Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  But centrality is the last thing accorded a woman by the canoneers. Women must be left on the margins.

  Even when a woman novelist is admitted to be a first-rate artist, the techniques of exclusion still operate. Jane Austen is vastly admired, yet she is less often considered as an exemplar than as unique, inimitable—a wonderful fluke. She cannot be disappeared; but she is not fully included.

  Denigration, omission, and exception during a writer’s lifetime are preparations for her disappearance after her death.

  Disappearance

  I use the word in its active, Argentine sense and in full awareness of its connotations.

  Of all the crass or subtle techniques used to diminish women’s writing, disappearance is the most effective. Once she is silent and powerless, male solidarity quickly closes ranks against the outsider. Female solidarity or the instinct of justice is rarely strong enough to force the ranks back open, and if the effort succeeds, it must continue endlessly, for the male ranks keep effortlessly reclosing.

  I have written before of instances of disappearance that particularly gall me: Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant. Both even now are often referred to only as “Mrs,” the title indicating their gender and their social condition. (We do not refer to “Mr Dickens” or “Mr Trollope.”) Gaskell and Oliphant were well known, popular, respected, and taken seriously while they lived. When they died, they were promptly disappeared. Gaskell’s work was reduced to the “sweet” Cranford. Social historians of the Victorian era kept reading her novels as documentation, as they read Dickens, but this did not count among the literary canoneers. Oliphant’s work was wholly forgotten but for one novel, Miss Marjoribanks, not her best, mentioned by historians of literature but not kept in print.

  The injustice of these dismissals is as painful as their wastefulness. There really weren’t so many excellent Victorian novelists that we can afford to throw out two of them simply because they weren’t men. Yet what other reason can be given for the disappearance of their novels? Gaskell is now fairly well reinstated, thanks to feminists and film; Oliphant is not. Why? She and Trollope have a good many similarities; their limitations are obvious, but not fatal; both wrote solidly entertaining novels, psychologically canny and perceptive, which are also fascinating social documents. But only hers vanished. Changing styles put Trollope out of fashion, but he had a great revival during the Second World War when Britons homesick for the old imaginary certainties found them in his books. Nobody remembered or revived Oliphant until the 1970s, when female solidarity in the form of feminist criticism and publishers rescued some of her books at least temporarily.

  The rawest case I know of actively disappearing a woman writer is Wallace Stegner’s treatment of Mary Hallock Foote. He took the setting, characters, and story of his novel Angle of Repose from her autobiography, which was published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Even his title is taken from a sentence in her book.

  Stegner degraded the character of the author he stole from, making her into an adulterous wife whose carelessness kills her child—a cruel travesty of the actual relationships recounted in the autobiography, the manner of the daughter’s death, the depth of the mother’s grief. Throughout, Stegner coarsened and cheapened Foote’s perceptions of people and landscapes.

  Nowhere did he mention Foote or her book’s title, deliberately hiding the fact that she was a published author. The only hint he gave of his source was a sentence in the acknowledgments thanking some friends of his, descendants of Foote, “for the loan of their grandmother.”

  Grandmothers are much easier to handle than women who write. Grandmothers don’t even have names.

  Of course artists borrow constantly from one another, but what Stegner did was not borrowing, it was expropriation. I would call it plagiarism. It is clear that to him Foote’s book simply did not exist in its own right. It was mere raw material for him, the man, the admired novelist, the Stanford professor, to use as he chose. To him, Foote herself did not exist. She was an object for his use.

  Rob the grave, just don’t say who you left buried in it.

  Many who have read Mary Foote’s book think it better than Stegner’s. Her story was based, selectively, on events of her own life, recounted with emotional control and accuracy. She drew her pioneers and engineers and the Western landscape from life, not secondhand. Stegner sensationalised and conventionalised the setting, the emotions, and the characters. But he was a famous male writer playing the part of famous male writer to the hilt. It worked. He got a Pulitzer for it. His book continues to be printed, praised, and studied.

  Mary Foote was a woman writer with a moderate popular reputation and no pretension to fame. Her book disappeared. Was disappeared. Though women’s solidarity during the second wave of feminism was enough to get it reprinted after a century of neglect, who knows about it? Who reads it? Who teaches it?

  Who will think it matters?

  ——

  I’m thinking now of a woman writer who died not long ago, one who is, I fear, particularly vulnerable to being disappeared: a singularly original and powerful storyteller and poet, Grace Paley. The problem with Paley is that she was—truly and genuinely—unique. Not a “fluke,” certainly, but like so many women writers, she was not part of any major recognised school or trend in fiction or poetry acknowledged by the male-centered literary establishment.

  And unlike so many men writers, she was not much interested in the advancement of her ego. She was ambitious, all right, fiercely so, but her ambition was to further social justice in her time.

  I fear that if women critics, feminist writers, fair-minded scholars and teachers and lovers of literature, do not make a conscious and consistent effort to keep Paley’s work visible, studied, taught, read, and reprinted, it will be quietly brushed aside within the next few years. It will lapse out of print. It will be forgotten, while the work of lesser writers will be kept alive simply because they were men.

  It won’t do. We really can’t go on letting good writers be disappeared and buried because they weren’t men, while writers who should be left to rot in peace are endlessly resurrected, the zombies of criticism and curriculum, because they weren’t women.

  I’m no beauty, but don’t give me a headstone that says She Was Plain. I am a grandmother, but don’t give me a headstone that says Somebody’s Grandmother. If I have a headstone, I want my name on it. But far more than that, I want my name on books that are judged not by the gender of the writer but by the quality of the writing and the value of the work.

  Learning to Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf

  Published in the Manchester Guardian, April 2011.

  You can’t write science fiction well if you haven’t read it, though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you write it well if you haven’t read anything else. Genre is a rich dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general literary language, it becomes a jargon meaningful only to an in-group. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I learned a lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf.

  I was seventeen when I read Orlando. It was half revelation, half confusion to me at that age, but one thing was clear: that she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic world, and brought it dramatically alive. I’m thinking of the Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over. Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt the marvelous strangeness of that moment five hundred years ago—the authentic thrill of being taken absolutely elsewhere.

  How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly selected, encouraging the reader’s imagination to fill out the picture and see it luminous, complete.

  In her novel Flush, Woolf gets inside a dog’s mind, that is, a nonhuman brain, an alien mentality—very science-fictional if you look at it that way. Again what I learned wa
s the power of accurate, vivid, highly selected detail. I imagine Woolf looking down at her dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she wrote in and thinking what are your dreams? and listening . . . sniffing the wind . . . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog’s timeless world.

  Useful stuff, for those who like to see through eyes other than our own.

  The Death of the Book

  This piece began as a blog post in 2012, was revised in 2014 for publication

  in Technology: A Reader for Writers (ed. J. Rodgers, Oxford

  University Press, 2014), and again revised slightly for this book.

  People love to talk about the death of whatever—the book, or history, or Nature, or God, or authentic Cajun cuisine. Eschatologically minded people do, anyhow.

  After I wrote that, I felt pleased with myself, but uneasy. I went and looked up “eschatological.” I knew it didn’t mean what scatological means even though they sound very much alike, but I thought it had to do only with death. I didn’t realise it concerns not one thing but the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. If it included scatology it would be practically the whole ball of wax.

  Anyhow, the eschatologists’ judgment is that the book is going to die and go to heaven or hell, leaving us to the mercy of Hollywood and our computer screens.

  There certainly is something sick about the book industry, but it seems closely related to the sickness affecting every industry that, under pressure from a corporate owner, dumps product standards and long-range planning in favor of high, predictable sales and short-term profits.

  As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing—taking on a second form and shape, the e-book.

  This has been a vast, unplanned change, as confusing, uncomfortable, and destructive as most unplanned changes. Certainly it’s put huge strain on all the familiar channels of book publication and acquisition, from the publishers, distributors, bookstores, and libraries to readers afraid that the latest bestseller, or perhaps all literature, will suddenly pass them by if they don’t rush out and buy it as an e-book and an electronic device to read it on.

  But that’s it, isn’t it? That’s what books are about—reading?

  Is reading obsolete, is the reader dead?

  Dear reader: How are you doing? I am fairly obsolete, but by no means, at the moment, dead.

  Dear reader: Are you reading at this moment? I am, because I’m writing this, and it’s very hard to write without reading, as you know if you ever tried it in the dark.

  Dear reader: What are you reading on? I’m writing and reading on my computer, as I imagine you are. (At least, I hope you’re reading what I’m writing, and aren’t writing “What Tosh!” in the margin. Though I’ve always wanted to write “What Tosh!” in a margin ever since I read it years ago in the margin of a library book. It was such a good description of the book.)

  Reading is undeniably one of the things people do on the computer. On the various electronic devices that are capable of and may be looked upon as “for” telephoning, taking photographs, playing music and games, etc., people may spend a good while texting Sweetie Pie, or looking up recipes for authentic Cajun gumbo, or checking out the stock report—all of which involve reading. People use computers to play games or wander through picture galleries or watch movies, and to do computations and make spreadsheets and pie charts, and a few lucky ones get to draw pictures or compose music, but mostly, am I wrong? isn’t an awful lot of what people do with computers either word processing (writing) or processing words (reading)?

  How much of anything can you do in the e-world without reading? The use of any computer above the toddler-entertainment level is dependent on at least some literacy in the user. Operations can be learned mechanically, but still, the main element of a keyboard is letters; icons take you only so far. Texting may have replaced all other forms of verbality for some people, but texting is just a primitive form of writing: you can’t do it unless you no u frm i, lol.

  It looks to me as if people are in fact reading and writing more than they ever did. People who used to work and talk together now work each alone in a cubicle, writing and reading all day long on screen. Communication that used to be oral, face to face or on the telephone, is now often written, e-mailed, and read. None of that has much to do with book reading, true; yet it’s hard for me to see how the death of the book is to result from the overwhelming prevalence of a technology that makes reading a more valuable skill than it ever was.

  Ah, say the eschatologists, but it’s competition from the wondrous, endless everything-else-you-can-do-on-your-iPad—competition is murdering the book!

  Could be. Or it might just make readers more discriminating. A recent article in the New York Times (“Finding Your Book Interrupted . . . By the Tablet You Read It On,” by Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel, March 4, 2012) quoted a woman in Los Angeles: “With so many distractions, my taste in books has really leveled up. . . . Recently, I gravitate to books that make me forget I have a world of entertainment at my fingertips. If the book’s not good enough to do that, I guess my time is better spent.” Her sentence ends oddly, but I think it means that she prefers reading an entertaining book to activating the world of entertainment with her fingertips. Why does she not consider books part of this world of entertainment? Maybe because the book, even when activated by her fingertips, entertains her without the moving, flickering, twitching, jumping, glittering, shouting, thumping, bellowing, screaming, blood-spattering, ear-splitting, etc., that we’ve been led to identify as entertainment. In any case, her point is clear: if a book’s not as entertaining on some level, not necessarily the same level, as the jumping, thumping, bleeding, etc., then why read it? Either activate the etc., or find a better book. As she puts it, level up.

  When discussing the death of the book, it might be a good idea to ask what “the book” is. Are we talking about people ceasing to read books, or about what they read the books on—paper or a screen?

  Reading on a screen is certainly different from reading a page. I don’t think we yet understand what the differences are. They may be considerable, but I doubt that they’re so great as to justify giving the two kinds of reading different names, or saying that an e-book isn’t a book at all.

  If “the book” means only the book as physical object, then to some devotees of the internet its death may be a matter for rejoicing—hurray! we’re rid of another nasty heavy bodily Thing with a copyright on it! But mostly the death of the book is an occasion of lament and gloom. People to whom the physicality of the book printed on paper is important, sometimes more important than the contents—those who value books for their binding, paper, and typography, buy them in fine editions, collect them—and the many who simply take pleasure in holding and handling the book they’re reading, are naturally distressed by the idea that the book on paper will be totally replaced by the immaterial text in a machine.

  I can only suggest, Don’t agonize—organize! No matter how the corporations bluster and bully and bury us in advertising, the consumer always has the option of resistance. We don’t get steamrollered by a new technology unless we lie down in front of the steamroller.

  The steamroller is certainly on the move. Some kinds of printed book such as manuals and DIY are being replaced by e-books. The low-cost e-book edition threatens the mass market paperback. Good news for those who like to read on a screen, bad news for those who don’t, or who like to buy from AbeBooks and Alibris or pounce on 75-cent beat-up mysteries at the rare surviving secondhand bookstore. But if the lovers of the material book are serious about valuing good binding and paper and design as essential to their reading pleasure, they will provide a visible, steady demand for well-made hardcover and paperback editions, which the book industry, if it has the market sense of a sowbug, will meet. The question is whether the book industry does have the sense of a sowbug. Some of its behavior lately leads one to doubt. B
ut let us hope. And there’s always the “small press,” the corporation-free independent publisher, many of which are as classy and as canny as can be.

  Other outcries about the death of the book have more to do with the direct competition offered on the web. “The world of entertaiment at our fingertips” makes reading obsolete.

  Here “the book” usually refers to literature. At the moment, DIY manuals, cookbooks, and guides to this or that are the kinds of book most often replaced by information on a screen. Encyclopedia Britannica just died, a victim, as it were, of Google. I don’t think I’ll bury our Eleventh Edition just yet, though. The information in it, being a product of its time (a hundred years ago), can be valuably different from that furnished by the search engine, which is also a product of its time. The annual encyclopedias of films/directors/actors were killed a few years ago by information sites on the Net—very good sites, though not as much fun to get lost in as the books were. We keep a 2003 film guide because, being ourselves ancient, we use it more efficiently than we do any site, and it’s still useful and entertaining even if dead. That is more than you can say of the corpse of almost anything but a book.

  I’m not sure why anyone, no matter how much they like to think the sky is falling, believes that the Iliad or Jane Eyre or the Bhagavad Gita is dead or about to die. The great works of literature have far more competition than they used to, yes; people may see the movie and think they know what the book is; the books can be displaced by the world of entertainment at our fingertips; but nothing can replace them. So long as people are taught to read (which may or may not happen in our underfunded schools), particularly if people are taught what there is to read and how to read it intelligently (extensions of the basic skill now often omitted in our underfunded schools), some of those people will prefer reading to all the titillations accessible to their fingertips.