14.i.08 Foundations of Verbal Communications

So, the SNAFUs of scheduling seem to have been overcome. TF is off to Guatemala to adopt a sister and SS is still sick, I'm guessing, but SN has joined us, so I think we are pretty much all on board.

I forgot again that this section did not receive their first-day lists, so they are bringing copies of Always Coming Home but not of The Tolkien Reader. I must remember to remind them that we will be going back and forth between these for a few weeks.

I wanted to start off with the five/four project (billed as "an opportunity to practice memorization and public speaking; in this case you present a poem of your composition, using LeGuin's Five/four structure. This gives you experience in concision of writing, focused rhetorical expression preparing you for the persuasive essay, but also giving you an "insider's" perspective on rhetoric."

I recited a five/four composed last year by Emily Keener:

"We have an issue
No attention paid
Hum of the static
Remains unresolved"

I said that the five/four project would involve composing one or more than one five/fours, memorizing the poem, and reciting it in front of the class: I said I would ask the students to present the poems several different ways to give different emphases to the lines, and that we would have an opportunity to discuss the meaning of the poem as the poet understood it.

I handed SN the syllabus, the handout on structure in "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", and an index card on which to write his preferred topics; I had, however, forgotten to make copies of the Oral Presentation of Poetry Worksheet, so I directed the students to read over the Five/fours on page 71 of Always Coming Home (U California Press edition).


When I returned from the copy room, I started on a brief presentation on Always Coming Home, beginning by saying that many expected it to be a hard-core feminist / anarchist tract, along the lines of Mary Daly's work. I mentioned LeGuin's earlier work The Dispossessed which is specifically about an anarchist community and its relationship to a capitalist and patriarchal community from which it seceded. I wrote "Gyn/Ecology Mary Daly: a scathing feminist indictment of patriarchy" on the board. Certainly ACH is no Gyn/Ecology (although a comparison could usefully be made).

I asked the students what they thought of ACH -- whether it was like anything they had read before. No, it wasn't. One student said that she found it difficult going at first because places were mentioned which she did not know, but by searching through the book she found maps which helped. She knew it was in California in the future but this didn't help. I asked her how she knew this was in California. She thought it was in the blurb on the back of the book (it's not). She was surprised to find that this was set in the future, but it was so primitive. One thinks of the future as being technological: "robots walking around" as she said.

Of course, this point is important and well worth investigating: expectations of what will happen versus what really happens. But I also remember, and perhaps the students in this section have not read, or read extensively, the great body of literature from the '60s and '70s of science fiction and fantasy set in a future after the collapse of western civilization: often an opportunity to combine ray-guns with magic-users, if the reader will excuse the brevity of expression here.

I suggested that we will investigate ACH as a novel and ask really whether it IS a novel. It does have a structure, though, and I wanted to begin to indicate that to the students. I wasn't really successful because I spent a good deal of time on groundwork. Students may construe this as tangent, but I hesitate simply to roll forward saying, for example, "Always Coming Home is a mock-ethnographic text with a feminist agenda strongly criticizing western technophilia and patriarchy... now, let's move on to our poems."

First, I was distracted in defining words (feminism, patriarchy, anarchy, and amphibole), and in illustrating feminism by giving a feminist critique of "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" (consider the relationship between TB and Goldberry: we have no sense whatever except by subtle innuendo that they have any kind of affection for each other; their relationship can hardly be considered equal; Bombadil essentially steals Goldberry, and we have textual evidence of Goldberry's resistance ("reeds hissed, herons cried, and her heart was fluttering") which might be interpreted as a feint, but could just as easily be read straightforwardly as objection).

Second, in looking at the structure of ACH, I took a bit of a detour examining the amphibole in the title "Towards an Archaeology of the Future", which demanded an examination of amphibole. Rather than simply defining amphibole and moving on, I looked for words with the constituent elements, hoping that we could find the known and work towards the unknown.

Amphibian, amphitheatre... in two, doubled, halved -- amphi-

"Diabolical" was a term we encountered frequently at the beginning of last semester, but no one could clearly recall a definition (I had spent some time in class examining the etymology of it then). -- bol: thrown, rolled: diabolical : thrown through or into the path of someone. Diabolical means therefore "obstructive, damaging, causing one to be diverted".

Amphibole: a phrase which because of its grammar can be interpreted at least two ways.

Since the students did not absorb the lesson on "diabolical" (one of the key terms in "The Unknown Masterpiece", one might argue that etymological examination of terms is not a meritorious pedagogical exercise. I suppose if it is to be retained, the students need to be brought to the point of analyzing terms on their own, investigating without my prompting.

I must consider how to bring forward discussion that will also advance vocabulary without constant interruption on my part. Is it merely "show-offery" on my part to work through etymologies? Would it not have been a better use of class time to define "amphibole" and then move along, or, better, to have avoided the term altogether?

No, no, no.

No: I am modelling a way to analyze words, and to work from known words and word elements to unknown words. This is the only practical way to increase technical vocabulary. The next question is, can students be brought into the action more, and if so, how?

No: I am not a dictionary. If all that is needed is quick acquisition of the word for the nonce, the students should be bound to bring dictionaries (which they should, in fact). The next question is, how can students be encouraged to bring dictionaries?

No: Students cannot acquire vocabulary without encountering new terms. The next question: should acquisition of vocabulary be merely technical within the field presented, or more broad, and how broad can it be before it is "impertinent"?

***

In presenting feminism, I found it necessary to speak of patriarchy -- a term apparently unknown to the students. So I outlined "-archies":

monarchy, oligarchy, plutarchy (and of course I could have added others), anarchy...

To illustrate patriarchy I spoke of the inequities of female/male salaries and social status generally, the numbers of women representatives in our government. This is not a matter of law -- legally, women may be said to have equality -- but in fact, women constitute a minority. I asked how many students' mothers had changed their names when they married (I assumed their mothers had married, though maybe I should not have) -- the vast majority of them had. I said that if they adopted their husband's names, this was an example of patriarchy.

The Kesh (in ACH) are matriarchal (conceived generally); a man leaves his mother's house, and moves into his wife's or mother-in-law's home.

We shall have to return to this theme, examining the text in class (this was one of the student comments at mid-term and on the final assessments last term).



The structure of Always Coming Home is centered on the novel "Stone Telling", with interspersed supplementary or explanatory material.

The plan of the supplementary material is loosely formed on the needs of the reader to understand the novel. The more strictly explanatory material (such as the glossary and the descriptions of the World and Sun dances is at The Back of the Book (as explained in "A First Note"); the remaining material is maybe more supplementary or deepening rather than explanatory.

Periodically (at 53, 95, 147, 239, 314, 339, 486, and 506) LeGuin addresses the reader using the guise of "Pandora", who is portrayed as a sort of ethnographer interviewing various Kesh "informants". At times (as at 314 ff) these "Pandora" sections express specifically the concerns of the author: "This is... an Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife, a critique of civilisation possible only to the civilised, an affirmation pretending to be a rejection, a glass of milk for the soul ulcered by acid rain, a piece of pacifist jeanjacquerie, and a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West" (316).

The "Pandora" sections allow a kind of "mediation" between the reader and the text which is often comic and "postmodern" in its effect. There is a sort of wink at the reader; "I know the Kesh don't really exist and may never exist, and I know that you know that I know this. I'm not trying to foist this off on you as though it were "channeled" or "revealed". I'm not proposing that we all rush off and become Kesh. This is fiction. But it is neat, isn't it?"

The name "Pandora" is significant, and is certainly not used randomly. Pandora is the first woman (the Greek "Eve"), wife of Epimetheus ("Afterthought") the brother of Prometheus ("Forethought"). Pandora's famous box (a jar in the Greek versions) was filled with all sorts of evils, of course -- but at the bottom was hope. LeGuin plays with this mythology particularly at 147-8.


I asked the students to read the first part of Stone Telling for class next time (I had made this assignment on the last day of class last semester, but only about five of the students had read this).

The first section is introductory material -- through the beginning of the story of "Stone Telling". The general understanding that this story is set in the future is established, but the reader is also presented with the notion of the way the story is developed: it is a kind of imaginative work like that of archaeologists, who reconstruct in their imaginations from what pieces of evidence they can find. in LeGuin's case, the evidence is not of what was, but of what may be. She says this is difficult, but not so hard as one might suppose. "The past, after all," she notes (xi), "can be quite as obscure as the future."

Since archaeology is the study of the past, there is a paradox in LeGuin's proposal simultaneously of an "archaeology of the future" in the sense of an archaeology to be employed in the future and an archaeology in the sense of an examination on archaeological principles of events which yet may be. Part of the key to this paradox lies in LeGuin's assertion that "[a]ll we ever have is here, now" (ix).

The small essay "Towards an Archaeology of the Future" includes most of the specific references to historical or literary material. By and large, though, "our world", the experience of 20th century America, is left out of ACH, or it is seen through the very different vision of the Kesh (see, for example, "A Hole in the Air", 154 ff). Occasionally, as in the introduction of "Chandi" (226) a reference is made to "our world": "The resemblance of the plot to one of the great biblical stories is striking; but so are the differences." The reference here is to Job. Also, on the same page, LeGuin-Pandora mentions Homer (the Greek poet). But while a knowledge of these (actual) cultural references will enrich the reader's experience of the (invented) Kesh, it is not necessary. The dig at Sartre on 240-241 is so subtle and minor it is really on the lines of an in-joke. The reference to Tolkien on 509 is another. Not to find them is no obstacle to an understanding of the "point" of ACH.