Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  They will read books, on paper or on a screen, as literature, for the pleasure and the augmentation of existence literature gives.

  And they will try to ensure that the books continue to exist, because continuity is an essential aspect of literature and knowledge. Books occupy time in a different way than most art and entertainment. In longevity perhaps only architecture and sculpture in stone outdo the book.

  And here the issue of electronic versus paper has to reenter the discussion. Much of the transmission of human culture still relies on the relative permanence of what is written. This has been true for over four thousand years. It’s possible that the highest and most urgent value of a book may be its mere, solid, stolid, physical existence.

  I’ll be talking now not about “the book” in America in 2012 so much as about how things are all over the world in the many places where electricity may be intermittent, or nonexistent, or available only to the rich; and how things may be in fifty or a hundred years if we continue to degrade and destroy our habitat at the present rate.

  The ease of reproducing an e-book and sending it all over the place can certainly secure its permanence for so long as the machine to read it on can be made and turned on. It’s well to remember, though, that electric power is not to be counted on in the same way sunlight is.

  Easy and infinite reproducibility also involves a certain risk. The text of the book on paper can’t be altered without separately and individually altering every copy in existence, and alteration leaves unmistakable traces. With e-texts that have been altered, deliberately or by corruption (pirated texts are often incredibly corrupt), it may be impossible to establish an original, authentic, correct text if no paper copy exists. And the more piracies, errors, abridgments, omissions, additions, and mash-ups are tolerated, the less people will understand what textual integrity is.

  People to whom texts matter, such as readers of poetry or scientific monographs, know that the integrity of a text may be essential. Our nonliterate ancestors knew it. Speak the words of the poem exactly as you learned them or it will lose its power. The three-year-old being read to demands it. Daddy! You read it wrong! The chipmunk says “I did not do that,” not “I didn’t do that!”

  The physical book may last for centuries. Even a cheap paperback on pulp paper takes decades to degrade into unreadability. At this stage of e-publication, continuous changes of technology, upgrades, deliberate obsolescence, and corporate takeovers have left behind them a debris of texts unreadable on any available machine. Moreover, e-texts have to be periodically recopied to keep them from degrading. People who archive them are reluctant to say how frequently this must be done, because it varies a great deal; but as anyone with e-mail files over a few years old knows, the progress into entropy can be rapid. A university librarian told me that as things are now, they expect to recopy every electronic text the library owns every eight to ten years, indefinitely.

  Imagine if we had to do that with printed books!

  If at this stage of the technology we decided to replace the content of our libraries entirely with electronic archives, a worst-case scenario would have informational and literary texts being altered without our consent or knowledge, reproduced or destroyed without our permission, rendered unreadable by the technology that printed them, and fated within a few years or decades, unless regularly recopied and redistributed, to turn inexorably into garble or simply blink out of existence.

  But that’s assuming the technology won’t improve and stabilize. Let us hope it does. Even so, why should we go into either/or mode? It’s seldom necessary and often destructive. Computers may be binary, but we aren’t.

  Maybe the e-book and the electricity to run it will become available to everyone everywhere forever. That would be grand. But as things are or are likely to be, having books available in two different forms can only be a good thing, now and in the long run. Redundancy is the key to species longevity.

  Despite all the temptations at our fingertips, I believe there will continue to be, as there has long been, an obstinate, durable minority of people who, having learned to read books, will go on reading them—however and wherever they can find them, on pages or screens. And because people who read books mostly want to share them, and feel however obscurely that sharing them is important, they’ll see to it that, however and wherever, the books are there for the next generations.

  Human generations, that is, not technological generations. At the moment, the technological generation has shortened to about the life span of the gerbil, and might yet rival that of the fruit fly.

  The life span of a book is more like that of the horse or the human being, sometimes the oak, even the redwood. Which is why it seems a good idea, rather than mourning their death, to rejoice that books now have not one but two ways of staying alive, getting passed on, enduring.

  Le Guin’s Hypothesis

  Rewritten from a blog post on my website and at Book View Café,

  June 14, 2012, this piece was given as a talk at the

  Sigma Tau Delta Conference in Seattle, March 2013.

  In a New Yorker article last year about literature and genre, Arthur Krystal called reading genre novels “a guilty pleasure.” I responded in my blog, saying that the phrase “succeeds in being simultaneously self-deprecating, self-congratulatory, and collusive. When I speak of my guilty pleasure, I confess that I know I sin, but I know you sin too, nudge nudge, aren’t we sinners cute?”

  So. Literature is the serious stuff you have to read in college, and genre is what you read for pleasure, which is guilty.

  But what about the non-guilty pleasure, the true pleasure, that we may get from any novel, whatever its category?

  The trouble with opposing Litfic to Genrefic is that what looks like a reasonable distinction of varieties of fiction hides an unreasoned value judgment: Lit superior, Genre inferior. This is mere prejudice. We must have a more intelligent discussion of what literature is. Many English departments have largely ceased trying to defend their ivied ivory towers by shooting down every space ship that approaches; many critics are aware that a lot of literature is happening outside the sacred groves of modernist realism: but still the opposition of literature and genre is maintained, and as long as it is, false categorical value judgment will cling to it.

  To get out of this boring bind, I propose an hypothesis:

  Literature is the extant body of written art.

  All novels belong to it.

  ——

  The value judgment concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction. The elitist snobbery that conflates the popular with the commercial, the Puritan snobbery of virtuous “higher” pleasure and guilty “lower” pleasure, become irrelevant, and very hard to defend.

  Though no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior, genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood.

  The many genres that go to make up the literature of fiction include mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, Western, war, Gothic, young adult, horror, thriller . . . along with the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as dysfunctional-suburban-family-semifactual-confessional, noir police procedural, and parallel history with zombies.

  Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some limit invention narrowly, others encourage it. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral.

  Each reader will prefer certain genres and be bored or repelled by others. But anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the “inferior” genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.

  If we approached all fictional genres as literature, we’d be done with the time-wasting, ill-n
atured diatribes and sneers against popular novelists who don’t write by the rules of realism, the banning of imaginative writing from MFA courses, the failure of so many English teachers to teach what people actually read, and the endless, silly apologising for actually reading it.

  If critics and teachers gave up insisting that one kind of literature is the only one worth reading, it would free up more time for them to think about the different things novels do and how they do it, and above all, to consider why certain individual books in every genre are, have been for centuries, and will continue to be more worth reading than most of the others.

  Because there is the real mystery. Why is one book entertaining, another disappointing, another a revelation and a lasting joy? What is quality? What makes a good book good and a bad book bad?

  Not its subject. Not its genre. What, then? That’s what good criticism, good book talk, has always been about.

  We won’t be allowed to knock down the Litfic/Fixfic walls, though, as long as the publishers and booksellers think their business depends on them—capitalizing on the guilty pleasure principle.

  But then, how long will the publishers and booksellers last against the massive aggression of the enormous corporations that are now taking over every form of publication in absolute indifference to its content and quality so long as they can sell it as a commodity?

  Making Up Stories

  A talk given at the Terroir Festival of Writing and Literature in

  McMinnville, Oregon, in 2013, slightly revised for publication.

  Thank you for having me to the first of what I hope will be many successful Terroirs, especially when we all learn how to pronounce it. My problem is I used to know French and so I know it isn’t actually pronounced terwha. Terwha is probably an Eastern Oregon county in one of Molly Gloss’s novels. But if I try calling it terrrroirrr in French all day, I will get a sore throat, and anyhow, who cares? This is Orrregon. And we are having a festival of writing and literature, which is a wonderful thing to do.

  I promised to talk about making up stories, which is how I have spent the best part of my life. Then I hope we can converse for a while about anything you want to talk about. But please don’t ask me where I get my ideas from. I have managed to keep the address of the company where I buy my ideas a secret all these years, and I’m not about to let people in on it now.

  All right. There are two major kinds of story: the kind where you tell what happened, and the kind where you tell what didn’t.

  The first kind is history, journalism, biography, autobiography, and memoir. The second kind is fiction—stories you make up.

  We Americans tend to be more comfortable with the first kind. We distrust people who make things up. We’re comfortable with stories about “real things” and “real life.” We want stories that tell us about “reality.” We want them so bad that when we stage completely fake situations and film them, we call it “reality TV.”

  The problem with all this is that your real is not my real. We don’t all perceive reality the same way. Some of us in fact do not perceive reality at all. You can definitely see that if you watch Fox News.

  These differences in how we define reality are probably why we have fiction.

  It seems common sense that fact should be our common ground. But in fact, fact is so hard to come by, so dependent on point of view, so debatable, that we may be more likely to meet a shared reality in fiction. By telling—or by reading—a story of what didn’t in fact happen, but could have happened or could yet happen, to somebody who isn’t an actual person but who might have been or could be, we open the door to the imagination. And imagination is the best, maybe the only way we have to know anything about each other’s minds and hearts.

  In workshops on story writing, I’ve met many writers who want to work only with memoir, tell only their own story, their experience. Often they say, “I can’t make up stuff, that’s too hard, but I can tell what happened.” It seems easier to them to take material directly from their experience than to use their experience as material for making up a story. They assume that they can just write what happened.

  That appears reasonable, but actually, reproducing experience is a very tricky business requiring both artfulness and practice. You may find you don’t know certain important facts or elements of the story you want to tell. Or the private experience so important to you may not be very interesting to others, requires skill to make it meaningful, moving, to the reader. Or, being about yourself, it gets all tangled up with ego, or begins to be falsified by wishful thinking. If you’re honestly trying to tell what happened, you find facts are very obstinate things to deal with. But if you begin to fake them, to pretend things happened in a way that makes a nice neat story, you’re misusing imagination. You’re passing invention off as fact: which is, among children at least, called lying.

  Fiction is invention, but it is not lies. It moves on a different level of reality from either fact-finding or lying.

  I want to talk here about the difference between imagination and wishful thinking, because it’s important both in writing and in living. Wishful thinking is thinking cut loose from reality, a self-indulgence that is often merely childish, but may be dangerous. Imagination, even in its wildest flights, is not detached from reality: imagination acknowledges reality, starts from it, and returns to it to enrich it. Don Quixote indulges his longing to be a knight till he loses touch with reality and makes an awful mess of his life. That’s wishful thinking. Miguel Cervantes, by working out and telling the invented story of a man who wishes he were a knight, vastly increased our store of laughter and of human understanding. That’s imagination. Wishful thinking is Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich. Imagination is the Constitution of the United States.

  A failure to see this difference is in itself dangerous. If we assume that imagination has no connection with reality but is mere escapism, and therefore distrust it and suppress it, it will be crippled, perverted, it will fall silent or speak untruth. The imagination, like any basic human capacity, needs exercise, discipline, training, in childhood and lifelong.

  One of the best exercises for the imagination, maybe the very best, is hearing, reading, and telling or writing made-up stories. Good inventions, however fanciful, have both congruity with reality and inner coherence. A story that’s mere wish-fulfilling babble, or coercive preaching concealed in a narrative, lacks intellectual coherence and integrity: it isn’t a whole thing, it can’t stand up, it isn’t true to itself.

  Learning to read or tell a story that is true to itself is about the best education a mind can have. Even in America many of us give our children imaginative books to read—Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte’s Web. In high school, science fiction and fantasy are at last recognised in the English curriculum. If only kids were seriously required to write not only What I Did on My Vacation, but also What I Didn’t Do on My Vacation! Once they got past childish wish-fulfillment (I shot down forty enemy planes! I got to be the Queen of Mars and ride a unicorn! I hit that dumb Jackie Beeson in the eye!), they’d get some training in following their imagination farther, using it wisely, using it well. They’d learn it is a way into the truth. An indispensable tool for being human.

  If as a writer you get over the peculiar puritanical terror of making things up—if you realise that you don’t have to tell episodes from your life experience directly, but can use your life experience as the substance to make stories from, as the material of your imagination—you may find yourself suddenly free. Your story isn’t “your” story any more. It isn’t about you. It’s just a story—and you’re free to go with it, go where the story wants to go, let it find its true shape.

  Gary Snyder gave us the image of experience as compost. Compost is stuff, junk, garbage, anything, that’s turned into dirt by sitting around a while. It involves silence, darkness, time, and patience. From compost, whole gardens grow.

  It can be useful to think of writing as gardening. You plant the seeds, but each plant will
take its own way and shape. The gardener’s in control, yes; but plants are living, willful things. Every story has to find its own way to the light. Your great tool as gardener is your imagination.

  Young writers often think—are taught to think—that a story starts with a message. That is not my experience. What’s important when you start is simply this: you have a story you want to tell. A seedling that wants to grow. Something in your inner experience is forcing itself up towards the light. Attentively and carefully and patiently, you can encourage that, let it happen. Don’t force it; trust it. Watch it, water it, let it grow.

  As you write a story, if you can let it become itself, tell itself fully and truly, you may discover what it’s really about, what it says, why you wanted to tell it. It may be a surprise to you. You may have thought you planted a dahlia, and look what came up, an eggplant! Fiction is not information transmission; it is not message-sending. The writing of fiction is endlessly surprising to the writer.

  Like a poem, a story says what it has to say in the only way it can be said, and that is the exact words of the story itself. Which is why the words are so important, why it takes so long to learn how to get the words right. Why you need silence, darkness, time, patience, and a real, solid knowledge of English vocabulary and grammar.

  Truthful imagining from experience is recognisable, shared by its readers. The great stories of imagination have meanings beyond any message and are meaningful to all kinds of people over hundreds of years. The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, A Christmas Carol, The Lord of the Rings, Honey in the Horn, The Jump-Off Creek: none of those stories is factual. All are pure fiction. And they are about all of us, they’re our story. They include us in a greater story, the human story, the reality of being human.