Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula Le Guin

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SOURCE: “Ursula Le Guin,” in Progressive, Vol. 62, No. 3, March, 1998, pp. 36-9.

[In the following interview, Le Guin discusses her experiences as one of the first female—and feminist—science-fiction writers, the portrayal of women in contemporary science fiction, her utopian vision in The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home, Taoism, and her objection to fundamentalist Christian criticism of imaginative literature.]

Ursula Le Guin, sci-fi feminist, was a gender bender before the second wave hit shore. Since The Left Hand of Darkness, a tale of an androgynous world published in 1969, Le Guin’s work has endeared her to women and has won her a following much larger than the hard-core sci-fi universe. Her two utopian novels, The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home, offer an anarchistic and Earth-friendly version of a better way to live (though one is set on a moon).

Le Guin challenged science-fiction conventions head-on in a 1973 talk that was reprinted in a special Le Guin issue of Science Fiction Studies. “One of the great early socialists said that the status of women in a society is a pretty reliable index of the degree of civilization of that society,” she noted. “If this is true, then the very low status of women in SF should make us ponder about whether SF is civilized at all.”

She didn’t limit her critique to the depiction of women, however. “In SF, where are the poor, the people who work hard and go to bed hungry? Are they ever persons, in SF? No. … The people, in SF, are not people. They are masses, existing for one purpose: to be led by their superiors.”

Le Guin, sixty-eight, who won the National Book Award in 1972 for The Farthest Shore, lives in a comfortable but not grand house in Portland, Oregon, her home for forty years. As we talk, six- month-old kittens make themselves at home between us. I’m absurdly pleased when she tells me I’m the best-smelling person, to a cat, to come along in months.

[Slaughter:] How did science-fiction loyalists react to your early feminist work?

[Le Guin:] When I came out and said “I am a feminist,” I lost a lot of automatic support that I had in the science-fiction community, which is still fairly male- dominated. It’s probably about two-thirds men and one-third women.

Strange as it seems for people who are supposed to be writing about the future, there’s a wing of science fiction that’s politically very radically conservative. And very anti-feminist. So I cut off some readers right there.

But I really wonder if I would have been able to go on writing novels if the second feminist movement hadn’t come along and picked me up and shown me how to write about women. My mother was the first person to say to me, “Why do you write about men?” And I said, “I don’t know how to write about women.” She said, “Well, you ought to find out.”

One of your short stories, “She Unnames Them,” appears to be about Adam and Eve. In an introduction, you said that this story tells whose side you’re on. How would you describe that side? Women and animals vs. the man who says. “What’s for dinner?”

I’m on the women and animals side, yes. That’s probably a cultural divide, for this culture, anyhow.

You write a lot about women’s way of being in the world. You talk about a female way of being.

I’m not an essentialist. As the daughter of an anthropologist, at least my father’s generation in anthropology, I can’t be an essentialist. He was of the generation that said there is no such thing as human nature. That makes a lot of sense to me as a novelist. As soon as you say men are, women are, you’ve lost sight of the fact that they are that way in your culture, in your society, right now. But can you look over the fence and see what they’re doing in the next garden? They’re doing something totally different. I’m always aware of that.

With Always Coming Home, several reviewers said it is a matriarchy. Because it isn’t a patriarchy. What it is is just equality. They handle gender very differently than we do. Gender division of labor basically doesn’t exist. You do the work you’re best fitted for, which again has happened in many other societies.

So you would disagree with the people who say that women are innately the caring, the good, and men are innately the violent?

I have to argue against it both because it seems intellectually suspect and also because it makes me morally very uncomfortable. As soon as you start saying men are innately violent, you’re saying, “Let’s go, boys.” It’s an excuse. “Women care, so let’s leave the women home.” We’ve simply built the walls higher.

Opening doors in walls is the image I always get back to. If I have any particular job as a writer, it’s to open as many doors and windows as possible and to leave them open. So the house gets drafty.

How far has science fiction moved from “the Rotary Club on Alpha Centauri,” as you put it in 1973?

In a superficial way, it’s moved very far. I think there are probably more female protagonists now than there are male. But they’re sort of Barbarella. There’s a lot of window dressing of gender equality.

Of the Star Trek variety?

Star Trek does try. Considering the medium the producers work in, they’re fantastic. I just read a scholarly essay knocking them pretty hard for gender tokenism. But who else does anything about racially integrating or gender integrating? There are two major officers of Deep Space 9 who are women, and they’re real officers. They don’t hang around and say, “Well, Captain, what should we do?”

Most of the media is horrible. Star Wars—Princess Leia and two nurses, in the entire galaxy. Most of that stuff is so naively male-centered it’s unbelievable. But the media are twenty or thirty years behind the writing in science fiction. There are lots of women writing interesting science fiction.

When I entered the field, it was just beginning not to be basically a pulp-magazine form, mostly read by adolescent males. Of whatever age. Slanted kind of toward engineers, obsessed with technology. Very optimistic about the future, unless it was an after-the-atomic-bomb story. And written in an almost consciously anti-literary mode, written by people who think that art is somehow opposed to intelligence.

There’s still a faction within science fiction—they call themselves hard science-fiction fans—who consider aesthetically oriented writing to be suspect because they think it’s not subservient to the ideas that it’s supposed to be expressing. There’s a conservativeness there: “We want things the way they were, and we want things at a pulp-fiction level. We want adventure, and no emotions, please. No characters, please.”

And then a bunch of us came in and insisted, “This is nonsense. We want literature and we’re going to do science-fiction literature, and we have just as good ideas as you guys. And we talk English better than you.” And it’s been that way ever since. The standards went up immensely and very quickly. It was fun being in on that generation. We were very arrogant about it, of course.

I wanted to talk about The Dispossessed. I think you called it an anarchist utopia.

It is an anarchist utopia, but its subtitle is “an ambiguous utopia.”

Is anarchism a philosophy that still attracts you?

My anarchism I’m writing about in The Dispossessed is pacifist anarchism, not the guy with the bomb in his pocket. It was basically defined by people like Kropotkin, who was very influential in the very first days of the Russian Revolution—there was a chance that that revolution might have gone anarchist instead of communist. And in this country Paul Goodman and Emma Goldman. I found myself at home with it in a way that I’d never been quite at home with socialism. Anarchism is a political philosophy more than a political movement, and it fits in extraordinarily well with Taoism, which is my other main intellectual bent. They are inevitably related.

One of the things that strikes me about Anarres, the utopian society in The Dispossessed,is that they’re living in a desert, under conditions of scarcity, and yet the people are cooperative. Whereas the usual model is that scarcity causes fighting and you can only have cooperation and sharing if there’s abundance. Did you do that on purpose?

No, I really didn’t do it on purpose. People have written articles about it and shaken my confidence. One of Kropotkin’s major works is Mutual Aid. He was a biologist, studying animals in the Siberian arctic—talk about tough!—and he found enormous cooperation among the animals. Of course, Social Darwinism in the early twentieth century said that the way all animals related was pure conflict. But take woodpeckers in the United States—the nestling from the year before hangs around and helps bring up this year’s new ones. Or the way whales behave, the aunties for each baby. All that kind of stuff had been pushed aside by the desire to find nothing but competition and violence. Which, of course, is there. If there isn’t enough to go around, people are going to jostle for it, whatever species they are. But some of them work out clever alternatives—it isn’t just, one eats and the other starves. Both eat a little less. It’s amazing how often this happens.

So I guess unconsciously I used that model. Also because, you know, when you’re doing a novel there’s an awful lot of stuff in it, a lot of information to be given. It simplifies life to put it in the desert. If I had had to describe all the different kinds of plants in a rainforest planet, the novel would have just crawled out of the living room. A desert really can simplify things for the writer—large open spaces with people standing around in them.

On Anarres, much of the society was structured to combat selfishness and power-grabbing, but one place that backstabbing still thrived was in academia.

We’re all cross-grained, nasty in varying degrees. We’re all selfish in varying degrees. You can’t legislate that out. What makes most utopias so boring is that the people are so good. Even Marge Piercy, in Woman on the Edge of Time—I can’t stand those utopian people. They’re all good and nice and kind and noble and better than me. Nobody likes people who are better than they are. The novelist really can’t do that.

But she didn’t make the future conflict-free. There was this big conflict between the people who wanted to genetically engineer the next generation and those who wanted to keep it random.

But it was an intellectual conflict. What I want in a novel, I do demand something of the grit of ordinary life. Whoever we’re talking about, life is not easy, there’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of boredom and frustration no matter what, and I think novelists do owe it to their characters to let them have that.

How have your ideas about utopia changed over time?

Always Coming Home is my real utopia; it’s not ambiguous. It is a straightforward attempt to draw a society that I like, a society that I think is worthy of the place where I put it, which is my favorite place in the world—the Napa Valley of California, a very long time from now. It is, again, anarchist. There is no central government. But the apparatus of society is drawn more from tribal peoples and so-called primitive peoples, certain California Indian customs and the Pueblos. I just picked and chose things that I liked. It’s a steady-state society, a climax civilization, like a climax forest. Ours is not. Ours is a growth model.

The shark model—you can’t survive if you’re not moving. Forward, we call it.

And that is such a strange model. Some of the reviewers said, “Oh, she’s a Luddite.” Anti-technology. But I love to describe technology—the book is full of it. They don’t use much “high” tech. They have a sort of intergalactic or at least interplanetary web of information, which they’re not particularly interested in using. Some of them are. Some of them go look up things and get into it and obsess over it, but most of them are too busy doing the things you do with other people. I was trying to say, you can have all this incredible information and yet not need to use it.

Are there other causes that get your blood boiling?

The environment is the big one, the most scary one, where capitalism just comes smack up against common sense. Everything the scientists are telling us and have been telling us for decades now about the atmosphere, the oceans, the food resources. I live downriver from Hanford, where we made all the plutonium. It’s all quietly seeping toward the Columbia River, in the groundwater. It turns up in my books. In my far future books there’s always a big area where nobody can live, and it’s my private Hanford.

I’m going to read a quote from 1977, from an interview in the magazine Seven Days.

I’ll probably disagree with it.

You said, “I have found, somewhat to my displeasure, that I am an extremely moral writer. I am always grinding axes and making points. I wish I wasn’t so moralistic, because my interest is aesthetic. What I want to do is make something beautiful like a good pot or a good piece of music, and the ideas and moralism keep getting in the way.” Would you still argue for an incompatibility between the moral and the beautiful?

I didn’t mean there’s an incompatibility between the moral and the beautiful. I meant that you need enormous skill as an artist to make a seamless whole out of ethical and aesthetic values. Virginia Woolf discussed this same problem and said if you’re preaching, you are not doing first-class art. The central ethical problem of my life as a writer is precisely that. If you’re preaching, you’re a second-class artist. But do you have to dump the morality to be a first-class artist?

Look at the moral ambiguity of Shakespeare. “Others abide our questions, thou art free.” Who said that? Shelley? Of Shakespeare. In other words, Shakespeare stands above morality, he’s so good that you can find the world inside him. That’s the dream, but how many artists can do that? With me, it is in a sense the productive vital tension between having something to say or feeling very strongly a moral, political agenda, and trying to keep it so deeply buried in my work that it does not preach—just informs, gives the work energy. But as soon as it comes out and says, “You should not do that. You should do this,” I think I’ve blown it as a novelist.

Your most recent publication is a translation of the works of Lao-Tzu. You mentioned Taoism earlier. Are you a Taoist?

Yes. The Taoism that most Americans who say they’re Taoists are talking about has to do with two books, Lao-Tzu’s book and Chuang-Tzu’s. Both books are about 2,500 years old. Both are Chinese classics. Lao-Tzu’s Taoism is about how to live. Very practical. Totally anarchistic, has absolutely no respect for anything. It’s only eighty-one little short poems—one of those things you chew over your whole life long and it never stops nourishing.

In some of your essays, you seem to make a point of calling yourself a non- Christian. Is it important to you to be a non-Christian?

Yes, it is, because I live in a country that calls itself Christian. Since Reagan came to power, this country has had a sort of orgy of self-congratulation about being Christian, and this really annoys me deeply. I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say so, because people seem to be afraid to say anything against Christianity at all these days.

The fundamentalist Christians have declared themselves to be my enemies in saying that all fantastic, imaginative literature is evil. OK. This makes me a little combative. I’m with Voltaire. I say, “To hell with the priests.” If they take that line, they have made me their enemy.

The whole problem of censorship is reduced over and over to pornography. Ask any librarian—90 percent of calls they get to withdraw a book have to do with Satanism, witchcraft. It is interference by fundamentalists or other rightwing groups with libraries and school curricula, school books, school libraries. It comes from fundamentalist Christians who apparently believe in witchcraft. If they didn’t, why would they make such a fuss over it?

But it’s not just Christianity. It is assumed in the United States that you’re some kind of monotheist, that you believe there is a God. You always run into this basic assumption of what people are. I meet it in writing classes: Everybody’s white, everybody’s heterosexual, everybody believes in God. I never have been interested in the idea of God. It’s just not part of my way of thinking. It doesn’t make much sense to me. That’s one of the reasons why Taoism appealed to me; I could find a structure of thought which is completely non-theist. It is a mysticism.

Do you come out and talk about non-theism very often?

No. Because I think it’s more effective to have it be part of the silent basis of everything I write. My work is central to my life. I would rather do it than say it. If my stories come from this central position of my own life, they’ll be honest and clear. And they won’t do anybody any harm. Because that is important. I think artists are responsible to their community to try not to do harm. That is a very unfashionable, perhaps dangerous thing to say. It doesn’t mean self-censorship, it doesn’t mean being afraid to hurt people’s feelings. It doesn’t mean not to rock the boat. It may mean to hurt people’s feelings. It may mean to rock the boat. But you’re doing it in the interests of not hurting people, not causing pain, trying to make the world a little more endurable.

I’m not an atheist in the sense of one who wants to fight with those who believe in God. I am simply not interested. I have a strong natural sympathy for polytheism, people like the Hindus or ancient Romans who had little gods everywhere, or Native American religions, which—what I know about them, which is not a lot—have a fully spiritual approach to reality. They don’t have gods, but everything is sacred. Now that makes complete sense to me. This is the religion I understand. But as soon as you get centered into a hierarchy with a boss at the top, I’m out.

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