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Article Excerpt
The Earthsea novels of Ursula K. Le Guin pit two visions of language and subjectivity against one another. On the one hand, the fantasy cycle is based upon the myth of a magical language, and the texts imitate this myth in the very rhetoric of the novels by way of carefully constructed names. (1) Drawing upon the mimetic capacities of language to create a mirror-like reflection between the multiple associations of a name and the attributes of its designated character, the texts employ these "mimological" names, to borrow Gerard Genette's terminology (5), in the reconstruction of the human subject as whole and unified. In other words, the names arc motivated in such a way as to make the characters appear as fully integrated subjects--or, more precisely, re-integrated subjects, since Le Guin's novels typically begin with a fracture, such as self and shadow, male and female, dragon and human, that must then be mended. On the other hand, the novels demonstrate a sensitivity to the violence of the name, and acts of nomination in particular introduce fractures and contradictions into the Utopian construction of both sign and subject. While this latter representation of names and naming is more consistent with the conditions of language and subjectivity as described by modern linguistics and psychoanalysis, the Utopian vision should not be viewed as a simple manifestation of naivete or ignorance. Rather, the construction of integrated characters and the creation of mimological names represents an artistic, emotional and intellectual response to the arbitrariness of the sign and the division of the subject.
Indeed, the relationship between subjectivity and motivated names must be seen against the backdrop of the modernist crisis of the sign, which aliments mimological desire and serves as a visible translation of the invisible crisis of the subject. (2) As Thomas M. Greene argues, semiotic disjunction is inseparable from psychic division:
If men and women arc understood to be in control of the language they use and, further, all the signs they use, if they conceive themselves to possess an intimate relation to these signs which then participate with or operate upon the cosmos, this control and this self- perception tend to produce intuitions of the subject as whole, coherent, unified, and firmly situated. ... The dispersal of signs, the perception of signs as arbitrary, the fragmentation of resemblance, tend to produce a fragmented subject, out of unmediated contact with its natural and spiritual context. The disjunction of the sign from both its agent and its referent leads to theories of the ego as itself radically divided. At the extreme, the subject is perceived as manipulated by signs out of his control. (85)
According to Genette, modern examples of mimoiogism represent an attempt to come to terms with this double crisis of subject and sign. For the recognition of the arbitrariness of the sign involves the renunciation of deep-seated desires; and yet, precisely because they have been repressed, these desires will seek expression and satisfaction elsewhere, as in the "phantasmic description[s] of language" that have been offered, not only by numerous poets, but by scientifically-minded linguists as well. (3) In using the term "phantasmic," Genette is quick to add, he does not mean to insinuate "falsehood," but rather to characterize mimological thought as a form of "wishful thinking," or "a complex and more or less conscious system of desires [or] predilections to be satisfied" (334). Behind this wish fulfillment lie motivations that are both psychoanalytical and aesthetic in nature. Looking more closely into the former, Genette claims that the insistent emphasis upon analogy and identity goes to the very core of mimological thought, which favors resemblance over difference. And this bias in favor of resemblance echoes a number of psychoanalytical themes, such as the Oedipus complex and its uterine oneness, or the Narcissus complex with its grounding in a mirror-like reflection. "[I]n Lacanian terms," Genette concludes, mimoiogism represents "the flight from the symbolic and refuge in the imaginary" (334).
These observations concerning the motivations behind mimoiogism hold true for Le Guin's fantasy. In psychoanalytical terms, the mimesis of the magical name amounts to an onomastic reconstruction of the imaginary order, in which we find a representation of the imago from Jacques Lacan's mirror stage. The symbolic order, meanwhile, is represented by acts of nomination that undermine the Utopian discourse of the novels as they foreground the violence of the name. In Lacan's theory of the human subject, the mirror stage corresponds to the moment when the child encounters its reflection in the mirror and, for the first time, recognizes that reflection as its own. This scene illustrates how the imaginary order organizes subjectivity in terms of duality and identification, polarizing an individual's experience into binary oppositions, while at the same time inducing the subject to identify with one or another of the poles in question. For, while the child identifies with the mirror reflection, it also perceives that image as something different and apart from itself. The imago, moreover, possesses a unity and coherence that the subject can never really obtain. As such, the recognition in the mirror stage is a mis-recognition, one in which the child comes to understand or see itself in terms of a fictional construct. Consequently, the subject is both attracted to and alienated from the imago, and it thus develops an emotionally ambivalent relationship to its own ideal reflection. A resolution of this state of ambivalence comes about only through the subject's entry into the symbolic order. The latter is Lacan's collective term for the dominant signifying systems--including the gender roles, rites of passage, kinship ties, dress codes, labor relations, and, above all, language--in which subjectivity is articulated within a given culture.
A resolution of the subject's ambivalence, however, can only come about at the price of its submission to and positioning within this very network, whose social conventions and linguistic rules not only precede, but extend over and beyond the subject's individual existence. As Lacan writes,
Symbols ... envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him "by flesh and blood"; so total that they bring to his birth ... the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond his death; and so total that through them his end finds it meaning in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it. (Ecrits 68)
Viewed in this light, subjectivity is not an inherent essence of one's being, but is rather culturally and, above all, linguistically constructed. Indeed, language mediates all other possible systems of signification, which means that the subject can participate and find its place within the symbolic order only after its acquisition of language.
Lacan illustrates this stage of the subject's development by way of the Oedipus complex--which, he insists, is one and the same thing as language. (4) This equivocation can be illustrated by way of a pun, one based upon the homophony between the French words non (no) and nom (name): the primordial law of human existence is the incest taboo, which forbids sexual union with the mother (non); and this law is imposed by and enforced in the the Name of the Father (nom). This name of all names, which stands metonymically for language in general, (5) is the most important term to appear in the discourse of subjectivity, since it confers a durable identity upon the individual. This identity, however, comes at the cost of sundering the subject from the real. For the construction of identity by way of the patronym necessarily takes place in language, and once the subject has entered into the symbolic realm, it becomes a purely linguistic being, one that is henceforth severed from its organism and from an unmediated experience of its social and natural surroundings. So, where the imaginary order fosters an illusion of wholeness, but induces a state of ambivalence that inhibits a sense of true and lasting identity, the symbolic order confers a stable identity by virtue of the Name of the Father, but demands in turn a double sacrifice, one that both divides the subject from itself and separates it from others. (6)
These differing states of subjectivity represented by the imaginary and symbolic orders are illustrated in Le Guin's Earthsea cycle with the two names by which the central male protagonist is best known, Sparrowhawk and Ged. The first, which is the protagonist's use name, serves as a representation of the imago in the onomastic reconstruction of the imaginary order. The second, which is the hero's true name, functions as a patronym that operates within the symbolic order. The latter is called "true" in the discourse of Earthsean magic because it is said to correspond to an individual's essence or inner being. Since individuals must keep this name hidden from all but their most trusted friends and relatives, they must also have a public or use name. As the narrator explains in A Wizard of Earthsea:
No one knows a man's true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may hear it. In front of other people they will, like other people, call him by his use name, his nickname--such a name as Sparrowhawk, and Vetch, And Ogion which means "ftr-cone". If plain men hide their true name from ah but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardry men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping. (75)
What this passage does not explain is that, because one is not given a true name until adolescence, and as it may likewise take time to receive a use name, the individual may also be given a juvenile name. In the opening pages of Wizard, for example, the hero is known as Duny. When the protagonist comes of age, however, this name is taken away and replaced by Ged. In what follows, we shall see that this substitution illustrates on multiple levels how a gender divide is at work in the hero's naming ceremony. This divide inscribes the male subject into a patronymic system, and introduces into the narrative a set of social contradictions that consequently sunder the illusory whole or integrated subject built up in the mimological construction of name and character.
The Onomastic Imaginary
Of the character's three names, Sparrowhawk is the one most transparently motivated, and also the one that operates most clearly in the framework of familiar rhetorical devices, such...
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