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Article Excerpt
A commentary presupposes the classic status of the text it speaks
about. --Walter Benjamin To accept a classical writer without changing him/her means to betray her/him. --Heiner Muller
This article arose out of the unease I felt at the ending of my "Fantasy" article, where it now seems to me not only that spacetime forced me to give short shrift to Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea writings, but that what I said applies only to the first three books, focussed mainly on the protagonist Ged. I want thus to follow the inner logic of her three last books set in Earthsea. (2) My working hypothesis is that these three books (Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind) constitute a "Second Earthsea Trilogy" of high interest precisely because it both continues and strongly modifies the first one. The second trilogy, while operating with the central presuppositions of the first one, amounts to its reconsideration and rewriting. At the end, I would wish to discuss what and how may be cognitive in this Second Trilogy.
The Creation of Ea(rthsea), Twice
The geographical layout of the Earthsea world, evident in the careful map carefully repeated at the beginning of most single books in what I shall call the "two trilogies," begins with the name of "Earthsea." It is a compressed oxymoron or paradox, akin to binaries such as "the left hand of darkness," repeated as the verse motto from this world's Creation song on or indeed before the first page of Tehanu:
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. The Creation of Ea
The verse "only in dark the light" may serve to introduce two of the main components of Le Guin's Earthsea vision: first, the contraries which complement each other such as dark and light; second, an order of preference in each verse which one suspects may harbour a hierarchy. As different from the full Daoist symmetry in The Left Hand of Darkness (where light was the left hand of darkness, darkness the right hand of light), the light here comes to be, comes out of, darkness, traditionally in most mythologies Mother Night (cf. also 57). Further, the word--both an all-important matter and an ineradicable beginning for every writer, but in Le Guin even expressly thematized as a magically creative force, e.g., in the secret "true name" of each person which shares in his/her essence, and therefore mentioned in the very first verse--exists, comes out of, can be heard only against the enveloping, motherly silence. Since light, again traditionally, means knowledge, cognition or understanding, I shall later investigate how far this obtains in the whole Trilogy. As to life, it exists, has meaning, has distinction only as it comes to be, as it is ceaselessly shaped against the background of dying (this shall become overwhelmingly important in the last book, The Other Wind.) And in the second half of the ditty, which the semicolon suggests is also a conclusion, the hawk's course is seeable as bright only (the adverb is here clearly implied) against the empty sky.
However, all the "against" oppositions, the background vs. foreground, were introduced by my comment: instead of what would seem to me the default concept of "against," Le Guin uses "on" or indeed "in." Why? There is a prosodic reason (in this steely delicacy one syllable more would be unbalancing), but I don't think it is the only or main one. "On"--as a line (of flight) on a visual field--is much more intimate, there is contiguity but no express opposition: if there were no sky flying would not be possible, if it were not empty but cluttered with visual "noise," the flight would be visible with difficulty if at all, certainly it would be less important or noteworthy. "On" seems to me here much akin to "a line on paper" (usually a black line on white paper), thus latching on to and enriching the first three "in"s: the word (now written), the light, the life (now bright); in fact, is a line on or in the paper? Only the laziness of our look from above prefers "on." The three couples of silence-word, dark-light, and dying-life are thus contraries but not contradictories, not only complementary to but intimately participating in each other. Furthermore, the verses also enforce the primacy of each first term (silence, dark/ness, dying/death) which we can therefore without too much straining call parental, engendering or motherly. The terms word-light-life are then filial, younger, fresher, more evident (or audible), but never to be fully and properly perceived and understood without the co-presence of the parental quality (the opposite doesn't obtain). The three first lines, where the final prosodic foot progressively contracts from three syllables to one, getting thus more weighty as the lines go on, imply to me also a value progression: life contains light which contains the word. I shall risk the hypothesis, to be checked against the Earthsea cycle as a whole, that this also means life subsumes cognition which in turn subsumes writing. This is the hierarchy which I here find implied in amazing pithiness.
As to the term "Earthsea" itself, The Creation of Ea clearly states that before the earth was, the sea was. A glance at the map of the Earthsea world confirms that the measurable islands are bathed in a circumambient Ocean of which we do not know where it begins or ends, very similar to the relation of life to death. This too is (literally) a hierarchy. It may not be very evident in the narrations, which have to concentrate on people mostly living on dry land, but its water element, connected to trees and the Old Speech, subtly defines and infiltrates the younger element and powers. Indeed, "the dry land" par excellence, that is without any trace of humidity (or sunlight or living contact), is the land of the dead of individualism, which is faced both in The Farthest Shore of 1972 and The Other Wind 30 years later, the final books of the first and the second trilogy.
The second half of the cited poem, the last two verses, relates to the first half as the particular to the general. First we were given the law of this world, coterminous with its perception. Now comes the course of events. The balance has here shifted: the parental function of the empty sky seems to me minimal, only an enabling function remains, somewhat offset by the emptiness. The stress is on the flight of the protagonist. Now, before they stood at the head of Tehanu, the cited verses stood at the head of A Wizard of Earthsea. In the first trilogy, even in The Tombs of Atuan, the hero was Ged, Sparrowhawk, and his end was honourable but, in retrospect, bright only in personal heroism but not necessarily in an opening to the future. The hero re-established a disturbed balance, his function was conservative. Depending on the situation, this may not be a swearword, but it now turns out the balance itself is very suspect. Now the hero, focus, and standpoint is a binomial heroine: Tenar, the motherly, who nurtures the life of and brings out into the light Therru as Tehanu, the dragon child who against all odds knows the words of dragons...
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