ACH - World-building, sources and influences, and effects

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It seems obvious to me that LeGuin has chosen to here explicitly engage in systematic world-building, a genre that has only become more important as we have turned out of the twentieth century, e.g. the so-called MCU, a multi-media franchise-universe intended to convey and validate neo-liberal world-views of Manichaen conflict between good and evil where accumulation of money is driven by fantasies of heroism. I would argue that a lot of RPGs, intentionally or not, do the same. And the current incarnations of all of those RPGs, and ACH, owe an evident debt to ground broken by LOTR and its publication success (the MCU has a different genealogy, but I think Jackson's interpretation of LOTR has exerted significant influence). While ACH and MCU_ are different from LOTR, I think that LeGuin's 'universe' is different in quite different ways. This thread is to discuss what difference these differences do or do not make.

LeGuin's story, like Tolkien's, is of a travel-quest that leaves and returns home, is divided into three parts that can be read straight through, but are presented with gaps. But in her story our protagonist does not cover vast distances, although her trip takes a much longer time, and what evil she finds in the world turns out to be immanent and local, not transcendent and greater than the world (there is a transcendent, but it is uninterested in governing human affairs). Unlike Frodo our protagonist knows from the beginning that she is a hybrid of two cultures (Frodo is all of one piece, but the Ring changes that). But like Frodo, she is not counted among the great, and her people are unimportant in the councils of rulers. She resides among both immanences, and finally concludes that one is ill and the other healthy, and unlike Frodo is not engaged to destroy either.

Like LOTR,_ ACH has extensive apparatus and appendices written by a scholarly contemporary of the present reader, and contains a lot of literary material not directly relevant to the story. It also contains far more visual cues than Tolkien, although this seems to me more due to technological advancements than any neglect on Tolkien's part. And I still treasure my Poems and Songs of Middle Earth record with Swann. But both Tolkien's and LeGuin's works are principally grounded in words, whereas the MCU is grounded in pictures with a few words.

However ACH has been (so far) less influential that both LOTR and MCU. I think that lack of influence is because of the absence of the emotional jolt of ressentiment provided by the inclusion of Manichaen themes.

I think we might have good conversation on these, and similar of topics.

Comments

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    MCU? I'm not familiar with the acronym?

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    @RichardAbbott said:
    MCU? I'm not familiar with the acronym?

    Marvel Comic Universe - The Avengers movies et al.

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    Aha right got it thanks

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    @BarnerCobblewood your questions need glossaries! I also didn't know what MCU was, and I had to look up

    Ressentiment: a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement.

    Manichean Themes Here I assume we mean the duality of good and evil, or something along those lines? My limited reading of Mani suggested to me that Manichaeism is not a dualist religion, but one based on the nature of conflict.

    So... unpacking these things... what's the question again LOL?

    LOTR and Marvel are both explicitly heroic. ACH is explicitly anti-heroic. I think that's the difference. Games in which the players play ordinary shmoes who worry about whether to wear a green shirt or a blue shirt on Sundays are never going to be very popular. There's room for all kinds of games (I know there's one about frousting lesbian snakes, for example) but games in which the characters can't somehow achieve important things are never going to have much appeal.

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    World-building and motivations... what a subject.

    Tolkien wrote Middle-Earth to create a whole new mythology for the English. It was based in his linguistics and mythology, but LotR was written as a story in a world created to have stories.

    Marvel, originally, I don't think had an overall vision, but the comics' worldbuilding accreted around snippets of pulp stories (and some with a moral message). The MCU plundered it to create eye-candy to watch while eating expensive popcorn, with enough of an easy story to keep people engaged but not thinking.

    Le Guin wrote a parable about the evils of patriarchy and Western capitalism & imperialism. I think it's all there to serve that aim. The setting is a small world to make the systems and choices small enough for the reader to understand on a personal level. Stone Telling's story is to give us an outsider's view on partriarchal imperialism. The anthropological notes around it are to show us that an anarchic (maybe matriarchal) and communal alternative is possible. The trip to the cotton-growers is there to show that conflicts between peoples can be resolved by understanding and agreement, rather than by force.

    In other words, Always Coming Home didn't generate new stories, because that was never its aim. It was intended to show us another way of living.

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    @NeilNjae said:
    ...Stone Telling's story is to give us an outsider's view on partriarchal imperialism. The anthropological notes around it are to show us that an anarchic (maybe matriarchal) and communal alternative is possible...

    I persist in thinking that she did a better job of communicating this in The Dispossessed :)

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    @RichardAbbott said:
    I persist in thinking that she did a better job of communicating this in The Dispossessed :)

    I've not read it. Perhaps I should.

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    It’s @dr_mitch ’s favourite book.
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    @Apocryphal said:
    Manichean Themes Here I assume we mean the duality of good and evil, or something along those lines? My limited reading of Mani suggested to me that Manichaeism is not a dualist religion, but one based on the nature of conflict.

    Not sure why you think Manichaen thought is not dualistic. I'm using the term in a very loose sense, where the key point is that good and evil actually exist and are in a conflict that we cannot avoid (by i.e. running away).

    In more detail, I am pointing to a series of interlocking beliefs that are part and parcel of our common world-stance: 1) There is an absolute good and an absolute evil, which actually exist and act in the world (i.e. they are not simply analytic principles used to explain things); 2) They are always engaged in an unavoidable conflict, where the evil is presently greater than the good (e.g. Sauron vs the free peoples); 3) Nevertheless there will be some possible prophesied apocalypse where the good will triumph and the evil will be completely destroyed (the ring destroyed in Mount Doom) and time / history will end; 4) Humans will be judged and condemned according to which side they picked (Gollum's annihilation vs Frodo's unending bliss).

    To which we can add the theological belief that the State's (The Condor) authority is derived from its application of immediate judgment supporting the good.

    Ressentiment: a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement.

    When faced with the way the world's people seem to be (i.e. not very good), the Manichaen person can be accused of failing to fight effectively, but also promotes envy and hatred of actual success by worldly (i.e. evil) people (e,g, Stone-Tellings's family).

    I think these ideas are the grounds for the dramatic conflict in ACH, LOTR, and many RPGs.

    LOTR and Marvel are both explicitly heroic. ACH is explicitly anti-heroic. I think that's the difference. Games in which the players play ordinary shmoes who worry about whether to wear a green shirt or a blue shirt on Sundays are never going to be very popular.

    I'm not sure what you mean here. While there are many stories of heroes not grounded on these specific beliefs, I don't see a lot of room for playing them in RPGs. And there can be all sorts of goals that are more important than which clothes you wear, which don't involve a violent and definitive resolution. Peace-making for example is something that never ends. Perhaps it is the uninterrupted nature of such work that makes it unappealing for role-playing. But if all roles are definitive, the value of the play is greatly reduced, because the world is not like that.

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    I thought that "dualistic" typically meant that good and evil were essentially independent and opposed forces, whereas the classical Christian position, and the one adopted by JRRT for his universe (implicitly but not explicitly Christian) is that evil is a perverted or misdirected distortion of good, and hence inevitably weaker in the long run (though as you say, in the apparent ascendant through much of history). Hence, for example, orcs as inferior knock-off copies of elves, or the theological point made in the in-universe creation myth that all of Melkor's apparent self-will in actuality served to further Eru's purposes.

    I don't know a lot about Manichean thought, but my impression was that this is dualistic in the stronger sense that evil is not simply twisted good, but has an existence and vitality of its own?

    An interesting feature of this - which JRRT explores at great length in the Frodo-Gollum-Bilbo-Sam cluster of interactions - is that in the LOTR universe, good and evil are sometimes hard to distinguish (whilst in history as opposed to eternity), and absolutely intertwined with each other to the extent that the nominally evil Gollum was needed in order to complete the quest of the nominally good Frodo. In this way, the interplay between good and evil is as intricate and essential as a yin-yang symbol, or other eastern religious tropes which Ursula LeGuin was keen to explore personally and in writing.

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    Always Coming Home is definitely all about the world building, and the main story is not much more than a longer version of the shorter stories given in the explicitly world building chapters. Where it's unusual is that it's world building with an almost explicit moral - such morals as are usually found in stories rather than world building. But I don't think it's a parable, or as in your face as say Narnia for example.

    The comparison with Tolkien is interesting. One could say Tolkien's also all about the world building, and to an extent that's true, though I'd argue it's more about mythology building (and philology). The world is built on stories. And such things as Lord of the Rings are layered on top of the mythology and stories from earlier in both his history of writing and the history of Middle Earth.

    Does Middle Earth have an explicit moral in the same way as Always Coming Home? I'd actually say not, though it's got plenty of implicit Christian ideas, and some Christian imagery repurposed. But in Tolkien's words, loosely phrased, it's not an allegory, though being allegorical is not the same as being applicable.

    The Manichean point is interesting. LeGuin certainly doesn't do that. Tolkien looks at a glance like he does, but really doesn't. @RichardAbbott explains it better than I could.

    But ACH is a rather difficult read, though at times intriguing. I can't say at the end whether I like it or not, though I am impressed by it. It's still very far from the best of LeGuin's writing (Earthsea, The Dispossed, The Left Hand of Darkness).

    I'm not sure I'd put the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the same category. I mostly liked the movies (some of them hugely so), and was incredibly impressed how they built up an internal mythology over a series of c.20 films, more or less consistently. There's nothing else really like it in cinema. But... the comparison to make might be with the Lord of the Rings movies rather than Le Guin or Tolkien books. This isn't intended as snobbery, just the danger of comparing books and films.

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    Oh, and if you've not read The Dispossessed, stop what you're doing, and read it immediately. I mean it. Unless you're currently experiencing an emergency I suppose.

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    @BarnerCobblewood said:
    Not sure why you think Manichaen thought is not dualistic.

    It was something I read in Michel Tardieu's book. It surprised me at the time, since 'dualistic' was just about the only thing I knew about Mani up until then.

    I think these ideas are the grounds for the dramatic conflict in ACH, LOTR, and many RPGs.

    These ideas being that Good and Evil will fight, and that some people will appear not to choose sides adequately, and thus become the subject of hatred?

    LOTR and Marvel are both explicitly heroic. ACH is explicitly anti-heroic. I think that's the difference.

    I'm not sure what you mean here.

    I mean heroic, as in fulfilling a higher end in the manner normally ascribed to heroes. Marvel and Tolkien are both like this. The Hobbits are reluctant heroes, but heroes nonetheless.

    Always Coming Home as anti-heroic, though. It's conceived as piece of literature that reflects the gatherer, not the hunter. To quote Le Guin:

    "The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course, the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or the spear, starting here and going straight _there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

    I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."

    So, what I mean is that this is a novel that tries to speak to the gatherers, rather than the hunters. Marvel is clearly speaking to the hunters. Tolkien does a pretty good job of appealing to both, I think.

    @BarnerCobblewood said:
    While there are many stories of heroes not grounded on these specific beliefs, I don't see a lot of room for playing them in RPGs. And there can be all sorts of goals that are more important than which clothes you wear, which don't involve a violent and definitive resolution. Peace-making for example is something that never ends. Perhaps it is the uninterrupted nature of such work that makes it unappealing for role-playing. But if all roles are definitive, the value of the play is greatly reduced, because the world is not like that.

    Right, so, yes. And there are many games like this. They definitely aren't all geared toward violence. But there's a definite thrust toward heroism - "The story isn't any good if he isn't in it." It's what most people expect. It doesn't need to be that way, but I think it's how it is. Peace-making doesn't exist without conflict.

    What else is there in RPGs? I think we could make an interesting list... for myself, I quite enjoy exploring and seeing how the other half lives. I try to set up interesting encounters that require problem solving, but not violence. One example, a story-line I never got to use in the 13-Wives, was to have the PCs enter a village in the high arid mountains and found the people dying of thirst because they refused to drink from their well. The well had water in it, but it also had fish inside, and they took this as a sign that the water was sacred to the local god. Is it a problem to be solved? For most it would be. Is it solvable? Perhaps. Would the solution create more problems? Perhaps.

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    Always Coming Home as anti-heroic, though. It's conceived as piece of literature that reflects the gatherer, not the hunter. To quote Le Guin:

    "The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course, the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or the spear, starting here and going straight _there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.
    I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."

    This is a very simplistic view of the novel. and of literature that extends deep into the past way beyond the development of the novel - I strongly suspect that ULG knew it was simplistic, and was making the statement for rhetorical purposes rather than explicitly dogmatic ones. So for example a great deal of ancient-near-east and other literature is based on a chiastic structure, in which the end recapitulates the beginning, and the main idea is at the centre - the structure is ABA or ABCDCBA or something like, where A, B etc are thematic ideas, characters, actions or whatever. You see this a great deal in New Kingdom Egyptian texts, and in portions of the Hebrew Bible. Quite a few years ago now I wrote about this, and in part said:

    ...the dominant paradigm expressed by chiasmus is that of coherence around a crucial centre. As Radday comments “Chiastic structure… is more than an artificial or artistic device… it is rather, and most remarkably so, a key to meaning”. He goes on to use this concept to address questions concerning the authorial intent of writing certain books and passages – “all we have to do in order to find the answer to this question is open the book to its middle and read. This reveals the book‟s focal concepts”. Bailey, writing some fifteen years after Radday, expresses similar thoughts: “The primary language of the picture is placed in the climactic center. Around that center is a series of interpretive semantic "envelopes", which provide direction to the reader's imagination”. Arguably, chiasmus in this more anthropological sense of embodying a world view, sits comfortably in a hearth-centred culture in which importance is identified more with centrality than vertical elevation. Although recognised in terms of literary structures, chiasmus is seen by these authors as having a wider role: it bridges a gap between the worlds of literary forms and social realities. It serves fundamentally, then, to reveal a way of conveying meaning that was evidently natural to the ancient near east, but was later replaced with a more linearly progressive view. Today, it runs the risk of being unrecognised and failing to secure the desired response.

    This is why I was keen to see if the creation stories, and in particular the assertion that the tales of the people in ACH were all middle - I wondered if ULG had structured it in a chiastic way. In fact, I couldn't detect any such structure at first reading, and it may not be there. On the other hand, I totally admit to skimming biggish chunks of the book as I ran out of May, and the various storylines failed to grip me.

    Now, I am explicitly talking about written art here, not film etc, which has its own set of conventions which overlap with novels but don't line up neatly. But although chiasmus as a rhetorical form is less popular (and less recognised) today than it used to be, it is still present. Various modern authors, including Hemingway, have used it to structure novels. Tolkien gets his hobbits back to the Shire before concluding, and returns to the matter of Bilbo's great age. Moving from the sublime to the commonplace, I built the first of my own books using this scheme (in part because it arose out of the work that led to my quoted passage above).

    Indeed, the classic assertion about novels, that the end has to resolve the problem set out at the start, implies some sort of recognition of chiasmus rather than simple progression. It would be fairer to say that most modern novels are more like a spiral - there is a return at the end to the issues, problems, crimes, challenges etc outlined at the start, but overlaid onto that there is some sort of progression - of character, morals, society or whatever.

    I also don't buy her statement that "the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag" - a bag is inherently shapeless, whereas a novel is always shaped - it is conscious art, not random collection of ideas. Again, I suspect that she knew this perfectly well and was trying to jar people's attention away from familiar patterns into unfamiliar ones - a kind of zen koan style of debate. Most of her novels were very carefully constructed and shaped, with this one being the odd one out.

    Anyway, I have rambled on long enough this morning :) - worth adding though that by our usual standards of how much debate the book triggers, ACH has done extremely well!

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    I previously mentioned I wouldn't likely use the setting of the valley as a game setting, but I might use some of the themes. Here's one of them:

    1. Setting. Right. I just said... never mind. The 'big picture' setting of this book is really interesting to me - more than the home of the Kesh. But what is the 'big picture' setting? We're given hints. We have The City of Man, which we take to be the body of historical human culture and enterprise - i.e. 'civilization'. Prehistoric and early cultures are excluded - these are "the time outside". Interestingly (to me), the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians had a similar concept. They believed in a set of principles or teachings called "the Me" (pronounced 'may') which are loosely defined as 'the trappings of civilization'. These are the things than make civilized culture - humanity - that which it is.

    Then we have The City of Mind: "Some eleven thousand sites all over the planet were occupied by independent, self-contained, self-regulating communities of cybernetic devices or beings - computers with mechanical extensions. This network of intercommunicating centres formed a single entity, the City of Mind."

    So, if we take a view from the centre, we have Humanity, Pre-Humanity, and Post-Humanity. I think there's a lot of interesting scope there for personal interactions and conflict - in a way very similar to what we saw in The Culture in the book The Player of Games.

    Pandora makes mention of a 'hole in the air' . A man built a house around it so it wouldn't blow away, then said 'heya' (a word that signifies moving from the profane to the sacred) and stepped into it. He emerged in the 'outside world', which seems to be the same place, but in the past. What does this saw about the nature of the Kesh world? Is it a simulation? How many such worlds are there? What's on the outside - the City of Mind, or the City of Man, or something else? Later, we're told that Valley history is all middle - no beginning and no end. This also suggests this is a constructed world.

    Toward the end of the book, we are told:
    "The technological ecosystem of the industrial age had been replaced by the almost ethereal technology of The City on the one hand, which had no use for heavy machinery, even their spaceships and stations being mere nerve and gossamer, and on the other hand by the very loose, light, soft network of the human cultures."

    What does Le Guin mean by 'nerve and gossamer' here? That the spaceships and stations have no physical presence? What does she mean by 'network of human cultures'? A trade network? Why does this network of human cultures obviate a technological ecosystem?

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    There is something disturbing here about the relation of imagination and everyday, something that RPGs could play with, but I think in practice such play is rare. Imagining and constructing, though related, are not the same activities, and constructing remains dependent. Melkor is perhaps the typical constructor who lacks imagination, and as such becomes resentful, controlling, and destructive when faced with the ephemeral, music being only form without substance, ungrasped yet experienced and influential. The world is nerves and gossamer, first.

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