MCPHERSON: You write a lot about dreams and reality in The Word for World Is Forest.
LE GUIN: Yes. The weird thing is after I wrote it Charles Tart sent me his book called Altered States of Consciousness and asked me if I knew anything about the Senoi tribe in Malaysia. An anthropologist in the 1930s went in and studied them—their culture was based on dreaming. But no one seems to have found them since, and I wonder if he dreamed them up. The Senoi use dreaming—they cultivate it. They are so close to my little green men! There are no tales of murder in that tribe. Their neighbors were warlike tribes but nobody would attack the Senoi because they were said to be magicians and sorcerers, although in fact they did not use magic—they used dreams. When they met at the breakfast table with their children, a little kid might say, “I dreamed that I fell,” and they’d answer, “How neat! Where did you fall and what did you see?” If he didn’t know where he fell to, he’d go back the next night and dream where he fell to. Or for instance if you meet a tiger in your dream there are all kinds of things you can do. You can let it eat you and see what that’s like, or you can eat the tiger. Or make friends with it. Jung wrote about the same sort of thing. When you meet a character in a dream, and you go back the next day and find out what he wanted. When I was trying to bring up my kids, the idea was never to take a dream seriously. You were supposed to tell your kid, “Oh, that was just a dream.” That never felt right to me. I never did it.
DAVID ZELTZER: You really got into the substance of dreams in The Lathe of Heaven.
LE GUIN: Yes, I wrote that in the sixties, right in the middle of all the sleep and dream research. They seem to have hit a plateau with that stuff now but back then it was a hot topic. I read all I could of the current research and the book just grew out of it. I’ve studied Jung just recently. He was a real shaman. He had great mana and power. It comes out through his books. I am under his influence for a week after reading one of his books; you have to be on your guard a bit, with a personality that strong. I had to start reading Jung: after I wrote the Earthsea trilogy, people would come up to me and say, “Of course, the Shadow is straight from Jung.” And I said, “The what from who?” Jung has been criticized for being too religious, too mystical. Actually, I think he’s no more religious than Taoism… I find Jung very useful. As a woman and an artist. And as a middle-aged person. Jung never discounted Freud. He just felt Freud placed too much importance on some things, like the Oedipus complex. Jung was interested in middle-aged people heading downslope after the Freudian battles of the twenties and thirties. By the time you’re thirty-five or older, you have it all, but then you have to put it all together. When you know how to do your work. I’m fascinated with the idea of the integrated person. Another fascinating thing is that I don’t think I could have written Earthsea if I’d read Jung first. But it’s completely “from” Jung. I can be reading along now and say, “Oh, is that what I was doing?” So my writing was almost like a proof of Jung’s theories.
ZELTZER: I notice there’s no anima in your books.
LE GUIN: Of course not—I’m a woman. But the animus writes my books. My animus, what inspires me, is definitely male. People talk about muses—well, my muse ain’t no girl in a filmy dress, that’s for sure. But of course this is all metaphor.[1]
MCPHERSON: In Earthsea there was the beginning of an anima figure in Arha except Ged didn’t follow her—he set her aside and pursued his own destiny.
LE GUIN: Yes. Ged shouldn’t connect. Sometimes I have no control over these things. Wizards usually have to be celibate or even virgin. I don’t know why. But when you draw on the unconscious as much as I do, you should trust it.
MCPHERSON: I wonder, though, whether some of the archetypes we accept are formed by stereotypes that we have to learn to break out of. Rulag, in The Dispossessed, was a similar character to Ged, unconnected and unconnectable, setting aside family ties to pursue her own destiny. But Ged’s actions seem natural; Rulag’s bother us, seem somehow unnatural.
LE GUIN: Yes, though I think if I had a witch in Earthsea she would have been like Ged, or probably more independent. But thank God for feminism. We are learning to separate the stereotypes from the genuine archetype.
MCPHERSON: I know you’re always hearing comments and questions about the fact that you write from men’s point of view in nearly all your books. But it strikes me that you come up with a lot of powerful women this way, perhaps more diverse than the men you create. In The Dispossessed there are three very vital women, Rulag and Takver and, indirectly, Odo. Each one seems to deal with a different part of what women are about, but all of them have something important to say about women’s liberation.
LE GUIN: I try to deal with women that way. I’m a woman, so naturally I write as a woman. I can’t help doing that. And the women I write about tend to be more varied, more complicated; the men are more conventional. I recently received a manuscript from Suzy McKee Charnas. She’s written a very good book, but she’s having trouble selling it because it has no men in it, and the publishers say, “No one will buy this; it’s just all women.” Suzy has set me thinking about this a whole lot. She says that it’s much harder to write from the point of view of women, because we write—in part—from all that we’ve read. There’s no tradition for us to follow. Most of the books about women were written by men. Who else do we have? George Eliot, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf. So we take the easy way and take a man as the main character, and then have women around him who are strong, but sort of hidden, side characters.
JENSEN: There seem to be only two conventions in science fiction for men. They can be either soldiers or diplomats.
LE GUIN: Yes, well, we don’t have conventions either for new women or new men. This is something we have to work out of.
JENSEN: Or anthropologists. That’s a third alternative. Like Lyubov in The Word for World Is Forest. You use that alternative.
LE GUIN: That’s the kind of man I knew. These are the people I grew up with. They were always around the house—anthropologists and Indians. And they were fine people. Many of them were refugees from Germany. And then they were ethnologists as well, doing fieldwork: Twice displaced. And so they didn’t fit the conventional roles.
MCPHERSON: You talk about the lack of available models in literature to break the conventional roles. What about some of the contemporary women writers: Atwood, Lessing?
LE GUIN: I don’t read many contemporary novels. I tend to wait a while… Margaret Drabble is one contemporary woman novelist I really like. Doris Lessing drives me up a wall. I read Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, and the first fifty pages were just great, but then she cops out. She really blows it. I wanted to throw the book across the room!
MCPHERSON: I wouldn’t judge Lessing on the basis of that book. But some of the others—like the Children of Violence series—The Four-Gated City is really science fiction.
1
The anima is the unconscious feminine side of a man; the animus is the unconscious masculine side of a woman.