Ursula Le Guin has died

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”

RIP

Fuck.

I like to think that I’m basically immune to sweaty-palm syndrome upon meeting someone I greatly admire, but when I met Ursula and we had a small chat about writing and fantasy lit, all I could think of during the conversation was, ‘Ursula Le Guin is talking to me.’ And when she addressed a group of writers I was lucky to be a part of, there was complete silence as she spoke. Reverential silence.

We will miss so much about her.

She was a wonderfully imaginative writer, skilled in her prose. Unlike most literary figures I know of, she was committed neither to deceptive quietism, nor to thoughtless reaffirmation of the status quo. Although an occasional fantasist she generally eschewed the reactionary skepticism of absurdism. Her work was about something, not just herself, or pieces of herself taking on second life as characters. I think you could say that as a writer she could make you feel and think at the same time, changing your outlook, if you let it. Of course, this is said of pretty much every writer who critics like, but I think in her case it was true.

But she was too good for cheap sentimentality. She deserved I think to be taken seriously. And when we do that, we have to admit that she was an anarchist. I suppose she was second only to Noam Chomsky in making anarchism look like a feasibly humane politics. But this was in the end still only a glamour of words. I suggest the very best fusion of her art and her politics wasn’t her science fiction, much less her fantasy. It was her historical romance of revolution, or possibly counter-revolution, Malafrena. Appropriate to her anarchism, it was both a fiction and backward looking. Appropriate to her art, it makes a bad case with grace and humanity. Even as we reject her, we must honor her.

I read her mother’s book, Ishi in Two Worlds, years before I encountered her science fiction. Her work was strikingly sane, compared even to her revolutionary contemporaries. The anthropological perspective is distinctive, refreshing, and necessary; it’s misleading to generalize about human nature from the behavior of our families or our neighbors.

I read A Wizard of Earthsea – but let’s just pause for a moment over that indefinite article: not the wizard, not the mightiest or most important or most special, just a wizard, one story among who knew how many others. There’s something quite deeply radical there. I often used to look at the map of the Archipelago and imagine the stories that could be told about people who lived on all those other islands (whose names I’ve forgotten, alas).

I read A Wizard of Earthsea, anyway, when I was 11, and it spoke to me – I mean, it named me; it seemed to build its world around me, in a way that I never remember feeling with C. S. Lewis (before) or Tolkien (after). I felt something similar, although I was or felt I was a very different person, when I first met Shevek on Amarres five years later. By that time I’d lost my childhood habit of re-reading my favourite books over and over again, but I made an exception for The Dispossessed. It informed my teenage shift from vague Guevarist Communism to a more articulated anarchism – and has left me with an enduring sense of the possibility of revolution.

The last work I’d mention is her 1975 short story “The New Atlantis”, which I only read much later – well, in my early 20s; again, it seemed like much later at the time. It’s at once a grumpy green-anarchist dystopia and an achingly sweet vision of… well, read it yourself (you can find it online). It’s like a meditation on Kafka’s joke – “Of course there’s hope – hope in abundance, endless amounts of hope. Just not for us.” (It also underlay my first published short story, for what that’s worth.)

If you’d mentioned Le Guin to me last week I would probably have said something grumpy about fallings-off and second-guessing and losing the courage of one’s fictional convictions and so on – and I still find it hard to overlook Tehanu. (But – authors, eh? Whedon killed Tara.) But my God, when she was good she was a world-shaper – and I’m not talking about fictional worlds.

Hail and farewell! She won’t be forgotten.

I’m very sad — she was a great writer. “The Dispossessed” is a classic — she “got” anarchism, and her account of it on Anarres showed that. Even its problems — she clearly understood that the struggle for freedom will always continue, even in societies which are much more free than others. I blogged about this aspect of “The Dispossessed” recently in response to something Ken MacLeod had written about it:

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/kropotkin-servitude-or-freedom-1900

MacLeod’s silly — and easily refutable — comments made me want to re-read the book, which I did. I do get something new from it every time I read. A true classic — and an inspiring one.

So somewhat sad today — I’ll re-read “The Left Hand Darkness” now. At least her works are still with us.

“Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them”

Adam Roberts@11 “Genuinely puzzled to hear Le Guin described as an anarchist.”
Ah, well, read The Dispossessed. You won’t be puzzled after that, plus you’ll have the experience of an amazing novel.

“Pigeonholes don’t capture her, but if anything we might call her a Taoist. Not at all the same thing.” LeGuin was a Daoist in the same sense one can be a Thomist but not a Roman Catholic. Or be a Kabbalist but not Jewish. Or be an astrologer but not superstitious. It’s not at all clear what being a Daoist means, except that the plot of The Lathe of Heaven means that using power to change society is not just morally wrong, but magically shows itself to be objectively, irrefutably wrong. The Lathe of Heaven shows her anarchism and Daoism are not not at all the same thing, but related. Not at all the same thing isn’t a synonym for the same thing.

“’Even as we reject her …’? Speak for yourself!” I thought the user name made it obvious I wasn’t speaking for you or any other CTer. But I’m not alone in rejecting anarchism (and Daoism too for that matter,) so the use of “we” is oppositional/defiant.
But I’m afraid I was quite serious in thinking that true respect for LeGuin meant taking her seriously, instead of dismissing her anarchism and Daoism as meaningless little quirks.

I love LeGuin’s books and The Dispossessed should be on any must-read list (along with its companion novel, Delany’s Trouble on Triton – and his long essay on how to read The Dispossessed in Jewel Hinged Jaw).

The Lathe of Heaven was the first book of hers I read, and the PBS film made from it continues to be one of the best book adaptations around.

steven t johnson

I suppose she was second only to Noam Chomsky in making anarchism look like a feasibly humane politics. But this was in the end still only a glamour of words.

It took me years, and more than one rereading, to articulate a response to the criticisms I’ve read of the politics of The Dispossessed, which is that the book is not attempting to give a demonstration of how anarchism would work, so that an objection that Anarresti society wouldn’t work is not to the point. I could point specifically to passages which expose obvious lacunae in the description of the Anarresti system. Nobody ever objects, I notice, that we are not given an explanation of the political system of A-Io, where the other half of the book takes place; nobody imagines that’s the point, or part of the point. It is, rather, the point of the book, or the larger part of the point, to show what people living in an anarchist society might be like, if such a thing as an anarchist society could ever exist; to give one answer to the question posed in the last line of The Left Hand Of Darkness, ‘Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars—the other kinds of men, the other lives?’

Every time I reread the Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness, I find something new & worthwhile to think about. The world – at least my tiny patch of it – is much richer mentally for her work.

I need to dig back through some of the other ones, it’s been too long.

I liked The Author of the Acacia Seeds, too. Another great one is The Rock that Changed Things.

J-D@21 “It is, rather, the point of the book, or the larger part of the point, to show what people living in an anarchist society might be like, if such a thing as an anarchist society could ever exist…” Very well put. This makes very clear in what sense LeGuin made anarchism look like a feasibly humane politics. Of course, this should be addressed to Adam Roberts, who never got that point at all.

“Nobody ever objects, I notice, that we are not given an explanation of the political system of A-Io, where the other half of the book takes place; nobody imagines that’s the point, or part of the point.” Nobody who would be listened to, to be precise. I object that one of the key points in the entire book is that Shevek rejects communism, because statism/revolution, etc. Why would an author want to falsely complexify the issue of pacifism by really spelling out imperialist war and fascism in a novel about pacifist anarchism? The book is not a thought experiment or a tract to be refuted. Shevek’s moral indifference to the plight of humanity on Urras is there, for the reader to see, if they wish.

Again, I think it demeans LeGuin to dismiss her politics and even her absurd Daoism as nothing worth thinking about.

icastico@19 “I love LeGuin’s books and The Dispossessed should be on any must-read list (along with its companion novel, Delany’s Trouble on Triton – and his long essay on how to read The Dispossessed in Jewel Hinged Jaw).” I read a version in paperback called Triton. Neither Trouble on Triton nor The Jewel-Hinged Jaw have ever been in a library I had access to. I remember regretfully passing on The Jewel-Hinged Jaw in a rather expensive trade paperback, when it first came out, I think. But venturing to rely on my memory, however risky a proposition, I would say that LeGuin, as befits an anarchist, was fundamentally looking backward, though in a thoroughly anti-Bellamy way. And Delany, whatever else he was doing in Triton (high comedy, I thought at the time,) wasn’t.

William Berry@18 Although you and I may consider LeGuin a strong feminist, others have felt differently. We should always be willing to be instructed. At this point I meant to link to an Athena Andreadis essay, “As Weak as Woman’s Magic” but it seems to disappeared from the database. Perhaps a left-handed tribute? If anyone has a downloaded copy, posting it would be enlightening.

I bought Always Coming Home over 30 years ago, read a little, put it down. A few months ago, packing up books, I came across it again. This time I couldn’t put it down. Reading it brought me close to tears many times.

By the way, she was a great short-story writer. Everyone knows “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”; but don’t miss “Sur“.

I think le guin is a far superior salesperson for anarchism than Chomsky, and the dispossessed a much more honest attempt to explore what anarchism would mean to ordinary people than he has ever tried. A flaw of revolutionaries is their unwillingness to say what their final society would be like. Le guin made the best attempt at doing so.

Also a shout-out to orsinian tales. She really knew how to bring the ordinary and the mundane to life.

Re the anarchism side discussion:
No doubt steven t johnson has read a good deal more Chomsky than I have, but my impression is that, when it comes to his political writings, Chomsky’s main concern has been the critique of U.S. foreign policy, not making the case for anarchism. I can’t say I’ve followed Chomsky’s work at all closely, but I do have on the shelf the book that it’s probably fair to say made his reputation in this respect, the essay collection American Power and the New Mandarins (pb, 1969), and I’ve dipped into it enough to know that it is definitely worth reading, esp. for those with any interest in the Vietnam War period.

ok, back to LeGuin, etc.

“They just hook by nature. They’re like Velcro, anarchism and Taoism.” http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/02/northwest_writers_at_work_ursu.html

In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin writes:

Yes, indeed the people in it [the book] are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are.

In 2001 I taught this book in a college setting — it was the first book on the syllabus — and the students came in to class, and I asked: “How are we ‘already’ androgynous? Where does gender not affect us?” I may have said different words.

And the moment was electric. I looked around the room. I was pretty sure that every single one of those students was staring, gazing, not blankly, but thinking, for a second, two, three. I had asked something they hadn’t asked themselves before, and they were sifting their experiences, seeking, seeing with new eyes, forming new synapses, making connections. And two or three voices called out at once, bursting with the enthusiasm of discovery. On the rowing team. In Wu Shu. Over the internet. And we made connections, categories… it was one of the best, if not the best, moments I’ve ever had in teaching.

Le Guin writes in that same introduction:

Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find — if it’s a good novel — that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

I also want to point out Le Guin’s work as a translator and advocate of others’ voices. I’m surely not the only one who never would have heard of Argentinian author Angélica Gorodischer except that Le Guin decided to translate Kalpa Imperial. And Le Guin created a translation of the Tao Te Ching. The breadth of her work — as this Oregon Public Broadcasting obit reminds us, “Her works can be found across six or seven sections of any bookstore or library, from poetry to children’s literature to criticism and essays, to her powerful, wondrous novels.” — she was her own kind of polymath, and I treasure that example she set, too.

In reading her 1983 commencement address delivered at Mills College I see how Le Guin’s message, that I need to decolonize my mind from thinking that maintenance and carework is second-class compared to exploring and making and building stuff, has influenced my career choices.

And maybe my favorite line of hers, from a book I haven’t even read yet:

“The dead are dead. The great and mighty go their way unchecked. The only hope in the world lies in the people of no account.” (from “The Finder,” in Tales of Earthsea)

Naomi Novik’s poem “For Ursula” made me cry again.

fwiw, I hadn’t remembered Anarres as a Utopia–after all, Shevek begins the work by fleeing it because of its stultifying ideologically-laden conformism. That was something that struck me at the time; to me, then, at least, The Dispossessed seemed deeply political, but yet also honest, because LeGuin was deeply political, but yet also honest–bright, intellectual, and richly imaginative, and struggling with the image of social order. I don’t recall the book as one where she comes to a real answer, though her sympathies obviously lie here and there. Perhaps I was projecting. But whether it was her or me I was reading, I ate it up.

As much as I loved The Dispossessed, and much of her other work, I will agree that her Taoism seemed both genuine and ridiculous (to me, a non-Taoist). Sometimes I just found it kind of cute–she was, after all, an old Bay Area hippie of the right era. That’s where I grew up, I feel like I’ve seen the type and personally find it charming. The Lathe of Heaven, though, was a punishment. And some of those short stories, too. Well, you can’t win them all.

One of the things that was wonderful about Earthsea–and there are so many things that are wonderful about it–was how it combined humanistic compassion with an analytic-critical appreciation of social roles and rites. For a long time I listed The Tombs of Atuan as my favorite book. One thing I loved, beyond the mere beauty of the language, was how clearly it showed Tenar as the chosen one; and yet an owned girl, an object of ritual significance, under the domination of nuns and worse yet the great old stones. Some agency most surely, but peculiar. She escapes! But then when she is free, with her dashing companion, there is–remorse, a sense of loss. The stones are broken. On the day she returns by ship she wears a golden armband, the next day she will be just another person, and a woman at that. The series returns to her later, and her life is just as rich and textured, but now: an ungrateful son, middle age.

I don’t know that I’ll ever really share her worldview. And I don’t think it’s all aged equally well–The Word for World is Forest, for instance, strikes me as a work that will be quietly forgotten as its moment has passed (reaction to Vietnam). But she was wonderful. I’m sure she could write an incredible eulogy for herself, full of sharper language than “incredible.” All I can do, though, is pay my respects in an ordinary way, and try to make time to read her wonderful works again.

The belief that Le Guin was an anarchist is quite widespread here in the U.S. Here’s a moving eulogy on that theme. https://crimethinc.com/2018/01/25/we-will-remember-freedom-why-it-matters-that-ursula-k-le-guin-was-an-anarchist

M. John Harrison was talking about Le Guin last night. He said that when he first encountered The Left Hand of Darkness “… it was completely unlike anything I had read before. I thought: This must have been written by an alien! It was so other! In the final analysis, that is a terrible indictment.”

J-D@42 begins by professing bafflement at why an explanation of the way in which The Dispossessed is an anarchist novel should have been addressed to Adam Roberts. The reason of course is that Roberts claimed that LeGuin was not an anarchist, and that she was a Daoist, as if Daoism and anarchism were incompatible, rather than related. (If anarchist-sympathizers protest anarchism is a political philosophy and Daoism is a philosophy/religion, that rather misses how anarchism is political philosophy in a religious cast of mind. It’s not just LeGuin whose real world anarchism was a kind of Sunday go-to-church and think good thoughts affair.)

It’s as if J-D were trying to amnesty Adam Roberts. Well, a science fiction critic misread a major SF novelist. This would be embarrassing, but politics are involved. I would hate to think that J-D was somehow convinced that the explanation of what LeGuin was doing somehow meant she wasn’t writing an anarchist novel. If Victor Hugo can have political commitments in Les Miserables and it was still a novel, rather than a crude tract, so can LeGuin.

If I’m going up to the attic to dig out a LeGuin book, I will get Malafrena. If I get The Dispossessed, rather than hunting for a quote, I’ll end up re-reading the whole book. But without quotes, a Communist activist approaches Shevek for political support, on the grounds that they are both anti-propertarians. Shevek refuses. It’s true that the book doesn’t use the word “Communist.”

As to the quotes in the comment? What ever is “non-authoritarian communist” supposed to signify except “not-a-Communist?” Not-an-anarchocapitalist?

LeGuin knew perfectly well that she could have written an Urras scene instead where sympathizers of Communism were hostile to Shevek on contact, condemning him as a draft dodger in the class war, cowards fleeing the ruling class of Urras. I surmise she didn’t because that version would be embarrassing, and worse, Shevek’s repudiation of revolution—as she she sees it of statism—was a major decision, especially as regards the political themes.

My (no doubt incomplete) impression of LeGuin’s Taoism is that it is – among other things – a tenable and rather attractive political position. In particular, its non-interventionism – the idea that in many cases you have a responsibility _not_ to intervene to correct what you perceive as an evil – is an essential corrective to American mainstream thought. Vietnam taught her that, as Iraq should have taught us.

“Shevek declines, after a discussion in which Chifoilisk attempts to make the case that Thu is closer to Odonian values than A-Io and Shevek, without directly denying this, attempts to make the case that Thu deviates from and is antagonistic to Odonian values, more actively antagonistic even than A-Io.”

Substitute “Einstein” (or “Ainsetain”) for Shevek, “Korolev” for “Chifoilisk,” “USA” for “A-Io,” and as you noticed yourself, “USSR” for “Thu.” Again, dramatizing the issue in this way, to make Shevek the hero in repudiating evil, rather than having Odonians despised as runaways from the struggle, was a choice, with meaning. (Yes, Odonians were ostentatiously portrayed as despised, for the wrong reasons, which discredited them.)

As I wrote previously, “I object that one of the key points in the entire book is that Shevek rejects communism, because statism/revolution, etc.” (You yourself quoted that one.) And I also wrote “I surmise she didn’t because that version would be embarrassing, and worse, Shevek’s repudiation of revolution—as she she sees it of statism—was a major decision, especially as regards the political themes.” Shevek is not a puppet for the author, but a character. Nonetheless, it is LeGuin, and Shevek, who see communism as statist, as authoritarian, as revolutionary dictatorship. People against revolution, i.e., winning the class war, reject communism, no matter what they wish, or say. Their non-authoritarian communism is a rejection of real world politics in favor of schemes and projects never to be undertaken, any more than LeGuin lived as an anarchist. Her anarchism was essentially religious, and the believer need no more live anarchism than the Christian.

All of them define communism as dictatorship, and reject the economics as unnatural, causing poverty. They always see the economic arrangements as restriction of consumption, what Marx condemned as barracks communism. It is a primitivism that better fits ancient Sparta than today’s world. But anarchists are not sophisticated thinkers, including LeGuin. Being an artist didn’t save her from the stupidities, of looking backward instead of forward.

Taking Adam Roberts’ purported objection is silly. Roberts was having a hissy fit because someone took her work seriously, instead of just mouthing the proper platitudes. Your common idea that The Dispossessed is some sort of thought experiment is preposterous. James Blish was the one who did that sort of thing, like in his fascist novel, or his deranged YA series. If you compare The Dispossessed with Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, you should notice two things: One, that in terms of SF premises and world building, they are very, very close to being the same thing. Two, that it was Heinlein who was playing with anarchism, whose characters wanted to win, and that LeGuin wasn’t playing, but even in fiction (especially in fiction) repudiated even a day dream of winning.