Disenchantment of Power

Whoever knows the true name of another has power over him. Ursula K. Le Guin already explored this consideration in her novel "Earthsea," published in the 1970s. In this fantastic epic, she penetrates deep beneath the surface of the everyday and into the levels of meaning of words and naming. Thus, the protagonist, a young magician, soon realizes, "For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing." Knowing someone's "true name" refers to something essential, the very being of another being, not a banal given name.

Le Guin echoes this idea of a powerful connection that comes through naming in "She Unnamed Her." Susanne Opfermann has included this text in her inspiring collection "Encounters with (Other) Animals," published in "Tierstudien" by Berlin-based neofelis Verlag. The motif of exercising power through naming reappears here. In it, Le Guin reports on the abuse of power by humans over the animals they name - but actually on the dissolution of this power relationship. By ridding animals of their names, which have arisen from a kind of tunnel vision of certain characteristics. A wide variety of animals appear - whales, dolphins, yaks, cats, insects, fish, and horses - and all are stripped of their names "Cattle, sheep, pigs, donkeys, mules, and goats, along with chickens, geese, and turkeys enthusiastically agreed to give their names back to the people who, as they put it, owned them."

What at first seems like a kind of alienation crystallizes as an act of liberation. Through naming and defining that has served purely human interests, animals have been forced into the spell of exploitation, subjugation, and objectification. Now they are being redeemed from this relationship. "Most accepted namelessness with the same utter indifference with which they had accepted and ignored their names for so long." The first-person narrator of the text reflects on her feelings after unnaming the animals - she feels closer to them now than she did while separated by human-given names. More unprotected, too, in a way.

The hierarchy has become uncertain, shaky. "They seemed much closer to me than when their names had stood like a partition between us: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one and the same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to smell each other's scents, to feel or rub or caress each other's scales or skin or feathers or fur, to taste each other's blood or flesh, to warm each other - that attraction was now one with fear, and the hunter was indistinguishable from the hunted, nor the eater from the eaten." An enigmatic smile may accompany the brief scene in which the narrator's I says goodbye to her husband Adam: " 'Well then, goodbye, dear. I hope the key to the garden turns up again. (...) I'm going now. With the-', I faltered and finally said: 'With them, you know', and left." She can no longer, she feels, "just babble away as usual and take everything for granted." The end of what is supposedly taken for granted is the end of a worldview. This is where the space for the new opens up.

The quotes of Ursula K. Le Guin's text have been translated from the German version. The Original of Le Guins ?She unnames them“ was first published in?The New Yorker, January 21, 1985

https://neofelis-verlag.de/verlagsprogramm/literatur-theatertexte/literatur/1057/begegnungen-mit-anderen-tieren