Ursula Le Guin: A Writer Out of This World
The literary world lost a beacon this week when Ursula Le Guin passed away. Her obituary in the New York Times, calls her “an immensely popular author who brought literary depth . . . to science fiction and fantasy.” I can’t help but wonder what she would think of this description. I imagine her making some wry comment about how, despite winning the National Book Awards’ Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, she still hasn’t gained full admittance into the lofty ranks of literary fiction.
Even those who subscribe to the notion that literary fiction is distinct from genre fiction have trouble explaining what literary fiction is. A common description I’ve come across is “fiction that has value and merit in the social world.” An article from The Guardian contains an array of definitions, including “an emotional journey through the symphony of words, leading to a stronger grasp of the universe and ourselves.”
According to these definitions, Ursula Le Guin’s work is definitely literary fiction. She has a uniquely agile lens, zooming in on a character’s psyche, then zooming out for a wide-angle perspective of humanity and society. There is no doubt her stories lead to “a stronger grasp of the universe and ourselves” perhaps even more so because she goes beyond our universe to explore those elements of our world that are most difficult to see beyond, such as race and gender.
Le Guin called her most acclaimed novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, a “thought experiment” which presupposes some changes to the world and probes their consequences. . . “I eliminated gender to find out what was left,” she told The Guardian in a 2005 interview. In a revealing line from one of her short stories, “The Diary of The Rose,” the narrator (a doctor in a futuristic authoritarian regime who probes the minds of mental patients) says, “What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can’t live on realism alone.”
It may be surprising, in light of my praise for Le Guin, to know that I am not a big fan of science fiction, perhaps for the same reason that she wasn’t for much of her adolescence: it seemed to be heavy on technological detail and battles and light on emotional depth. However, Le Guin bucked that convention along with many others. I am familiar, primarily, with her short stories, but I know her best from one of her least known books: her writer’s guide, Steering the Craft.
Any doubts about Le Guin’s literary chops are dispelled by this little gem. In the first sentence of chapter 1, she writes, “The sound of language is where it all begins, and what it all comes back to.” To me, it is this sensibility for language, and a focus on its importance to and impact on the story, that are the hallmarks of literary fiction.
The power of words clearly fascinated Le Guin. She claimed she could not write a story until she had chosen the right name for a character, and loved the evocative “echo-allusions” hidden in the sounds of names. In the Earthsea series, magic is driven by language, with Wizards gaining “power over people and things by knowing their ‘true names’,” as her obituary notes. In her short story “The Silence of the Asonu,” from her collection Changing Planes, the narrator describes a culture of people who rarely ever speak, and the fascination of those who observe them and speculate about what wisdom their silence conceals. In a society where words are rare, each one uttered is given tremendous weight.
Even as she revels in the power and beauty of words, Le Guin cautions that “a narrative sentence isn’t serving the story well if its rhythm is so unexpected, or its beauty so striking, or its similes or metaphors so dazzling, that it stops the reader, even to say Ooh, Ah! Poetry can do that. . . . In a story, it’s the scene—the setting/characters/action/interaction/dialogue/feelings—that makes us hold our breath and cry. . . and turn the page to see what happens next. And so, until the scene ends, each sentence should lead to the next sentence.” It’s the rhythm of the sentences that “keeps the song going.” Of course, this sounds simpler than it is. She quotes Virginia Woolf to point out just how complex rhythm can be:
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand, here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it….”
Le Guin even infuses the topic of punctuation with wonder and wit. “If you aren’t interested in punctuation, or are afraid of it, you’re missing out on a whole tool kit of the most essential, beautiful, elegant tools a writer has to work with.”
Her guidebook is rife with examples from her role models, writers widely considered literary masters, from Mark Twain and Charles Dickens to Jane Austen and most prevalently, Virginia Woolf, whose prose Le Guin calls, “the subtlest and strongest in English fiction. “The important thing for any writer,” she writes, “is to know what we’re doing with our language.” I use the exercises in Steering the Craft again and again to train my focus on language, and the joy of playing with it. On days when I am wrestling with plot and character, they are a welcome reminder of why I love to write, even when it is difficult, draining and discouraging.
“I’m not going to discuss writing as self-expression,” Le Guin writes, “as therapy, or as a spiritual adventure. It can be these things; but first of all—and in the end, too—it is an art, a craft, a making. To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.”
