Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

Where do writers get their ideas from? From experience. That’s obvious.

And from imagination. That’s less obvious.

Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent—to tell us a story.

Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, continually, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story go mad. Or, like infants or (perhaps) animals, they live in a world that has no history, no time but now.

The minds of animals are a great, sacred, present mystery. I do think animals have languages, but they are entirely truthful languages. It seems that we are the only animals who can lie . We can think and say what is not so and never was so, or what has never been, yet might be. We can invent; we can suppose; we can imagine. All that gets mixed in with memory. And so we’re the only animals who tell stories.

An ape can remember and extrapolate from her experience: once I stuck a stick in that ant hill and the ants crawled on it, so if I put this stick in that ant hill again, maybe the ants will crawl on it again, and I can lick them off again, yum. But only we human beings can imagine—can tell the story about the ape who stuck a stick in an anthill and it came out covered with gold dust and a prospector saw it and that was the beginning of the great gold rush of 1877 in Rhodesia.

That story is not true. It is fiction. Its only relation to reality is the fact that some apes do stick sticks in anthills and there was a place once called Rhodesia. But there was no gold rush in 1877 in Rhodesia. I made it up. I am human, therefore I lie. All human beings are liars; that is true; you must believe me.

Fiction: imagination working on experience. A great deal of what we consider our experience, our memory, our hard-earned knowledge, our history, is in fact fiction. But never mind that. I’m talking about real fiction—stories, novels. They all come from the writer’s experience of reality worked upon, changed, filtered, distorted, clarified, transfigured, by imagination.

“Ideas” come from the world through the head.

The interesting part of this process to me is the passage through the head, the action of the imagination on the raw material. But that’s the part of the process that a great many people disapprove of.

I wrote a piece years ago called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” In it I talked about how so many Americans distrust and despise not only the obviously imaginative kind of fiction we call fantasy, but all fiction, often rationalising their fear and contempt with financial or religious arguments: reading novels is a waste of valuable time, the only true book is the Bible, and so on. I said that many Americans have been taught “to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful. They have learned to fear [the imagination]. But they have never learned to discipline it at all.”

I wrote that in 1974. The millennium has come and gone and we still fear dragons.

If you fear something you may try to diminish it. You infantilise it. Fantasy is for children—kiddylit—can’t take it seriously. But fantasy also has shown that it can make money. Gotta take that seriously. So when the first Harry Potter book, which combined two very familiar conventions, the British school story and the orphan-child-of-great-gifts, hit the big time, many reviewers praised it lavishly for its originality. By which they showed their absolute ignorance of both traditions the book follows—the small one of the school story, and the great one, a tradition that descends from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana , the Thousand and One Nights and Beowulf and the Tale of Monkey and medieval romance and Renaissance epic, through Lewis Carroll and Kipling to Tolkien, to Borges and Calvino and Rushdie and the rest of us: a tradition, a form of literature which really cannot be dismissed as “entertainment,” “great fun for the kiddies,” or “well at least they’re reading something .”

Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it—because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. “Oh those awful Orcs,” they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is. And they’re too damned lazy to do it.

What the majority of our critics and teachers call “literature” is still modernist realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns mysteries science fiction fantasy romance historical regional you name it—is dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, so what? Magic realism, though—that bothers them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians (American ones and Indian ones) dancing up in the attic of the New York Times Book Review . They think maybe if they just call it all postmodernism it will go away.

To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention. In mean moments I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted, highly puritanical proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay.

But that has been a genuine popularity, a real preference, not a matter of academic canonizing: people really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography, sure, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice, and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.

Our high valuation of story drawn directly from personal experience may be a logical extension of our high value for realism in fiction. If faithful imitation of actual experience is fiction’s greatest virtue, then memoir is more virtuous than fiction can ever be. The memoir writer’s imagination, subordinated to the hard facts, serves to connect the facts aesthetically and to draw from them a moral or intellectual lesson, but is understood to be forbidden to invent. Emotion will certainly be roused, but imagination may scarcely be called upon. Recognition, rather than discovery, is the reward.

True recognition is a true reward. The personal essay is a noble and difficult discipline. I’m not knocking it. I admire it with considerable awe. But I’m not at home in it.

I keep looking for dragons in this country, and not finding any. Or only finding them in disguise.

Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in poverty. Hopeless poverty, cruel fathers, incompetent mothers, abused children, misery, fear, loneliness…. But is this the property of nonfiction? Poverty, cruelty, incompetence, dysfunctional families, injustice, degradation—that is the very stuff of the fireside tale, the folktale, stories of ghosts and vengeance beyond the grave—and of Jane Eyre , and Wuthering Heights , and Huckleberry Finn , and Cien Años de Soledad …. The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.