This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are after—simply seeing, really seeing, really being aware. Which means you’re recognizing the things around you more deeply, but they also seem new. So the seeing-as-new and recognition are really the same thing.[12]
Learning to argue with Tolstoy:
Q: You said you used to be too respectful to disagree with Tolstoy but after you got into your sixties your faculty of respect atrophied and you began to ask rude questions of Tolstoy. What were they?
LE GUIN: “Why did you say ‘all happy families are alike’?” You know, the famous beginning of Anna Karenina. What a ridiculous thing to say. Show me two happy families that are alike. Show me two happy families.
Q: That’d be a good start, to find them and compare them!
LE GUIN: Right, yes. There are families that are happy from time to time, I grew up in one. But the idea of them being “a happy family” or a family that is continuously happy… what are you talking about, Tolstoy? I think he got a good first sentence, it sounded good, he couldn’t let it go.[13]
How our uncertain reality requires new storytellers:
One of the American science-fiction writers I admire most is Philip K. Dick, and Philip K. Dick’s world involves immense tracts of pure insanity. It’s a world which is always in danger of falling to pieces. It is an accurate picture of what is going on in a lot of people’s heads and how the world actually does affect us—this weird, disjointed, unexpected world we’re living in now. Well now, Phil Dick reflects that by using a sane, matter-of-fact prose to describe the completely insane things that happen in his novels. It is a way of mirroring reality.[14]
As she grew older, she became even more irreverent. Here, a year before her death, she takes on a question from the Times Literary Supplement, “What will your field look like 25 years from now?”:
My field? What is my field, I wonder. My favorite field is the one below the barn at the old ranch in California. I hope in twenty-five years it looks just the way it does now, all wild oats and chicory and foxtail and voles and jackrabbits and quail.[15]
Life is a journey back to where you started from, Le Guin always said. True voyage is return. When you get there, you might know a little more than when you began.
Isn’t the real question this: Is the work worth doing? Am I, a human being, working for what I really need and want—or for what the State or the advertisers tell me I want? Do I choose? I think that’s what anarchism comes down to. Do I let my choices be made for me, and so go along with the power game, or do I choose, and accept the responsibility for my choice? In other words, am I going to be a machine-part, or a human being?[16]
I’m reading A Wizard of Earthsea again, this time aloud, to my nine-year-old daughter. I still have the same well-traveled copy of the book I bought in 1975, although it is beginning to disintegrate. We’ve made it to the part where Ged, whose arrogance has caused him to let loose a monstrous shadow creature on the world, is sailing to confront the dragon. Lily wants to know why Ged has to fight the dragon instead of making friends with it, and why all the wizards are men. I tell her Le Guin eventually had the same questions, and that the sequels show a different picture of life in Earthsea.
The book has shifted for me again. As a teenager I saw it as a heroic adventure tale. During my brief stint as a war correspondent it was a parable of power. Now it is a book about reckoning with oneself, about how to live fully and honestly. Ged’s only hope for survival is to turn the tables on his shadowy pursuer, to hunt the hunter, to take back the world. It is a message that seems particularly potent at this troubled moment in our country, one that Le Guin echoed in her 2014 National Book Foundation lifetime achievement acceptance speech:
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
THE GIFT OF PLACE
INTERVIEW BY THE 10 POINT 5 EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE
10 POINT 5 MAGAZINE
SPRING 1977
Interview conducted by Karen McPherson, Peter Jensen, Alison Halderman, David Zeltzer, and Karen Kramer
PETER JENSEN: You write science fiction. Do you have any particular vision of the future?
URSULA K. LE GUIN: The thing about science fiction is, it isn’t really about the future. It’s about the present. But the future gives us great freedom of imagination. It’s like a mirror. You can see the back of your own head.
KAREN MCPHERSON: You’ve said that writing science fiction is sometimes like performing “thought experiments.” You establish a set of conditions and then see where they lead. For instance, in The Dispossessed you set up the conditions of an anarchist society, almost as though you’re working in a laboratory. Can you actually learn about anarchism from this—whether and how it could work? Its strengths and problems?
LE GUIN: Sure. Calling it a “thought experiment” is maybe a little scientific, clinical. When I said that, I was grasping at respectability. But it is a process, a technique. I used it fairly consciously in The Left Hand of Darkness. I wanted to see what would happen in an androgynous society. The Dispossessed was less experimental. I went into it thinking I knew where it would lead. But in The Left Hand of Darkness I kept getting stuck, because although I’d worked hard trying to plan out that world, I wasn’t sure how an androgynous person would think. And I would wonder: What would Estraven’s reactions be here? So I’d sit back and say all right, I won’t plan what I’m going to write next, and quite often one of those myths would come out. I can only interpret it by saying it was my unconscious instructing me as to how androgynes think. Anyway, whenever I’d written one of those myths I would put it aside and go on, and I would have gotten over this hump or this knot in the story. I didn’t intend to include them. They were just my problem-solving devices, but then when the book was done, and I looked at them, I thought, Well gee, some of them are kind of nice in themselves, and they might help other people read the book, so I did put most of them in. I was so deeply into that world while I was writing that book that I could even write in Karhidish. I could write poetry in Karhidish.
ALISON HALDERMAN: How did you conceive of the landscape in Earthsea?
LE GUIN: That’s a big question. You’re kind of getting at what fantasy creation is. I cannot say I invented it. That’s not what it feels like. It feels like discovering it. You’ve got this place inside yourself which is an ocean with a lot of islands in it. Islands with these peculiar people. And you find out about them as you write about them. It is certainly related to dreaming, or to deliberate fantasy in the psychologist’s sense. Not daydreaming, which is just wandering. But it’s a very odd business, and I can’t explain it.
12
“Ursula K. Le Guin, The Art of Fiction No. 221,”
13
14
Irv Broughton,
15
“Twenty Questions with Ursula K. Le Guin,”