SIMULTANEITIES V

I'm a few weeks into my year of reading Le Guin, and I'm thinking I'm in better shape than if I'd chosen some drastic new fitness program as my new year's resolution.  400 pages into the 'big book of Earthsea' (a volume that includes the first four books) I'm having no problems moving along and staying interested.  My thoughts on Le Guin are evolving too.

Earthsea is a work written for young adults, as far as I know.  It has an 'overall' map that begins the volume and that would have (I assume) been included with the first work (A Wizard of Earthsea).  Each of the subsequent three books of Earthsea also has its own map, and each focuses in on an 'area' of Earthsea.

The book, I would argue, 'performs' the map, in the sense that it adds detail in the form of names, descriptions, and actions that enrich and augment its virtuality.  There is a very well worked-out philosophy of names/language that evidences Le Guin's spatial anthropological knowledge, and that becomes a 'wizard ethos' and toolkit.

By which, of course, I mean the casting of spells.  The naming side of things in Earthsea is really well worked out. In fact, it is central to the whole endeavour.  But what is actually going on in Le Guin's world? We are pulled ineluctably and delectably into Earthsea through a kind of emotional buy-in, and therefore enter the moral world of its environs. In offering us the 'true' names of its wizards, dragons, and 'regular' folk (if there can be said to be any Earthsea), we become privy to the secret knowledge of spell-casting and magic.

It is about the magic of names. Naming and language are, in fact, the launch-pad for all good works of science fiction and fantasy as Ciscery-Ronay has argued in an early chapter of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, and as Le Guin herself argues in Words are My Matter.  But in Earthsea, the matter is much deeper than a simple parallel with, for example, the invention of Klingon in Star Trek.

Klingon is clearly a well worked-out thing, but it is not as fundamental a thing as having an entire philosophy of language forming part of a virtual world like Earthsea.  I would argue that this makes the latter a much richer thing (though Trekkies might surely disagree).

It's that fundamental philosophy that, I think, drives Le Guin's life-worlds forward and that can draw so many kinds of reader, of all ages, in.

*

In a previous post (the first of this SIMULTANEITIES series) I said I thought Le Guin had a bit of latent racism, but this was in reference to one of her earliest published short stories.

The anthropological aspect and mid-twentieth century timing of Le Guin's oeuvre and the fact of that preceding 'K' in her name lead me to believe I'm not far off in my earlier assessment. But this doesn't count against Le Guin, per se. It counts against the genre, I think, because as many (especially Rieder in his Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction) have pointed out by now, the whole SFF genre has a bit of a problem in this regard (post-colonial SF notwithstanding).

Earthsea is more sophisticated and if I had children I would most certainly be urging them to read this book, but it does of course fall into some of the same traps as Tolkien's great trilogy.  However, Earthsea is peopled with beings that are not quite as clearly delineated by racial features, in my opinion, as LOTR.  Earthsea contains (unless I'm missing something) beings that are all, essentially, one species (except, of course, the dragons). Race appears, for example, only with reference to varying skin colours that people have in different parts of Earthsea.

But there isn't that kind of hard-bounded separation and territorialization of racial characteristics into speciation.  In this, I think Earthsea is 'less racist' than, at least, some of Le Guin's early short stories.

The map might be the reason. It is a very well crafted, and thought-through thing. The virtual world it enables is mostly water, which serves as a liquid boundary between the different 'nations' that compose this, essentially anarchic, world.  Anarchic in a political, Le Guinean, sense.  This sense, and reference, are tenuous, ephemeral, and ever-changing things.