When I was in my early teens, I was a prolific book reader.
Like today, I was reading a lot of Fantasy and Science
Fiction. One Christmas, I found a set of three books in my
stocking, they were the Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K.
Le Guin. I recall reading the books and enjoying them,
but had very little recall on what they were about.
As I was watching the Sci/Fi channel I noticed they are
going to show a miniseries based on the Earthsea stories,
so I thought this was as good a reason as any to reacquaint
myself with them. To my delight, I discovered that the
author had written three additional books in the series. I
have devoured the first four and started on book five just
a couple days ago.
I don’t normally read the “forwards” or “introductions” to
books but I did make a point to read the forward in the
5th book. It was published in 2001 and I was curious what
she had to say about the continued story she started over
thirty years ago. What I found was something not only
very eloquent, but moving as well.
Le Guin writes about how the world has changed. How
morality has changed. “Profoundly disturbing moral
choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe.” It’s the “us”
against “them”, “good” versus “evil” attitude. We hear
this in every speech our glorious leader gives. He tells us
about the “evil doers” and how we will crush and kill
them, but doesn’t exactly explain who these evil doers are
except to say “you’re either with us or against us”. So we
shouldn’t question the killing of another human being and
when you have declared them evil it makes the killing all
that much easier. The choice is easy to make, there isn’t
any reason to think about the greater morality issues.
Le Guin goes on to talk about how materialism has helped
distract us from having to think about these “tough”
issues. “The passionately conceived ideas of the great
story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys,
molded in bright-coloured plastic, advertised, sold,
broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.” Great
ideas are no longer great, they are thrown out with the
cheap broken toys.
Le Guin tells us how things change in ways we never
imagined. “What I thought was going to happen isn’t
what’s happening, people aren’t who — or what — I
thought they were, and I lose my way on Islands I thought
I knew by heart.”
It is indeed interesting how things change and in ways we
never expected. Who would have thought things would
truly get this bad in just four short years. I know many of
us feared the worst, but I’m not sure if even our
predictions came close to the horrors we see each night on
the evening news.
In my own life, I see how “people aren’t who — or what
— I thought they were”. My own family members getting
so caught up in this religious fervor that they would turn
upon their own flesh and blood — mother against child,
brother against sister. I see people I once respected,
blindly following our glorious leader. I look back upon it
all in a curious wonder and continue to be baffled about
the actions of people who I once thought were perfectly
normal.
The Earthsea series is not complicated reading, but it is
filled with people making moral and immoral choices.
People who make mistakes and then do the right thing to
fix those mistakes, even if it means sacrificing their own
lives. She touches on many topics: women’s rights, child
abuse, respecting life and the choices people make for
themselves, and much more. Le Guin is right when she
says “enchantment alters with age” and it’s been
interesting how my perspective has changed from the fist
time I read this series.
I was very touched by this perspective of Ursula K.
Le Guin and wanted to share it with you:
In the years since I began to write about
Earthsea I’ve changed, of course, and so have
the people who read the books. All times are
changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid
moral and mental transformation. Archetypes
turn into millstones, large simplicities get
complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what
everybody knows is true turns out to be what
some people used to think.
It’s unsettling. For all our delight in the
impermanent, the entrancing flicker of
electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We
cherish the old stories for their changelessness.
Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go
“there and back again,” and “there” is always
the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out
forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the
realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths,
immutable simplicities.
And the mills of capitalism provide them.
Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a
commodity, an industry.
Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents
nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds
by depriving the old stories of their intellectual
and ethical complexity, turning their action into
violence, their actors to dolls, and their truthtelling
to sentimental platitudes. Heroes
brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as
mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping
profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are
sanitized, made cute, made safe. The
passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers
are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys,
molded in bright-coloured plastic, advertised,
sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.
What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and
exploit is the insuperable imagination of the
reader, child or adult, which gives even these
dead things life — of a sort, for a while.
Imagination like all living things lives now, and
it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we
do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded;
but it survives commercial and didactic
exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The
conquerors may leave desert where there was
forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the
rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable,
untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as
much a part of human history and thought as
the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and
some are more enduring.
We have inhabited both the actual and the
imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t
live in either place like our parents or ancestors
did. Enchantment alters with age and with the
age.
We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of
them true. The shire changes irrevocably even
in Bilbo’s lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out
to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there.
It’s been a joy to me to go back to Earthsea and
find it still there entirely familiar, and yet
changed and still changing. What I thought was
going to happen isn’t what’s happening, people
aren’t who — or what — I thought they were,
and I lose my way on Islands I thought I knew
by heart.
So these are reports of my explorations and
discoveries: tales from Earthsea for those who
have liked or think they might like the place,
and are willing to accept these hypothoses:
Ursula K. Le Guin
©Ace Books May 7, 2002
Excerpt from the forward
things change:
authors and wizards are not always to
be trusted:
nobody can explain a dragon.
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Angela C. Byers
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