Franz Rottensteiner
Le Guin's Fantasy
Ursula K. Le Guin. The Language of the Night. Essays an Fantasy and Science Fiction.
NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1979, 270p. S9.95.
This volume, edited and introduced by Susan Wood, collects a number of Ursula K. Le Guin's writings on SF and fantasy, many of them from the fanzines, but also a few
speeches, introductions to her own books, observations on other writers and assorted other
shorter pieces. They are organized in the sections "Le Guin Introduces Le Guin,"
"On Fantasy and Science Fiction," "The Book is What is Real,"
"Telling the Truth," and "Pushing at the Limits." From humble
beginnings, Ursula K. Le Guin has risen to become one of the most important authors in
American SF, and has become known even outside the pale of SF, and for that alone her book
deserves attention and respect. She is one of those writers, so rare in SF, whose work and
theoretical statement form a unity. She doesn't say one thing and practice another: in
her, reflection and action are one. Above all else, she tries to write beautifully, her
books are intended to be fully rounded works of art, with human characters, meaning and
import, aesthetics and ethics in one. What matters to her is the whole atmosphere of the
writing, the sensual concreteness, rhythm, symbol, tone, and metaphor. She is not for
abstract theses barely covered with a pretense of fiction. Mrs. Le Guin is intelligent and
well read, modest and possessed of a sense of humor (e.g., her "30 years of
malpractice"), sympathetic to other writers yet firm where essential issues are
touched upon.
In some respect all her essays circle around the twin poles of beauty and truth,
aesthetics and ethics. Where these are concerned, she can get quite passionate. Truth she
is willing to concede only to great literature, whereas fantasy is to be content with
imagination. Her preference and love in literature, including SF, is definitely the great
traditional novel of character that helps to understand human nature. This view is
spiritedly expounded in her long essay "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown," starting
from a remark of Virginia Woolf's. This stressing of common human beings and
psychologically tenable characterization is also visible in the introductions to her own
books and in her piece on Philip K. Dick.
While such a view is certain to meet with sympathy and is persuasive because Mrs. Le
Guin writes so modestly, reasonably, and gracefully, there arises the principal doubt
concerning whether SF can compete in this respect and whether this understanding of
literature, which is apparently also shared by other SF writers, isn't at best only
partially true, and more appropriate for the 19th than the 20th century. There are, after
all, many other ways of writing literature, even writing novels, than "getting into
the ring with Mr. Tolstoy," as Gregory Benford, for instance, quotes Hemingway as
having described the novel--a hopeless fight for any SF writer. There exist some SF novels
that are quite decent as novels of ideas, but none that would make the grade as novels of
character. Patrick Parrinder's reply, "The Alien Encounter: Or. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Le
Guin" (SFS No. 17) seems to be much more sensible--and realistic. Mrs. Le Guin
herself, attempting the kind of psychological or psychologizing novel that appears to be
her ideal, comes off as at best second-rate, and often her concern with myth (which is
perhaps more appropriate for fantasy) gets in the way of the characterization. Mrs. Le Guin
has a good ear for language, and a genuine striving for truth and justice: but her books
lack vigor and the determination to get to the bottom of a problem or a person. Above all,
her fiction is dominated by a striving for balance which appears to be detrimental to
truth: and for this reason she often lacks depth, the ability to face the full
consequences and implications of something. She tends to glide over unpleasant truths, and
therefore she simplifies--though for the sake of beauty, it would seem. The depths of the
human heart are not touched in her prose, and while she is an honorable person and a
respectable writer--a shining exception in the desolate wastelands of SF--she is not a
great writer. As novels, not even her best SF is exceptional, and her celebrated and
award-winning longer and shorter stories like "The Word for World is Forest,"
"Nine Lives," "The Day Before the Revolution," or "The Eye of the
Heron" are first and foremost banal--ethically and morally commendable, but
essentially shallow. These stories have more human warmth than they have the power to
move, and I think as an aesthetics of SF, Mrs. Le Guin's views on "Mrs. Brown"
could only further the self-deception to which SF and SF criticism tend anyway: the
pretension that mediocre but popular works are first-rate works of literature. (Consider,
for example, the insider praise for the work of the arch-sentimentalist Theodore Sturgeon,
who is so often cited as a great writer unduly ignored outside of SF.) But this
preference--or prejudice--for "good characterization" is certainly shared by the
readership at large, which favors long books with "serious" characterization
(but which nevertheless must not offer any difficulty in instant comprehension). Why else
would books like "Star Dance" by Jeanne and Spider Robinson or
"Dreamsnake" by Vonda N. McIntyre be so popular, except for a fundamental
misunderstanding of characterization? These are hardly books that a literary critic would
notice.
Mrs. Le Guin's inherent tendency for illusionism, which is in part explainable by her
own development as a writer from modest beginnings in Amazing Stories and with
Ace Books to the preeminence in the field today, may best be gauged from her enthusiastic
attitude to the currently popular brand of fantasy. What was for the German romanticists
the blue flower of Novalis are for her the dragons, and the difference between a beautiful
and elegant flower and a rather crude animal like a dragon is indicative of the worlds
that separate romantic fantasy from its modern incarnation as a phenomenon of the
mass-market. For Mrs. Le Guin, dragons are symbols of a nocturnal, somewhat more noble
world, far from everyday life and its personal and political conflicts--not mere escapism,
but rather a poetic transformation of life, a metaphor and a symbol. Again and again she
defends these dragons and sorcerers as symbols of a deep psychological truth, often citing
Jung's psychology, his shadow and other symbols of the unconscious. Polemically it could
be said that the psychological basis of modern fantasy lies not in its power of
individuation but, on the contrary, in its appeal to common symbols, perhaps directly
influencing the subconscious--i.e., its appeal to the mass mind. This may explain its
success in the market place, but is not necessarily indicative of great literary merit.
Mrs. Le Guin also polemicizes against sword and sorcery and the pretentiousness of the
stolen myths found in so much SF; but she rarely cites particular examples. Samuel R.
Delany and Roger Zelazny, the main culprits in this respect, are probably not meant by
her, although she says a few words about a misdirection of Zelazny's development as a
writer. She loves above all J.R.R. Tolkien, whom she thinks is a most profound writer
often slighted by certain reviewers who claim that his philosophy and ethics are
simplistic (because they are simple minds themselves, such as the writer of these lines).
Is Tolkien more than a British Robert E. Howard with an university education and tenure?
Yet she seems to be seriously of the opinion that fantasy is a suppressed literary form
that doesn't get due attention. Dragons are symbols of freedom, i.e., of the freedom of
imagination, and therefore disliked by librarians and similar unimaginative people. Why
are Americans afraid of dragons?, she asks in a speech given in 1973. Can there be a
bigger misunderstanding of the situation? Tolkien isn't exactly an unread, suppressed
writer, and if he may have suffered some attacks, and was ignored by other critics, the
readers stood solidly behind him: in commercial terms, he is one of the most successful
writers of the century. Tolkien is a romantic writer, and Mrs. Le Guin says in one place of
herself that her imagination is romantic and not ironical, and this natural
disposition--in her case surely without any commercial intentions-- explains, perhaps more
than the beauty of her writing, her success: identification is what insures success in
American SF or fantasy, not critical distancing and an ironical stance. And why are Italo
Calvino's so much more sophisticated and ironical knightly fantasies known to only a few?
"I suspect," Mrs. Le Guin writes, "that almost all very highly technological
peoples are more or less anti-fantasy. There are several national literatures which, like
ours, have had no tradition of adult fantasy for the past several hundred years: the
French, for instance. But then you have the Germans, who have a good deal and the English,
who have it, and love it, and do it better than anyone else" (p. 40). But about what
kind of fantasy is she speaking here? Surely fantasy is as old as literature, and has
existed in many countries, including, most emphatically, France. But nobody there or in
Germany thought, as Tolkien did, and the modern fantasy writers in England and America do,
of creating complete parallel worlds: they fluctuated perhaps between a fairy tale world
or a world glimpsed in dreams and the real world, but they did not think of firmly
occupying a fantasy world to such an extent as to create whole alternate geographies,
cultures, languages--invariable simple worlds close to nature and the physical attributes
of all its creatures. All the parallel "inner lands" of Tolkien and others like
him are "inner" only in the sense that they have sprung from human minds--as
cannot be otherwise in literature, just as the euphemism "imaginative
literature" sometimes used for fantasy, is a presumption. More important than the
spiritual values in these books are the descriptions of purely physical things, of
external landscapes, and of physical feats. But in the eyes of the apologists for fantasy,
any stumbling around in a fantasy world becomes a spiritual quest.
Contrary to what Mrs. Le Guin thinks of the anti-fantasy attitude of highly
technological people, modern fantasy is a reaction to industrial society and its
pressures, and could hardly have arisen in another society; a peasant people would hardly
have any use for such a literary genre. It is not chance that this kind of fantasy arose
in l9th-century England, the country that first felt the full pressure of
industrialization; that its main practitioners, whether Morris, Lord Dunsany, C.S. Lewis,
E.R. Eddison, or J.R.R. Tolkien all profoundly disliked their own time; or that this
literature reached its greatest popularity in the scientifically and industrially most
advanced country on Earth (the US), and then spread from there to other countries. Modern
fantasy is a literature for a discontented city population, and especially for the young
people fed up with their civilization: seeing no sense in technological progress,
dissatisfied with things as they are, and unable to create new values, they turn to
writers who re-create at great length what genuine fairy tales told much more poignantly
and with greater charm; and Le Guin's short remarks on H.C. Andersen suggest, at least to
this writer, that Andersen is so much better than the touted J.R.R. Tolkien. For Mrs. Le
Guin and a few others, myth may indeed be a living reality and the proper expression of
what they want to say. But in general, the myths presented in fantasy are dead, and
perhaps it is exactly for this reason that they can, with impunity, be varied and
re-combined in literature, just as the dead languages Greek and Latin provide a ready
reservoir for scientific terms. Writers who lack an inner guide that would enable them to
create something truly new and appropriate for our times may approach them with the
unconscious habit of grave robbers in search of "eternal verifies" to give
significance to their pulpish stories. Again it is perhaps not merely chance that the
fantastic writings of Mircea Eliade, as archaic and anti-scientific as they are [but Mircea Eliade knows whereof he speaks] are not even mentioned in American discussions of
fantasy--for they have nothing in common with the currently popular brand of fantasy. Now,
of course, even the writings of Tolkien (and Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, which is
so much better than Tolkien) have a proper, if only very minor place in literature: only
when they rise to mass phenomena do they become a regrettable symptom of what is wrong
with our times.
Le Guin's book is a well-written, intelligent, witty and above all coherent statement
of a world view: but at the same time it is ameliorating, and for all its love for truth
often is illusionistic and lacking the courage and the insight to perceive the true state
of things. These latter qualities may all contribute to Mrs. Le Guin's popularity with
readers, but they stand in the way of her being a great writer of lasting significance.
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