Ursula K. Le Guin was her own toughest (and best) critic

 

 

 

In “The Language of the Night,” a recently reissued classic, she engages science fiction and fantasy — including her novels — with passionate intensity.

Review by B.D. McClay

 

 

Even before her death, Ursula K. Le Guin had become one of the literary world’s secular saints. Since her passing, her halo has only grown brighter: In a rhapsodic piece for Literary Hub in 2022, four years after Le Guin died at 88, Susan DeFreitas characterized her as “an author whose work moves you so deeply that reading it is like going to church.” The sentiment is representative. In his introduction to “The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy,” a 1979 collection of Le Guin’s essays that has just been handsomely reissued, fellow science fiction writer Ken Liu breathlessly declares it “a monumental classic — a book of criticism so influential that it has become a work of art itself.”

Well, why shouldn’t Le Guin’s reputation only grow? She managed to somehow be resolutely herself while appealing to nearly everyone. She was conventional in her private life — happily married with children — but faithfully left-wing in her politics. She was a staunch defender of the rights of the individual and of the worth of genre writing, but she also remained unrelentingly snobbish. (In an interview in 1984, she called “Star Wars” “anti-intellectual and sort of deliberately stupid.”) In her nonfiction writing, she was endearingly direct, speaking to audiences with a familiarity that never undercut her authority. She produced genre fiction of unimpeachable literary merit; she wrote children’s books that could be loved by adults.

In short, Le Guin can seem like a figure with whom nobody could possibly disagree.

What a pleasure it is, then, to open “The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy,” and discover someone vigorously disagreeing with herself on almost every page. To say that the Le Guin we meet in this book is argumentative, sometimes unfair, sometimes wrong and even self-contradictory is not to diminish her greatness. It is rather to rescue her from the dullness imposed on her by her canonization.

By her own account, Le Guin was an indiscriminate reader of books at a young age; she read science fiction but with no particular devotion. As she got older, the genre did not seem to have a place in it for an adult. “If I glanced at a magazine,” she wrote in the essay “A Citizen of Mondath,” included in this collection, “it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery.” She drifted off to “Tolstoy and things,” and it was only when a friend told her to read a short story by Cordwainer Smith that she went back to science fiction.

Smith — whose real name was the somehow even more improbable Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger — worked for the United States military; he was, perhaps, too close to war to fantasize about it. He drew imaginatively from other sources, like Joan of Arc and Chinese mythology. His work, which features psychic pilots and heroic space cats, is elastic, wild and, perhaps most important in seeing his influence on Le Guin, very funny.

For Le Guin, who was also uninspired by military aesthetics and similarly eclectic in her influences, and would complain that nobody ever noticed when she was being funny, reading Smith must have been a shock of recognition akin to love at first sight. (“I don’t really remember what I thought when I read it,” she wrote, “but what I think now I ought to have thought when I read it is My God! It can be done!”) It gave her hope that her genre-less stories, which were returned to her by publishers with comments like “This material seems remote,” might finally find a home. She sold her first stories to editor Cele Goldsmith Lalli at the magazines Amazing Stories and Fantastic. Even if Le Guin entertained doubts at the time (she later wrote that her earliest stories were “amiable, but not very good, not serious, essentially slick”), she kept writing at a breakneck pace. She published her first novel, “Rocannon’s World,” in 1966, a sequel to it the same year, and three more books before the end of the decade. “A Wizard of Earthsea” (1968) remains one of her greatest novels. “The Left Hand of Darkness” (1969) is her tale of humanoid aliens who can change sex and who live on Gethen, a planet coated in ice.

The essays in “The Language of Night” have aged unevenly, in part because of their author’s own impact; no doubt in some remote library carrel a solitary man sits at his chair and lets his monocle drop at the idea of science fiction having literary merit, but the world has moved on. Le Guin, however, was a staunch critic as well as a defender of genre. These essays contain a handful of references to “the Golden Age of Science Fiction” of the 1940s and ’50s, all of which are negative. A golden age for who, after all? Not for writers, who were, Le Guin thought, producing junk, works that focused on the aforementioned starship captains and brainless babes. And not for readers, who were stuck with that junk.

Le Guin put forth her own critical apparatus for evaluating science fiction and commented almost as an aside that what she meant was “neither self-evident nor popular”:

Within the SF ghetto, many people don’t want their books, or their favorite writers’ books, judged as literature. They want junk, and they bitterly resent aesthetic judgment of it. And outside the ghetto, there are critics who like to stand above SF, looking down upon it, and therefore want it to be junky, popcult, contemptible. … I consider it a real cop-out, an arrogance toward both the books and their readers.

Le Guin believed that Dunsany and Tolkien (and even, perhaps, Cordwainer Smith and Philip K. Dick) had a right to sit alongside Tolstoy and Beethoven in the canon, but that didn’t mean her criteria for entering that canon were broadened or diluted. (In fact, one longs to see her get out the knives for her non-genre peers — a brief comment about “Nabokovian fiddle-faddle” indicates there must have been plenty of material.)

But Le Guin’s most interesting subject was not the now-extinct snob or the still-thriving junk writers. It was herself, capable of greatness but falling short through her reluctance to confront certain subjects. A happily married wife and mother, she bristled at the implication from her feminist contemporaries that she was, in some sense, a gender sellout. Her evasiveness on the subjects of sex and gender cropped up in her work. She preferred to write male protagonists but would get irritated if asked why; in “A Wizard of Earthsea,” she explicitly established that women cannot do magic.

For the present-day reader, “A Wizard of Earthsea” presents Le Guin at her best and most frustrating. On one level a gripping adventure that features a duel with a dragon, at its core it is an introspective tale of grappling with your own darkness; the archipelago where Earthsea takes place is endlessly interesting; and our hero, Ged, is not White, though you have to read pretty closely to notice. Inventive, vivid, rich in language, slyly diverse — all strengths of Le Guin’s work present from the beginning. But banning women from magic was an attempt to exclude them, preemptively, from any future narratives. And the women in the novel who try to use magic aren’t just delusional; they’re evil.

Why?

When the essays in “The Language of the Night” first appeared, Le Guin was still in the process of answering that question. And in the third section of the collection, titled “The Book Is What Is Real,” she reproduced some of her own pieces about her books, mostly introductions to new editions. One of these, “Is Gender Necessary?,” was annotated by Le Guin in a companion list of footnotes called “Redux,” added to a 1989 edition of this collection. It is a double work, presented in two columns: On the left, the original essay, and on the right, Le Guin’s later commentary on it.

In the original, Le Guin argued defensively that “The Left Hand of Darkness” was described by others as about gender when gender was not really the subject of the book; it was not about “feminism or sex or gender or anything of the sort,” but “betrayal and fidelity.” Androgyny is “only half, the lesser half, of the book.” These statements seem odd — a book about ambisexual aliens having no interest in sex or gender seems unlikely. But it’s also true to the experience of reading the novel, in which androgyny does seem more like a grace note than the central theme.

Similarly, Le Guin originally defended her use of the generic “he” throughout the book (“I do not consider this really very important”), even though it created an impression that society on Gethen was not so much androgynous as made up of men who can get pregnant when they go into heat. In the revisionist commentary, she writes: “I now consider it very important.”

It’s a pity that Le Guin was one of the few writers to engage her work with such passionate intensity. Where most others were content to gesture at the existence of “The Left Hand of Darkness” as settling the question of whether science fiction could push against conventional boundaries, Le Guin was willing to ask herself if she really succeeded in doing so, and to say that the answer might be no.

Sainthood is rarely a good outcome for a writer. Put up on the high shelf, outside the rough and tumble world of argument, books get dusty. When Le Guin is turned into an inspirational quote machine, her prickly qualities start to disappear; what is left in their place is a nice old lady, to be nodded at and cited on special occasions. But she knew — even if the rest of us don’t always remember — that she was better than that.

WASHINGTON POST