Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2001 00:40:08 +0200 From: Petra Mayerhofer Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU The BDG book for July is _Always Coming Home_ by Ursula Le Guin. I try to start the discussion with the opinion of somebody else (I have to finish the story before I can add mine): Danny Yee's Review http://dannyreviews.com/h/Always_Coming_Home.html "Always Coming Home is the only work I've ever felt could really be compared with Tolkien, in this case with the Silmarillion rather than with The Lord of the Rings, since it is a fictional ethnography rather than a novel. Where Tolkien drew on history (along with linguistics and mythology) to create his imaginative world, Le Guin draws on anthropology (along with linguistics and mythology) to create hers. This difference is very clear cut: Tolkien's world has almost no ethnographic detail, while Le Guin's has no history. The subject of Le Guin's work is the Kesh - a people who inhabit a valley in a far-future California and who are clearly based on native American models. Mostly she lets them speak for themselves, allowing the reader to learn about them through a montage of their short stories, poems, and myths. These are laid out around a central novella, which tells the story of a woman called Stonetelling who leaves the valley to live with her father's people, the Condor. The "back of the book" contains additional information about the Kesh in more traditional ethnographic form. While there are a few passages of reflexive commentary in Always Coming Home (where Pandora the archaeologist addresses the reader directly) and some of these make direct comments on contemporary issues, Le Guin's "message" is not directly imparted. A more explicit account of her ideas about utopia can be found in the essay "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Very Cold Place to Be" (reprinted in Dancing at the Edge of the World). As a work of fictional anthropology Always Coming Home is a brilliant success. As a utopia, however, it has some major flaws. One is the "machina ex machina" of the City of Mind, a benevolent collection of machine intelligences which provides the Kesh and other peoples with all the positive benefits of science and technology (weather forecasts, global communication, etc.), while sparing them the need to devote resources to those ends. Another is the straw-man patriarchal and authoritarian society of the Dayao/Condor. This is too extreme to be an interesting contrast to the Kesh (except polemically), and its implausibility means that the failure of the Condor to dominate the societies around them (in effect to reenact the historical incorporation of traditional societies by empires and centralised states) actually detracts from the credibility of Le Guin's vision. (I can't help thinking that things would be a little different if the Kesh were to face Julius Caesar and a single Roman legion, even with their technological inferiority.) In an attempt to avoid this criticism Le Guin falls back on possible genetic changes in "human nature", a move which undercuts her work's engagement with reality and which I found as distressing as the terrible ending to Tehanu. Le Guin seems to have lost the strength of mind and the intellectual courage which were so apparent in The Dispossessed, where she went out of her way to face the likely problems in her anarchist utopia. Despite its flaws, Always Coming Home is a work of extraordinary creativity. Though many who loved Le Guin's novels will find it unapproachable, many who would never think of touching a science fiction novel would enjoy it." What did you think of this utopia? How does it compare in your opinion with the utopia of _The Dispossessed_? What did you think of the unusual make-up of the book? Petra ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 22:27:23 +0100 From: Heather Stark Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU I've been putting off reading this for 16 years, because I was concerned that the format was a terrible temptation to self-indulgence - on the part of the author. (I usually find the poems that authors put into novels to be a mistake.) Glad BDG nudged it to the top of my list. It hit two of my buttons hard, in a nice kind of way: * I once lived in Northern California, and the hills and forests and coasts there gave me a gift - uninterpreted and powerful - which I can still feel * when visiting Tofino - at the end of the road, on Vancouver Island - one night I met woman who lived way up the coast, where the roads don't go, who had come many miles by boat, to 'the big city', and we made a strong connection at the edges of each others' worlds. Then, years later, I bought 'Daughters of Copper Woman' in a second hand shop - and it turned out to be retellings of tales from her people. Both incidents were uncanny, and important in a way I don't understand. So how could I not like 'Always Coming Home'? Let me count the ways... ;-). Well, I did like it - mostly. As I'd suspected, the format requires more quiet perseverance than a pure narrative, which if it is doing its job, just gets you in its jaws and gallops off with you, without you having to do any work. Here, the picture builds more slowly, emerging from the convergence and interplay of evidence. In some ways this style in the whole of mirrors the more detailed structure of some of the tellings. The matter of fact tone, and lurking disconnects and significances are things I've found in of all the stories I've read from first peoples - including Daughter of Copper Woman, and the very first ones I read when I was ten, ghost stories from the Six Nations (North East Canada/US). I agree with the Danny Yee that the City of Mind - some kind of big AI in the sky - didn't quite seem to fit in to the world very well. I also agree with Danny that the contrast with the Condor people was a bit stark - and seemed laid on quite thickly. What about the utopia? I think Ursula Le Guin said it best herself, in the book. Pandora: I never did like smartass utopians. Always so much healthier and saner and sounder and fitter and kinder and tougher and wiser and righter than me and my family and friends. People who have the answers are boring, niece. Boring, boring, boring. Archivist: But I have no answers and this isn't utopia, aunt! Pandora: The hell it ain't. Archivist: This is a mere dream dreamed in a bad time, an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons... a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection... (p. 316, University of California Press, 2001) And so it is. Heather ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 18:48:05 -0700 From: Sandy Cronin Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU > * I once lived in Northern California, and the hills and forests and > coasts there gave me a gift - uninterpreted and powerful - which I can > still feel Wow. This touches on how I feel about "Searoad". I spent summers as a child on the Oregon coast, and that book took me right back there. Thanks for reminding me; I need to find my copy and re-read that book! I felt similarly about ACH when I first read it, for a college class, about 10 years ago, but not as strongly as with Searoad. Several of her books make me feel lucky to live in this part of the world. :) -Sandy ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 22:28:30 -0700 From: "Jennifer R. J." Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU I finally finished this book! It took me a long time because of the different format. I found it very hard to get into because there wasn't a whole lot of flow between one part and the next. I have terrible problems reading things like this and anthologies because of the abrupt change of story- I have concentration problems. I liked the Stone Telling part of the book. I think it would have been easier to read and it would have made more sense to me if the other parts had been interwoven with the Stone Telling story. I kept asking myself as I read "but how does this connect to Stone Telling?" I knew that it wasn't necessarily supposed to shed any more light on that story, but I found myself wanting it to. Jennifer ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2001 21:57:11 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU I've been toting *Always Coming Home* everywhere for a couple of weeks, thinking about what to say about it. It's hard to decide where to begin. This book is a perfect example of what Le Guin was talking about in her essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" (from *Dancing at the Edge of the World*): "I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. [...] Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story." This essay was published the year after *Always Coming Home*. Probably not a coincidence. So, in the spirit of Le Guin, I will throw together a "carrier bag" of critical comments about the book. What struck me most strongly about Stone Telling's story was that it wasn't a happy tale. This is supposed to be a utopia, right? One could argue that Ayatyu's misery in The City serves merely to highlight how ideal her life in Sinshan had been and would be, once she returned. But rereading it for the first time in 15 years, I realized that there is a lot more ambiguity to it than that. North Owl (this woman had too many names!) went off with her father because she was *already* miserable, and had been so for years. Tensions within her family and ridicule from other children ("half-House") made her feel like an outsider, and as a consequence she latched onto her father more tightly than she should have when he finally appeared. And her "illness", as she called it, was tied to her mother's "illness", and the "illness" of the Warrior and Lamb Cults, which in turn were tied, indirectly, to the Condor themselves. The village of Sinshan, though in many ways beautiful and harmonious, does not come across as the greatest place to live in this story. At one point, Stone Telling comments on the ignorance of people who live in small towns; in the post script to her story, "About a Meeting Concerning the Warriors", Bear Man writes: "We avoid talking about sickness when feeling well, but that is superstition, after all. Looking mindfully at the things that were talked about at the meeting, I have come to think that the sickness of Man is like the mutating viruses and the toxins: there will always be some form of it about, or brought in from elsewhere by people moving and travelling, and there will always be the risk of infection. What those sick with it said is true: It is a sickness of our being human, a fearful one. It would be unwise in us to forget the Warriors and the words spoken at Cottonwood Flats, lest it need all be done and said again." (p. 386, Harper & Row edition) There is tension here, between the general lack of a historical sense in the Valley and the occasional realization by individuals that the study of history and education in general are crucial for avoiding "illness". To study history, Woman Coming Home visits Telina-na, a place of learning, "a town like a bunch of grapes, like a cock pheasant, rich, elaborate, amazing, beautiful." (p. 12) This is the friendly face of the city; the Condor's City is the unfriendly face. I find this tension in much of Le Guin's fiction. The city as freedom and intellectual challenge vs. the village as peer pressure and ignorance. The village as spiritual wisdom and harmony with the land vs. the city as alienation and rapacious consumption. Heyiya-if reversals, maybe? This isn't to say that I don't think Le Guin feels the Valley is a utopia. It is, no question about it. But it is not a society in stasis. I was struck, this time, by the emphasis on how customs differ from town to town and from past to present. "The Trouble with the Cotton People" in the "Four Histories" section was particularly intriguing. In the course of that story it becomes clear that there are many, many groups of people with distinct languages and customs living along the coast of what used to be California. The Kesh are only one such group. There are occasional "wars" (I found it interesting how this word as it was used seemed to mean something closer to "skirmish" or "feud" than "war" in Modern English), but for the most part people coexist peacefully, trading goods and using TOK, the universal pidgin of the coast (and perhaps the entire world), to communicate where other language fails. The keys to this relative harmony seem to be: 1) low population density, 2) a nearly universal communication tool. This is where the science fiction comes in. Danny Yee criticizes Le Guin for her "machina ex machina" device of the City of Mind. I don't think this is a valid criticism. This is a work of science fiction, not an anthropological monograph on a historical Native American culture (no matter how much it resembles one). A self-sustaining artificial intelligence is a trope in many, many science fiction works. To say that it doesn't belong in this story is to ignore the story Le Guin is telling. Ditto for his complaint about "possible genetic changes in 'human nature'." The way he has phrased it makes it sound like humanity has magically evolved into a more peaceful species. What Le Guin actually says is: "Is it possible that the genetic changes worked by the residues of the Industrial Era upon the human race, which I saw as disastrous -- low birth rate, short life expectancy, high incidence of crippling congenital disease -- had a reverse side also? Is it possible that natural selection had had time to work in social, as well as physical and intellectual terms? (pp. 380-1) I took this to mean that humanity, faced with a new set of circumstances, had to change its habits or perish in short order. Which isn't the same as waving a wand and saying that humanity has been genetically improved to become more peaceful. It strikes me as similar to the setup in *The Dispossessed*: Anarres, the barren, dry planet, is the setting for the cooperative anarchist society; Urras, the fertile paradise, harbors an unbalanced, oppressive regime. Funny how Le Guin's take on utopia seems the opposite of the traditional "land of plenty"; to her, scarcity is what makes people cooperate. (I have a vague memory that this might not be so in *The Word for World Is Forest*, however.) This bag is getting quite full enough. But I do want to note some things I very much liked about the book: * The holidays based on solar and lunar cycles. As an atheist who nevertheless feels the pull of the seasons, I have long found particular meaning in the winter solstice. It gets very dark in Vermont in December. * The respect accorded to old people in the Valley, and the recognition of the fact that they are not always "well-behaved". I loved Stone Telling's offhand comment in the first section of her story: "My grandmother got drunk and disorderly, and spent the night in the barns, gambling." * The recognition of the fact that children are not "pure" creatures, "innocent" of sexuality; the celebration and acceptance of both sex and abstinence. Some things I wondered: * What happened to the Condor? They seem to have suffered a cultural collapse and completely disappeared. Were refugees taken in by other groups or did they just disappear into a hole in the air? * How is the Kesh's focus on "sickness" different from the Condor's focus on "impurity"? Isn't the first as likely to be harmful as the second? That's it for now. Here are a couple of interesting links I found. Put copies in your carrier bags if you want to. Heya. http://www.dancingbadger.com/greenthtf.htm http://abacus.bates.edu/~dkolb/places/Time_Spreading.html ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: Massive Attack -- Mezzanine "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 17:35:07 +1200 From: Jenn Martin Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Just to add to what Janice has already said, I'm sorry it's said in such a round-about way. I've been toting Always Coming Home around for the past few weeks, like Janice... trying to work out what to say about it. Although... that's not entirely true.. I've actually been toting it around with me for five years, since I first read it, trying to understand why I like it so much. I liked what Janice said about "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' and her realisation that the Valley isn't a utopia (if it was, why would Stone-Telling leave?). The essay that has always struck me most in relation to Always Coming Home has been 'A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Very Cold Place to Be'. As far as I can understand it, the stories in Always Coming Home comprise a sort of open-ended critical Utopia, they respond to each other in certain ways, most of the stories have a tragic element, the hint of war or violence, the story of a man or woman who has been rejected, for one reason or another as Stone-Telling was. Like Janice said, Stone-Telling's time with the Condor people isn't happy, and it's easy to think that the Condor People live in the Dystopia, while the Valley of the Kesh is the Utopia. But even in the Valley, people are grouchy, things don't grow properly: only the hardiest of plants can grow in the soil there in the valley. Clowns come in the night to scare children. If you get pregnant too young, you are ostracised, if you don't pull your weight, or if you hoard food or belongings, you are ostracised. The Kesh seem to work in the same way any society works, utopian or not. Like Janice, it reminds me of the Dispossessed (I tried to reply when you asked about Danny Yee's review ages ago but it just wasn't workin' for me)... The anarchistic society is pretty bleak, like the Kesh, they don't own personal items or land, they are a similarly a cooperative society, the only difference really is scale (planet vs valley). Their environment's differ, but both are hard to live in. I really appreciate this, because what Le Guin builds is critical utopias.. she doesn't put her characters in an easy landscape, they're not in paradise, they're not perfect (remember the way the people turn on Shevek at the gate to the port when he's leaving the moon?) but for some reason, it still seems like it might be a nice place to live *wrinkles her nose* you know what I mean? Is scarcity really the basis for Utopia? my reactions to Sinshan and Anarres tell me 'maybe so'. For me, it all comes down to a passage in the essay I mentioned earlier in which Le Guin describes the traditional Utopia (everything from Plato on) as -yang- ... 'bright, dry, clear, strongg, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing and hot' Le Guin believes that this sort of Utopis is 'totalitarian and depends upon reason as the controlling power. This description fits the Condor people perfectly, not only do they live in volcano country, but pride themselves on their strength, wealth, growth, the expansion of their territory. I believe that Le Guin has not set out to create a Dystopia with the Condor People (although I do think that it's not a nice place) so much as a -yang- utopia. In contrast, I believe that the Valley of the Kesh (and Anarres in the Dispossessed) is a -yin- utopia: in many ways they are both 'dark, wet, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting and cold.' I love the way that, in this description, Le Guin has joined together words that are usually perceived as having negative connotations (like weak and passive and obscure and cold) with words that convey a sense of comfort and safety (peaceful, nurturant). What better way to create a critical utopia, what better way to rebel against the yang utopia than to find a way to create a utopia that is non-rational in it's thinking... non-euclidean.. circular and cyclical as opposed to lineal, drawing inwards instead of pushing outwards. Somewhere, Le Guin talks about the need to 'go backwards' to 'get to' Utopia, and I think this is her way of doing it. She has gone forward to a future-earth, it is true, but the Kesh way of life is simple, it is a retraction of sorts, a retreat. Like in 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction', where she reduces the book back to its basic form, story-telling, a container for ideas and meanings... so you can carry a whole bag of 'grain' instead of a handful, the world she has built on the future West Coast brings the focus of life back to the earth, and a quieter pace of life unfolds that is very attractive. One of the things I loved most when I first read Always Coming Home, was the map of the watershed of Sinshan. I was fifteen and has never heard that word before, but the idea of the land, the valley itself as a shed that housed the water that ran through it made a very profound impact on me. For me, what Le Guin has done is like what she has done in making the book a 'medicine bag' that houses meanings. For me, the valley is the watershed that houses meaning, there in the earth, under the four lodges and the madrone trees and the houses with the deep verandahs, beneath the individual stones in the fields and hills around the villages that every child knows by name, that is where the meaning lies for me, the essence of the utopia. There -are- incredible tensions in this book, like Janice said, tensions between the villages and the city.. tensions between the earth-based valley-people and their 'ignorance' and the information-based city of man perhaps? There are tensions between the beauty of the landscape, the importance of the earth, and the poison that is in it. There is the tension between thinking you have found utopia and realising that the Kesh are like any society, that being human -is- a sickness. These complicate things. Why am I bothering to say any of this... Janice said it best: >I find this tension in much of Le Guin's fiction. The city as freedom >and >intellectual challenge vs. the village as peer pressure and ignorance. The >village as spiritual wisdom and harmony with the land vs. the city as >alienation and rapacious consumption. >Heyiya-if reversals, maybe? It's captured quite well in the title of 'A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Very Cold Place to Be' really isn't it? That title carries so many meanings, that to live in a non-rational california is to live in a cold place, as in unfriendly, hard to live in etc... but also the 'cold' of the -yin- utopia... a cold that is nurturaant and peaceful. The ambiguity of this title sums up the ambiguity of the nature of any society. I mean, hey, some people believe Arlington, Texas is a utopia... the lessons that Le Guin has taught me prompt me to shrug my shoulders and say 'if someone believes that then, sure, why not?' ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 08:40:35 +1000 From: Nike Bourke Organization: Griffith University Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU I didn't want to *clip* your/her whole comment - but just wanted to say how much I appreciated the intelligence and empathy you bought to discussing le guin's work. i've always been a huge of this awkward and somewhat difficult work. I just wanted to contribute something ... reading the top layer of your bag of tricks I was reminded very strongly of Virginia Woolf's words about writing ... how she relates her notion of the perfect novel to that of a bottom drawer - full of the flotsam and whatnot of life - something she particularly effected in 'the waves' Certainly 'always coming home' is a novel (can we really call it that?) that disrupts structure, disrupts our ideas about plot and character development, etc. once again, thanks. nike ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 20:31:05 -0400 From: "Janice E. Dawley" Subject: Re: [*FSF-L*] BDG: Always Coming Home To: feministsf-lit@UIC.EDU Thanks for your lengthy and thoughtful reply, Jenn. And thanks for the kind comments, Nike. At 05:35 PM 8/2/01 +1200, Jenn Martin wrote: >The essay that has always struck me most in relation to Always Coming Home >has been 'A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Very Cold Place to Be'. Yes, I agree that this essay is a very illuminating companion piece to *Always Coming Home*. In a way it can be read as the challenge to which ACH, published three years later, is the reply. But is that reply really a "yin utopia"? The Kesh do seem to match Levi-Strauss's description of a "cold", self-limiting society: The way in which they exploit the environment guarantees them a modest standard of living as well as the conservation of natural resources. Though various, their rules of marriage reveal to the demographer's eye a common function; to set the fertility rate very low, and to keep it constant. Finally, a political life based upon consent, and admitting of no decisions but those arrived at unanimously, would seem designed to preclude the possibility of calling on that driving force of collective life which takes advantage of the contrast between power and opposition, majority and minority, exploiter and exploited. (p. 91) And the Condor's "hot" society is indeed destroyed by "Heaven the Equalizer" by the end of Stone Telling's story. But this take on ACH brings me to a thought I had about the book that I couldn't really articulate last time. Can a yin utopia be said to be better or more healthy than a yang utopia? Both, by definition, are out of balance. (Perhaps I am confusing Le Guin's terminology, and she doesn't equate "cold" with "yin", but I don't think so.) Yin is commonly thought of as the feminine principle, and indeed the Valley is a place where the traditional feminine is privileged, lineage is matrilineal and families are matrilocal. Sex roles are not policed as they are now, but generally the behavior of men and women is strikingly similar to our current norms: women are more domestic and rooted, whereas the men are more restless and sexually promiscuous. But the prestige scale has been tipped the other way, so that traditional female activities are afforded a respect and cultural centrality that is unknown today. It must be another conscious tension on Le Guin's part that, as a downside to this system, men are subtly discriminated against. Milk, one of Flicker's mentors in the life story "The Visionary", is contemptuous of her colleague Tarweed simply because he is a man and she doesn't think he knows his "place" (in this case, the woods and fields, rather than the heyimas). In defense of Tarweed, Flicker exclaims, "Even if he is a man he thinks like a woman!" A somewhat backhanded compliment that ties in with the fact that there are a number of "woman-living men" mentioned in the text, but as far as I could see, no "man-living women". What woman in this society would want to be seen as a man? This is a version of "difference feminism" that in much fantasy is tied to the worship of a goddess figure, but in ACH the closest we come to that is a female Coyote, rather than the traditional male version. And Coyote, though she is reputed to have birthed humanity in various creation stories, is far from a traditional earth mother. I am grateful for this. There is plenty of room to imagine that this casual sexism will be addressed and dealt with, hopefully before a situation like that in "The Matter of Seggri" develops. Out of curiosity, Jenn, have you read this story? In some ways I think it is a thought-experiment exaggeration of the sex roles in *Always Coming Home*. I found it very thought-provoking and powerful. I guess I am coming back to what Jenn said in her message: "There is the tension between thinking you have found utopia and realising that the Kesh are like any society, that being human -is- a sickness." Le Guin is idealistic but also realistic. She believes that it *is* possible to address the inequalities of human society, but that "human nature" may in fact be constant in certain ways. We must always remain vigilant and look for the balance. Which to my mind would be more "warm" than "cold", but there's plenty of room in this bag for disagreement. ----- Janice E. Dawley.....Burlington, VT http://homepages.together.net/~jdawley/ Listening to: Massive Attack -- Mezzanine "...the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas