*Spoilers ahead*
The Eye of the Heron is another fantastic novel by Ursula K. Le
Guin. Because of its brevity and
directness, it feels at times like a YA novel, but its depth and complexity
says that it’s intended for mature readers.
It occupies this between ground comfortably and elegantly, and impressively.
Reading the story in early 2019 was surprisingly hard, emotionally-speaking. As with all of the other Le Guin novels we’ve
read, I read Eye of the Heron aloud to Ann each night, so the progress
was slow-ish and the challenges facing the people of Shantih had time to
resonate in our heads at the end of each chapter for a day or two before we can
pick the book up again. For those of you
who read the novel a while back and need a quick refresher, the book is about
two societies on the planet of Victoria.
Victoria was originally a prison planet for prisoners from Brazil. Those people founded the City of Victoria and
have a classic capitalist power structure with the aristocratic bosses and peasants. Their culture is also divided along what we
consider traditional gender roles, with men as dominant and privileged and
women as property and fragile vessels of morality. Fifty or so years after the first settlers
were sent, a third ship arrived, this time with 2,000 members of a communist
labor group. They founded the town of
Shantih, where they work farmland for communal benefit. The two civilizations have
a relationship, each providing things that the other needs. At the beginning of the book, set 70 years or
so beyond the arrival of the last ship, the people of Shantih have found a
place in the wilderness to establish a second settlement, and they plan to send
half the population northward. The bosses of Victoria City are afraid of losing
their labor force and plan to put pressure on the people of Shantih so that they
lash out, giving the military force of the bosses and reason to quell the “rebellion”
and turn the peaceful and leaderless communists into slave labor.
So the non-violent people want to extricate themselves without violating
their code of non-violence while the all-too-familiar power structure of Victoria
city is looking for any excuse to subdue and conquer them. Even though I knew that Le Guin is an
optimist, or if not an optimist, someone who believes in providing models of
hope, I didn’t see any way for the people of Shantih to escape their horrible
situation. Or I should say, I didn’t see
any way for them to do so without the author pulling some punches or creating
cheap escapes. So I read with dread of either
watching the one group subdue and yoke the other. Since we are living in a time in America that
a third to half of the political forces in America are willing to embrace authoritarianism
and vilification of the weakest amongst us in the name of stability and
privileged comfort, the dilemma of the book hit me very viscerally, way more
than it would have done if I had read the book four years ago.
The resolution was of course thoroughly satisfying. Le Guin is not only a gifted writer but a
perceptive student of humanity. The
thing that makes her novels so thrilling and interesting is that she can turn
her mind into a laboratory of human conditions.
She creates a test lab of limited variables, puts people into her
constructed situation, details those people with specificity and uniqueness,
and then records what she sees in her minds eye. In the case of Eye of the Heron, she
reduces the world to two cultures in a world with no outside influences but
their traditions and memories. Then she gives each side simple desires that are
opposed to each other, and a set of techniques and beliefs that govern the way
they act on those desires. But her magic
ingredient is that she clothes these generic positions in specificity, grounding
them in real characters with relationships and individual desires and personal
commitments. She’s concerned about
things at a high level, but her stories take place in the weeds and mud of real
people. Large ideas might be forceful
and driving, but they are always channeled through people. Falco is no nameless capitalist, but a man
with a specific position, a specific relationship with his daughter, and
relationships with the other capitalists both established and upcoming. Lev and Vera and Luz and Andre and Southwind and
Macmilan are each anchored by their own relationships and views of the world
that exist simultaneously within and separate from the larger movement of which
they are a part. The best social science
fiction writers do this, and Le Guin is among the best of the best. The laboratory of the mind can and should
never be a fully sterilized place. There
are variables that must be removed for her experiment to take place, but as
soon as the characters of the experiment are complicated and breathing people,
a million tiny forces of reality are at play, and the talented author sees them
and acknowledges them and grants them space to affect the story unfolding.
As usual, my intended introductory remarks have grown into their own
little analysis, leaving me little room to comment on the things that I filled
my paper with while brainstorming about the book after finishing it. I’ll just throw out some of the ideas now and
you can do with them what you will.
Ignore them, foster them into full ideas, use them as leaping off points
for your own thoughts—whatever you do is cool by me.
The book begins and ends with wotsits, the most alien of creatures on Victoria. All the other animals are based on the
initial inhabitants’ memories of earth: herons, coneys, pouchbats. The wotsit, as the name suggests, is completely
strange. It’s something like a
three-eyed, feather-winged, shadow-colored toad. Where it goes, it goes of its own will. It cannot be coerced and it cannot be caged,
because all caged wotsits die. Knowing
this, no one tries to cage them. The
wotsits appear to be an obvious analogy for the human spirit, and the people of
Shantih in particular, who are making their break from the bosses of Victoria
city.
The ringtree is a gorgeous creation and another beautiful image. The tree grows solitary and at some surprise
moment, explodes its one seed pod that then plants seeds in a neat circle around
it, where in time, 40-60 trees take root and create a ring of trees around a
center in which nothing but shrubgrasses grow and often a pond forms where the
original tree was rooted once it has died.
Ringtree becomes tree ring and then the cycle starts all over
again. The relationship between the
individual and the society seems an obvious read as the individual leader is
only leader for a moment before the strength is given over to the masses to
hold the line together until such a time as another leader is needed. Perhaps it’s also related to the people of
Shantih’s Long March, where an idea is the seed for a gathering of like minded
people who can carry the idea to its end, until another idea from the crowd
bursts forth to have its influence, with Luz being the next ringtree to explode,
instigating the final expansion into the wilderness, taking Lev’s and Vera’s
place.
I love the first section of Chapter 10, the section that immediately follows
Lev’s death. Luz, Vera, Southwind, and Elia
are wrestling with what happened on the hill and what it means for the
community. Nothing is easy and nothing
is clear, and even though they survived as an independent people, no one is comfortable
with how things shook out or where things should go from here. Not only is Lev dead, but the army was turned
back because the people of Shantih responded by rushing the army, an act of
violence. Moreover, Falco’s shooting of
Macmilan and other soldiers was also a significant reason for their victory,
and his motivation was not one of peace or an interest in protecting the people
of Shantih. So the philosophy that is at
the foundation of their movement is shaken and challenged and they are all
struggling with how to proceed. It is
painfully human and complicated, and all it does is raise questions and not
answers. It is a beautiful section
because it recognizes what has happened and doesn’t attempt to line up lessons
or morals. We are still believers in non-violence,
but we must acknowledge that we don’t know its limits or how it exists entirely
separately from violence, to which is always exists in relation.
I also loved chapter 6, the one in which the hundred or so people of
Shantih are being forced to labor in the new fields at gunpoint. This chapter is stunning in its depiction of
power and consent. Even though the
soldiers have rifles, the laborers are there only because they have consented
to be there. As such, it would be more
productive to lay down the rifles and share in the labors. More would get done and community could
thrive, but the city soldiers believe there is a hierarchy as long as they have
the guns. We know that belief is an
illusion. We often think of this dilemma
as Angel did when he thinks the laborers are stupid because they outnumber the
guards but do nothing to challenge them and are sheepish instead. Lev makes it clear that it is not
sheepishness that makes them organize as they do. We are all connected and interdependent, and
the more we acknowledge that unity rather than try to force a difference the better
work we can do. Le Guin is careful I
think to not criticize those who have yielded to the oppressive power of guns—hell,
it’s the thing that caused me so much anxiety while reading the book. But power is always a relationship of consent,
and when that consent ends, so does the power.
The people of Shantih are educated enough to know this; the people of
Victoria City are not.
The novel is interested in the difficult relationship that we have with
traditions and our past. The
understanding of “this is who we are” comes from our past. The storyteller in chapter 10 tells of the
Long March, and every child knows the stories.
This is who we are and how we handle adversity. They are a comfort to us and a guide, but
they can equally become a prison. The
traditions of Victoria City are what led Vera to staying in Casa Falco, which
is what influenced Luz to side with the people of Shantih, which determined the
course of the story. There is tradition
and there is growth and adaptation. Luz
is the one who rejects tradition, and as such she becomes a leader and a force
for change. She first rejects her own culture
and then challenges her new people to push on beyond their boundaries. Which I guess brings us back to the
wotsit. All the other creatures are traditional
to us, things that remind us of home, but the wotsit is unique and fully adapted
to the planet Victoria. They are everywhere
and free and totally alien. And they are
a sign of hope and the people who Luz has joined will become something as
unique and perfectly suited to the life they are creating.
