Four Ways to Forgiveness
by Ursula Le Guin, Victor Gollancz, 拢15.99, ISBN 0 575 06301 7
WINNING or losing, inner or outer, open or closed, river or rock. Ursula
Le Guin鈥檚 fiction is filled with such neat, powerful antitheses, which function
within a larger pattern of balance. The French anthropologist Claude
L茅vi-Strauss also focused on binary oppositions, basing his system of
structural anthropology on them, and with her own anthropological family
background, Le Guin is fully au fait with kinship patterns and the
like. Le Guin鈥檚 kinships, however, stretch far across time and interstellar
space. In her fictional world, dominated by the planet Hain, the timeframe
ranges from 3 million years ago, when the people of Hain seeded many
worlds鈥攊ncluding Earth鈥攚ith humans, to a few thousand years hence,
when the Ekumen鈥攁 United Nations of space鈥攊s slowly relinking those
highly divergent, evolved communities. Le Guin鈥檚 worlds are ideal Petri dishes
for experiments in anthropology, ideology and satire.
Hainish worlds appear in Le Guin鈥檚 apprentice science fiction adventure
novels, as well as two of her masterpieces, the gender-bending The
Left Hand of Darkness and her ambiguous Utopia, The Dispossessed.
Since her canonisation as a major literary figure, Le Guin seemed to have left
interstellar regions behind her. But to go is to return, as she would remark in
one of those pithy Taoist yin-yang phrases that permeate her work.
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The quartet of connected novellas that comprise Four Ways to
Forgiveness explore the slave society of planet Werel and its colony world
Yeowe in their time of revolutionary changes and contact with the 鈥渁lien鈥�
Ekumen. But this narrative isn鈥檛 the whole story. There鈥檚 also a subdialogue
with feminist critics, some of whom have chided Le Guin for presenting men as
the doers and women as the more passive founts of being.
Much in this Werel reflects an exaggeration of our own world, in mirror image
or upside down. It reverberates with loud echoes from Earth, of the cotton
plantations, of apartheid, of the Vietnam War. The dominant blacks on the planet
have enslaved the whites, making the phrase 鈥淏lack is beautiful鈥� a repressive
axiom rather than a clarion call. The blacks have institutionalised divisions
between owners and chattels, characterised by a male dominance more extreme than
that in Margaret Atwood鈥檚 The Handmaid鈥檚 Tale.
Le Guin does strive to avoid too many absolutes: colour, gender and economics
aren鈥檛 totally cut and dried. Slaves can be self-employed, paying tithes to
owners and running their own businesses. Many slaves become eunuchs, gaining
status and power and even roles in government, though we learn little about what
it鈥檚 like to be a eunuch and a lot about sexual abuse and violent rape by
bosses. Organised women of the underclass manage to spur an uprising on Yeowe,
only to find themselves the underdogs in the new society of Free Men.
The first two novellas emphasise connections, reconciliations. On Yeowe a
teacher, melancholy yet restless, has retired to the swamps to live soulfully
alone. She reluctantly nurses a redoubtable yet anguished demagogue in distress.
She and he are old and defeated, but they find harmony and trust.
A feisty young woman of the Ekumen tries, in the second story, to subvert
gender tyranny by example. Her conduct causes bewilderment, and earns contempt
from her military bodyguard whose own life of stoical duty has, like those of
many Vietnam veterans, been betrayed.
Muddled 鈥減atriots鈥� kidnap the ill-assorted pair. Power politics dictate that
the two prisoners are to die. In their grim confinement, she nurses him,
and mutual admiration and understanding slowly grow. He realises the futility of
his own patriotism. She acknowledges her priggishness. Ultimately, holding fast
to 鈥渢he one noble thing鈥� becomes vital for both.
The third story, A Man of the People, begins as the perfect paradigm
of an anthropological tale. With 3 million years of history behind them, Hain鈥檚
historians are faced with the impossibility of studying so much 鈥渆ndless
repetition of unceasing novelty鈥濃�攁n insight which alone justifies the
whole book.
If our own species survives who, in a million years鈥� time, will be able to
know anything about Homer or Napoleon or Shakespeare, even if all knowledge
remains available?
Hain is a world of pueblos or villages, with widely dissimilar and arbitrary
belief structures and customs upheld by mutual consent. This scheme enriches
their citizens鈥� lives with mythic significance. At hi-tech centres where facts
and reason are disseminated, people dissatisfied with mystery discover social as
opposed to scientific knowledge is always local and culturally relative.
Losing his local world, an ex-pueblan becomes an envoy to Yeowe. He is beaten
up by patriots, and then he is nursed (a recurrent theme) by a good woman, and
nurtures emancipation.
A Woman鈥檚 Liberation chronicles the life of the woman he marries, an
ex-slave from Werel who was abused as a girl. She was freed in a disastrous,
irresponsible act of ambitious idealism, and after much struggle finds true
freedom鈥攁nd love. The strand of love running through these four tales is
vital. Without it, the weave would be unbearably downbeat, in a way which
Americans often caricature British science fiction as being.
What鈥檚 more, Le Guin鈥檚 wisdom of the heart inspires hope and purges
bitterness, bringing a deep existential realism to situations that might
otherwise seem like parodies. Le Guin鈥檚 skill is such that we believe in
sufferings and punishments that are laid on with a trowel, as in a Russian
tragedy.
Although her voice is American, the streak of satire in Le Guin鈥檚 stories
smacks of Eastern European (before the fall). A spaceship several hundred years
old, in which refugees lie on felt pads in the cargo hold during take-off, is
very Russian. There鈥檚 more than a hint of Gulliver鈥檚 Travels, too,
though without Swift鈥檚 streak of loathing.
And there鈥檚 more. Twenty pages of mini-Berlitz background notes on the
history and planetology of Werel-Yeowe emphasise that here is an SF text, rather
than a metaphorical fable. Actually, not everything makes sense. For instance,
only male slaves were transported to Yeowe for a century, to be worked to death.
During the next two centuries, female slaves were also sent, as breeders, in
hardship conditions. Yet the population of Yeowe rises from half a million to
450 million鈥攁 thousandfold increase. (We on Earth experienced a tenfold
growth during the past prolific 300 years.)
Also when the Hainish first seeded highly habitable Werel, there were no
native fauna to displace. And on Yeowe, no animal life had evolved. It鈥檚
possible for biospheres to consist entirely of plants, bacteria and seaweed, but
the image that arises is of two immense globes of agar jelly.
The set-up seems contrived, providing an overly easy morality tale in a
living Petri dish. And why are the two globes always apparently in convenient
proximity, instead of periodically distant as each orbits its sun?
Ultimately, however, quibbles about orbits or demography seem
trivial鈥攅xcept, perhaps, to prompt for the question of whether these
stories need to be science fiction. Such is the clarity, emotional strength and
freight of significance in the stories, that much is forgiven. So much is given,
so effortlessly, so concisely, so movingly.
Four Ways to Forgiveness would not work as well as it does if it was
set in Ruritania or in never-never land. Much of its significance and emotive
power is the result of the huge distances the protagonists cover.
Einstein is obeyed: star-travellers know that when they reach their
destinations, all former friends and family will have grown old or died, so that
they must commit themselves to the societies they encounter鈥攈owever much
these differ from their own. Yet the alien society will be human, even in its
inhumanities, and certainly in its harrowing struggle towards betterment.