Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

It’s ready. I’m ready. The great first sentence of the first chapter of the great book—not the greatest book, but perhaps the second greatest—is, yes, we can say it in unison: “All happy families are alike; unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.” Translations vary, but not significantly.

People quote that sentence so often that it must satisfy them; but it does not, it never quite did, satisfy me. And twenty years ago or so, I began admitting my dissatisfaction to myself. These happy families he speaks of so confidently in order to dismiss them as all alike—where are they? Were they very much commoner in the nineteenth century? Did he know numerous happy families among the Russian nobility, or middle class, or peasantry, all of them alike? This seems so unlikely that I wondered if perhaps he knew a few happy families, which is not impossible; but that those few were all alike seems deeply, very deeply implausible. Was his own family happy, either the one he grew up in or the one he fathered? Did he know one family, one single family, that could, over a substantial period of time, as a whole and in each of its component members, honestly be called happy? If he did he knew one more than most of us do.

I’m not just showing off my sexagenarian cynicism, proud though I may be of it. I admit that a family can be happy, in the sense that almost all the members of it are in good health, good spirits, and good temper with one another, for quite a long time—a week, a month, even longer. And if we go into the comparative mode, then certainly some families are far happier than others, on the whole and for years on end—because there are so many extremely unhappy families. Many people I have talked with about such matters were in one way or another unhappy as children; and perhaps most people, though they stay deeply attached to their relatives and recall joyous times with them, would not describe their family as happy. “We had some real good times,” they say.

I grew up in a family that on the whole seems to have been happier than most families; and yet I find it false—an intolerable cheapening of reality—simply to describe it as happy. The enormous cost and complexity of that “happiness,” its dependence upon a whole substructure of sacrifices, repressions, suppressions, choices made or forgone, chances taken or lost, balancings of greater and lesser evils—the tears, the fears, the migraines, the injustices, the censorships, the quarrels, the lies, the angers, the cruelties it involved—is all that to be swept away, brushed under the carpet by the brisk broom of a silly phrase, “a happy family”?

And why? In order to imply that happiness is easy, shallow, ordinary; a common thing not worth writing a novel about? Whereas unhappiness is complex, deep, difficult to attain, unusual; unique indeed; and so a worthy subject for a great, a unique novelist?

Surely that is a silly idea. But silly or not, it has been imposingly influential among novelists and critics for decades. Many a novelist would wither in shame if the reviewers caught him writing about happy people, families like other families, people like other people; and indeed many critics are keenly on the watch for happiness in novels in order to dismiss it as banal, sentimental, or (in other words) for women.

How the whole thing got gendered, I don’t know, but it did. The gendering supposes that male readers have strong, tough, reality-craving natures, while feeble female readers crave constant reassurance in the form of little warm blobs of happiness—fuzzy bunnies.

This is true of some women. Some women have never experienced any glimpse of happiness in their whole life better than a stuffed fuzzy bunny and so they surround themselves with stuffed fuzzy bunnies, fictional or actual. In this they may be luckier than most men, who aren’t allowed stuffed fuzzy bunnies, only girls in bunny suits. In any case, who can blame them, the men or the women? Not me. Anybody who has been privileged to know real, solid, nonfuzzy happiness, and then lets some novelist or critic buffalo them into believing that they shouldn’t read about it because it’s commoner than unhappiness, inferior to unhappiness, less interesting than unhappiness,—where does my syntax lead me? Into judgmentalism. I shall extricate myself in silence.

The falseness of Tolstoy’s famous sentence is nowhere shown more clearly than in Tolstoy’s novels, including the one it’s the first sentence of. Dolly’s family, which is the unhappy one we are promised, is in my opinion a moderately, that is to say a realistically happy one. Dolly and her children are kind and contented, often merry together, and the husband and wife definitely have their moments, for all his stupid skirtchasing. In the greater novel, the Rostovs when we meet them might well be described as a happy family—rich, healthy, generous, kind, full of passions and counterpassions, full of vitality, energy, and love. But the Rostovs are not “like” anybody; they are idiosyncratic, unpredictable, incomparable. And, like most human beings, they can’t hang on to their happiness. The old Count wastes his children’s heritage and the Countess worries herself sick; Moscow burns; Natasha falls in love with a cold fish, nearly runs away with a cretin, marries and turns into a mindless brood sow; Petya is killed pointlessly in the war at sixteen. Jolly good fun! Fuzzy bunnies everywhere!

Tolstoy knew what happiness is—how rare, how imperilled, how hard-won. Not only that, he had the ability to describe happiness, a rare gift, which gives his novels much of their extraordinary beauty. Why he denied his knowledge in the famous sentence, I don’t know. He did a good deal of lying and denying, perhaps more than many lesser novelists do. He had more to lie about; and his cruel theoretical Christianity led him into all kinds of denials of what in his fiction he saw and showed to be true. So maybe he was just showing off. It sounded good. It made a great first sentence.

My next essay will be about whether or not I want to be told to call a stranger Ishmael.

In 1988 Xanadu Press published The Book of Fantasy , a translation of the Antologia de la literatura fantástica , which Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo first published in Buenos Aires in 1940. Asked to contribute a foreword to the English edition, I did so with pleasure. I have revised it so that I could include it in this collection, wanting to render some small homage to Borges.

There are two books that I look on as esteemed and cherished greataunts or grandmothers, wise and mild though sometimes rather dark of counsel, to be turned to when my judgment hesitates. One of these books provides facts, of a peculiar sort. The other does not. The I Ching or Book of Changes is the visionary elder who has outlived fact, the ancestor so old she speaks a different tongue. Her counsel is sometimes appallingly clear, sometimes very obscure indeed. “The little fox crossing the river wets its tail,” she says, smiling faintly, or, “A dragon appears in the field,” or, “Biting upon dried gristly meat.” One retires to ponder long over such advice.

The other Auntie is younger, and speaks English. Indeed she speaks more English than anybody else. She offers fewer dragons and much more dried gristly meat. And yet A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles , or the OED as she is known to her family, is also a Book of Changes. Most wonderful in its transmutations, it is not the Book of Sand, yet is inexhaustible; not an Aleph, yet all we have said and can ever say is in it, if we can but find it.

“Auntie!” I say, magnifying glass in hand, because my edition, the Compact Auntie, is compressed into two volumes of print no larger than grains of sand, “Auntie! Please tell me about fantasy, because I want to talk about a Book of Fantasy, but I am not sure what I am talking about.”