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

WESTLING:How do you go about mapping out an imaginary world like that of Malafrena ?

LE GUIN:You certainly have to have maps. You have to know how far it is from there to there, or you get all mushy in your mind. Don’t all the novelists draw maps? Jane Austen did it, when she needed to, and the Brontës did.

WESTLING:But when Joyce wrote back to Dublin and had people measure the time it would take to walk from one place to another and whether Bloom could jump over the railings, wasn’t he being awfully literal-minded?

LE GUIN:Well, of course. A novelist has to be really, stupidly literal about these things.

WICKES:But that’s very different from inventing a country, as you do in Malafrena.

LE GUIN:Whether it’s real Dublin or invented Dublin, it’s got to be right. Whether it’s really there and other people can walk it, or whether you’re building it for them to walk in the mind, it’s got to be absolutely solid.

WESTLING:When you got ready to write The Lathe of Heaven, did you wander around in downtown Portland to see exactly where the parking structure was in relation to the other places?

LE GUIN:I checked a couple of things, because my memory’s so terrible. There are deliberate red herrings there. For instance, I could show you the house George lives in, but it’s not on the street I say it is, it’s one down. And Dave’s Delicatessen never was on Ankeny Street. When they moved it, I went into an absolute panic. I thought, if they put it on Ankeny, I’m leaving this town.

WICKES:Why did you choose Portland as the setting instead of some imaginary place?

LE GUIN:Oh, that wasn’t an imaginary place type of story. That was about America now. That story came close to home, literally.

WICKES:Is this your vision of what’s going to happen in the next twenty years?

LE GUIN:The book’s a dream, quite a bad one. If I had a vision of what’s going to happen, I’m sure I would be unable to speak of it. And I don’t see why I should. I don’t see what right I have. I’m not a prophet. I do not predict. I certainly hope I’m wrong.

WICKES:Are you more interested in the past or in the future? Your fiction goes both ways.

LE GUIN:It’s all mixed up together for me. You don’t get one without the other. It’s a Gordian knot which I have no wish to cut. It’s obvious there’s going to be no future without the past and no past without the future. I get rather Chinese about the whole thing.

WESTLING:Well, in a way then, real time doesn’t matter because what you’re doing is establishing metaphors within which problems can be explored. Is that right?

LE GUIN:Yes. And I think the way of talking about time that makes the most sense to me and within which I work most happily is to connect what it’s now fashionable to call waking-time and dream-time. There are two aspects of time, and we live waking in one; but Western Civilization has announced that there’s only one real time, and it is that one. This I more or less consciously reject, and I am perpetually attempting by one metaphor and device or another in my books to reestablish the connection between the dream-time and the waking-time, to say that the one depends upon the other absolutely.

WESTLING:Well, then, do you see the writer as a dreamer?

LE GUIN:Any artist goes back and forth between the two times, trying to speak one to the other, as a translator or interpreter.

WICKES:One of the most interesting things that keeps turning up again and again in your fiction is “mindspeech” and telepathy. Do you believe in ESP or anything like that?

LE GUIN:I have to give an agnostic’s answer. I certainly have never experienced it. But it was a very convenient metaphor for what I needed to do in the stories. I am not sure what it’s a metaphor for. I’ve read some critics who have had some ideas about what I was trying to say and have left that to them because I really don’t know what I was babbling about. I just know I needed it in certain stories.

WICKES:I think it works very well.

LE GUIN:It certainly is another way of talking about double vision. There is more than one way to see, more than one way to speak, more than one aspect to reality.

WESTLING:It’s also a way to indicate the closeness of the two travelers across the ice.

LE GUIN:Sure, it’s a lovely emotional metaphor. You can play with it endlessly. That’s what’s so neat about science fiction. It gives you the opportunity to say, “All right, there is such a thing as telepathy, and you can learn it as a technique.” Then you play with it novelistically. That’s why I’ve enjoyed writing science fiction.

WESTLING:Have you ever lived in a desolate place like Anarres?

LE GUIN:No, I never really lived in a desert, although I’d been across it in a train, until we went to [the eastern Oregon town of] Frenchglen years ago, just overnight. A whole book, The Tombs of Atuan, came out of that one trip into the Oregon desert. And I’m absolutely addicted to the desert now. Both of my parents liked the high desert country; they liked the Southwest and went there when they could.

WESTLING:Your new story in the New Yorker makes me think of another question, which I’m sure you’ve been asked ad nauseum, but I’ll just ask it one more time. Why is it that most of your protagonists are male?

LE GUIN:I don’t know. Yes, I’ve certainly been asked it, and I’ve tried and tried to answer it, and I’ve given up trying to answer it. In the crudest sense it’s that all protagonists doing the kinds of things that I had mine doing were male, and it took an effort of the imagination which I wasn’t capable of making until very recently to change that. This is going to look rather odd in print, but it really doesn’t matter to me very much what sex people are, and this is my main problem as a feminist. Every now and then I forget to be upset.

WESTLING:Well, Flannery O’Connor said that she always knew there were two sexes, but she guessed that she behaved as if there were only one.

LE GUIN:Yes, I’m afraid this happens to a lot more of us than has either been fashionable or even right to admit, but I think now we can admit it. I think the Movement has gone far enough, given us strength enough that we can say it. Sometimes it just doesn’t bloody matter.

WESTLING:I used to be quite disturbed when I thought of myself in front of a classroom. For years I saw a man in a tweed coat with a pipe. And that bothered me. I’ve been working on it for ten years, and I’m still not able to see me up there yet, but it’s not the man in the tweed coat anymore. I wonder whether you’ve had to make that kind of conscious effort.

LE GUIN:Oh, yes. And I am so grateful to the whole women’s movement for giving me the intellectual tools to make the effort with. Sometimes it’s almost gimmicks—making yourself change the sex of a pronoun to see what happens, for example.

WESTLING:So sex does matter, ultimately, doesn’t it?

LE GUIN:Of course it does. But it doesn’t always matter in everything.

WESTLING:Well, if one grows up with adventure stories, they’re always about boys, and one’s imagination gets formed by that.