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

I interviewed Le Guin by letter in November and December of 2001, in anticipation of the publication of her major new collection, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, in March 2002. Le Guin is a subtly but firmly opinionated writer, and I posed her some deliberately provocative questions. She responded with all the vigor I hoped for, pouncing on many of my stated assumptions with the kindly didacticism for which she is famed. So: if some of the questions below seem naïve or crass, please remember, reader, that they were sacrificial in nature, and for all that, many people would agree heartily with their premises. Le Guin’s fictions are engines of thought, and much of that thought must run contrary to hers.

NICK GEVERS: The Telling, Tales from Earthsea, The Other Wind, and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories : four major new books in under two years, including your first novels since Tehanu ; probably your most prolific period since the 1970s. To what would you ascribe this productivity?

URSULA K. LE GUIN:This effect of immense industriousness is an artifact of the peculiarities of the publishing industry. I was writing along at about my usual rate for some years without being sure where to publish in book form (for various reasons—changes of editors, of literary agents, etc.). My new publisher, Harcourt, once they got onto me, were eager to print everything I gave them in very short order; and then my old publisher, Harper, suddenly decided I was still alive. So I end up with four books in two years (five, counting a long-delayed kid’s book, Tom Mouse , to come out in March).

Two of these new books assemble stories I wrote in the 1990s but didn’t include in my 1990s collections A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Unlocking the Air, Searoad, and Four Ways to Forgiveness. (Those last two, being story-suites, count, in my mind, pretty much the same as novels. Similarly, Tales from Earthsea isn’t a novel, but it carries the Earthsea series from Tehanu to The Other Wind without a break.) Then the two novels, The Telling and The Other Wind, came one right after the other at the end of the decade. One came slow, the other fast.

GEVERS:The hallmark of your work over the last decade has been a return to, a revisioning of, your original Hainish and Earthsea sequences. One should never speak too soon, but do you think you’ve now finished with Earthsea and the Ekumen, rounded them off conclusively?

LE GUIN:Earthsea got revisited and revisioned, and certain obscurities were made clear. The Ekumen worlds merely got further explored, it seems to me.

I don’t know that I’ve finished anything. Certainly not the Ekumen, which has no shape and, therefore, no end.

I seem to tend to avoid conclusive conclusions, as it were, she said, evasively and inconclusively. I like to leave doors open.

GEVERS:Your newest works have a strong reconciliatory air: not a compromise with patriarchy and tyranny, but a bringing together of masculine and feminine elements that seemed mutually alienated in your middle-period works like Always Coming Home and Tehanu . Have you mellowed? Or has your ideological emphasis simply shifted?

LE GUIN:Thank you; I like “reconciliatory not compromising.”

But I wonder why you find masculine and feminine elements “alienated” in Tehanu and not in A Wizard of Earthsea and The Farthest Shore, books which have no female characters of any importance. Absence is not alienation?

Tehanu is the beginning of a genuine reconciliation. The first steps are the hard ones.

As for the masculine and feminine elements in Always Coming Home, my own opinion is that it’s in that book, of all my works, that the reunion, cooperation, harmony of the genders (among the Kesh) reach perhaps the highest degree. Of course, this would not be visible to people who perceive gender harmony only as a result of either one being superior to or dominating the other. Such people insist on describing Kesh society as “matriarchal,” which is nonsense. Apparently their logic is: if it isn’t patriarchal, it has to be matriarchal. Hierarchism dies very hard, doesn’t it?

As for mellowing, I’d like to be good-natured and open-minded, but certainly do not want to mellow into mere mushiness. Like pears that rot from the inside. I’d rather be like Cabernet. Except that would involve staying bottled up for years…

As for ideology, the hell with it. All of it.

GEVERS:In line with the previous question: your style has shifted with time, from a rich mythic/epic register early on to the spare, precisely honed diction of your 1980s work. Now, the two seem to combine, alternating or mingling in a stylistic reconciliation. How deliberate is this fusion?

LE GUIN:Nothing I do is exactly deliberate.

But I do work very hard and consciously at my craft. At the sound, the flow, the exactness, the connections, the implications of my words.

GEVERS:A striking contrast between the original Earthsea and Ekumen novels and their recent successors is the latter’s move from action to observation: The Telling and The Other Wind are contemplative and discursive rather than plot-driven. Why is this?

LE GUIN:Probably because I was getting into my seventies when I wrote them. There is something about one’s body as it gets around seventy years old that induces—strongly—often imperatively—a shift from action to observation. Action at seventy tends to lead to a lot of saying ow, ow, ow. Observation, however, can be rewarding. As I never have been sure where my body leaves off and my mind begins or vice-versa, it seems unsurprising to me that the condition of one of them induces a similar condition in the other.

Anyhow, I have never written a plot-driven novel. I admire plot from a vast distance, with unenvious admiration. I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t. My stories are driven (rather slowly and erratically, with pauses to admire apparently irrelevant scenery) by a different chauffeur.

GEVERS:Ever since Always Coming Home, you’ve seemed to advocate a profound simplicity of life-style: communal, agrarian, sustainable. The Kesh of Always live that way, and then there are the folk of the planet O in various stories, Ged in his goat-tending and turnip-cultivating retirement on Gont, et cetera. But isn’t this idea sentimentally nostalgic, and, in the wrong hands (Pol Pot) positively dangerous?

LE GUIN:Could we have this question again? There is a genuine problem in it, but in its present form I cannot answer it; it seems to either answer itself or destroy itself. The terms are ideological and self-contradictory. A “sustainable” lifestyle is “sentimentally nostalgic”?

A man in a non-industrial economy, who no longer has a source of income, but does have the use of a small piece of land, tends goats and (I’m sorry, I do not recollect any turnips in Earthsea) a kitchen garden, poultry, fruit trees. What else would you suggest that he do, if he likes to eat now and then? [1] The turnips were rhetorical—Nick Gevers

Of course the mere idea of the existence of a non-industrial economy may be what you are considering as “sentimentally nostalgic.”

The question of nostalgia deserves looking into. Much fantasy, and science fiction too, draws upon an apparently inalterable human longing for “the peaceable kingdom,” the garden Voltaire suggested we cultivate. But terms must be used carefully and respectfully in such a discussion.