*As usual, this
post is filled with spoilers and the assumption that you have read the novel
already—proceed at your own risk.*
I have been excited
to get to Tehanu ever since I learned that we would be reuniting with
Tenar from The Tombs of Atuan. I
don’t know what I expected, but I most certainly could not have predicted the
story Le Guin has created. Of course,
that’s one of the things I love about Le Guin as a storyteller. In all the novels of hers I’ve read, I have never
been able from the half-way point in the novel to predict where it was
going. She accomplishes this feat not
through trickery and twists and turns of plot, but through having a desire to tell
stories that lie outside conventional norms.
As I’ve said in
some of my other posts, I often read books to my wife before we go to bed, and Tehanu
was one of these nightly readings.
Unlike the other Earthsea books, however, this one made for difficult
pre-sleep reading. We begin with a child
maliciously burned in a fire after being beaten nearly to death and raped. Good jesus, that’s a sobering note to begin
on and a clear signal that Le Guin will be dealing with an aspect of Earthsea’s
that we have not hitherto seen. Shortly
thereafter, Tenar and Therru are menaced by a group of men on the trail to
Ogion’s home. This is a clever way to
place the novel within the time frame of The Farthest Shore, but seeing
our protagonist threatened is unnerving.
We most certainly have never seen Ged threatened like that, in a way
that made us genuinely concerned for his safety. The of course Ogion dies, and Ged comes home,
not triumphantly, but in crisis over who he is now that he has been drained of
his powers.
This is heavy
stuff, and while it made for rocky bedtime reading, I loved it. As Le Guin says in her afterward to my edition:
By the time I wrote this book I needed to
look at heroics from outside and underneath, from the point of view of the
people who are not included. The ones who
can’t do magic. The ones who don’t have
shining staffs or swords. Women, kids,
the poor, the old, the powerless. Unheroes,
ordinary people—my people. I didn’t want
to change Earthsea, but I needed to see what Earthsea looked like to us.
That theme of
power and powerlessness are laced throughout the story, of course. Tenar meditates many times on what it means
to be a middle-aged woman beyond her child-bearing years. She sees women’s power as residing in their
sexual power and maternal power, and once they are beyond that, what power do
they have left? Like Ged, she has found
her cup of power, what litter there was, emptied, and she was wondering how to
define herself as well. And this theme
of power is directly related to why this story has to be violent and
threatening as it is, in a way that none of the other Earthsea books before it
have been. How do you show powerlessness
so you can discuss it? To truly show the
power lacking, you have to show her at the mercy of others’ powers, threatened
by them, degraded by them, attacked by them, and terrified by them.
Looking back, it
seems only fitting that this would be Le Guin’s focus once she turned her
attention back to Tenar. Tombs of
Atuan is equally about power, and its crisis for Tenar lies in the moment
she realizes that she is treated as though she has power when she in fact has
none and is at the mercy of the other priestess who had no respect for the Nameless
Ones.
The book
questions the patriarchy and anti-feminism that lies at the foundations of
Earthsea’s hierarchies and political structures. In her long conversation with Ged about power
over the winter, they speculate what just power might look like, and it might
resemble parental power, in that the parent knows that their child is obedient
only because they choose to be. And they
will only choose to be obedient for as long as they trust you. I loved when Tenar wished that Ged had killed
Hake with his pitchfork, because now the King’s justice would demand that hake
be punished. Tenar rebels against the
idea of someone meting out punishment because punishment is an act of power,
remember how Handy wanted to punish Therru and Tenar. They both wish Ged had just killed Hake and
both cannot stand idly by and let him die, even though they both want it. That complication and impossible position is
so relatable and achingly painful. And everything
then comes into stronger focus with the return of Spark, her son. She realizes she has “failed” because she has
repeated the sexism and hierarchy in him instead of using what influence and
power she had to make him different, and in doing so make the world
different. Spark was once an underdog,
struggling to survive, but he has returned home with a firm position of power,
and nothing about his previous status has taught him how to wield that power,
let alone to give it up.
In the other novels,
I feel like Le Guin had philosophical positions about life and death and how one
should live that she wrapped her narratives around. Tehanu is not that. There is searching and struggling in Tehanu. There is an unresolved attitude, a wish that
is at odds with the way we have experienced life so far. There is a knowledge of right and wrong but
still no easy answer to lay before. Ged
laid things bare for Tenar in Tombs of Atuan. He explained the crisis clearly and
succinctly to Arren in Farthest Shore.
But here, he’s got nothing. Just
some observations and feelings. This Ged
is not a mystic full of power. He’s a
mess of a man, and he’s lovelier for it, struggling with Tenar instead of
leading her to safety.
I also love how
names take on a different meaning in this book.
We know that names hold power in this world, that they name a reality
that can be obscured by the world around us. But here, Le Guin goes beyond the division of
real names and use-names. Tenar has a
wealth of names: Arha, Tenar, Goha, Mother, and Wife. At one point Tenar has a conversation with
herself and Le Guin frames it as Goha talking to Tenar. This isn’t a use-name talking to the real
thing. This is two different aspects of
Tenar’s character and life debating with one another. Likewise, Ged has become Hawk because he is a
different person than his old use-name Sparrowhawk. In the worlds of the powerless, everything is
less clear, and even use-names have power.
The power of the mage is the power of reduction: reducing the world to what
seems and what is. Tehanu blurs
those lines and asks if that division is even any good to begin with. Such a division is only useful if we all
stand on an equal footing, and the world of Earthsea, like our own, is anything
but equal. When Aspen has the power, he
forgoes both Tenar’s real name and her use-names and assaults her afresh with
the word Bitch. We see evil in Aspen
(good lord did I hate that motherfucker), but Tenar is also frustrated with the
wizard on Lebannen’s boat who for all his knowledge is blind.
In my review of Farthest
Shore, I said I’d leave analysis of the relationship between humans and
dragons to someone else, and I’ll continue to pass the buck here, where
Therru/Tehanu is concerned. Ann believes
that Therru’s dragon-personhood came about because she was pushed into that
fire and it burned away her human part.
I suspect she was born that way, speaking the words of the Making as all
dragons are. The fact is, I don’t think
Le Guin could answer that question if she were still here to have it posed to
her. One of Le Guin’s magical qualities
is that she brings together intense intellectualism with fierce instincts and
always seems to know when one should yield to the other. When she decided that dragons were closely
related to people in the Farthest Shore so that they were affected by Cob’s actions,
she didn’t know why that was the case, she just knew it was right. And here we can see her prodding those
instincts farther, growing the legend and the connection out. There’s great
analysis to be done about these dragon-people, but I’m not the one to do
it. I’m just here to gush about how cool
it is. How much did I love that fan
detail?! So much!
This is a book I
will definitely revisit when we finish the next two books. There’s a lot here to unpack and think about,
and I don’t think I can do so fully without a full re-read. For now, my love for this book rivals my love
for Tombs of Atuan. Something
about Tenar pushes Le Guin to do her best work.
