We, the People
Jul. 23rd, 2006 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustA while back I stumbled across the tail end of a conversation between ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mevennen and fjm: they had, I think, been talking about Zenna Henderson. Her SF stories fall for me into the class of Books I Loved When I First Read Them Long Ago, And Don't Dare Re-read: tales of People with mysterious abilities living hidden in the depths of rural America, described vividly and with great sweetness. That was the problem: would that sweetness retain its emotional power, or would it have become cloying in the decades since I first read the stories?
Bibliographical note: the People first appeared in short stories. I have two collections, Pilgrimage (Panther, 1965, containing material with original copyright dates throughout the 1950s) and No Different Flesh (Penguin, 1973 - with an original copyright of 1966). In each of these, a linking narrative connects the original short stories into something that can be presented as a novel. There is a more recent collection, Ingathering, which brings together these two volumes, plus some individual stories.
Each linking narrative presents an outsider or outsiders encountering the People, and, as different individuals tell their stories, gradually realising who they are and what they can do. In Pilgrimage, Lea is suicidal, but Karen rescues her and takes her to hear a sequence of life stories recalled with the extraordinary memory which is one of the abilities of the People: finally she comes to realise that she is not alone, and learns why these gatherings are being held. The framing narrative is somewhat artificial, but it does have some structure of its own. In the later book, Mark and Meris rescue a lost child, and as a reward are told stories by visitors from the People, this time drawing not only on their own memories, but on a combination of group consciousness and race memory, "something we can't quite explain" which allows someone to express the last memories of her great-grandmother, including memories of events after her parting from all the rest of the People. There seems no need for this awkward, strained device, other than to justify the linking together of pieces which work perfectly well as independent stories.
This astonishing power of memory is central to who the People are: exiles from a dead planet who, generation after generation, retain the memory of their home, its flowers and fruits, its traditions and beliefs. Their exodus is the most traditionally SFnal aspect of the story, yet it is linked to the most unusual. The people are deeply religious - or rather, matters which on Earth depend on faith and belief are, for the people, a question of direct knowledge. Just as they sense each other's presence, and are able to communicate telepathically, so they are aware of a divine Presence, and death is, for them, a happy time when they are Called back into that Presence. The stories are profoundly religious, but hard to pin down, which is perhaps why so many faiths are able to see their own reflection in them. The People quote extensively from the Old Testament, to express, among other things, their sense of exile. Zenna Henderson herself was born and raised as a Latter-day Saint, but in later life moved outside that church.
This is not a world view for which I have much sympathy: but it is completely consistent with the depiction of the People, and I was relieved to discover that I did not find it any more embarrassing than I had remembered. I did, however, find it undramatic, undoing any tension that the stories created: bad things happen, but in the end all is well, the good people resist temptation, find true love and the support of the People, and, if the worst comes to the worst, make good deaths and return to the Presence. There is conflict, but it can usually be resolved; parents and children work out their differences, a rare selfish adult sees the error of her ways. The prevailing emotions are melancholy and joy.
A similarly anti-dramatic function is played by the wide range of gifts enjoyed by the People: they communicate, they heal, they fly, they sense water and metal in the ground... Many of the stories deal with the recognition and use of each ability: the child who suffers the pain of anyone near her, and who must be taught to channel away the agony so that her empathy can serve to diagnose and to heal, the boy who wants to travel in space but lacks the skill to drive the spaceship by mental power. Professor Xavier might well set up a branch of his school in Cougar Canyon; or perhaps not, for the People might not approve of his pedagogical methods. But the People stories are, in their way, precursors of the superpowered mutants, with their adolescent difficulties. Their powers, too, have some of the flavour of magic: and not the most rigorously imagined magic, either, but the sort where new tricks can be produced as needed.
This kind of imagination is not Zenna Henderson's strong point. She doesn't do alien: Deluge shows the last days of the Home. Here the People are just like us with a few different names, plants, foodstuffs. David drinks from his "morning cup" at breakfast, but at a table with a table cloth and dishes to be cleared after (with a snap of the fingers; Simon has left six odd sandals floating above his bed).
Despite the rituals, this suburban planet is less unfamiliar than the rural America to which the exiles travel: they seem to take off in the 1950s, and land in the 1890s. Precise dates are not specified, but Angels Unawares implies that the People first arrived in the nineteenth century, and the main characters are the children and grandchildren of those first arrivals. But the People are long-lived, so those generations are not a certain indication of time elapsed. Their lives seem old-fashioned, because they live in rural backwaters, quietly, to avoid drawing attention to their communities, and they cling to old-fashioned virtues of neighbourliness.
There is a gentle pleasure in these tales of life in the south-west, of mining and survival and the need to find water in a dry year, of friends and relations scattered during the crossing but gradually gathered together, the scenery of the woods and mountains and the neighbours who know there is something odd about those folk further up the canyon, but don't interfere. Although such themes as interplanetary travel and alien skills are essential to the stories, they are not their main charm. Zenna Henderson's People are, finally, just people.
mevennen and fjm: they had, I think, been talking about Zenna Henderson. Her SF stories fall for me into the class of Books I Loved When I First Read Them Long Ago, And Don't Dare Re-read: tales of People with mysterious abilities living hidden in the depths of rural America, described vividly and with great sweetness. That was the problem: would that sweetness retain its emotional power, or would it have become cloying in the decades since I first read the stories?Bibliographical note: the People first appeared in short stories. I have two collections, Pilgrimage (Panther, 1965, containing material with original copyright dates throughout the 1950s) and No Different Flesh (Penguin, 1973 - with an original copyright of 1966). In each of these, a linking narrative connects the original short stories into something that can be presented as a novel. There is a more recent collection, Ingathering, which brings together these two volumes, plus some individual stories.
Each linking narrative presents an outsider or outsiders encountering the People, and, as different individuals tell their stories, gradually realising who they are and what they can do. In Pilgrimage, Lea is suicidal, but Karen rescues her and takes her to hear a sequence of life stories recalled with the extraordinary memory which is one of the abilities of the People: finally she comes to realise that she is not alone, and learns why these gatherings are being held. The framing narrative is somewhat artificial, but it does have some structure of its own. In the later book, Mark and Meris rescue a lost child, and as a reward are told stories by visitors from the People, this time drawing not only on their own memories, but on a combination of group consciousness and race memory, "something we can't quite explain" which allows someone to express the last memories of her great-grandmother, including memories of events after her parting from all the rest of the People. There seems no need for this awkward, strained device, other than to justify the linking together of pieces which work perfectly well as independent stories.
This astonishing power of memory is central to who the People are: exiles from a dead planet who, generation after generation, retain the memory of their home, its flowers and fruits, its traditions and beliefs. Their exodus is the most traditionally SFnal aspect of the story, yet it is linked to the most unusual. The people are deeply religious - or rather, matters which on Earth depend on faith and belief are, for the people, a question of direct knowledge. Just as they sense each other's presence, and are able to communicate telepathically, so they are aware of a divine Presence, and death is, for them, a happy time when they are Called back into that Presence. The stories are profoundly religious, but hard to pin down, which is perhaps why so many faiths are able to see their own reflection in them. The People quote extensively from the Old Testament, to express, among other things, their sense of exile. Zenna Henderson herself was born and raised as a Latter-day Saint, but in later life moved outside that church.
This is not a world view for which I have much sympathy: but it is completely consistent with the depiction of the People, and I was relieved to discover that I did not find it any more embarrassing than I had remembered. I did, however, find it undramatic, undoing any tension that the stories created: bad things happen, but in the end all is well, the good people resist temptation, find true love and the support of the People, and, if the worst comes to the worst, make good deaths and return to the Presence. There is conflict, but it can usually be resolved; parents and children work out their differences, a rare selfish adult sees the error of her ways. The prevailing emotions are melancholy and joy.
A similarly anti-dramatic function is played by the wide range of gifts enjoyed by the People: they communicate, they heal, they fly, they sense water and metal in the ground... Many of the stories deal with the recognition and use of each ability: the child who suffers the pain of anyone near her, and who must be taught to channel away the agony so that her empathy can serve to diagnose and to heal, the boy who wants to travel in space but lacks the skill to drive the spaceship by mental power. Professor Xavier might well set up a branch of his school in Cougar Canyon; or perhaps not, for the People might not approve of his pedagogical methods. But the People stories are, in their way, precursors of the superpowered mutants, with their adolescent difficulties. Their powers, too, have some of the flavour of magic: and not the most rigorously imagined magic, either, but the sort where new tricks can be produced as needed.
This kind of imagination is not Zenna Henderson's strong point. She doesn't do alien: Deluge shows the last days of the Home. Here the People are just like us with a few different names, plants, foodstuffs. David drinks from his "morning cup" at breakfast, but at a table with a table cloth and dishes to be cleared after (with a snap of the fingers; Simon has left six odd sandals floating above his bed).
Despite the rituals, this suburban planet is less unfamiliar than the rural America to which the exiles travel: they seem to take off in the 1950s, and land in the 1890s. Precise dates are not specified, but Angels Unawares implies that the People first arrived in the nineteenth century, and the main characters are the children and grandchildren of those first arrivals. But the People are long-lived, so those generations are not a certain indication of time elapsed. Their lives seem old-fashioned, because they live in rural backwaters, quietly, to avoid drawing attention to their communities, and they cling to old-fashioned virtues of neighbourliness.
There is a gentle pleasure in these tales of life in the south-west, of mining and survival and the need to find water in a dry year, of friends and relations scattered during the crossing but gradually gathered together, the scenery of the woods and mountains and the neighbours who know there is something odd about those folk further up the canyon, but don't interfere. Although such themes as interplanetary travel and alien skills are essential to the stories, they are not their main charm. Zenna Henderson's People are, finally, just people.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-23 11:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-23 11:41 pm (UTC)That said, I think I've read every one of them in the past but also haven't re-read them in some time.:)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 08:08 am (UTC)"It has been a quiet day in Graymalkin Lane..."
Having said that, maybe I should borrow them off you to have a read through.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 09:32 am (UTC)Oh, I wish I'd thought of that: that's perfect!
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 09:39 am (UTC)Oh well, feel free to steal the line for any future discussions about them.