Rocannon's World, Part III

 

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

We begin with Yahan finding Rocannon being burned at the stake in Zgama's fortress. Yahan loosens the chains holding Rocannon and gives him a drink, but there are too many of Zgama's people around, and Rocannon is too weak, for them to make a break for it yet. Rocannon spends the following day preparing himself, then just as Zgama is about to escalate his torture, Rocannon breaks free. He intimidates his captors with his technological superiority and they allow him to walk out.

Rocannon is rejoined by Yahan, who explains that after leaving Mogien, he had tried to join Zgama's people, believing them to be a free Olgiyor society. However, he was quickly disillusioned. But having abandoned his master Mogien, he has no way to reintegrate into the Angyar-ruled world either. So Rocannon offers to accept Yahan's pledge of service, giving him a place in society again.

Yahan and Rocannon make their way, hungry and cold, to the south until they encounter a wide body of water. They have no boat to cross it, though Rocannon remembers from his maps that they are on a peninsula that connects to the mainland somewhere off to the west.

Yahan and Rocannon soon meet Piai, a hunter who shares a cabin with two others. He is initially suspicious of the strangers, but comes around to offer them his rough hospitality, and the use of a boat to cross the sound. Things go sideways, however, when one of the other hunters, Karmik, reveals that he heard about the strangers' escape from Zgama, and knows that Rocannon carries Semley's necklace. Rocannon reluctantly agrees to trade the jewel for passage across the sound.

Rocannon and Yahan make their way southwards across a desolate landscape. Their lack of supplies makes things difficult, and eventually they are forced to turn back. Just then, they are found by Mogien, Raho, and Kyo, riding on their windsteeds. Mogien explains that they were attacked by Zgama's people, in the course of which Iot was killed. However, they razed Zgama's settlement in retalliation. They then found Piai's house, where they learned about the hunters' encounter with Rocannon and Yahan, and forced them to return Semley's necklace.

Reunited, the group continues southward, eventually reaching the forested foothills of the southern mountains. While camped near some ruins, they are surrounded by mysterious cloaked figures who capture them and bring them back to a strange city. The "cloaks" prove to be wings, as these Winged Ones are a species of humanoid previously unconfirmed by off-world anthropologists. Rocannon slips out of the building where they are being kept and goes exploring, eventually discovering that the Winged Ones have brought his companions here to be food for their young ones.

There's a lot happening in these chapters that relates to themes discussed in previous episodes, but I want to start with the way Le Guin's astronomical descriptions jumped out at me during these chapters. As Rocannon travels, the text makes repeated mention of the state of the sky, particularly the arrangement of Fomalhaut's numerous moons and the "Greatstar," the secondary sun in the Fomalhaut system. We don't get enough detail here to work out the specifics of the moons' orbits and so forth. I can't know for sure without access to her papers, but I suspect Le Guin wasn't putting a lot of time into calculating the exact movements of the heavenly bodies anyway. It's the kind of thing that can be easily done with various worldbuilding websites today, but which would have been quite challenging to do by hand back in the 1960s.

The frequent attention to astronomical details serves several functions in the narrative. First and most simply, it reminds us that this is a science fiction book. The events of this section could, without too much difficulty, be transferred into a fantasy or historical fiction kind of setting. The only "high-tech" being used is the impermasuit, which is basically magical anyway. So pointing out the moons and stars is a reminder of the larger dimension to the story -- that Rocannon is a visitor from a far-off world and that their quest potentially affects the preparations for a galactic war. At one point Rocannon answers Yahan's questions about his homeworld of Hain, pointing out its star in the sky and reflecting on the fact that due to time dilation during near-lightspeed travel, everyone he knew on his homeworld is now dead.

The astronomical moments connect to the theme of navigation. Rocannon planned his overall route using maps he, as a scientist from a higher technology civilization, had created. These maps were lost in the crossing to the southern continent. He is able to navigate somewhat from memory in these chapters, as he recalls the general configuration of the land, but the usefulness of his memory fades as he gets farther away. He has to shift into a mode of navigating by engagement with the land, following ravines based on his understanding of their geological formation.

Chapter six ends with the ultimate disruption of any map-based navigation, as Rocannon and his companions find themselves in a massive city heretofore unknown to them. The city of the Winged Ones was not on any map Rocannon had, yet it is not secretive or hidden. The Winged Ones thus present a challenge to the supposed universality and objectivity of the map. Rocannon has engaged with maps as factual representations of reality. That his maps were created using data gathered from space further emphasizes their claim to objectivity. They present a view from above that would seem to approximate a Harawayan view from nowhere, scientific objectivity achieved by Rocannon's civilization but not by the primitives of Fomalhaut. And yet here is a whole new species of sentient being, creating its civilization right under the noses of the Hainish scientists. The Winged Ones are more than just a monster-of-the-week threat to the protagonists, they challenge the foundation on which Rocannon's broader mission to Fomalhaut, as well as his current quest, rests.

Rocannon reacts to the Winged Ones from an anthropological point of view. When he is awakened after their attack on his camp, his first thought is for his handbook that mentions an unconfirmed fourth possible species. "And he had the luck to confirm it, to get the first sight of a new species, a new high culture, a new member for the League" (84). This is a two-sided reaction. On the one hand, it clearly distinguishes Rocannon from the kind of biceps and blasters heroes that populated much science fiction of the time. His first reaction to a new species, even one that is credibly threatening him and his friends, is neither fear nor violence. It's curiosity -- he is excited to learn something new about the planet and its inhabitants.

At the same time, however, his curiosity has a colonial framing. He is excited that he will get credit for being a kind of future Columbus, discovering people who were already there. He also evaluates them through the hierarchical lens that Le Guin adopts from 19th and early 20th century anthropology, where civilizations can be ranked higher or lower based on their technological achievements. The Winged Ones are especially exciting for Rocannon because they are more "advanced" than the other species of the planet, including his companions.

Because of their advancement, the Winged Ones can be slotted into the diplomatic dimension of his mission. His goal, like so many of Le Guin's early protagonists, is to persuade other species to join the League of Worlds. This is a nice, liberal, cosmopolitan goal, and certainly a fair sight better than the aim of conquest that arises in much science fiction in the 50s and 60s. However, it's still a Hainish-centric goal. The Hainish created the League, with particular aims in mind, such as preparing for the war to come. Joining the League means assimilating to the Hainish-centered structure of the galaxy.

These chapters also have a lot to say about the Olgiyor and their place in the racial hierarchy of Fomalhaut. And frankly, it's not great. The descriptions of Zgama's settlement continue to emphasize the primitiveness and dirtiness of his way of life. Yahan had to trade his good northern clothes for "dirty furs" to fit in. And the state of Piai's house is little better.

In Rocannon's escape, we get another iteration of the trope of the technologically advanced civilization being feared as godlike by the superstitious natives. Though Zgama thought he had the upper hand after capturing Rocannon, the star-lord has only to step out of the fire to overawe the medieval midmen and walk out into the night. The primitiveness of their reaction is emphasized by the fact that we see it from Rocannon's perspective, and so we know that he is scared, starving, and on the edge of collapse. These silly primitives don't know they've been had.

The most troubling aspect of the depiction of Olgiyor, however, is that it is endorsed by Yahan, our most sympathetic Olgiyor character. He refers to Zgama's people as "oafs." He explicitly states that he thinks his people are better off as servants of the Angyar in the north, than as free people in the south: "They call my people slaves, but I'd rather be a man serving men than a beast hunting beasts, like these [Piai's companions]." (68) He regrets his temporary desire to join a free society. One can certainly imagine how someone in Yahan's position might come to this conclusion, out of a combination of indoctrination and culture shock. But there's nothing in the text to encourage us to relativize or question his perspective.

The book works hard to show us Yahan's quality of character. He is brave, loyal, skilled at survival, and altruistic without sacrificing self-respect. He seems perfectly designed to rebut any claim that Le Guin views all Olgiyor as lesser. Moreover, Rocannon seems to want to treat him as an equal during their journey together. But Yahan is the one who refuses that equality. He happily swears his life to service of Rocannon, allowing him to reenter Angyar society in his accustomed subservient position. Mogien, for his part, immediately drops the issue of Yahan's insubordination and desertion when he is informed that Yahan is now Rocannon's servant. As a sort of honorary Angyar, Rocannon has taken over responsibility for Yahan.

Rocannon's attempts to treat Yahan as an equal actually create some distress for Yahan. This is crystallized in the fact that Rocannon saved Yahan's life by agreeing to give Semley's necklace to Piai's people. He agreed to the exchage of the jewel for passage on the boat only because the hunter Karmik was holding a knife to Yahan's throat (since he knew the impermasuit would protect Rocannon himself from any direct threat). Mogien is, unsurprisingly, upset: "To buy that worthless life, that disobedient halfman? You hold my heritage cheap!" (). But Yahan agrees. As Le Guin describes his thoughts, "To see a 'lord' toss away a jewel worth a kingdom's ransom to save a midman's life, his life, was to see all order subverted, admitting unbearable responsibility" ().

This could be read as a commentary on the naivete of individualistic liberal responses to structural inequalities. Rocannon is, in essence, trying to eliminate racism on Fomalhaut by declaring "I don't see race." That kind of change of individual attitude and behavior can be ineffective, or even backfire, in a wider cultural context of structural inequality. Again, though, I doubt that Le Guin is writing with these ideas in mind, and this kind of critical race theory inspired reading requires us to bring a lot of things to the text that aren't necessarily present within it.

Several times I've referred to the Olgiyor of the southern continent as "free." But that's not entirely accurate -- they're less free of Angyar rule than simply overlooked by the Angyar. This is shown by the ease with which one Angyar, with an Olgiyor servant, a Fiian companion, and a set of windsteeds, decimates the two Olgiyor communities they encounter. From Mogien's point of view, they simply deserved it as revenge for messing with their betters, and he had no compunction about using overwhelming force. Mogien is happily cutting a bloody swath through the people of the south.

Let's look now at the ecology of the new lands traversed in these chapters. Le Guin is more parsimonious with her descriptions of landscapes than someone like Tolkien, but she packs a lot into what we do get.

Upon their escape from Zgama's stronghold, Rocannon and Yahan take refuge in nature. They have no food with them, but Yahan is able to find some plants to make a meager meal. Afterward, he replants their roots. Yahan is far from home and his woodcraft is of limited use here, but he demonstrates an idea of care for nature and reciprocity with it. No such care is explicitly signaled in the descriptions of Piai's group. This may be just a product of the brevity of their appearance in the story, but it is interesting to see this care attributed specifically to the selfless "good" Olgiyor but not the ones who selfishly betray Rocannon and Yahan.

Across the strait, the landscape begins to change more dramatically. This region is desolate and uninhabited by humanoids. Le Guin describes it as flat, open, and gray. The underlying geology is flat, but criscrossed by eroded gullies that ultimately prevent Rocannon and Yahan from advancing before they're rejoined by their companions with windsteeds.

Various specific ecological terms are used in Chapter 6 -- desert, plain, grassland, pampas. On earth, these can all mean different things. Their juxtaposition here suggests either that the landscape doesn't match earth's ecology, that Rocannon as the viewpoint character is ignorant of these ecological details, or some combination. In any event, the association of non-forested land with desolation and hardship reflects a pro-forest ecological prejudice that crops up again and again in Le Guin's work. It's certainly an understandable prejudice, and it's deeply woven into Euro-American culture to see forests as abundant and grasslands as desolate. But it's still worth noting how this trope shows up even here in her first book.

The group is in much better shape when they reach the forested foothills. Though even further from home for any of them, this region is presented as much more ecologically hospitable. Indeed, it is so hospitable that Rocannon and his companions begin to wonder why they see no human inhabitation. "A fine, rich land to be so empty," says Raho (). Empty, of course, means empty of sentient humanoids. Fomalhaut has several humanoid species, but the residents of the planet seem to concur with Rocannon in drawing a sharp line between sentient species and all other organisms.

Raho's comment is, of course, some ironic foreshadowing. By the end of the chapter we learn that the foothills are not in fact empty of people, they're the home of the Winged Ones. But for a while, the comment seems accurate to Rocannon and his companions, and it prompts some discussion. Mogien speculates that this land was the original homeland of the Angyar, before they left to conquer the northern continent. This suggests that the Angyar have some sort of Edenic narrative about their origins. The foothills are a place of natural plenty that has been lost to modern people. If the foothills had been inhabited in the past, that would resolve the paradox of a land richly useful to people that had no people to enjoy its bounty. Mogien can't just let a place be what it is without people.

I'll end this consideration of these chapters with some further examination of the Winged Ones' city. Rocannon's fear arises out of the juxtaposition of two conflictring tropes. On the one hand, the city is sterile, high-tech, and symmetrical. But it is home to larvae sucking the juices out of various prey, a very organic and visceral experience. They have confounded his expectations.
Rocannon struggles repeatedly to communicate with the Winged Ones, using Hainish techniques that are meant to bridge cultural gaps. But it's no use. The dream of rationally and cooperatively sorting through the conflict is pronounced dead. It's natural to sympathize with the plight of Rocannon and his companions, since we're seeing the danger from their point of view. At the same time, the Winged Ones are not an invasive threat. Rocannon and his companions intruded -- albeit unknowingly -- on their territory. This makes them different from the enemy who destroyed Rocannon's ship, as one part in a larger plan to assault the rest of the galaxy.

Rocannon initially proclaimed himself lucky to have confirmed the existence of the fourth sentient species. By the end of the chapter he seems extremely unlucky to be on the menu for their young. But this is more than just a matter of bad luck potentially stopping his quest, as if he had accidentally fallen off a cliff or something. Rocannon's bad luck in being captured by the Winged Ones puts direct pressure on his ethics and values as an anthropologist -- and by extension on Le Guin's conception of the anthropologist as protagonist. How they handle that pressure will be the subject of the next chapter.

Next time, join me as we finish our discussion of Rocannon's World.