Site Presented By
Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Partly, this is all lovely. I have always been troubled by the sexism of Earthsea, and it especially hurt when I read the trilogy for the first time at 24. But partly, it's as though Tolkien had woken up 30 years later and written a new volume in which Gandalf's wizardry is revealed to be a fundamentally corrupt institution and Bilbo is discovered to have raped a few young hobbits.
I'm not sure beautiful stories should be "corrected," even when they are sexist, hierarchical and gross. It might possibly break a fundamental covenant between writer and reader for the author to "reveal" that her fantasy world was radically different, and far worse, than she had previously told us.
Thankfully, "The Other Wind" is not only about the sexism of Le Guin's earlier world. Well, sexism is a major subject, as is the original, painful division between dragons and humans, who used to be part of the same species (sort of like the traumatic division of the lovers' bodies in Plato's "Symposium"). The exiling of humans and dragons from one another entails the separation of wisdom from wildness, morality from freedom. It is a much smarter version of the Fall, or as the truncated surviving species both call it, Verdunan, the division.
But mostly, "The Other Wind" is about death. Death was a big, big subject in the original Earthsea books as well, but Le Guin approaches it much differently here. And here her emendations do not seem ham-handed, but instructive, deeply interesting and moving. Alder, "a common sorcerer," comes to visit Ged, who has long been without power. Alder has troubling dreams of the dead, especially his wife, who has kissed him across the "wall of stones" that Le Guin made so intensely real in the trilogy. (It is the wall that separates living and dead.)
But Alder loves his wife. He doesn't mind kissing her, only that she is apart from him -- and seems in pain, and begs him to "free her." In the trilogy, the dead lived in a "dry land" where the mother did not touch her baby and lovers passed each other in the streets. In the trilogy, this did not seem so horrible, but here it does -- as though death had come closer to Le Guin and through this novel, to the reader. A bit the way it felt closer to us in New York the other week.
Love, too, is much more central and important than in the other Earthsea books. The loss that all lovers face, even when they are completely constant and loving, is one of the aching subjects here. In the first few pages of the novel, Ged feels "a sadness at the very heart of things," and in fact essential loss, essential grief is the main thing that "The Other Wind" is about -- which makes me respect it immensely.
How to address that sadness is this novel's question. As the book opens, something is changing -- the dead didn't used to be able to touch the living, but now Alder's wife has touched and kissed him. Other dead people come to him in dreams and try to touch him, too. Also, something is happening with our cousins the dragons -- they're attacking the Archipelago en masse, when only a few of them used to attack before. And King Lebannen, still unmarried, has been sent an improbable, Middle Eastern-like, veiled bride from Kargad.
Tenar is the real hero here. She is elderly, and Ged is extremely elderly, and a great deal of the novel's drama lies in whether she will manage to save the world and get home to Ged before one of them passes away.
I love this. It's one of the most moving things Le Guin has written.
Death itself has changed in "The Other Wind "(as Alder has found out). Suddenly, the dead clamor to lose their names, to join with soil and rock, to meld with the world and to be reborn as something else, like the rest of creation. Those who remember the "Tombs of Atuan" will recall that the Kargish say that "the accursed-sorcerers," that is, the people of the Archipelago, do not get reborn, as the Kargish do -- they are damned eternally.
That is, they stay themselves forever, in "the dry land." This turns out to be connected to the fact that they have "true names," the essential foundation of the Archipelago's wizardry. The true sadness of wizardry as it has been practiced in Le Guin's world turns out to be that lovers cannot rejoin each other after death "in rocks, and stones, and trees. "
Le Guin, writing now, finds these separations a problem, and for that I applaud her.
