URSULA K. LE GUIN · MADELEINE L’ENGLE
A Wizard of Earthsea; The Tombs of
Atuan; Tehanu; A Wrinkle in Time
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC, MEANWHILE, WERE TWO writers – Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) and Madeleine L’Engle (1918–2007) – who sought with varying success to put a tweak on the white male inheritance of mainstream science fiction and fantasy. The first novel in Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, A Wizard of Earthsea, came out in 1968, capping off the decade that saw Garner and Cooper get their starts. She was no less important a writer, but she was in some respects a very different one.
Le Guin’s fantasy setting was not a hidden palimpsest of our own: there is no portal to Earthsea in Berkeley, California; there is no Object of Power hidden somewhere in Portland, Oregon. Her imaginary world came with politics and detailed local mythologies and, satisfyingly, with maps – she said that when the idea for the book came to her “the first thing I did was sit down and draw a map […] on a very large sheet, probably butcher paper, which I had rolls of for my kids to draw on.”* Its connection with our real world was psychological and mythopoeic.
The protagonist of A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged, is a trainee magician in a world in which enchantment is a widespread technology and (in keeping with so many accounts of magic) the mastery of objects and forces comes through the knowledge of their occult true names. Her starting point was that “Back then, in 1967, wizards were all, more or less, Merlin and Gandalf. Old men, peaked hats, white beards. But this was to be a book for young people. Well, Merlin and Gandalf must have been young once, right?”*
So it’s a book about growing up. Ged’s powers are considerable, but uncontrolled – and it’s when he casts a forbidden spell, and it goes wrong, that he brings into being his principal antagonist, a “shadow-creature” of horrible and unceasingly shifting forms whose first attack scars him. For the first part of its existence the shadow implacably chases Ged; then, realizing he must confront it, Ged chases the shadow. Their final confrontation takes place in a tenebrous space beyond the bounds of the known world where Ged overcomes the shadow by speaking its name aloud. The name is his own:
Ged spoke the shadow’s name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: ‘Ged.’ And the two voices were one voice. Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.
Ged finds victory in a sort of defeat; defeat in a sort of victory: “Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.”
The book’s themes are the seductions of power, the perils of pride and the way in which evil is not something external to us – as it is in so many simpler children’s stories – but a part of every individual soul. Astonishingly, given how deeply the book resonates even at the level of vocabulary (“the shadow”) with Jungian thought, Le Guin claimed not to have read Jung when she wrote A Wizard of Earthsea.
Le Guin further pushed the normative assumptions of the genre by making Ged brown-skinned and his friend vetch black. Not that her publishers always noticed. As she complained, she had to contend for years with cover designers whitewashing her creation: “Earthsea was bathed in bleach.”* The second and fourth books (The Tombs of Atuan, 1971 and Tehanu, 1990) both had a female protagonist.†
Even so Le Guin, looking back, believed that the eighteen-year gap between the third and fourth books in the series was because “an increasing sense of something missing in my own writing, which I could not identify, had begun to paralyze my storytelling ability. Without the feminist writers and thinkers of the 1970s and ’80s, I don’t know if I ever could have identified this absence as the absence of women at the center. Why was I, a woman, writing almost entirely about what men did?”‡
She wrote passionately, too, against the association of fantasy writing with childishness.
The conventionality of the story, and its originality, reflect its existence within and partial subversion of an accepted, recognized tradition, one I grew up with. That is the tradition of fantastic tales and hero stories, which comes down to us like a great river from sources high in the mountains of Myth – a confluence of folk and fairytale, classical epic, medieval and Renaissance and Eastern romance, romantic ballad, victorian imaginative tale, and twentieth-century books of fantastic adventure such as T.H. White’s Arthurian cycle and Tolkien’s great book.
Most of this marvelous flood of literature was written for adults, but modernist literary ideology shunted it all to children. And kids could and did swim in it happily as in their native element, at least until some teacher or professor told them they had to come out, dry off, and breathe modernism ever after.*
By the time the series concluded, she said: “I […] abandoned any attempt to suit my vision of Earthsea to a publisher’s category or a critic’s prejudice. The notion that fantasy is only for the immature rises from an obstinate misunderstanding of both maturity and the imagination.” Or as she also put it: “Despite what some adults seem to think, teenagers are fully human. And some of them read as intensely and keenly as if their life depended on it. Sometimes maybe it does.”†
Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery award-winning A Wrinkle in Time (1962) freely mashed up fairytale and mythic elements with hard science fiction, sending its protagonists Meg Murry and her younger brother Charles Wallace Murry on an adventure across distant planets in search of their missing scientist father. Here’s another writer for whom the poetic resonances of post-Newtonian physics offered possibilities. Meg and Charles’s means of travel is “tessering” through wormholes when spacetime is folded (the tesseract is the name given to a five-dimensional cube); yet her fictive universe also includes a trio of ancient and eccentric creatures called Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit, who are something between benevolent witches and guardian angels. Charles Wallace – bullied by his classmates as a “moron” – seems to be what we’d now call neurodivergent; he has savant-like linguistic abilities and, for the purposes of the book, an ability to “read” other people and predict their behavior that borders on telepathy.
Like C.S. Lewis, L’Engle drew explicitly on her Christian faith for her Time Quintet (A Wrinkle in Time had four sequels). The principal antagonist is a “Black Thing” – evil reified, essentially – that is swallowing planets and which, only from a very great distance, can be seen threatening our own world. When the children find their way to the planet of Camazotz, where it holds absolute sway, they find a world of unbroken uniformity and obedience, plus some hellacious bureaucracy. The Black Thing is metaphysical, but it’s also totalitarian. It is temporarily seen off – and its hypnotic grip on Charles Wallace broken – only by the application of the one thing antithetical to it: love.
L’Engle celebrates parental and sibling love, and childhood difference – Meg is worried about being plain, and impatient, and aggressive and “an odd man out”; her friend Calvin lacks love in the home and finds it with the Murry family; Charles Wallace is special in a way that the world cannot understand. The world didn’t understand Madeleine L’Engle either. Her celebration of nonconformity was too nonconformist for most publishers, and A Wrinkle in Time was rejected (in L’Engle’s account) by something between twenty-six and forty of them before finally finding its way into print. Her diagnosis, which has the ring of truth about it, and which tells us something about how siloed children’s publishing was even then, is that publishers just weren’t prepared to countenance a science-fiction novel with a female protagonist. Children’s writers were starting to push the boundaries – but the boundaries, at this stage, were still prone to pushing back.
* Author’s Introduction to The Books of Earthsea (Gollancz, 2018).
* Author’s Afterword, ibid.
* Author’s Introduction, ibid.
† Tehanu was originally subtitled “The Last Book of Earthsea,” though it wasn’t – Earthsea turned out to have other ideas.
‡ Author’s Introduction, ibid.
* Author’s Afterword, Ibid.
† Author’s Afterword, Ibid.