Dr. A. Waller Hastings
Northern State University
Aberdeen, SD  57401
 
 

 Cultural References in the Introduction to
Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness

    In her discussion of the significance of extrapolative fiction as "thought experiment," Ursula K. LeGuin makes use of a number of cultural allusions that may not be instantly recognizable.  The following brief definitions may help you to understand her references; if you want to know more detail about one of these terms, just follow the links.  Definitions are given here in the order in which the terms appear in the Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness.

•      The Club of Rome is a group of scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of State and former heads of State who study world problems.  For several decades, this think tank has been issuing reports predicting dire consequences from the population explosion and environmental degradation.

•      Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that the movement of electrons could be understood if they were considered as waves, rather than as particles.  Schrödinger’s work, along with that of Werner Heisenberg, led to the development of quantum mechanics, with the concept that the actions of  subatomic particles cannot be accurately predicted from their existing states.

•      Philip K. Dick (1928-82) was a science fiction writer, one of whose novels became the basis for the cult movie Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford.  He won a Hugo Award (for best science fiction novel) in 1963 for The Man in the High Castle, a story about an alternative universe in which the Nazis won World War II.

 
•      Mary (Wollstonecraft) Shelley (1797-1851), the daughter of political radicals and the wife of a major Romantic poet, was the author of Frankenstein, in which a scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, gives life to an artificial creature, then turns from his creation in disgust.  The monster, left to his own devices, manages to acquire language and seeks to find companionship, but instead learns that normal human beings flee or attack him wherever he goes; the monster then begins to exact his revenge against his creator before both flee into the Arctic Sea.

 
•      The Rand Corporation is one of the largest, oldest (founded in 1946), and most famous of the “think tanks,” nonprofit corporations that study various issues of public policy, science, and technology, producing research reports under contract to government agencies or other entities tho help shape official policies.  Its name is a shortened form of “Research and Development,” its primary objective.

 
•      The Marshalsea Prison was a famous London prison, originally built in the 14th century, rebuilt in the 18th century, and finally torn down in the middle of the 19th century.  Over the years, its occupants varied from pirates and similar criminals to political dissenters and, most relevant to the allusion in LeGuin’s introduction, debtors – as a debtor’s prison, it figures in various of Charles Dickens’s novels, in particular Little Dorrit.  Whole families would follow the imprisoned debtor into the Marshalsea, the children and spouses exiting daily to work (hopefully) to pay off the debt and achieve freedom for the loved one.

 
•      The Battle of Borodino was an important encounter between the invading French forces of Napoleon and a defending Russian army under General Mikhail Kutusov on August 26, 1812.  The Russians inflicted massive losses on Napoleon’s forces (taking nearly as many casualties themselves), which ultimately led the French to retreat from Russia (on the retreat, losses to infection and disease were even more significant than those suffered in battle) and Napoleon’s eventual defeat.  In his epic novel, War and Peace, the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy gives a vivid account of this battle.

 
•      Awen is a Celtic term which means something roughly like inspiration” or “muse” – an expression of the creative spirit among the early peoples of the British Isles.  (If you didn’t already know this one, don’t feel bad – I had to look it up myself!)

 
•      Pythagoras  (thrived c. 500 B.C.E.) was a famous Greek mathematician who believed that numbers could be used to express all important relationships in the world.  He greatly influenced the early development of mathematics as a separate branch of knowledge, and is perhaps best known today for the geometric theorem attributed to him (the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides).

 
•      Dionysios was the Greek god of wine, usually written “Dionysus” (and known to the Romans as “Bacchus”).  Connected to his role as god of wine, Dionysus was also associated with madness, and some of his followers engaged in frenzied acts of wine-inspired violence.  In the writing of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Dionysus symbolized irrationality and creativity, in contrast to the somewhat sterile Apollo (the Greek and Roman sun god), who represented rationality, order, and harmony; to Nietzscheans, then, Dionysus represents an important creative principle closely connected to the idea of insanity.




Last updated September 7, 2001

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