Ursula Le Guin and Art as Copulation

I'm nearly finished with Luckhurst (finally), but since it is taking me so long to wade through that text and I want to get more reading accomplished this summer, I've started on Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays On Fantasy and Science Fiction.

This is the book:

I love this woman. Not only because she actually wrote back to me in response to a letter I sent her on her Gifts books series, but because there is something lush and snarky about her writing. It is also a relief to switch gears from Luckhurst who, while lovely, references so many theorists and authors that I spend more time thinking about how much I haven't read yet then about the actual information he's putting forward. It's like having too many people talking to me at one time: not quite incoherent, but close enough to incoherency to be frustrating.

Le Guin is just one voice, speaking sweetly and pleasantly.

Here is a quote from The Language of the Night:

"Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all they have the same mutual enemy, sterility." (Le Guin, 27)

From what I've been reading about Le Guin both in the Luckhurst text and in the introduction to The Language of the Night, she's very much concerned with ethics, balance, sexual identity, and the "necessity of internal exploration...to produce a whole, integrated being" (17).  Which brings me to the quote I cited from her on art and sterility. It's a weighty sentence, so I'll do my best to unpack it as clearly and briefly as possible.

There's a relationship in this quote between art and life -- life in the sense of reproduction, continuity, and self-expression. Art here is an act of creation, a kind of birthing from the interior self rather than the biological self. This birth takes the intangible and renders it tangible, and even communicable by externalizing it into physical form.

Le Guin states that art cannot be carried on "indefinitely solo," the suggestion being that a solitary expression is a part of this process, but that it "cannot" be the only part if it is to truly be meaningful. And meaning, as the warning against sterility implies, lies in reproduction. 

She's obviously not considering cloning or asexuality as a form of reproduction here, so let's take that argument off the table and assume, based on the semantic value in the sentence placed on artistic interaction as something more than solo, that artistic reproduction involves a kind of mental copulation with another individual.

The creative self is externally expressed, and through that externalized expression, capable of being shared. This sharing (or copulation), is where art is truly born. Two minds (or more than two), share an idea of some sort through artistic externalization, and from that communion, new ideas are formed. An essential change occurs in both parties, pleasurable or painful, which always involves inspiration, and that change is transformative. 

The thing to note is that this transformation, according to Le Guin's sentence, at least, cannot occur alone. It can be pleasurable, but unless it's shared, that pleasure amounts to masturbation, and nothing comes of that (in the sense of continued life), except temporary relief. 

As I said, speaking sweetly and pleasantly. 

And apparently impregnating my brain with ideas.