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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
But in the process, the novel rather proved Le Guin's earlier point. "Tehanu" is feminist, fascinating and daringly self-critical, but it is also didactic as sin. Its two heroines -- Tenar, now adult and suddenly a housewife-Everywoman, and Tehanu, the abused little girl -- were one-dimensional and generic. They were more embodiments of Le Guin's politics than fully realized characters. Unlike Ged, they barely had shadows.
Eleven years later, Le Guin has come back to Earthsea again. This time she gets it righter. The story collection, "Tales From Earthsea," is bracing. "The Finder," the longest story, also tackles abuse, but embodies it much more successfully in myth. It is chilling and beautiful, a description of the slavery of a wizard -- and most other people in his world -- in the dark years before Roke was founded. Le Guin writes of 20-year-old Otter, forced to be a slave-wizard to a crazy mage named Gelluk who thinks mercury mining and the slow murder of his slaves through disease and starvation are the key to ultimate power and beauty. There are echoes of the Holocaust in Gelluk's exultation in his enslaved refiners' sores and diseased spittle, which he believes add to the mystical powers of the metal . He worships mercury as "the All-King." In the time Le Guin is writing about, wizards -- men and women both -- are nearly all forced to serve wealth and power.
Le Guin's descriptions of abuse in "The Finder" are so traumatic that they can almost not be read. Otter is constantly tortured with spells and beatings, and led around on a leash to do magic for Gelluk. A woman slave he meets, Anieb, is bald, naked, toothless and covered with sores -- that's what a 20 year-old looks like after only a year of labor as a mercury cooker.
Otter tries to find trust in the terrible place. There is immense beauty in the poems Le Guin makes up as nonsense scraps-nursery rhymes that are the record, hundreds of years later, of Otter's efforts to flee. (They are a record the way that Humpty-Dumpty is a record.) Those efforts depend directly on his cooperation with women -- some caring, rebellious women in particular, but also the entire gender at a time when women are the most oppressed people in his world -- to save themselves and him:
There was a wise man on our hill,
Who found his way to work his will.
He changed his shape, he changed his name,
But ever the other will be the same.
So runs the water away, away,
So runs the water away.
I'm not going to give away the ending, but Le Guin goes into the founding of Roke, which is accomplished -- surprise! -- mostly by women. Much of the collection (as well as the novel, "The Other Wind") details the subsequent history of Roke and how it came to ban women students and teachers. In the process we learn how "higher magery" itself came to be an art expected only of men, how the institution of Archmage was founded -- and how it is an institution much more like that of Archbishop or Pope than readers might have imagined.
Perhaps my favorite revelation is the one about sex, and why throughout the Earthsea trilogy all the wizards (even sexy Ged) didn't have it. We learn that the Archipelago wizards began putting spells on themselves and everybody else to keep the people around them from thinking about sex. This was after male mages decided wizardry should be purified of sexual energies and banned women from the school.
A nice story called "Darkrose and Diamond" is about wizard who falls in love even though he is supposed to be celibate, and also about the false idea that magic depends on cutting oneself off from all sorts of other powers -- sexual, creative, parental. Delightful, also, is the factoid, given in an appendix, that Erreth-Akbe and Maharion were "heart's brothers," which apparently means gay lovers. This would be roughly equivalent to C.S. Lewis's Oyarsa of Mars falling in love with his Oyarsa of Jupiter. A compelling final story, "Dragonfly," is about the first girl who tries to get into Roke after the ban.
