Rich
Erlich, ENG 210, 113 Reformatted
1997/98
StGd WWF
Study Guide for Ursula K. Le
Guin's
The Word for World Is Forest
1. Extensive bibliographies of works by
and about Le Guin can be found in the following places:
Bittner, James
W. Approaches to the Fiction of
Ursula K. Le Guin. Ann Arbor:
UMI Research P, 1984.
Cosell,
Elizabeth Cummins. Ursula K. Le
Guin: A Primary and Secondary
Bibliography. Boston: Hall, 1983.
Levin,
Jeff. "Bibliographic
Checklist of the works of Ursula K. Le Guin" in Le Guin's collection, The
Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ed. and introd.: Susan Wood. New York: Putnam's Sons, 1979.
Tymn, Marshall
B. "Ursula K. Le Guin: A
Bibliography." In Ursula
K. Le Guin. Ed.: Joseph D.
Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg.
New York: Taplinger, 1979.
There is "A
Survey of Le Guin Criticism" by James W. Bittner in Ursula K. Le Guin:
Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, ed.: Joe De Bolt (Port
Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1979). This is useful for early responses to Le Guin's work.
Explicit
commentary on WWF can be found in Gary K. Wolfe, "The Word For
World is Forest" in Survey of Science Fiction Literature, ed.:
Frank N. Magill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1979), V, 2492-96. See also Douglas Barbour,
"Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin," Science-Fiction
Studies (=SFS) 1 (Spring 1975): 164-73; and Thomas J. Remington,
"A Touch of Difference, A Touch of Love: Theme in Three Stories by Ursula
K. Le Guin, "Extrapolation" 18 (December 1976): 28-41—on
WWF, "Nine Lives," and "Vaster than Empires and More
Slow." For background, see
the two Ursula K. Le Guin anthologies cited above, plus Le Guin's own
comments in the collection Language of the Night. Note that both SFS and Extrapolation,
the two major SF journals in North America, have done special Le Guin issues: SFS
#7 = Vol. 2, Part 3 (November 1975) and Extrapolation, Vol. 21, No. 3
(Fall, 1980). Also: Richard D.
Erlich, Coyote's Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo P,
eventually).
2. Anyone interested in researching
scientific dream research in WWF should see me; also see me if you'd be
interested in the "dream time" as studied by anthropologists.
3. Afterword to WWF in Again,
Dangerous Visions, Vol. 1:
Writing is usually hard work
for me, and enjoyable; this story
was easy to write, and disagreeable.
It left me no choice.
Writing it was a little like taking dictation from a boss with
ulcers. What I wanted to write
about was the forest and the dream; that is, I wanted to describe a certain
ecology from within, and to play with some of Hadfield's and Dement's ideas
about the function of dreaming-sleep and the uses of dream. But the boss wanted to talk about the
destruction of ecological balance and the rejection of emotional balance. He didn't want to play. He wanted to moralize. I am not very fond of moralistic tales,
for they often lack charity. I
hope this one does not. I can only
say—having been forced to endure the experience—that it is even
more painful to be Don Davidson than it is to be Raj Lyubov. (126)
4. The "Afterword" was not
reprinted when WWF was printed by itself, as a novel (New York: Berkley,
1976)—the edn. which all my citations below will be to. Anyway, it may be significant that the
short story came out in 1972, while America was still adventuring in Indochina,
and that the novel came out in 1976—when America was getting out of
Indochina, with the general approval of the American people. I.e., such an afterword may have been
(commercially?) necessary in 1972 and not so necessary in 1976. In that case, then, Le Guin is engaging
in a bit of disingenuousness in her Afterword, a bit of disingenuousness
standard with satirists. She gave
Don Davidson hell—and then charitably noted that "it is even more
painful to be Don Davidson than it is to be Raj Lyubov." To say what I suggest, however, is not
to deny the last part of the Afterword: Le Guin may recognize Davidson's pain,
even as she gives him righteous hell.
5. Note, then, that part of WWF is
a savage satire of American involvement in Indochina, attacking our defoliation
programs, our arrogance, our ignorance of the Vietnamese people, and what Le
Guin strongly suggests was our racist attitudes—attitudes that led to a
policy of slavery moving toward genocide in WWF if not literally in
Indochina. (It's fair play for a
satirist to exaggerate, so long as the exaggeration is based on something the
target is really guilty of.
American slang terms like "gook," "slope,"
"slant," etc. clearly indicate racist aspects to our fighting in
'Nam.)
6. Brute force criticism, chapter
by chapter:
Chapter
1: Le Guin's narrator is omniscient with the major characters and
any other characters whose heads Le Guin wants to get into. The story is told from the points of
view of the three major characters: Davidson (chs. 1, 4, and 7), Selver (chs.
2, 6, and 8), and Lyubov (chs. 3 and 5).
NAFL:
Nearly As Fast as Light ship.
p.
1: Note Davidson's attitude
toward women: "prime
human stock." Note also that
he recognizes what's happened to "Dump Island" without feeling
responsible and also without feeling a whole lot of sadness or regret.
p.
2: Davidson is on "New
Tahiti"—a significant
name for the Terrans to use—"to tame it." Of all the different divisions of
people into "two kinds of people" one of the most significant is
those who accept the version of Creation where humans "have dominion . . .
over all the earth" (Genesis 1.26—P Code) and the version in which
God creates a garden and puts Man (=Adam) into the garden "to dress it and
to keep it" (Genesis 2.15—J Code). Le Guin is into Daoism and ecology and the J-Code version
(although she's an atheist who talks of gods); many of her villains and
negative characters are into dominance and the P-Code version. Le Guin seems to
see—correctly—that the desire to "have dominion" over the
land goes well with the macho desire to have dominion over people.
pp.
2-3: Note Davidson's attitude
toward "creechies":
"he could tame any of them" (my emphasis). As the story unfolds, does Davidson
turn out to be ignorant of creechie psychology? Do Davidson and those like him make this world into "a
paradise, a real Eden"—or do they work to destroy the Garden? Consider the possibility that trying to
dominate the world only leads to destroying the world (a favorite idea among
the Daoist philosophers and among contemporary ecologists). Throughout, note people's attitudes
toward the forest. Davidson wants to cut it down.
p.
4: Right on cue, the ecologist
Kees enters to give his views.
Recall that we've just been told—from Davidson's point of
view—that Kees had been right about "Dump Island" (2). In satire, subtlety is not a virtue.
p.
5: Note Davidson's contempt for
"euros" like Kees.
Davidson's contempt for anyone at all alien turns out to be an important
part of his psychology.
Some
place in through here try to figure out if Davidson's name might be significant. "Don" is a standard sort of
masculine American name. It's the
diminutive of "Donald," from the Scotch-Gaelic word for "world
ruler"; it's identical in appearance to the Spanish knightly title, don. "Davidson" means "son of
David", and David, of course, was the great Jewish warrior-king. If Le Guin wants us to see an allusion
to David, "Davidson" becomes quite ironic: little David fights the
giant Goliath; Davidson's big battles are with little Selver. King David was indeed into sex and
violence, but he was also the great singer of psalms, a man with enough
humility and self-confidence to risk his royal dignity dancing before the Ark
of the Covenant. Davidson may
emulate the worst of David and totally ignore the good things in the great
King. (Note, though, that Le Guin
might not approve of David at all.
In The Lathe of Heaven her presentation of the
Judeo-Christian-Rationalistic-Western tradition is quite negative.)
p.
6: Note the term "realistic";
it's quite important in WWF.
p.
7: Images of darkness and light are very important in Le Guin's works. She agrees with the Chinese idea of
Yin-Yang: the balance of darkness and light, soft and hard, passive and
active (inaction and action), female and male, etc. Davidson sees men on "New Tahiti" working "to
end the darkness." (Note that
Yin-Yang is the basis for everything we can perceive. It includes, by definition, all oppositions, so you can add
all sorts of things to the list above: sleeping and waking, unconsciousness and
consciousness, death and life.)
pp.
8 f: Hain-Davenant: In Le
Guin's "future history" this really is the home planet for all the
species and forms of the galactic genus Homo.
ETs: Extraterrestrials, non-Terrans.
Obknanawi
Nabo: He doesn't have much of
a character in WWF, but he does have a function. He shows us here that not all Terrans
are downright evil. Try to figure
out what other functions (if any) he serves.
slavery: Note that Davidson sees non-Terran
humans as non-human. Throughout,
note people's attitudes towards aliens.
p.
12: Note Davidson's genocidal plan for the "creechies." Note the obscene euphemism of
"Voluntary Labor" for enslaving the native humans on "New
Tahiti." (As George Orwell
points out in "Politics and the English Language," such euphemisms
are common when people commit atrocities and would rather not admit—even
to themselves sometimes—that they are engaging in atrocities. Euphemisms are very common during wartime.)
p.
13: Note the colors and try to figure out what (if anything) they mean. Is there some system of color imagery
in WWF? (Real question.)
p.
14: Davidson thinks well of technology and patriotism.
What should we think of them in the world of WWF? (For Le Guin on patriotism, see The
Left Hand of Darkness; for technology see Lathe of Heaven
and—for technology's possibilities for good—The Dispossessed.)
p.
15: In the Yin-Yang symbol, the feminine Yin contains a speck of Yang, and the
masculine Yang contains a speck of Yin.
Carl Jung tells us that every human male contains a feminine portion
(the Anima) and every human female contains a masculine portion (the
Animus). It is probably very
dangerous for a woman to deny her masculine portion or a man to deny his
feminine portion. We would expect
a man who denies his Anima to project it upon others, therefore, possibly, to
see other men as effeminate. (Jung
is undoubtedly correct in noting that each of us contains a Shadow: a
primitive, "animal" portion similar to the Freudian Id. People who deny their Shadows almost
inevitably project them upon others, seeing their own evil or amorality or
"animality" in the people around them or in people alien enough for
them to see as inferiors. I will
note that I have "met" both my Shadow and Anima; I'll assert that
denying them will do bad things to one's head.)
p.
17: Key word, given great stress: "Aliens."
Note that the "creechies" are naked creatures, living in a
forest/Garden. This might
symbolize "Noble Savages" and/or some sort of unfallen
innocents. (Such an interpretation
would go along with, say, Denis Diderot's vision of Terran Tahitians in his Supplement
to Bougenville's Voyage.) Le
Guin, however, is far too learned in anthropology to believe in any sentimental
vision of noble savages. She's
fond, though, of getting us to sympathize with aliens, thereby getting us to
see our world from a new point of view.
p.
18: To Davidson, "Creechies all looked alike . . ."—he's a
racist, all right.
p.
19: Davidson sees the attack as "a crazy bad dream, a
nightmare." This introduces
the dream/reality motif. Note it
well.
p.
20: Selver sings over Davidson.
Cf. singing contests
as a vent for aggressivity among the Eskimos (the Inuit and other tribes). Cf. also the observation of several
ethologists (including Konrad Lorenz and possibly mentioned by Robert Ardrey)
that some social species are actively inhibited from harming conspecifics if
the defeated animal assumes an appeasement posture. (The most spectacular example of this is in wolves.)
p.
20: Note Davidson's interpretation of Selver's actions, and those of Selver's
followers.
p.
21: "rat extermination":
In the Nazi propaganda film, The Eternal Jew, the Diaspora is pictured
as a bunch of rats infesting greater and greater portions of the world. Le Guin needn't have seen this
particular bit of racist pornography; the idea is common in racist propaganda
and has a certain perverse logic to it.
If a man or woman wants to commit genocide and retain any self respect .
. . . Well, those can't be people
we're going to kill; that would be murder.
Chapter
2: Selver's point of view
p.
25: The standard translation of Dao—and the one Le Guin uses in City
of Illusions and Lathe—is "Way"; that is probably not
what the word means here, but be sure to circle any "way" you come
across in Le Guin's works. Note
here the description of the forest; there is a possibility that forest is a
metaphor for mind in WWF (that's one of the functions for the forest in
her "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" [see Ian Watson essay in SFS
#7]).
p.
26: God: Note that the
old man takes Selver for a god; he's correct. Figure out early on what "god" means in this
novel. Note all through the novel
the use of dreams by the native humans on "New Tahiti."
pp.
29-30: Summary of past action from Selver's point of view; compare and contrast
Davidson's version. (Truth, for Le Guin, is many-faceted; we must see
it from many angles. Finally, it
is up to the reader to determine truth, through use of imagination. [See
introd. to Avon, 1976 edn. of The Left Hand of Darkness—also,
p. 1 of that novel by Le Guin.]
Note, though, that Le Guin is not the sort whose mind is so open the
wind blows through; there ain't nothin'subtle about the tone of this novel;
Selver's version of things will usually be right; Davidson is generally wrong
in his vision of things.)
pp,
31-34: Interview between Coro Mena and Selver:
Old
Tongue: In A Wizard of Earthsea this is the True Speech; for humans,
but not for dragons, it is very difficult to lie in True speech, since True
Speech gives things their right names.
(Note "true speech" as "language" of unconscious
[and of dreams?] in Lacanian psychological theory.)
"Do
men kill men, except in madness: Does any beast kill its own kind?" (33):
Until now, the answers to these questions on "New Tahiti" would have
been "No". On Terra, in
our times, the answer to both is "Yes." We are prepared for the change in Selver's world by Coro Mena's
correct statement, "The world is always new . . . however old its
roots."
Selver
on "yumens", p. 33: Note that Terrans are not inhibited from striking
"a bowed neck"; cf. the submission posture of wolves, with neck
outstretched—and bowing as an act of deference in many Terran cultures.
".
. . the way we had to go was the right way and led us home": One of Le Guin's
favorite sayings is "True Journey Is Return" (The Dispossessed). Note that "way" here can
indeed refer to Dao (33).
"For
you've done what you had to do, and it was not right" (33-34): A very
powerful line for Le Guin.
Ordinarily for her, human duty is to do what one must do, and
cannot do any other way. This is a
Daoist idea, stated explicitly in The Farthest Shore.
pp.
34-36: What kind of god is Selver?. Note the use of "must"—and the division of
political labor between the native men and women on "New Tahiti."
p.
38: Note the technical stuff on dreaming and "the diurnal
cycle." Real question for me:
is the cycle for the Athsheans the same as ours?
pp.
42-43: Note the image of making the forest into a "dry beach." A Garden/Desert motif is fairly common,
I think, among the Hebrew prophets and moralists of other peoples familiar with
gardens and deserts. Note the
question of whether a whole people can be insane; I'm not sure just how this
question is answered—if it is—in WWF.
pp.
44-45: Selver on Lyubov and "yumens" (=Terrans): Lots of key words
and ideas here: "roots," sanity," "must,"
"dream," "men" (often="humans" of both sexes in
Le Guin), "gods within"—which we Terrans try perversely
"to uproot and deny."
There may be an explicitly Jungian (or Freudian) idea here. In any event it's good psychology: to
deny major archetypes in the subconscious is an invitation to evil actions and
mental instability—forms of madness, sometimes.
p.
46: There's an obvious re-birth motif in WWF. I'm not sure what it signifies and want your comments on
it. (There's a good topic here for
a paper.)
p.
47: Note that Selver has had no time for solitude and inaction (in the literal,
not-necessarily-Daoist sense of "inaction"). Such involvement in continuous action
would be a bad thing in classical Chinese Daoism. I will hypothesize that "little time for the . . .
running of the great dreams" would be very bad in the theories of Hadfield
and Dement—for sure it's a bad thing in the theories of Carl. G. Jung.
p.
48: The "Tree"
coro Mena refers to here may be the World-Tree, Yggdrasil—the great
ash-tree in Nordic mythology, the support of the universe. Note that one of the roots of Yggdrasil
goes down to the land of Hel, the kingdom of the dead (Edith Hamilton, Mythology,
ch. 23). Coro Mena suggests a much
more positive career for Selver than Selver sees for himself.
(In The Farthest Shore one must go
very far, even too far, to find victory.)
Note the imagery of fertility and renewal—all those trees—in
Coro Mena's vision.
Chapter
3: Lyubov's point of view. Note that Lyubov thinks of the
Athsheans as Athsheans. Lyubov is
an anthropoligist, and Le Guin usually approves of anthropologists; she is,
however, well aware of Lyubov's weaknesses.
p.
52: A bit later we'll hear of the possibility that Athshean culture is
stagnant. Here we see that the
Athsheans have progressed a great deal with what we'd consider the Oriental
skills of controlling one's own head— a process connected more with being
than with doing (in the Western idea of "doing").
pp.
52-54: The Council at Terran Headquarters on Athshe.
p.
52: Note allusion of Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress,"
the source of the title to Le Guin's "Vaster than Empires."
p.
53: Le Guin's Cetian tale is The Dispossessed; as of l988/89 she hasn't
directly handled the Hainish (most of her "Hainish Cycle" takes place
on worlds on the periphery of Hainish expansion and planting of human
life). Note well that she talks here
of the Cetians as one people; that is an important point for her later novel, The
Dispossessed. (In The
Dispossessed the Cetians are divided, occupying Anarres and Urras.)
p.
58: ". . . the dry, intoxicating odor of power": Le Guin is a communist anarchist in her
politics and freely admits to being a Romantic in her writings. Still, she's no wildly optimistic
romantic like William Wordsworth or the Moody Blues (British poet and singing
group, respectively); she's quite aware of the human Will to Power.
p.
59: Note Davidson's "image of himself as the totally virile man";
note also the reference to a posture that actively inhibits aggression (an idea
Konrad Lorenz develops in On Aggression).
pp.
60-61: The inhibiting position
described here is identical to the position that inhabits aggression in
wolves—more exactly, the position that inhibits the victorious wolf from
killing, harming, or even touching a wolf that "admits" his
defeat. The singing business is right
out of the customs of most Eskimo groups.
(For Le Guin and K. Lorenz, note that "The Athsheans are
carnivores, they hunt animals": Lorenz argues against Raymond Dart and
Robert Ardery that aggression is the same as predation—and argues that it's unfortunate that
we do not act more like dangerous beast of prey, animals who usually
develop inhibitions against killing conspecifics.)
pp.
61-62: I'm not sure to what extent the Athsheans are "a static
uniform society"—they don't seem all that homogeneous from the
description on p. 36, and they certainly are very advanced at being (as
in dreaming and other introverted skills). Still, there may be a sense in which the Athsheans need to
speed up change, and Selver's crusade against the Terrans may help them do
that. (Ca. 1950 Eric Hoffer
suggested that Western imperialism might bring the East out of its stagnation
by goading Orientals into mass movements to expel the foreigners [in his
well-known book, The True Believer]. Harlan Ellison relates war with progress in his 1968 story,
"Asleep: With Still Hands.")
p.
62: On pp. 44-45 Selver had questioned the humanity of the Terrans; here, Col.
Dongh and Lyubov begin a
similar discussion—ending with Dongh's statement that the Athsheans
aren't human beings in his "frame of reference" (64). Note the irony that Dongh is from Viet
Nam. Note also the logic of the
Cetian, Or, that Athsheans as carnivores kill animals and would have no moral
qualms about killing (though, presumably, not eating) animals that talk and
look sort of human, but who have "ignored the responses, the rights and
obligations of non-violence."
The logic, history, and anthropology are quite correct in this argument:
insofar as we see aliens as radically Other—non-human—we will lose
our inhibitations (innate and cultural) against killing them.
p.
64: Again, note the irony of Dongh's considering the "creechies"
sub-or non-human; not so long ago his people were "gooks" to
Americans. Note that Or's
"Hainish stock" business is correct.
p.
65: The Ansible is for
real, and so is the League.
p.
68: Lyubov thinks that "To the Hainish . . . civilisation [sic:
British "s"] came naturally." Robert Ardrey argues in African Genesis that
civilization does not come naturally to us: that it is a veneer over our
animal nature. (In The Left
Hand of Darkness, Le Guin calls this veneer metaphor very dangerous.)
p.
70: Throughout, note the diction of the military men; note the climax position
for "genocide."
p.
72: Here we get the title for the book.
An anthropologist like Lyubov should understand the significance of "The
Athshean word for world
is also the word for forest."
Words often give us important clues to the (world-)views of people and
peoples (another reason why it's significant that Dongh et al. often use
English so badly).
pp.
72-74: Note the good points and the weaknesses of Lyubov. His head is on right, but he lacks
confidence and courage. The use of
"Creechie Problem" is loaded; cf. "Final Solution to the Jewish
Problems" and more recent references to the "Black Problem," the
Palestinian Problem," the "Catholic Problem" in Northern
Ireland, etc.
Chapter
4: Davidson's point of
view.
pp.
75-76: Note sanity question juxtaposed to the ansible business. Strange things may be happening to
Davidson's mind in through here.
It would be logical to say, We predicted the ICD, and the ETs
used the prediction to pass off a phony device on us. It's also rational to think that the ETs might've put phony
settings on the ansible so they could start giving orders to the Terrans on
Athshe. Still, there's something
strange about the way Davidson's mind jumps from theory to theory to arrive at
the sort of conclusion that Lyubov says they'd come to immediately anyway: as a
defense mechanism of compartmentalized minds (see pp. 66-67).
pp.
78-80: Note Davidson's ideas on treason, aliens,
and sanity. Note his animal associations for
humanoids. Mr. Or, the Cetian, has
already worked out the logic for us: one exterminates rats. What is Davidson's idea of
"normalcy"? What should we
infer from the fact that of the "whole creechie work-force . . . . Not one
had stayed"? Note well that
Davidson is quite right about the military threat of the "Creechies"
to Centralville; Selver will, indeed, use those "handy new recruits, who
knew the layout of the town."
Still, is Davidson's "final solution" better than what Dongh
does in releasing the Athshean slaves?
Note well Davidson's Messiah-complex. (Another reason why we might see "Davidson" as
significant: the Messiah was or will be—depending on whom you
ask—of the Davidic line of descent [see Luke 1.67-69, Matthew 1.1-17]).
p.
81: The Romantics' great contribution to moral, or ethical, theory was in
pointing out that it takes imagination to feel with another person, to
put yourself in another's place and feel compassion for him or her. Le Guin here shows the possibility of
wicked imagination, in the older tradition: "And the LORD saw that the
wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the
thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (Genesis 6.5). It is very important for Le Guin's
vision of the source of evil that she juxtaposes Davidson's wicked imaginings
with the macho theory that "The fact is, the only time a man is
really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another
man."
pp.
82-83: Note Davidson on the "damn forest," Major Muhamed's
selfrighteousness (projection by Davidson?), IQ, treason, and making "this
world safe for the Terran way of life." For the last cf. our going off to World War I (and other
silly or unjust wars) to "Make the world safe for democracy," to
"protect the American way of life," etc.
p.
84: Davidson is an exponent of conspiracy theory; this is significantly
juxtaposed with what even Davidson recognizes as a sort of paranoia about
"creechies" in Ecological Control Officer Atranda.
P.
85: War as a game, played by older boys with "war toys" was a popular
idea in the late 1960s. The idea
of "a real bond among men" engaging in hunting and/or warfare is
argued by Ardrey in African Genesis and by Lionel Tiger in Men in
Groups.
pp.
85-86: Davidson is less inhibited by a submission posture than some of his men
are. Note here that Davidson sees
homosexuality and killing "creechies" as "clean" (Le
Guin isn't militantly straight, but in her early works she mildly disapproved
of homosexuality among adults).
Chapter
5: Lyubov's point of
view.
p.
87: The bond of friendship
is a major theme with Le Guin.
Lyubov's friendship with Selver is antithetical to the idea of "the
Creechie Threat" (cf. "Communist Threat," "Red
Menace," "Yellow Peril.").
pp.
88-89: Note Lyubov's getting used to the forest; that speaks well for his adaptability, his
willingness to return to a true home for humans, and his ability to balance
consciousness with unconsciousness.
Note also the difference between Terran and Athshean metaphors for Man.
pp.
90-91: Lyubov is a good anthropoligist—he really gets to know the Athsheans. Note that he's a moral man, willing to
give things their correct names: he talks of slaves, not "The
Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Corps" (63).
pp.
92-93: The problem of scientific objectivity is raised here. Can any scientist "always leave his own shadow
out of the picture he draws"?
Can an anthropologist be a friend and a detached observer of the
people he studies? Is it right to
merely observe other people, as objects?
In The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin specifically alludes to
Martin Buber's I and Thou, and in most of her works she sees as central
to the integration of alien peoples a personal bond between a pair of aliens
(an I-Thou relationship, as opposed to an I-It relationship). The decline of an effective pair
bond between Lyubov and Selver foreshadows the lack of integration at the end
of WWF.
Note
here the possiblilty that Le Guin is trying to answer the question of how
humans can go from individual aggression to "group enmity." In African Genesis Robert Ardrey
talks about the "amity-enmity complex" (amity for the in-group,
enmity for the Others); in On Aggression Konrad Lorenz talks about
"militant enthusiasm" taking over a social group. Among nonhuman primates, one of the
things needed for effective group aggression is a strongly aggressive
"alpha ape"; among humans, a strong human leader is needed. Lyubov's inability here to figure out
what "element was missing" may stem from his current ignorance about
the function of gods among the Athsheans.
p.
94: Note the utter centrality of friendship—friendship "too deep to be
touched by moral doubt." Note
also Lyubov as a kind of savior, completing a trinity of "saviors":
Davidson (in his own mind), Lyubov (the one who saved Selver's life), and
Selver (the god who will save his people at such great cost to himself, the
Terrans, and the Athsheans). Note
very well the "definition" of "racial hatred" as to treat
someone "not as 'you' but as 'one of them'." The antidote to such hatred might be
touch.
p.
95: Venus Genetrix: The
Great Mother in her kindly, fertile form.
Radically: literally means, "from the root" (Latin
radix="root").
p.
96: Selver's warning to Lyubov foreshadows the attack on Centralville. It's significant that Lyubov really
doesn't understand the warning—he also fails to mention it in his report
to Dongh et al.
pp.
97-98: Le Guin has no illusions about easy friendship among alien peoples; even
differences in relative size can make friendship difficult. Note again the social-political set-up
among the Athsheans.
p.
99: Note very well "the fine balance of reason and dream" (my
emphasis). Le Guin is committed to
the Daoist/ecological idea of balance.
pp.
99-100: Lyubov correctly
understands the psychology of slavery, and how people in servile roles learn "how to be
invisible." Note well the
relationship between Selver and Lyubov as a possiblity for "bridging the
gap between two languages, two cultures, two species of the genus
Man." I'm not sure what two
languages, two cultures, two species of the genus Man." I'm not sure what to make of "the
Athshean significance of the word 'dream,' which was also the word for
'root'"—the "key to the kingdom of the forest
people." I know, however,
that dreams are very important for Le Guin in general (Lathe of Heaven, Farthest
Shore) and for WWF in particular; roots are also very important in
her thinking (see The Earthsea Trilogy).
Try to figure out the significance of the lines I quote here. (The "key to the kingdom"
alludes to Jesus' lines to Peter beginning with "Thou art Peter, and upon
this rock I shall establish my Church" and including giving to Peter
"the keys to kingdom of heaven.")
pp.
102-103: Lorenz argues—and Hoffer quotes Hitler to the effect-that
whatever instinctive "blood-thirst" people might have is soon slaked,
usually long before we've killed anyone or even drawn much blood. (As Lorenz says, we rarely want to kill
an opponent; we want him to grovel before us, admitting our superiority.) Note Le Guin's comments on suicide and
murder, and see if her comments on repetitive murder seem to refer to Macbeth. (Some of Le Guin's ideas on macho are
similar to those of Lady Macbeth; I can't justify the feeling, but I think Le
Guin likes Macbeth and alludes to it in subtle ways. Then again, I may just be most familiar
with macho theory from my own study of Macbeth.)
p.
104: "Creechie-lover": Cf. "Nigger-lover." Note that Lyubov "could not set a
possible, general good above Selver's imperative need. You can't save a people by selling your
friend." In the debate on
ends and means, Le Guin sides with the "soft-hearted" school, or with
the communist anarchists against the Marxists: i.e., "Ill means, ill
end" (A Wizard of Earthsea, ch. 7). Machiavelli has the most famous statement of the other
theory: ". . . in the actions of men, and especially of princes, the end
justifies the means" (The Prince, ch. 18, near the end of the
chapter). Note also the words
attributed to the High Priest Caiaphas in deciding to execute Jesus of
Nazareth: "It is better that one man should die that the people may be
saved." Le Guin's view is
that one man's life is always important and ought not be sacrificed to a vague
general good (see Roconnan's World and Left Hand of Darkness).
p.
105: Lyubov's claiming, "I don't know what 'human nature' is" goes along with his saving
Selver—philosophical realists (who we'd call idealists") believe in
abstractions like "human nature"; nominalists tend to see the real
reality of things in individuals.
Note very well that the ecologist Gosse puts scientific detachment into
a rat metaphor.
pp.
105-107: Figure out what "Selver is a god" means.
p.
107: Note very well Lyubov's starting to become a moral agent: "'What are
they doing?' abruptly becomes, 'What are we doing?' and then, 'What must I
do?'" Again, must is
important.
p.
108: Machina ex machina: pun on Deus ex machina: the "god from
the machine" that comes in to resolve the insoluble problem in a
play. Note Lyubov on diversity and
life; this delight in diversity is important to Le Guin and standard in
sophisticated and/or recent science fiction.
p.
109: Le Guin's Daoist proclivities lie, in her early works in productive,
uneasy tension with Existentialism; she disagrees with Jean Paul Sartre on a
lot of things but not on the basic idea of humans as choosing
animals. So it's good that Lyubov
makes a choice here; it's not good that it's an unconscious choice.
p.
110: Try to determine precisely what Lyubov's treason is.
Le Guin is probably serious about "traitor" here (in a
stressed position)—but the political implications of the word may be the
least important.
Chapter
6: Selver's point of
view.
p.
113: Note the repetition of "ex-slave/ex-slaves."
Davidson
was right about the military importance of the "creechies" who had
served the Terrans and learned about the colonial cities.
In
The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy Robert Ornstein argues that
Macbeth, "Like Raskolnikov . . . kills for self, for 'peace'—to end
the restless torment of his imagination . . . . Macbeth kills because his wife
makes him admit that he wishes to kill; and because he condemns himself before
he kills Duncan, the act of murder is fraught with a hatred of self which
eventually and inevitably becomes a hatred of all of life" (Madison &
Milwaukee: U of W Press, 1965, p. 231).
Selver, of course, is no Macbeth: but he, too, shares "the evil
dream," and the threat to him is becoming like Macbeth: no longer the
Hero-god, but a villian-hero in the bloody Jacobean fashion.
pp.
114-115: Try to figure out how significant might be the "must" at the top of p. 114. Note "the home-call that ends the
hunt." This last sentence
could be an allusion to the Dart-Ardrey theory that brings together hunting and
aggression. (This idea isn't
entirely new. Robert Ornstein
discusses at some length the hunting imagery in Shakespeare's war play, Henry
V [A kingdom for a Stage, ch. 8].)
p.
116: The need for action
has denied to Selver solitude and dreaming silence; this is not good for his head. On p. 108 Lyubov had predicted that
only fear was likely to disturb the healthy situation of the Athsheans'
and Terrans' leaving each other alone.
We see here that Lyubov was mostly correct. What was missing from Lyubov's theory was knowledge that
Davidson had attacked the Athsheans.
Perhaps Lyubov was nearly completely correct-if we see fear as
Davidson's primary motivation.
(That would be a real possiblity.
Davidson might be driven by his fear of aliens, his fear of the forest,
his fear of being unmanly.)
pp.
117-118: In Selver's "dream" many important motifs occur.
prisoner:
A powerful word for Le Guin (see Dispossessed).
"You
must go back . . . to your own . . . to your roots": Again note the idea in Earthsea
and in The Dispossessed that "True journey is return." The most basic sort of return is to
one's roots, and to the roots of being.
The
narrator describes Lyubov as Selver's "friend, the gentle one, who had
saved his [Selver's] life and betrayed his dream."
The second "his" is ambiguous. Has Lyubov betrayed Lyubov's dream, Selver's dream, or both
their dreams? How has he
betrayed the dream? (Real questions.)
p.
119: Note reference to "the evil dream that must be understood lest it be
repeated";—see p. 103, top and recall what I presented as the
Macbeth-threat. Note here the
necessity for mobilization before you can have a war; Le Guin makes much
of this idea in The Left Hand of Darkness.
pp.
123-125: Selver's conference with Gosse.
Don't
make too much of Gosse's objection that the Athshean can't negotiate much since
they have "no government, no central authority." Le Guin's an anarchist; she believes
that a promise is a promise, binding without the sanctions of government and
central authority. Besides, Selver
is a god; that's all the authority he needs. Obviously.
Truth: Both absolute and relative (124). We know that Davidson has made his raid
and that Selver is correct here.
murder/guilt:
This looks like a Sartrian idea, straight out of Jean-Paul Sartre's The
Files. If you do what you must
do, you may commit murder; you are responsible for the crime—but don't
get hung up with guilt (124).
(Elsewhere, Le Guin, I think, disagrees strongly with much of what
Sartre has to say in The Flies about philosophically macho man standing
outside Nature and without gods [and maybe symbolically, certainly literally in
the play, murdering his mother].)
realist:
Here the word is used in its political sense as opposed to the
philosophical sense of realist vs. nominalist ("idealist" vs.
someone-not-into-abstractions).
Note well Selver's definition of "realist" and his idea that
Terrans are insane (125).
p.
126: Note Selver's questioning his own sanity and Tubab's telling him that, indeed,
Selver's head is not in good shape.
It is reassuring for us, the audience, however, that Selver questions
his sanity: dangerous nuts are usually quite certain that they're the only sane
ones.
p.
127: "Weave"
and "shape" are
key words with Le Guin. She may
see art as intrinsic to living as a human being—and artists are weavers
and shapers of words, forms, motion, sounds. (Le Guin is a teller of tales: Old English scop,
related to scyppan: "create," "shape,"
"make.") It is
significant that Selver's reference to shaping dreams is followed by the wise
advice that Selver needs to sing.
(In the Earthsea trilogy, Le Guin demonstrates her fascination with old
songs that tell the history of the people. She has commented somewhere that as a girl she was
fascinated by the old tales of the Nordic scops; in the Old English tradition,
at least, scops accompanied their stories with the harp.)
p.
128: Note that the Athsheans are "a little uneasy under the bare open
sky," even as most Terrans are uncomfortable in the forest. Perhaps the Athsheans need to move more
into consciousness, even as Terrans need to recognize more the validity of the
unconscious. Note also that "
. . . Selver reached out to touch him [lyubov], to console him." Touch is central to the
philosophy of Odo (Dispossessed and "The Day Before the
Revolution"). Lyubov,
however, is now beyond Selver's literal touch.
p.
129: "A singing note
came into Selver's voice . . ."—he's ready to compete with Col.
Dongh. The Athsheans do know
competition and aggressivity, but they've directed them into harmless
competitions and "fights."
Adult Athsheans haven't eliminated human passion but have learned how to
control it, to make something beautiful out of it.
pp.
129-131: Selver and Col. Dongh.
Note
Dongh's diction. Note also
Selver's "deteriorated mental state."
pp.
132-135: Athshean-Terran Debate.
The
Viet Nam analogy is made explicit here (133). Note Dongh as the Terran's "Old Man": this is the
technical term for an archetype.
The Old Man is supposed to be a source of wise advice. Dongh isn't quite the "turkey"
or "ding dong" that his nicknames suggest; still he isn't up to the
wisdom suggested by the archetype.
pp.
136-137: Note Selver as translator,
the link between two peoples as well as the god who bridges dream-time and
world-time. Note Selver's
insistence that the Terrans are human.
(Spiders are ambiguous animals for Le Guin. They're weavers, of course, but they
weave out of their own "guts."
Hence they can symbolize art, but also a kind of self-sufficiency that
Le Guin—in a tradition as old as Erasmus and Shakespeare—strongly
rejects.) Note that the god Selver
needs help to walk and comes with empty hands. (The empty hands business occurs also in A Wizard of
Earthsea and in Shevek's story in The Dispossessed. Shevek is explicitly presented as a
link between two worlds.)
Chapter
7: Davidson's point of
view.
p.
139: Davidson is also into history and being a savior.
p.
140: "A traitor to his race"
is a standard locution among racists.
Thinking
"about the unthinkable" is an allusion to Herman Kahn: a man who
thought about how we should organize things after World War III.
p.
141: Note Davidson's idea of reality. Note that he also
did what he "had had" to do in eliminating (murdering) Muhamed. Davidson, however, uses a euphemism
where Selver can think in terms of murder.
p.
142: Again, Le Guin is a great believer in friendship and trust; it is highly
significant that Davidson has gone a little paranoid. His lines on "Blood tells, after all" remind us
(yet again) of his racism. Note the
irony of his being a "euraf" from Ohio. That's progress!
He's proud of his European-African ancestry; he's simply shifted the
objects of his hatreds. (Ardrey
doesn't deal with the idea, but the amity-enmity theory suggests that love for
the in-group and hatred for the Others is intrinsic [innate, genetically
determined]; culture, however, determines just who belongs to the in-group and
who are the Others.)
p.
145: "massive retaliation"
was the earliest formulation (under Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles,
and maybe Allen W. Dulles) of what we now call "balance of terror" or
"Mutual Assured Destruction" (MAD). It is 1/2 of the idea that aggression by America's enemies
would be met with massive nuclear retaliation by us—hence, the more
recent formulations).
pp.
145-147: Note again Davidson's idea of realism. (The satire here is on Henry Kissinger
and his Machiavellian predecessors, all of whom were fond of accusing the
"peace freaks" of being idealistic—hence, by their definitions,
unrealistic. Indeed, some of the
"Machiavellians" went so far as to suggest that morality in foreign
policy was "unrealistic."
This idea is underscored by "There were actually very few men who
could face reality when the going got tough." This sports cliché was applied [with some
justice] to those who wanted to pull out of Indochina when American losses got
high.)
Note
the macho justification for using terror tactics: the crucial thing is
to show "who was boss."
In The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, Robert Ornstein says
that Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida makes clear that the Greeks'
motivation in the Trojan War was to impose their will on Troy—and the
Trojans risk the destruction of their civilization by refusing to accede to the
moral imperative of returning Helen because this would give the appearance of
knuckling under to the Greeks (Ornstein, p. 243). I am not competent to comment on the motivation of the
Vietnamese in resisting the U.S. for so long; I have argued, though, that Troilus
is an excellent commentary on U.S. involvement in Indochina after it became
obvious that we weren't even serving our self-interest there.
p.
148: "Can't make an omelet without beating eggs": A slight variation
on a cliché "justifying" evil means to attain a worthy
end. Note that this cliché
is a kind of euphemism. The moral
issue is clarified if one said something like, "You can't make/repress a
revolution without killing people."
p.
150: Le Guin doesn't approve of most recreational drugs, although she's not a
fanatic on the subject—and she personally likes beer. (Esp. in her early works she tended to
be a political radical and a cultural conservative.) On this page note the standard cliché on eggs and
omelets.
p.
153: Note that Aabi wishes to avoid the touch of Davidson's gun. (Holding a gun to someone's head definitely puts you into an
I-It relationship with him.
Contrast the I-Thou touch in earlier parts of WWF.)
p.
154: Note "rats," Davidson's paranoia, and Davidson's visions of his
own strength. Davidson is sort of
fascistic here.
p.
157: Aabi/Judas=Davidson/Christ—says Davidson.
p.
158: Davidson assumes the Athsheans submission posture, and still manages to
see himself as a god.
pp.
159-162: Selver/Davidson.
Note
both of them as gods, with Davidson having given Selver the
"gift" of murder. Selver
wishes to give the gift of "not killing."
Note
very well the repeated idea of choice.
Chapter
8: Selver's point of
view.
p.
163: Lyubov has become a shadow for Selver. What does this word mean here? (In A Wizard of Earthsea the Shadow is of the Jungian
variety.)
pp. 166-end: Note that Selver is no longer a god. Was his godhood a good thing? Is his return to regular humanity a good thing? Do we get a happy ending in WWF? As happy an ending as is possible?
From Richard D. Erlich, Coyote's
Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin.
From
1969 through 1985, Ursula K. Le Guin published several important works that
deal significantly with large-scale violence: "Winter's King" (1969),
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Word for World Is Forest
(1972), The Eye of the Heron (1978), Stone Telling's story in Always
Coming Home (1985), and, to a lesser extent, The Dispossessed
(1974). For one of the bases of
violence, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) is useful, as is
"Nine Lives" (1969). And
"The New Atlantis" (1975) and Tehanu (1990) are important for
smaller-scale violence and for Le Guin's rethinking the question in more
feminist terms. In this chapter, I
wish to look at Le Guin's extended investigation of the roots of war and lesser
forms of highly organized mass murder—dystopian topics; and, true to Le
Guin's frequent use of comparison and contrast, I'll examine also Le Guin on
the opposite of dystopia ("bad place"), eutopia (a "good
place").
Violence
was a pressing topic in the United States of the late 1960s and early
1970s. Putting the matter crudely,
human beings in general and Americans in particular were running out of
excuses. Most of us, most of the
time are peaceful enough, but a fair number of Americans every generation or so
marched off to kill large numbers of other human beings, ordinarily to the
applause of the fellow citizens of the killers. Why? * * *
THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972)
Le
Guin returned to questions of violence and war, treason and patriotism in The Word for World Is Forest. The plot
of The Word for World begins near
the end of the story, with a massacre of Terran colonists at a location they
call Smith Camp on a planet they call New Tahiti. In chronological order, the story goes like this.
Not
very long from now, our Earth is in the midst of an ecological disaster, and we
Terran humans are saved by the humans from Hain-Davenant, who, among other
things, give us Nearly As Fast As Light (NAFAL) ships to allow colonizing other
worlds. Some twenty-seven
lightyears from Earth is World 42, New Tahiti. The Terrans plant a colony, almost all males, under military
organization and authority, to prepare the world for permanent settlers. The planet is mostly water, and the
land is heavily forested.
Preparation of the land for farmers means clearing the forests—at
great profit since wood is more prized on Earth than gold (7; ch. 1). Aiding the Terrans is "The
Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Corps" (63; ch. 3)—enslaved men and
women from the native species of humans: literally little green men (and
women), who call their world Athshe,
"Forest."
One
of the Terran officers, Captain Don Davidson, rapes Thele, an Athshean woman, a
rape from which she dies.
"[A]cting without argument or speech," or only a bit of
speech, Selver Thele, her husband, attacks Davidson and attempts to kill him:
an act we may see, in Hannah Arendt's words, as "the only way to set the
scales of justice right again" (On Violence 64 § 2).
Davidson is a big "euraf" (WWF 79; ch. 4) from Cleveland and a professional soldier;
he is hurt and scared by Selver's attack but defeats him in the fight and
prepares to kill him. He is
stopped by Raj Lyubov, an anthropologist who had worked with Selver, with
Selver as a native informant.
Selver leaves for the North Isle and lives on the coast of Kelme Deva
where he sees the Terrans destroy the city of Penle, enslave some hundred of
its inhabitants, and cut open the world (30; ch. 2). Commanding the Terrans at Kelme Deva—Smith Camp—is
Captain Davidson. Selver organizes
the Athsheans, and "after long talking, and long dreaming, and the making
of a plan, we went in daylight, and killed the yumens of Kelme Deva with arrows
and hunting-lances, and burned their city and their engines," killing some
two hundred of the Terrans.
Davidson—gone to colonial headquarters at Centralville, mostly to
get laid by one of the newly arrived women—returns to find his camp
destroyed. Selver attacks Davidson
and is wounded by Davidson, but brings down the Terran and sings over him
(19-20,ch. 1; 30-32, ch. 2).
There
is an investigation at which we learn Athsheans are supposed to be
"intraspecific nonaggressive" and have no real history of
violence. The Terrans learn from
visiting Cetian and Hainish officials that there is now a League of worlds, communicating
by ansible, an instantaneous communication device. The brutal ways of Terran exploitation of Athshe are
over.
Davidson
is sent off to a distant outpost where he organizes a quiet atrocity against
the local Athsheans. Lyubov
continues his work, eventually encountering Selver at the Athshean town of
Tuntar. Selver tells Lyubov to
leave Centralville two days hence (96), and Lyubov forgets that advice and
semiconsciously omits mentioning Selver in his report on his trip to Tuntar
(109-10; ch. 5). Selver leads the
Athsheans against Centralville, killing all the women—thus
"sterilizing" the Terrans—and capturing most of the men. Lyubov is killed in the battle and
Selver sees the body and/or the dying Lyubov (117-18; ch. 6).
Davidson
kills his local commanding officer and refuses to stop fighting the
Athsheans. Finally his position is
over-run, and his men are killed.
Selver and his comrades capture Davidson and handle him as they would an
Athshean psychotic: they isolate him on an uninhabited island. Plot and story end with the return of a
Terran ship and League representatives to pick up the remaining Terrans; the
ship's commander and a League representative tell Selver that, in large measure
because of Lyubov's work, Athshe "has been placed under the League
Ban" and will no longer be subject to Terran colonizing or any other alien
interference (165-67; ch. 8).
Ironically, the least conventionally heroic of the trio of potential
heroes in this book, the intellectual Dr. Lyubov, turns out to be highly
effective; Lyubov's "inactive action" of anthropological scholarship
is crucial for the long-term survival of the Athsheans.
*
The
Word for World Is Forest might be
seen as Planet of Exile (1966)
shifted out of Romance and into the modes of Tragedy and Satire. Both stories use third-person, limited narration from the
points of view of three main characters.
In Planet, old Wold does
what old people are supposed to do in Romances: he shuffles off on "his
last foray," leading the women and children to a well-protected fort (87;
ch. 10)—and then shuffles off this mortal coil (123-24; ch. 14), leaving
the stage clear for the (relatively) young couple of Rolery and Jakob Agat to
consummate their marriage in fertility, and for a new and better world to
coalesce around them: a world in which the native humans and the Terrans will
integrate and prosper. Jakob Agat
looks around in joy at the end of the story and sees "his fort, his city,
his world; these were his people.
He was no exile here"; and he says to "the alien, the
stranger, his wife" (122) the last words of Planet of Exile, "come, let's go home" (124).
The
Word for World emphatically does not
end in joy, integration, and coming home.
Selver
in The Word for World corresponds
to Rolery in Planet of Exile: the
point of view nonTerran, native human; Davidson corresponds to Agat: a leader
among the Terran colonists; and—much less exactly—Lyubov
corresponds to Wold: the third member of a triangle. In Planet, we
have a love triangle with the key apex occupied by Rolery, daughter to Wold and
later wife to Agat, with Wold coming to love both his Summer-born daughter and
son-in-law. In The Word for
World, we get two love-hate
triangles, with Selver emphasized.
The first triangle is Selver-Thele-Davidson. Again, Davidson rapes and (indirectly) murders Thele, for
which Selver tries to kill him.
Lyubov saves Selver, earning Davidson's enmity. When the action of the plot begins,
then, Selver and Davidson hate one another; Lyubov and Selver have come to love
one another; Lyubov intensely dislikes Davidson, and Davidson despises
Lyubov. To make The Word for
World into a kind of Romantic Comedy
would be easy enough: the "marriage" of the Athshean Selver and the
Terran Lyubov would be central to a plot moving toward the conversion or defeat
and expulsion of Davidson and reconciliation and friendship between the two
peoples. We get a hint of this
possibility in a savior motif in the central triangle. Lyubov saves Selver; Selver tries to
save Lyubov by warning him of the attack on Central, and Selver does save his
people; and Davidson consistently sees himself as a Messiah for the Terrans on
Athshe. Which fits his name: Don, "world ruler," plus Davidson, "son of David"—suggesting a
descendent of King David, as a Messiah should be (see Matthew 1.1-17).
The
plot moves away from integration and toward alienation and isolation: Lyubov is
killed in the attack on Central; Davidson ends up isolated on an island; and
the Athsheans will be isolated by the League for generations. And that is as happy an ending as we
are going to get.
In
her introduction to The Word for World Is Forest, Le Guin tells how she wrote the story under the
title of The Little Green Men in
1968, while in England, "a guest and a foreigner" with "no
outlet" for her anger at the war in Vietnam (LoN [1979]:151).
I have suggested that Le Guin's inability to demonstrate directly her
anger with her government and people led her take action in the old-fashioned
Prophetic way of writing a mâshâl (plural: mâshâlim): "a likeness; . . . 'taunt,' or 'satire.' Whatever the translation, the
'likeness' in question is either the aptly stated analogue of a previously
experienced reality, or it is the quasi-magical, verbal prefiguring of reality
in the shape, for good and for ill, in which the utterer would like to
encounter it" (Rabinowitz 320).
The Word for World Is Forest
is, in part, a mâshâl
of the war in Indochina in the late 1960s. It is also the aptly stated analog of a long series of
encounters between people sophisticated in the technology and political
organization of violence (civilized people) and people with far fewer means for
killing other people ("primitives"). In the physical and psychological territory of
"Frontierland," we meet the Others and "the normal
defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting" can get very
bloody (Erlich, ". . . Le Guin and . . . Clarke"
111). Le Guin's Narrator places an
early scene in the book in a pretty clearing that "might have been Idaho
in 1950 . . . . Or
Kentucky in 1830. Or Gaul in 50
B.C." (see Siciliano 76). Or,
I will add, the upper waters of Mill Creek in California, a few weeks after 15
August 1865, where White men under the command of R. A. Anderson ambushed one
of the few remaining groups of Yahi Indians. The limited action in the scene in the clearing in Word
for World includes a distant bird
saying, "Te-whet" (9; ch. 1).
Kentucky and Gaul are among the many places where Terran tribal peoples
were slaughtered by the civilized, and the immediate response to thoughts of
Kentucky and Gaul is what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has assured us is the one
decorous comment on massacres:
. . . there is
nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or
want anything ever again.
Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always
is, except for the birds.
And what do
the birds say? All there is to say
about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?" (Slaughterhouse-Five 19; ch. 1 [see also 19, 23, 215]).
The best Le Guin can see for Indochina is, in a
geopolitical sense, about what happened: that the United States would lose the
war, and we would have to go home.
Where
Le Guin proved optimistic was in the suggested body counts: Le Guin's imaginary
war was far less bloody than the Terran reality (over 58,000 Americans killed,
over two million Vietnamese and others).
Where Le Guin was highly optimistic was in her utopian vision of the
Athsheans, and in her Anarchistic faith that such a utopian culture could
defeat a high-tech army. The
Vietnamese did, indeed, defeat the U.S. military, but, as Le Guin well knew,
they had a good deal of experience fighting off invaders. The
Terran commanding officer in Word for World, Col. Dongh, a Vietnamese, mentions his people's
spending "about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one after the
other in the twentieth century" (133; ch. 6): the Japanese, the French,
and then the USA, 1940s on.
*
Athshe
is like an Earthsea where the Immanent Grove has spread out over the
Archipelago to create a huge Yin-Yang symbol: "Ocean: forest. That was your choice on New
Tahiti. Water and sunlight, or
darkness and leaves" (7; ch. 1). And the people there are peaceful; like
the Gethenians, they've never had a war.
Unlike the Gethenians, they additionally don't have
"assassinations, feuds, forays"; Athshean murders are committed only
by extraordinarily rare psychopaths; even fights are rare and usually limited
to adolescents ("Gender . . . Redux" 10; WWF 58, ch. 3).
Most important, the Athsheans are Hainish Normal in their sexual anatomy
and physiology: our Terran standard-issue, sexually dimorphic human
beings. A bit more than the
Gethenians, the Athsheans are sane and relevant.
With
the Terran conquest, we see on Athshe a pattern of opposition Le Guin began as
early as A Wizard of Earthsea"
(1968) and continued into Always Coming Home (1985).
The Athsheans are technologically primitive and organizationally simple,
anarchistic, "communal . . . and somewhat
introverted." Their
populations are stable in size and stay put. "They have no nomadic peoples, and no societies that
live by expansion and aggression . . . . Nor have they formed large,
hierarchically governed nation-states" that can be mobilized for war. "Competition is ritualized, and,
when ritual breaks down, the resulting violence does not become mass violence,
remaining limited, personal."
The Terrans are from a "hierarchically governed" world-state
and are under military law and discipline. And the Terrans are heavily armed and dangerous.
What
the Terran officials have done is familiar enough and takes little
interpretation: they have sent men (mostly) organized militarily and have given
them rules, regulations, and orders.
They are like US Army units on the Western frontier during the Indian
Wars, the period my US military history book called the "nadir" of US
Army history. One cause for some
US war crimes in the Indian Wars was units operating independently under
ambitious commanders, with George Armstrong Custer as the best-known
example. But the telegraph came
through fairly early on in the American West, and Lyndon Johnson
"micromanaged" US warfare in Vietnam; even so Le Guin introduces the
ansible—and Le Guin supplies a League government that is competent (as
LBJ was), but also moral, relatively peace-loving, and well-intentioned. In the mâshâl of Vietnam, the League can be read as a wish for
something like the United Nations to attempt to undo US damage in
Indochina. In political terms, the
point may be that a strictly political analysis is insufficient: even if the
Terran military were absorbed into a good system—with sane, ethical
people giving orders from Earth—the frontier and/or military culture would undermine the new system. More concretely, a charismatic traitor
like Don Davidson could get enough support to cause a lot of trouble; and, of
course, in Word for World he
does. Whether 1849ers going to
California for gold or future loggers going to New Tahiti for lumber, men who
flee civilization and strike out for riches are not going to let native peoples
stand in their way; as they think necessary, the invaders will destroy
inconvenient natives through "disease, malnutrition, forced removal,
massacre, aggravated rape . . ." (Buckley 438). Military organization and armaments
mean that when an intelligent psychopath like Don Davidson takes over a group,
he has a group organized and equipped for carnage (84; ch. 4). And, finally, militarism, macho, and
racism ("speciesism" here) can be mutually reinforcing. Davidson, anyway, believes that
"The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when
he's just had a woman or just killed another man" (81; ch. 4). A macho mind, tightly
compartmentalized, can feel both manly and guiltless raping human females not
seen as really women and killing human males not seen as really men. In Davidson's head, such a mind can
allow him to disobey orders and thereby endanger the Terran colony, assassinate
his commanding officer, lead armed men to massacre a village—generally
engage in murder and treason and atrocities—and still feel himself the
only true patriot, the only truly sane, morally, and manly man.
And
here I will stop discussing Don Davidson and the Terrans, whom Le Guin
anatomizes in great detail. That's
the dystopian satire in Word for World. The violated utopia of
the Athsheans is equally interesting.
How
do we get decent behavior out of human beings, a genus not notably
"primitive, harmless, and peace-loving" (63; ch. 3)? One answer, as we've seen in The
Left Hand of Darkness, is to be sure
that they organize themselves anarchistically. In Left Hand,
however, war was prevented (as things worked out) by the presence of outsiders:
Ai and the Ekumen. War on Gethen
would have been between two Gethenian peoples with sufficient sense of identity
to have "two polarities we"
and the Gethenians "perceive
through our cultural conditioning"
as patriot and traitor ("Gender . . . Redux" 12), and two
polarities that the Gethenians through their cultural conditioning—and we through reading Le
Guin's novel—perceive as Karhide and Orgoreyn. Genly Ai knows "the love of one's homeland" but
beyond that he's not sure, from his own experience, what patriotism is. Estraven, soon to be exiled for treason
explains it to him: "No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other.
And its expressions are political not poetical: hate, rivalry,
aggression" (19; ch. 1). In
the United States ca. 1969, Estraven's comments were highly relevant: lack of
patriotism was a standard charge against the Peace Movement, the people trying
to end US military adventures in Indochina; since antiwar actions were
necessarily "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" in time of
war—however undeclared by Congress—movement people were also
traitors. The Left Hand of
Darkness as a whole goes even further
than just problematicizing words like "patriotism" and
"treason"; as a whole, Left Hand emphatically puts personal loyalties and love of home over attachments
to any abstraction (true treason
is to betray a friend), but Le Guin gives us technologically sophisticated
people on Gethen, living in a complex civilization: there is on Gethen the
possibility for conflict between personal loyalty or loyalty to home and the
loyalty patriotism requires to the State.
The
Athsheans have not had to deal with conflicts in loyalty between concrete
people and abstracts commonwealths because they have never had abstract states
to be loyal to; they are not civilized people: i.e., they don't have cultures
based on cities in the ways ancient Terrans developed civilization from city
life. What Athsheans call cities
we'd call villages or towns, and the Gethenians might call Hearths; and no conqueror
or other consolidator has come along to bind the villages into a confederation,
set up his royal seat in a city, and continue expanding until he or a successor
ran into another royal thug with similar ideas. So: the immediate reason the Athsheans don't have big wars
is that they can't; their social groups are too small. But those groups are small because they
have no history of consolidation, and one reason they have no consolidation is
they have no history of feuds and forays that could be organized into rational
warfare for the purpose of large-scale theft. Apparently, it has never occurred to Athsheans to organize
into groups to murder, maim, wound, and (thereby) terrorize others in order to
steal the property or labor of those others. Put in such terms, this hardly appears a mystery, but it is
a mystery. In Le Guin's Hainish
universe, warfare has been fairly common; and the Hainish universe is a
legitimate extrapolation from and fabulation upon human history on our
Earth—where, I believe, warfare began as highly organized theft with
violence (see discussion of ACH). Why are there no feuds and forays on
Athshe? Why are even fist fights
uncommon? Why are they really
nonviolent, really peaceful?
Putting the matter formally: As human beings the Athsheans have as a
trait aggressivity; to a greater
or lesser degree they all are capable of getting very, very angry, so angry
they desire to lash out. Further,
"The Athsheans are carnivorous, they hunt animals" and can hunt in
groups; and they have their rare psychotics and the concepts of rape and murder
(61; ch. 3)—and weapons. Why
then is there so little aggression?
One
reason is that politics among the Athsheans is controlled by old women, the
Head Women of the villages: ". . . old women are different from
everybody else, they say what they think" (98; ch. 5). In Earthsea terms, politics on Athshe
are conducted in a True Speech. A
second reason is that fights will not move into deadly violence because the
Athsheans have "aggression-halting gestures and positions" (WWF 60) like those of Terran wolves and jackdaws (Lorenz
123-28). And it is highly unlikely
a conflict would ever get to physical combat. Among men, anyway, they have a custom like Terran Inuit and
use ritualized "singing to replace physical combat." Any Athshean man can, when angry,
sublimate aggressivity into art and sing a song against his opponent—a
very literal mâshâl,
in the sense of "taunt," "satire"—the quality of the
song depending upon the man's talent.
Like the appeasement gestures, the singing contests also "might
have a physiological foundation . . . ." However deep their roots (and there has
to be a biological basis somewhere), Athshean aggression-halting and
aggression-ritualizing customs make "an effective war-barrier,"
especially since there is relatively little positive motivation for warfare
(60-61; ch. 3). The Athsheans have
little wealth, so there is little to steal. The Athsheans also have no tradition of hating outsiders and
are slow to learn group enmity. They
are literally in touch with one another, with an entire grammar and vocabulary
of "touch-exchanges" filling that vast gap in Terran culture (US
culture) "between the formal handshake and the sexual caress" (94-95;
ch. 5). Possibly most important,
the Athsheans are incredibly well integrated into their world. They can go with the unconscious, with
the Dao. To a remarkable degree,
they are sane. Athsheans can
take their dreams and, according to their abilities, shape, analyze, react to,
and reshape them. As a folk art
they can dream while awake and "balance . . . sanity not on the
razor's edge of reason but on the double support, the fine balance of reason
and dream" (99; ch. 5).
Bright
water and dark forest balance on Athshe.
Even so, intellect—that clear light of reason—balances the
maze-like, forest-like unconscious among Athsheans (25-26; ch. 2). "They're a static, stable, uniform
society" from Lyubov's somewhat limited point of view, "Perfectly
integrated and wholly unprogressive.
You might say that like the forest they live in, they've attained a
climax state"—but they can adapt and apparently have adapted rather
spectacularly to the Terran colony with their massacring the Terrans at Smith
Camp (61-62; ch. 3). Lyubov notes
that the Athsheans have "recognized us as members of their species, as
men. However, we have not
responded as members of their species should respond. We have ignored . . . the rights and obligations
of non-violence. We have killed,
raped, dispersed, and enslaved the native humans, destroyed their communities,
and cut down their forests. It
wouldn't be surprising if they'd decided that we are not human." The Cetian, Mr. Or, completes the
logic: "And therefore can be killed, like animals . . ."
(62; ch. 3).
What
it takes a long time for Lyubov to figure out is the mechanism for change among
the Athsheans. He has to be told
directly and then mull it over: "Selver is a god," he's told (97,
[100], 105; ch. 5). Then he
thinks, Selver is "a link between the two realities, considered by the
Athsheans as equal, the dream-time and the world-time
. . . . A link: one
who could speak aloud the perceptions of the subconscious. To 'speak' that tongue is to act. To do a new thing. To change or to be changed, radically,
from the root. For the root is the
dream." Selver was such a
link, a literal translator, one
who carries over. "He had
done a new deed. The word, the
deed, murder. Only a god could
lead so great a newcomer . . . across the bridge between the
worlds" (106-7; ch. 5).
When
Selver tells the story of the Smith Camp massacre to the old Dreamer, Coro
Mena, Coro Mena replies, "Before this day the thing we had to do was the
right thing to do; the way we had to go was the right way and led us home. Where is our home now? For you have done what you had to do,
and it was not right. You have
killed men" (33-34; ch. 2).
From a Daoist perspective, and for Le Guin, these are powerful
lines. A classical Daoist talks
little of right and wrong but of following the way and, in Le Guin's
formulation, doing as one must
do—which is right. Coro Mena here admits the Western
paradox that sometimes one must do evil—which makes evil unavoidable, but
no less evil. And Coro Mena has,
all together, an optimistic view of Selver (47-48; ch. 2)! The more pessimistic possibility is
suggested by Lyubov's asking himself whether Selver was "speaking his own
language, or . . . Captain Davidson's" (107; ch. 5). Selver may not be a god; he may just be
a charismatic man who has learned that a possible political means to desirable
ends is massacres. Either way
could fit into the story. The
point of view characters are a trinity of two saviors and Davidson as
Messiah-manqué. There are
also two clear traitors: Davidson and Lyubov (110; ch. 5). Selver could complete the threesome of
traitors. Selver's gift to his
people is guerrilla warfare, which requires group enmity. Athsheans must think of themselves as
Athsheans, with a cause to press against the Terrans; this sets up the
possibility for Selver of a conflict of loyalties. In attacking Central, Selver endangers his friend Lyubov; in
warning Lyubov, Selver endangers the cause of his people and the lives of those
who have chosen to follow him in the attack. Selver fails to save Lyubov, which may be a betrayal. It would elegantly reinforce the theme
of treason if Selver were to betray his own nature in learning murder from
Davidson and teaching mass murder to his people. But this is not my reading. The Change Selver brings the Athsheans is, I think, a true
Change, just deeply, and appropriately, problematic.
At
the end of the story, Selver tells Lepennon, from Hain, that a god "brings
a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. . . . He brings this across the bridge
between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to
drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and
pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to
kill one another" (168; ch. 8).
The book ends with
Selver with the memory of Lyubov—they remain in touch—and the
knowledge that Davidson is on an island, still alive. It is not a totally tragic vision of isolation, but its
vision of Athshe figuratively walled off from the galaxy is decorously bleak
for the years of war and reaction in which it was written (1968) and published
(1972).