Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  But they do not justify any judgment of literature by genre.

  There are commercial subcategories, such as some series mysteries, gross-out books for children concerning snot, and strict formula romances, which are so narrowly prescribed, so rigidly diminished in emotional and intellectual scope, that a genius would go mad trying to write one of serious merit. But if you sneer at romance as an intrinsically inferior fictional category, may I invite you to read the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë?

  Judgment of literature by category or genre is worthless.

  So what are we going to do now? What use is the concept of genre if you can’t damn whole categories of fiction with it so that you never have to bother learning how to read them, and if the fiction writers are going to keep crossing over, ignoring boundaries, miscegenating, interbreeding like a barnful of cats while publishers and booksellers and librarians cling desperately to the old, false, rigid divisions because they’re commercially unrisky and they make it easy for people to find certain types of books without being exposed to any alien forms of literature that might possibly take over their minds and put new ideas into them?

  Perhaps in the almost pathless confusion of the internet, and in the fact that we now have two major ways of publishing and reading books, the problem of genre has already begun to find its solution.

  “Things Not Actually Present”: On Fantasy, with a Tribute to Jorge Luis Borges

  A talk given at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts in January 2005.

  The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is a wonderful book. It’s not quite Borges’s Book of Sand, yet it is inexhaustible. All we have ever said and can ever say is in it, if we can only find it. I think of the OED as my wise aunt. So I went to Auntie, with my magnifying glass, and said, “Auntie! Please tell me about fantasy, because I want to talk about it, but I am not sure what I am talking about.”

  “Fantasy, or Phantasy,” Auntie replies, clearing her throat, “is from the Greek phantasia, lit. ‘a making visible.’” And she shows me how “fantasy” in the late Middle Ages meant “the mental apprehension of an object of perception,” the mind’s act of linking itself to the external world, but later came to mean just the reverse: an hallucination, a false perception, or the habit of deluding oneself. And she tells me that the word fantasy also came to mean the imagination itself, “the process, the faculty, or the result of forming mental representations of things not actually present.” And again, those representations, those imaginations, can be true ones, or false. They can be the insights and foresights that make human life possible, or the delusions and follies that bedevil and endanger our lives.

  So the word fantasy remains ambiguous, standing between the false, the foolish, the shallows of the mind, and the mind’s deep, true connection with the real.

  Auntie has very little to say about fantasy as a kind of literature. So I have to say it. In the Victorian and modernist periods, writers of fantasy were often apologetic about what they did, offering it as mere whimsy, a sort of bobble-fringing to real literature, or passing it off, sneakily, as Lewis Carroll did, as being “for children” and therefore beneath serious notice. Writers of fantasy are often less modest now that what they do is recognised as literature, or at least as a genre of literature, or at least as a subliterary genre, or at least as a commercial product.

  Fantasy has, in fact, become quite a business. There are people who turn out unicorns by the yard. Capitalism flourishes in Elfland.

  But when one night in Buenos Aires in 1937 three friends sat talking together about fantastic literature, it wasn’t yet a business. Even less so one night in a villa in Geneva in 1816, when four friends sat talking together and telling ghost stories. They were Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mr. Polidori; and they told awful tales to one another, and Mary was scared. “We will each write a ghost story!” cried Byron. So Mary went away and thought about it, and a few nights later she had a nightmare in which a “pale student” used strange arts and machineries to arouse from unlife the “hideous phantasm of a man.”

  And so, alone of the friends, she wrote her ghost story, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, which is the first great modern fantasy. There are no ghosts in it; but fantasy, as the OED observes, is more than ghoulie-mongering. Because ghosts haunt one corner of the vast domain of fantastic literature, people familiar with that corner of it call the whole thing ghost stories, or horror stories; just as others call it Fairyland after the part of it they love best or hate worst, and others call it science fiction, and others call it stuff and nonsense. But the nameless being given life by Frankenstein’s or Mary Shelley’s arts and machineries is not a ghost, not a fairy; science-fictional he may be; stuff and nonsense he is not. He is a creature of fantasy, archetypal, deathless. Once raised he will not sleep again, for his pain will not let him sleep, the unanswered moral questions that woke with him will not let him rest in peace.

  When there began to be money in the fantasy business, plenty of money was made out of him in Hollywood, but even that did not kill him.

  Very likely his story was mentioned on that night in 1937 in Buenos Aires when Silvina Ocampo and her friends Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares fell to talking, so Casares tells us, “about fantastic literature . . . discussing the stories which seemed best to us.” And they enjoyed it so much they collected the stories into a Book of Fantasy, which exists now in both Spanish and English. It is a wild mishmash, horror story and ghost story and fairy tale and science fiction all together. A piece we might think we know almost too well, such as “The Cask of Amontillado,” regains its strangeness when read among works from the Orient and South America and distant centuries, by Kafka, Swedenborg, Cortázar, Akutagawa, Niu Chiao. The book reflects the taste and curiosity of Borges, who was himself a member of the international tradition of fantasy which includes Rudyard Kipling and H. G. Wells.

  Perhaps I should not say tradition, since it has so little recognition in critical circles, and is distinguished in college English departments mainly by being ignored; but I believe there is a company of fantasists that Borges belonged to even as he transcended it, and that he honored even as he transformed it. By saying fantasy is for children (which of course some of it is) and dismissing it as commercial and formulaic (which of course some of it is), many academics and most literary critics feel justified in ignoring it all. Yet looking at such writers as Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, and José Saramago, I see our narrative fiction going slowly and massively, as a deep current, in one direction: and that direction is towards the reinclusion of fantasy as an essential element of fiction. Or put it this way: fiction—writing it, reading it—is an act of the imagination.

  Fantasy is, after all, the oldest kind of narrative fiction, and the most universal.

  Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it’s a manageable size, it’s comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever. Fiction is terrific at giving factual, pyschological, and moral understanding.

  But realistic fiction is culture-specific. The language, the unspoken assumptions, all the details of ordinary life that are the substance and strength of realistic fiction, may be utterly obscure to the reader of another time and place. And reading a realistic story that takes place in another century or another country involves an act of displacement, of translation, which many readers are unable or unwilling to attempt.

  Fantasy need not have this problem. People tell me they don’t read fantasy “because it’s all just made up,” but the material of fantasy is far more permanent, more universal, than the social customs realism deals with. Whether a fantasy is set in the real world or an invented one, its substance is psychic stuff, human constants, imageries we recognise. It seems to be a fact that everybody, everywhere, even if they haven’t met one before, recognises a dragon.<
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  Until fairly recently, the societies in and for which realistic fiction was written were limited and homogeneous. The realistic novel could describe such societies. But that limited language is in trouble now. To describe society since the mid twentieth century—global, multilingual, infinitely interlinked—we need the global, intuitional language of fantasy. García Márquez wrote his histories of his own nation in the fantastic images of magical realism because it was the only way he could do it.

  The central moral dilemma of our age, and of this very moment now, is the use or non-use of annihilating power. This choice was posed most cogently in fictional terms by the purest of fantasists. Tolkien began The Lord of the Rings in 1937 and finished it about ten years later. During those years, Frodo withheld his hand from the Ring of Power, but the nations did not.

  So, in so much contemporary fiction, the most revealing and accurate descriptions of our daily life are shot through with strangeness, or displaced in time, or set on imaginary worlds, or dissolved into the phantasmagoria of drugs or of psychosis, or rise from the mundane suddenly into the visionary and then come out the other side.

  So the magical realists of South America and their counterparts in India and elsewhere are valued for their accuracy, their truthfulness to the way things are.

  And so Jorge Luis Borges, who chose to identify himself with a tradition considered marginal, not the mainstream of realism and modernism that dominated literature in his youth and maturity, remains a writer central to our literature. His poems and stories, his images of reflections, libraries, labyrinths, forking paths, his books of tigers, of rivers, of sand, of mysteries, of changes, are everywhere honored, because they are beautiful, because they are nourishing, because they fulfill the most ancient, urgent function of words: to form for us “mental representations of things not actually present,” so that we can form a judgment of what world we live in and where we might be going in it, what we can celebrate, what we must fear.

  A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti

  This piece first appeared in The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K.

  Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, edited by Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman,

  Lexington Books, 2005. It is a general response to the articles in that book.

  I revised it slightly for this book in 2014.

  I’ve spent a good deal of vehemence objecting to the reduction of fiction to ideas. Readers, I think, are often led astray by the widespread belief that a novel springs from a single originating “idea,” and then are kept astray by the critical practice of discussing fiction as completely accessible to intellect, a rational presentation of ideas by means of an essentially ornamental narrative. In discussing novels that clearly deal with social, political, or ethical issues, and above all in discussing science fiction, supposed to be a “literature of ideas,” this practice is so common—particularly in teaching and academic texts—that it has driven me to slightly lunatic extremes of protest.

  In reaction to it, I find myself talking as if intellect had nothing to with novel-writing or novel-reading, speaking of composition as a pure trance state, and asserting that all I seek when writing is to allow my unconscious mind to control the course of the story, using rational thought only to reality-check when revising.

  All this is perfectly true, but it’s only half the picture. It’s because the other half of the picture is so often the only one shown and discussed that I counter-react to the point of sounding woowoo.

  When critics treat me—even with praise—as a methodical ax-grinder, I am driven to deny that there’s any didactic intention at all in my fiction. Of course there is. I hope I have avoided preaching, but the teaching impulse is often stronger than I am. Still, I’d rather be praised for my efforts to resist it than for my failures.

  Even in quite sophisticated criticism, the naïve conflation of what a character (particularly a sympathetic one) says with what the author believes will goad me into denying that I agree with what the character says, even when I do. How else can I assert the fact that a character’s voice is never to be taken for the author’s? Je suis Mme Bovary, said Flaubert, groaning as usual. I say: J’aime Shevek mais je ne suis pas Shevek. I envy Homer and Shakespeare, who by being only semi-existent evade such impertinent assimilations. They retain effortlessly the responsible detachment which I must consciously, and never wholly successfully, labor to achieve.

  So The Dispossessed, a science-fiction novel not only concerned with politics, society, and ethics but approaching them via a definite political theory, has given me a lot of grief. It has generally, not always but often, been discussed as a treatise, not as a novel. This is its own damn fault, of course—what did it expect, announcing itself as a utopia, even if an ambiguous one? Everybody knows utopias are to be read not as novels but as blueprints for social theory or practice.

  But the fact is that, starting with Plato’s Republic in Philosophy 1-A when I was seventeen, I read utopias as novels. Actually, I still read everything as novels, including history, memoir, and the newspaper. I think Borges is quite correct, all prose is fiction. So when I came to write a utopia of course I wrote a novel.

  I wasn’t surprised that it was treated as a treatise, but I wondered if the people who read it as a treatise ever wondered why I had written it as a novel. Were they as indifferent as they seemed to be to what made it a novel—the inherent self-contradictions of novelistic narrative that prevent simplistic, single-theme interpretation, the novelistic “thickness of description” (Geertz’s term) that resists reduction to abstracts and binaries, the embodiment of ethical dilemma in a drama of character that evades allegorical interpretation, the presence of symbolic elements that are not fully accessible to rational thought?

  You will understand, perhaps, why I approached this collection of essays about The Dispossessed with my head down and my shoulders hunched. Experience had taught me to expect a set of intellectual exercises which, even if not accusing me of preaching, moralising, political naïveté, compulsive heterosexuality, screeching feminism, or bourgeois cowardice, even if interested in or supportive of what the book “says,” would prove essentially indifferent to how it says it.

  If fiction is how it says what it says, then useful criticism is what shows you how fiction says what it says.

  To my grateful surprise, that’s what this collection does. These essays are not about an idea of the book. They are about the book.

  Perhaps I can express my gratitude best by saying that reading them left me knowing far better than I knew before how I wrote the book and why I wrote it as I did. By seldom exaggerating the intentionality of the text, they have freed me from exaggerating its non-intentionality, allowing me once more to consider what I wanted to do and how I tried to do it. They have restored the book to me as I conceived it, not as an exposition of ideas but as an embodiment of idea—a revolutionary artifact, a work containing a potential permanent source of renewal of thought and perception, like a William Morris design, or the Bernard Maybeck house I grew up in.

  These critics show me how the events and relationships of the narrative, which as I wrote the book seemed to follow not an arbitrary but not a rationally decided course, do constitute an architecture which is fundamentally aesthetic and which, in being so, fulfills an intellectual or rational design. They enable me to see the system of links and echoes, of leaps and recurrences, that make the narrative structure work. This is criticism as I first knew it, serious, responsive, and jargon-free. I honor it as an invaluable aid to reading, my own text as well as others’.

  Though I had pretty well saturated my mind with utopian literature, with the literature of pacifist anarchism, and with “temporal physics” (insofar as it existed) before I wrote the book, my knowledge of relevant theoretical thinking was very weak. When I read recurrent citations in these essays—Hegel above all, Bakhtin, Adorno, Marcuse, and many more—I hunch up a bit again. I am embarrassed. My capacity for sustained abstract thought is somewhat above
that of a spaniel. I knew and know these authors only by name and reputation; the book was not written under their influence, and they can’t be held responsible, positively or negatively, for anything in my text. At most (as with the “shadow” in Carl Jung and in A Wizard of Earthsea) it is interesting to observe parallels or intersections of thought.

  On the other hand, I was glad to see my thought experiment tested against the writers who did contribute to its formation—above all Lao Tzu, Kropotkin, and Paul Goodman.

  A good many of the writers in this book treat The Dispossessed as if it stood quite alone in my work. This ahistorical approach seems odd, since the book has been around so long, and isn’t an anomaly among my other works. It was followed in 1982 by a fairly lengthy discussion of utopias (“A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”), which forms a clear link to a second, if radically different, utopian novel, Always Coming Home (1985). It’s hard for me to put these out of my mind when thinking about The Dispossessed. Both offer a chance to compare some of the things I did in the earlier novel with things I said in the essay or did in the later novel—testing for consistency, change of mind, progress, regress, aesthetic and intellectual purpose. And also, the unanimity with which these writers refuse to read The Dispossessed as a single-theme, monistic, closed-minded text makes me long to see some of them take on Always Coming Home, which has often been read, or dismissed unread, as a naïvely regressive picture of a sort of Happy Hunting Ground for fake Indians. The narrative experimentation and the postmodernist self-conscious fictionality which some of these essayists point to in The Dispossessed are carried a great deal further in Always Coming Home. I for one am curious as to why I play these particular tricks only when writing utopias, or anyhow semi-utopias with flies in them. In some of these essays I began to catch a glimpse of why, and I’d very much like to learn more.