Lauren Sealy

Looking Through “The Big End of the Telescope”: Pandora Reading the Past and Seeing the

Future in Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home

My paper discusses Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, which is itself an extrapolative science-fiction projection of both the past and the future of humanity, told as a re-envisioning of life in a nonexistent Northern California. The narrative portion of the book traces the Kesh, Le Guin’s fictitious civilization who are said to have lived a long, long time ago in the future. The imagined Keshi society is detailed almost anthropologically through the book in a string of narrative styles, yet is consistently interrupted by the narration of the character Pandora, who serves dually as a reappropriation of the figure in Greek mythos as well as, I argue, Le Guin herself. Le Guin’s/Pandora’s narrations speak across time and space, as Le Guin co-opts the tale of Pandora’s box and reworks it through a narrative that is simultaneously a critique of the past and a projection of humanity’s future. In looking through both ends of Le Guin’s metaphorical telescope, Pandora’s protest of past and contemporary civilization becomes fictionalized as Le Guin’s utopic future race: an anarchic, secular and less populated network of villages in the Californian landscape.

I limit the focus of my paper on the novel’s eight Pandora sequences, all of which cryptically indict humanity’s pattern of destruction and domination through a complex narrative structure, marked by the past/future voice(s) of Pandora/Le Guin. Like her mythological counterpart, Le Guin’s Pandora unloads humanity’s burden – what she calls the “Sickness of Man,” a metaphor for death and destruction – not solely upon herself.