Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  “Your race is appallingly alone in its world. No other mammalian species. No other ambisexual species. No animal intelligent enough even to domesticate as pets. It must color your thinking, this uniqueness. I don’t mean scientific thinking only, though you are extraordinary hypothesizers—it’s extraordinary that you arrived at any concept of evolution, faced with that unbridgeable gap between yourselves and the lower animals. But philosophically, emotionally: to be so solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook.”

  “The Yomeshta would say that man’s singularity is his divinity.”

  “Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be the cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. Orgoreyn is in the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing things around. What do the Handdarata say?”

  “Well, in the Handdara…you know, there’s no theory, no dogma….Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part.” Tormer’s Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,

  Light is the left hand of darkness

  And darkness the right hand of light

  Two are one, life and death, lying

  together like lovers in kemmer,

  like hands joined together,

  like the end and the way.

  My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.

  Ai brooded, and after some time he said, “You’re isolated, and undivided. Perhaps you are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism.”

  “We are dualists too. Duality is an essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.”

  “I and Thou,” he said. “Yes, it does, after all, go even wider than sex….”

  Le Guin’s Taoist poem gives her more than a title. It is the book, the woman, the spirit unappeasable and peregrine that I recall saluting in the last letter I sent to her, unknowingly written the day after her death. She gives Ai his finest moment in expressing an understanding of the love between Estraven and himself:

  For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.

  This is so precisely phrased that the voice is Le Guin’s. She also is unsure if they were right, and as her reader I, too, am uncertain. It would be a very different book if they had become lovers in the complete sense. Somewhere Le Guin remarks that her true subject is marriage, and here she gives us a Shakespearean marriage of true minds. Le Guin being Le Guin, she does not stop there. One of her inventions is mindspeech, by which two empathics can communicate without speech, a praxis that Ai teaches Estraven:

  We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying. Presently Estraven yawned and said, “I am deaf, deaf as a rock. We’d better sleep.” I assented. He turned out the light, murmuring his brief praise of darkness; we burrowed down into our bags, and within a minute or two he was sliding into sleep as a swimmer slides into dark water. I felt his sleep as if it were my own: the empathic bond was there, and once more I bespoke him, sleepily, by his name—“Therem!”

  He sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud. “Arek! is that you?”

  “No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you.”

  His breath caught. Silence. He fumbled with the Chabe stove, turned up the light, stared at me with his dark eyes full of fear. “I dreamed,” he said, “I thought I was at home—”

  “You heard me mindspeak.”

  “You called me—It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He’s dead. You called me—you called me Therem? I…This is more terrible than I had thought.” He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off nightmare, and then put his face in his hands.

  “Harth, I’m very sorry—”

  “No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man’s voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me ‘Harth’? Oh, I see why there’s no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing….All right. All right, speak to me again.”

  “Wait.”

  “No. Go on.”

  With his fierce, frightened gaze on me I bespoke him: “Therem, my friend, there’s nothing to fear between us.”

  He kept on staring at me, so that I thought he had not understood; but he had. “Ah, but there is,” he said.

  After a while, controlling himself, he said calmly, “You spoke in my language.”

  “Well, you don’t know mine.”

  “You said there would be words, I know….Yet I imagined it as—an understanding—”

  “Empathy’s another game, though not unconnected. It gave us the connection tonight. But in mindspeech proper, the speech centers of the brain are activated, as well as—”

  “No, no, no. Tell me that later. Why do you speak in my brother’s voice?” His voice was strained.

  “That I can’t answer. I don’t know. Tell me about him.”

  “Nusuth…My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Estraven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We…I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years.”

  The two Estravens had been lovers, incest not being a Gethenian taboo. They had sworn faithfulness to one another and had a son. Therem will join Arek in death when he attempts valiantly to make his escape from Karhide:

  But he was off, downhill: a magnificent fast skier, and this time not holding back for me. He shot away on a long quick curving descent through the shadows over the snow. He ran from me, and straight into the guns of the border-guards. I think they shouted warnings or orders to halt, and a light sprang up somewhere, but I am not sure; in any case he did not stop, but flashed on towards the fence, and they shot him down before he reached it. They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, “Arek!” Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

  It is a tribute to Le Guin’s art that every time I reread this I become very sad. In some ways Genly Ai plays Horatio to Therem Estraven’s Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Hamlet dies upward in an apotheosis, whereas Therem descends to icy darkness, crying out the name of his long-dead brother as though Genly has fused with Arek.

  Genly Ai is soon liberated by royal orders and has another audience with King Argaven, after arranging to bring down the Ekumen spaceship:

  After some silence, he said, “How was it, that pull across the Ice?”

  “Not easy.”

  “Estraven wo
uld be a good man to pull with, on a crazy trek like that. He was tough as iron. And never lost his temper. I’m sorry he’s dead.”

  I found no reply.

  “I’ll receive your…countrymen in audience tomorrow afternoon at Second Hour. Is there more needs saying now?”

  “My lord, will you revoke the Order of Exile on Estraven, to clear his name?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Ai. Don’t rush it. Anything more?”

  “No more.”

  “Go on, then.”

  Even I betrayed him. I had said I would not bring the ship down till his banishment was ended, his name cleared. I could not throw away what he had died for, by insisting on the condition. It would not bring him out of this exile.

  The Left Hand of Darkness concludes with Genly Ai visiting the Hearth of the Lord of Estre, who had borne both Arek and Therem.

  Esvans Harth rem ir Estraven was an old man, past seventy, crippled by an arthritic disease of the hips. He sat erect in a rolling-chair by the fire. His face was broad, much blunted and worn down by time, like a rock in a torrent: a calm face, terribly calm.

  “You are the Envoy, Genry Ai?”

  “I am.”

  He looked at me, and I at him. Therem had been the son, child of the flesh, of this old lord. Therem the younger son; Arek the elder, that brother whose voice he had heard in mine bespeaking him; both dead now. I could not see anything of my friend in that worn, calm, hard old face that met my gaze. I found nothing there but the certainty, the sure fact of Therem’s death:

  The old lord looked at the boy, then at me.

  “This is Sorve Harth,” he said, “heir of Estre, my sons’ son.”

  There is no ban on incest there, I knew it well enough. Only the strangeness of it, to me a Terran, and the strangeness of seeing the flash of my friend’s spirit in this grim, fierce, provincial boy, made me dumb for a while. When I spoke my voice was unsteady. “The king will recant. Therem was no traitor. What does it matter what fools call him?”

  The old lord nodded slowly, smoothly. “It matters,” he said.

  “You crossed the Gobrin Ice together,” Sorve demanded, “you and he?”

  “We did.”

  “I should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy,” said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem’s son, said stammering, “Will you tell us how he died?—Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars—the other kinds of men; the other lives?”

  Le Guin had a special genius for endings. In the boy Sorve’s voice we hear Therem’s spirit speak again, and we realize freshly the ironic necessity of his dying, a sacrifice to open up his closed society to otherness, indicated by the triple repetition of the refrain “other.”

  CHAPTER 44

  The Dispossessed (1974)

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  IN ONE OF HER LETTERS TO ME, in response to my praise for The Dispossessed, Le Guin said that the process of writing this book was particularly important for her, in that she felt it had taught her how to make her work more capacious. Certainly Shevek, the novel’s protagonist, is by far her most complex character, a physicist of genius, a dedicated anarchist, and a pilgrim who mediates between antithetical worlds.

  The book begins and ends at the launch port of the anarchist nation of Anarres. Between the port and the rest of the land there is a forbidding wall, more ominous for looking so commonplace:

  There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

  Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

  Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

  Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

  Between Shevek and the spaceship is an angry crowd determined to prevent his departure:

  Some of them had come there to kill a traitor. Others had come to prevent him from leaving, or to yell insults at him, or just to look at him; and all these others obstructed the sheer brief path of the assassins. None of them had firearms, though a couple had knives. Assault to them meant bodily assault; they wanted to take the traitor into their own hands. They expected him to come guarded, in a vehicle. While they were trying to inspect a goods truck and arguing with its outraged driver, the man they wanted came walking up the road, alone. When they recognized him he was already halfway across the field, with five Defense syndics following him. Those who had wanted to kill him resorted to pursuit, too late, and to rock throwing, not quite too late. They barely winged the man they wanted, just as he got to the ship, but a two-pound flint caught one of the Defense crew on the side of the head and killed him on the spot.

  Once safely on board, Shevek is disoriented as he tries to absorb attitudes and information totally alien to his life experience. The doctor tending to him expresses views on gender that are senseless to the anarchist and physicist never exposed to such societal nonsense:

  Shevek turned the conversation, but he went on thinking about it. This matter of superiority and inferiority must be a central one in Urrasti social life. If to respect himself Kimoe had to consider half the human race as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect their sex lives? He knew from Odo’s writings that two hundred years ago the main Urrasti sexual institutions had been “marriage,” a partnership authorized and enforced by legal and economic sanctions, and “prostitution,” which seemed merely to be a wider term, copulation in the economic mode. Odo had condemned them both, and yet Odo had been “married.” And anyhow the institutions might have changed greatly in two hundred years. If he was going to live on Urras and with the Urrasti, he had better find out.

  Odo was the heroic theoretician of the anarchist idea on which Anarres was founded some seven generations before The Dispossessed opens. The novel subtly traces Shevek’s career on Urras, alternating it chapter by chapter with his past life on Anarres. A great theoretical physicist, he had had his work inhibited by the relatively primitive resources and institutions of Anarres. His flight to Urras fuses elements of scientific truth seeking, personal restlessness, and at last a revival of his anarchist beliefs.

  Initially, Shevek is happy enough with his teaching and research activities at the university on Urras. The creature comforts are new to him, and for a while he is content. When he falls ill, he is visited by his mother, Rulag, a cold and brilliant person who had abandoned him soon after his birth. No relationship can develop between them, and she comes to oppose his mission. When he is strong enough, Shevek abandons the university and finds his way to join the anarcho-syndicalists of Urras in their mass protest against the regime. The uprising is quelled bloodily, and Shevek finds his way to be reunited with his life partner, Takver, and their four-year-old daughter, Sadik, whom he meets for the first time. As he lies awake, with a sleeping Takver in his arms, his consciousness begins to fuse his life ex
perience with his quest as a physicist for a new theory of time as simultaneity:

  Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

  Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

  It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a hole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

  So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.