The language of the nigh.., p.6
The Language of the Night, page 6
I did not much bother with all the islands that I knew lay between Sattins and Pendor, and north and south of them. They weren’t involved. I had the distinct feeling, however, that the island of “Word of Unbinding” lay up north of Pendor. I am not now sure which island it actually is, that one I first landed on. Later voyages of discovery have so complicated the map that the first landfall, like that of the Norsemen in the New World, is hard to pin down for certain. Sattins, however, is on the map, high in the East Reach between Yore and Vemish.
Along in 1965 or 1966 I wrote a longish story about a prince who travels down through the archipelago from its central island, Havnor, in search of the Ultimate. He goes southwest out into the open sea, beyond all islands, and finds there a people who live on rafts all their lives long. He ties his boat to a raft and settles down with them, content with this as the Ultimate, until he realizes that out past the farthest journey of the drifting raft-colony there are sea-people, living in the sea itself. He joins them. I think the implication was that (not being a merman) he’ll wear out eventually, and sink, and find the ultimate Ultimate. This story wasn’t submitted for publication, as it never worked itself out at all well; but I felt strongly that the basic image—the raft-colony—was a lulu, and would find itself its home somewhere eventually. It did, in the last of the Earthsea books, The Farthest Shore.
I explored Earthsea no further until 1967, when the publisher of Parnassus Press, Herman Schein, asked me if I’d like to try writing a book for him. He wanted something for older kids; till then Parnassus had been mainly a young-juvenile publisher, putting out the handsomest and best-made picture books in America. He gave me complete freedom as to subject and approach. Nobody until then had ever asked me to write anything. I had just done so, relentlessly. To be asked to do it was a great boon. The exhilaration carried me over my apprehensions about writing “for young people,” something I had never seriously tried. For some weeks or months I let my imagination go groping around in search of what was wanted, in the dark. It stumbled over the Islands, and the magic employed there. Serious consideration of magic, and of writing for kids, combined to make me wonder about wizards. Wizards are usually elderly or ageless Gandalfs, quite rightly and archetypically. But what were they before they had white beards? How did they learn what is obviously an erudite and dangerous art? Are there colleges for young wizards? And so on.
The story of the book is essentially a voyage, a pattern in the form of a long spiral. I began to see the places where the young wizard would go. Eventually I drew a map. Now that I knew where everything was, now was the time for cartography. Of course, a great deal of it only appeared above water, as it were, in drawing the map.
Three small islands are named for my children, their baby names; one gets a little jovial and irresponsible, given the freedom to create a world out of nothing at all. (Power corrupts.) None of the other names “mean” anything that I know of, though their sound is more or less meaningful to me.
People often ask how I think of names in fantasies, and again I have to answer that I find them, that I hear them. This is an important subject in this context. From that first story on, naming has been the essence of the art-magic as practiced in Earthsea. For me, as for the wizards, to know the name of an island or a character is to know the island or the person. Usually the name comes of itself, but sometimes one must be very careful: as I was with the protagonist, whose true name is Ged. I worked (in collaboration with a wizard named Ogion) for a long time trying to “listen for” his name, and making certain it really was his name. This all sounds very mystical, and indeed there are aspects of it I do not understand, but it is a pragmatic business, too, since if the name had been wrong the character would have been wrong—misbegotten, misunderstood.
A man who read the ms. for Parnassus thought “Ged” was meant to suggest “God.” That shook me badly. I considered changing the name in case there were other such ingenious minds waiting to pounce. But I couldn’t do so. The fellow’s name was Ged and no two ways about it.
It isn’t pronounced Jed, by the way. That sounds like a mountain moonshiner to me. I thought the analogy with “get” would make it clear, but a lot of people have asked. One place I do exert deliberate control in name-inventing is in the area of pronounceability. I try to spell them so they don’t look too formidable (unless, like Kurremkarmerruk, they’re meant to look formidable), and they can be pronounced either with the English or the Italian vowels. I don’t care which.
Much the same holds for the bits of invented languages in the text of the trilogy.
There are words, like rushwash tea, for which I can offer no explanation. They simply drink rushwash tea there; that’s what it’s called, like Lapsang souchong or Lipton’s here. Rushwash is a Hardic word, of course. If you press me, I will explain that it comes from the rushwash bush, which grows both wild and cultivated everywhere south of Enlad, and bears a small round leaf which when dried and steeped yields a pleasant brownish tea. I did not know this before I wrote the foregoing sentence. Or did I know it, and simply never thought about it? What’s in a name? A lot, that’s what.
There are more formal examples of foreign languages in the trilogy; in The Farthest Shore there are several whole sentences in the Language of the Making, as dragons will not speak anything else. These arrived, spelling (formidable) and all, and I wrote them down without question. No use trying to make a lexicon of Hardic or of the True Speech; there’s not enough in the books. It’s not like Tolkien, who in one sense wrote The Lord of the Rings to give his invented languages somebody to speak them. That is lovely, that is the Creator Spirit working absolutely unhindered—making the word flesh. But Tolkien is a linguist as well as a great creator.
(In other books I have taken the invented languages further. I knew enough Karhidish, when I was writing The Left Hand of Darkness, to write a couple of short poems in it. I couldn’t do so now. I made no methodical lexicon or grammar, only a word list for my own reference.)
I said that to know the true name is to know the thing, for me, and for the wizards. This implies a good deal about the “meaning” of the trilogy, and about me. The trilogy is, in one aspect, about the artist. The artist as magician. The Trickster. Prospero. That is the only truly allegorical aspect it has of which I am conscious. If there are other allegories in it, please don’t tell me; I hate allegories. A is “really” B, and a hawk is “really” a handsaw—bah. Humbug. Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality to it, can “really” be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast.
Wizardy is artistry. The trilogy is then, in this sense, about art, the creative experience, the creative process. There is always this circularity in fantasy. The snake devours its tail. Dreams must explain themselves.
What I wanted to send Andy Porter was a long passionate article about the status of “children’s books.” He wanted something more personal. But as an SF writer I resent being low paid in comparison to dreck-writers; and if SF writers think they’re low-paid, they should look at writers for children. I am not complaining personally. Atheneum, who now publish my children’s books, have treated me well, and with great personal civility; the same goes for Gollancz in England; and both firms have given me splendid (woman) editors. What is wrong is the whole scale—all the publishers’ budgets for their children’s books. There is seldom big quick money in kiddylit, but a successful kids’ book has an unusually long life. It sells to schools, to libraries, and to gift-giving adults, and it goes on selling, and making money, for years and years and years. This is not reflected in the advances or the royalties. It is a very badly paid field, in general.
But the economic discrimination is only an element, as usual, of the real problem: a reflection of a prejudice. The real trouble isn’t the money, it’s the adult chauvinist piggery.
“You’re a juvenile writer, aren’t you?”
Yeth, Mummy.
“I love your books—the real ones, I mean, I haven’t read the ones for children, of course!”
Of courthe not, Daddy.
“It must be relaxing to write simple things for a change.”
Sure it’s simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up.
All you do is take all the sex out, and use little short words, and little dumb ideas, and don’t be too scary, and be sure there’s a happy ending. Right? Nothing to it. Write down. Right on.
If you do all that, you might even write Jonathan Livingston Seagull and make twenty billion dollars and have every adult in America reading your book.
But you won’t have every kid in America reading your book. They will look at it, and they will see straight through it, with their clear, cold, beady little eyes, and they will put it down, and they will go away. Kids will devour vast amounts of garbage (and it is good for them), but they are not like adults: they have not yet learned to eat plastic.
The British seem not to believe publishers’ categorizations of “juvenile,” “teenage,” “young adult,” etc., so devoutly as we do. It’s interesting that, for instance, Andre Norton is often reviewed with complete respect by English papers, including the Times Literary Supplement. No pats, no sniggers, no put-downs. They seem to be aware that fantasy is the great age-equalizer; if it’s good when you’re twelve, it’s quite likely to be just as good, or better, when you’re thirty-six.
Most of my letters about the Earthsea books from American readers are from people between sixteen and twenty-five. The English who write me tend to be, as well as I can guess, over thirty, and more predominantly male. (Several of them are Anglican clergymen. As a congenital non-Christian I find this a little startling; but the letters are terrific.) One might interpret this age difference to mean that the English are more childish than the Americans, but I see it the other way. The English readers are grown-up enough not to be defensive about being grown up.
The most childish thing about A Wizard of Earthsea, I expect, is its subject: coming-of-age.
Coming-of-age is a process that took me many years; I finished it, so far as I ever will, at about age thirty-one; and so I feel rather deeply about it. So do most adolescents. It’s their main occupation, in fact.
The subject of The Tombs of Atuan is, if I had to put it in one word, sex. There’s a lot of symbolism in the book, most of which I did not, of course, analyze consciously while writing; the symbols can all be read as sexual. More exactly, you could call it a feminine coming-of-age. Birth, rebirth, destruction, freedom are the themes.
The Farthest Shore is about death. That’s why it is a less well-built, less sound, and complete book than the others. They were about things I had already lived through and survived. The Farthest Shore is about the thing you do not live through and survive. It seemed an absolutely suitable subject to me for young readers since, in a way, one can say that the hour when a child realizes, not that death exists—children are intensely aware of death—but that he/she, personally, is mortal, will die, is the hour when childhood ends and the new life begins. Coming-of-age again, but in a larger context.
In any case I had little choice about the subject. Ged, who was always very strong-minded, always saying things that surprised me and doing things he wasn’t supposed to do, took over completely in this book. He was determined to show me how his life must end, and why. I tried to keep up with him, but he was always ahead. I rewrote the book more times than I want to remember, trying to keep him under some kind of control. I thought it was all done when it was printed here, but the English edition differs in three long passages from the earlier American one: my editor at Gollancz said, “Ged is talking too much,” and she was quite right, and I shut him up three times, much to the improvement of the whole. If you insist upon discovering instead of planning, this kind of trouble is inevitable. It is a most uneconomical way to write. The book is still the most imperfect of the three, but it is the one I like best. It is the end of the trilogy, but it is the dream I have not stopped dreaming.II
I. Note (1989). I use Fowler and Follett rarely now, finding them authoritarian. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, corrected and supplemented by Miller and Swift’s Words and Women, are my road atlas to English, and have never led me astray. A secondhand copy of the small-print Oxford English Dictionary in two volumes has been an infinite source of learning and pleasure, but the Shorter Oxford is still good for a quick fix.
II. (1989) Nor have I yet stopped dreaming it. It was a pleasant surprise to me to discover that Ged was in fact quite mistaken about how his life must end, and that the person who would guide me through the last book of Earthsea was Tenar. That last book—Tehanu—though I longed to call it Better Late Than Never—is to be published soon.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
(1972)
I am very pleased, very proud, and very startled to accept the National Book Award in children’s literature for my novel The Farthest Shore.
Nothing could give me greater joy than to share that honor, as it should be shared, with the people whose work and patience and constant trust were essential to the writing and publication of the book: the people at Atheneum Press, especially my editor, Jean Karl, and illustrator, Gail Garraty; and my literary agent, Virginia Kidd; and—last of all and first of all—my husband and our children.
And I also rejoice in the privilege of sharing this honor, if I may, with my fellow writers, not only in the field of children’s books, but in that even less respectable field, science fiction. For I am not only a fantasist but a science fiction writer, and odd though it may seem, I am proud to be both.
We who hobnob with hobbits and tell tall tales about little green men are quite used to being dismissed as mere entertainers, or sternly disapproved of as escapists. But I think that perhaps the categories are changing, like the times. Sophisticated readers are accepting the fact that an improbable and unmanageable world is going to produce an improbable and hypothetical art. At this point, realism is perhaps the least adequate means of understanding or portraying the incredible realities of our existence. A scientist who creates a monster in the laboratory; a librarian in the library of Babel; a wizard unable to cast a spell; a spaceship having trouble in getting to Alpha Centauri: all these may be precise and profound metaphors of the human condition. Fantasists, whether they use the ancient archetypes of myth and legend or the younger ones of science and technology, may be talking as seriously as any sociologist—and a good deal more directly—about human life as it is lived, and as it might be lived, and as it ought to be lived. For after all, as great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
THE CHILD AND THE SHADOW
(1974)
Once upon a time, says Hans Christian Andersen, there was a kind, shy, learned young man from the North, who came south to visit the hot countries, where the sun shines fiercely and all shadows are very black.
Now, across the street from the young man’s window is a house, where he once glimpses a beautiful girl tending beautiful flowers on the balcony. The young man longs to go speak to her, but he’s too shy. One night, while his candle is burning behind him, casting his shadow onto the balcony across the way, he “jokingly” tells his shadow to go ahead, go on into that house. And it does. It enters the house across the street and leaves him.
The young man’s a bit surprised, naturally, but he doesn’t do anything about it. He presently grows a new shadow and goes back home. And he grows older, and more learned; but he’s not a success. He talks about beauty and goodness, but nobody listens to him.
Then one day when he’s a middle-aged man, his shadow comes back to him—very thin and rather swarthy, but elegantly dressed. “Did you go into the house across the street?” the man asks him, first thing; and the shadow says, “Oh, yes, certainly.” He claims that he saw everything, but he’s just boasting. The man knows what to ask. “Were the rooms like the starry sky when one stands on the mountaintops?” he asks, and all the shadow can say is “Oh, yes, everything was there.” He doesn’t know how to answer. He never got in any farther than the anteroom, being, after all, only a shadow. “I should have been annihilated by that flood of light had I penetrated into the room where the maiden lived,” he says.
He is, however, good at blackmail and such arts; he is a strong, unscrupulous fellow, and he dominates the man completely. They go traveling, the shadow as master and the man as servant. They meet a princess, who suffers “because she sees too clearly.” She sees that the shadow casts no shadow and distrusts him, until he explains that the man is really his shadow, which he allows to walk about by itself, a peculiar arrangement, but logical; the princess accepts it. When she and the shadow engage to marry, the man rebels at last. He tries to tell the princess the truth, but the shadow gets there first, with explanations: “The poor fellow is crazy, he thinks he’s a man and I’m his shadow!”—“How dreadful,” says the princess. A mercy killing is definitely in order. And while the shadow and the princess get married, the man is executed.
Now, that is an extraordinary, cruel story. A story about insanity ending in humiliation and death.
Is it a story for children? Yes, it is. It’s a story for anybody who’s listening.
If you listen, what do you hear?
The house across the street is the House of Beauty, and the maiden is the Muse of Poetry; the shadow tells us that straight out. And that the princess who sees too clearly is pure, cold reason is plain enough. But who are the man and the shadow? That’s not so plain. They aren’t allegorical figures. They are symbolic or archetypal figures, like those in a dream. Their significance is multiple, inexhaustible. I can only hint at the little I’m able to see of it.
The man is all that is civilized—learned, kindly, idealistic, decent. The shadow is all that gets suppressed in the process of becoming a decent, civilized adult. The shadow is the man’s thwarted selfishness, his unadmitted desires, the swear words he never spoke, the murders he didn’t commit. The shadow is the dark side of his soul, the unadmitted, the inadmissible.
