City of
Illusions is the third book Ursula K. Le Guin wrote for her Hainish Cylce.
It’s been a
lot of fun reading these books in order because you can see Le Guin’s style and
skill evolving, with each book offering more impressive writing and thinking than
the one before it. It’s also neat to see
how she places the books in the same universe with casual connections rather
than strict chronology or any kind of cause and effect between books. The main character in City of Illusions,
Falk, is a descendant to the Jacob Agat in Planet of Exile, but it’s not
an important fact, and nothing in the story hinges upon your understanding that
connection. The details are rewarding to
a fan but not an impediment to a new reader.
Another fun
element for us is that our edition of these collected works includes the
introductory essays that Le Guin wrote in the 2010s. Le Guin is a loving and astute reader of her
old texts, able and willing to point out their weaknesses and their strengths,
noting connections, and treating each one like an old lover for which she is
grateful to have had in her past. It was
in her introduction to Planet of Exile that she noted a recurring theme
in her novels is “marriage,” which I wrote about in my review of the book. Foregoing any plot summary of City of
Illusions, I want to jump right into my analysis because it picks up on
this notion of marriage.
There are
plenty of spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t read the book and don’t want to
know what happens, stop reading here.
Know that it is an excellent read and that if you like her other books,
you should read it. Then come back and
tell me what you think of my analysis.
My
interpretation of Le Guin’s “marriage” theme is that she is interested in the
coming together of two cultures or people to see how they synthesize to create
something original. Her most common
approach in these Hainish novels has been the stranger in a strange land
motif. Here, Falk is an alien with no
memories making a home on Terra. Through
his education in the first chapters of the novel, he comes to inhabit the
culture of the forest dwellers and then sets off to Es Toch, the city under the
control of the Shing. On his way, he
encounters different people who teach him a little more about the world. Finally, in Es Toch, he is reunited, through
the Shing’s technology, with his original identity, Ramarren. Le Guin makes it clear that Falk and Ramarren
are two separate individuals cohabitating in the body of one man. We have a literal coming together of two
cultures in the mind of Falk/Ramarren.
In her introduction, Le Guin says that that idea, two minds existing in
one person, was the kernel of the novel she set out to write, which she
intended to call The Two-Minded Man. In the climax of the novel, Falk
and Ramarren come together in one identity:
He turned and stared foggily at Orry and Ken Kenyek. What to do with them? They had come along, evidently. Erase the records on the computers, said a voice inside his mind, a familiar voice, his own—Falk’s. Ramarren was dizzy with fatigue, but gradually he saw the point of this request, and obeyed. Then he could not think what to do next. And so, finally, for the first time, he gave up, made no effort to dominate, let himself fuse into . . . himself.
Fusion
occurs because of an act of relenting, of ceding to a state of equality, of not
dominating. For two things to meet in
the middle and have a genuine and productive union—marriage—there needs to be
mutual respect, equality.
In contrast
to this moment of fusion are the Shing, inhabiting Terra but totally separate
from the native people. The Shing
control and dominate and keep themselves apart.
In that same climactic scene, before their union, Falk thinks about the
Shing while considering the fate of Estrel:
Had they retrained her, razed her mind, killed her? No, they did not kill. They were afraid to kill and afraid to die, and call their fear Reverence for Live. The Shing, the Enemy, the Liars. . . . Did they in truth lie? Perhaps that was not quite the way of it; perhaps the essence of their lying was a profound irremediable lack of understanding. They could not get into touch with men. They had used that and profited by it, making it into a great weapon, the mind-lie; but had it been worth their while after all? Twelve centuries of lying, ever since they had first come here, exiles or pirates or empire-builders from some distant star, determined to rule over these races whose minds made no sense to them and whose flesh was forever sterile. Alone, isolated, deaf-mutes ruling deaf-mutes in a world of delusions. Oh desolation . . .
The Shing’s relationship
with earthlings, and specifically the sterility of their relationship, recalls
the situation in the Planet of Exile.
In Planet of Exile, the two people are able to bridge the divide
between them and become one people, but here, the Shing apparently have no
interest in a marriage of equality, and so are doomed to a lonely
existence. The Shing refuse to fuse with
the people of Terra, and unlike Falk and Ramarren, no third thing is created,
and become, in Falk’s analysis, something to be pitied. In Le Guin’s universes, there is always more
power—and pleasure—in union. Without
that union, you have hierarchy, rulers and ruled, controllers and
controlled. With that union, you get
equality and progress.
I think it
is important that the novel culminates in a city, Es Toch. Cities are meeting grounds for all kinds of
cultures and ways; they are the embodiment of cultural synthesis. Not surprisingly, the Shing have forbidden
all cities but the one they control.
Presumably, this is to keep humans apart from each other, but in the
terms of the novel, it is to keep thing homogenous and unmixed. When Ramarren gets to tour Es Toch near the
end of the novel: “That day they showed Ramarren all over Es Toch, which seemed
to him who had lived among the old streets of Wegest and in the great
Winterhouses of Kaspool, a sham city, vapid and artificial, impressive only by
its fantastic natural setting.” Instead
of being a place of synthesis and life, Es Toch is a sham, vapid and
artificial. There’s no genuine mixing of
ideas and culture, no chemical reaction between people that is life.
The Shing’s
big claim of success is how peaceful Terra is under their rule. Ramarren observes that under the Shing,
humans have become “almost a race of children.”
The peace the Shing bring is an unproductive peace. When people don’t interact or clash, there
are no battles and no conflict, but there is also no synthesis, no growth. What I find interesting is that the logical
extension of this argument is that people must necessarily war to some extent
or another in order to synthesize and change each other. Given that, it seems perfectly natural that
Le Guin moves on to Gethen in The Left Hand of Darkness for her next
novel, asking herself what a world without war might look like and what sort of
circumstances might create a world without war but still with cultures coming
together. In fact, not only does Gethen
exist without war, but the League of Worlds is replaced by the Ekumen, the
former being a league built around war and the latter built around the exchange
of ideas between planets.
I found City
of Illusions to be a rich novel that gave me a lot to think about, and in
my understanding of Le Guin’s writings, it’s a kind of lynchpin of ideas as she pivots from one way of thinking to the next.
