In order to see how Earthsong extends and complicates the themes of the previous two novels, however, we must first review what has already happened in the trilogy. In Native Tongue, the women of the Lines develop Láadan, a secret language created to express the perceptions and experiences of women, while the US government simultaneously tries and fails to acquire a non-humanoid Alien language. When the women, pushed by rebellion leader Nazareth Chornyak Adiness, finally begin speaking and teaching Láadan among themselves and the girlchildren, it changes the fundamental gender relations of the participants. As Delina remembers, “After we women began speaking Láadan, and after our little girls began growing up speaking it, … we were different. So different that the men could no longer bear to have us with them for more than half an hour at a time … so different that they built the Womanhouses for us, to keep us separate” (74).
But it is not until The Judas Rose that the women of the Lines begin spreading Láadan, through a complicated network of religious institutions, to the larger Terran populace of women, resisting the systematic isolation of women and separation between Linguists and the general population. Through the Linguist women’s own prayer services and the subversive work of non-Linguist women planted throughout the galaxy as Catholic nuns (made possible by Linguist nun Miriam Rose), the women make Láadan more broadly available while still resisting the religious authorities’ attempts to make Láadan serve patriarchal goals by excising any suggestions of feminism or goddess-worship. At the same time, the US government is participating in a new race with other Terran nations to expand space colonies, efforts that are tightly controlled and monitored by the Aliens.
As Earthsong opens, we learn that the Láadan experiment apparently has failed (at least from the women’s immediate perspective), the Aliens have abruptly withdrawn from the Earth, and Terran society has been plunged into deep ecological, social, and economic chaos. The Alien retreat is disastrous. It has left the Earth without renewable technologies (since the machines left behind by the Aliens will slowly fail) and without any resources or knowledge to repair those machines. Soon Earth enters the Icehouse Effect, which, coupled with the loss of Alien income, plunges the colonies into famine. Men are particularly vulnerable to cold and hunger. Intensive work by women, often led by women of the Lines, to save the lives of the men gives way to sperm banking and in vitro fertilization as the only recourse to prevent human extinction. Although the famine and ecological disaster are devastating to the entire human population, audiosynthesis, a technique of aural nourishment already spread by Linguist women through the Music Grammar Schools and by StarTangle missionaries through their ministries, prevents humanity’s wholesale annihilation.
Desperate for guidance after the Alien abandonment, Delina Chornyak braves the objections of the women of her household and a number of Native Americans, and goes through a vision quest. She does so to contact Nazareth, who died on the very day that the Aliens departed. During their vision-quest conversation, Nazareth reveals to Delina that the Aliens abandoned Earth because of the incurable violence of human beings, and she counsels Delina that to end violence she must find a way to end hunger. Ultimately, this encounter prompts Delina to study and name audiosynthesis, a practice by which the human body is nourished with music, and the women of the Lines form an alliance with the PICOTA (an alliance of Native American peoples) to spread audiosynthesis secretly, just as they had spread Láadan. After many years, audiosynthesis is being used galaxy-wide, though the non-Linguists using it are unaware that they are doing anything other than making music. Hence, this renegade technique of human nutrition has become too well-entrenched to be squelched by Earth’s patriarchal governments when it finally comes to light. Despite their innate resistance to any technology that will threaten the balance of power, the Terran male leaders are forced to install it as policy, bringing with its adoption the beginning of the end of violence.
While initially the first two books may seem only tangentially related to Earthsong’s stress on hunger and violence, a closer consideration reveals that all three books are joined by the essentially linguistic perspective they present on the challenges facing human society. The plot swerve in Earthsong turns on a homologue—aural/oral—and the principle, “‘[based on linguistic science],’ that changing any distinctive feature from the definition of humanness would transform the human being into a different creature … and that the new human might well be able to do without violence.”2 Elgin’s science fiction premise—her novum, to borrow a term from Darko Suvin—is the discovery that human beings can nourish themselves without killing.3 The act of substituting a nourishment that is aural for one that is oral, and in so doing substituting an act of artistic creation (music) for an act of violent destruction (the production of food through both agriculture and animal husbandry), enacts a revolutionary reconfiguration of one of the essential traits of a human being. In short, Elgin’s novel turns Shakespeare’s romantic proposition into a revolutionary answer to human violence: “If music be the food of love, play on.”4
The Seeds of Change
In this final book in the Native Tongue trilogy, the themes of violence, revolution, gender, power, language, and religion culminate in a model for creating effective change. Elgin’s Linguist women are patient, proceeding by indirection, working in parallel and nested organizations to catalyze change on a number of fronts: medical, social, spiritual, and political. In short, the women incarnate in fiction the strategies required of feminists and social activists during the Reagan/Bush era of conservative backlash against the gains made by the various political movements of the 1960s onward, the context for Earthsong’s initial publication in 1994.
The contours of Terran society after the Aliens’ departure reflect the gender dynamics of the Reagan/Bush era as well as humanity’s unremitting violence, particularly the important and destructive connection that the Terran men perceive between political power and personal identity. Once the Aliens leave, the control and power wielded by the Linguist men lose their foundation; their linguistic skill with Alien languages is no longer valuable to the governments of Earth. As Chief Will Bluecrane remarks, “It must be like losing both your legs at once, with no warning—very disorienting” (18). With the much-vaunted power of the Lines no longer theirs, the men give way to often dissolute despair. Their options, after all, are to administer the Music Grammar Schools, teach linguistics or languages, or pretend to look after the fortunes of the Lines, none of which is challenging or fulfilling after having more or less run intergalactic trade (99). The women recognize that the men equate loss of power with loss of self, and they try “to give [the men] a sense of Being that wasn’t tied to how strong (or how rich, or how cruel) they were” (187). In the end, though, the memory of power cannot be so easily eradicated; when the men of the Lines learn about the women’s audiosynthesis project, they once again resume their former power struggles (184–85).
Although the Alien quarantine of Earth exposes the tenuous connection between possession of power and a sense of self most clearly in the men of the Lines, other male characters in the novel demonstrate this problematic connection as well. The Vice President, for example, “had always known, from his earliest childhood, that it was his destiny to save at least the nation, probably the planet and all its colonies, and perhaps the entire solar system” (133). The central role of violence in maintaining male power and dominance becomes clear when we realize that the Vice President considers killing the President’s indiscreet secretary as forwarding, rather than undermining, the grand destiny he envisions for himself. Indeed, it is telling that he ruins himself not by trying to kill the secretary, but by botching the job. With that act, he hasn’t just made a mistake, he has erased who he was meant to be: “He wished—not idly, but with all his heart—that something could have happened right then, right then when he was at the peak of his entire existence. A stroke. A heart attack. An assassin’s chemdart. Anything that would have let him exit his life like tha
t, splendid and confident and with the President of the United States of Earth looking after him in gratitude and admiration” (137).
The characteristically masculine habit of assuming a connection between selfhood and power that Elgin diagnoses and portrays in Earthsong leads those in political power to misread the women’s motivations for discovering and circulating audiosynthesis. As the President argues, “All of human society, all of human culture, rests on the knowledge we have … that human beings are only capable of really buckling down and working together in groups when their goals are evil. They’ll do it for money or power or conquest … they’ll do it to be famous, to get themselves on the threedies and the newspapers…. But a conspiracy to feed everybody? No, Jay. That’s not possible. That is a thing that could not happen” (181). The Linguist women have been prepared for this reaction; they expect the government to try to suppress audiosynthesis as a potential threat to the balance of power (60). Because power is central to the male self-image, any shift in this balance is met with sanctioned violence.
The response of US government staff to the sex- and murder-scandal that troubles the President reflects the patriarchal reflex toward violence as a solution. As Zlerigeau explains:
Look … when the United States goes to war, it has to kill people. This is no different. This is the war for peace and security, sir. This is the war to keep the whole solar system from falling apart. However much the colonies claim to despise Earth one and all, if Earth fell apart they would suffer trauma difficult to repair. Without Earth to hate, they’d fight each other, you know—we all know that’s what would happen, and it has to be prevented. It’s a just war, Mr. President, and the death of Joe Fall Guy is just an unavoidable side effect. (144)
The irony of having a war for peace isn’t lost on the reader. The death of Joe Fall Guy hinges on violence as a way of life, not simply a strategy to be used when necessary and then again avoided. Violence is so pervasive, in fact, that when it is resisted, it does not disappear; it merely gets displaced into a more deeply hidden plan. When the President disagrees with the plan to convict and execute a substitute for the murder of the secretary, Zlerigeau announces,
In that case … we have no choice. In that case, what we have to do is agree with you that it’s a dumb and naughty idea, promise not to do it, and do it anyway behind your back. But we also have to work out some kind of halfass alternate plan that you will approve. And then we have to go to all the trouble and expense of carrying out that plan, too. It’s a big waste of the taxpayers’ money, Mr. President. (139)
Because violence is the official response to any problem, it is also the official response to other violence. Torturers, for example, are systematically paralyzed and given an hour’s experience of torture. However, violence functions ideologically here, masked under the sign of “rehabilitation.” As the Judge tells the prisoner:
There are those who would tell you that you are an evil man … and that this is a suitable punishment for such evil. I want you to know that it is not punishment at all. If I wanted only to punish you, this is not what I would do. I know that you are not evil, my friend. And I know that when you understand what torture is, when you truly know how it feels to suffer the kind of pain you inflict on others, you will not do it. Not ever again. I understand that. (163)
But it becomes painfully clear that the “education” fails to work as intended when a torturer appears in the prison, slotted to be tortured a second time. The Judge’s disillusionment is so great that he kills himself (165). The book’s critique of violence rests on exposing and undermining the idea that violence can ever produce anything other than violence: there could never be a war for peace because that war institutes the very violence that undermines peace.
When the system does acknowledge violence as problematic, segregation of the worst offenders is usually the primary strategy (hence our overflowing prisons system). In this world of the future, violence is also segregated in an attempt to ameliorate its effects on Earth. But what worked in the era of the first novel is here demonstrated to be a temporary solution at best. As a theologian in the novel remarks,
We thought, fools that we were, that is was all over. All the crime, all the violence, all the poverty, all the basic wickedness of humankind. During the two hundred years when we could end every frustration by simply moving on—to one more planet, yet one more asteroid—we thought we had it solved. In our arrogance we even set aside planets dedicated to specific varieties of wickedness, so that those who wished to devote their lives to evil had them as convenient havens shared only by others of like mind. But we had forgotten three important facts. That humans are not gods. That history always repeats itself, though it may take a very long time. And that the day would inevitably come when there were no more frontiers to move to and no more empty planets waiting for us. Nowhere left to ship those who disturbed the rest of us, to spare us the nuisance of having them among us. (133)
As Delina mourns, “The problem, the terrible problem that human beings have always faced, is that it seemed as if violence were somehow part of the definition of being human. Getting rid of it … it’s like getting rid of lungs, somehow” (74). Violence is not a trivial problem, then, and under patriarchy is as central to human life as the act of breathing: indeed, Earthsong indicts the very structure of human society and human interaction.
The novel does take care not to suggest that all violence should be eliminated. Sometimes, violence is a necessary part of positive change. When the women are preparing to let their audiosynthesis project be discovered, for example, they “knew there was the very real possibility that the women of the Lines would be slaughtered in the first waves of rage, those waves that would be the birth pangs of the first race of human beings to take its sustenance from sound rather than from flesh. Birth pangs are good in the long run; women who are weary to death of hauling babies about in the womb long for them. But they are brutal and messy and painful and, once begun, unstoppable” (189–90). Violence linked to natural processes is a productive force, but violence for its own sake, or in order to perpetuate a destructive status quo, is the target of Earthsong’s fierce critique.
In opposition to the destruction that the Linguist and Terran men wield, the Linguist women enact a highly sophisticated schema for rebuilding human society from the ground up, reshaping its socioeconomic, ecological, cultural, and linguistic institutions. This reconstruction has broader implications as it both saves humans from extinction and makes Terrans fit for intergalactic society. This plan within a plan couples the spread of audiosynthesis with an alliance with the PICOTA, the alliance of numerous Native American peoples whose spiritual gifts first enabled Delina to contact the deceased Nazareth and begin the quest for an alternative to violence. Nazareth’s suggestion, as reported by Delina, that the women of the Lines begin marrying the men of PICOTA is described by Chief Bluecrane as “the marriage of the highest of technologies” (35). In contrast to the Alien and machine technologies, which cause the Icehouse Effect (151) and generally fail in unfixable ways (105, 40), these technologies—linguistics, spirituality, and alternative forms of healing—are part of the fabric of human interaction, possessing the power to transform society instead of destroying it.
The alternative technologies the women wield embody the nature of lasting change, which is not merely additive but transformative. Linguistics provides one metaphor for that kind of global transformation: “Translation, you know, is not a matter of substituting words in one language for words in another language. Translation is a matter of saying in one language, for a particular situation, what a native speaker of the other language would say in the same situation. The more unlikely that situation is in one of the languages, the harder it is to find a corresponding utterance in the other” (6). The women’s invention of Láadan provides the most powerful example of this process. As Delina recalls:
So … remember how, after we began speaking Láadan, and after our little girls began growing
up speaking it, how we changed? It wasn’t that we were the same women with a different language added on, Sarajane: we were different. So different that the men could no longer bear to have us with them for more than half an hour at a time … so different that they built the Womanhouses for us, to keep us separate. Remember? (74)
The implication is that people are something like native tongues: given a change of sufficient magnitude, they will be translated, so that certain perceptions or expressions would be more (or less) thinkable. This, then, is the hope of audiosynthesis, which Delina explains in a conversation with Sarajane:
“The point,” said Delina, “is that the creatures we are … and perhaps most especially the male creatures … seem unable to set violence aside. But human beings who have never eaten mouthfood … who have never had to say to themselves, ‘This substance in my mouth was once a living creature like me, until it was caught and killed and cooked for me to eat’ … Sarajane, they won’t just be the same creatures eating a different diet.” …
“You are saying … evolution.”
“Yes! Evolution. Exactly. It wouldn’t have had to be audiosynthesis, Sarajane—any change of sufficient scope would have done it.” (74–75)
Like audiosynthesis, like language, a well organized local faith can also produce translating change. When Delina learns about audiosynthesis, she realizes that she hasn’t found something entirely new, but rather rediscovered something that had been hidden in plain sight in holy books for thousands of years (53). As the women of the Lines spread audiosynthesis secretly, they do so by way of a new religious branch of women: Our Blessed Lady of the StarTangle. Presumably aligned with the Catholic Church and comprised entirely of women of the Lines, the Order takes as its mission the creation of Music Grammar Schools, which in turn allows them to nourish children aurally and thus institute audiosynthesis secretly. As its name implies, the Order takes seriously the women’s addition to the traditional rules of research and analysis: “find the one critical end of the tangled string. The one you pull to make the entire knotted mess fall into orderly disorder at your feet” (39). Hunger is the string the women pull—by means of audiosynthesis—to untangle the mess that is human violence. And faith is another form of translation, another technology of transformation. As Chief Bluecrane observes when Delina emerges from her vision quest, “She was no prettier than she’d been when she first showed up to torment him, but right now she had the uncanny translucent elegance that goes with a sacred procedure done properly and all the trimmings laid on. She had not only survived … she had improved. And that was how it was supposed to work” (33).
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