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

STREITFELD:The esteemed critic John Clute said every science fiction novel is secretly about the year it is written, and reflects what the writer was thinking and the cultural attitudes of the time.

LE GUIN:Inevitably!

STREITFELD:Would Wizard be fundamentally different if it had been written ten years later?

LE GUIN:Clute was talking about science fiction. This is fantasy. Fantasy draws on a much older, deeper well for its models, inspiration, style, everything. Science fiction is time-bound in a way that fantasy can be but does not need to be. But I can never answer questions like that. Ten years later I was a different person, so of course I would have written a different novel.

STREITFELD:You began by writing firmly within the male power hierarchy. In Wizard , women take a secondary role. There are sayings in Earthsea about “weak as woman’s magic” and “wicked as woman’s magic.” The wizard school on Roke does not admit girls. Wizards are celibate.

LE GUIN:I was comfortably writing within that tradition in the 1960s, and then I was uncomfortable writing within it. Earthsea certainly would have been different if I started it ten years later. I had to turn around in the fourth volume, Tehanu , and untie it, untie the whole Earthsea from the male-centered, happily hierarchical, top-down world of the old fantasies. In coming back to Earthsea after seventeen years, what was interesting and reassuring to me was the realization that it wasn’t any longer going to be about heroes in a happily male-dominated world, with no sex for the wizards. I didn’t want to do that anymore, I couldn’t do it anymore. It wasn’t true anymore. And yet it was still Earthsea. I didn’t have to change anything, I just had to explain it. It was quite an education for me, actually, writing those last few books—the fourth, fifth and sixth. Now it’s done. I could go on and do sequels about other people in Earthsea but no. A story has an arc. You don’t want to go on after the end of King Lear.

STREITFELD:I interviewed you in 1990 when Tehanu came out. You said, “Finally the story is done.”

LE GUIN:I was wrong. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things about Earthsea. But now I believe I’m right. [2] She wasn’t, quite. A last Earthsea story, “Firelight”—a moving account of Ged’s dying, with Tenar by his side—appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of The Paris Review, six months after Le Guin’s own death.

STREITFELD:You wrote Lavinia after you did the later Earthsea books. It was a novel about a character in the Aeneid, that translates the latter part of the epic, that revisions it, that is an explicit dialogue with its author, Virgil, as well as a tribute to him. As so often with your work, people had a hard time categorizing it.

LE GUIN: Lavinia doesn’t fit, just like Orsinia doesn’t fit. It’s not science fiction, not fantasy, not realism. Why the hell does it have to fit a label? Labels—that’s how you sell. And that’s how you shelve at the library. It can be helpful but it is limiting.

The thing to do is get away from these late-twentieth-century attitudes. What does Borges write? You can only call it Borgesian. Kafka is Kafkaesque. There is no label for what Calvino does. Calvinistic? It’s just what Calvino does. What you really want is to be your own label.

STREITFELD:You recently said you’ve stopped writing fiction.

LE GUIN:I didn’t say I stopped. I said, “The fiction isn’t coming.” It’s never been a matter of “I will write” or “I won’t write.” I’m not getting short stories. I haven’t gotten a story now for quite a while. “Elementals” was in Tin House in 2012, and then they published “The Jar of Water” in 2014 after the New Yorker sat on it forever and then didn’t take it, which was very un- New Yorker– like. That’s probably my last written, last published story.

STREITFELD: Lavinia in 2008 was your last novel.

LE GUIN:There just wasn’t another novel lurking somewhere at the back of my consciousness. It’s a very strange feeling, like having a well and the well goes dry. It’s a disappointment and a letdown, it’s work I loved doing. I know I can do it, so there’s a feeling of waste. I have my profession, my art. I’m good at it. It’s a pity I can’t use it on what I love to use it on most, which is fiction. But I’ve got to have a story that picks me up and carries me. If it ain’t there it ain’t there. What is the use sitting around and whining about writer’s block? It’s not writer’s block. I’m just written out. I’m glad I still can write poetry. I started with that and can continue with it now. That is both a lifelong need and a solace. If that gives out, I will be frustrated.

STREITFELD:You once clarified your political stance by saying, “I am not a progressive. I think the idea of progress an invidious and generally harmful mistake. I am interested in change, which is an entirely different matter.” Why is the idea of progress harmful? Surely in the great sweep of time, there has been progress on social issues because people have an idea or even an ideal of it.

LE GUIN:I didn’t say progress was harmful, I said the idea of progress was generally harmful. I was thinking more as a Darwinist than in terms of social issues. I was thinking about the idea of evolution as an ascending staircase with amoebas at the bottom and Man at the top or near the top, maybe with some angels above him. And I was thinking of the idea of history as ascending infallibly to the better—which, it seems to me, is how the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to use the word “progress.” We leave behind us the Dark Ages of ignorance, the primitive ages without steam engines, without airplanes/nuclear power/computers/whatever is next. Progress discards the old, leads ever to the new, the better, the faster, the bigger, etc. You see my problem with it? It just isn’t true.

STREITFELD:How does evolution fit in?

LE GUIN:Evolution is a wonderful process of change—of differentiation and diversification and complication, endless and splendid; but I can’t say that any of its products is “better than” or “superior to” any other in general terms. Only in specific ways. Rats are more intelligent and more adaptable than koala bears, and those two superiorities will keep rats going while the koalas die out. On the other hand, if there were nothing around to eat but eucalyptus, the rats would be gone in no time and the koalas would thrive. Humans can do all kinds of stuff bacteria can’t do, but if I had to bet on really long-term global survival, my money would go to the bacteria.

STREITFELD:In the Library of America’s edition of Orsinia, you quote from a 1975 journal when you were finishing up the novel that you began in the 1950s, Malafrena. You realized that in many ways it was spiritually and thematically similar to the novel you had just finished, The Dispossessed. You wrote, “not only the person and the situation are similar but the words :—True pilgrimage consists in coming home—True journey is return—and so on. I have not a few ideas: I have ONE idea.”

LE GUIN:[ Laughs ] People will take it literally, and they will quote it as the gospel truth, but what the hell—you just can’t write for stupid people. I beat up myself considerably about putting that section of a private diary in print. I’ve never done anything really like that before. I just kind of thought, “Oh, what the hell.” I wrote it and reading it decades later said, “Yeah, okay, there’s some truth in that, and what have I to risk?”