“We’ll need writers who can remember freedom.” (Photo credit: Benjamin Reed/WriterPictures via theNerdPatrol)
I learned about death on the island of Roke.
Not about its existence of course: the smallest child learns quickly that all things end. No, on that vividly-imagined island I started to learn its nature. I learned about death’s abruptness; its darkness; and above all about its sublime and harmonious necessity. My young and curious self was coaxed to the island by gentle and lyrical words. I left Roke a couple of chapters later in a state of delighted shock.
I am writing of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea: a revolutionary and spiritual epiphany disguised as a children’s novel. From the moment that Le Guin’s gifted but arrogant young protagonist, the wizard-in-training Ged, allows his pride to drive him to summon the dead in order to impress and frighten his peers, it becomes obvious that something special is about to happen in the pages – indeed the world – unfolding before the reader’s eyes. The spell inevitably goes wrong. A dead woman’s spirit flickers briefly and agonisingly from her slumber, and instead a terrifying Shadow erupts from Ged’s body, tearing a great wound in his face. The other boys scream in horror, a wizard is killed trying to fend off the Shadow, and Ged himself collapses into a coma. The Shadow escapes from Roke in order to evolve. Ged, recovering but traumatised, hides from this malign creature at first – but in time he recognises that he cannot do so forever. He pledges to pursue his Shadow across the waters and islands of Earthsea, and correct the evil that he has unleashed. But as he does so, a disturbing realisation slowly emerges: that the Shadow is taking on the form of Ged himself. It is gradually acquiring and violating the protagonist’s very self – his body, his power, his name. The Shadow is consuming him.
And here the most radical lesson for my younger self struck home. Le Guin in her skill and wisdom had created a villain that was utterly terrifying in its familiarity. This antagonist was no dark lord, no invading army, no unknowable external force. It was a reflection of the protagonist himself and, by extension, of the reader. A product of human folly: of temper, and vanity, and lack of forethought. If we had been in Ged’s weathered boots, any one of us could have lost our temper and, in that moment of weakness, unleashed such agonising darkness. The Shadow is a reminder of death, a harbinger of evil mistakes to come; and it resides in all of us, just waiting to burst out.
My younger self was stunned by this, and impressed beyond words. But there was more to come. At the end of the saga, out at the furthest reaches of the wide sea, Ged’s final confrontation with the Shadow results not in one fighting the other, but in one naming the other – identifying the other, embracing the other – to become a frighteningly beautiful whole. My young mind twisted inside out. In learning about death and darkness, I was taught about life and light.
In some ways I regret that I did not return to the world of Earthsea until many years later, but in other ways I do not. Older and allegedly wiser, I was better able to recognise the intricate and radical nuances in the thinking of Le Guin. Each addition to the Earthsea Cycle struck a deeply-resounding chord. The Tombs of Atuan, seen by many as a more feminist reimagining of A Wizard of Earthsea, underlined the stifling expectations pressed on young woman as they navigate through life towards their own understanding of the balance between light and dark. It is told through the eyes of the young priestess Tenar as disruptive intrigue in her conservative all-female temple leads to a painful questioning of her faith and her world. In The Farthest Shore, the inexplicable ebbs and flows of history are addressed as the reader witnesses the world of Earthsea falling into a slow but steady decline: magic is seeping from the land, minds are dulling, and societies are falling into apathy and aimlessness in an upsettingly familiar manner. And yet our protagonists see a glimmer of hope and cling to it as they tour the disillusioned isles, and strive through the silence to reach the music of the future. In Tehanu, published in 1990 (eighteen years after The Farthest Shore), the island-hopping scale of the previous adventures is sacrificed to focus on an agonisingly personal tale on the pursuit of happiness and comfort, in a profoundly unhappy and uncomfortable world. The villain is no supernatural force, but a rapist, who haunts the dreams of the main characters and plagues their waking thoughts.
The radical vision and bravery of Le Guin’s writing builds a vibrant tapestry behind her otherwise clear and gentle prose. Her dedication to the art of fantasy in the face of sceptical “realists” is a guiding light for those of us who seek to preserve the flame of childhood imagination and use it to better illuminate the cruel and beautiful realm of adulthood. Her work transports us to other worlds: yet there is a political and social edge to her otherworldly themes that infuses her tales with an acute understanding of worldly injustices. The prominence of non-white and non-male characters in her stories is not a naïve utopianism but an honest assessment of how the world is, or can be when traditional narratives are challenged. Perhaps the critical political philosophy of Le Guin’s oeuvre is best represented not in her fantasy, but in her science fiction. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the reader is thrust onto the planet Winter, where gender does not exist except when the reproductive cycle of the ‘ambisexual’ population swings around. The potential of this gender-fluid setting is utterly immense, especially considering that it was published in 1969, yet Le Guin with admirable restraint keeps the book punchy enough to raise challenging questions about the place of sex and gender in social development without delving into excessive speculation. The fact that Winter is, as its name suggests, gripped by a harsh weather cycle that makes organised war and authoritarian nation-building highly impractical renders The Left of Hand of Darkness’s central issue unanswerable: Do traditional gender roles explain the persistence of war and authoritarianism? The book’s illusiveness is wonderfully frustrating.
The Word for World is Forest is less ambiguous. The 1972 novella is a fiery critique of American and European foreign policy in the era of the Vietnam War, in which the peaceful society of Athshe becomes irreversibly corrupted by mass violence for the first time in order to survive the industrial colonising efforts of the humans from Earth. Long before James Cameron’s Avatar sent nature-loving CGI aliens flinging themselves across the world’s cinema screens with shallow abandon, Ursula K. Le Guin was using The Word for World is Forest to fiercely dissect the culture of rampant neoimperialism.
It is tempting to delve in to more of the myriad themes that colour Le Guin’s universe. The power of names, identities, language, silence, violence, and nature flows through her thoughts. But ultimately, I must return to that one philosophy that struck my younger self on the mythical island of Roke: that balance is present, and vital, everywhere. That Shadows cannot exist without light.
“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.”
(‘The Creation of Éa’ in A Wizard of Earthsea)
The influence of philosophical Taoism and of the upbringing provided by Le Guin’s anthropologist parents shines in her appreciation of harmony and cultural diversity. Her worlds seamlessly blend teachings from Native American religion, Northern European mythology, and beyond. Her approach was broad-minded but fiercely visionary. Even into old age, the quiet ferocity of her wit and intellect was apparent in her writing: there was a cheeky flash behind her eyes as she blasted profiteer mass retailers and praised her fellow artists and creatives while accepting the ‘Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters’ in 2014 at the age of 84.
“Hard times are coming,” she carefully mused before her enchanted audience, “when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”
When I heard that Ursula K. Le Guin had passed away, I was gripped by the sadness of a lost companion, even though I had never come close to seeing her in the flesh. Her writing has spoken to me so profoundly, the connection between my mind and the book in my hand felt something akin to friendship. The news of her death stung as though that connection had been abruptly severed.
But as the fact settled in my mind, the lessons I learned alongside Ged on that fantasy island of Roke came back to me. I hope it is not too intrusive to believe that Le Guin, so eloquent in her appreciation of life, was graceful in her approach to death. The conclusion to her 2014 acceptance speech rings with even greater significance now that Ursula K. Le Guin has passed away, seemingly at a time when the world is most in need of her:
“I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. It’s name is freedom.”
As this beautiful reward is threatened in Europe, America, and far beyond, and as Le Guin’s harmonious vision seemingly fades further from realisation, it falls to us, the “realists of a larger reality” to look the Shadow in the eye. We must, with childish shock and wonder, seek to observe its true and frightening nature.
–
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. And very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
(1929 – 2018)
Ishneich 