The social sciences inform [Ursula K. Le Guin's] fantasies with far more earthy substance than the usual imaginary space-flight, and her hypothetical futures have a strong flavor of familiar history…. ["The Beginning Place"] describes with plenty of moral and psychological complexity the mating of two modern young people; its fantastic terrain … belongs not to any conjecturable future but to that vast, vaguely medieval never-never land whose place in our shared nostalgia was sealed by Malory's telling of the Arthurian legends, revived by Tennyson and William Morris, and given phenomenal modern currency by Tolkien's saga of Middle-earth. (p. 94)
The adventure that Irene and Hugh come to share in this storybook village is excitingly told, and so simply, boldly composed of the ancient motifs of curse and quest that any summary would reveal too much. Read as a metaphor of sexuality emerging from masturbatory solitude into the perilous challenge and exchange of heterosexual encounter, "The Beginning Place" is full of just and subtle touches. Both Irene and Hugh first fall in love with images of themselves: Irene is dark, and Hugh is fair, and the objects of their infatuation in Tembreabrezi—the saturnine Master, the fair Allia—exaggerate these aspects. The dragon they must slay—white and wrinkled and blind, hideous and piteous, loud with pain and craving, heavy with viscera—would appear to be our sorry carnality incarnate, with a runny touch of the subconscious chaos, the foul disorder of bad dreams…. The exact meaning of the fact that Hugh can always get into the enchanted realm but gets lost within it and that Irene has trouble getting in but always knows the way and can get out eludes me but feels right. The terror that only Hugh fails to experience and the singing that only Irene can produce in this twilight devoid of birdsong are details that command belief without an equation, gathering their own weight within a fairyland that never seems too remote from actual states of mind. Daydream, trance, faith, and passion all exist on the borders of waking thought…. As deftly as she makes the muddled patchwork landscape around Kensington Heights yield a supernatural dell, the author manipulates the four personae her two characters yield: Hugh and Irene in their real, "poisoned" lives, and these same two in Tembreabrezi, where they bear the slightly altered names of Hiuradjas and Irena. In another feat of shading, she turns the "ain country" sinister and malevolent—as solitary sexual dreaming will become—and the polluted real world, returned to at night, in the rain, beautiful: the true beginning place.
This is a free excerpt of 424 words. There are 513 words (approx.
2 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Le Guin, Ursula K(roeber) 1929–: Critical Essay by John Updike Access Pass.
