“She Unnames Them” is a mâshâl (mâshâl − a Hebrew word for a linguistic construct like a parable, satire or prophecy, but in the ancient sense of language in which words act in the world; so mâshâlim that epitomize past situations educate their hearers in significant ways and satires and prophecies may will future outcomes) in the sense of a light-toned, highly serious comic satire. “She Unnames Them” ends Buffalo Gals, and, again, it is, in this context − and helping greatly to establish the context − an (anti)Prophecy, a mâshâl of unmaking: a figurative unbuilding of walls. In this beautiful funny little story, Le Guin is as sincere as the authors of the “J-Code” in their story of the making: the myth of the Creation of Eden. Initially, in the J-Code version of Creation, you have a pretty sterile world, because Yahweh had not yet created farmers and gardeners nor watered the earth. So the Eternal gathers up dust (‘adamah) and animates it with “the breath of life,” making ‘adam, “man ... a living being” − i.e., dust plus breath (ruach, anima, spiritus). The body/soul business is a later importation, and, I strongly agree with Le Guin, a very bad idea. Then,
The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden, to till it and tend it. And the Lord God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild beasts; but for Adam no fitting helper was found. So the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man; and, while he slept, He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib that He had taken from the man into a woman; and He brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This one at last
Is bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh.
This one shall be called Woman,
for from man was she taken.”
Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh. (Gen. 2.18-24; Tenakh).
In the more sophisticated P-code (or E-code) version of creation, God makes men and women together (and perhaps hermaphroditic) and just comes right out and gives us rule, dominion, mastery (Gen. 1.26-28). The more primitive Eden story is more subtle and yokes together consciousness, dominion, and an ambiguous marriage, soon to become fully patriarchal (Gen. 3.16).
“It is not good for man to be alone,” and in the J-code version of the creation story, there’s just Adam, in the beginning, and the garden. So the Eternal makes the beasts and birds, and in the first act of human consciousness Adam names them. Which gives him dominion over the beasts: “Because the name is the thing… and the true name is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing” [Le Guin U.K. The Rule of Names // The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. – NY: Harper and Row, 1975. – 303 p. – P. 76]. The naming, however, does not give him a proper companion and “fitting helper,” so the Eternal does the rib trick and gives the man a woman. The woman is an afterthought and created to be a helper, but is still accepted by a rather poetic and punning Adam as “bone of my bones / And flesh of my flesh.” And, in an image of innocence, “The two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame” (Gen. 2.24).
The Hebrew for “naked,” though, ‘arummim, leads to ‘arum, “shrewd” in the next verse, where we learn that “…the serpent was the shrewdest of all the wild beasts that the Lord God had made” (3.1). And the rest of the story is the Fall and the establishment first of explicit patriarchal rule of Adam over Eve then expulsion from the Garden, then the birth of Cain and Abel-and then murder and, by Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel, civilization, and civilization’s hubristic discontents.
The first act of complicity, then, with the monotheistic Father/Creator God was Man’s unilaterally naming the beasts. Woman undoes the job, in Le Guin’s version, and does it democratically, indeed, with good anarchistic participation: “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 particular grace and alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element” − water, the favorite element of the Daoists, perhaps, in its yielding strength, and large bodies of water, representing Being, the Dao that can be named (if we weren’t giving up naming). There is a problem with yaks for a bit: “Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats or fleas that have been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name.” But it’s a name “The council of elderly females finally agreed that… might be useful to others” but was totally “redundant” from “the yak point of view”: they didn’t need a name for themselves and had never used it [Le Guin U.K. Buffalo Gals And Other Animal Presences. – Santa Barbara: Capra P., 1987. Collection. – 196 p. – P. 194].
Pets were a problem, especially among the “verbally talented individuals” like “some parrots, lovebirds, ravens, and mynahs” who “insisted that their names were important to them.” The solution here was getting them to understand “that the issue was precisely one of individual choice, and that anybody who wanted to be called Rover, or Froufrou… or even Birdie in the personal sense, was perfectly free to do so.” What she unnames is not the personal name any animal likes to name itself but “the lower case (or, as regards German creatures, uppercase) generic appellations poodle, parrot, dog, or bird and all the Linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail.” The insects and fish give up their names easily, especially the fish, whose names “dispersed from them in silence throughout the oceans… without a trace” [P. 195]. All this work of unNaming done, she feels closer to the beasts, far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear{sic}. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell one another’s smells, feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm, − {sic} that attraction was all one with the fear, and the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food [P. 195−96].
In fairness, she, the Woman, will not make an exception for herself, so she goes to Adam and says, “You and your father lent me this − gave it to me, actually. It’s been really useful, but it doesn’t exactly seem to fit very well lately. But thanks very much! It’s really been very useful.” She is embarrassed (it is awkward to return gifts), but, fortunately perhaps, Adam “was not paying much attention,” and responds to what I’ll call The Great Divorce with only “‘Put it down over there, OK?’ and went on with what he was doing.” One of the reasons she, the Woman, leaves is “talk was getting us nowhere,” but she had been prepared to talk things over. She “fiddled around a little, but he continued to do what he was doing” − doing being what one with dominion does − “and take no notice of anything else. At last I said, ‘Well, goodbye, dear. I hope that garden key turns up.’” And Adam, oblivious, asks “When’s dinner?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m going now. With the −” I hesitated, and finally said, “With them, you know,” and went on. In fact I had only just then realized how hard it would have been to explain myself. I could not chatter away as I used to do, taking it all for granted. My words now must be as slow, as new, as single, as tentative as the steps I took going down the path away from the house, between the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining [P. 196].
Eve has given up her name, her share of dominion, and Adam and the household of ‘adam, returning to the woods or forest or line of trees she cannot dismissively name “forest,” or whatever. She has given up the taxons and binomial nomenclature of Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78), and, more deeply the universals and categories of Western thought going back to at least Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Most deeply, she has redone the Western myth underlying all such naming in the Judeo-Christian-Rationalist West. Now she must face the world face to face − a truly radical Nominalist − without abstractions, and Le Guin values such immediate, unmediated contact with the world, however much to the rational (masculinist?) mind, this relationship with what is may seem like unconsciousness.
Eve’s act, seen this way, is also a mâshâl for women’s giving up the ease of writing that comes with working within a tradition they have grown up with: “The beauty of your own tradition,” Le Guin has written, “is that it carries you. It flies, and you ride it… It frames your thinking and put words in your mouth. If you refuse to ride, …you lose that wonderful fluency.” If women are to create their own tradition, they must drop men’s categories, which means, for at least a while, “…you have to stumble along… like a foreigner in your own country, amazed and troubled by things you see, not sure of the way, not able to speak with authority.” I think the lesson is that, like this re-visioned Eve, women must make the attempt in order to “to speak your own wisdom” [Le Guin U.K. Earthsea Revisioned. – Cambridge, MA: Children’s Literature New England, 1993. – 26 p. – P. 12].
[From Erlich R.D. Coyote’s Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin].