoning these themes, also rotates itself into a deeply philosophical work touching on themes of social justice, personal responsibility, and (ultimately) the nature of morality.
The abstract nature of this story is foreshadowed via the disorienting way in which The Lathe of Heaven begins. As the novel opens, the book's main protagonist, George Orr, is introduced as he awakens in what he initially believes to be the ruins of an apocalyptic war. In a sequence which shifts in and out of contrasting layers of reality, George's narration describes how his head is wedged between two blocks of fallen concrete, his eyelids burned away from a nuclear blast while his body succumbs to radiation poisoning.
It's only in time that George's conscious mind reasserts itself, and he realizes that he is not in fact lying in the ruins of an apocalyptic wasteland, but instead in the tiny apartment in which he lives--his brain afflicted with the aftereffects of a dangerous cocktail of drugs which (for reasons that will become clear shortly) he illegally took the night before.
It's in this condition that George is found by the very down-to-earth elevator man of his apartment, Mannie Ahrens, who immediately calls a doctor. As the paramedic who arrives shortly afterwards treats George for his overdose, George is told that his abuse of controlled substances will result in him being institutionalized unless he reveals how he obtained these drugs. When George refuses (insisting that doing this will needlessly harm people who were only trying to help him), Mannie steps forward and falsely claims responsibility for George's crime. This is an act which George objects to, but Mannie shrugs off these concerns in a brief exchange that has far reaching bearing for the story that follows.
"I never used your card."
"So confuse 'em a little. They won't check. People use people's Pharm Cards all the time, they can't check. I lone mine, use another cat's, all the time. Got a whole collection of those reprimand things. They don't know. I taken things HEW never even heard of. You ain't been on the hook before. Take it easy, George."
"I can't," he said, meaning that he could not let Mannie lie for him, could not stop him from lying for him, could not take it easy, could not go on." (p.9-10)
As an opening scene, this chapter establishes several critical elements of this story simultaneously. In addition to introducing the reader to the book's ambiguously distopian setting (the paramedic who treats George makes reference to many children in the area who are suffering from malnutrition, as well as a local government which has mobilized the national guard against striking railway workers), Le Guin also demonstrates what becomes the defining quality of her main protagonist. George is introduced very overtly declaring to the reader that he is incapable of doing anything in this story, even if that thing is (paradoxically) nothing. When George tries to stop Mannie from lying to the paramedic on his behalf, he fails, and likewise when Mannie tells George that he should "take it easy," George claims that he can't do that either.
It's with George's conviction in his own helplessness established that the novel shifts perspective to its second protagonist. Thanks to Mannie's intervention, George is assigned several weeks worth of "voluntary therapy" with a local psychiatrist named William Haber. In contrast to George's belief in his inability to act, Haber is immediately established by Le Guin as a person defined by his capacity for action. That is, Haber spends the chapters in which he appears continually declaring to those around him what he intends to do--how he will impose his will upon the world, and in-so-doing twist it to serve not just his ends, but (he imagines) the ends of everyone around him.
For instance, in the scene when he and George first meet, Haber makes the split-second decision to not shake George's hand, and then confidently reflects to the reader that many of his patients are unsettled by the thought of physical contact. Haber's self-narration then proceeds to congratulate himself on this rapid moment of judgement--pleased that he has used his expertise as a doctor to put his new patient at ease, all while skillfully setting the stage for the productive therapy session with George which he imagines is about to follow. Yet in a subtle element of humor on Le Guin's part, these many rapid observations and calculations are revealed to be occurring as George awkwardly stands in front of him, having offered this doctor his hand in a greeting which Haber is now refusing to reciprocate.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Orr!" he said, rising, smiling, but not extending his hand, for many patients these days had a strong dread of physical contact.
The patient uncertainly withdrew his almost-proffered hand, fingering his necklace nervously, and said, "How do you do." The necklace was the usual long chain of silvered steel. Clothing ordinary, office-worker standard; haircut conservative shoulder length, beard short. Light hair and eyes, a short, slight, fair man, slightly undernourished, good health, 28 to 32. Unaggressive, placid, milquetoast, repressed, conventional. The most valuable period of relationship with a patient, Haber often said, is the first ten seconds. (p.12)
It's on this note that Haber's treatment of George begins. After he astutely deduces that the medications George was caught taking would have suppressed George's natural dream states (and that therefore his habitual use of drugs must derive from an intense fear of dreaming), George reluctantly explains why it is that he is so afraid of his dreams.
For much of his life, George has believed that whenever he experiences a particularly vivid or emotionally taxing dream (what he describes to Haber as an "effective dream"), then this dream influences the nature of reality. When these dreams occur is impossible for George to predict, as is both the content of these dreams, and what it is about that content which will become real. All that George knows for certain is that he is the only person aware of the changes that his dreams enact on the world, with even history itself often shifting to accommodate his alterations to reality. It's out of a fear of what type of world his mind might dream into being that George was driven to illegally take the drugs which lead to his overdose--convinced that he must do whatever he can to prevent his mind from changing the nature of the world.
After hearing all of this, Haber devises a plan for how to cure George of these beliefs. Correctly noting that George's fears of his dreams are rooted in a fear of his own mind, Haber decides that the best course of action is to teach George to dream from within the safety of his office. Via a combination of hypnosis and artificial brain stimulation, Haber explains that he can easily put George in a trance where he will dream anything he is told, and in this way (presumably) learn via Haber's guidance to dream in a way that is healthy and not frightening. As Haber (in his characteristically verbose style) describes this treatment:
"Now, think about this. How would you feel about testing this whole thing out, and perhaps learning how to dream safely, without fear? Let me explain. You've got the subject of dreaming pretty loaded emotionally. You are literally afraid to dream because you feel that some of your dreams have this capacity to affect real life, in ways you can't control. Now, that may be an elaborate and meaningful metaphor, by which your unconscious mind is trying to tell your conscious mind something about reality--your reality, your life--which you aren't ready, rationally, to accept. But we can take the metaphor quite literally; there's no need to translate it, at this point, into rational terms. Your problem at present is this: you're afraid to dream, and yet you need to dream. You tried suppression by drugs; it didn't work. O.K., let's try the opposite. Let's get you to dream, intentionally. Let's get you to dream, intensely and vividly, right here. Under my supervision, under controlled conditions. So that you can get control over what seems to you to have got out of hand." (p.19-20)
Something which I think is easy to miss in these passages is that, while Haber is immediately established as a problematically self-absorbed character, his efforts to help George are still depicted by Le Guin as altruistic. As Haber is quick to point out, George's fears of his dreams are valid, because they derive from George's subjective experience of reality. Whether literally real or not, George's conviction that his dreams can change the world is something that he finds legitimately terrifying, and so Haber's response to these fears--rather than insisting that they are irrational and misguided--is to seek to help George find a way to more safely manage these phobias.
Of course, Haber's treatment doesn't go according to this plan. Just as how George can recognize when the world changes as a result of one of his dreams, Haber too quickly realizes that when he is the one who places George in the hypnotic trance, he too is capable of perceiving how the world around them changes in response to George's thoughts.
It's here that Le Guin enacts a twist on her book's premise. In part working as a doctor honestly attempting to cure George of his anxiety, Haber also sets himself toward the parallel goal of using the unbounded power of George's dreams to benefit all of humanity. When George mentions that he is anxious about the global threats of food scarcity, Haber commands that he dream of a world in which there is enough food for everyone--a world in which no one on Earth lives in fear of going hungry. Likewise, later on Haber commands that George dream of a world where no one dies of illness, and still later, he tells George to dream of a world without war itself (a world in which, as his post-hypnotic suggestion to George very succinctly puts it, there are no "humans fighting humans").
Yet as was foreshadowed by George's initial fears of his dreams, a sleeping mind is an impossible thing to ever fully control. When Haber tells George to dream of a world without famine, George dreams into being a dystopian world where decades earlier much of humanity was killed off in a carcinogenic plague (thereby ensuring via the brutal logic of arithmetic that there is now more than enough food for the few survivors who remain). Likewise after Haber tells George to dream of a world where no one dies of illness, George dreams not of a world in which life-threatening disease does not exist, but instead a world ruled by an authoritarian government whose openly eugenicist policies demand the public execution of anyone suspected of harboring a terminal disease (in the process ensuring that no one ever dies of illness). Finally, in what is by far the book's most unexpected twists of genre, when Haber tells George to dream of a world without war (a world without "humans fighting humans") George goes to sleep in Haber's office, only to awaken on a planet under siege by an overpowering invasion of space aliens who have taken up residence on the moon, with the last remaining nations on Earth having banded together so as to stave off the inevitable eradication of the human species.
Or, as Haber had indeed requested, a world without humans fighting humans.
It's probably due to the subtlety of how these sci-fi elements interact that The Lathe of Heaven is so often misunderstood. Haber's need to use George as a tool to dream up a more perfect world without famine, illness, and war continually only results in disaster, and so in a sense it's easy to assume from this that The Lathe of Heaven's overall message is one that is critical of the concept of societal change (that, as the summary at the back of my copy of the novel read, The Lathe of Heaven is a story about "the consequences of playing god"). As George himself states to Haber early on, his fears of his dreams derives from his reluctance to change reality, with much of the tension of this story deriving from Haber's constant need to use George to negate those aspects of reality which they both feel are wrong or misguided. While George doesn't want to change the world, Haber does, and it's Haber's desire to change the world that is continually shown to result in catastrophe.
The problem that I have with this reading is that it ignores the fact that, while Haber often functions as something akin to this book's antagonist, George is also a character who Le Guin depicts in terms that are equally fraught. It is after all George's own fear of his dreams that initially drives him to attempt to artificially repress the functions of his own mind via drugs, with it being specifically George's fear of the change his dreams enacts on the world that is shown to be just as dangerous and destructive as Haber's obsessions.
This fact is actually demonstrated via the very scene in which George first meets Haber--a scene in which Le Guin cleverly foreshadows why Haber's planned therapy for George is so catastrophically misguided. After they are first introduced, Haber immediately decides that George's fears of his dreams are rooted in his inability to control his thoughts--that if George were merely to find a way to dictate to his unconscious mind what reality he is going to dream up from one night to the next, then he would be forever cured of his anxiety.
Yet when George himself actually describes his fears to Haber, this is very critically not what he tells his doctor he is afraid of. Instead, George states to Haber that the reason he is afraid of his dreams is because he doesn't feel that anyone should have the sort of power which he inexplicably possesses. Interestingly, George's belief that he doesn't have the right to control reality is something which Haber himself seems incapable of conceptualizing, to the point where even when he hears George literally speak these words to him, he doesn't seem to process their meaning.
"O.K. I take it that you had other dreams that seemed to have this same sort of effect?"
"Some. Not for a long time. Only under stress. But it seemed to... to be happening oftener. I began to get scared."
Haber leaned forward. "Why?"
Orr looked blank.
"Why scared?"
"Because I don't want to change things!" Orr said, as if stating the superobvious. "Who am I to meddle with the way things go? And it's my unconcious mind that changes things, without any intelligent control. I tried autohypnosis but it didn't do any good. Dreams are incoherent, selfish, irrational--immoral, you said a minute ago. They come from the unsocialized part of us, don't they, at least partly?" (p.18)
This subtlety is further enforced via the introduction of a third character into this book's dynamic--Heather Lelache. Introduced first as a civil rights lawyer who begins investigating Haber for possible malpractice, and then (as George and Haber skip across numerous realities) a friend of George's, his wife of many years, and then finally a stranger whom he happens to bump into in an antique shop, Heather is a character whose interactions with George illuminate the vital qualities of his fears which Haber's treatment has overlooked. When George first speaks with Heather, it's she who actually takes the time to listen to his anxieties, with it ultimately being a result of George's conversations with Heather that he begins to articulate the true nature of his fears of his dreams to himself.
"He's not... not an evil man. He means well. What I object to is his using me as an instrument, a means--even if his ends are good. I can't judge him--my own dreams had immoral effects, that's why I tried to suppress them with drugs, and got into this mess. And I want to get out of it, to get off drugs, to be cured. But he's not curing me. He's encouraging me."
After a pause, Miss Lelache said, "To do what?"
"To change reality by dreaming that it's different," the client said doggedly, without hope. (p.48)
It's because of all of this that, while George and Haber are initially introduced as opposites, as the story develops further Le Guin reveals how both of these characters are actually strikingly similar. While George is seeking to repress his dreams out of a fear that they might change the world, Haber's need to control George's dreams is rooted, ironically, in the very same belief. Both George and Haber, while they don't realize it, are acting on the assumption that there is something about George's mind which needs to be controlled.
This sets up The Lathe of Heaven to be a deceptively complex story whose minimalist narrative unfolds across multiple layers of reality. In one sense, this novel is a very literal science fiction story about parallel universes, dystopian governments, and alien invasions. In another sense however, while George's beliefs in the power of his dreams are presented to the reader as factual, Le Guin's focus on Haber's treatment of George means that the book also functions as a work whose science fictional elements exist in parallel to the book's depiction of George's anxiety.
Finally, amongst all of this is the most abstract story of this novel--a narrative in which, due to how every world in which George finds himself is one that he has very literally dreamed into being, all of this book's characters function in part as expressions of George's own hopes and fears. In this view, George and Haber are not two people, but instead two manifestations of a single mind that has come into conflict with itself. This is why when George initially realizes he needs treatment at the start of the book (when he tells Mannie and the paramedic that he "needs help"), the treatment he immediately receives is an expression only of what he thinks will cure him--a doctor who is willing to impose control on his thoughts. Yet naturally this "cure" proves disastrous, because it was itself merely an affirmation of George's fears reflected back at him. Haber is, very literally, George's anxieties made manifest.
The brilliance of The Lathe of Heaven, and the reason why this book's story is so difficult to summarize, is the fact that Le Guin writes all of these narratives simultaneously. The literal sci-fi elements of this book conclude when Haber's growing ambitions leads him to ruin, with his philosophy of constant control and action driving him to seize a power he doesn't understand. Likewise, the parallel story of Haber's treatment of George ends when, albeit unintentionally, he guides George to the single personal realization which George has always resisted in himself--that his dreams do not need to be repressed or restrained or controlled, because the only real danger George ever faced from his mind was his own fear at what it might create.
Finally, if the entire novel is read as an abstract expression of George's thoughts themselves, then the struggle between George and Haber over whether or not his dreams should be used to change the world resolves not when Haber cures George of his anxiety, but when George for his part finally abandons the need for control manifested by his own fears of Haber and what he represents. Fittingly, it's at that moment that George awakens in a world in which he is not trapped within one of Haber's many dystopias, because it turns out that all of that was just a dream.
The Lathe of Heaven is a book that begins with its protagonist reflecting in desperation that he is utterly helpless. Yet it ends not when that protagonist overcomes this helplessness, but instead accepts it, with the book charting via its narrative the deliberately paradoxical story of how George learns to do the one thing which even someone as endlessly active as Haber seems permanently incapable.
Exist.