The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Eye of the Heron (1978) often gets lost in discussions of Ursula K. Le Guin's novels, for though it is a planetary science fiction story, it is not part of the Hainish cycle, thus unconnected to her most famous SF. The novel's separation from Le Guin's various series lends a sense that it is a minor work, but it is only so in the best sense: a variation on ideas treated more grandly elsewhere, a delving into a particular niche, a meditation on a single facet of an epic. As such, The Eye of the Heron is a triumph.

(Note: The Library of America just announced their Spring 2024 releases, and Eye of the Heron will be included in their seventh Le Guin collection, this one devoted to the "stand-alone novels": The Lathe of Heaven, The Eye of the Heron, The Beginning Place, Searoad, and her final novel, Lavinia.)

Le Guin has spoken of Eye of the Heron as a transitional work — the book in which she embraced writing a female protagonist instead of writing male leads, as she had done before. The transition is clearly true, but the shift was hardly a simple one of identification, because Le Guin's male-identified focal characters always provided her a useful path by which to explore questions of masculinity, gender, and power that remained consistent throughout her career, even as she struggled toward a conscious feminist awakening in the later 1970s. (Her 1992 reflection on the 1975 Khatru Symposium on women in SF gives some sense of the profound and painful journey she was on at the time.) In a review of a book about Le Guin and "post-feminism", Sandra J. Lindow makes the important point that Le Guin's "early work cannot be considered masculinist" even if it is not overtly or obviously feminist: 

It is apparent that Le Guin's writing condemned women's oppression, advocated for gender equality, and was informed by feminist thought from the beginning. The androgyny described in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) was certainly inspired by 1960s gender discussion. Ged, of the first Earthsea trilogy (1968-1972), becomes an arch mage but is primarily interested in finding his own emotional and spiritual balance and is willing to give up his power for the good of his world. Shevek of The Dispossessed (1974) is depressive, over-worked, and underweight. Never the massively muscular macho sort of male hero of the pulps, Shevek is a nerd who loves physics nearly as much as he loves his wife and children. Both heroes can be read, as Robin Roberts describes in Gender and Science in Science Fiction (1993), as "codedly feminine," where "an author explores a singularly feminine dilemma using a male character as a stand-in or cover" (Roberts 16). Shevek and Ged are driven by motives of preserving hearth and home and do so to the detriment of their own health and well-being. Most female readers historically have had little difficulty identifying with them.

The presentation of gender ideas in The Eye of the Heron is actually quite simplistic in comparison to the story's other concepts, and aside from its importance as a transitional text for Le Guin, it is not a book to recommend to someone who is interested in SF and gender, as dozens of other stories by other writers (and even Le Guin herself) from the same era put gender more at the forefront. Though the novel (or, perhaps more accurately, novella) first appeared in Virginia Kidd's anthology Millennial Women and there is a patriarchal society within The Eye of the Heron, its patriarchy is so stark as to feel almost cartoonish — almost, because unfortunately reality has its own cartoonish quality, and some societies on our planet today share all the assumptions of the book's patriarchs. That was even more true in 1978.

A more complex theme throughout the book is the implications and challenges of pacifism. This seems to have been Le Guin's motivating interest in the story. The basic plot makes this clear: The Eye of the Heron is the story of a planet named Victoria where two groups of people have been exiled from Earth: prisoners, the first group sent there, and some members of a pacifist group fleeing persecution, who left fifty years later. The descendants of the prisoners quickly found the pacifists useful, relegating them to farmlands six kilometers outside the city, and treating them like citizens of a company town.  The pacifists have sent an exploratory team to seek new lands on the planet where they might expand their village, and the city-dwellers feel threatened by this, leading to confrontations and rebellions.

What's most interesting to me about The Eye of the Heron is the way it complicates its own schematic premise. Though Christian stories certainly influenced the book (as they should, since Tolstoy and Martin Luther King are among the great heroes of pacifist writing), the overall structure is the Taoism so central to Le Guin's own worldview: the book establishes various dualisms (rural/urban, pacifist/violent, male/female, old/young) and then slowly undoes them. It's not that the dual elements do not exist and affect the characters' lives — they clearly do. They form oppositions, and that's the problem, because rather than see the elements as transient, temporary, and illusive, the characters cling to them, assuming essence and permance, then imbuing the elements and, worse, the oppositions with meaning and portent. When opposition and conflict are assumed, they become real.

That's the story of the first 3/4ths or so of the novel, and if that were the whole story, it would be an entertaining but relatively familiar and simplistic tale, not much different from, say, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. It is in the last quarter that the book becomes extraordinary and resonant.

The confrontations and rebellions reach a tragic climax, and it is in the aftermath of this climax that the characters must figure out how to continue without the certainties of their cherished assumptions. The protagonist, Luz  (a traitor to her family in the city who has sought shelter with the pacifists in their village), is left without anything she can comfortably call home, any sense of purpose, anything she can even identify as her own. Ultimately, she chooses to journey into the wilderness. She and the group she travels with must seek a new place in which to build a life. Instead of the certainties of ideology and belief that ruled her choices before, she must attend to the everyday cares of survival, she must build her life anew in her own way, whatever it may be.

Le Guin's writing in the final, emotionally powerful chapter is some of the best in the book, as she takes the time to attend to the details of Luz's thoughts, perceptions, and physical existence. Gone are the predictable dialogues about force and morality, now we must attend to the things of the world:

Nobody had made this wilderness, and there was no evil in it and no good; it simply was.
She drew a circle in the sandy dirt near her foot, making it as perfect as she could, using a thorny twig to draw it with. That was a world, or a self, or God, that circle, you could call it anything. Nothing else in the wilderness could think of a circle like that — she thought of the delicate gold ring around the compass glass. Because she was human, she had the mind and eyes and skillful hand to imagine the idea of a circle and to draw the idea. But any drop of water falling from a leaf into a pool or rain puddle could make a circle, a more perfect one, fleeting outward from the cneter, and if there were no boundary to the water the circle would fleet outward forever, fainter and fainter, forever larger. She could not do that, which any drop of water could do. Inside her circle what was there? Grains of sand, dust, a few tiny pebbles, a half-buried thorn, Andre's tired face, the sound of Southwind's voice, Sasha's eyes which were like Lev's eyes, the ache of her own shoulders where the pack straps pulled, and her fear. The circle could not keep out the fear. And the hand erased the circle, smoothing out the sand, leaving it as it had always been and would always be after they had gone on.

The words and sentences are simple and clear, as they are through most of the book (the exceptions only a couple of tour de force moments of heightened emotion and confusion that move into something like interior monologue), but by this point we have arrived at a new maturity of vision. The progression of the book is from simple parable or allegory toward more complex narrative. Though the characters are of a range of ages, they are part of very young societies, and the story of The Eye of the Heron is less the story of any one character than it is of how communities make their way toward complexity.

Though The Eye of the Heron starts off seeming like a parable of the virtues of pacifism over violence, Le Guin is too smart to let it remain that. While she is certainly a writer of philosophical novels, and sometimes even lets herself sail toward the shoals of didacticism, she knows that literature of ideas is not synonymous with literature of messages. It's actually quite canny of her to make so much of Eye of the Heron seem to be stacking the deck in favor of the unbelieveably pacific villagers. If we stick with the story and give ourselves over to its apparent premises, we will be as shocked as the characters when the deck is thrown to the winds at the end of Chapter 9. This kind of shock is one of the great virtues of a well-told story, for it is the kind of shock that storytellers at least as far back as Aristotle have known can bring us toward recognition of truths greater than what we had assumed before.

The development of the story of The Eye of the Heron mirrors the development of people from toddlers toward adulthood. Starting out, we all need simple views of the world and of ourselves. There is no shame in that. We build ideas of reality based on what we know and can understand. The shame is in clinging to those views as if they are sufficient, as if they are not views but instead reality itself. Luz learns this through the course of the novel, and Le Guin's art is in helping us along on the journey — a journey that she herself was very much in the midst of as she wrote the book.

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