Fran Magazine: Issue #111

A guest post from Nicholas Russell

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) and reread diary issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd.

Hi from the woods…

I’m (Fran) away on residency but today I’m thrilled to share the first of three guest pieces from friend of the magazine, Nicholas Russell. You may remember that Nicholas wrote for Fran Magazine last year about Air, but in terms of more recent work, you can enjoy his thoughts on the new Conner O’Malley special in Defector, David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for Bright Wall/Dark Room, or a new piece of fiction in No Tokens. I always enjoy reading Nicholas and I hope you do too!

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Enduring Journeys: Ursula K. LeGuin & Returning to Earthsea
by Nicholas Russell

I’ve worked in bookstores for over five years now and one is either delighted by the chance to be surrounded by books every day, dismayed at just how much bullshit gets published on a weekly basis, or some constantly shifting mixture of both. Particularly now, after the pandemic reading boom, in this strange period of massive readership and book sales but recalcitrant corporate conservatism and diminishing literary quality, to say nothing of the hyper consumerist instrumentalization of books on TikTok and social media, the very act of reading has returned to the realm of fetish. I say “returned” because books have always been fetish objects and so have the sections they’ve been shelved in. 

Since high school, reading has occupied a tenuous position in my life. I’m never quite certain what I’ll want or when. I’ve spent a lot of my time trying to sharpen my sense of what I’m interested in and much of this comes down not to content but style. I’ll read anything on anything, but it has to be written well. This stipulation is, without a doubt, pretentious but one I feel strongly about, one I think is important for everyone to foster if they’re serious about literature and art. Maybe what I mean by “well” is the sense, beyond structure and composition, that what I’m reading has been written by someone who is committed to finding the right voice, the right sensibility, the right veracity and control of language for the project at hand. I want to go into something with good faith and feel that, regardless of the author’s intentions or what they feel about the work, that what they’re grappling with is imbued with some sense of genuine curiosity and attention. 

I started thinking about all this in earnest when I revisited Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea cycle. Fantasy has made up a huge portion of book sales in the past few years. I could reach for statistics but (because I’m lazy), in this case, it’s apparent walking into any bookstore now how drastic the shift has been. Multiple frontlist displays. Dedicated face-out tables. Special sprayed-edge hardcover editions of new releases. Reprints of older titles with revamped covers and “exclusive” new material. The enlarged footprint of the genre sections due, in part, to the recategorization of books that were once in YA to adult fantasy (hence an insipid blurring of the two). Combined with sci-fi and romance, fantasy commands a sizable readership that, according to some, has widened the space for authors who would have otherwise never gotten a shot at publication. 

This framing turns a conversation ostensibly about books instead into a conversation about economic power and cultural influence. There is not necessarily much to be said about style, substance, or longevity because such concerns are secondary to the fact that books are being sold. Where once there were endless debates about the literary value of fantasy and the arbitrary creation of genre, now there is the simple fact that an author like Sarah J. Maas has sold more than 38 million copies worldwide of a series whose hashtag on TikTok has over 8 billion views. I find this kind of capital-focused congratulatory posture at once infantilizing and lame. More importantly, it saps the strength of fantasy’s true potential. 

I started reading fantasy as a kid. Almost everyone did. Because of that, fantasy is necessarily entangled with youth and the development of a nascent love of reading. Such is the bedrock of Neil Gaiman’s lucrative speaking career, where he expounds earnestly about the empowering, empathy-instilling, escapist possibilities of reading fantasy as a kid. In a 2013 piece for the Guardian, Gaiman wrote, “If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn’t you take it?” Gaiman came to my local library in Vegas when I was in middle school and gave a version of this same speech. I lapped it up. I’d be lying if there wasn’t still a part of me that’s moved by the notion of so baldly advocating for fiction as a tool for some sort of existential, life-long battle. But I bristle at this instrumentalization of fantasy and literature more generally. 

On the one hand, we have the idea of literature as escapism, which can feel true even as it offers an unflattering reflection of a reader’s impulse to turn away from the world. This is the mode in which many “defenders'' of fantasy argue: the genre offers a chance to leave a tattered and painful daily existence behind for a while. This impulse has always been bizarre to me. I’m reminded here of a particularly unfortunate essay I came across on CrimeReads where the author wrote, “While quarantined at home, the thought of reading literary fiction never crossed my mind (I’m not that high-brow). I wanted/needed to escape and genre fiction held the key. The beauty of genre fiction is that there’s something for everyone.” To say nothing of the author’s immediate couching of her ability to enjoy or engage with literary fiction, the superior “for everyone” quality of genre fiction is simply the beauty of literature in general.

On the other hand, we have empathy as the common unifying grace that writers like to point to as a benefit of reading fiction. But it’s a limited idea. Author Namwali Serpell posited in an interview once that literature “doesn’t create our capacity for empathy (or, really, identification and projection); our capacity for empathy allows us to create and read literature.” I was lucky to have attended a workshop with Serpell just prior to the pandemic. I remember her expounding upon this idea to our cohort because so many of us, avowed nerds and lovers of genre, couldn’t stop championing fantasy as a unique means of identifying with the Other. Serpell found our enthusiasm endearing (I hope) but also pushed us to see how this framing put a cap on what any kind of fiction could do. 

Which brings me back to Earthsea. 

Ursula K. LeGuin’s bibliography is staggering in scope, but not all of it gets treated with the same degree of attention nor is all of it necessarily good. This is not to proclaim she’s either under or overrated, but that she’s less critically read than other genre writers. Maybe people read The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed in school. Maybe they know of LeGuin because she was such an eloquent lecturer on how the political and the spiritual could coincide with a writing life. But I started with Earthsea and, to a large degree, it’s where I’ve stayed. 

The series takes place in a world made up almost entirely of islands. Magic is common, though not everyone has the capacity to wield it. In particular, magic is marshaled through a mastery of the Old Speech, the language of dragons. Even if one never uses magic, the invocation and centrality of naming suffuses everything (see: Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles). A person isn’t complete until they learn their true name. Wizards might be taught on the island of Roke, where only men are permitted to enter, though local witches, sorcerers, and other less well-trained practitioners exist all over Earthsea. Most of the protagonists throughout the cycle are non-white agricultural dwellers who live in an age without kings or legitimate forms of government. The world is large but united by a common distrust of foreigners and a pessimism about the goodness of people in general. 

The first three books, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1970), and The Farthest Shore (1972), nominally follow Ged, nicknamed Sparrowhawk, an unremarkable boy from the island of Gont who possesses a remarkable aptitude for learning and commanding the Old Speech. LeGuin originally envisioned the Earthsea books as children’s novels, which partially accounts for the seemingly generic bildungsroman nature of A Wizard of Earthsea. But it’s clear both from the overarching narrative, which quickly deviates from Ged’s journey, and from the quality of LeGuin’s writing, which transforms with each installment, that her conception of books written for young adults encompassed a level of maturity, worldbuilding texture, and stylistic rigor most contemporary YA books rarely bother with. When Ged goes to Roke, filled as it is with ancient knowledge and mysterious elders, he enters into an intense rivalry with a fellow student named Jasper, who taunts and belittles him even though Ged is the more powerful wizard. 

Ged is a humble kid by most considerations. His first grand act of magic takes place in A Wizard of Earthsea’s stunning first chapter where Ged protects his village from an invading war tribe by shrouding the entire mountain in fog. But more consequentially throughout the series, Ged is known as the wizard who once herded goats, a common child without much claim to power or glory. Before he attends Roke, he wanders the forest with his first mentor, an old wizard named Ogion famous on Gont for calming an earthquake. With Ogion, Ged learns little else except patience. Where there are spells that could call out the rain’s name and ask it to pass them by, Ogion lets the storm run its course. Threaded here is LeGuin’s lifelong fascination with Taoism, a key moral facet that serves to underline the limits of human control over much of anything, magic or not.  

Where LeGuin deviates from the standard magical boy plot is partially through her handling of the consequences of Ged’s pride while at Roke. Jasper goads Ged into summoning a dead spirit, a forbidden practice not fully understood by even the most learned wizards. Ged succeeds in opening a portal into what is known among wizards as the Dry Lands, a darkened realm haunted by restless spirits who know no love and remember little of their waking lives. A “clot of black shadow” sneaks out and attaches itself to Ged before it’s driven away by the Archmage of Roke, who leads the school and councils the other teachers. The effort kills the Archmage. Meanwhile, Ged’s face is scarred and his spirit weakened. The ordeal imparts such a profound existential weight onto Ged that he seems to age, with a weariness and melancholy beyond his years crowding out his otherwise boyish appearance. Gone is Ged’s foolish lust for power. Now his power frightens him because he so easily unleashed evil into the world. Evil acquires an arresting quality in LeGuin’s usage throughout Earthsea. It’s not a placeholder term for the merely bad or cruel, it has moral significance and, as a consequence, a valence of obligation. For the rest of the first book, it becomes Ged’s duty to confront his shadow and banish it back to where it came from. The journey, aided by friends and allies, is a sad one. 

The second book, The Tombs of Atuan, follows Tenar, a girl from the distant, white-skinned island nation of Karg, banished to a lifetime as a priestess of the Nameless Ones. She’s raised to be a holy, blank vessel ignorant and fearful of the wider world, queen of an empty kingdom premised on superstition and religious lies. About halfway through the novel, Ged appears and becomes trapped by Tenar until eventually they both realize their capacity to help one another escape the shroud of darkness that Tenar has been living under. Except Tenar’s introduction into the wider world is painful. Triumph is difficult to come by in Earthsea. That’s not to say it’s lacking for heroism or courage or spectacle. But LeGuin’s project, from the outset, seemed to be one of complication and deliberate narrative plasticity. After the first novel, Ged is seen in fits and starts and almost always after a massive time jump. Tenar becomes the fulcrum from which a boy-centric understanding of the world swings and shatters completely. 

I saw recently an article posted on some fake mental health website that fantasy is important for kids who have experienced trauma and need to escape the real world. I think it’s obvious lately that we are treated as consumers at every turn and thus infantilized by corporations, influencers, and each other. So it should be unsurprising that fantasy is seen by some as a form of therapy. But what I find so resonant about a series like Earthsea is its capacity to transport and to reflect. There are allegories, sure, but it’s in LeGuin’s characterization of her protagonists that she achieves something beyond genre or metaphor. As ever, LeGuin herself put it best, “The complex meanings of a serious story or novel can be understood only by participation in the language of the story itself. To translate them into a message or reduce them to a sermon distorts, betrays, and destroys them.”

The Earthsea books are, among other things, “about” getting old and dying. They depict how difficult it is to change the world because of structural obstacles but also because of the petty grievances and paranoias of everyday people. They depict the real world and they depict Earthsea and all the better when both entities are able to exist apart from and because of each other. 

After the original trilogy was completed, LeGuin put Earthsea away for almost two decades, chipping away at her Hainish Cycle and the Catwings series, along with poems and short stories. Then, in 1990, she returned with Tehanu, which follows Tenar as a middle-aged adult on Gont. It’s clear with each book in Earthsea that LeGuin was grappling with the conventions of fantasy, particularly its paternalism and misogynistic wish fulfillment. The first novel is written in a style that evokes Tolkien, while the second is comparatively looser and faster-paced, eliding much of any focus on men, except from a wary perspective. Later in life, LeGuin said her writing style changed with her priorities as an older woman. “My model for this is late Beethoven,” she said. “He moves so strangely and quite suddenly sometimes from place to place in his music, in the later quartets. He knows where he’s going and he just doesn’t want to waste all that time getting there. But if you listen, if you’re with it, he takes you with him. I think sometimes about old painters – they get so simple in their means. Just so plain and simple. Because they know they haven’t got time. One is aware of this as one gets older. You can’t waste time.” Stylistically and qualitatively, it’s easy to see LeGuin evolving her focus on what Earthsea could be. 

In Tehanu, LeGuin entertains the idea of a fantasy novel bereft of magic. In the years since The Tombs of Atuan, Tenar has married, had children, and become a widow. At the beginning of Tehanu, she adopts a young girl assaulted then abandoned by a roving band of vagabonds. Tenar keeps a farm and chats with Ogion, Ged’s old mentor. She earns the trust of the villagers nearby, though they harbor doubts because of her Kargish origins. When Ged finally appears on the back of a dragon halfway through the novel, he’s utterly spent from the events of The Farthest Shore. His magic is depleted, his will splintered. Tehanu is Earthsea’s most complex and dense book and one of its main threads is how Ged might rebuild his sense of self in the absence of the power he was used to wielding. Too, stymied by the conservative tradition of Roke, Ged must learn late in life what it means to be a man of the world rather than a coddled boy upheld for his special gifts and fearful of women. Tenar sees in him a stubborn chauvinism at odds with his patience, wisdom, and desire to be helpful to others. Together, they share a hope that they might heal one another. 

LeGuin would ultimately write two more Earthsea books, Tales from Earthsea, a compilation of short stories, and The Other Wind, the final novel, both published in 2001. Uncollected short stories abound, along with unimaginative adaptations. But part of me believes Earthsea has resisted easy commodification because its story is both so ordinary and, by the standards of high fantasy, unconventional. The Earthsea novels depict a lifelong struggle against apathy, nationalism, greed, and a fear of death. The final Earthsea story, “Firelight”, published in The Paris Review just after LeGuin passed away in 2018, charts Ged’s eventful life via a string of memories playing out as he dies. What he glimpses is all that he had to go through in order to lead a good life. He remembers his friends. He remembers Tenar. He remembers life before and after magic. He remembers his duty to others. 

In the middle of A Wizard of Earthsea, after Ged suffers from a long period of self-doubt and depression following the loosing of his shadow, he confronts a dragon. The dragon plagues the villages of the Ninety Isles and Ged sets out to bargain with it. The dragon, employing its ancient cunning, offers to tell Ged the name of the shadow so that he might have power over it. But somewhere deep inside, Ged knows it won’t be so easy to undo what he did. “He fought a moment with sudden, startling hope. It was not his own life that he bargained for. One mastery, and only one, could he hold over the dragon. He set hope aside and did what he must do.”