The Lottery, or, the Adventures of James Harris

The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris is a unique collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson.  Published in 1949, this collection is the only collection of her short stories that were published in her lifetime.  I do not know to what extent she had a hand in determining which stories to include and in what order, but I like to think this was entirely by her design.

The 25 short stories are divided into four groups, and each group is preceded with an excerpt from Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphatus.  That’s not a made up name or title, but a real book published posthumously in 1681 about witchcraft.  In the quote preceding the first group of stories, the author describes the witches partying down with the Devil in one of their rituals.  This focus on witches and Devils runs throughout the collection, especially given the alternate title of “The Adventures of James Harris.”  Jims and Mr. Harris’s appear throughout the various stories collected here.  He first appears as a named figure in the second story, “The Daemon Lover,” which follows a young woman who is stood up by her fiancé, the man who proposed to her yesterday.  She searches the area for him and believes that she has tracked him down to an apartment where he appears to be shacked up with another woman.  Only no one answers the door when she knocks, and she returns regularly to try to find him but never does.  Does Jim Harris exist?  Is he fucking with the young woman, or is she delusional in some way?  It’s a fantastic story, but Shirley Jackson doesn’t care to answer that question.  So Jim is a kind of phantom, and you could describe him as devilish. 

The epilogue for the collection of short stories is an excerpt from a translation of Child Ballad No. 243, the ballad titled “James Harris, The Daemon Lover.”  In the ballad, James Harris is a man who lures a married woman and mother away from her family with the promise of riches, but once he has her, he reveals that he is the devil and that he is taking her to hell with him.  So the theme of devilry and witches runs throughout the stories, even though there is nothing resembling a witch in any of the tales.

Jackson’s stories are almost all about modern young women and their own spaces, living their lives.  It is of course not the women accused of witchcraft who called themselves witches in the 17^th century, but the men like Joseph Glanvil.  These are women being women in women’s spaces, the kind of thing that makes some men uncomfortable and accusatory.  What exactly is Shirley Jackson saying, I don’t know, but I would love to read the analysis that connects all the threads that are dangling loose in my head right now.  Unfortunately there appears to have been little scholarly work done with regards to this text.

Prior to reading this collection, I had not read any of Shirley Jackson’s short stories except for “The Lottery,” and I read that so long ago that my only memory was that the winner of the lottery got stoned (spoilers!).  I was expecting, then, dystopic tales and possibly even science fiction, but this collection could not be farther from that description.  I was surprised upon rereading “The Lottery” to find that there was nothing science fiction-y about it.  It only seemed that way to my young mind because “village” sounded so quaint and otherworldly, I suppose.

No, these stories are all about New England in the 1940s, and they feel like it.  They are tales that present situations fraught with danger, but the worst things you imagine are not where the story goes.  Jackson is concerned with the mundane rather than the magnificent.  For example, “The Tooth,” one of the final stories in the collection begins with a woman boarding an overnight bus from New Hampshire to New York, where she expects to have her tooth pulled in the morning.  Suffering from a terrible toothache, she boards the bus after popping codeine and drinking plenty of whisky.  Oh, and sleeping pills.  Good night!  How many things can go wrong there?!  And, while they do not go well for our protagonist, she does not end up raped, killed, or abandoned on the side of the road. The threat is certainly present, but Jackson is interested in things other than the sensational.

She spends much of her stories recounting character’s actions in pretty minute detail.  Her writing is clear and strong, and stays away from poetic phrases or extended similes and metaphors.  She keeps you grounded in the moment to moment actions of her subject and does not meditate on things beyond that.  The meaning to be pulled from the stories is in the action of the drama itself, not in its presentation.  There were several stories that were utterly captivating, and there were a handful that simply left me scratching my head.  Every time I felt like I figured her and her writing out, along would come a story that would dumbfound me.  “The Dummy,” for example.  What the hell was that story saying?  Or “Come Dance with me in Ireland.”  Or “A Fine Old Firm.”  But even the headscratchers ere beautifully brought to life.  

It was tempting at times while reading one story or another to think that Jackson just didn’t know how to build to a climax or seize upon a moment of tension in the narrative.  But it is clear that Jackson can do exactly those things when she wants to, which means that these stories that don’t do those things do exactly what she wants them to.  Often her protagonists are stuck in socially awkward situations and we read on to see how, if at all, they extricate themselves.  Will there be a moment of confrontation?  More often than not there isn’t. The protagonist often yields to the opposing force in a moment of quiet defeat or setback. These quiet moments seem to be the things that most captivate Jackson’s imagination, and I must say, I very much enjoyed her approach.

This is not a collection to be rushed through. Each story wants to be lingered over and compared to the others in its group.  What are they saying?  How are they reflecting one another?  What, if anything, do they add up to?  I don’t have solid answers, but I have feelings tingling around in my guts, and I like the echoes of my unanswered questions.

Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

*Spoilers ahead.  Read at your own Risk.*

This novella is the first non-science-fiction/non-fantasy work of Le Guin’s that we have read. It is, however, pure Le Guin, as it deals with one of her central themes: how two people connect across the gulf of our own minds and experiences.

When we began it, neither Ann nor I was particularly excited, since it felt so very much like a young adult novel, with a wise-cracking teen narrator who is both smart and lonely, feeling like a freak among his “normal” peers.  It’s not really until Natalie enters the picture that the novel takes off.  Once our two protagonists met on the bus, we knew we were going to be okay because Le Guin was going to do one of the things that she does best.

The length and limits of the novella speak of Le Guin’s focus and her ability to get right to the heart of the matter.  We are used to Le Guin’s stories taking their time, unfolding gradually and organically.  There is no such wandering in Very Far Away from Anywhere Else.  It’s not that there’s rushing or shut-off avenues; it’s just that this is a story about the complicated nature of love between a young man and a young woman.  The novella could easily have been expanded by exploring other facets of young adulthood as so many young adult novels have done, looking at all the tough parts of growing up.  I appreciate Le Guin’s unswerving attention to Owen and Natalie’s relationship.

I also appreciate that this is not a story about how Natalie saved or ruined Owen’s life.  Natalie does save Owen’s life in her own way, but her purpose in the story is not just to save Owen.  Natalie is a woman of focus and ambition who does not want anything to distract from those dreams.  Owen’s story is of how he learned he was not alone in the world and that he should not sell out his own dreams to live the life his parents (and by extension, society) wants him to live.  Natalie doesn’t just listen to and advise Owen; she is a living example of what Owen needs to see.  Natalie is a friend and an inspiration.

The crisis of the story is when the phantom of romantic love begins to haunt Owen’s mind.  As Owen says, he convinces himself that his fondness for Natalie is capital-L Love, and he begins to play the part of the lover, if only in his own mind.  This pressure echoes the other pressures in Owen’s life, the pressure to live by a script written by someone else.  The things he does as a lover—mooning over her looks, writing poetry, quietly aching in his heart—are all things that American pop culture defines as the behavior of love.

What I love is that in their healing discussion, Natalie confesses that she made mistakes too, that Owen is not the only one who reacted poorly to the love growing between them.  She says, 

The way I figured, I didn’t want to get really involved with anybody.  Falling in love or love affairs or marrying or anything like that.  I’m pretty young, and there’s all these things I have to do. That sounds stupid, but it’s the truth. If I could take sex lightly the way a lot of people do, that would be fine, but I don’t think I can.  I can’t take anything lightly.  Well, see, what was so beautiful was that we got to be friends. . . . I thought we’d really made it, and everybody’s wrong when they say men and women can’t be friends.

Owen apologizes for “pushing the sex stuff in where it didn’t belong,” but Natalie counters, ”Yeah, but it did belong. . . . You can’t just tell sex to go away and come back in two years because I’m busy just now.”  She felt the sexual tension and desire too, and her error was to ignore it because it was inconvenient.  But this realization is not followed by a declaration of love and restructuring of plans.  Natalie’s solution appears to be to move forward as before but with the full awareness of what they both feel.  That’s amazing, and beautiful, and everything I expect from Le Guin. 

So many writers skip past the difficult conversations needed to foster true connection between people, using the pressures of love to elide the hard work of communication.  The joy of this novel is that that conversation is made the climactic moment of the story.  As a writer you can’t do that unless you know exactly what you believe about human relationships and love itself.  Le Guin knows, and I can listen to her talk about it all day.

Destruction and Survival on the Lathe of Heaven

There are tons of spoilers ahead, so tread knowingly.

The Lathe of Heaven is one of Le Guin’s shorter novels, but it packs a big punch.  It’s a dystopic novel in which the dystopia is always changing because living in this Utopia is a man whose dreams change the very fabric of reality.  It’s is trippy and heavy, funny and irreverent, sad and thought-provoking.

As in the best of her novels, in The Lathe of Heaven Le Guin uses her unique world to tell the story of very human characters.  There are three main characters in this story.  George Orr, in his late 20s or early 30s is the man whose dreams are at the center of the novel.  He has been having his “effective” dreams since he was 15 or 16, but they didn’t cause him much worry until four years before the start of the novel.  We learn that something happened that April—we never know what, only that it was an action that Orr worries was unjustified—that made Orr fear the power of his dreams to change reality.  At that point he started to take drugs to keep himself from dreaming.  As the novel begins, George is delusional from having taken a dangerous combination of drugs and is ordered by the state to go to Voluntary Therapy to avoid a sentence.

Dr. Haber is the therapist George is assigned to.  Haber is an oneirologist, a scientist of sleep and dreams.  He is a man of quick judgments and conviction.  After the first session with George, Haber learns that the young man’s dreams can indeed change the world.  Haber wants to learn how George does it and wants to use the power of those dreams to make the world a better place.  As the novel starts, the earth’s population is stretched to its limit while climate change was ruined food production so there is very little for very many people.  But George’s dream-power is like the cursed monkey paw, and every changes Haber brings about is accompanied by an unintended shift.  For example, Haber instructs George to dream that there is plenty of elbow room for all, and the past is rewritten so that there was a major population crash, wiping out 6 million people.  Haber instructs George to dream of peace, and history is rewritten so that all the countries of Earth are united . . . against an alien species that has occupied our moon for years.

Heather Lelache is an attorney in Portland, Oregon (where the novel is set), a hard-nosed attorney who takes civil rights cases.  George comes to her when he suspects that Haber is using George’s dream-power against George’s will.  While our first impression of her is that she is as strong-willed as Dr. Haber, her dismissal of George upon first meeting of him gives way to gentler feelings and a drive to understand.  She observes one of George’s sessions with Dr. Haber in the name of the ACLU, making sure that the new technology Haber is devising to work with George’s dreams is safe and legal.  When George dreams, only he remembers the past truths as well as the present truths, unless someone is with him when he dreams, in which case that person two holds memory of the old and new world.  By witnessing the session, Lelache learns the truth about what is happening.

These three characters and their relationships make up all the energy and drama of the story, all with the backdrop of a rotating horror of global strife and tragedy.  No matter what George dreams, the climate has been thoroughly ruined by corporate greed and human apathy.  Man, I would love to see a quality mini-series made of this book—it is perfect for what television can do today.

For all that, what is the book about? 

Each chapter begins with a literary quote, most of which come from Zhuangzi, both the author and the book.  I was unfamiliar with Zhuangzi or his writing, so I did a little research.  Zhuangzi is a philosopher, and his tales are about the mystery of the nature of reality and how to live in an uncertain world.  The title of the book, The Lathe of Heaven, comes from chapter 23 of Zhuangzi, and is included as the quote at the head of chapter 3 of the book: 

Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven.  They do not learn this by learning.  They do not work it by working.  They do not reason it by using reason.  To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.  Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven (26).

The Lathe of Heaven, taken as a whole, is a kind of parable that could appear in Zhuangzi, if Zhuangzi was a modern work of science fiction.  The philosophy at its core is one of balance and acceptance, of being a part of the world even as you see yourself as apart from it.  That quote above is about accepting and being a part of the world not through human action, but by being.  To not be, to push for your own ends will lead to destruction upon the lathe of heaven.  Be shaped by the will of heaven.  To fight it and try to be the lathe yourself will only end in horrors.  Which is, of course, precisely what happens to Dr. Haber.  He wishes to push his own will on the heavens and pays the ultimate price for it, and makes a huge chunk of the world pay that price as well.

Orr, on the other hand, is a son of heaven, in the sense of the quote above.  George is the living embodiment of balance, as we learn in chapter nine, when Haber tells him about the results of his personality tests, calling him “the man in the middle of the graph.”  For Haber, to be so centered is to be “self-cancel[ing]”: “You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left.”  A colleague of Haber’s proposes a different reading: “he says your lack of social achievement is a result of your holistic adjustment,” a notion Haber finds laughable, but that we can see the wisdom of. We are told early on that 

Orr was not a fast reasoner.  In fact, he was not a reasoner.  He arrived at ideas the slow way, never skating over the clear, hard ice of logic, nor soaring on the slipstreams of imagination, but slogging, plodding along on the heave ground of existence. He did not see connections, which is said to be the hallmark of intellect. He felt connections, like a plumber (39).

See how that connects to the sons of heaven?  He does not reason it by using reason.  He does not work it by working.  And he is only too happy to let understanding stop at what cannot be understood.  After the aliens come to Earth, George learns from them and rediscover this inner peace by asking for their help.  George snaps back to a feeling of balance that abandoned him four years ago when he began trying to control his dreaming.  For nearly 10 years before that, he dreamed easily and the world didn’t suffer.  (I admit that is an uncertain statement to some degree, insofar as the world kinda sucked, and we have no idea how George affected reality before the start of the novel.  But whatever his dreams did or didn’t do, we know that the lathe of heaven is turning and shaping him, using him to shape the world, in the philosophy of the text.)

I’ve got much more buzzing around in my head than I have time to write right now.  I suspect that George Orr’s name is a nod to George Orwell and simultaneously important because “or” is the balancing point of alternatives. George can let both parts of the or exist without tension or exclusion.  There is no “either” to George’s “or.”  That would be a fun path to pursue.

I would like to read a whole essay about Lelache, who is, I think, a crux in the novel.  She is introduced in opposition to George just as Dr. Haber is, but she is no Haber.  Her mixed racial background makes her almost a living example of opposites meeting, so much so that her blackness is so crucial to who she is that she cannot exist in the gray-skinned world Haber creates through George’s dreams.  I would love to see an analysis of how Lelache matters to the themes of the novel.  Because I think it’s a critical role she plays.

I want to talk about the opening chapter and how George is like the jellyfish in the ocean.  I want to talk about the Aldebararians and why they look like sea turtles, how they are the eastern mystics, and why they talk out of their left elbow.  I want to make connections between their broken speech and George’s broken speech in the first chapter, in which we get insight into the back story of his broken sentences while the listening characters are clueless.  I want to talk about the snake poison analogy and its implications.  I want to talk about the alien quoting Macbeth and George responding with Hamlet.

There’s so much to think and talk about in this short novel because it is insanely rich and beautifully crafted.  Here, Le Guin is at the top of her game.  Read it and write about all the things I couldn’t, please.

The Farthest Shore

*As always there are spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.*

The Farthest Shore is Le Guin’s third book in the Earthsea cycle, and another excellent novel.  At root, it is the story of Arren as he journeys from being the boy prince of Enlad to the man and future King of All the Isles.  Arren travels with Ged across the Western isles and into the realm of the dragons in search of who is responsible for what appears to be the death of magic in Earthsea. 

The list of Le Guin’s talents and gifts as a writer is long, but one of my favorite is her refusal to tell any story but the one that is right to her, no matter what genre and tradition might say.  We have seen the story of the boy who became king many times.  If he’s a prince, as Arren is, then he’s usually arrogant and used to wielding power, and he must learn humility and responsibility.  Or he is feckless and must learn the gravity of what it means to rule.  In other stories, he proves himself in battle or saves the realm with feats of heroism.

Arren has none of these traits.  He falls in love with Ged upon meeting him and wishes only to serve him.  He may not be humble, but nor is he arrogant.  He puts others above himself for most of the story.  When he is on the rafts of the Children of the Sea, the ruler acknowledges Arren as a prince, but doesn’t know whether to address him as an equal or a child.  The narrator tells us at that time that Arren prefers to be thought of as a child.  Arren’s sword remains in Lookfar throughout the novel, coming out only as Ged and Arren land at Selidor.  He swings the sword once, but it does nothing against Cob because “there is no good in killing a dead man.”

The battle with Cob seems to be what the narrative is bending towards from early on in the novel, once Ged and Arren determine that one wizard is likely responsible for the state sweeping over the world.  But there is never a battle at all.  When living Cob faces Ged, Orm Embar the dragon crushes Cob before the battle begins.  In the realm of the dead, when Ged and Arren again face Cob, Ged makes it clear that Cob has no actual power; he can’t even remember his own name, let only exert any magic.  Arren swings his sword, but it does nothing, and Ged, well, Ged doesn’t even bother with Cob.  The climax isn’t about Cob at all, but about the healing of the rift that has been torn between life and death.  Ged spends all his magic not defeating Cob but restoring balance to Earthsea by closing the rift.  And Arren grows to manhood, not by partaking in that act, but by bearing witness to it and carrying Ged up the mountain to reenter the world of the living.  We know that he has grown because when he meets Kalessin the dragon, he meets him as an equal, one ruler to another.  Now, Arren doesn’t prefer to be treated like a child.  Instead he says to Kalessin, “Let my lord be.  He has saved us all, and doing so has spent his strength and maybe his life with it.  Let him be!”  Arren spoke “fiercely and with command. He had been overawed and frightened too much, he had been filled up with fear, and had got sick of it and would not have it anymore. He was angry with the dragon for its brute strength and size, it’s unjust advantage.  He had seen death, he had tasted death, and no threat had power over him.”  Yelling at the oldest dragon on the planet is pretty badass, and a sure sign of Arren’s growth. 

The Farthest Shore is about a world being torn apart by self-interest and greed, the willingness to ruin the world if only it means I can live forever.  But Cob and his greed is only a symptom of the larger problem.  The ring of Erreth-Akbe have been returned and peace should rule the land, but it doesn’t.  There is an absence of war, but that is a poor substitute for true peace.  True peace in this tale comes by the uniting of all the islands under one ruler.  I think this is not about the importance of a ruler, but about the coming together as a joint entity, not as a nation, but as a people.

The whole series is about split things coming together.  In the first novel, Ged is split with himself and must rejoin the two.  In the second novel, East and West come together to deliver the ring of Erreth-Akbe to Havnor.  In the third novel, all of Earthsea is rejoined by the separating of life and death.

There’s a reading to be made about the importance of dragons in this novel, how they are linked to human beings, so that the rift between life and death affects them both equally.  They move from legend and distant threat to partners with Ged in this book.  I was particularly struck by Arren’s observation when Orm Embar curls up beside Ged as he slept after arriving at Selidor: “Arren was aware of his yellow eye, not ten feet away, and of the faint reek of burning that hung about him.  This was no carrion stink; dry and metallic, it accorded with the faint odors of the sea and the salt sand, a clean, wild smell.”  Dragon are not supernatural, but a part of nature. This reading of the dragons, I’ll leave to others, but I will say that Le Guin was clever in her use of them to escalate the stakes of the conflict.  Seeing the dragons cannibalize each other and go mad made clear that all of Earthsea is endangered by Cob’s actions, not just the fate of the people of Earthsea.

I really enjoyed the novel, though The Tombs of Atuan is still my favorite of the Earthsea novels so far.  I am excited to get back to Tenar in the next half of the series!

The Tombs of Atuan

*As always, this review is intended for others who have already read the novel, so there are plenty of spoilers ahead.*

This is my first time reading through the Earthsea cycle, and I’m ordering the books as I go, one at a time.  When I got halfway through The Tombs of Atuan, I went to Amazon to order the next book, The Farthest Shore (because, sadly, our library doesn’t carry it).  I’ve seen excited posts in the last week or two about the new illustrated collected volume of the Earthsea books, a thousand-page, hardbound edition full of quality illustrations.  So I considered getting that instead of buying the 2012 rereleases that I have been getting.  But I didn’t, in part because I didn’t want an artist’s interpretation of the texts coming between me and what I was reading for the first time.  The illustrations are really fantastic, and on second readings, I would love to see them to see how they align with my own mental pictures.  But the real reason I’m sticking with the editions I’m reading is that they include an afterword written by Le Guin herself in 2012.  As I said in my review of A Wizard of Earthsea, no other artist can evaluate her own work like Le Guin, and these afterwards, though only 8 pages or so, are full of insight and humor and top-notch analysis of both the intellectual and artistic variety.  Ann and I had dinner a few nights ago before finishing The Tombs of Atuan, and a lot of the observations we brought up in our conversation about the book over that meal Le Guin includes in her afterword, only more sharply observed and more eloquently phrased.

I will add a few observations of my own, but let me included for you some of what she says here.

[W]hen I started The Tombs of Atuan, I saw it, as well as I can recall, simply as a sequel.
 And a change of gender.  Ged would play a part in it, but the person whose story it was would be a girl.  A girl who lived far from the cities of the Archipelago, in a remote desert land.  A girl who could not seek power, as young Ged could, or find training in the use of it as he did, but who had power forced upon her.  A girl whose name was not given to her by a kind teacher, but taken from her by a masked executioner.

The boy Ged, offered wisdom, refused it through his own pride and willfulness; the girl Tenar, given the arbitrary power of a goddess, was taught nothing about living her life as a human being.

When I was writing the story in 1969, I knew of no women heroes of heroic fantasy since those in the works of Ariosto and Tasso in the Renaissance.  These days there are plenty, though I wonder about some of them.  The women warriors of current fantasy epics – ruthless swordswomen with no domestic or sexual responsibility who gallop about slaughtering baddies – to me they look less like women than like boys in women’s bodies in men’s armor.

Be that as it may, when I wrote the book, it took more imagination than I had to create a girl character who, offered great power, could accept it as her right and due.  Such a situation didn’t then seem plausible to me.  But since I was writing about the people who in most societies have not been given much power – women – it seemed perfectly plausible to place my heroine in a situation that led her to question the nature and value of power itself.

The word power has two different meanings.  There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge.  And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.

Ged was offered both kinds of power.  Tenar was offered one.

Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world.  I hadn’t yet thought much about that archaism.  My story took place in the old hierarchy of society, the pyramidal power structure, probably military in origin, in which orders are given from above, with a single figure at the top.  This is the world of power over, in which women have always been ranked low.

In such a world, I could put a girl at the heart of my story, but I couldn’t giver her a man’s freedom, or chances equal to a man’s chances.  She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense.  Not even in a fantasy?  No.  Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.  After all, even in a democracy, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, after forty years of feminist striving, the reality is that we live in a top-down power structure that was shaped by, and is still dominated by, men.  Back in 1969, that reality seemed almost unshakeable.

So I gave Tenar power over – dominion, even godhead – but it was a gift of which little good could come.  The dark side of the world was what she had to learn, as Ged had to learn the darkness in his own heart. (215-218)

And this:

In The Tombs of Atuan, the Old Powers, the Nameless Ones, appear as mysterious, ominous, and yet inactive.  Arha/Tenar is their priestess, the greatest of all priestesses, whom the Godking himself is supposed to obey.  But what is her realm?  A prison in the desert.  Women guarded by eunuchs.  Ancient tombstones, a half-ruined temple, an empty throne.  A fearful underground labyrinth where prisoners are left to die of starvation and thirst, where only she can walk the maze, where light must never come.  She rules a dark, empty, useless realm.  Her power imprisons her. (218-219)

And this:

She is only able to escape when Ged becomes her prisoner.  She, for the first time, exerts her power to – her freedom of choice.  She chooses to let him live.  So she gives herself the chance to see that, if she can free him, she can free herself.

Some people have read the story as supporting the idea that a woman needs a man in order to do anything at all (some nodded approvingly, others growled and hissed).  Certainly Arha/Tenar would better satisfy feminist idealists if she did everything all by herself.  But the truth as I saw it, and as I established it in the novel, was that she couldn’t.  My imagination wouldn’t provide a scenario where she could, because my heart told me incontrovertibly that neither gender could go far without the other.  So, in my story, neither the woman nor the man can get free without the other.  Not in that trap.  Each has to ask for the other’s help and learn to trust and depend on the other.  A large lesson, a new knowledge for both these strong, willful, lonely souls.

Reading the book, more than forty years after I wrote it, I wonder about many of its elements.  It was the first book I wrote with a woman as the true central character.  Tenar’s character and the events of the story came from deep within me, so deep that the subterranean and labyrinthine imagery, and a certain volcanic quality, are hardly to be wondered at.  But the darkness, the cruelty, the vengefulness . . . After all, I could have just let them go free – why did I destroy the whole Place of the Tombs with an earthquake?  It’s a kind of huge suicide, the Nameless Ones annihilating their temple in a vast spasm of rage.  Maybe it was the whole primitive, hateful idea of the feminine as dark, blind, weak, and evil that I saw shaking itself to pieces, imploding, crumbling into wreckage on the desert ground.  And I rejoiced to see it fall.  I still do. (219-220)

Yeah, that’s better than I could have said.

So over that dinner the other night, Ann and I agreed that something about writing a young adult novel did cool things for Le Guin’s style.  The need to be straightforward with a clearly directed plot makes for sharper storylines than her earlier work.  (Note: I love the way Le Guin lets her plots unfold and meander, so I’m not knocking that at all.)  At the same time, she doesn’t let that need for direct storylines affect her ability to tell the kinds of leisurely plots that she is inclined to write.  We see this is in A Wizard of Earthsea once Ged is in pursuit of the shadow.  As I said in my review of that book, the pursuit of the shadow is when the book really starts to feel like a Le Guin novel.  That feeling is amplified and extended, to my mind, in The Tombs of Atuan.  Though it’s a much shorter novel, it reads more slowly and moves more quietly than A Wizard.  Plenty happens on the island of Atuan, but it’s a novel that is concerned with the interior life of Arha/Tenar.

We see all the classic Le Guin themes at play in this novel: the coming together of opposed cultures; the negotiating and “marriage” of them as some synthesis occurs, creating something entirely new; the meaningful bonds formed between two thoughtful and opinionated minds.  If I were to make a study of the book, I would love to go through the novel again and see how Le Guin weaves together plot and personal reflection.  The novel never drags and never wanders off into onanistic philosophizing, and I’d love to see how she strikes this wonderful balance.

Another amazing talent Le Guin possesses is the ability to stay focused on a main character.  There are so side plots or diversions away from Arha’s journey.  Another author could easily have made a side story about of Arha’s relationship with Penthe or Manan.  Another author could easily have made a cartoon villain out of Kossil as well.  There are a thousand ways to have messed with this story in I think detrimental ways, and Le Guin steers through all the dangers true, like Ged with his mage wind. 

As much as I like A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan is the book I think I’m most likely to reread and revisit going forward.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Le Guin is a rare breed, an author who is not only willing to reflect on what she has written but is skilled at breaking down what her novel has accomplished, where it shines, and where she feels it falls short.  My copy of Earthsea comes with an afterward that Le Guin wrote in 2012, some 44 years after the novel was first published.  Reading it, she said everything I was thinking about the nature of her hero and his quest as it relates to other fantasy quests.  Here’s what she says:

Hero tales and adventure fantasies traditionally put the righteous hero in a war against unrighteous enemies, which he (usually) wins.  This convention was and still is so dominant that it’s taken for granted – ‘of course’ a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.

But there are no wars in Earthsea. No soldiers, no armies, no battles.  None of the militarism that came from the Arthurian saga and other sources and that by now, under influence of fantasy war games, has become obligatory.

I didn’t and don’t think this way; my mind doesn’t work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting – danger, risk, challenge, courage – to battlefields.  A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons.

War as moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous.  By reducing the choices of action to ‘a war against’ whatever-it-is, you divide the world in Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.  This is puerile, misleading, and degrading.  In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the ‘right’ side and therefore will win.  Right makes might.

Or does might make right?

If war is the only game, yes. Might makes right.  Which is why I don’t play war games.

To be the man he can be, Ged has to find out who and what his real enemy is. He has to find out what it means to be himself.  That requires not a war but a search and a discovery.  The search takes him through mortal danger, loss, and suffering. The discovery brings him victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of a life.

Like all her novels, A Wizard of Earthsea is beautifully written and narratively compelling.  Unlike her other novels published before it, A Wizard of Earthsea is focused, moving with a purpose from chapter to chapter.  It’s not rushed; it unfolds leisurely as is her want, but each chapter moves us measurably along a course that is discernible to the reader.  At some point in every novel before this one (and at many points in most of them) I have wondered where the story was going, what it was building to, what it was about.  A Wizard of Earthsea sets up Ged’s contest with the shadow early on and doesn’t veer.

It was a quite refreshing tactic, and I was thrilled to see that she could accomplish the feat without sacrificing any of the style that makes her writing so rewarding. The most that’s-so-Le-Guin part of the story was, to me, Ged’s and Vetch’s sailing beyond Lastland through the open waters, and getting to it was like rejoining a friend after a long parting. 

The world of Earthsea, the system of archipelagos as the only known lands, is a rich idea for a fantasy world, and Le Guin uses her art to bring the system of islands to life, giving each region and cluster its own flavor and history.  I can see already why the book was turned into a series, not something Le Guin had originally planned to do.

We are going to be starting on The Tombs of Atuan even tonight.

The Handmaid's Tale

There are plenty of spoilers ahead, so read on at your own risk.

I can’t find it now, but I remember reading a passage in which Orwell talks about his political fiction and how it was important to him that his novels be art first and political second.  Political fiction that is mere didacticism will not have an impact because it will never be read or tolerated.

Atwood was clearly inspired by Orwell’s 1984, and she also appears to have shared his position concerning political fiction.  The Handmaid’s Tale flies far above political handwringing to create a compelling and disturbing narrative.  Atwood can successfully critique the direction she saw America heading in the mid 80s because she wrote a story about a character with real blood in her veins and placed her in a world made of flesh and bone, bricks and concrete.  The arts of language and narrative come first in her telling of Offred in Gilead, and Atwood is a master of those arts.

Part of what makes the novel powerful—the part that I was struck by—is how imperfect a hero Offred is.  She didn’t see the warning signs about where the world was heading when she was younger, and when she finally did, she didn’t think much further than herself and possibly her daughter.  As readers, we rally behind her insight and her ability to analyze the horrors that she endures, but once she kicks off her affair with Nick, she loses interest in the larger movement that Ofglen and others are fighting for.  Offred is not here to start a revolution; she just wants her own freedoms back.  To the reader she is simultaneously understandable and frustrating.  Presenting her protagonist in this way allows Atwood to position her readers both behind Offred’s eyes and above her, so that we can feel for her without being trapped in her perspective, always forcing a little distance between us.  Most readers are savvy enough to know that you can’t fully trust a first-person narrative, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to be critical of what we’re told.  Offred’s shortcomings help us do just that.

But what I really want to talk about are the endings.  I use the plural because there is the ending to Offred’s account and also the ending of Atwood’s novel, the “Historical Notes on the Handmaid’s Tale.”  Talk about a roller coaster ride!  First, trained by 1984 and similar dystopias, I was expecting some real dark shit to go down at the end of Offred’s account.  That it ended with her being escorted out to the Mayday folks was surprisingly uplifting.  Yes, technically it’s a Lady-or-the-Tiger ending, but since we know she is writing the narrative we have just read, it is unlikely that she was taken away and killed by the Gilead government (although as I write that, I am certain some enterprising scholar out there has written a solid essay about why we should believe that very thing).  So boom, surprise happy ending!  But wait!  Enter James Darcy Piexoto and the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies.

What a powerful and devious move by Atwood!  After taking us through a dark and emotional journey through the looking glass, she jerks us into the brightly lit halls of some convention center or hotel where smug pricks like Professor Piexoto is saying shit like this: 

If I may be permitted an editorial aside, allow me to say that in my opinion we must be cautious about passing moral judgment upon the Gileadeans.  Surely we have learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific.  Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are more happily free.  Our job is not to censure but to understand. (Applause.)

Fuck you and your detachment from which you can look at the subjugation of half the populace and be simply fascinated.  Instead of Gilead becoming this historical moment that is learned from, it has become a subject for scholars to analyze and chuckle politely over.  There is a Gileadean Society?  This is their twelfth symposium?  Good God.  It reminds me of Don Delillo’s White Noise and Jack Gladney’s position as head of Hitler studies.  Instead of Offred’s story having any power to change the world, we learn in this afterward that it has been absorbed by the world and turned into a curiosity.  This is a much darker ending than if Offred had been hung on the wall.  Even when Gilead falls, nothing will have changed except the names of places and people.

That final chapter is both horror and warning.  Heed this tale and the emotions it stirred, and threat them with reverence.  Don’t let the monstrosities of our past and present become intellectual playthings without meaning. 

The most disturbing thing about reading the novel in 2018 is how prescient it has proven to be.  Though written in the Reagan years as the religious right was first becoming a political force, it is only more apt today as the GOP in the Senate fights to confirm Brett Kavanaugh on the highest court in the country.  Moreover, Atwood identifies the growing environmental concerns and the rampant racism in America and a panic over the “browning” of America.  The Handmaid’s Tale is a wonderful and disturbing novel.