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

STREITFELD:The idea turns up everywhere in your work. You wrote a poem called “GPS” which ends:

LE GUIN:Another major version of that idea is Always Coming Home. It’s even in the title. That’s one of my most neglected and most central books. You want to understand how my mind works, go there. In the novel within the book, Stone Telling starts in the valley, goes to a different valley and comes back. There’s this whole difference between the circle and the spiral. We say the Earth has a circular orbit around the Sun, but of course it doesn’t. The sun moves too. You never come back to the same place, you just come back to the same point on the spiral. That image is very deep in my thinking. You can’t come home again and you can never step in the same river again. I quote that over and over again.

STREITFELD:Is this the central fantasy notion? It’s certainly in many fairy tales and ghost stories. I’m not sure how many of your peers are preoccupied by it.

LE GUIN:I recognize it in Borges. We’re very different writers, but he uses that notion too. Saramago—and Borges too, for that matter—is fascinated by the idea of doubles. I don’t go there.

Is going home a central fantasy notion? I think that would be a very interesting question to explore. Certainly it’s a central idea of The Lord of the Rings. But of fantasy? It may be a central idea, one of them. The first great fantasy is The Odyssey. And what does Odysseus do? He comes home. Homecoming may not be such an easy visit, after all. The world is changing. It is a spiral. That is kind of the point.

STREITFELD:The idea has less appeal in science fiction. The central SF idea, as molded in the 1940s, is, “We’re going to Mars, to another galaxy. We’re out of here and we ain’t coming back.”

LE GUIN:Outer space was an extension of the frontier—“We’re going to California in 1849. We’re gone.” I just discovered, though, that some people went back and forth, including my own family. My great grandfather, James Johnston, was a ’49er. He went out on the immigrant trail the first year of the Gold Rush, spent quite a while in California, ranched a while in Steens Mountain in Oregon—why, I can’t imagine—and then went back on the immigrant trail to Missouri. He ended up in Wyoming. There were a lot of people who did something like that. You always hear about the westward movement. You don’t hear about the backwash. Once you get to the frontier and there is no more frontier, what do you do? Well, you find a new frontier. That was talked about a lot in the 1940s, the 1950s. What is the new frontier? It’s the moon, outer space. We must have a new frontier, we must go forward! It fits in with capitalism, after all.

STREITFELD:In 1974, you published an essay, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” You wrote, “I think a great many American men have been taught to repress their imaginations, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful.” Fantasy was kept in the nursery or with the outcasts.

LE GUIN:Americans are no longer afraid of dragons, I think it’s fair to say. [ Laughs ] What’s that old saying, Be careful of what you wish for? The panic is dying. We’re going back to the mixture as it was before in earlier generations, when realism and fantasy mixed in all sorts of different ways.

STREITFELD:We’re inundated with fantasy now.

LE GUIN:But much of it is derivative; you can mash a lot of orcs and unicorns and intergalactic wars together without actually imagining anything. One of the troubles with our culture is we do not respect and train the imagination. It needs exercise. It needs practice. You can’t tell a story unless you’ve listened to a lot of stories and then learned how to do it.

STREITFELD:When the new Ghostbusters movie came out, and it had an all-female cast, the culture trembled. There were riots in the street, almost. Is fantasy now infantilizing us?

LE GUIN:I was talking about the genrification of fantasy literature. When you get into the whole pop-culture side of things, I don’t know what goes on there. The retreat into childishness is not a special characteristic of fantasy, but it can be a characteristic of almost anything.

STREITFELD:I stand corrected.

LE GUIN:To genrify is necessary. There are different genres. What is wrong is to rank them as higher or lower, to make a hierarchy based only on genre, not the quality of the writing. That is my whole argument and it goes no further. So don’t try to extend it into this world.

STREITFELD:You noted the tendency in American culture to leave the unbridled imagination to kids, who will grow out of it to become good businessmen or good politicians. Has that changed?

LE GUIN:Maybe it’s changed some.

STREITFELD:The battle has been won?

LE GUIN:Can we get away from the battle metaphor, and from winning and losing? Things have changed and maybe they’ve changed in that perspective, and in a good direction. You talk about winning and losing. I see it as, you make a gain here and then discover you lost something there.

STREITFELD:Okay.

LE GUIN:The place where the unbridled—not a word I’d use—imagination worries me is when it becomes part of nonfiction. You’re allowed to lie in a memoir now. In fact, sometimes you’re encouraged. I’m not a curmudgeon, I’m just a scientist’s daughter. I really like facts. I have a huge respect for them. The indifference toward factuality that is encouraged in a lot of nonfiction—it worries me when people put living people into a novel. Even when you put in rather recently dead people, it always seems you’re taking a terrific risk. There’s a kind of insolence about it, a kind of colonization of that person by you, the author. Is that right, is that fair? And then we get these biographers where they are sort of making it up as they go along. I don’t want to read that. I always think, what is it, a novel, a biography, what is it?

It’s funny. As a novelist, my requirements for a nonfiction book are different than for many nonfiction writers. The difference between fiction and nonfiction to me is pretty absolute. Either you’re making it up or trying to figure out what happened and say it as well as you can. Your own biases will get in the way and nobody can be perfectly factual, but you try. The main thing is trying. It seems to me a lot of people have given up trying, and the reviewers give them their blessing. But we have to be factual. Ask any scientist.

STREITFELD:Reality is so murky…

LE GUIN:Of course. So don’t make it murkier.

STREITFELD:History used to be about white men.

LE GUIN:That wasn’t wrong for previous generations. It is for this society. Times change.

I can’t make moral judgments about what was wrong and right a hundred or two hundred years ago. I don’t live in that world. We have so much trouble reading history without colonizing it, without asking how could you possibly be in favor of slavery or whatever. As if they had the ideas in their head to think the way we do. It’s so unfair.

There’s a sort of absolutism today. You do one bad thing and you’re a bad person. That’s just childish. There’s a lot of childishness around.