Tehanu: A Return to the Source
This
chapter on Tehanu is from a doctoral dissertation by Sharada Bhanu.
Entitled, “Not Two: An Indian Perspective on Western
Fantasy Fiction for Children,“ and supervised by Dr. Susan
Oommen, Reader and Head of the Dept. of English, Stella Maris
College, this thesis was successfully submitted
to Madras University, 2007.
Sharada
Bhanu writes from an Advaitist position, and as this spiritual
philosophy is not widely known in the United States, I asked her to
provide a brief description of it, which she kindly did.
— UKL
Advaita
The Indian
philosophical system known as Advaita is usually translated as
nonduality. Advaita literally means “not two” and states
that reality is one and this One (Brahman) is not different from
Atman, the Self. Brahman has no name or form and nothing can be
predicated about ‘it’ than that it is enduringly reality,
consciousness and joy. All language is inaccurate in describing
Brahman, and can do no more than gesture towards it. Thus, Brahman
cannot be called ‘he’ or ‘she’ but neither is
the term ‘it’ correct. The universe arises owing to a
mysterious power that Brahman possesses, a creative illusion called
maya. Advaita is not a dead philosophical system; it is a living mode
of spiritual practice, which attempts to teach the sadhaka, or
spiritual aspirant, the way to jnana, or wisdom. The goal of
all spiritual aspiration is to recognize the identity of oneself with
transcendent Brahman. This state is called ‘realisation’
or ‘moksha, ’ liberation from successive states of
birth and death. However, since Brahman is the very self of the
spiritual seeker, it cannot be said to be ‘attained.’
The unillumined individual, known as jiva, is subject to maya
because of a wrong identification of oneself with the body. Under the
guidance of a guru or wise teacher, the jiva discards this
mistaken assumption and recognizes a oneness with Brahman, which
constitutes moksha.
— Sharada Bhanu
Tehanu: A Return to the Source
Sharada Bhanu
Eighteen years after The Farthest Shore, Tehanu: The last Book of
Earthsea appeared taking from the former its power to conclude
and the finality of its ending. The subtitle of Tehanu in turn
proved false when Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind appeared, each succeeding volume altering not merely adding to
the whole. The three later works constitute a second trilogy,
different in many ways from the first. Sexual experience, at least
overtly absent from the first trilogy, finds place in the second; but
this is not the primary reason by which a change of address is
implied. Each of the first three featured an adolescent coming of
age; the middle- aged protagonists of Tehanu and its one
silent child observed till almost the end of the novel from the
outside, constitute a change of focus and provide a different
emotional tone. All the novels, individually and serially, present an
evolution in understanding. The second trilogy enlarges, interrogates
and deconstructs the first; a feature that not all readers have
appreciated.
Tehanu is adapted to the older reader partly because the text has
emerged from a growth in consciousness on the part of the author and
a changed cultural ethos, in particular the feminist movement. ‘Weak
as women’s magic; wicked as women’s magic’ goes a
saying in Earthsea, the school of Roke admits no women.
Women, particularly in Wizard and Shore are
weak, wicked, marginalised, missing or dead. Tehanu redresses
the balance by presenting a woman’s world, interests, magic and
problems, through the perspective of Tenar the protagonist of Tombs now a middle aged widow. Women of various ages and professions
are pictured, all portraits (including that of the witch Ivy who
dislikes Tenar) are sympathetic. The men on the other hand seem weak
and limited in vision even when well meaning, misogynistic, depraved
and vicious when given up to positive evil as in the case of Handy
who has raped and burnt his own daughter and Aspen the wizard, who
sadistically tortures both Ged and Tenar.
Where the first three novels place at stake the peace and safety of the
whole of Earthsea, Tenar’s problems in Tehanu are how
to protect a Ged now powerless without his magic and a burnt, abused
child Therru from the continued threat posed by her abusers. In Shore, in spite of the despair that pervades the novel, the plot
supplies at different points all the varied arts that the School of
Magic preserves and teaches. Ged works weather by supplying his boat
with a magic wind whenever needed, he creates illusions, changes
shape, reads the pattern of events in the past, present and future,
knows the true names and above all heals by keeping open the door
between life and death. Cob and Thorion summon and Arren and others
chant the old songs.
In Tehanu Tenar makes one attempt to teach Therru the language
of the Making and gives it up; it seems wrong. She teaches her more
successfully how to spin, cook and a number of other domestic
tasks. “Teach her all Ogion said, and what am I teaching
her? Cooking and spinning?” Then another part of her mind said
in Goha’s voice, “And are those not true arts, needful
and noble? Is wisdom all words? (Tehanu 133)
Through much of the novel Tenar is nursing back to physical and
emotional health Ged and Thenu, imparting a sense of self-worth to
each, ensuring physical and emotional security and attempting to
provide for both a future. All this demands tact, wisdom, courage,
patience and unremitting work, day after day. This is the kind of
magic women do that goes under the name of ‘caring for a family
and domestic work.’ Lightning results are of course not
possible and the work of weeks may show no overt results as with Ged,
or be undone by the vicious intervention of men as with Therru, or
only help someone die, as with Ogion. Even when there is nothing she
can do “ there was always the next thing to be done.”
(44)
Tenar attends to the endless succession of chores as well as her
family and through it all enquires into her own identity, determined
not only by her true name, Tenar, but also the ‘Arha’
of her past girlhood and ‘Goha,’ as wife to Flint. Tenar
draws wisdom from all her roles and experience but refuses to be
limited by any. She is not only all her roles, she accesses the
wisdom of her friend Lark, her daughter Apple, the witch Moss, the
old weaver Fan and Lebannen, who is in a sense the son she ought to
have had. Tenar, Ged and Tenar for Thenu are all in quest of
identity. For Tenar identity is constructed through recognising self
in multiple contacts with the other. When Tenar does not see why
“power, should be different for a man witch and a woman witch.
Unless the power itself is different. Or the art;”
Moss’s answer is Advaitic — the power, the substance is
always the same, the receptacle is different. “A man gives out
dearie. A woman takes in…our…power…goes down
deep. It’s all roots.” (109-110)
Since the spiritual journey of birth begins inside the woman’s
body, and women’s labour constantly nourishes, heals, supports
body and spirit; and since it is so often women’s care that
makes dying a little easier, women may be seen as symbolising the
ever- present source. Doing justice to women is not just a matter of
correcting an imbalance in the first trilogy, it is a conscious
return to the origin which is always there but its importance is so
overwhelming. so obvious that it passes unperceived. Tehanu
rises from the awareness that when all power is gone, there is yet
the source from which the power came. Ged has lost magic and with it
has gone his position as Archmage, the whole world of Roke, the role
he once dreamt of as advisor to the king he has shaped - Lebannen,
everything, in short, that had given significance to his life. He can
now no longer defend himself from the most negligible sorcerers; his
powerlessness as several critics have pointed out, puts him at the
level of women.
The celebration of women and women’s power in Tehanu is
only one mode in which the text attempts an Advaitic journey —
a return to Source. Such a hunger for the origin can never be
dismissed as meaningless or impossible. The quest ends only when
recognition arrives that one can never be alienated from the source.
It is the Self and therefore not an object that can be gained or a
space outside that can be reached. Till this moment arrives, a search
for the source is always valid.
Ogion the wise mage of Wizard, perhaps the figure who best
expresses the values of the first trilogy, dies on the exulting cry
“All changed! Changed…” ( Tehanu 26-6). Yet
the artistry of the Earthsea cycle is such that every change in the
second trilogy can be seen as stemming from what is implicit in the
first. The emphasis on the woman’s perspective, as seen in the
preceding analysis, has led to Tehanu being generally
perceived as a feminist work; a critique of male dominated
perspectives in the genre of fantasy. Susan Mclean states of Le Guin
in ‘The Power of Women in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu,
“ In Tehanu she attempts to change the whole system by
exposing the dark side of patriarchy…and by postulating an
alternative women’s power…” (110). Yet Le Guin’s
protagonist is Tenar from Tombs, older now, but not severed
from the girl she was in the past. In a persuasive article
‘Unlearning Patriarchy: Ursula Le Guin’s feminist
Consciousness in The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu’
Holly Littlefield claims that the early novels, including the first
trilogy, exhibit “the author’s early feminist leanings”
(245) and in the Tenar of Tombs Le Guin created “a
female character that ran counter to nearly every feminine role model
that her genre had produced up until that time.”(249-50).
Tehanu interrogates the very basis of male magic by
celebrating female skills which are imparted with few or no words; in
keeping characters in long periods of silence, in rejecting book
learning in the uselessness of Ogion’s books. However silence
is movingly evoked as early as Wizard, through the figure of
Ogion. The subtext of Shore, as indicated earlier, prepares
the way for the liberation of the dead in The Other Wind. Le
Guin may have a point when she claims “The second trilogy
changes nothing in the first. It sees exactly the same world with
different eyes. Almost, I would say, with two eyes, rather than one.”
In her technique, as well as thematically, Le Guin returns to the
source, and as she has stated in this interview. she expands and
re-visions rather than invalidates, retracts or revokes her earlier
writing.
Through another interesting device and in a movement fundamental to
the process at work in the writing of the cycle, an understanding or
development that occurs in the later novels is presented as belonging
to a time earlier than that described in the first trilogy eg. gender
justice in Roke is not merely the product of the later evolution of
Earthsea’s society but shown to be a feature of its past in
Tales from Earthsea. So if Earthsea is moving towards greater
freedom for women in the last novel of the cycle, it will only mean a
return to its own source. Similarly the Old Powers of the earth
worshipped by the Kargs, seen as evil in Tombs, are
re-visioned as originally, and in themselves, good in Tales.
In the tale ‘The Finder’ set three hundred years before
the events of Wizard it is stated that at the time of the
founding of Roke “men and women, had no fear of the Old Powers
of the earth, but revered them, seeking strength and vision from
them. That changed with the years.”(70) So the cycle presents
the discovery in the later trilogy of the sacredness of the earth as
a return to the values of the early years of Earthsea’s
history.
Le Guin’s Foreword to Tales reveals the author’s
nondualistic vision. Distinctions between the alternate world of
Earthsea and the world of the author and the reader, fictional time
and real time, the writing of history and the writing of story,
author and reader, all collapse. Jean Paul Sartre in ‘What is
Literature’ states that an author can never perceive his (sic)
own work as a reader would. ‘When the words form under his pen,
the author doubtless sees them, but he does not see them as the
reader does, since he knows them before writing them down…The
writer neither foresees nor conjectures; he projects …Thus
the writer meets everywhere only his (sic) knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself.”(1338). Either
Sartre took too simplified a view of writing, or women create
differently, or Le Guin functions as author in a manner that Sartre
cannot account for. In her foreword Le Guin refuses to separate the
world of Earthsea from “the so-called real world” and
explains that she could not go on with Tehanu because the
story had arrived at precisely the point of time at which the author
was situated. “I didn’t know what would happen next. I
could guess, foretell, fear, hope, but I didn’t know.”
She sees Earthsea as not just coexisting in the author’s time
but as a place existing outside and independent of her knowledge,
will or plans, to use Sartre’s terms. She confesses “A
good deal about Earthsea, about wizards, about Roke island had begun
to puzzle me.” In order to clarify both the gaps in her
knowledge of Earthsea as well as to understand the present of
Earthsea, which is not separate from the time in which she lives, she
had to research into the “Archives of the Archipelago.”
The manner one researches into “nonexistent history is to tell
the story and find out what happened. I believe this isn’t very
different from what historians of the so-called real world do.”
The alternate world of Le Guin’s fiction has as much weight and
solidity for the author as any real world; its future as well as its
past is unknown, mysterious and it unfolds in the very act of
telling/experiencing it, as that of the ‘ real’ world
does. With such a nondual approach it is not surprising that
distinctions between author and reader break down. Le Guin
acknowledges that both author and readers have changed in the three
decades over which the Earthsea cycle has been making its appearance.
It is inevitable that a return to Earthsea should result in a
discovery that this world is both familiar and changing. “…people
aren’t who - or what - I thought they were, and I lose my way
on islands that I thought I knew by heart.” (xv). The author
approaches the world as a reader would, and her researches,
extensions, and further explorations are consistently in the
direction of a more rigorous nonduality.
Another element of continuity and change is in the figure of the dragon,
which for Le Guin, symbolizes magic and the genre of fantasy itself.
Robin McKinley comments in a review ‘The Woman Wizard’s
Triumph’ that the rich humanity of Tehanu works within
the genre of fantasy, “for here there be dragons, and Ms. Le
Guin’s dragons are some of the best in literature.”(38)
They are also consistently present with important roles in all the
novels of the cycle except Tombs. As reptiles in terms of this
world and as the first created beings in the world of Earthsea, they
are creatures close to the source and threatening enough to symbolize
the end. Impossible to classify as good or evil, both beast and
supra-human, imbued with connotations from both Western and Chinese
myth, they are seen as wild and dangerous, but also winged creatures
of the higher elements - air and fire, the only beings of Earthsea
who use the original Language of the Making for the purposes of
ordinary communication. The first trilogy holds them in awe and at a
distance. Ged chases away the dragon Yevaud from the isle of Pendor.
In Shore they are found spatially on the edge of the world, at
Selidor; and only the extremity of Earthsea’s predicament makes
them belated allies, at the very end of the novel. As Meredith Tax
puts it in her review ‘Fantasy Island’ Tehanu is
“about the common heritage and the uncertain borderline between
humans and dragons.”(75) For the first time we learn that
people and dragons were once one species and there still exist those
who are both dragon and human. Iterative images of fire, associated
with the dragon, are linked with not only Tehanu who turns out to be
dragon- born, but also Tenar. The dragon Kalessin appears at the
beginning and end of Tehanu but the interrogated borderline
forces the reader to understand that dragons are no longer far away
in space and time but present as people and present (as in Tenar’s
courage, laughter and anger) as inspiration and a latent potential
within people.
In erasing the difference between dragons and people, nature is
discovered to be magic and the seemingly realistic novel may also
have the wonder of fantasy. Therru/Tehanu the eponymous child
protagonist, burnt by her own father, has lost one eye and one hand
is a claw. She is a special-needs child, scarred, physically and
emotionally sub-normal. But such children can sometimes show
abilities that are vastly beyond the capacity of ordinary children.
She is seen differently by those who encounter her and often the
assessments reveal more about the perceivers than the child. She is
perceived as a talent that needs education by the wise Ogion, with
revulsion by Tenar’s son Spark who decides she has deserved
her misfortune, with fear by the witch Ivy who can sense her power,
compassion by Ged, Tenar, Lark, Moss and Beech, hatred by the
misogynistic Aspen. That Therru’s unseeing eye looks into an
alternate reality, that her silent voice can speak in the language of
the source cannot be guessed even by those who are most hopeful on
her behalf. According to McLean, “she can integrate wisdom and
power, reason and feeling action and caring …because she is
part dragon… a symbol of nature, of wildness and freedom and
anger” (113). At the conclusion of Tehanu when Therru
walks carefully to the edge of the cliff and summons the dragon
Kalessin to the rescue, at the level of realism the act is, for a
disabled child, a triumph of physical co-ordination, memory, speech,
rational analysis and conquest of fear. At the level of fantasy, the
child accesses the latent potential of her origin to bring a dragon
and defeat evil. The wonder lies in neither one nor the other
perspective, but somehow in a combination of both. It is, in the
final analysis, impossible to say whether Therru’s victory at
the end of the novel springs from her mysterious birth, her being a
child and female and therefore closer to the source, the abuse that
has left her handicapped but ‘special’ or the love,
training and support she has received from principally, Tenar. Magic
has merged with the source, culture and nature are one.
As pointed out earlier the novel’s theme is profoundly Advaitic — it is an enquiry into what constitutes the self. Tenar has the task
of finding herself as well as helping both Ged and Therru reach a
positive sense of self. Where the first trilogy provided stories in
which protagonists came of age, in Tehanu they access inner
resources when more superficial powers, abilities, family,
profession, name, language and flesh itself drop away. If hole and
sea are the governing images of Shore. root, bone and fire
are the central images of Tehanu. Therru, so badly burnt that
the bone has been laid bare on her cheek, plays silently with two
figures of bone, one might be an animal, the other represents a human
figure of indeterminable sex. The text reveals a process of stripping
of inessentials to arrive at a core. Ged has surrendered magic and
power, Tenar had earlier refused magic and the language of the
making; now she surrenders son, farm, possessions, reputation; and is
stripped of part of her memory, speech and free will by Aspen. She
and Ged nearly lose their lives but are saved by the child that they
have cherished and risked their lives to protect. At the point of
greatest danger they literally do nothing; they can neither think nor
act; but a process, a power seems to work in their favour, protecting
them. Therru is not a normal child but as the only child in the text,
she represents in some sense, childhood. The child functions as the
source that protects because it is children who have ready access to
the dragon that symbolizes the privileged world of fantasy and its
truth-telling. Le Guin has remarked:
“The strength of fantasy is the strength of the Self… In
the creation and preservation of fantasy worlds, the role of the
child seems central. Jesus…remarked that access to it was
limited to those willing to become little children. The kingdom of
God is within you; the burning ground where the goddess dances is the
heart.” (‘Do-It-Yourself Cosmology’)
Numerous images of fire permeate the novel; the fire in which Therru
is burnt, the sparks that fly from the hair of Tenar, the inner fire
of the dragon and the child born of the dragon, the fire of the
hearth by which food and warmth are generated, and the fire in which
the dragon returns to annihilate evil at the end. Fire symbolizes the
anger with which Tenar faces the worst marks of patriarchy, as well
as the primeval fire of the star Tehanu, the Arrow in the sky. It is
both the fire that fosters life and the stripping of inessentials,
the via negativa, the method by which the seeker reaches the self,
the method the Upanisads call neti, neti usually translated as
‘not this, not this.’ In the Katha Upanisad the boy
seeker Nachiketas is taught by the god of death that “That fire
which is the means of attaining the infinite worlds, and is also
their foundation, is hidden in the sacred place of the heart.”(56)
This is the fire of creation and the fire of the sacrificial altar
and the fire of Brahman, pure spirit. “The whole universe comes
from him and his life burns through the whole universe.” (65)
The novel celebrates not the special relationships of
master/disciple, the self/shadow, protagonist/antagonist that the
first trilogy examined. Instead we have the bond between spouses and
the love that knits a family together, brought into focus. Tehanu
does not sentimentalise. As Goha, the wife of Flint, Tenar could
achieve so much and no more; her son Spark is selfish, possessive
and sullen. Yet Ged, Tenar and Therru represent the achievement of a
family at the end of the novel. These structures are what permit
other relationships to evolve. Tehanu celebrates the ordinary
world of Earthsea and its small concerns. It is this world that
permits wizardry to rise, the norm against which magic makes a
difference.
Ged regrets for a while his lost power, after the encounter with
Handy and his associates is over, dealing with a set of ruffians
would have presented no problems at all had he still been a mage:
“They’d never have known what hit them.” (203). But
as Tenar points out, they have no clue now either; he was once a mage
with a staff but he is respected now among the farm workers as a man
who is “useful with a pitchfork”(203). He has lost magic
to recover manhood. In Tehanu Ged actually goes through
another coming of age that does not involve becoming a wizard but the
completely traditional “St(icking) another man full of holes,
first, and l(ying) with a woman, second.” (212). However this
too is not the full truth; Tenar adds “It’s not a weapon
or a woman, can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything
but himself.”(212). This is a novel that resolutely affirms
the Advaitic theme of a search within, in order to arrive at the Self
as true source.
As pointed out in the discussion of Wizard silence in the
Earthsea cycle functions not as the mere opposite of speech but as
the source from which speech takes its origin and the background
against which speech must be heard in order to exist. Advaita teaches
that the self can be reached not through speech or learning but only
through silence. Tehanu, more than any other text in the
cycle, honours silence. Therru, for the most part, lives in a silence
occasionally punctuated by monosyllables; unable even to communicate
to Tenar her own name. Ged, recovering from exhaustion, again
physical, emotional and spiritual, spends much of his time in
silence. He has been emptied of the words of power. A moving scene
shows him trying vainly to call hawks; an ability which as a child
got him his own usename, Sparrowhawk. In a sense the connection
between him and his own name is gone. In Wizard everything
depends on correct naming, Ged’s final triumph lies in the
naming of the shadow. Here Tenar is frequently querying the use of
and need for magic and words of power(as in the decisions she makes
about Ogion’s books). Aspen’s curse deprives her for a
time of both speech and thought. Silence may be deprivation of
language, loss, the result even of abuse. However it is silence that
enables Ged to heal, silence that seems more valuable than spells, in
silence that the seed is planted and the skills of women are taught
and it is within silence that Therru’s call to Kalessin has
such tremendous effect.
In Wizard the idea that the shadow may have no name reduces
Ged to despair; control is possible only through knowledge of the
name. In Tombs the evidence that Tenar serves evil is simply
in the powers being called The Nameless Ones. Shore combats
the possibility of name and form vanishing. In Tehanu while
the naming of Therru as Tehanu is significant, it is seen as what she
has always been, Therru means fire, while Tehanu is the name of a
star. Through the rest of the novel names drop away, recede and with
it the idea of magic as something done by men through a special
language that is acquired.
In Tehanu, the cycle has progressively moved towards
increasing nonduality in that the source, as represented by women,
dragons, by the child, the sacred earth and by silence, is no longer
seen with fear. It is a space from which both life and death, good
and evil arise but which itself transcends both, an emptiness, a
freedom. In Shore the sea as it poured through a cave near
Selidor the farthest isle of all makes a noise that Arren identified
as ahm the sound that is the beginning and which Ged hears as
ohb the sound that signifies the end (151). The source from
which the beginning and end come is seen as something to be kept at
bay, a door to be held shut, old powers that are evil and threaten to
collapse the dungeons of Tombs which Ged is holding up with
all his magic at his command. In Tehanu it is a place to which
one can return, when power which arose from it has again receded into
it. All such returns however are to recognize that one has never left
it as it is inalienable, being no other than one’s own self.
Magic is by definition a transgression of the laws of nature. To do
magic it has to be perceived as different from nature. Now that magic
has gone, the text invites the reader to a recognition that nature,
as a source of magic, is itself wonderful. In Shore Ged
closes the mysterious breach in the boundary between life and death,
with all his wizardly power and the rune Agnen, the rune of ending.
In Tehanu when Handy and his associates attempt to break
into Tenar’s farmhouse and find the broad unshuttered kitchen
window Tenar defeats them by opening the front door, a butcher’s
knife in her hand. In Wizard Ged’s transgression begins
with a forbidden peep into Ogion’s books. In Tehanu
Ogion’s books lie unheeded; they are of no use to Ged.
Tenar has refused magic long ago and at the end of the novel,
realises she has left the books behind in her house. It does not seem
to matter. Therru, who is perhaps the future Archmage, wishes to
plant a peach.
The novel closes on the simple tasks that need to be done to keep
life going. Planting a vegetable garden is more important than
learning spells. Yet the critics who see Tehanu as a realistic
novel are surely incorrect. The novel sees the so-called real world
as magic. The wizard’s staff has become just the thick wooden
stick that Tenar cuts to help her walk the long distance from her
farm to Ogrion’s cottage. The magic staff has merged into its
source. But the secret springs of life that make the peach tree bear
fruit are also magic.
Copyright © 2007 by Sharada Bhanu.
From her doctoral theses, "Not Two: An Indian Perspective on Western Fantasy Fiction for Children"
Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.
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