always talking about home

[calimac]

So much interesting was said at the Always Coming Home Book of Honor panel at Potlatch that I almost wished I hadn't been moderating it so that I could have afforded to spend some attention on writing it down. amy_thomson, one of the panelists, recorded it, but many of us spoke without microphones, especially audience members. I haven't heard the recording and haven't heard how it came out.

The panel description writeup framed this as a discussion of the nature of the book and of how it should be read. I began the panel by saying something like this:

If you turn to the title page of Always Coming Home, you see credits reading "Ursula K. Le Guin, author; Todd Barton, composer; Margaret Chodos, artist; George Hersh, geomancer; maps drawn by the author." A little unusual for the title page of a novel, and the cover of the first edition assures us, right below the title, that this is "a novel."

You turn the pages, and after two different authorial introductions and a poem, you come to the main text. It's pretty straightforward, the autobiography of a woman. It continues on for a while, but on page 41 it stops and says, "The second part of Stone Telling's story begins on page 173." What is this, a choose-your-own-adventure story? Should you turn to page 173 or go on to page 42? If you go on, on pages 46-47 you find this chart which explains a few odd terms like "Third House" and "Blood Lodge" that you might have come across in the story, which is fine. But is this actually a novel as people customarily understand the term?

General opinion on the panel and among the audience was that a novel can be many kinds of things, and that this thing is one of them. But my point was that the term "novel" raises certain expectations in many people's minds of a certain type of continuous, end-directed narrative. And when confronted by a book which is more of a mosaic, a portrait, they're likely to become bewildered and hostile; thus Norman Spinrad in the review referred to in the panel description.

But here I can just point you in the direction of the excellent liveblogging of badgerbag, who covered several panels (see elsewhere on her LJ). So I can make my further comments in the form of adding useful footnotes and a bit of clarification to what I said on the panel, as reported by her:

Norman Spinrad's review in Asimov's, "a novella surrounded by the equivalent of the Dune Encyclopedia". It's 40K words therefore it's a novel. As defined by Mike Resnick. Also this disrespects the rest of the stories, like the stories which were award winning in their own right and some published separately. Someone else said that novels are stories that are pointed towards their own ending "the purpose of reading the book is to get to the damn ending" ACH is a mosaic, a portrait, that does contain stories. Which have story power.

On the length question, the way I put it was something like: "It's actually over 40,000 words long, which makes it technically a novel.* And in a world with people like Mike Resnick in it, who think that never the twain shall meet**, that makes a difference!" Of course this is trivial; a story lives or dies by its merits, not its length, but it's telling – either about Spinrad or about the Hugo definitions, possibly both – that Spinrad would seek to belittle it in this way.

*By the Hugo and Nebula rules, which I did not add, trying to speak briefly and thinking most of the audience would know that.

**i.e., that a story of 40,001 words - a novel by Hugo definition - is a completely and utterly different animal from a story of 39,999 words - a novella by Hugo definition. The backstory to this is that the Hugo rule definitions of story lengths actually include a grey area around the edges; a story in that grey area can be placed in either category. When the Hugo Administrators (of whom I was one) applied that rule in 1994, Mike Resnick was outraged, and claimed to see no difference between putting, say, a 39,000 word story in Novel (well within the grey area as the rules then stood) and putting a 2,400 word story in Novel.

Regarding the rest of the stories, I specifically referred to "The Trouble with the Cotton People", which was not only published separately (nor was it the only ACH component which was), but which then was chosen for Gardner Dozois' respected Year's Best Science Fiction anthology. So it's not some insignificant encyclopedia entry.

Novels tend to be, in our readings, stories that are pointed towards their own endings. This leaves many readers at a loss when facing books which are not ending-directed. (Compare this with the bewilderment of many listeners who see music as a story-telling medium when faced with composers, like Anton Bruckner or the minimalists, whose music is content to just be, as an object of contemplation.) I referred to the "just throw the ring in the volcano, already" school of Tolkien criticism, and I wasn't kidding: there are people who really think that way.

How you read it. Reading path? Read first bit, then what? should you or should you not turn to page 173.

Molly Gloss replied you should do whatever you want to. So I asked what she did, which was to continue straight through. I didn't go into this, but I think that "do whatever you want to" answers miss the point. Of course you can do whatever you want to. We’re not trying to enforce traffic laws here. What we're doing is giving advice on how to approach a work of literature, so what's your advice? Anyone who already knows what they want to do will do it without asking. We're speaking to the genuinely conflicted or puzzled, trying to show them a way into what for them, if not for others, is a confusing text.

I liked visiting, I wouldn't want to live there. If I were there I'd go to (wakwaha) and spend all my time on the computer. I am visiting and learning about it from an ethnographic perspective.

src also blogged this panel, and asked, "what would he gain by visit? What does he perceive he'd lose by residency?"

Good questions. I replied, What I gain by visiting (which I have done, for reading a book as full and intense as this one constitutes visiting this culture in the only way available to us) is a chance to view the world, and how to live in it, in a different way that my own. It enlarges us, and enriches our understanding and appreciation even of other cultures and other ways of being in our own world, to experience these different views, and it can teach us necessary truths [in this case especially ecological truths] about how we too should live.

What I'd lose by living there comes from the fact that I am a child of this world. I am used to our amenities and comforts, to our intellectual pursuits, to our cultural and artistic creations. I have a mindset built by our culture, not by the very different Kesh culture. After much more than a book's-length visit there, I would feel lonesome and deprived, in a way that I perhaps might not feel had I been born into it.

It only resembles native american stuff in the way that Gandalf resembles Merlin. Not a copy! There was one specific comparison in the book about people living lightly on the land as the native americans did. Maybe that's where some reviewers are getting the idea.

badgerbag goes on to say that this sounded disingenuous and weirdly defensive. "It's not like anyone went Oh Ursula you heinous racist." Actually, I have occasionally elsewhere seen comments that tended in that direction, and I find them disturbing. The recent discussion of cultural appropriation here on LJ was so toxic that I consider it necessary to defuse such a discussion in this case before it started. I'd have brought it up with the panelists had I thought there'd be any tendency to move in that direction.

Nor is it disingenuous. Of course, as a creative writer UKL brought in echoes of native american cultures. But I do not consider it useful to view the Kesh that way. This is why I brought up the parallel of the relationship of Merlin and Gandalf. One is not a copy of the other. Instead, both are reflections of a broader reality, a Platonic archetype if you will. This is important to understanding ACH, because UKL's thesis on the Kesh lifestyle, and part of the reason she focused it so precisely geographically, is that this particular land, properly understood and listened to by its inhabitants, generates a particular type of civilization: a type expressed in one way by the people who come here before us (the native americans) and in another way by those who come afterwards (the Kesh). UKL herself is at pains to emphasize that the Kesh don't live what we would call a "low-tech" romantic-idealized aboriginal lifestyle, though it may seem like one superficially.

my thing was to take these maps, I work for the us geological survey. I got the topographical maps, and I went to the place and paid my respect to it.

Correction of slight misunderstanding here: I don't work for the USGS, I just went and got their maps. Maps are my native language, I said, so that is what I was most drawn to.

Motel with the mysteries - send up of far future anthropology of now

That's Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, IMHO the best of a number of books gently guying archaeology by depicting future archaeologists misunderstanding the relics of our civilization.

Different tribes in northern california on the map

What I was saying here was re-emphasizing the smallness and specific landscape of the Kesh civilization, and confirming the book's implication that they are surrounded by other equally small tribes, by pointing to the map of native american tribes in northern California in Handbook of the Indians of California by Alfred Kroeber, UKL's father (a copy of which was up for sale in the next day's auction). This depicts northern California as being divided into the territory of many small and distinct tribes.

Comments

[yarram.livejournal.com]

I referred to the "just throw the ring in the volcano, already" school of Tolkien criticism, and I wasn't kidding: there are people who really think that way.

Including this reader of SF. :-P

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The audience laughed when I made the reference, which is why I felt obliged to demonstrate that I wasn't making it up.

[yarram.livejournal.com]

I believe you that they laughed; even I laugh as I say it to describe my own opinion. :-D