Rocannon's World, part II

 

 

Today we'll be looking at chapters three and four of Le Guin's first published novel, Rocannon's World, from 1966.

Chapter three opens with Rocannon's preparations for departure. Lady Haldre, Semley's daughter and now ruler of the realm of Hallan, gives him five companions -- Mogien and four Olgyior, named Yahan, Raho, Iot, and Bien, with windsteeds for all of them. Kyo the Fiia also comes along. Haldre also bestows on Rocannon the necklace which Semley brought back many years ago, which he hides underneath his clothing.

The group flies southward, after several days reaching the town of Tolen where they discover that the ruling Angyar family has been kidnapped and their castle stands empty next to the village of Olgyior they had ruled over. Rocannon's company flies on to Plenot, stronghold of the warlord who is responsible for Tolen's devastation. They succeed in defeating the lord of Plenot and securing the release of prisoners and boats that had been siezed in the earlier conflict. In the fight, Rocannon is wounded in the leg because he neglected to wear his impermasuit, a body garment impervious to weapons.

The company takes two of the boats and sets sail for the southern continent. On the way, Rocannon's boat capsizes, losing all of his gear and killing two windsteeds. Upon reaching shore, Mogien orders a recalcitrant Yahan to go back to Hallan with an update on their progress. The rest of the company then sets out southward.

Rocannon is separated from the party when he stops to get a walking stick, and he is captured by the barbarian lord Zgama. Zgama is an Olgyior and suspicious of a possible Angyar invasion. He is unimpressed by Rocannon's attempt to pull rank on him, and orders the stranger burnt at the stake. Rocannon's impermasuit protects him from the flames, but it can't free him from captivity or provide a drink. After a long thirsty day, he is finally rescued by Yahan.

Maps play a surprising role in this portion of the novel, and you know I can't pass up the chance to talk about maps. We're told that the Angyar don't make maps, but Mogien is very interested in what he calls Rocannon's "pictures" while they plan their attack on Plenot. It's common for cartographers to insist that a map is not just a picture of the earth. It's a simplified diagram presenting a variety of data about the earth, often including things that are not straightforwardly visible, and converting everyhing into abstracted symbols. Reading maps is a skill, which children in map-literate societies have to learn just as they learn to read text. But on the other hand, Mogien is accustomed to viewing the land from a high vantage point as he flies on his windsteed, so perhaps he can make an analogy between what he has seen and the diagram that is Rocannon's map, making it an easier leap for him to understand.

Traveling by air gives Le Guin the opportunity to give us some nice descriptions of landscape and geomorphology. For example, she writes "The river, curving away to the south, lay in loops and oxbows, the hills ran out into long plains, and far ahead was a mirrored pale brightness in the sky. Late in the day they came to a castle set alone on a white bluff, beyond which lay a long reach of lagoons and gray sand, and the open sea." Fantasy authors often make a hash of geomorphology in their worldbuilding, so it's pleasing to see Le Guin describing what could be a textbook landscape diagram. For example, she has captured the way that rivers often run swiftly down through mountains and highlands, before slowing down as they cross more gently-sloped plains on their way to the sea. The change in speed means that the river begins to deposit more sediment, and the flatter terrain gives it more room to reshape its own course instead of being confined to existing valleys. It's typical for a river crossing a plain to develop big meanders. Anywhere there's a slight bend in a river's course, it will start eroding the bank on the outside of the loop while it deposits sediment on the inside, causing the loop to stretch out into a looping meander. Eventually, the neck inside the meander grows so thin that the river, often aided by a flood, will cut through it. This straightens out the main channel, and leaves the remains of the meander as a curved lake, known as an oxbow. If my audio description of the process is hard to visualize, there are a number of good depictions available in places like YouTube.

In any event, Rocannon's maps are lost when the boat capsizes. Rocannon enters the southern continent without the advantage of his superior knowledge. These are, after all, the very same maps that allowed him to pinpoint their destination based on the overheard coordinates. He is in the same boat -- literally as well as metaphorically -- as his companions, who have only very vague information about the territory before them.

The crossing in which the maps are lost is another opportunity for Le Guin to focus in on the environment and landscape. The sea is gray and shrouded in mist, leaving Rocannon damp and disoriented, and Le Guin's descriptions are richly done here. The fog is both blinding and deafening. Rocannon finds himself in sympathy with the windsteeds, who are tied up on the boats and spend the whole crossing moaning. The water into which Rocannon falls is described as red. This is a bit heavy-handed as symbolism for blood, but it also provides a nice image of a river swollen with sediment spewing an unexpected current into the water near the shore. Throughout, the whole party is dependent on the sailors from Tolen who are able to navigate the dangerous and shifting waters, and to find a landing place among the cliffs of the southern continent. Given that this is the passage in which Rocannon's maps are lost, we get an implied contrast between the abstract geographical knowledge that Rocannon has brought and the detailed familiarity with local environmental conditions of the unnamed sailors. Kyo provides a third, somewhat enigmatic, type of knowledge. Rocannon attempts to pump him for information about the southern continent, but he answers cryptically, seeming to assume that Rocannon must already know the answers.

The loss of the maps is representative of a larger shift that's happening for Rocannon in these chapters. The destruction of his ship and ansible has forced Rocannon to rework his relationship with Fomalhaut II and its people. When the story opened, he envisioned himself as an anthropologist, doing the honorable work of collecting data about his study site while also protecting them from interference by the League of Worlds.

This self-image involves a certain amount of self-deception, disguising the amount of power that he's really exercising over the people he is studying. The people of Fomalhaut II, on the other hand, aren't deceived. They call him "starlord," in frank acknowledgement of his position of power. But being a lord, in a hierarchical society such as the Angyar have, comes with responsibility as well as privilege. The help that Haldre gives him in preparing for his journey is in some sense a challenge: "OK, starlord, time to protect your people." After all, his goal in this journey is not just to address his own problem of being stranded on an alien world, but also to sound the alarm about the enemies who are presumed to threaten all of Fomalhaut II.

As Rocannon's journey begins, he is given a new title by Kyo: "Olhor," "the wanderer." At first this name simply serves to handwave any curiosity on the part of those they meet about Rocannon's strange appearance and speech, without having to explain his real backstory. As the chapters go on, Rocannon adopts this title for himself, first using it during the parley with the lord of Plenot. Yahan then incorporates the title into the song he composes about the battle, in which Rocannon is one of the heroes.

Rocannon tries out the title with more gusto when he meets Zgama. He says "I am Olhor, the Wanderer. I come from the north and from the sea, from the land behind the sun. I come in peace and I go in peace. Passing by the Hall of Zgama, I go south. Let no man stop me!" Though ineffective on Zgama himself, this speech impresses his court. Zgama only wins them back by loudly declaring Rocannon to be a spy. I can't blame Rocannon for trying to save his own skin, but I can question the way Le Guin here seems to embrace the trope of the traveler from a technologically advanced society dazzling the natives who then regard him as some kind of god or powerful magician. Rocannon's ploy is only defeated by Zgama's innate cussedness, so it's hard to read this passage as a subversion of the trope.

Even more so than Olhor, the term ascribed to Rocannon in these chapters that most invokes the godlike visitor trope is "pedan." This is first used by the Olgyior of Tolen and defined by Yahan as "one who walks among men." Rocannon does not initially understand this as referring to him, until the term is used again by Zgama's followers to express amazement at how he is protected by his impermasuit.

The precise nature of being who "walks among men" is left ill-defined. But it does add something to Rocannon's meditations on Fomalhaut's religion, or lack thereof. "... he had kept seeking for their religion; they seemed to have no creeds at all. Yet they were quite credulous. They took spells, curses, and strange powers as matter of fact, and their relation to nature was intensely animistic but they had no gods."

These chapters give us some examples of Le Guin's concern with how concepts are translated across cultures. This is a major preoccupation of anthropologists, whose job largely consists in explaining the culture of their study site to an audience who is not part of that culture. It's also a preoccupation of speculative fiction writers, who have to explain various features of their imaginary worlds to an audience located in the real world. There's a longstanding debate among writers about navigating between the Scylla of confusing your readers versus the Charybdis of infodumping. Things get further complicated when the writer and the audience are not part of the same culture -- so you get instances of African or Indigenous authors deliberately not explaining concepts from their cultures in ways that white European and American readers would understand, as a way of resisting cultural hegemony.

In this case, Le Guin, the imagined reader, and Rocannon are all treated as having compatible cultural backgrounds, in contrast to the peoples of Fomalhaut II. Le Guin has a light touch in explaining elements of Fomalhaut to the reader. And since Rocannon acts as a cultural stand-in for the reader within the story, he is in a position to explain concepts from his culture to the people of Fomalhaut. Consider this passage, where he outlines his mission to Lady Haldre:

"I hope to enter their ... their castle, and make use of their ... message-sender, to tell the League they are here, on this world."

This line is pretty typical of how most science fiction authors handle the trope of a person from a more technologically advanced society explaining things to people from a less advanced society. Rocannon is able to refer to the League of Worlds without further explanation, presumably because it has been a frequent topic of conversation during his time in Hallan. But the elipses show that he is coming up with the terms "castle" to refer to the enemy base, and "message-sender" to refer to their ansible, on the spot.

It's perfectly plausible that a person in Rocannon's position might speak this way to his Angyar host. But it's worth noting the effect that it has on the reader that Le Guin chose to include this bit of conversation in the story. Rocannon's halting locution creates a kind of baby-talk effect, since we the readers know he's talking about military bases and ansibles, but he has to dumb down his language for a listener who wouldn't be familiar with those modern concepts.

This line thus contributes to a worldbuilding trope that runs throughout this book, and which is progressively strained out as the Hainish novels go on. The trope in question is cultural evolutionism,  which I discussed in an earlier episode. Rocannon and the Angyar are being positioned at different levels of a cultural hierarchy.

The cultural hierarchy is racialized in descriptions of the Olgyior of Tolen. They are described in unrelently negative terms -- "pale and short-bodied," "ugly fellows," "cringing fish-eating yokels," hiding in their hovels from the visitors. Some of this negative description comes through the words of Mogien, to whom we might simply ascribe racial prejudice. But others come from the narration, suggesting that Le Guin agrees with this assessment of these Olgyior as inferior or degenerate. I'll note here that I've been using the term "Olgyior" throughout this podcast, but the narration typically uses the loaded term "midmen."

Another way the people of Fomalhaut are exoticized is their inability to say Rocannon's name correctly. I have to admit I'm not sure what pronunciation difference Le Guin had in mind, but she consistently spells the character's name differently in the narration versus in dialogue spoken by Angyar and Olgyior characters. It's spelled R-O-C-A-N-N-O-N in the narration, and R-O-K-A-N-A-N in dialogue. The latter's use of a K and dropping the double N evokes phonetic spellings and eye-dialect that are typically used to indicate a character is less educated or sophisticated. So Le Guin is associating that trope with the people of Fomalhaut, even though as I said I don't know what the difference in sound would be -- similar to how eye-dialect will drop silent letters and replace S with Z, even in cases where everyone pronounces things that way, including upper-class people whose dialogue is spelled in the standard way. It's a way of tagging some people's speech as unsophisticated.

The incidents of the attack on Plenot and Rocannon's capture by Zgama in these two chapters make a good pair for examining the social hierarchies of Fomalhaut II and how Rocannon -- and through him the reader -- relate to them. A well-worn difficulty experienced by anthropologists is how to handle unjust social hierarchies among the people one is studying. The desire to observe and analyze the society as it is, and not impose one's outside values on it, consels acquiescence to existing hierarchies. But because the ethnographic method involves living in the society being studied, the anthropologist would become complicit in the maintenance of those hierachies. This is an especially troubling dilemma when the anthropologist is present on the sufferance of the dominant groups within the local hierarchy, which is precisely Rocannon's position.

The attack on Plenot is framed from an Angyar point of view. Tolen is presented as clearly suffering from the destruction of its Angyar ruling class. Mogien declares the lord of Plenot to be an Errant, that is, a kind of independent warlord. The outsider status of an Errant entails a refusal to respect social norms such as hospitality rules, thus making him a legitimate target for violence. By participating in the attack, then, Rocannon is restoring a proper social order. He is removing a threatening free agent and placing the Angyar hierarchy back in control of both Plenot and Tolen. Rocannon doesn't seem to appreciate this as a political attack. Rather, it's a necessary step in his Angyar-authorized journey to the south. And it's also a bit of fun, as illustrated by his gleeful throwing of a torch to help burn down Plenot.

In Zgama, we see the situation from the other side. Zgama is an Olgiyor who fears having his independence stripped away by Angyar invading from the northern continent. The narrative stresses his crudeness and barbarity. He and his people are dirty, wear animal skins, and drip grease from their meals of roasted meat. On the one hand, this feeds into the troubling endorsement of social hierarchy woven into the worldbuilding of this book. But given the negative depictions already given for the northern Olgiyor, it's good that the book remains consistent and doesn't set Zgama apart as special or different.

As awful and threatening as Zgama is, we have to admit that he has a point. In the previous chapter, we just read about an Angyar-led expedition to subdue an independent locus of political power. Why shouldn't Zgama fear that this is exactly what Rocannon and Mogien have planned for him? And Rocannon only makes the situation worse by trying to claim Starlord privilege to get released. Zgama is not interested in bowing to a hierarchy which would place him at the service of Angyar, much less aliens.

Rocannon's impermasuit plays into the contrast here as well. Le Guin would later say that she thought the impermasuit was a silly idea and she removed this technology from her later Hainish novels. But it plays an important role in this story. In the attack on Plenot, Rocannon declines to wear the suit, and is wounded by an arrow that the suit could easily have stopped. This speaks to his naievete about what he was getting himself into. Riding into battle on a windsteed is not part of the usual job description for an anthropologist. Leaving the impermasuit behind shows a failure to fully appreciate and commit to his involvement in the politics of violent force. But in fact he is involved, and his arrow wound is a direct reminder that he can't exempt himself. Afterwards he thinks about how he is "sealed by his shed blood to this world to which he had come a stranger across the gulfs of night."

Despite Yahan's song, Rocannon is no warrior. He envisions himself as being armed once he finds a driftwood walking stick, but he is immediately defeated by Zgama's men. Once captured by Zgama, the impermasuit proves quite useful. Were it not for the suit, Rocannon would have been burned alive. But here the suit helps him learn a complementary lesson. While Zgama can't directly wound his body, he is still at risk of confinement and dehydration. Rocannon learned in Plenot that he can't place himself outside of politics. He learns in Zgama's hall that he can't place himself above politics. If he cares about the world of Fomalhaut II, he has to find a place for himself within it, politics and all.

Next time, join me for a discussion of chapters 5 and 6 of Rocannon's World.