Ursula K. Le Guin and Science Fiction as Metaphor

"All  fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of those metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it nonmetaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination."

-Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

The Language of the Night, p.159

“…the truth is a matter of the imagination.”

Ursula Le Guin is specifically talking about the function and ability of Sf to describe personal truths through metaphor in this essay, and while I find this description a very satisfying and fantastic defense against those who would say Sf is useless, silly, or insubstantial, what I really take from this passage is that it points to the fact that perception of the world is subjective. If, as she says, “truth is a matter of the imagination,” then truth is an individualized experience. It is a facet of perception, inseparable from our ability to perceive and contemplate our experience of the world, and fiction becomes a medium through which this accumulated perception can be articulated.

These truths are expressed, perhaps can only be expressed with any kind of firm cohesion, through metaphor, but metaphor, like truth, is subjective, and part of the pleasure and frustration of fiction is that, if it is done well, a reader or viewer can begin to see the threads that bind the metaphors that express personal truths. We can begin to see, if we look, how all these images come together to form a tapestry that presents not just the world itself, but what we take from it into ourselves, who we become and what we are because we live in the world. It is through fiction, through storytelling that we get a glimpse of life from an alternate perspective, that we can perceive the chords that link us to other people. And truth becomes visibly malleable, personal, universal, because it is after all, “a matter of the imagination.”

Ursula Le Guin and What A Novel Gives You

Every novel gives you a chance to do certain things you could not do without it; this is true for the writer as for the reader. Gratitude seems the only fit response. Some things I am grateful to this book for:

The chance to invent the patterning frame (I wish I had one).

The chance to use my own "translations" (collation-ripoff) of the Tao Te Ching. 

 The chance to imagine my own country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our own species as it was five hundred years ago; the vastness of this land, the empty beauty of it; here and there (random, the pattern broken) a little settlement of human beings; a buried supermarket or a ruined freeway made mysterious and pathetic as all things are by age. The sense of time, but more than that the sense of space, extent, the wideness of the continent. The wideness, the wilderness. Prairie, forest; undergrowth, bushes, grass, weeds; the wilderness. We talk patronizingly now of "saving the wilderness" for "recreational purposes," but the wilderness has no purpose and can neither be destroyed nor saved. Where we tame the prairie, the used-car lots and the slums arise, terrible, crowded, empty. The wilderness is disorder. The wilderness is the earth itself, and the dust between the stars, from which  new earths are made.

The chance to play with forests. The forest of the mind. Forests one within another.

The chance to speak of civilization not as a negative force -- restraint, constraint, repression, authority-- but as an opportunity lost, an ideal of truth. The City as goal and dream. The interdependence of order and honesty. No word or monument or way of being is more or less "real" than any other, and all is "natural"; what varies is vividness and accuracy of perception, clarity and honesty of speech. The measure of a civilization may be the individual's ability to speak the truth.

Thus, the chance to remark that programmed pigs may talk ethics but not truth.

The chance to take another journey. Most of my stories are excuses for a journey. (We shall henceforth respectfully refer to this as the Quest Theme.) I never did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B -- or, more often, from A to A -- by the most difficult and circuitous route. 

The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it.

The chance to build a city across the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. 

The chance to argue inconclusively with the slogan "reverence for life," which by leaving out too much lets the lie get in and eat the apple rotten. 

The chance to give Rolery and Jakob Agat a descendant.

The chance to begin and end a book with darkness, like a dream.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to City of Illusions 

The Language of the Night, p. 146-148

Ursula Le Guin, Mrs. Brown and Essential Consciousness

"I don't think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don't think man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware -- to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential. We are subjects, and whoever among us treats us as objects is acting inhumanly, wrongly, against nature. And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness. If we stop looking, the world goes blind. If we cease to speak and listen, the world goes deaf and dumb. If we stop thinking, there is no thought. If we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness."

-Ursula K. Le Guin, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown."

The Language of the Night, p.116

I need to remember this for class in the Fall. Dr. S agreed to do Atomic Holocaust Sf for Independent Study (the one I wanted!), and it might be useful to reference this quote when we read Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. 

"If we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness," eh? There's something tricky about that sentence. It assumes that there is no other consciousness than the one that we humans perceive, and further, suggests that all the bones and flesh and rock and sea and ferns and so on need us to impose our perception upon them. The world is still the world whether we're around to think about it or not, but it wouldn't be our world anymore if we weren't here, it would just be a world, spinning in space around a sun, existing without a name or a physics equation or a mathematical sequence to explain it. These things don't need names and mathematical equations to go on carrying about their business, they just happen. It's we who need to name them, and so, yes, if we destroy ourselves, we destroy our consciousness, and all those names and equations will go down in flaming glory with us.

Le Guin touches on a phenomenon, though, that is equally tricky: In imposing our perception onto the objects that make the world, we transform those objects into something more -- into subjects, which is, according to Le Guin, what we are because we are conscious. We make the world into ourselves because we reflect on it, dream about it, are conscious of it, because we name it. 

There's a poem by Tennyson called "Ulysses," that describes the dissatisfaction and yearning Ulysses feels after returning home to his wife Penelope and his people after a lifetime of living for whatever waited beyond the horizon. One of his complaints is that he is a stranger to his people, and they are strange to him:

"It little profits that an idle king1,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me." 

-Tennsyon, "Ulysses" l.1-5

"...I am become a name; 
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy3.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."

 -Tennyson, "Ulysses" l.11-21

Here a name is not enough to give meaning to interaction; there must be a connection, a bond that has been forged through shared experiences for a sense of kinship or any kind of understanding to be achieved. Le Guin and Tennyson are talking about different aspects of consciousness, but Le Guin's fascination with consciousness and the importance of names (as is demonstrated by her Earthsea series) reminded me of this poem. In "Ulysses," the shared experience enables the individual to become "a part of all that [they] have met," but I think that those interactions would have been significantly different without his name.

It also demonstrates another aspect of my point, that we need to impose our perception onto the world, not the other way around. There would be one true language if that were the case, and many fantasy authors have explored this concept (including Ursula Le Guin). Naming is just a facet of imposing consciousness, a step towards transforming the object into a subject. Important for us, essential for us, because without it, conscious as we are, we are rendered strange, and a stranger, to everything we consciously perceive.

Ursula Le Guin, from "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?"

I don't agree with everything she says about art and sterility in this essay, but as a defense of Fantasy as a genre, this is a pretty interesting approach. To give you some sense of context for the passage from The Language of the Night that I'm about to post, she's theorizing that something must happen in childhood that cultivates a rejection of Sf (and in particular, Fantasy) in people.

"So I arrive at my personal defense of the uses of the imagination, especially in fiction, and most especially in fairy tale, legend, fantasy, science fiction, and the rest of the lunatic fringe. I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grownups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They known that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

So I believe that we should trust our children. Normal children do not confuse reality and fantasy -- they confuse them much less often that we adults do (as a a certain fantasist pointed out in a story called "The Emperor's New Clothes"). Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, ift hey are good books, are true books. All too often, that's more than Mummy and Daddy know; for, in denying their childhood, the adults have denies half their knowledge, and are left with the sad, sterile little fact: "Unicorns aren't real." And that fact is one that never got anybody anywhere (except in the story "The Unicorn in the Garden," by another great fantasist, in which it is shown that a devotion to the unreality of unicorns may get you straight into the loony bin). It is by such statements as, "Once  upon a time there was a dragon," or "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" -- it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth (44-45)."

-Ursula Le Guin, "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" (1974)

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.