Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Immediately after this mellow and meditative tale came Blindness (its Portuguese title is An Essay on Blindness); soon after came “The Tale of the Unknown Island,” an endearing and witty fable, and soon after that, All the Names, perhaps the most Kafkaesque of his novels, with its satire of a monstrous bureaucracy. Comparing Saramago with Kafka is a tricky business, though; he is dryer and gentler than Kafka, his anger deep and temperate. I can’t imagine Saramago writing “Metamorphosis” any more than I can imagine Kafka writing a love story. And All the Names, with its unforgettable Registry leading back into impenetrable darkness, and its protagonist, Senhor José, a clerk driven to seek the person behind one of the innumerable names in the files of the Registry, if not exactly a love story, is a story about love.

  After the Journey to Portugal, mentioned above, Saramago wrote The Cave, which in some ways I like the best of all because I like the people in it so much. Saramago will tell us what the book is about—though when he wrote this in The Notebook he wasn’t talking about his novel, but about the world he saw in May 2009.

  Every day species of plants and animals are disappearing, along with languages and professions. The rich always get richer and the poor always get poorer. . . . Ignorance is expanding in a truly terrifying manner. Nowadays we have an acute crisis in the distribution of wealth. Mineral exploitation has reached diabolical proportions. Multinationals dominate the world. I don’t know whether shadows or images are screening reality from us. Perhaps we could discuss the subject indefinitely; what is already clear is that we have lost our critical capacity to analyze what is happening in the world. We seem to be locked inside Plato’s cave. We have jettisoned our responsibility for thought and action. We have turned ourselves into inert beings incapable of the sense of outrage, the refusal to conform, the capacity to protest, that were such strong features of our recent past. We are reaching the end of a civilization and I don’t welcome its final trumpet. In my opinion, neoliberalism is a new form of totalitarianism disguised as democracy, of which it retains almost nothing but a semblance. The shopping mall is the symbol of our times. But there is still another miniature and fast-disappearing world, that of small industries and artisanry. . . .

  This is the framework of The Cave, an extraordinarily rich dystopia that uses science-fictional extrapolation with great skill in the service of a subtle and complex philosophical meditation that is at the same time, and above all, a powerful novel of character. One of the principal characters is a dog.

  In 2004 came Seeing, which picks up the setting and some of the characters of Blindness, but uses them in an entirely different way (nobody could accuse Saramago of writing the same book over, or anything like the same book). It is a heavy-hitting political satire, very dark—far darker, paradoxically, in its end and implications than Blindness.

  In his Nobel speech, the author, calling himself “the apprentice,” said this:

  The apprentice thought, “we are blind,” and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.

  It is, on the face of it, an odd description of Blindness, for in that book it is powerless people who insult human dignity, ordinary people terrified at finding themselves and everyone else blind and out of control. Some behave with stupid, selfish brutality, sauve qui peut, indeed abandoning self-respect and human decency, like the men who take over the asylum and abuse its inmates. They are a microcosm of the corruption of power. But the truly powerful of our world don’t even appear in Blindness, while Seeing is all about them, the perverters of reason, the universal liars.

  Very evidently Saramago’s novels are not simple parables. It would be rash to “explain” what all the people (but one) in the first book were blind to, or what the citizens of Seeing see. What’s clear is that they’re the same people in the same city a few years later: one book illuminates the other in ways I can only begin to glimpse.

  The story begins with those ordinary citizens, who not so long ago regained their sight and their tranquil day-to-day life, doing something that seems quite unconnected with vision or lack of it. It’s voting day, and 83% of them, after not going to the polls in the morning, go in the late afternoon and cast a blank ballot. We see the dismay of bureaucrats, the excitement of journalists, the hysteria of the government. The satire is at first quite funny, and I thought I was in for a light Voltairean tale. I was missing signals.

  Turning in a blank ballot is a signal unfamiliar to most Britons and Americans, who aren’t yet used to living under a government that has made voting totally meaningless. In a functioning democracy, one can consider not voting a lazy protest liable to play into the hands of the party in power (as when low Labour turnout allowed Margaret Thatcher’s reelections, and Democratic apathy both elections of George W. Bush). It comes hard to me to admit that a vote is not in itself an act of power. I was at first quite blind to the point Saramago’s nonvoting voters are making, but I began to see it at last, when the minister of defense announces that what the country is facing is terrorism.

  Other ministers oppose him, but he gets what he wants, a state of emergency. A bomb is exploded (by terrorists of course, as the media report), killing quite a few people. An attempted evacuation of the 17% of voters who marked their ballots ends in failure because the government forgets to tell the troops blocking the roads to let the refugees through. The nonvoters, the so-called terrorists, help the refugees carry home all they tried to take with them, the tea service, the silver platter, the painting, grandpa . . .

  The humor is still tender, but the tone darkens, tension rises. Characters, individuals, begin to come to the fore, all nameless except for Constant, the “dog of tears” from Blindness. A superintendent of police is sent into the city to find the woman who did not go blind when everyone else did four years ago, the suspected link between the “plague of white blindness and the plague of blank ballots.” The superintendent becomes our viewpoint and mediator; we begin to see as he begins to see. He brings us to the woman who did not go blind, the gentle light-bearer of the first book, but where that story began with an awful darkness slowly opening into light, this one goes right down into the dark. Seeing says more about the days we are living in than any novel I have read.

  By now Saramago was well into his eighties, and not surprisingly chose to write a book about death—a subject an old man understands with an intimacy no young writer, no matter how many bulls he fights or airplanes he jumps from, can quite equal. The premise of Death with Interruptions (also published as Death at Intervals) is irresistible. Death (who isn’t one person, but many, each with a locality she’s responsible for—bureaucracy, after all, is everywhere) gets sick of her job and takes a vacation from it. This is a major theme in Saramago, the humble employee who decides to do something just a little out of line, just this once . . . So in the region for which this particular Death is responsible, nobody dies. For a time it seemed that the genially morbid tale was going to bog down in recounting the paralytic idiocy of governmental rivalries and bureaucratic infighting, all too reminiscent of the American Congress. Then the dog showed up, and I knew everything was all right. With the dog would come people, real people, who would do brave, stupid, and unpredictable things. They would fall in love, have sex, play the cello, make mistakes, they would be Saramago characters, they would be foolishly, painfully, nobly, simply human. Even if one of them—the only one with a name—was Death.

  In 2010, very shortly after Saramago’s death, The Elephant’s Journey was published in English. It may be his most perfect work of art, as pure and true and indestructible as a Mozart aria or a folk song.

  History attests that in 1551 an elephant made the journey from Lisbon to Vienna, a present from King João III of Portugal to Archduke Maximilian of Austri
a. In the novel, Solomon the elephant and his mahout, Subhro (whom the archduke renames, with true Habsburg infelicity, Fritz), proceed through various landscapes at an unhurried pace, attended by various functionaries and military men, and meeting along the way with villagers and townsfolk who variously interpret the sudden enigma of an elephant entering their lives. And that’s the story.

  It is extremely funny. Old Saramago writes with a masterfully light hand, and the humor is tender, a mockery so tempered by patience and pity that the sting is gone though the wit remains vital.

  The passage that begins with the mahout discussing religion with the Portuguese captain is particularly endearing. Having explained that he is a Christian, more or less, Subhro undertakes to tell the soldiers about Ganesh. You obviously know a good deal about Hinduism, says the captain. More or less, sir, more or less, says the mahout, and goes on to describe how the god Shiva cut off his son Ganesh’s head and replaced it with an elephant’s head. “Fairy tales,” says a soldier, and the mahout says, “Like the one about the man who, having died, rose on the third day.” Peasants from the nearby village are listening with interest. They have agreed, “There’s not much to an elephant, really, when you’ve walked round him once, you’ve seen all there is to see.” But the religious discussion arouses them and they go wake up their priest to inform him of the important news: “God is an elephant, father.” The priest protests and promises to exorcise the elephant: “Together,” he tells them, “we will fight for our holy religion, and just remember, the people united will never be defeated.” The whole episode is a series of contained miracles of absurdity, quiet laughter rising out of a profound, resigned, affectionate wisdom.

  In his Nobel talk, Saramago said, “As I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world’s, if I can be allowed such an immoderate ambition.” That hard, patient digging is what gives so light and delightful a book as this its depth and weight. It is no mere fable, as the story of an elephant’s journey through the follies and superstitions of sixteenth-century Europe might well be. It has no moral. There is no happy ending. Solomon will get to Vienna, yes; and then two years later he will die. But his footprints may remain across the reader’s mind, deep, round impressions in the dirt, not leading to the Austrian Imperial Court or anywhere else yet known, but indicating, perhaps, a more permanently rewarding direction to be followed.

  Those tracks are now imprinted on electrons as well as in the dirt, on the page, in the mind; they are now in the vibrations in our computers, the symbols on our screens, as real and intangible as light itself, for all who will to see and read and follow. Saramago writes with wit, heartbreaking dignity, and the simplicity of a great artist in full control of his art. Let us listen to a true elder of our people, a man of tears, a man of wisdom.

  Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic

  An introduction to the Chicago Review Press edition of 2011.

  Part of this introduction is taken from a review of Roadside Picnic I wrote in 1977, the year the book first came out in English. I wanted to keep some record of a reader’s response at a time when the worst days of Soviet censorship were fresh in memory, so that intellectually and morally interesting novels from Russia still had the glamor of risk-taking courage about them. A time, also, when a positive review of a work of Soviet science fiction was a small but real political statement in the United States, since part of our science-fiction community had undertaken to fight the Cold War by assuming every writer who lived behind the Iron Curtain was an enemy ideologue. The moral purity of these reactionaries was preserved (as it so often is) by not reading, so they didn’t have to see that many Soviet writers had been using science fiction for years to write with at least relative freedom from Party ideology about politics, society, and the future of mankind.

  Science fiction lends itself readily to imaginative subversion of any status quo. Bureaucrats and politicians, who can’t afford to cultivate their imagination, tend to assume it’s all ray guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in We to bring the censor down upon him. The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government’s policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology—something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write.

  Roadside Picnic is a “first contact” story with a difference. Aliens—the Visitors—have visited the earth and gone away again, leaving behind them several landing areas (now called The Zones) littered with their refuse. The picknickers have gone; the pack rats, wary but curious, approach the crumpled bits of cellophane, the glittering flip-tops from beer cans, and try to carry them home to their holes.

  Most of the mystifying debris is extremely dangerous. Some proves useful—eternal batteries which power automobiles—but the scientists never know if they are using the devices for their proper purpose or employing (as it were) Geiger counters as hand axes and electronic components as nose rings. They cannot figure out the principles of the artifacts, the science behind them. An international Foundation sponsors research. A black market flourishes; “stalkers” enter the forbidden Zones and, at risk of various kinds of ghastly disfigurement and death, steal bits of alien litter, bring the stuff out, and sell it, sometimes to the Foundation.

  In the traditional first contact story, communication is achieved by courageous and dedicated spacemen, and an exchange of knowledge, or a military triumph, or a big-business deal ensues. Here, the visitors from space, if they noticed our existence at all, were evidently uninterested in communication; perhaps to them we were savages, or perhaps pack rats. There was no communication, there can be no understanding.

  Yet understanding is needed. The Zones are affecting everyone who has to do with them. Corruption and crime attend their exploration; fugitives from them are literally pursued by disaster; the children of the stalkers are genetically altered until they seem scarcely human.

  The story set on this dark foundation is lively, racy, unpredictable. The setting appears to be North America, perhaps Canada, but the characters have no particular national characteristics. They are, however, individually vivid and likable; the slimiest old stalker-profiteer has a revolting and endearing vitality. Human relations ring true. There are no super-brilliant intellects; people are commonplace. Red, the central figure, is ordinary to the point of being ornery, a hard-bitten man. Most of the characters are tough people leading degrading, discouraging lives, presented without sentimentality and without cynicism. Humanity is not flattered, but it’s not cheapened. The authors’ touch is tender, aware of vulnerability.

  This use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—super-brilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen. Those who want the genre to remain specialised—“hard”—tend to prefer the elitist style. Those who see science fiction simply as a way of writing novels welcome the more Tolstoyan approach, where a war is described not only from the generals’ point of view, but through the eyes of housewives, prisoners, and boys of sixteen, or an alien visitation is described not only by knowledgeable scientists, but by its effects on commonplace people.

  The question whether human beings are or will be able to understand any and all information we receive from the universe is one which most science fiction, riding on the heady tide of scientism, used to answer with an unquestioning yes. The Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem called it “the myth of our cognitive universalism.” Solaris is the best-known of his books on this theme, in which the human characters are defeated, humbled by their failure to comprehend alien messages or artifacts. They have fai
led the test.

  The idea that the human race might be of absolutely no interest to a “more advanced” species could easily lend itself to overt sarcasm, but the authors’ tone remains ironic, humorous, compassionate. Their ethical and intellectual sophistication becomes clear in a brilliant discussion, late in the novel, between a scientist and a disillusioned employee of the Foundation about the implications, the meaning, of the alien visit. Yet the heart of the story is an individual destiny. The protagonists of idea stories are marionettes, but Red is a mensch. We care about him, and both his survival and his salvation are at stake. This is, after all, a Russian novel.

  And the Strugatskys raise the ante on Lem’s question concerning human understanding. If the way humanity handles what the aliens left behind them is a test, or if Red, in the final, terrible scenes, undergoes trial by fire, what in fact is being tested? And how do we know whether we have passed or failed? What is “understanding”?

  The final promise of “HAPPINESS! FREE! FOR EVERYONE!” rings with unmistakably bitter political meaning. Yet the novel can’t possibly be reduced to a mere fable of Soviet failure, or even the failure of science’s dream of universal cognition. The last thing Red says in the book, speaking to God, or to us, is “I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad!”

  Jack Vance: The Languages of Pao

  An introduction to the 2008 reprint of the novel by Subterranean Press.

  Jack Vance loved to invent elaborate, gorgeous pageantries of costumes and manners, castes and classes, and to recount histories of powerful men scheming and striving for more power, set in countries with remarkable geographies and exotic names, on distant worlds, in a far future. On returning to those Vancean worlds after many years, the first thing I noticed, with surprise and affection, was how familiar they are. Despite the science-fictional apparatus of space flight and super-hi-technology, they aren’t alien worlds or future worlds. They are our own lost world. They are Earth before the airplane, Earth in all the centuries when it was boundless, endlessly rich in mystery and strangeness—when there were blanks on the map, when Samarkand or Timbuctoo or California were names of legend, when Marco Polo was a stranger in Cathay, when Baghdad was where the Thief lived . . .