Sadler's Lectures

Ursula K Leguin, Tehanu - Spark, Tenar's Failed Son - Sadler's Lectures

This lecture discusses the science fiction and fantasy author, Ursula K. Leguin's novel, Tehanu, the fourth of six Earthsea books

It focuses specifically on the character Spark, Tenar's son, who was away on a boat crew, but who comes home and displays himself as an underdeveloped, entitled man, to the great disappointment of his mother.

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Duration:: 15m
Broadcast on:: 18 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Sadler Lectures Podcast. Responding to popular demand, I'm converting my philosophy videos into sound files you can listen to anywhere you can take an MP3. If you like what you hear and want to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. I hope you enjoy this lecture. In chapter 13 of her fourth Earthsea novel to Hanu, Ursula K. Le Guine, narrates a set of encounters between a mother and her son who has come back from applying his fare of being a sailor, on a ship that has a disreputable function, perhaps a pirate ship, perhaps not as we're gonna see. And the reason why this is such an important encounter is because her son Spark is really a stand-in for a sort of failure of manhood in this story. And Tenar takes it to heart as her own failure. And I think that in large respect, the novel to Hanu, thematizes the relations between women and men. And we can see Spark in so many other people, not only in the Earthsea universe, but even in our own cultures as well. So a bit of backstory here first. Tenar, who is the main character in the second novel, who's from the Kargish lands. She's actually a priestess, Arha, the Eaten One. She regains her name back, Ged in her managed to escape, to reunite the ring of Eryth Akpa, which holds out the possibility of restoring a kind of unity and order and function to Earthsea. And then she stays after they go to Haavnur and present the ring. She comes back to Gaunt, stays with Ged's old teacher, Ojian, and then decides on a life for herself, taking a name, a use name, Golha. She marries the farmer Flint, and she has two children, a daughter, Apple, and a son Spark. These being, of course, their use names, not their true names. Apple ends up marrying, and she is a important secondary character in this story. She meets her mother at the port when her mother, Tenar is coming in on the great ship with the king, and she's sort of a stable character. Spark, however, goes off to sea. And at the time that the novel begins, Tenar hasn't seen him for years. He doesn't even know that his father has died years back. Flint himself will die on the farm, and Tenar will tell that story to Spark. So she becomes the widow, Golha, and she manages the farm as that widow, and that's where the story begins, and she still has that status when Spark returns early on in chapter 13. So I'm gonna read a little bit of this. Even with Ged to help her all her thoughts and days went into the business of the farm, he shared the housework with her as Flint had not, but Flint had been a farmer, and Ged was not. He learned fast, but there was a lot to learn. They worked, there was little time for talk now. At the day's end, there was supper together, and bed together, and sleep, and wake at dawn, and back to work. And so round and round, like the wheel of a water mill, rising full and emptying, the days like the bright water following. And so this is a very nice routine for Ged and Tenar, who have known each other since. He was a young man, and she was a girl, and finally have gotten together, right? He's pretending essentially to be a farm hand. Then we have something happen. Hello mother, so the thin fellow at the Farmyard Gate. She thought it was Lark's eldest, and said, "What brings you by, lad?" Then she looked back at him across the clucking chickens on the parade and geese. "Spark!" she cried, and scattered the poultry running to him. "Well, well," he said, "don't carry on." He let her embrace him and stroke his face. He came down and sat down in the kitchen at the table. "Have you eaten? Did you see Apple?" "I could eat." She rummaged in the well-stocked larder. "What ship are you on? Still the gall?" "No." A pause. "My ships broke up." She turned in horror. "Racked? No," he smiled without humor. Crews broke up. Kingsmen took her over. "But it wasn't a pirate ship? No." Then why? Said the captain was running some goods they wanted, he said unwillingly. He was thin as ever, but looked older, tan, dark, lank-haired with a long, narrow face like flint, but still narrower, harder. So we've got this, you know, homecoming, and it seems kind of nice at first. And then there's a little bit of reticence, a little bit of foreboding. He was on a ship and something sketchy was happening. It's not a pirate ship as such, but there's a reason why the king's men broke up the crew and why he's back in town. And then he asked, "Where's Dad?" Tender stood still. "You didn't stop by your sisters?" "No," he said indifferent. "Flint died three years ago." She said of a stroke in the fields on the path up from the laming pens, clear brook frown found him. It was three years ago. And so he's kind of indifferent to things. He doesn't talk much. You notice that in the sentences, he doesn't even speak in full sentences. He's a person who's unwilling to give things, and he's being very cagey about what's going on. He asked, "So who's been running the farm? "What's that to you, son?" She asked him gently, but dryly. "It's mine," he said, in a rather similar tone. After a minute, Tender got up and cleared his dishes away. So it is. You can stay, of course. He said very awkwardly for attempting to joke, but he was not a joking man. And then he starts asking questions about who's still here, who's not. So he's clearly asserting his ownership over the farm and ignoring everything that his mother has done along with all the other people and just thinking about how it's his. Tender thinks that he's like his father. She asks him a question. And this is kind of a revelatory incident. He says, "Are you here for a stay then? "I might be." So Flint had answered her questions for 20 years, denying her right to ask them by never answering yes or no, maintaining a freedom based on her ignorance, a poor, narrow sort of freedom, she thought. And we see this with so many people. They have a need to preserve their own little, tawdry freedom, their own little petty freedom. And they do so by not behaving like a decent human being, engaging with other people, speaking straightly with them, allowing them to make plans, allowing them to engage you in a relationship. It's a way of trying to maintain control by keeping other people ignorant. There's another thing that's said about him there as well that I think is completely on about him. She says, "Poor lad, you're crew broken up, "your father dead, strangers in your house all in a day. "You'll want some time to get used to it. "I'm sorry, my son, but I'm glad you're here. "I thought of you often on the seas and the storms in winter. "She's behaving towards him as a parent. "He said nothing. "He had nothing to offer and was unable to accept." That is revelatory of the kind of person we're dealing with. He has nothing to give, he accepts nothing. Again, trying to maintain his own freedom against other people in a kind of solitude and loneliness. What he does expect, however, is to be served. And there's also an incident there where he's very scoffish and skeptical about Thero being his sister, a sister by adoption. He can't see what everybody else can see in Thero. But he does expect to be served. He wanted breakfast the next day and expected it to be served to him. His father, I would have been waited on by mother, wife, daughter. Was he less a man than his father? Was she to prove it to him? She served him as meal and cleared it away from him and went back to the orchard, right? And Spark goes off to join Clearbrook and Tiff, and he stayed mostly with them as the day passed. The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenner, with the two old men who'd been there all their lives. His father's men took him about and told him how they managed it all and truly believed. They were managing it all and shared their belief with him. So what we have are the guys and they're not really doing any real work, and then we have Ged and the women who are doing the real work of the farm. And this should be a familiar picture for so many of us, not just with farms, but households, businesses. It doesn't necessarily have to be men and women, but they would say men are a little bit more prone to this unless they are in certain institutions. Ged has been a mage. We might think of other cases where men will take on work and not call it women's work. For instance, when I was in the army, if you tried to tell people that cooking, cleaning, ironing, all those sorts of things, where women's work and you weren't gonna do it, these very, very tough men would look at you as if you're insane because it's not women's work, it's work, and the same thing for a farm. So what we have here is a young man who is rather entitled, who doesn't have a lot to offer and who hangs out with the other people who don't as well. Tenor comes to feel anger about this, but she also feels shame. Shame at how her young man, Spark, has turned out. Her daughter has turned out to be quite a decent person. Spark is not, and what we see in this discussion is she in a way tests him, right? The next morning, Spark was up early to breakfast with him for he was going fishing with old Tiff. He got up from the table saying with a better grace than usual, "I'll bring a mess of fish for supper." Tenor had made resolves overnight. She said, "Wait, you can clear off the table, Spark. Set the dishes in the sink and put water on them. They'll be washed with the supper things." Notice what she's not saying. You have to wash the dishes. Just pick up your dishes, put them in the sink, put a little water on them. Very trivial thing to do, he won't do it. Why not? He says, "That's women's work." And she says, "It's anybody's work who eats in this kitchen." "Not mine," he said flatly and went out. She followed him, so she's gonna press the issue. Hawks, meaning Ged, but not yours. He merely nodded, going on across the yard. And she says to herself, "It's too late, failed, failed. She can feel the lines in her face stiff beside the mouth between the eyes. You can water his stone, but it won't grow." Ged says, "You have to start them when they're young and tender like me because at 15 years old, he was already doing those things. As a matter of fact, with OG and there wasn't any, oh, that's women's work to do either, right?" Spark refuses to do the most trivial things. And Gohar, a tenor, says to Ged a little bit earlier, "My turn, my turn to lose what I was proudest of." Ged says, "What have you lost? My son, the son I did not bring up to be a man. I failed, I failed him." Ged did not try to argue with her or persuade her out of her grief. He asked, "Do you think he'll stay?" And she says, "Yes, he's afraid to try to go back to see. He didn't tell me the truth or not all the truth about his ship." He was second mate. I suppose he was involved in carrying stolen goods. Secondhand piracy, I don't care. Gonta sailors are all half pirate, but he lies about it. He lies. He's jealous of you, a dishonest, envious man. So she's seeing her son as somebody who came from her, who she raised, but has turned into a failure as a man. A failure in many respects. It's not just the entitlement and unwillingness to do women's work, you know, labeling things as beneath him, expecting to be waited on. It's also the lying, lying to the people that he should be least lying to his own family. He's got no center. He has no, as we say, moral compass. And you can't rely on him for anything. And this produces a grief, a shame, a anger on her part. Now Ged tries to put a good face on it. He says, frightened, I think, and not wicked, and it is his farm. And she says, "Then he can have it, and it may be as generous to him as in she's cursing him." And Ged says, "No, dear love. Don't speak, don't say the evil word." He was so urgent, so passionately earnest that her anger turned right about into the love that was its source. And she cried, "I wouldn't curse him or this place. I didn't mean it. Only it makes me so sorry, so ashamed. I am so sorry, Ged." Ged says, "No, no, no. My dear, I don't care what the boy thinks of me, but he's very hard on you." And she says, "And Thero, he treats her like. He said to me, what did she do to look like that? What did she do?" And they talk about going off together, perhaps goat herding or something like that, because they're not gonna stay there. Then something forces the issue. Moss is sick. She needs to be taken care of up by Ojian. And so they decide that they're going to leave. And she tells Spark, "We'll be off to Ray Albee. First thing, tomorrow, son, Hawk and Thero and I." He looked a little frightened. "Just go off like that?" "So you went, so you came," said his mother. "Now look here, Spark. This is your father's money box. There's seven ivory pieces in it, and those credit counters from Old Bridgman. He'll never pay. He's never got anything to pay with. These four Andrean pieces flint got from selling sheep skins to the ship's outfitter. The three Hovorian ones are what Tholi paid us for. I had your father buy that farm, and I helped him clear it and sell it. I'll take those three pieces before I've earned them. The rest and the farm is yours. You're the masters. And so they're leaving now. And he says, "Take it all. I don't want it." And she says, "I don't need it, but I thank you, my son. Keep the four pieces when you marry. Call them my gift to your wife." Spark says, "When are you coming back?" And she says, "I don't know, my dear. If you need me, I'll come." Spark, "You can do something for me. Go see your sister and tell her I've been to thee. I've gone back to the overfell if she wants me to send word." So she is giving him what he wants, but he doesn't want it the way that she's giving it. He asserted ownership over the farm, but he assumed that she would just stay there waiting on him hand and foot, and instead she's gonna move on with her life. She reminds him that, "You left like this. I can leave like this as well." She's being very fair with him, and he is taking it about as well as he can. There's not really a solid relationship there, and is it Tenar's fault that he turned out the way that he did? Perhaps she bears some responsibility, but probably not. He's a grown man. He decides what he does and what his character will be. So this is a very interesting vignette that we see, and Le Guine is telling us something about men in Earth see and men in our own world through presenting Spark in this way. Special thanks to all of my Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. You can find me on Twitter @philos470 on YouTube at the Gregory B. Sadler channel, and on Facebook on the Gregory B. Sadler page. Once again, to support my work, go to patreon.com/sadler. Above all, keep studying these great philosophical works. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (light music) (gentle music)