Connor Gilroy: From Dualism to Unity

Introduction: Dualism

“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction” (Newton 83).  In physics, in philosophy, and in literature, everything has its opposite.  This is found in concrete pairings like male and female, light and dark, as well as in more abstract ones like life and death, time and eternity. 

These oppositions present parallels, each half of a pairing being connected to one half of every other pairing.  These may then be equated.  The abstractions may be summed up under transcendence—the idea that the “Ultimate Reality” is “Out There”—and immanence—the idea that it is “inside things,” “in the world” (Erlich, para. 11).  Further, the pairings may be universally described using the Daoist concepts of yin and yang.¹ 

This is yang: “the light, active, masculine principle” (Campbell 152).  It is associated with eternity, with transcendence, with the God up in Heaven. 

This is yin: “the dark, passive, and feminine” (152).  It is connected to time, to immanence, to the Goddess of the Earth. 

In theory, these opposites coexist, linked together in delicate balance.  The Daodejing puts it thus: “All beings support yin and embrace yang / and the interplay of these two forces / fills the universe” (Lao Tzu 55, verse 42).  The enemy of this balance is dualism, the complete separation of these opposites. 

In the West, the philosophical traditions have tended toward dualism.  This began when the Greeks, in a break with the mystics among them such as the philosopher Heraclitus, developed logic as a way of splitting everything into two. Aristotle thus sets up the conflict when he declares in his Law of Non-Contradiction that “opposite assertions cannot be true at the same time” (Gottlieb para. 7, from Metaphysics IV 6 1011b13–20).  Descartes introduces the notion of mind and body being separate entities (Hatfield 3.4 para. 1).  In so doing, he raises the transcendent mind above the immanent body.  And as for religion, the dominant paradigm has been that of “St. Augustine’s declaration of the holy war of the Civitas Dei against the Civitas Diaboli,” an absolute division of spiritual and earthly realms (Campbell 159). 

Thus, for more than two thousand years, Western civilization has polarized itself, moving toward yang.  It has striven upward, be it for Heaven as in the Middle Ages or for Progress as in the Industrial Revolution.  By the twentieth century, surely, this striving ought to have brought about an earthly paradise.  Instead, the result has been extremist ideologies—jingoism, fascism, Communism, Islamism, and, yes, in some instances capitalism—which have led to two World Wars and countless genocides.  This is what comes of supporting yang to the exclusion of yin. 

The lesson is this: one cannot entirely dissociate two concepts without privileging one over the other.  If one is true, the other is false.  If one is good, the other is bad. 

This is indeed logical.  But the Chinese sage Laozi warns against just this error, counseling instead:

            Hold your male side with your female side

            Hold your bright side with your dull side

            Hold your high side with your low side

            Then you will be able to hold the whole world (41, verse 28)

Throughout the Daodejing, Laozi condemns force, violence, power, and other conventional expressions of yang (82, verse 69, 89, verse 76).  He emphasizes the lowness of Dao, the importance of inaction, as a means of leveraging yin back into its proper position in a society—in this case, Ancient China—that has gone too far toward yang (56, verse 43, 79, verse 66). 

Postmodern literature likewise marks a shift back towards yin.  Here it is a reaction to modernism—the pinnacle of yang in literature—and to the direction of Western society up through the first half of the twentieth century.  This philosophical movement can be illustrated by three postmodern authors whose stories—in spite of their disparate genres, characters, and settings—follow the same pattern of a return to yin and thereby to balance.  Ursula K. Le Guin describes the growth of a relationship amid an androgynous society drawn back from the brink of war in The Left Hand of Darkness.  Marion Zimmer Bradley reinvents the Arthurian legends from a feminine perspective in The Mists of Avalon.  And Salman Rushdie deals with the notion of change through issues from immigration to religion in The Satanic Verses.   The stories differ, of course, but the methods are the same.  All three authors make heavy use of ambiguity, contrast, and paradox in their arguments as they tilt the scales in favor of yin.  They establish yin-yang dichotomies in their characters and cultures and then subvert them.  They blur the boundaries between the real and unreal.  And they structure the changes within their novels as a return, through death, to balance. 

It was, in fact, seeing the connections between these disparate works that first sparked my interest in this topic.  I was further drawn by the purported commonality of mystical experiences, despite or perhaps due to my own lack of them.  As I read, the theme grew into a religious statement and a philosophical framework.  Given the difficulty of condensing mysticism to words, the primary application in this paper shall be literary.  But perhaps by showing the influence of these principles in select works of literature, I may take a step toward demonstrating their universal validity. 

This paper, then, is an illumination of a pattern and an argument for it.  It is an attempt to describe the links between opposing forces, in hopes of arriving at a greater unity. 

Chapter Two: Shadows

Light and dark, good and evil, yang and yin may only be defined in opposition to each other: “Everyone recognizes virtue / only because of sin” (Lao Tzu 15; verse 2).  But it is not a matter of simple opposition.  “What rises up appears bright / What settles down appears dark,” writes Laozi, “Yet there is neither darkness nor light” (27; verse 14).  Just as Laozi does, Le Guin, Rushdie, and Bradley bend and conflate the two forces of yin and yang, confusing them deliberately to make the point that they are connected.  They set up numerous oppositions and subvert them in paradox, overturning convention in the process. 

Their principle method involves the use of paired characters, each one half of the duality, who then come to reflect unity by their actions and interconnections. This method is extended to contrast entire settings, societies, and worldviews.  Moreover, these authors go one step further and actually advance yin over yang, as counterweight to the societal tendency to promote yang values.  Each, in its own way, plays the devil’s advocate. 

It would seem impossible that the Classic of the Way and its Virtue should be a devil’s advocate.  And yet that is the central position of the Daodejing.  “Abandon holiness” it says, “Discard cleverness, and the people will benefit a hundredfold.”  It explicitly rejects ren, the paramount virtue of Confucianism: neither Heaven, nor Earth, nor the Sage, is ren (18, verse 5).  Ren is humanity, partiality, preference; it is kinship, patriotism, any sort of relationship with other people.  It also derides the Confucian ideal of the scholar, of learnedness, lauding instead humble ignorance.  “It [Tao] is not something gained by knowing, or lost by forgetting” (80; verse 67).  Inaction is better than action (56; verse 43); what is good often seems bad (54; verse 41).  In keeping with this paradoxical manner of thinking, Laozi states over and over something negative about Dao, and then refutes it: “Tao is empty / yet it fills. . .”; “Tao is hidden / yet it shines. . .” (17; verse 4). 

In The Left Hand of Darkness, the opposition takes the form of two countries and their respective religions.  Karhide is a land of shadows, of subtleties.  Its cities and palaces are dark and brooding.  Genly Ai, narrator and Envoy for the Ekumen, does not like it.  He tires of the “color, choler, and passion” of the Karhidish people (Le Guin 114).  He refuses to trust Prime Minister Estraven, who pulls support from his audience with the King at the last moment. 

Genly Ai’s initial impression of Orgoreyn is much more favorable.  He contrasts the capitals of the two nations: “Mishnory was cleaner, larger, brighter than Erhenrang, more open and imposing.”  Orgoreyn is “orderly,” its people “colorless, steady, subdued” (114).  Yet for all the welcome and civility he sees on the surface, he is betrayed by the Commensals of the Orgota government and taken to a Voluntary Farm, a prison camp. 

It is in fact ex-Prime Minister Estraven, “the only man on Gethen that [Genly Ai has] refused to trust,” who rescues Ai from the Farm (199).  In the end Estraven sacrifices his life for Genly’ cause (284).  To further illustrate the perfidy of light and the value of darkness, there is the voyage across the Ice that Ai and Estraven take to escape from Orgoreyn and return to Karhide.  The most unnerving part of the journey is the “Unshadow,” where all shadows disappear and they must travel blind in a snowless white nothingness (261).  Pure light is just as blinding as pure darkness.  

The Handdara, the traditional religion of Karhide, is one of few rites. It is “paradox developed into a way of life” (252).  Like Daoism, it values ignorance (56) and focuses on Immanence (58).  The Handdarata are “given to negatives” (57).  In stark contrast, the cult of Yomesh, the state religion of Orgoreyn, centers around the transcendent vision of Meshe.  The Yomeshta are obsessed with light, Sight, and surmounting time, going so far as to declare that darkness does not exist, that it is illusion (164).  And yet Meshe was a Handdara Foreteller; light sprang from darkness (60).  

The central opposition in The Satanic Verses lies in the characters Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha.  To begin with, the one is loud, boorish, and ostentatiously Indian, while the other is sedate, refined, and would like nothing so much as to be British.  Both are middle-aged Indian actors who immigrate to Britain; their airplane explodes en route, and they are transformed in their fall from the sky.  Beyond that, their paths are mirror images. 

Gibreel becomes his archangel namesake, complete with halo and power to transform reality.  But this is not as amazing as it would seem.  Angels, it is made clear, lack their own will, and exist to do the bidding of man and Allah (Rushdie 95).  And Gibreel is an unlikely angel.  He is a breaker of women’s hearts, the sort who can get away with anything.  In his quixotic crusade to redeem London, he winds up tattered and disheveled (343).  His most angelic quality at the start, his immense capacity for love, manifests itself instead in obsessive jealousy with Allie (457).  His end is madness, murder, and ultimately suicide (558-61).  But for all that Gibreel is driven by his adversary, for all that he intends to wreck vengeance and to “hurl the adversary down, once more, into the Darkest Deeps” (337), when the time comes to do so, he forgives Chamcha, in a legitimately angelic display of character (483). 

Chamcha, on the other hand, is made into a devil, with horns and goatish tendencies.  He continually attempts to act out his own will and is often thwarted.  He wants nothing more than to assimilate into England, yet becomes a symbolic hero to the immigrant underclass, as the Anglo-Bangladeshi girl Mishal informs him: “‘Chamcha,’ Mishal said excitedly, “you’re a hero.  I mean, people can really identify with you’” (296).  He himself is detained for illegal entry to the country, despite holding citizenship (while Gibreel of course is let off the hook) (146).  He refuses to forgive Gibreel for not rescuing him, and enacts revenge by ruining Gibreel’s relationship with Allie (461). 

And yet it is Chamcha, not Gibreel, who reconciles with his father and receives his happy ending with Zeeny Vakil back in Bombay (561).  The angel falls and the devil is raised up.  This is how Rushdie makes his point of conflating light and dark.  Chamcha becomes Gibreel when he forgives his father and returns to India.  Gibreel becomes Chamcha when he takes revenge on Allie and pushes her off a skyscraper for a perceived slight.  “For are they not conjoined opposites, these two, each man the other’s shadow?” (441).  Their mirror trajectories are even anticipated in the Daodejing: “Heaven operates like the bending of a bow— / the high it pulls down / the low it brings up” (Lao Tzu 90, verse 77). 

Yang and yin manifest themselves additionally in Gibreel’s dreams, where they are portrayed in open conflict.  They are represented by Allah, the God, and Al-Lat, the Goddess, and their respective servants.  Chief among these are the Prophet Mahound and the sorceress Hind.  Neither compromises, and both lose: she loses her temples and her city to his army, and he loses his life to her witchery (Rushdie 405).  In some lights, the poet Baal, another devotee of Al-Lat, is also Mahound’s dark opposite: Baal marries twelve whores in mockery of the Prophet’s twelve wives, and in so doing becomes more sympathetic to the Prophet in mindset (396).  He is a coward and a liar, but is executed for a final display of courage (404).  In another dream, the Imam returns from exile to the land of Desh to retake the country from the worldly Empress Ayesha, and Gibreel does battle with Al-Lat in the sky above the capital (221).  Indeed, the Imam’s obsession with stopping time, his goal of the eternal, makes him, like Meshe, the epitome of yang (222). 

In Gibreel’s dreams, Allah triumphs over Al-Lat.  But Rushdie undermines his victory.  With deliberate irony, the Prophet is called Mahound, “the Devil’s synonym” (95).  He is additionally painted as a liar and a hypocrite.  The first time it was the devil, the second time the angel, claims Mahound when he recites and recants the Satanic Verses.  But Gibreel, the angel of the Recitation, knows it was he himself both times, or at least Mahound’s will speaking through him: “. . . me first and second also me” (126).  This makes Mahound’s rationalization nothing more than wishful thinking.  Mahound himself has more than the permitted number of wives, and the “sexual segregation” of Islam actually increases prostitution in Jahilia (403).  Laozi in fact anticipates that extensive rules of conduct lead to “great hypocrisy” (31; verse 18).  Furthermore, the God that Gibreel serves while awake, in fact the narrator of the novel, is implied to be Satan (Rushdie 337).  Evil is part of human nature, or so he claims (442).

The Mists of Avalon is devoted to exploring the viewpoint of the stereotypically “evil” side.  In so doing, it presents numerous pairings of both characters and cultures.  These include Gwenhwyfar and Morgaine, Arthur and Lancelet, Galahad and Mordred, the Saxons and Celts, and Christianity and Celtic paganism. 

Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar (i.e. Morgan le Fay and Guinevere) are the focal points of the work, and they are foils for each other as much as are Gibreel and Chamcha.  Gwenhwyfar is the fair lady, the Christian queen (Bradley 158).  She is the driving force behind the Christianization of Arthur’s court and kingdom (317).  For this, she is yang.  Morgaine is the dark sorceress, the pagan priestess, who seeks to protect the Goddess-centered religion of Avalon (138).  This makes her yin.  Morgaine, however, is the more active one, moving directly to confront Arthur and Kevin over their betrayals of Avalon, such as their decision to bury Viviane in Glastonbury (503).  Gwenhwyfar, on the other hand, is passive for the most part.  She acts largely by manipulating Arthur and Lancelet, imploring them for instance to replace the pagan serpent banner with one of the cross (392).  One surmises that this reversal is due to Gwenhwyfar’s low status on the hierarchy of yang, which comes from her gender.  Also, Morgaine attempts to “[a]ct without acting” (Lao Tzu 76, verse 63), in submitting herself to the will of the Goddess (Bradley 876).  But at one point, Nimue recognizes that if the women had not fallen on opposite sides of an ideological divide, they could have been friends (788).  Moreover, Morgaine herself recognizes the irony with which their lives are intertwined: “And for a bizarre moment Morgaine saw herself as the Queen’s shadow . . . somehow her fate and mine have gotten all entangled” (533).  Each woman would have been happier in the other’s place.  Not only that, but in the end they do assume each other’s places: Gwenhwyfar takes decisive action in entering a convent and removing herself as a source for conflict between Arthur and Lancelet (864), while Morgaine is able to pray in a Christian church (875).  They end with goodwill and love overcoming their prior animosity. 

Arthur and Lancelet start on considerably better terms.  Again, Arthur is light: even his birth-name, Gwydion, means “bright one” (109). Lancelet is dark, son of the Lady of Avalon (146).  But here the connections are more in evidence.  Each is involved, sexually and emotionally, with both of the aforementioned women (180, 303).  They are close friends, even though the political implications of Lancelet’s affair with Gwenhwyfar strain their friendship.  They reconcile, but too late to save Arthur’s kingdom (865). 

A further example, Mordred and Galahad, serves to illustrate the complexity with which yin and yang are interwoven.  Mordred is Arthur’s son, yet he is dark like his mother Morgaine, and a scion of Avalon (693).  Galahad is Lancelet’s, yet he is fair and light (626).  Unsurprisingly, Arthur names Galahad, so much more like himself, as his heir in place of Mordred (708).  This only makes their connection clearer to Morgaine, who thinks, “If Galahad is to be king in the land, is my son then the Merlin, tanist and dark twin and sacrifice?” (644).  Their deaths, too, reflect both their opposition and unity.  Mordred, a creature of yin, dies by the sword Excalibur, a symbol of yang (867). Galahad is slain by the Grail, symbol for yin (819).  But Mordred dies in pursuit of the temporal, Galahad in pursuit of the eternal.  Fortunately, according to Campbell, the affiliations of yin and yang in this case may be reversed: “And so it is that both the male and the female are to be envisioned, alternately, as time and eternity” (170).  This goes to show, however, that one may find aspects of both yin and yang in any situation. 

The invaders are always yang, the invaded yin, as Le Guin discusses in her essay “Which Side Am I On, Anyway?” (27).  The particular invasion of the British Isles occuring in The Mists of Avalon is that of the Saxons (Bradley 14).  The victims are the Romanized British Celts.  Yet Arthur defeats the Saxons at Mount Badon, forcing them to agree to peace for a time (710). 

However, this political conflict does not drive the novel as the one between Karhide and Orgoreyn does in The Left Hand of Darkness.  Instead, the driving conflict is one of religion.  The yin characters—Morgaine, Lancelot, Mordred—are all tied to Avalon, the yang characters—Guinevere, Arthur, Galahad—to the Christian church.  But the differences between the two amount to nothing more than the dogma of narrow-minded individuals on both sides—Gwenhwyfar and Patricius on the one hand, Morgaine and Viviane on the other—because, as the Merlins of Britain, Taliesin and then Kevin, repeatedly assert, “all the Gods are as One” (206). 

The ultimate message of all of these works is one of unity.  Gethenians are obsessed with it, and by the end of The Left Hand of Darkness, Karhide and Orgoreyn are bound to join together in the Ekumen of All Worlds.  The Satanic Verses shows the struggle between light and dark to be questionable, futile.  And even as Arthur’s reign ends in tatters in The Mists of Avalon, the characters all find some sort of personal peace.  Even the most devoted servants of good and evil contain elements of the other, because “All things support yin and embrace yang” (Lao Tzu 55; verse 42).  Through numerous powerful illustrations, it is established that light is also dark, that darkness is also light, because, as Le Guin has it, “Light is the left hand of darkness / and darkness the right hand of light” (233). 

Chapter Three: Changes

Equilibrium is not static.  This is encapsulated in the two central tenets of the philosophy of Heraclitus, the Unity of Opposites and the Doctrine of Flux (Graham para. 7).  Opposites are the same because they become each other.  Everything changes.  Balance is delicate.  Heraclitus says conflict is an integral part of existence (para. 15).  Certainly it is necessary for the existence of a novel.

The Mists of Avalon, The Satanic Verses, and The Left Hand of Darkness begin in worlds dangerously out of balance, tilting heavily in favor of yang.  The protagonists manage to restore balance by leaning towards yin.        

All three works occur in times of societal upheaval, change on a large scale.  In Britain, in the sixth century or thereabouts, there is political upheaval.  Rome is gone, the legions never to return (Bradley 14).  The Saxons threaten to tear down what is left of civilization (15).  For a space, Arthur has halted the decline.  But beneath this onslaught, traditional Celtic culture is fading.  And religious change is only cemented during Arthur’s rule, with an increasingly restrictive brand of Christianity displacing the pagan followers of the Mother Goddess, much to Morgaine’s dismay.  This last conflict is central to Mists of Avalon.  Glastonbury of the priests replaces Avalon of the priestesses (114).  The banner of the cross is raised in place of the serpent banner of the Pendragon (393).  Pagan rituals are retained with scant regard to their original meaning (584).  The chalice of the Druid Regalia becomes the Holy Grail (770).  The Goddess becomes the Virgin Mary (875).  Yet, “[t]he Spirit of the Valley never dies” (Lao Tzu 19, verse 6).  What is lost is still there, buried, just harder to find. 

A similar transition is repeated with Islam in Gibreel’s dreams.  Al-Lat, a much less positive figure than the Celtic Goddess, has her temples destroyed and her power broken by the forces of the Prophet (Rushdie 386).  A new wave of newcomers to Britain brings turmoil in the 1980s of the book’s reality, immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia (428). 

In The Left Hand of Darkness, the new religion and the old maintain an uneasy equilibrium, but the political and social aspects of society are threatened by change.  Karhide takes a step towards Orgoreyn, as the new prime minister attempts to evoke in his people emotions that are appropriate for war (Le Guin 152).  An even greater change is precipitated by Genly Ai’s arrival, the induction of Gethen into the Ekumen of All Worlds (293). 

Against this backdrop are set the personal experiences of the main characters.  It is exceedingly common for the protagonist of a work to embark on a journey.  What sets these three apart is that the journey is a return, a homecoming.  This is the yin version, the reversal, of the yang-style transcendental journey, the archetypal hero’s quest.  And yet, “[t]he movement of Tao is to return” as well, suggesting a universality to this structure (Lao Tzu 53; verse 40).  And does not every journey involve a homecoming, provided the hero lives to see it?  What makes these stories yin, to varying degrees, is their focus on the returning aspect. 

Morgaine runs away from Viviane in Avalon, and thenceforth yearns to go back (Bradley 287).  When finally she does, she finds that the isle has drifted even farther away from reality, that the skilled priestesses are all aged, and that there is little hope of ever restoring Avalon to its position in the world (593).  Yet it is a homecoming, for she is welcomed by Niniane and Raven, restored as a priestess, and given the strength to do as she must (757). 

Chamcha begins The Satanic Verses on a flight to London and ends it back in Bombay.  He spends most of the book running away from India, rather than seeking it.  Instead, it finds him, even in England, as he winds up among the unassimilated immigrants he detests.  But finally after a near-death experience, he gives up, surrenders to the subcontinent.  He returns to reconcile with his father on the latter’s deathbed, replaces his English wife Pamela (by this point deceased) with Zeenat Vakil from Bombay; in short, embraces his identity.  And yet he abandons his childhood neighborhood of Scandal Bay, to go along with his own growing up (Rushdie 561). 

Though Genly Ai and Estraven leave Karhide for Orgoreyn near the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness, they spend the heart of the book trying to get back.  Neither finds what they seek in Orgoreyn, and while they are gone, Prime Minister Tibe pushes the people of Karhide toward war.  The core of the book, that cements the relationship between these two characters, occurs on the Gobrin Ice as they strive to get back into Karhide. 

However, says Heraclitus, one can never go back, not entirely.  “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow” (Graham para. 8, from Heraclitus DK22B12). That is, the river that one returns to is still there, but the water that it once contained has long since been swept away, replaced by the current.  This same observation is made in Siddhartha, when the titular character notes that “[h]e saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new” (Hesse 102).  This paradox is the reason that one cannot return completely.  The place will have changed, or the person will have changed, even as they maintain some recognizable continuity.   

 The most drastic and inevitable transition is that from life into death.  Furthermore, the return demands just this sort of sacrifice.  “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die’” (Rushdie 1).  It is no coincidence that all three novels end with a death, in some cases several. 

“What of the King Stag when the young stag is grown?” (Bradley 556).  It takes her lover Accolon’s death in challenging Arthur for his sword and throne to restore Morgaine to her full role as priestess.  And Arthur himself must die in the end, at the hands of his son Mordred, for betraying the oath he has sworn to Avalon.  However, the Druidic belief in reincarnation perhaps mitigates the severity of these deaths (Bradley 12). 

The Satanic Verses accumulates a high body count in its final pages, all of it necessary for the protagonists’ catharsis.  Chamcha’s father must die, so that father and son may reconcile (Rushdie 545).  Allie must die, so that Gibreel can find the strength to kill himself (558).  And Gibreel must die, that he may find freedom and peace (561).        

The Left Hand of Darkness provides the clearest indication of the necessity of the sacrifice, even with only a single significant death.  Death is the only certainly, Faxe the Weaver tells us (Le Guin 71). Estraven is determined to bring Karhide into the Ekumen, even though he knows it will come at the cost of his own life.  So he frees the Envoy of the Ekumen Genly Ai from Orgoreyn and brings him across the Ice back into Karhide, whence he himself is exiled.  Ai successfully brings down his ship, but Estraven is betrayed and shot as he attempts to flee (284). 

By the ends of their books, Morgaine, Chamcha, and Genly Ai come to terms with themselves, their positions, and their actions.  The worlds in which they reside, too, achieve some sort of balance. 

Chapter Four: Dreams

Balance exists, but how can one balance the worlds of reality and imagination?  Where does the boundary between these two lie?  Imagination, manifesting itself as dreams, visions, and art, provides numerous alternative truths.  But these differing perceptions of the truth clash with Aristotle’s Law of Non-Contradiction, the notion that, logically, an idea and its opposite may not both be true at the same time.  How, then, can an accommodation be reached between true and false?  Is there room only for one truth?  Or, perhaps, truth is not always simply a matter of logic. 

The Chinese sage Zhuangzi calls the difference between dreams and reality into question with his parable of the Butterfly Dream: “. . . he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi” (44).  In The Satanic Verses, it is this very thought that terrifies Gibreel, who dreams he is the archangel of the same name, and whose dreams always resume from the very point where they leave off (Rushdie 85).  Is he real, or is the archangel?  Gradually, what happens to him awake comes to resemble what happens to the angel in his dreams.  Awake in England, he is forced to listen to Rosa Diamond’s story of her life in Argentina, and even to experience her lover’s three contradictory deaths as she is unable to decide what she wants to be true (157-159), just as in his dreams he is made to embody the will of the Prophet Mahound (112-114).  Indeed, as the book progresses, we find that “the world of dreams was leaking into that of the waking hours . . . the seals dividing the two were breaking” (314).  Gibreel becomes increasingly convinced that he is the archangel, and attempts to first redeem the city of London (332) and then bring about the Apocalypse with the trumpet Azraeel (476). Gibreel is “the fulfiller of dreams,” taking the desires of mortals and making them reality (476). 

Gibreel does not have a monopoly on dreams-come-true.  Chamcha, his friend and adversary, has a nightmare of a bomb-laden terrorist woman.  When she shows up on his flight to London, he refuses to believe she is the woman from his dream until she hijacks the plane (75).  Similarly, in The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai awakens to find that his dream of a raid on the Orgoreyn town of Siuwensin is occurring in fact.  (Le Guin 110).  In the opposite manner, Morgaine in The Mists of Avalon makes her way into the fairy country, “[a]s if she had fallen into a dream” (Bradley 403).  Reality for her becomes a dream.  She loses count of the handful of days she spends there, and the only way she knows it is real and not a dream is because five years have passed in the world of men when she returns (407).  And in the end, she, too, has a true dream that informs her of Lancelet’s death as it is happening (870). 

But certainly there is an element of madness involved in conflating fact and fantasy.  Gibreel, diagnosed with schizophrenia, is medicated and placed under the care of his girlfriend Allie to hold his “‘angel’ self” in check (Rushdie 350).  In The Left Hand of Darkness, the Handdarata in their Foretelling make use of “Zanies,” also characterized as schizophrenics (Le Guin 63).  Even Morgaine, who journeys twice into the land of the fairies, wonders if her first trip was not “only the sick fantasy of a breeding woman” (Bradley 313).  But when Genly Ai, attending a Foretelling to pose his own question about the future, wonders why the psychopaths remain uncured, he is answered, “Would you cure a singer of his voice?” (Le Guin 63).  Madness, too, may be essential. 

And what if the delusion is shared?  If others are experiencing the same events, it must not be mere madness.  The Satanic Verses in particular abounds in such events running contrary to logic.  It begins with Gibreel and Chamcha falling through the sky and being saved from death by the latter’s will and the former’s singing and flapping (Rushdie 9-10).  They communicate in the air, though this is “impossible” (6).  Gibreel’s angelic nature is revealed several times in the story through a distinctly visible halo, to the police (146), to John Maslama (199), and to Maslama’s employees (463).  He commands the weather of London to change, and a “tropical heatwave” does appear (367).  In the dream of the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Ayesha pilgrims walk into the Arabian Sea at Bombay and drown.  Yet of those accompanying them who survive, all except Mirza Saeed insist that they saw the waters part.  “Believe don’t believe” says Mrs. Qureishi, “but what my eyes have seen my tongue repeats” (518).  Throughout the book, Gibreel and Allie are each haunted by a ghost: Gibreel by his lover Rekha Merchant, who committed suicide, and Allie by her fellow Everest-climber Maurice Wilson, who died trying to climb the mountain alone.  But before Gibreel—or perhaps Rekha—pushes Allie off a Bombay skyscraper, he sees Allie’s own spectral companion Maurice.  Thus the existence of at least one ghost is confirmed, contrary to what one would believe possible (559).  One especially dramatic event from The Mists of Avalon likewise demonstrates shared delusion: the appearance of the Grail in Arthur’s court.  Each person present has his or her own vision of the Goddess, and then the Holy Chalice disappears (Bradley 772).  Again, an event that would seem impossible is validated by its appearance to so many.  But when what is presented as true blatantly conflicts with what is possible, who can know the truth?

In uncovering the truth, intuition may be shown to play a role equal to that of logic.  In The Left Hand of Darkness, the Foretelling are the only known accurate means of predicting the future.  To Genly Ai they have “the imperative clarity of a hunch” (Le Guin 67).  Farfetching, “the intuitive perception of a moral entirety,” is described as essential to Ai’s own position as Envoy (147).  The ex-Prime Minister of the Gethenian kingdom of Karhide, Estraven, acts by intuition instead of logical thought (203), and his judgment of the political situations in Karhide and Orgoreyn is ultimately correct (287).  The “gift” of insight involves “seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole” (204).  Premonitions also occur in The Satanic Verses, if with a lesser degree of accuracy.  Saladin Chamcha sees flames on the teenage Mishal Sufyan’s forehead, and knows she will cause his death (Rushdie 430).  But when he enters the burning Shaandaar Café to rescue her, he himself is rescued by Gibreel (481-483).  Allie meets Maurice Wilson on Everest, and he becomes “the angel of her death” (203).  She, however, does not die in “solo ascent” of the mountain, but in a fall from a skyscraper called Everest Vilas in Bombay (556-560).  In Gibreel’s dream of Jahilia, the poet Baal, in “the only prophetic remark of his life,” predicts the closing of the brothels by Mahound’s troops and the path leading to his own execution at their hands (400-405).  The Mists of Avalon is as rife with prophecy as the other works.  The priestesses of Avalon develop the “Sight” to give them glimpses of the future, limited but always true (Bradley 121).  The prophetess Raven serves as an oracle, keeping a vow of complete silence except when she would deliver a message from the Gods (195).  It is she who foresees the theft of the Holy Regalia of Avalon (760).  Again, the source is intuition, yet she speaks nothing but truth. 

Art also has a unique relation to the truth.  Throughout The Satanic Verses, art is mocked as being by nature false.  “People write to tell lies,” observes a drunken Persian scribe, who shares the author’s name (Rushdie 398).  “Writers and whores.  I see no difference here,” says Mahound (405).  Chamcha and Gibreel are actors, a fact which brings the former in particular much scorn for not being a “real” career (48).  But in contrast with the negative views expressed, art, especially the art of words, is shown to have the power both to reveal and to shape reality in Mahound’s Recitation (116-117), Baal’s satirical poetry (108), and Chamcha’s messages that lead to the deaths of Allie and Gibreel (460-461).  Le Guin in her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness seems to admit the falsehood of art: “I am an artist too, and therefore a liar.”  But this is paradoxical, for she goes on to say, “I am telling the truth.” 

Bradley reaches the heart of the matter—of dreams, of intuition, of art—in The Mists of Avalon, describing how “it is the belief of mankind which shapes the world, and all of reality” (12).  The in-between existence of the isle of Avalon and the island’s role in the struggle between Christianity and Druidic paganism best illustrate this claim.  Avalon coexists in the same place as Glastonbury Tor and its Christian monastery, yet at a remove from the world, and invisible to most (113).  All who visit it affirm that it is real, “but in a different way,” as Lancelet has it (145).  Viviane, Lady of the Lake and High Priestess of Avalon, asserts to Morgaine that “It is more real than any other place you have ever seen” (131).  Yet it is fading, and this is what Viviane seeks to reverse.  At one point, she declares, “It is what lives in their dreams and imagination that we must control from Avalon” (470).  The battle between Avalon and the Christian church is fought in the minds of men, because the dreams and imagination of humankind directly affect the real world.  The Christians have room for only one God, one truth.  And so, Avalon—which has no place in their world—is receding into the mists until it will be “no more than a legend and a dream” (800).  Yet the legend remains: Morgaine says of the Grail, the Holy Chalice of the Druid Regalia, “Let there be, in this new world without magic, one Mystery the priests cannot describe and define once and for all, cannot put within their narrow dogma of what is and what is not . . .” (814). 

And so it is, that a thing may be false historically or rationally and yet true in a mythic or artistic sense.  For instance, I have been deceptive in referring to the Chinese sage Laozi, the purported author of the Daodejing, as a real person.  By all modern indications, there was no such man.  The most sacred text of Daoism is a product of multiple authors and commentators (Star 1).  Yet Laozi is every bit as real as Avalon, or as the archangel Gibreel, because, as Genly Ai says in The Left Hand of Darkness, “Truth is a matter of the imagination” (Le Guin 1). 

Conclusion: Unity

“Om mani padme hum” ‘The Jewel is in the Lotus’ (Campbell 171).  This most famous of Buddhist mantras presents itself as a summary of the unity of opposites.  The specific union represented is that of Nirvana and Samsara, the “jewel of eternity” and the “lotus of birth and death,” but it may be generalized to include all “pairs of opposites” (152).  The jewel is hard, yang; the lotus is soft, yin.  The eternal, inanimate jewel and transient, living lotus are one and the same; immanence and transcendence can be found in each other.  For a symbol of this unity, we have the Daoist taijitu, the circle with light and dark halves, each containing a dot of the other (Capra 107). 

This unity is displayed prominently in the works of Bradley, Rushdie, and Le Guin.   It is shown when Morgaine sees the pagan Goddess in the statue of the Virgin Mary (Bradley 875). It is shown when the angel Gibreel and devil Chamcha become mirrors of each other (Rushdie 441).  It is shown when Karhide and Orgoreyn enter together into the Ekumen of All Worlds (Le Guin 293).  Each example speaks toward the literary truth of unification.  Moreover, the universe itself seems to favor this sort of unity over dualism, as can be seen by comparing the obsolete “mechanistic” notion of the separation of mind and matter (Capra 22) to the “relativistic” idea that matter is energy (divided by the speed of light squared) (201).  So the first, and perhaps most central, conclusion is that of the unity of opposites. 

The three authors set their works amid the “ascendan[cy]” of yang, political and religious upheaval leading to more violent and rigid societies (Suvin para. 13).  The threat of invasion, war, violence pervades all three books.  Christianity and Islam are described rising, in The Mists of Avalon and The Satanic Verses respectively, in a way that illustrates Campbell’s criticism that “the popular and orthodox expression of both the Mohammedan and the Christian doctrines has been so ferocious that it requires a very sophisticated reading to discern in either mission the operation of love” (159).  

But if the authors depict societies moving toward yang, they themselves respond by moving toward yin.  A voice is given to the women of Arthurian legend (Bradley xi).  Chamcha’s attempts at remaking himself, forcing himself to be what he is not, are thwarted (Rushdie 561); patriarchal Islam is mocked (380).  A softer, saner androgynous society is imagined on Gethen (Le Guin 94).  In these deliberate shifts, the authors reflect their societal context, leading to the second conclusion: that in literature and in culture, the wheel is at last turning toward yin.  Goddess be praised. 

These shifts from yin to yang and vice-versa lend weight to the third conclusion: that the world is constantly changing.  This is the view of both the Daoists and Heraclitus, who “believed in a world of perpetual change, of eternal ‘Becoming.’”  The change is “cyclic” (Capra 20), as the seasons or the process of “birth-and-death” (95).  In literature this often appears as a return journey, a homecoming.  Morgaine and Arthur come back to Avalon (Bradley 868).  Chamcha and Gibreel return to Bombay (Rushdie 552).  Genly and Estraven make it back to Karhide (Le Guin 271).  In each case, the latter character dies as the price of returning. 

The fourth conclusion is both an extension of and a proverbial grain of salt for all the others: real and unreal often cannot be separated.  Between the two fall myths, dreams, stories, the essentially ambiguous nature of which is exploited by Bradley, Rushdie, and Le Guin.  Furthermore, this conflation of “existence and non-existence” applies equally to the universe on an atomic level (Capra 153).  The difficulty in pinning down truth results in the fundamental uncertainty quantified by Heisenberg (158).  Fortunately for the cause of literary analysis, this paradox means, conversely, that truth also can be found in fiction. 

All of this leads back to Dao, to “Logos,” as Heraclitus called it, as the principle behind the universe’s unity (20).  Laozi describes it, does not describe it, thus: 

It is the mother of the universe

I do not know its name

                        so I call it “Tao”

            Forced to name it further

            I call it

                        “The greatness of all things”

                        “The end of all endings”

            I call it

                        “That which is beyond the beyond”

                        “That to which all things return” (38, verse 25)

Dao is the beginning.  Dao is the end.  And yet Dao is the Way:   

            Tao and this world seem different

                        but in truth they are one and the same

            The only difference is in what we call them (14, verse 1)

Ends and means are the same; the journey is the destination.  The path is a circle.  We end where we began, and yet everything has changed. 

Notes

            ¹ For romanization of Chinese, I uniformly employ Hanyu Pinyin; the sources I cite prefer to use Wade-Giles.  This results in slight discrepancies between the text and the citations: Laozi/Lao Tzu, Dao/Tao, etc.  

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