I recently read A Wizard of Earthsea for the first time and I LOVED it. I had to draw Ged, The lightless cities of the dead, and Ged's confrontation with the dragon of Pendor. I also wrote some of my feelings on the book:
Ursula K Leguin is basically a fucking god. Really gorgeous language that feels mythic without being overwrought faux-medieval/shakespearean, and a sense of magic and mystery that was legitimately emotionally overwhelming- and generosity and tenderness in its characters without feeling like it’s handling everything with kid gloves.
There’s a really heavy weight of grief hanging over everything that really seems to set it apart from other fairytale adventure stories- though it’s not that being ‘set apart’ makes a given work of genre fiction good, only that this approach brought something really resonant out of a story that you could call “simple” if viewed in abstract.
It really does remind me of the small glimpses of Real Magic that we get to see in the LOTR books, this sense of something really otherworldly, something so powerful that it seems impossible even inside the fantasy narrative it’s a part of. I really have missed stories where the magic feels like it’s actual magic. The end of this book could be shot with like 500 dollars worth of equipment; but it feels more ‘epic’ than most fantasy series' big final battles.
If you've ever heard me talk about Fantasy/Fairytales then you’ve heard my maxim "a good fairytale takes what's internal and intuitive and makes it tangible and material". I thought LeGuin’s approach to that was so exciting. Not very many adventure stories about Growing Up handle the experience of shame and failure as uncomfortably as this one does.
the story has this omniscient, almost historical oral tradition type voice, with Leguin occasionally telling us about Ged's future and his Great Deeds as though we must already know him, while he still hasn't done shit, so you have this image of him as a badass wizard, then when he brings the Shadow into the world, it's like...oh...well how could someone so fucked up and broken ever become this legendary figure? and instead of undercutting the linear narrative it’s a part of, it feels more like a challenge.
It’s saying, “Even someone like Ged can get better.” Going on this adventure isn’t something he’s doing for fun, or even to prevent some apocalyptic event- finding peace is an existentially significant mission for him, otherwise he will spread darkness into the world for the rest of his days. He doesn’t do that out of an altruistic love for Humanity, but a fear of hurting anyone else ever again, personally. It’s a personal story, but not a selfish one.
Ged gets everything he ever wanted- notoreity, mastery, etc, but not in the way he imagined. It’s not that Ged comes into a unique mastery of the world because he’s better than everyone else, but more that the weight of his ambition is rebalanced tenfolld by responsibility. I think it’s such an elegant and exciting angle on the “young hero rises to greatness” narrative.
I’d like to assert that all the most popular and influential fairytale adventure stories are the ones that don’t neatly fit into the western/colonialist narrative of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey/Bildungsroman- despite how often they are called “archetypal”. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, A Wizard of Earthsea; and of course I do know there’s plenty of racism in Star Wars and LOTR, I’m just focusing in on the themes/character arcs and how they correspond to the supposed “Monomyth”: a framework with no academic basis but an undeniable influence on a massive amount of crappy mainstream fantasy writing.
All of these stories are about heroes who are, basically, wimps. Out of the three of them, only Luke Skywalker sort-of-wins 2 fights, and Ged only one (so far. I havent read the next 2 Earthsea books. But my point still stands). They aren’t stories about warriors, “Returning Home Having Changed,” with loads of treasure extracted from a distant land. They’re people who are broken and rebuilt by their journeys, burdened with the overwhelming responsibility of finding themselves when there is no clear path, who fail horribly. For all of them, their greatest moments of strength are acts of love and acceptance, exposing themselves unguarded to death and destruction in the name of protecting their tenderness.
It’s such a shame how these stories valorizing being a pussy have been mutated and re-interpreted by mainstream culture into stories about Cool Men Leveling Up and Crushing The Outsider. There are criticisms of the “adventure narrative” that claim that there’s really no separating it from the ideology of Western individualism, and that any other messages are ancillary to the subconscious thread of white supremacy in the “hero’s journey”.
I do get where that’s coming from, but A: The hero’s journey is fake, as in made-up, and B: I’m pretty sure that people will just write what’s in their heads, even if they’re following a script consciously/unconsciously- for good or ill. I’d argue that A Wizard of Earthsea is a perfect example of a story that concerns an individual’s journey to find himself that is not about power over the world/others, but about becoming a better person for your sake and the sake of others.
The presence of connection and companionship is so essential to A Wizard of Earthsea, and Ged is able to construct a sense of self, and find his self-awareness, explicitly thanks to the generosity and love of others. So is Frodo! And ultimately, so is Luke Skywalker (LeGuin and Tolkein both being self-proclaimed Anarchists as well! Just saying!).
“Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters; Samwise the stout hearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?’ ”
Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
I think it’s heartening that even in the midst of all the bull crap of the modern times, immersed in alienation and commodification down to the cellular level, we are drawn towards stories about embracing our smallness and connection with ourselves, one another, and our environment. Those are the best and most thrilling aspects of these stories for me, and I think a huge part of what still gives them life.
