Beginnings: Early Works

The people [of a California tribe] sang:

I dream of you,

I dream of you jumping

Rabbit, jackrabbit, and quail.

And one line is left of a dancing song:

Dancing on the brink of the world.

With such fragments I might have shored my ruin, but I didn't know how. Only knowing that we must have a past to make a future with, I took what I could from the European-based culture of my own forefathers and mothers. I learned, like most of us, to use whatever I could, to filch an idea from China and steal a god from India, and so patch together a world as best I could.

"An die Musik" (1961)

Ursula K. Le Guin's first published story, "An die Musik," is set in the city of Foranoy in Orsinia in Central Europe on "a warm bright day, late spring" (140) and then in September of 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was meeting Adolf Hitler in Munich.¹ We are reminded twice of Chamberlain's trip to Munich (142, 143); readers who know the history of World War II in Europe know that Chamberlain's meetings with Hitler in 1938 did not bring "peace with honour" or "peace in our time." Nazi Germany got the Sudetenland, and England and Europe and much of the world got the most destructive war in human history. What happened to Foranoy and Orsinia in general is more difficult to know; you will find them only on maps that include Sir Thomas More's Utopia (Utopia, 1516) or Freedonia in the Marx Brother's Duck Soup (1933). In science-fictional terms, Orsinia is located in a universe with a history identical to that of ours, with the exception of the existence of a country on our Earth called Orsinia. Orsinia differs from More's Utopia and its relatives in that Le Guin is interested in it primarily for itself, not so much as a place to hold up to our world the "mirror" of satire. Le Guin gives us Orsinia with the completeness and detail of a fantasist, but she follows in her presentation the conventions of mundane literature, of Realism (Cummins 128-29).

"An die Musik" is the highly naturalistic story of a few hours in the life of Ladislas Gaye: his springtime visit to Otto Egorin, impresario; Gaye's talk with Egorin; his trip home; some time at home, mostly talking with his wife and then his son; a barely noticeable passage of time (141-42); walking to teach a piano lesson; and his return home, where, finally, he "went off to bed" (145). And that is it.²

The story takes on additional meaning in Orsinian Tales (1976), where it fits into a fuller context, but in itself it is important for at least four reasons. First, for introducing Ursula's country, Orsinia (with its play on Le Guin's given name); second, for postulating (very quietly) a world without a transcendent god; third, for showing at the beginning of her career a genius for handling complex issues in a lucid, simple style. And, finally, "An die Musik" is important for introducing related themes Le Guin would return to throughout her career up though "The Kerastion" (1990) and "The Rock that Changed Things" (1992), and other stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: the roles, for good and for ill, of artists and intellectuals in society; the problem in believing that utility usefulness is the only criterion for value; the demands of their callings in the lives of people who are, among other things, artists and intellectuals; the necessity to find alternatives to apparently "either/or" choices; the possibility of momentary visions that can give a healing certainty and the related, Daoist feeling for human creativity, where one goes the Way to the whole created object, without forcing thought or trying to find the Way; the importance of moving out of imprisoning houses and constraining cultures back into nature and the world.

In a few hours on a spring day and then later, in September of 1938, thirty-year old Ladislas Gaye takes his son for a walk and visits Otto Egorin, to show Egorin some of the few compositions Gaye has managed to produce when not supporting his somewhat sick wife, very sick mother, and three children, by working as a clerk and moonlighting as a piano teacher. Gaye is obviously under stress (he starts to cry), and eventually Egorin asks, "Have you ever thought of throwing it over, Gaye? Not the music. The rest." That is, his family. "If you live for music{,} you live for music." Gaye replies "I'm not made so" (Orsinian Tales 136). Egorin continues his argument with "You can't serve two masters," but then he compromises and suggest that Gaye "Write little songs, not impossible Masses." Gaye replies, "The Mass is what I've got to write" (plus a symphony); "I've begun it, I have to finish it" (137). Egorin's wife, Egorina enters, and we see Egorin's sacrifice "To Music": Egorina is hyperkinetic and inflicts upon Egorin and the world "An unceasing flood of words" for a full day before she appears in concert; she is, apparently, a brilliant singer, a snob, something of an airhead, and a casual bigot: in Central Europe in 1938, her dismissive reference to someone she calls "that little Jew" (never named) is a damning indictment of her.

Gaye returns to his family, and readers should sympathize with Gaye's weeping. Gaye is "not made so" that he can just abandon his family, and the whole situation seems not made so that any of the family can (re)negotiate the terms of their relationships. By the time she reached her 1986 lecture on a woman writing, Le Guin would give Mrs. Gaye a voice and suggest that she might be the one having trouble finding time for her art.³ But the issue in "An die Musik" isn't dysfunctional relationships or who gets to do art, but the value of art, period especially in Central Europe in 1938.

Even Egorin (significantly named if we see him representing the selfish artistic Ego) even Egorin questions "what's the good" of music. With the world marching to, not dancing on, the brink of disaster, who wants or needs music?

In his chapter on the Orsinian stories, James W. Bittner argues that this is Le Guin's point, that it is asking the wrong sort of question, making the wrong kind of demand, to ask art "to save anything or to make anything happen or to change the world." Art's social usefulness, paradoxically, "is to deny the world, to detach people from politics and history so they can receive visions of a better world," and then those people of vision, perhaps, can act to "redeem politics and history with that vision." Following W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1940), Bittner asserts that when it does its job, art "removes the obstacles that block the way to a better world, but it does not bring that world into being. That is the historical task of the artist's audience" (Approaches 51).

Bittner is correct about what Le Guin was saying in 1961 in "An die Musik."

In the climax of the story, Gaye is troubled with the poetic line he has set, "It is Thou in thy mercy that breakest down over our heads all we build, that we may see the sky: and so I do not complain" (143).⁴ The line hangs him up even in a quiet moment at the kitchen table. And then he hits bottom and gets an insight, a feeling, similar to the ones that will come to several later, depressed Le Guinian heroes:

As I hinted earlier, there is a problem or two with the sexual politics of this story: wives usually have had more trouble following artistic callings than husbands; an Otto Egorin was as likely to be a genteel anti-Semite as his wife was. There is also a problem with seeing personified music (or a god, for that matter) breaking down "all the shelters" so figuratively when the German air force and armies a year later would begin the destruction of very literal houses all over Europe. In later works, Le Guin's image becomes "unbuilding walls" and refers more explicitly to political institutions and cultural categories that have grown inflexible; such walls refer to hatred and human arrogance and to all that separate people from each other, nature, the world: the hindrances keeping us from following the Dao, the Way that leads home.⁶

Bittner asserts that "Ultimately, the real subject of 'An die Musik' and the rest of Le Guin's fiction that explores ethical problems is not a group of ethical questions. These are means, not ends. Her purpose is to ask them, not to answer them. The real subject of 'An die Musik' is celebration; the tale is a celebration of Gaye's devotion to his art, and beyond that, a celebration of art itself" (53). Bittner's comments are true, but it is more true, I think, that "An die Musik" raises its ethical questions as part of a very rigorous and quite serious set of thought experiments and that "An die Musik" celebrates Ladislas Gaye's devotion to his art and to his family, his refusing to make an impossible choice. It also celebrates a music that will at least get us out of our houses, out of culture, that we "may see the sky" (145).⁷

Jesus of Nazareth spoke well when he said no one "can serve two masters" (Matthew 6.24 [Luke 16.13]) not when they're God and personified riches ("Mammon"). Otto Egorin, though, is playing the Tempter's role or that of the militantly antifamily Jesus in asking Gaye to think "of throwing it over," dumping his family and living totally for music (136-37).⁸ Ladislas Gaye is not a Romantic Hero as Artist giving up all for his art (and hurting a lot of other people in the process), nor is he a martyr sacrificing his art for deified Responsibility.⁹ He's an average human being, but with a knack, a talent, and he muddles through as best he can. That deserves celebration, and even as Europe moves toward catastrophe in September of 1938, Le Guin celebrates this artist as a low-key, domesticated, hero, loyal to his art and to his family, to his marriage Promise.¹⁰

Rocannon's World (1966)

Rocannon's World is the first novel in Le Guin's Hainish series, and it is useful to have an overview of Le Guin's Galactic History in approaching the series.¹¹ A word of caution, though: the Hainish series was not written in its historical order, nor can we be at all confident that Le Guin had its whole order in mind when she began in the middle 1960s a series continuing into the mid-1990s.¹² Indeed, we can be certain that there are some inconsistencies in the History as it is presented in the various novels and stories in the series.

In the History, there is a planet called Hain by its inhabitants (and eventually called Davenant by the people of our Earth, Terra). Long ago, in the near-mythic part of the history, the people of Hain seeded the galaxy with human stock, creating the galactic genus, Homo. During a great collapse, Hain lost contact with many of its colonies. After a recovery, Hain re-established contact with some of the worlds, forming a League, initially called, pretentiously and/or hopefully, the League of All Worlds. From the first, the League possessed Nearly as Fast as Light (NAFAL) ships; early in League history, a Cetian physicist develops the theory necessary for building an Instantaneous Communications Device (ICD), the ansible. Ansibles start out incredibly expensive but soon come down in cost, allowing a fair degree of communication among the worlds of the League. In Rocannon's World, nuclear bombs can also be delivered instantaneously by newly-developed Faster than Light (FTL) ships (31; ch. 1). Ansible communication though not FTL nukes becomes vital, to prepare for the War to Come against an extragalactic enemy. The enemy comes, wins, and humanity survives the Age of the Enemy; the worlds of the League again lose contact, and then regain it. By The Left Hand of Darkness, the League has become the well-established Ekumen (i.e., "household") of Known Worlds, and well along in the task of reuniting the human family.¹³

Rocannon's World is set fairly early in the Galactic History, during the preparation for the War to Come and when the League was "Dominated by the aggressive, tool-making humanoid species of Centaurus, Earth, and the Cetians"{sic} (36; ch. 2). In terms of Le Guin's thinking, Rocannon's World comes before Le Guin explains the existence of numerous humanoid species; and in Rocannon's World, Hain-Davenant is just another planet, not or not necessarily the home-world of the human genus (85; ch. 5).

In its political plot, Rocannon's World is a story of rebellion and revenge, in the Germanic or Nordic manner. Gaverel Rocannon ("Rokanan" to the local inhabitants) is Director of the First Ethnographic Survey of Fomalhaut II, sent by the League to do a systematic and thorough study of High Intelligence Life Forms (HILFs) of the planet.¹⁴ The League's interest is more than academic: the better they understand the peoples of technologically primitive Fomalhaut II, the more efficiently they can use them to prepare for and fight the War to Come. Rebels against the League from the planet Faraday arrive on Fomalhaut II and bomb the meeting place to which Rocannon has called his fourteen on-planet colleagues and friends, killing all the League people at the meeting except Rocannon (30; ch. 1). This is the incident that gets the plot going. Much later we learn that the Faradayans have set up a base on Fomalhaut II, with six FTL warships (131; ch. 9). After an arduous and costly quest, Rocannon is able to call in a League attack with FTLs, which takes out the base with surgical precision. Thus Rocannon saves the League, saves the peoples of Fomalhaut II from the tyranny of the rebels, stops the war of the rebellion, and avenges the deaths of his friends. Rocannon also marries a woman he's recently met: the Lady Ganye, leader of a relatively egalitarian people; within a few years Rocannon dies, before ships of the League return to the planet, so Rocannon "never knew that the League" in gratitude "had given that world his name" (135-36; Epilogue).

Even more than "An die Musik," Rocannon's World introduces a number of themes and narrative elements that are important for Le Guin's canon. Plus some elements that are probably not all that important but interesting and fun. For example, the windsteeds of the low-gravity Fomalhaut II in Rocannon's World are the tiger-size literary ancestors of the winged cats of the illustrated Catwings series for children (1988-94). The Lady Semley on her windsteed, feeling "like a girl again, like the wild maiden she had been" (11; Prologue) is similar to one of Le Guin's poetic narrators, recalling herself as a "dirty little virgin."¹⁵ Rocannon's World can be viewed as high fantasy, or Germanic epic, modernized and made more "realistic" through an SF presentation, and one gauge of the difference between high fantasy and the fairy tale can be found in the difference between the great, mute, flying cat-steeds of Rocannon's World with the little winged cats with their own language and culture in the Catwings series. One can get the same sort of gauge contrasting the Lady Semley with the "Dirty Little Virgin," getting herself joyously filthy.¹⁶

More attractive to professional students of Le Guin (earnest folk, frequently) are the "themes and narrative elements" embodied in tales: of the dance, joy, naming; "pseudospeciation," wholeness and balance; the shadow-death, the blood-bond and telepathy; godhead, the anthropologist as hero, doing what one must do, the ethical responsibilities of scientists generally and anthropologists especially, the ethical obligation to individuals (including oneself); and the connections linking together aggression with technology, spirituality, and urbanization, or in that mating of urbanization and spiritual striving that we often call civilization.

Rocannon's World begins, "How can you tell the legend from the fact on these worlds that lie so many years away? planets without names . . . where the past is the matter of myth, and a returning explorer finds his own doings of a few years back have become the gestures of a god. Unreason darkens that gap of time bridged by our lightspeed ships, and in the darkness uncertainty and disproportion grow like weeds" (5 [see also 27]). Not much comes of this opening since most of the book is the straightforward narration of the tale of Rocannon. There's the Prologue of "The Necklace" Le Guin's story, "The Dowry of the Angyar" from 1964 and an Epilogue, plus an inserted song, a message to the League Presidium, and a couple of expository excerpts from The Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms (5-6) and the Handbook for Galactic Area Eight (27-28); but the great majority of this short novel is a straight-line narration moving from the attack on Rocannon's colleagues to Rocannon's revenge. Such linearity is an elegant way to proceed, but it leaves us with basically one tale, which we will believe or not -like any story, including those that don't open with questions about epistemology. Like much else in this introductory paragraph, development of the epistemological question will wait for Le Guin's later works.

This is not the case with the rest of my list of themes and elements. In two very dense clusters near the climax of the book, Le Guin brings them together, and, I think, makes sense of them.¹⁷

Early in the narrative Rocannon is thinking about the rebels from Faraday and how they threaten to take over Fomalhaut II "for colonization or for military use. The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet . . . they would ignore or enslave or extirpate . . . . For to an aggressive people only technology mattered." Rocannon goes on to think that this may be a weakness of the League itself, a weakness even in terms of the desperate need to prepare for the War to Come. As a "hilfer," an anthropologist, Rocannon questions "the wisdom of staking everything on weapons and the uses of machines."¹⁸ Dominated by aggressive tool-makers, the League "had slighted certain skills and powers and potentialities of intelligent life, and judged by too narrow a standard" (36; ch. 2).

You have to keep in mind a number of passages to get the point, but the issue is clear enough if we put together a kind of thematic sandwich, or layer-cake. In the Prologue, we get to meet the most technologically developed of humanity on Fomalhaut II: the Gdemiar, or Clayfolk, who seem a combination of folklore dwarves with the Clay People from an old Flash Gordon serial (1938) and the Morlocks from H. G. Welles's The Time Machine (1895). Near the beginning of the book proper, we get the "MORAL" on technology and aggression, the unwisdom of placing one's hope in war machines (36). Immediately after that, we again see the Clayfolk, and they're still troglodytic, short, arrogant, sexist, relatively urban and ugly, if also clever, communal, and mildly telepathic (37-42; ch. 2). At the end of the novel proper, we see a rough sort of justice where those who live by the FTL die by the FTL and the Faradayans get blown up by a League missile. In the center of Rocannon's World we get the basic point made more strongly, philosophically, and symbolically when we meet a native human species that has gone (we may infer) too far along the way of technology, spirituality, and "urbanity." In chapter 6, Rocannon and friends are captured by what seem to be angelic, high-tech dwellers in what is emphatically "a city, not a stone-age village or a bronze-age fortress but a great city, severe and grandiose, powerful and exact, the product of a high technology" (96). Under the seeming, the reality of the tall, thin, god-like, angelic Winged Ones is that their "noble heads held brains degenerated or specialized to the level of insects" (102; ch. 7) and they're vampires to boot (100-101; ch. 6). On the surface-level of the story, we have technology, which is to accepted, but accepted within reasonable limits; down below a bit, we get technology (transcendent spirituality, civilization) associated with some of our most unconscious prejudices and most powerful fears. We have technology associated with dwarves in caves; and, more important, we have technology and civilization associated with angelic looking vampires in a city as mathematically perfect as a hive (102, 104, 109; ch. 7).¹⁹

Immediately after the episode in the vampire city, Rocannon's World moves toward its climax, and moves into the second dense cluster of significant, interrelated thematic elements.

Aiding Rocannon and friends escape the vampire city are the Kiemhrir, small talking animals whose group "name" is in fact "only an adjective, meaning lithe or swift." Rocannon ask a leaderly animal, "Small lord, may I know your name?" and receives in response "'Name,' the black-faced one whispered. . . . 'Liuar,' he said, the old word Mogien had used to mean both nobles and midmen, or what the Handbook called Species II. 'Liuar, Fiia, Gdemiar: names. Kiemhrir: unname" (105; ch. 7). The Fian, Kyo, addresses the little animals as "Wordmasters . . . Wordlovers, the eater of words, the nameless one," which brings up motifs Le Guin will develop in The Tombs of Atuan and, far more immediately, links the ideas of names and species (106). This link is developed within a few hours of fictive time, when Rocannon and Kyo sit and talk about how Kyo knew of the Kiemhrir. Like their cousins, the dwarfish Gdemiar, the elfin Fiia have a degree of telepathy amongst themselves: "What one of us in my village remembered, all remembered . . ." but Kyo had no memory of the Winged Ones. Kyo tells Rocannon that the Fiia "have no memory for fear," nor should they be expected to: "We chose. Night and caves and swords of metal we left to the Clayfolk, when our way parted from theirs, and we chose the green valleys, the sunlight, the bowl of wood. And therefore we are the Half-People. And we have forgotten, we have forgotten much!" (108).²⁰

Rocannon, on the other hand, as a Hainish-normal man, finds names very important. When Kyo asks him, what a name might be, Rocannon tells him that his birth-name was "Gaverel Rocannon" and that when he has pronounced that he has "described nothing, yet I've named myself. And when I see a new kind of tree in this land I ask you . . . what its name i[s]. It troubles me," Rocannon says, "until I know its name" (111; ch. 7).

A bit later Rocannon observes what might be an awakening individuality in Kyo (110; ch. 7) and goes on to discuss with Kyo names and distinctions, ending in Rocannon's question, "How do you know one [mountain] range from another, one being from another, without names?" Kyo doesn't answer. There is a dance at the Fian village, and Kyo tells Rocannon that Kyo will leave the quest; he will not leave the valley to accompany Rocannon to the mountains: "The dance that had no music was ended, the dancers that had no more name than light and shadow were still. So between him and Kyo a pattern had come to its end, leaving quietness" (112; end of ch. 7).

For many of us, the implication of the image cluster and the plot upshot would be a value judgment: Kyo and the Fiia should reintegrate with the Gdemiar and become a full people.²¹ That way Kyo could continue loyal in his metaphoric "marriage" to Rocannon and aid in the just struggle against the Faradayans and, anyway, get to see the mountains. That is correct, but we should balance against it Rocannon's anthropological ethic of pretty vigorous cultural relativism.

Rocannon himself questions exploiting the peoples of Fomalhaut II and "pushing them about" (33; ch. 1 [also 42; ch. 2]). And a fair number of readers nowadays would accept more readily Rocannon's willingness to let other cultures follow their ways if he were, say, a dumpy little woman: an unimposing Starlady rather than a Starlord, and perhaps liable to lose status any moment and be treated little better than a slave among at least two groups on Fomalhaut II. Still, there is much to be said for the philosophy of "Let be" when dealing with other peoples, and much to be said for the cultural relativism that lies behind this "Let Be." Kyo and his people may be incomplete and immature in sticking to the valleys; they go against modern individuality in denying ethical primacy to "one man's fate" (43; ch. 2 [133; ch. 9]); and they deny a fundamental doctrine of modern lore in seeing community ties superior to the pair-bond of love and friendship and deny a fundamental doctrine of masculinist culture in rejecting the Heroic project of making a name for oneself. But there are arguments to be made for the "elfin" position (arguments Le Guin will make later in her career), for the Daoist view rather favoring valleys over mountains, and unnamed Dao over the named things of everyday: for staying within nature and (as much as possible) outside culture, history, and as far away as one can from high-tech civilization. Certainly the Fiia have this much superiority to us, who usually live in a high-tech world and unmindfully find it «natural»: the Fiia chose their way (108); they consciously walked away from the potential City of Man.²² In Rocannon's World, though, the rest of the questers leave Kyo and go to the mountains, where Rocannon's aristocratic companion, Mogien, finds his "domain" and joy in battle against the cold and against fear from encountering the shadow of his death (113-14, 115-16; ch. 8). "Mogien was his [Rocannon's] leader and he followed. He had forgotten why he wanted to cross these mountains, remembering only that he had to, that he must go south" (114). The older man follows the younger man here, as Ged will follow Arren in The Farthest Shore; Rocannon is reduced to doing only what he must do, as Ged will advise Arren to do as a matter of royal policy (and which Le Guin would advise as Daoist policy applicable to everyone, especially given that, for Le Guin, we are all potential kings, or even gods).

Doing what he must leads Rocannon to a cave containing the Ancient One, a kind of combination of Mimir (the guardian of the Well of Wisdom in Norse mythology), and an atypically nasty Daoist hermit.²³ "It was like the Clayfolk, dwarfish and pale; like the Fiia, frail and clear-eyed; like both, like neither" integrated, combining two binary opposites in one, like an androgyne (LHD [1969]), or the girl/dragon Tehanu (1990) and the creature is highly telepathic. Telepathy being an innate ability in most humans (in the Hainish universe through the 1960s), the Ancient One easily educes in Rocannon the power to mindhear, but at the cost of "That which you hold dearest and would least willingly give" (118; ch. 8), which is Rocannon's companion and friend, Mogien whose death is the blood-bond, giving the story its meaning.²⁴

With the gift of mindhearing, Rocannon becomes a pedan, a "god," a hero, a world changer (125; ch. 9). Even as just "one man alone, against a people bent on war," he is able to call in the FTL strike that destroys his enemies (133-34; ch. 9).²⁵ With this gift he also brings real telepathy to the League, which we should feel is their one chance in the impending war. A great good has been done for a great number of the human family, and any sane, mature, civilized, rational calculation would come out, Bottom Line: even counting all the deaths, Rocannon made the right decisions. But yet it is fortunate for Rocannon that he did what he must do and could see no alternatives to doing; for there is something to be said for the way of the Fiia in that it allows human beings to live without making such bloody calculations.

Planet of Exile (1966)

Planet of Exile might be called the Hainish cycle's Romeo and Juliet, and, as in Romeo and Juliet, the action is passionate, violent, and speedy: completed between "the last days of the last moonphase of Autumn" (5; ch. 1) to the time of the first blizzard of winter; a Terran month could encompass the action. The fictive history of Planet of Exile, however, is more considerable.

After the time of Rocannon's World but still during preparation for the War to Come, a Terran colony was placed on the planet Gamma Draconis III, which moves in a huge, elliptical orbit around a sun called Eltanin, the true name for Gamma Draconis (26; ch. 3).²⁶ The Year on Gamma Draconis III is 24,000 days long, and the Winter is very severe; the Terran colony would be marginal under the best of circumstances, and circumstances turned out far from the best. Ten local Years before the action of the novel, the Enemy entered human space, and the Terrans on Gamma Draconis III sent home their ship and ansible and some of their people. They have not heard from anyone in the League of All Worlds for some 657 Terran years. Nor have they done well in their isolation. On the positive side, Terrans have not been troubled by local diseases; on the negative side, they have not fit well into the local ecology in any other ways, and their birth rate has been very low (45-46; ch. 5). For the most part, they have been true to their Law of Cultural Embargo, which forbids them to transfer to the native High Intelligence Life Forms ("hilfs") any technique, theory, "cultural set or pattern" without permission of the League's Area Council and Plenum (68; ch. 8) permission it would be impossible to get even if the native humans were ready for significant cultural transfer, which they are not. Indeed, the natives are hostile, and a film production of Planet of Exile could have much fun with old movie clichés on "The natives are restless tonight, Bawana," since the Terrans are dark-skinned, and the native humans much lighter, with the most barbaric being northerners who look Nordic. The Terrans, then, have remained aliens on the planet: choosing to stay aloof from the world and its culture(s) in some ways, in other ways being kept out of the world.

The political crisis at the beginning of the story comes from the once-a-Year migration south of the northern barbarians, the Gaal; this Southing has never been a major problem before for either the Terrans or the literally more civilized among the native humans: the Gaal have moved in small groups and could not do much damage to walled and fortified cities. But "a new time" has come to the planet, as Jakob Agat of the Terrans explains to Wold, Eldest of his clan and chief man of the Range and Winter City of Tevar:

There is a potential irony here, as Agat much later thinks to himself:

The Gaal have lived as savages within nature; they are moving into culture, and they are about to enter history and civilization. In the manner of the peoples of Atilla, Genghis Kahn, or Tamburlaine the Great, they are going to make history.²⁸

*

The method of narration of Planet of Exile is useful if one thinks it problematic to tell "fact from legend, truth from truth" (RW 5). We get the story in third-person, limited omniscient from the points of view of Rolery, a woman of Tevar; of Wold, "the Eldest Man of the Men of Askatevar" (34; ch. 4) and of Jakob Agat Alterra the last word an honorific indicating one of the ten elected leaders of the Terrans (who call themselves Alterrans [words change]).²⁹ Of the fourteen chapters, we get Rolery's point of view in five (chs. 1, 5, 8, 11, 13), Wold's in four (2, 4, 7, 10), and Agat's in five (3, 6, 9, 12, 14). To push a point, we could divide the chapters in the manner of an Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet into an octave and sestet, only I would prefer to put the sestet first and have the turning point of the novel the marriage of Rolery and Agat in chapter 6, followed by the arrival of the Gaal horde in chapter 7.

The political over-plot begins with Agat's attempts to form an alliance between the Alterran town of Landin and the Winter City of Tevar so they can ward off the Gaal Southing. Forming such an alliance is difficult since even Rolery, born out of season and marginal herself, initially sees the Alterrans as "black falsemen" (9; ch. 1), and a dying Alterran near the close of the book one who has fought alongside Tevarans against the Gaal still sees the Tevarans as "hilfs," not humans, and "bloody barbarians": he is disgusted with the thought that "our human blood" will be lost "if we can breed with the hilfs," that the Terran exiles will cease being "Man" (115; ch. 13). Agat convinces Wold to get his people to prepare for the horde, but meanwhile Rolery and Agat have fallen in love and have made love in the forest margin between Landin and Tevar. They are soon caught by Rolery's kin, and the alliance is harmed. Rolery goes to Landin with Agat, where they marry; the Gaal arrive and destroy the Winter City; Wold and the remaining Tevarans go to Landin, which they defend together. Landin is slowly losing ground to the Gaals, and the defenders are being pushed to the innermost keeps, when Winter comes on. Wold dies; the Gaals move off. It turns out that the Alterrans come down with infections from wounds, so it seems they've adapted to the planet, in that sense, entered the world. Rolery knows "that she could bear Agat's son" (116; ch. 13), and a promised integration ends the book: "Come," Agat says to her, "come, let's go home" (124; ch. 14).³⁰

Romeo and Juliet brought to a happy ending, plus some other Le Guinian twists but let's start with the happy ending.

At the end of Planet of Exile we can look at Rolery and Agat and say, figuratively (and using a masculinist phrase), "the wall is down that parted their fathers."³¹ We can also see literal walls down, or at least breached: those of Tevar and Landin. The literal invasions of the cities are very bad things (chs. 7, 12), but there is something in Le Guin that is - even this early in her career, even when they are most positive -highly ambivalent about walls. In a complex way, she associates the walls of Landin with the grey-faced, bitter, highly gifted mind-hearer Alla Pasfal Alterra and associates Alla Pasfal with breaking the Law of Cultural Embargo, and with both an assertion and negations of what Thomas J. Remington has discussed as "touch." It is Alla Pasfal who does the actual mindhearing to spy on the Gaal, breaking the Law of Cultural Embargo: "The walls of the City are safe" she says; Agat replies: "But the law is broken" and it turns out the Gaal have left a force to take and occupy Landin, a force already inside the city's walls (94-95; ch. 11). It is Alla who comes to Jakob Agat when Rolery brings him back after he's beaten by the men of Tevar. She reaches out to him with news and mindspeech, but her message is that "Man and unman cannot work together. . . . We can make no alliances but among ourselves. . . . Never hold your hand out to any creature that belongs to this planet." Agat rejects this advice, most importantly by asking Rolery to marry him (56-57; ch. 6).

Le Guin associates the walls of Tevar with old Wold, who comes to realize that their walled City, built under his leadership, "is only a trap" against the Gaal horde (63; ch. 7). Significantly, one instance of Wold's thoughts on walls is sandwiched between Wold listening to one of his people ranting against "the farborn," the Alterrans, and Wold's thought, "All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens" (37; ch. 4).

The movement of romantic comedy is the integration of people into a re-formed community, that new and better world coalescing around a central couple. In Planet of Exile Le Guin takes the pattern of romantic comedy and moves it to an intercultural scale: the comic movement of Exiles finding a home, envoys finding their mission a success.³² Insofar as she color-codes her people, she suggests a wish for integration in a political sense obvious to a careful reader in the mid-1960s: Black and White together, / They do overcome; Rolery and Agat making love in any one of several conventional positions, yields variations on the Yin-Yang symbol.³³ Insofar as she has her future Terrans people of color, she hints at a point about literal racial survival that will become more specific in later stories. Still, at the center of Planet of Exile is the marriage of Rolery and Agat, which offers hope for the Alterrans on Gamma Draconis III: their marriage can be fertile, and Rolery and Agat can produce sons and (biologically more significant) daughters who can be fertile with both peoples (117; ch. 13).

Rolery has noticed that Agat spoke of all the people on the planet as humans and soon after that, Agat tells her that communicating by mindspeech mostly requires learning how "to break down one's own defenses," to reach out to the alien (110-11; ch. 13). Speaking from Agat's point of view, the Narrator looks through Agat's eyes at Rolery and tells us that "She the stranger, the foreigner, of alien blood and mind, did not share his power or his conscience or his knowledge or his exile. She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them. . . . In his mind he heard her say his own name, like a whisper in the night, like a touch across the abyss" (80-81; ch. 9). They have formed the first of many central Le Guinian marriages, a constant in her canon. This marriage serves in the plot as a seal of the alliance between the two people: a blood-bond made with many deaths but not those of the central lovers. In more literary ways, the marriage is a kind of synecdoche or metonym see Note below for the integration of the Tevarans and Alterrans: as if to say, by hundreds and thousands of such moments of touch, of such bondings, peoples are brought together, and a people like the Terrans can become part of a world, finding a home. And so the people on Gamma Draconis III will be brought together and thrive: as we learn in City of Illusions, where Gamma Draconis III has long been the prosperous planet colloquially called, Werel, "the world."

A Note on Walls (etc.):

Synecdoche is the rhetorical figure of taking part of something for the whole thing, e.g., "The ranch hands herded 2000 head of cattle" (complete human beings' herding full cows, bulls, steers, and calves -not picture the literal meaning). Metonym suggests relationship: when "Factions of the Plantagenet family fought for the English Crown" they wanted more than the physical headgear: the crown is a metonym for a finite but indefinite set of powers, privileges, and so forth. Symbolism is like a new and still unfocused metonym put to uses more literary than rhetorical: e.g., in William Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona's handkerchief takes on symbolic values as the play goes on, as do clothes in Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear.

As indicated above, I will ask you to pay close attention to Le Guin's walls and roofs, which are always available for figurative or symbolic use, starting with the synecdoche of walls and roofs as parts of buildings, buildings that can contain humans and allow us to stay indoors: safe. In a good sense in bono as Medieval scholars used to say such buildings provide shelter and convenient places for humans to form communities. In malo (bad senses), those buildings are traps and/or prisons separating humans from a truer home in nature. Buildings in turn can become synecdoches, metonyms, symbols for home, urban life, civilization, safety, technology, and/or culture, which in turn can be traps and prisons. And walls and roofs can be just there, neutrally: part of the setting.

1 The meeting of German, Italian, British, and French-but not Czech-representatives began on 29 September 1938 and lasted into the next day.  The upshot of the Munich meeting was that the Czechs were forced by the major powers to cede the Sudetenland to Germany, plus a small area to Poland.  What remained of Czechlosovakia then disintegrated as its constituent ethnic groups divided the country.  "Munich" entered English as a figure of speech for "appeasement," and "appeasement" became a loaded word as Hitler found other lands needed for the German Empire.

2 Plus, in the original 1961 version, a number of "allusions to Romantic poets and musicians"; see Bittner, Approaches 135, n. 38.  For his excellent discussion, Bittner uses the original version; I use the revised text of 1976.

3 For print versions of Le Guin's lecture, see "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Writes the Book," and "The Fisherwoman's Daughter."

4 This is from Joseph Eichenforff (1788-1857), "Es wandelt, was wir schauen" ("Things change . . .").  Note that Bittner translates Eichendorff's Himmel as "heaven" where Gaye, and Le Guin, has the less likely "sky."

5 Music by Franz Schubert (1797-1828 [see Orsinian Tales 135]), for a lyric by Franz von Schober (Bittner, Approaches 50).

6 In a good society like that of Rer in "Coming of Age in Karhide," the walls are just part of houses that are themselves true homes.  See the "Note on Walls" at the end of this chapter.

7 Again, Le Guin translates "sky" not "heaven, but in later works she will go farther: music no longer gets us to see the (still potentially transcendent) sky, but puts us in touch with the more clearly Daoist sea (New Atlantis [1975]) or with the quantum field that allows us to "dance" to space-time light-years away, "in no time at all" ("Dancing to Ganam" [1993]).

8 Bittner cites the key texts for Jesus on the family: Matthew 10.34-39, Mark 3.31-35, Luke 14.26; Eric Hoffer adds Matthew 8.21[-22], Matthew 10.21, 12.47-49 (True Believer 40-42; ch. 5, section 32.  

9 See later in Coyote the discussions of sacrifice in BP and EoH, and Le Guin's denial of the goodness of sacrifice. 

10 For the motif of the Promise, see TD.  

11 Le Guin and I have corresponded, somewhat flippantly, on the meaning of "Hain."  Le Guin would have it pronounced [hain], with the option of rendering the "n" somewhat nasalized, French fashion, making the word similar to the French word hein?: "eh?".  Hain is also the brand name of a line of natural-food products; in correspondence in July 1989, Le Guin told me "We have been using Hain(ish) Mayonnaise for years"; in a note in 1996, however, she said that she had not known about Hain condiments (etc.) when she first used the name.  

12 For a summary of what Le Guin has given us of Hainish history as of 1997, see Brigg, "'Literary History'" 16-21.

13 See my discussion of LHD for a note on "Ekumen" and my rendering it "household."

14 In Ace first edn. "Gaverel" on p. 111 (ch. 7), "Gaveral" on p. 131 (ch. 9).  There are numerous minor variations in spelling in the 1966 Ace edn.

15 "Song" in Wild Angles (21), quoted and discussed in Arbur, "Le Guin's 'Song' of Inmost Feminism." 

16 For another gauge of the changes in Le Guin's emphases, cf. and contrast Semley and another NAFAL traveler through time, King Argaven XVII in the two versions of "Winter's King" (1969/1975).  I discuss Semley in later chapters, passim.

17 My analysis follows from Bittner's suggestive description of much in RW as "both conventional science fiction and a critique of it" (95).  

18 For an excellent discussion of Rocannon as anthropologist in the role of Ishi, a lone survivor in a highly different culture-and for good comments on RW generally-see Maslen, esp. 64-65. 

19 The Clayfolk, on their own, were definitely low-tech, fine craftsmen; it is unclear if their culture would have changed without strong pushes from the League.  This is symbolically significant.  High technological culture isn't "dwarvish" but "angelic": it is based on a philosophy with a transcendent God outside of the universe.  For the significance of the hive, see Dunn and Erlich, "A Vision of Dystopia."  

20 <See Kroeber § 119 on "Subcultures and Part-Cultures," esp. 82; ch. 7.  If the Clayfolk are like Welles's Morlocks in The Time Machine, the Fiia are like Welles's Eloi.  

21 Such a moral on the necessity for reuniting Half-People is quite explicit in Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic dystopia We (ca. 1920). Wholeness, balance, and integration are certainly norms in Le Guin's later work; see Barbour, "Wholeness and Balance . . . ," esp. 165. 

22 The Kesh in ACH (1985) and the pueblo Hainish in "A Man of the People" (1995) have this much advantage on the Fiia: their separation from high technology and history is far less final, and they choose again and again, as peoples and individually.  

23 Near one of the roots of Yggrrasil, the World Tree, there is the Well of the Highest Wisdom, plus a giant named Mimir who drinks daily from the well and epitomizes wisdom.  The god Odin comes to drink at the well, and Mimir tells him the cost is one of Odin's eyes; Odin pays the cost (Hamilton 308; Putnam's "Mimir" and "Odin").  Note also the divine name El Shaddai in the ancient Near East, usually Englished as "God Almighty;  according to the annotation for Gen. 17.1 in the Oxford Annotated Bible, a literal rendering would be "God, the One of the Mountains" (see also Ex. 6.2-3).  

24 Italics indicate mindspeech, telepathy.

25 On pedan, see ch. 9, p. 125; ch. 2, pp. 45-46; ch. 3, p. 53; and ch. 4, p. 68.  Cf. and contrast Selver as a god in WWF.  

26 An aside in PE but, with a reversal, the True Name of the Sun is a very important point for CI (1967). 

27 Here, "Man" = Terran humans, viewed by a Terran-descended male.  Through LHD, "Man" in such contexts in Le Guin's writing means "human being(s)."  Such generic uses of "Man" for "human being," along with "he" as the "generic pronoun," were quite common into the 1970s; for "he" as the generic, see (even) Joanna Russ's "The Image of Women in Science Fiction" (1970): 39.  

28 See below, my chapter on ACH.  For some old Kulturkampfen, note that in PE there is no privileging of a Gaal militarized horde over Gaal savages, or civilization absolutely over the savagery or barbarism of the New Stone Age.

29 "Limited omniscience" is an oxymoron, but the phrase is useful; to avoid the contradiction, I'll prefer the clipped form, "third-person limited."  For Le Guin on point of view, see "On Theme," Those Who Can 207-08.  My page references to PE are to the Fourth Ace rpt. of 1974, Ace #66953 (incorporated as the central number of the ISBN); in places this differs slightly—up to two pages—from the pagination of Ace #66951 and possibly other printings.  Try looking ahead a couple pages if you have trouble finding my references.  

30 Cf. and contrast adaptation to New Zion in "The Eye Altering" (1976/1978).  

31 Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.350-51—a play closely related to Romeo and Juliet.

32 See Spencer, "Exiles and Envoys."

33 Most simply imaged, a Yin-Yang is a circle with a wavy line separating and joining black on one side (with a speck of white)—Yin—and white on the other side (with a speck of black): Yang.  This is a Daoist symbol of wholeness and of balanced opposites, including female/male produced by the Dao and in turn producing "The Ten Thousand Things" that are the universe.  It is a symbol Le Guin uses frequently: for the integration of Ged in WE, for true marriages in works ranging from LoH (1971) through Tehanu (1990).  For more on Daoism, see listed Barbour works, the appendix on Daoism in Bittner's "Approaches" diss. and my discussions below.