Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

As a dead white man of the ruling class remarked, power corrupts. To the extent that adults have more power than kids, adults are inarguably corrupt, while kids are at least relatively innocent. But innocence is not what defines people as human. It’s what we share with the animals.

An adult indeed may have absolute power over a child and may abuse it. But even truthful, valid descriptions of abuse are weakened when the writer’s point of view is childish or infantile. To accept the infantile view of adulthood as omnipotent, readers must abandon their hard-earned knowledge that most adults in fact have very little power of any kind.

I will use the same two books as examples as I did in the previous essay, on fictional characters: David Copperfield and Huckleberry Finn .

We are caught in and share young David’s perception of his stepfather’s cruelty. But Dickens’s novel is not about a child abused by jealous and hateful adults: it is about a child growing up, becoming a man, a complete human being. All David’s mistakes, in fact, are the same mistake repeated—a childish misperception of false authority as real, which prevents him from valuing the real help that is always at hand for him. By the end of the book he has outgrown the infantile myths that held him helpless.

Dickens as a child was, in many respects, David, but Dickens the novelist does not confuse himself with that child. He keeps the complex, hard-earned vision. And so David Copperfield , fearfully acute in its understanding of how children suffer, is a book for adults.

Contrast J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The author adopts the childish view of adults as inhumanly powerful and uncomprehending, and never goes beyond it; and so his novel, published for adults, is better appreciated by ten-year-olds.

The childish point of view and the child’s point of view aren’t necessarily the same thing. A good deal of Tom Sawyer is a rather uneasy mixture of the two, but Huckleberry Finn , though narrated in a boy’s voice, has nothing childish in it. Behind Huck’s limited vocabulary, perceptions, and speculations, his ignorances, misconceptions, and prejudices, is the steadfast, lucid, ironic intelligence of the author, and it is through that intelligence that we understand and feel Huck’s moral dilemma, which he has such difficulty understanding himself.

When I read the book as a kid Huck’s age, I understood that, as well as anybody under eighteen understands irony. So I could read with understanding even when shocked by some of the language and events—until I came to the episode where the boys, at Tom’s insistence, imprison and torment Jim. There I saw the black man I had come to love powerless in the hands of the white children, his fear and grief and patience ignored and devalued, and I thought Twain himself had joined in the wicked game. I thought he approved of it. I didn’t understand that he was satirising the cruel mockeries of Reconstruction. I needed that historical knowledge to understand what Twain was doing: that he was honoring me by including me in the same humanity with Jim.

Throughout Huckleberry Finn , the boy’s unquestioned assumptions (which are those of his society) and the author’s convictions and perceptions (which are frequently counter to those of his society) contradict each other deliberately and shockingly. It is a profoundly complex, dangerous book. Those who want literature to be safe will never forgive it for being dangerous.

Each Unquestioned Assumption has a possible opposite, a reverse, which if written into fiction would give us stories in which men occur only as sexual objects for women, where homosexuality is the social norm, where white skin has to be mentioned whenever it appears, where only godless anarchists act morally, or where adults rebel vainly against the bullying authority of children. Such books are, in my experience, rare. One might meet them in science fiction.

Realistic fiction that merely questions or ignores the assumptions, however, is not unusual. We do have novels that assume that women represent humanity as well as men do; that gays, or people of color, or non-Christians, represent humanity as well as heterosexuals, whites, or Christians do; or that the adult or parental point of view is as valuable as the childish one.

The stigma of “political correctness,” invoked by those who see all refusal of bigotry as a liberal conspiracy, may be slapped on such books. They are often ghettoised by publishers and reviewers, segregated from fiction “of general interest.” If a novel is centered on the doings of men, or its major characters are male, white, straight, and/or young, nothing is said about them as members of a group, and the story is assumed to be “of general interest.” If the major characters are women, or black, or gay, or old, reviewers are likely to say that the book is “about” that group, and it is assumed, even by sympathetic reviewers, to be of interest chiefly or only to that group. Thus both the critical establishment and the publishers’ publicity and distribution tactics lend immense authority to prejudice.

A writer may not want to defy both the reactionary critical establishment and the pusillanimous marketplace. “I just want to write this novel about the kind of people I know!” “I just want to sell my book!” Fair enough. But how much collusion with prejudice, disguised as unquestioned assumptions about what is normal, does it take to buy safety?

The risk is real. Look again at Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is still getting bad-mouthed, banned, and censored, because its characters use the word nigger and for other reasons, all having to do with race. Those who allow it to be thus abused in the name of equality include people who think teenagers are incapable of understanding historical context, people who believe education for good involves suppressing knowledge of evil, people who refuse to understand a complex moral purpose, and people who distrust or fear secular literature as a tool of moral and social education. A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.

Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to—by gender, sex, race, religion, age—is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write.

This piece was a contribution to a volume edited by Paul M. Wrigley and Debbie Cross as a benefit for the Susan Petrey Fund and Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1989. This version is different here and there, updated, but the illustrations are the same.

Sometimes I worry about workshops. I’ve taught quite a few—Clarion West four times; in Australia; at Haystack on the Oregon coast and at the Malheur Field Station in the Oregon desert; at the Indiana and Bennington Writers Conferences, at the Writing Centers in D.C., and at Portland State University; and many times at the beloved and muchmissed Flight of the Mind. And I still teach workshops sometimes, though sometimes I think I should stop. Not only because I am getting old and lazy, but because I’m two-minded about workshops, not single-minded. I worry, are they a good thing—yes? no?