Урсула Ле Гуин - Ursula K. Le Guin - The Last Interview and Other Conversations

WESTLING:That’s the heart of that book, the most fully realized thing in it.

LE GUIN:Sure, that’s where it started. But that is also my Antarctic dream, my having followed Scott and [Edward] Wilson on those awful trips for years. Every now and then I have another binge, going back to Antarctica. I have a story coming out in the New Yorker about the first women who got to Antarctica. Actually, they got to the Pole first. But they didn’t leave any traces.

WICKES:You mean they got there ahead of everyone else?

LE GUIN:They got there just a little ahead of Amundsen. A small group of South American women. I think I enjoyed writing that story [“Sur”] more than anything in my whole life.

WICKES:Now that brings up something else. You have all these journeys in your fiction; people are always traveling around. That’s a great way to see your geography, but it often becomes the plot. We go on a journey, not always an ordeal or quest, but we always go on a journey.

LE GUIN:You’ve just hit a very significant note here. Actually I’m terrible at plotting, so all I do is sort of put people in motion and they go around in a circle and they generally end up about where they started out. That’s a Le Guin plot.

WESTLING:Well, who says you have to go straight ahead and then stop?

LE GUIN:I admire real plotting, the many strands and real suspense. But I seem not able to achieve it.

WESTLING:Have feminists commended you on this fact? They should. That’s supposed to be feminine, just as Eastern culture is supposed to be feminine because it emphasizes the circular.

LE GUIN:But complexity surely is neither masculine nor feminine, and I see the line of my stories being awfully simple. It’s not that I want to write mysteries, I’m talking about something more like what Dickens did, pulling strands together, weaving something—I’m not very good at that. I just plunge ahead. Or I do it by trickery, by zigzagging.

WICKES:How long have you lived in Oregon?

LE GUIN:Since 1959.

WICKES:Do you think Oregon has had an influence on your work?

LE GUIN:Sure. It’s the place I’ve lived longest now.

WICKES:Has it made you a dendrophile, or were you one already?

LE GUIN:I must have been one already, but I didn’t even notice until I was looking over that bunch of short stories I was supposed to write an introduction for and suddenly realized, “My God, this thing’s crawling with trees.” I think living on the edge of a forest has had some influence. And we’ve managed to plant a forest, without really intending to. The kids won’t let us cut anything down: “Oh, what a sweet little seedling!” So now we have a garden towering over us. And every summer when I was growing up in northern California, I lived in a forest, up in the foothills of Napa Valley, and going out in the woods was what I did.

WESTLING:Were you a tomboy?

LE GUIN:I had three older brothers, so I tagged around after them. I wasn’t brave, and I didn’t climb trees—I’ve been terrified of climbing and so on—I was not a tomboy in the sense of being brave and courageous, but my parents made no great distinctions between boys and girls, so I had the freedom of the woods.

WICKES:Would your feelings about nature have something to do with your feelings about what we might loosely call civilization or more exactly call technology? How do you feel about technology—for or against?

LE GUIN:Oh, for. I don’t know, it’s such a large question, every answer turns out sounding like a fortune cookie, but you don’t get civilizations of any kind without technology. If you want a tool to do something with, you’ve got to figure out how to make it and how to make it best. And all that aspect of life I enjoy very much. I am really interested in things and artifacts, doings and makings and objects. So in the very simplest sense I enjoy technology. I love a good tool or a well-made thing.

WICKES:Yes, but there’s a difference between craftsmanship and technology.

LE GUIN:Well, craftsmanship is just good technology. Now if you’re talking about the excesses of the industrial West, then obviously we have taken something too far too hard. But to say that I’m against technology would make me a Luddite, and that I detest and abhor and am afraid of. People who think they can get on without the things that we now know how to do are kidding themselves. I would last five days in the woods without a good deal of technology. And besides, I like houses and cities.

WICKES:Yet it seems to me that your ideal state is the one you describe in City of Illusions, for instance, a comfortable old Maybeck house in the forest, with modern conveniences that nobody has to look after, where life is rather simple.

LE GUIN:No, no, not at all. That’s a total dead end. That’s why he had to get out of that place. It was fun to describe it, to give it the solar cells and stuff so they had this nice, low-level dream technology, but I’m a city person.

WICKES:I’m surprised to hear you say that because I thought the city was a bad place in your fiction. There’s the one in City of Illusions, which is a bad place, or the one on Urras in The Dispossessed, which is beautiful and luxurious but ultimately evil.

LE GUIN:But what about the other city in that book, the one on Annares? It’s a kind of Paul Goodman city.

WESTLING:And yet dangers lurk there, because of the political conniving.

LE GUIN:A city is where all dangers come together for human beings, where everything happens to human beings. I use “city” in a fairly metaphorical sense. A city is where culture comes together and flowers. A pueblo is a city.

WESTLING:The idyllic moments in many of your stories, though, seem to occur outside of cities. It’s the pastoral problem. People need to escape the corruption of urban life and find renewal in an idealized natural setting, but they have to go back.

LE GUIN:Yes, people are always going back and forth. But in my fiction the place they’re going to end up and do their work and live their lives out is the city. As at the end of The Beginning Place, which is, of course, much fresher in my mind than City of Illusions is. If I might say so, City of Illusions is rather a bad book to use for anything; it’s my least favorite and certainly the one with the most just plain stupid mistakes and holes in it.

WICKES:Still, quite often you present this antithesis between the modern city and the natural world, and my impression is that your fiction doesn’t show much interest in technology. By technology I mean hardware, gadgetry. This side of science fiction doesn’t seem to interest you very much, and though you’ve got the convenience of space travel which will permit you to visit all these wonderful different worlds, you’re not really interested in how the contraption works.

LE GUIN:Not at all. Because I don’t believe in it. If you ask me, do I believe that we will have space-flight of the speed necessary to get outside the solar system in any foreseeable future, I’d say no. We have nothing leading to such technology. So the whole thing is a metaphor, and you play around with making it look realistic, because that’s part of the fun of a novel. And I put limitations like they couldn’t exceed the speed of light. I like that part of it; I like playing with theory and what science I am able to absorb, which is pretty limited. But the engineering part is where I draw the line. I like my washing machine, and I treat it well, but I don’t really yearn to know what’s inside.