

I am a science fiction tragic but this semester I missed out
on teaching our senior speculative fiction elective. So I was talking with Mrs
L about which books should be in the speculative fiction course and what it
should cover.
The classic way to teach a course like this is to load it up
with dystopias (and may be a utopia or two). Serious political works like 1984 and Brave New World tend to make the grade in this version of the
course and genre science fiction tends to miss out. But I’m not a big fan of
some of the dystopian science fiction classics. Basically, I think Brave New World is a terrible novel so
we decided to mix it up and include some genre stuff.
I really hesitated, however, when fantasy was suggested.
Understand, this isn’t because I don’t like reading fantasy.
I do really. I got a little obsessive recently about George R.R. Martin and I’ve
got fond memories of slogging through Tolkien as a little kid. But I find it
more difficult to justify fantasy as an object of study. I knew I loved it, but
I couldn’t understand why. Anyway I didn’t convince L and, amongst other
things, their students are going to read Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Because we were talking about it L lent me The Other Wind. Lovely to find a series
you thought was finished has another book in it.
I’ve been obsessive since I cracked it (leaving me a little
unprepared for some classes). Le Guin’s world is beautiful and I can’t get
enough. If you missed A Wizard of
Earthsea let me say first – go read it!
Go on, I’ll wait. It’s only short.
Done? The central idea of the novel is that there is a
language in which men can only speak the truth (A similar premise gets a
science fiction treatment in the excellent Embassytown
by China MiƩville).
The language the world was made in. Everyone in this world has a true name
known only to them and perhaps a few of their closest confidantes. If you know
someone’s true name, you have power over them. Le Guin makes this such a
convincing and organic part of her world that when I’m speaking aloud I can
only refer to her main character as Sparrowhawk – the nickname he uses in
public instead of his true name.
Something about the series seems fundamentally true to me.
It is deeply metaphorical and I think it says something fundamental about the
nature of human beings and of language and of the world that I can’t really
explain. The fact that I can’t explain it is why I hesitate to use it as a
teaching text. May be that is the mark of a really great novel, that it can’t be
summarised in any satisfactory way. I think it is Ken Robinson who tells a
story about a choreographer asked to explain what her dance meant. The answer
was something like: “If I could say it in words I wouldn’t have gone to the
enormous trouble of dancing it.” The Earthsea saga has that same quality, I
feel like I am glimpsing some great truth through it that I can only feel, not
explain.
I love the novel, clearly, and I’ve taught it before. But I
don’t know how to assess student understanding of something when I can’t even
demonstrate that understanding myself. Perhaps there are some things in this
discipline of English that you can’t teach. Not because they can’t be known, or
because students need some innate gift to be able to understand them, but
because the understanding of another person can never really be grasped from
the outside.
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