In 2010, at the age of 81, the acclaimed novelist Ursula K.
Le Guin started a blog. Blogs never seemed a likely destination for
the writer, who by then had a long career in 20th-century
traditional publishing behind her. But Le Guin’s new book, No Time To Spare, which
harvests a representative sample of her blog posts, feels like the surprising
and satisfying culmination to a career in other literary forms.
Thriving in an unexpected genre is nothing new for Le Guin.
She began to write stories as a child but didn’t achieve mainstream publication
until her thirties. Her difficulties may have had something to do with her
subject matter. From the start she eschewed the constraints of realism,
choosing to write about the alien and the speculative. In her early thirties
she finally found her niche, science fiction. It was an unlikely home for a
woman. At the time, the genre was overwhelmingly male and regressive in many
other ways, too. In the journal Science Fiction Studies, Le Guin
described the state of the field as she first found it:
“The only social change presented by most SF has been
towards authoritarianism, the domination of ignorant masses by a powerful
elite—sometimes presented as a warning, but often quite complacently. Socialism
is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten.
Military virtues are taken as ethical ones. Wealth is assumed to be a righteous
goal and a personal virtue. Competitive free-enterprise capitalism is the
economic destiny of the entire Galaxy. In general, American SF has assumed a
permanent hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, with rich, ambitious,
aggressive males at the top, then a great gap, and then at the bottom the poor,
the uneducated, the faceless masses, and all the women.”
Today, by contrast, the genre has become one of the
preeminent literary spaces for imagining social and political change. Women
like Ann Leckie, N.K. Jemisin, Nisi Shawl, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor,
Aliette de Bodard, among others, are at the forefront of this transformation,
and Le Guin was one of their forebears. Her career is filled with achievements
in great storytelling that also offer galvanizing visions of worlds that differ
from our own: the feminist and anti-capitalist utopias of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and Always Coming Home; the Taoist epic fantasy of the
Earthsea novels; the emancipatory historical fiction of Lavinia. Her work shows the moral character of Le
Guin’s mind, a quality that comes through still more lucidly in the blog’s
compressed form.
“It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy
says,” writes Le Guin in a blog post:
“[This is] a playful statement, made in the context of
fiction, with no claim to “being real.” Yet it is a subversive statement. . . .
Fantasy not only asks ‘What if things didn’t go on just as they do?’ but
demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the
very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.”
Le Guin has always been fascinated by the subversive
possibility of imaginative writing, and the central conceits of her two
best-known series explore it. The Hainish Cycle is a series of stand-alone
novels set in the same universe, on separate planets where civilization has
developed in radically different ways. Humans can travel between these planets,
but they cannot travel faster than light, and so the expenditure of time is
prohibitive; but they remain connected through Le Guin’s signature SF
invention, the “ansible.” The ansible is a communication device allowing near
instant communication between any two points. People on separate worlds who
could never cross the vast distances between them in the span of a single life
can still communicate. This imaginary technology poses an interesting thought
experiment. If two people can only trade information, what effect can they have
on each other’s lives? The ansible is an obvious metaphor for writing itself.
The Earthsea Cycle, by contrast, is a series of fantasy
novels and short stories set in a universe where anything spoken in Old
Speech—a language in which everything has a secret, true name—comes to pass.
Again the central conceit appears to reflect the question of writing itself,
and how it can affect the world. The condition for using Old Speech—that you
must find out a thing’s true name—suggests a condition for good writing: you
must describe the world accurately. How could a writer of science fiction and
fantasy suggest such a thing?
Le Guin has stated that she thinks of genre as a formal
constraint, the way a writer of sonnets might treat the fourteen lines as a
limitation that allows for otherwise impossible effects. A book like The
Left Hand of Darkness checks all the genre boxes—an alien world,
thrilling events, political machinations—but at the same time, it invites us to
reflect on the role of sex in everyday life and everyday aggression, as we
inhabit the point of view of a male stranger on a hermaphroditic world. Often
Le Guin’s protagonists are strangers exposed to new societies, and their
visions of otherness become vehicles for the reader’s self-reflection,
highlighting the strangenesses in our own world that we’ve become too
accustomed to to notice. For Le Guin, imaginative fiction is not
“escapist” in the usual, derogatory sense, but in a different, subversive
sense: “The direction of escape is toward freedom,” she notes. “So what is
‘escapism’ an accusation of?”
Now, at 87, Le Guin has stopped writing fiction. She
continues to blog, and she has found ways to pursue a similar subversive
mission in the new medium.
On the blog, Le Guin’s scope is somewhat narrower. A running theme is the life of her cat, Pard. Between each of No Time to Spare’s four topical sections are essays entitled “Annals of Pard.” Devoting such time and interest to the observation of a cat might seem to represent the commonest impulses both of internet culture and old age; but, as always, Le Guin wades into her new genre to deepen and expand it. When Pard brings her a living mouse to and drops it on her bed in the night, her solution is to lock them together in the kitchen until the mouse disappears (whether through elusion or ingestion, she doesn’t know). She reflects on the ethical implications and possible reasons for her resistance to intervention:
“I want to say clearly that I do not believe any animal is
capable of being cruel. Cruelty implies consciousness of another’s pain and the
intent to cause it. Cruelty is a human specialty, which human beings continue
to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about
it. We prefer to disown it, calling it “inhumanity,” ascribing it to animals.
... Wild cat and wild mouse have a clear, highly developed, well-understood
connection—predator and prey. But Pard’s and his ancestors’ relationship with
human beings has interfered with his instincts, confusing that fierce clarity,
half taming it, leaving him and his prey in an unsatisfactory, unhappy place.”
Even in the familiar relationship of an old woman and her
cat, Le Guin finds an ambit for challenging moral insight and matter for an
inquisitiveness that probes the deep time of evolution. She represents an
artist unimpeded by old age or acclaim. She continues to look for new sources
of otherness in her life, and to give us glimpses of the otherness she
inhabits. It took Le Guin the first half of her career as a published novelist
to learn how to write female protagonists in a male-dominated and
male-glorifying genre, and now she is learning to write from the perspective of
old age in the youth-worshipping medium of the internet. “A lot of younger
people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of
age as negative,” she writes. “Wanting to deal with old people in a positive
spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality. ... ‘You’re only as old
as you think you are!’” She scoffs at this attitude and points out its logical
and moral problems. Unlike capitalism and patriarchy, the illusion surrounding
old age is that it is an illusion:
“Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires.
Fear is seldom wise and never kind. Who is it you’re cheering up, anyhow? Is it
really the geezer? To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t
exist. Erase my age, you erase my life—me.”
Age, she insists, makes one a “diminished thing.” Likewise,
a blog does not possess the same artistic or persuasive power as a novel;
reading about Le Guin’s cat will not change your life, the way that reading
about her strange, freer worlds might. Blog posts are short, topical, and often
polemical in a narrow way. On her blog, Le Guin talks about many of the same
things she addressed in her stories, but the form itself is a diminished thing.
An essay like “A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters,” about the differences
between types of gendered solidarity, can never open as wide a space for
reflection as the extended thought experiment in differently-gendered
solidarity that is The Left Hand of Darkness.
But even in a diminished form of writing, the spirit of Le
Guin’s work remains. When she began to blog, she had a predecessor in mind. The
Nobel Prize recipient Jose Saramago had also begun to blog in his eighties. His
posts were published in English as The Notebooks, and Le Guin
thought that “seeing what Saramago did with the form was a revelation.”
Reading No Time To Spare, it’s hard not to feel the same about what
she has done with the form. Blogs may not be novels, but a blog by Le Guin is
no ordinary blog, either. It is a comfort to know, as reality seems to grow
more claustrophobic and inescapable, that she remains at her desk, busily
subverting our world.
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De NEW REPUBLIC, 07/09/2017
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