Earthsea, Continued
When talking about Earthsea, touchstone said:
I like this sort of voice - stories that are written as if to be read aloud, or as if actually being spoken. Is it to other peoples' taste? Did anyone find it distracting? (Or just unremarkable?)
I am a self-admitted addict to the travelog. However, people don’t actually talk in the vast amounts of description that I find so restful to read, so a spoken-voice narrative means that I occasionally missed my accustomed vice. However, most of the time I was able to fall into the rhythm of the story without too much problem. I would say it was more of a bug than a feature for me, but I could appreciate it for what it was.
Then touchstone said:
This is a classic Campbellian 'Hero's Journey' story; really, one of the clearest examples I know of. That reinforces the 'mythic' feeling of the story for me - there are so many parallels to draw to real-world myth that it slides itself into the same sort of genre by association. He's offered wisdom by a wise teacher, but rejects it because he doesn't understand its value (and later returns, more knowledgeable, and regrets the early decision). He goes on a long, solitary journey. He visits the land of the dead. There are so many references and classic elements that it could have felt overdone. It didn't for me, but did anyone else have a different reaction? And what about the same elements, as analogy for an internal struggle of the psyche? Ged literally confronts himself.
It didn’t feel overdone to me, but it was very mythic in nature, I’d agree. And actually, I would take the internal struggle of the psyche even more literally than symbolically. Oh, there was plenty of symbolism and foreshadowing--one of the most slap-you-in-the-face-with-a-dead-rabbit moments was the fact that he arrived at Roke on the Shadow. However, I don’t think that it was just pain and suffering that taught Ged to be less of an asshole after the botched summons. Not only did several references such as “it is the shadow of your arrogance,” get made, in the end the Shadow had Ged’s own name. He was made weaker by fleeing this dark side of himself. Confronting it and vanquishing it was not simple in the least. But in the end, one of the things that he cried was “I am made whole.”
The whole ‘dark side of your ID has its own monstrous form’ is /also/ a very classic storyline too, after all.
Then touchstone said:
On a totally different subject - Roke versus Hogwarts. Which is more convincing for you as a school of wizardry? How heavily do you think Rowling was influenced by LeGuin? And are there other books you can think of that show sign of similar influence?
lilisonna followed up:
Roke was more believable to me. Hogwarts is very High Fantasy Wizard school; Roke felt a little more grounded.
Then lightbearer said:
Roke is much more a medieval university sort of school. Hogwarts tried to be a Very High Fantasy equivalent of an English boarding school. Personally, I preferred Roke. I think lilisonna's term of 'grounded' works well here. Hogwarts, for all the later books, seems more ... ethereal and ephemeral, perhaps for its remove from the outside world. Roke is, in some ways, the center of its world.
Here I buck the trend because to me Roke felt the most mythic. I’m not really saying that Hogwarts is better in all ways, but I felt more a part of the scene in the Hogwarts descriptions of classwork and homework and trying magics until they could make it work rather than the magic of Earthsea.
Then touchstone wrote:
I'm apparently very bad at paying attention to physical descriptions of characters in stories. I was vaguely aware that the majority of the characters in the book (with the exception of the Kargs) are copper- or black-skinned, but I didn't much attend to it; I don't usually visualize characters while I'm reading. The SciFi miniseries whitewashed most of the characters but for a token few and cast Caucasians in most of the roles, to the author's very great distress and irritation. So. Race issues! Discuss. Was I the only oblivious one?
lightbearer followed up with:
The book's not really that racially diverse; pretty much everyone, as you said, are copper- and brown-skinned. IIRC, the islands of Earthsea are reasonably close to the equator, so that certainly makes sense from a physiological perspective. The cultural differences were more noticeable than the racial ones, if only because there's not much in the realm of racial issues when everyone seems to be racially nigh-homogeneous.
There’s actually one race of pale-skinned people, though being Osskils that’s no great recommendation for the Earthsea Caucasians. ;) However, it seems odd to me that the author deliberately wrote a book this mythic, then would make kerfluffle over the races of the actors. Though there were various races and even some mild bigotry (the Osskils called Ged ‘’The Red One’) it really felt like a minor and unimportant theme for the book, which was much more about the Hero’s Journey and the confrontation of self, as mentioned previously.
Then touchstone wrote:
Next up, gender. There are only four female characters in this story who are coming readily to mind, and they're all archetypes. Oh, wait. Five, but one of them is just a foreshadowing of one of the later ones. There's the aunt: older, not unhelpful but controlling and with her own interests at heart. Serret is a temptress; the girl on Gont who convinces Ged to look in Ogion's book is much the same. Yarrow is an innocent. Elfarran - goodly and beautiful, but long dead and only seen as a spirit - is the ultimate in 'unobtainable feminine ideal'. It struck me that we don't see much in the way of positive portrayals of adult women, here.
lilisonna followed up with:
As for the gender -- I was mostly willing to let it go because it's a story that deals heavily with Archetypes and because of the publication date. Sure, it would have been nice to see female students in the wizards school, and I think it's lacking something because of that, but it didn't seriously rock the foundations of the novel.
I think she nailed it-much like race, gender roles weren’t really the focus of this book. You could probably go through and define the various men that showed up in the book in similar ways to what you’ve done with the women.
On a totally other topic, does anyone have strong opinion on why yew was so appropriate? It’s apparently got life and death symbolism, but I’m less familiar with what specific sources Le Guin would have been using.