“corruption / Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet”

[larryhammer]

Wednesday reading, continued — which is to say, still reading Always Coming Home. I’m into the Back of the Book section of technical appendices.*

I am once again struck by the structure of the ending of the main part of the book. Stone Telling’s final section sets us up to think the book title is riffing off her new name upon returning to the Valley, Woman Coming Home. (It is, but there’s more.) After that there’s one more section, another selection of songs, these all of ritual use, and their formality further prioritizes Stone Telling’s story as the book’s primary narrative. And then the last poem of the fourth section, a Finder’s Lodge ritual for seeing someone off on a journey, ends with a book title drop — a recognition that makes it click into place as The End Of The Book. It’s a really powerful landing.

But it isn’t the end. There’s one more thing, a poem addressed to the people of today as spoken by the people of the Valley. Making it last already emphasizes it, but all that final structure adds even more weight. (As do all the Pandora sections, the author-stand-in who’s the anthropologist studying the Kesh — acting as a Finder for the readers.)

A master at work, this.


* Talk about ways to directly evoke comparisons to Lord of the Rings. Earthsea is frequently mentioned as an example of responding to Tolkien, but Always Coming Home is as well, in entirely different directions. Though speaking of things I don’t see mentioned, why isn’t ACH ever described as a further development of the narrative strategies of The Left Hand of Darkness?

---L.

Subject quote from Shine, Perishing Republic, Robinson Jeffers.

Comments

[graydon]

It's not a real book; no problem is resolved through murder.

(I am being maybe a little wry, but I'm certainly not joking.)

[larryhammer]

When Stone Telling is returning from the City (with her toddler and servant), she's accompanied by two Condor warriors, and their presence causes her party big problems passing through regions in conflict with the Condor peoples. One of them is killed and the other driven off, leaving the women to travel (safely) alone. Also, the nearest neighbors of the Condor people do fight back with deadly force (though the final collapse is conveniently a self-implosion).

But it's true no Kesh ever kills any of the Condors, nor for that matter the hardcore members of the Warrior Lodge, but rather use non-violent techniques Le Guin previously explored in Eye of the Heron. The one instance of adult Kesh killing human people (in "The War with the Pig People") is roundly condemned by others as immature and shameful. (The adolescent boys of the Bay Laurel Lodge involved are side-eyed but given a pass for being appropriately immature.)

[graydon]

There's murder and violence, but it doesn't get anything like the customary narrative significance; it's much more like an environmental hazard. This significant and surely not accidental excursion from narrative convention makes me think the self-implosion of the Condor people polity has narrative significance, too, it's a story about how it's on you to want only things you can obtain in responsible ways.

And the whole thing is so extremely transgressive of convention (and so very far ahead of its time! you can get away with transgressing those conventions a bit more this decade than in 1985) that I think it more or less caused everyone's critical faculties to short out. Couldn't figure out how to tell a story about the story.

(From utterly different directions, I observe something much like that happening with Glen Cook's Port of Shadows, which is a brilliant take on unreliable narrators and the construction of narrative.)

[larryhammer]

It's not that avant garde. I mean, it builds on techniques developed by the Modernists, such as Dos Passos's USA Trilogy. Admittedly not much had been done with those techniques in SFF before then (though again, see The Left Hand of Darkness).

The implosion of the Condor people totally has narrative importance -- a heavy one. It's almost anvilicious with its message, compared to the multi-layered significance of the rest of the book.

[graydon]

I don't think anyone who would be familiar paid attention to SFF and nobody in SFF really knew what to do with The Left Hand of Darkness, either.

I wouldn't be inclined to doubt someone who did an analysis suggesting that this is pretty ubiquitous across critical responses to LeGuin, either.

[larryhammer]

Other than shove both a Hugo and a Nebula at it...

Jesting aside, I've seen a LOT of critical comments and commentary on LHoD, both and out of the genre -- it made her career and is a foundational text of feminist SF. Not so much ACH, alas.

[graydon]

All the commentary I've seen on LHoD is about gender, historical context of gender, whether the genthans are convincing in how they present gender, etc. Haven't seen anything about narrative structure or craft of writing.

It's highly likely I've just missed that portion of the commentary, but it's one of those things that seems like a gap.

[sovay]

Though speaking of things I don’t see mentioned, why isn’t ACH ever described as a further development of the narrative strategies of The Left Hand of Darkness?

I don't know; you should maybe say it more loudly.

[larryhammer]

Instead of in a digression wrapped inside a footnote?

[sovay]

Instead of in a digression wrapped inside a footnote?

Yep!