How Everything Went to Heck
Ursula Le Guin on the original sin of disunited states
Welcome to Enchanted in America, where we search literature for
scenes of enchantment; and
insights about how enchanted states contribute to united states.
Ursula Le Guin was a multi-award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer when “She Unnames Them” (1985) appeared on a single page of The New Yorker, a feminist speculation about what might have happened in the Garden of Eden.1
In Le Guin’s short story, Eve takes back the names given to the animals by Adam, since the animals do not need the names. Like many couples through the ages, Le Guin’s Adam and Eve sometimes work at cross-purposes. By Eve’s account, “talk was getting us nowhere.”
Le Guin’s Eve does not take anyone’s name without their consent. Each species gets to decide if it wants to be unnamed. The story begins in the midst of this process: “Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element.”
Eve intends to take down artificial barriers between herself and the other creatures, but the outcome is “somewhat more powerful” than expected. She finds “that attraction was now all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food.” Still, she continues what she has started.
When the time comes to give back her own name, Eve lacks the words to explain herself to Adam. Fortunately, he is busy and gives her only a fraction of his attention. “Put it down over there, OK?” he says of Eve’s attempt to return the gift of her name.
As she slips out of the garden, full of poetic awareness of her connectedness to all living things (except Adam and his F/father), she acknowledges that her words “must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house.” The consequence of unnaming all the creatures, including herself, is that it becomes very difficult to express herself in language.
This is not to say that language is the problem.
Among the matriarchal yaks, language works perfectly well as a medium of communication and compromise. Some yaks are ready to give back their name, but others dissent. Le Guin’s description of the decision-making process offers a vision of how democracy might work . . . with a feminist fantasy writer in charge:
A faction of yaks . . . protested. They said that “yak” sounded right . . . They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves . . . After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw, their agreement was reached and the designation “yak” was returned to the donor.
As though they had been studying George Washington, the yaks do not allow factions to break up the union of the species. Important as this example might be to illustrate a functioning democracy, Le Guin gives only a few sentences to the yaks’ summer-long debate. She acknowledges that language, well applied, can mediate political consensus, and she draws attention to this part of the story with the amusing “faction of yaks.” But this fantasy of a well-run democracy is only a sidebar to the more pressing problem of Le Guin’s Eden.
The original sin of this story is human forgetfulness of the natural unity of all life. Le Guin traces our human misuse of language (to divide and rank, to defend factions) all the way back to Adam’s act of choosing names in the Garden. What if, asks this fantasy, we go back to the Garden, and put language to different uses than mastery and differentiation?
Le Guin admits of two life-enhancing uses for language.
Under the influence of wise leadership (the “councils of elderly females”), language can be used for the discussion of ideas necessary to mutual understanding and an informed, deliberative democracy.
What’s left—language without domination—is simply poetry.
“She Unnames Them” offers a speculative fiction writer’s account of what consensual democracy might feel like when language is not used to sort, divide, and entrench factions, but instead used for respectful deliberation and poetry—nothing else.
To Eve, the result is disorienting and enchanting. Choosing her words with the care of a poet, Eve exits the Garden with “new,” “slow,” and “tentative” awareness of “branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.” It feels strange to make way without trees or sun, but Eve is “far closer” to the other creatures than before, and her acute attention represents a new way of relating to the world.
“She Unnames Them” is more than a whimsical revision of the Garden of Eden story from Genesis. It is also a feminist manifesto for the use of language. In this fantasy, respectful understanding and poetic enchantment are its proper uses. Nothing else.
A one-paragraph shortened version of “She Unnames Them” is available on The New Yorker website at no cost. The full, one-page version is available to New Yorker subscribers in the digital archive. (Click “View article” in the link above to reach the subscription page.) Unofficial copies may sometimes be found online with a simple search, but the work is too recent to be out of copyright, so I will not link anything unofficial here. Instead, I will quote enough above that you understand the story’s usefulness and appeal. I do recommend reading it in full, if you are able.
A wonderful and even exciting way of viewing language and its purpose. Anti-devisive. A plus-vote for the feminine view of things. Hurray! AND, "a faction of yaks" has taken up a spot in my brain and it is waiting for opportunities to be used, mainly to amuse. Thank you for the writing.
“A faction of yaks protested.” Haaa! What a wonderful phrase. I love Ursula le Guin but had never heard that before. Love it!