Hi, my name's Shelley, I'm a grad student in Religious Studies. I've been
having a great time lurking on this list, but recently I stumbled across a
book that seems relevant to a query Rudy posted a couple weeks back. If I
recall correctly, she posted looking for books with themes addressing gender
and ESP.
A couple nights ago, I started reading _And Chaos Died_ , a 1970's novel by
Joanna Russ. In typical Russ-ian style, the narrative isn't exactly
straightforward, but near as I can tell (reading it as I am in fragments
during that last bleary half hour before I fall asleep), the story seems to
be about a quasi-human colony where the inhabitants possess Psi-abilities of
every kind--- telepathy, telekinesis, tele-portation, etc.
(small spoilers below)
The story is told from the point of view of a man who crash landed into the
colony while on a commercial space-flight, and the story seems to be partly
the tale of his own psi abilities unfolding as he attempts to relate to and
communicate with the colonists. His primary relationship is with Evne, a
woman colonist, and though I haven't been paying attention to the gender
themes in the book, I'm sure, knowing Joanna Russ, that there are some.
The title is taken from Chuang-tzu (?) and there seems to be a theme of
attention and boundaries between world and self woven into her descriptions
of the colonists' abilities. Samuel Delany wrote the blurb on the back of
the paperback, and like the Delany novels I've read, there's a preoccupation
with language, power and domination in this story. Russ contrasts the two
escape pod survivors, and their dependence on speech, with the telepathic
communication of the colonists, implying different modes of power and
control that are available through language vs. telepathic communication.
I'm not even half-way through the novel yet, but the line of dialogue that
has stayed with me so far is when the pov character Jai tells one of the
colonists: "Technical matters...You need words for technical matters..." Set
in such close proximity to a scene where the Evne is explaining to Jai that
plants and hills have thoughts and feelings, I wonder if Russ is using this
exchange to highlight how language works for us to distance, manipulate and
control that which we can name. For some reason, It makes me think somehow
of Le Guin's mind-speak in _Left Hand of Darkness_; though mind-speak is
still heard as language, one cannot lie or deceive when speaking
telepathically.
I don't know what your student is reading for the ESP paper, Rudy, but if
she can get her hands on a copy of the Russ novel, it might be worth her
time.
Michelle.Wolfe@cgu.edu
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I love the smell of scholar-sweat in the morning.
(with apologies to Xena)
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