Ararat by Zenna Henderson

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

 

I tried another zoom group on Monday; they’re reading at a rate of four stories a session through sci fi anthologies – now working on The Future is Female, edited by Lisa Yaszek. It is nice to talk about short stories, because it is possible for each person in the group to have them about equally in mind and well in mind – something much harder to accomplish with a book group. Also, if one just hates a story, one can have surprises as people find stuff in it that one couldn’t see. It’s great training.

 

The group re-introduced me to the world of “The People,” Zenna Henderson’s enviable humanoid aliens with powers, marooned in the backwaters and dark corners of earth after their ship exploded. I went through a phase of liking these stories very much – not so much the anthology’s choice, “Ararat”, but a story that seemed to me full of biblical longing, “Gilead”. All these stories are about people coming home, finding their people -- finding, that is, those people who understand and can value traits that, in most places, make them outcasts. It’s powerful stuff for gifted, alienated, neuro-divergent, and or queer kids.

 

Later, I came away from these books, partly because I saw them as wish-fulfillment fantasies, and dis-valued that, as a misuse of fantasy. To write a story in which a character says to you just what you have always wanted someone to say to you – qualifies as a psychological exercise, but not as a public thing.

 

Now, I’m not sure (of this, or, actually, of most things). It seems important and non-trivial to explain one’s wishes, to get complex wishes out into the marketplace of wishes. And Zenna Henderson’s wishes, unlike my Lone Ranger and Superman fantasies, are complex. There is the obvious starting point: magic powers, being special, being valuable. But she adds other things: one’s magic makes sense in the context of a community in which many other people have complementary powers, so that the magic binds the community together. Also, magic makes it possible for the community to persist as a stable, self-contained entity: the needs of the community can be served within the community, there is a depth of common exploration and growth that gives elders real authority and real power, and the basic categories of human life are clearly marked out by overwhelmingly obvious differences: one doesn’t have a problem finding one’s identity or place, because nature is set up to make identities clear to everyone all the time. One is a healer or a lifter or a seer, not by social convention but by obvious biological difference. 

 

This echoes, for me, the vision of the early Christian communities pictured in Acts and in Paul’s letters: the community is a body, and gifts are given to members for the welfare and upbuilding of the body, different gifts but the same spirit (I Corinthians 12, 4-11). Henderson, as a convert to the Mormon Church, participates in the 19^th Century American revival of enthusiasm for that vision, that package of inter-connected ideals.

 

I think of how this story would have hit my mother, a talented Mormon teenager growing up on a ranch a few miles outside of Scipio, Utah. She left enough writing that I have a clear picture of the pettiness and narrowness of this small town, where the religious and secular authorities were the same people and deviation was considered dangerous, where bullies got away with bullying, if they were well connected, where new ideas were suspect. I also see the intensity of family life on a ranch at the margins, the way people who worked together that hard came to care about each other. Such a teenager says, “I have to get out of here; it is suffocating me. And yet, everything I care about is here.” As more and more teenagers went away, small town ranch life could not endure. And yet, the sensitive ones among the teenagers who left knew what valuable things they were leaving – and thereby, eroding. It was a tragic situation. (World War II made the break easier, giving lots of kids patriotic and duty reasons to leave home, taking the decision out of their hands.)

 

I can imagine my mother wanting a set-up within which elders kept getting wiser, deep mysteries and profound growth were available right at home, a small community could supply its own spiritual and intellectual needs, and the natural questions one had growing up had easily accessible answers – God was right at hand, identities were written in the nature of things. That would be the sort of place one wouldn’t need to leave – and wouldn’t want to leave for long.

 

The discussion around this story made it very clear that this isn’t a utopia for everybody, that real uncertainty and real choice are important to some people, that some people would be uneasy in a world in which identities and metaphysical categories were obvious, clearly marked, uncontroversial. Even my mother might have ultimately found the world of The People confining, but I can imagine her dreaming dreams not unlike Henderson’s, as she confronted the reality that her kids would not stay home and farm, would move on to less secure lives than the ones she knew about.

 

It may be that the contemporary commitment to ideas about the fluidity of categories like gender, vocation, and authority will make these stories irrelevant fossils for readers going forward – relics of a time when people could imagine that their familiar categories were founded in cosmic principles, the unalterable will of God.

 

I wonder how Zenna Henderson felt, writing these stories. Was she expressing in a colorful and exaggerated way an experience of fulfillment and community that she had found, in her life within the Mormon Church? Was the mood perhaps bitter, instead: this is what would have to be true, for me to get all of what I want – and of course, the world is not like this?