The Poetics of Myth in Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World (1966)

“How can you tell fact from legend, truth from truth?” This opening question structures the plot and poetics of Rocannon’s World (1966), Le Guin’s first published novel. Inspired by Norse mythology in its settings and Native American mythmaking in its effects, this novel retraces a diegetic myth: the creation story of a new world, through the initiatic adventures of a culture hero. This early novel lays the foundations of Le Guin’s wider reflection on the links between myth and SFF (Science Fiction/Fantasy) as it explores the notion of truth through the confrontation and intertwining of two modes of discourse: the rational language of science fiction and the mythical language of fantasy. The novel constantly shifts from one genre to the other, playing with the reader/writer contract. Each genre defamiliarises and revitalises the other, shedding rational light and symbolic shadows on the tragedy of life-in-time and the themes of exile and dispossession. Through this process, Le Guin herself acts the way a myth-teller would in a traditional performance. This first novel prefigures Le Guin’s theory of the “language of the night”—the symbolical and untranslatable language of myth, poetry and fantasy. “A symbol is not the sign of something known,” she comments, “but an indicator of something not known and not expressible otherwise than symbolically.” Myth thus appears not as a foil to scientific discourse, but as its complementary opposite.