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The Telling
by Ursula K. Le Guin
This is a novel in the Hainish series.
Editions:
- Harcourt; ISBN: 0151005672; Published 2001; 264 pages; Hardcover
- Gollancz; ISBN: 057507258X; 254 pages; Published 18 October, 2001;
Paperback
Reviews
Short review by John Barrington 6 march
2001
I just finished reading The Telling by Le Guin. The active character
is an "envoy" from the Ekumen to Aka. The story is an interesting commentary
on religion: it's rise and fall and value. But mostly, it is a comment
on the meaning and value of history and non-fiction, and a denunciation
of book burning. What makes it momentarily relevent is is the destruction
by the Taliban in Afganistan of Budist statues.
John Barrington
Reflections on The Telling
These are some reflections on the book by David Salo.
This text first appeared on The Ekumen,
and is reposted here with permission of the author.
I've been an admirer of Ursula LeGuin's work for many years, since
I read "A Wizard of Earthsea" as a child. I still prefer
the Earthsea stories (all of them) to the "Hainish Cycle". But I very
much enjoyed LeGuin's latest novel, The Telling.
The size of the hardback volume is a bit
deceptive; the wide margins and spacing indicate that this book will
probably make a pretty slim paperback. I have no idea where "novella"
stops, or "novel" begins, so I don't know if it's accurately classed,
but it is a quick read.
LeGuin's creativity is always rooted in
our conventional world. I had not read very far in The Telling
before I said to myself, "Oh, she's talking about (The People's Republic
of) China." But in fact there are numerous culture-destroying states
which could serve as a comparable model.
None of them, however, has made quite as thorough-going a cultural
purge as the Dovzan Corporation. Reviewers seem to regard this state,
with some surprise as a strange mixture of capitalism and communism.
But it's not a very long reach for LeGuin, and should come as no surprise
to any student of political systems: for a very long time now, capitalism
and communism have shared the common myth of the salvific potential
of technology, and have preached the benefits to be gained by the effective
organization of workers under a directing hierarchy. The Soviet State
was, effectively, an immense, monopolistic, closely held corporation.
The differences between the systems are not really about social organization
but about efficiency: does competition between corporate units drive
out inefficient and unproductive units, allowing the most productive
and efficient units to thrive? Or is it a wasteful expenditure of productive
energy, since efficiency could be imposed by careful, scientific planning?
We don't get a good enough look at the
Dovzan Corporation to know for certain which side they come down on;
one may guess, however, that they allow a mixture of low-to-mid-level
competition combined with overall bureaucratic control, much like the
system in place in the modern PRC.
The highland peoples of Aka, on the other
hand, reminded me of Tibetans. Of course, there's supposed to be less
of a "national" distinction between the speakers of Rangma and of Dovzan
(despite their different languages) than there is between the Chinese
and the Tibetans. And the highland Akans are both more 'rationalistic'
in religion (or what passes for religion among them) and more intrinsically
mercantile in culture than the Tibetans are, or were. Nonetheless, the
mountain scenery and the nomenclature (Rangma, Silong) are reminiscent
of Tibet.
"The Telling" -- the native Akan religion
-- is pretty clearly (and more or less explicitly) modelled on Taoism,
as LeGuin understands it. The narrator, Sutty's, understanding of the
Telling changes throughout the book, and you're never quite sure if
she's gotten it right (and how much more than approximate can any anthropologist's
understanding of a culture be?). What Sutty ends up classifying as the
Akan sacred writings turns out to be, in fact, their entire body of
native literature (written in ideograms -- again, explicitly modelled
on the Chinese writing system). This includes not just what we'd call
"religious literature", but also historical and pseudo-historical legends,
astrology, herbalism, exercise, as well as more recent accounts of events.
But the Akans only write down, or tell, what "goes right" -- an incompletely
explained concept -- and so have no record of the events in Dovza surrounding
the building of the Corporate state, when things indubitably "went wrong".
We find out eventually that the rot predates the Corporation, going
back to a time when (at least in Dovza), certain of the maz (scholars,
or teachers -- more or less equivalent to religious functionaries) became
"bosses" and took political and social control. The Dovzan revolution,
and its anti-religious reaction were in response to the oppression of
the boss maz, which they replaced with an oppression of their own.
Since everything we know about Aka is
filtered through Sutty, we have to take her account with a grain of
salt. Raised as a member of an oppressed minority in the grip of a destructive,
fundamentalist state, she has a distrust of all forms of religion, which
she never quite loses. She comes to grip with the native Akan religious
traditions by draining them of their religious character, differentiating
between what to her is a dross of superficial "HP" ("Hocus-Pocus") and
a substrate of valuable teachings that work on a social, economic, philosophical,
and ethical level. These teachings had produced many millennia of social
homeostasis ("stagnation" from the Dovzan point of view) which had only
recently been upset, with catastrophic results. The new ideology is
that of the "March to the Stars" -- a commitment to technological progress,
cumulating in the acquisition of space flight which could place them
on par with the worlds of the Ekumen. Sutty in time comes to perceive
this ideology as the equivalent of the fundamentalist religious ideologies
which had oppressed her. The Dovzan bureaucrats, by contrast, assume
that their attempts to assimilate technology (ultimately of Ekumenical
origin) will be viewed far more sympathetically by the observers of
the Ekumen than the reactionary "rotten-corpse ideology" of the highlands.
They fail to understand that the observers are more interested in unique
cultures, than in imitations of their own.
Sutty finds "religion" unsatisfactory
as a word describing the Telling, which she views as a culturally unifying
web of story set within a deeply mercantile society (all stories, or
teachings, must be paid for -- though there appears to be some notion
of a fair price, and it is considered wrong to be extortionate). But
clearly there are religious aspects to The Telling. I think that Sutty
(and LeGuin?) may be missing the distorting effect of the Corporation
itself. By labelling all aspects of pre-Corporate culture "religion",
and banning it all without exception, they have created an artificial
unity to a diverse body of cultural practices. It seems to me doubtful
whether there really was a "Telling" per se before the Corporation set
it up as the enemy -- probably there was just literature, oral and written,
religious, legendary, and scientific. From that point of view the maz
were just teachers (however much honored), and the umyazu were
just schools or libraries. The Telling wasn't a religion or even a specific
cultural practice; it was just the Akan mode of life-long education.
By banning it, the Corporation rendered it all of equal value, and worthy
of protection: "holy", in a sense. Retrospectively, then, all umyazu
become temples (houses of holy writings) and all maz become priests
(speakers of the holy word). That's not to say that these elements didn't
exist, potentially, in these offices; but by the time Sutty arrives
on Aka, the the scientific and the superstitious, the religious and
the secular, have become mixed together and hard to disentangle.
LeGuin doesn't say any of this, of course,
and may not intend it. I think that it is still a plausible reading
of the situation, and explains some of Sutty's perplexity.
There are a lot of other things to say
about The Telling, many of them perplexing. What are we to say of the
legends of "riding the wind", flying by psychic powers (once or twice
given brief confirmation, which is then placed into doubt)? This motif
appears repeatedly, and significantly. What about the notions of "right"
and "wrong", significantly placed in juxtaposition with regard to both
Sutty's self-analysis of her observation, and the understanding of the
maz about the modes of telling a story? I hope that someone will explore
some of these in greater depth than I can at present.
-- David Salo
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