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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Le Guin wrote after the children went to bed and, when they got older, during their school hours, but initially her work met with little acceptance. Her poems were regularly published, but she couldn't find a market for her short stories or fantastical historical novels set in a fictional analogue of Czechoslovakia, a country she named Orsinia. She describes her earliest work as being "just a bit off," containing some oddity or fantasy element that prevented editors from labeling her work, putting it in a literary or genre box.
She received love letters about her writing skills and style, but literary editors rejected her stories as "not quite right for us." Le Guin still maintains a dispute with critics and academics who insist only realistic fiction can be literary fiction. She says, "That attitude knocks out about nine-tenths of all American literature. Once we had the South American magical realists you couldn't say only realism is literary."
In 1961 her mother's book "Ishi in Two Worlds" made the bestseller list. (Still in print, it has sold over a million copies.) Theodora Kroeber started writing in her 50s, "after my children left to have children," and her work struck a chord with the market that surprised her family and her publisher. Le Guin's turn came the next year, when two of her stories sold. She sold an Orsinian tale to a small literary magazine (with payment in copies of the magazine) and a time-travel story, "April in Paris," to Fantastic for $30. Looking at the proceeds from both markets, Le Guin decided to focus her writing where it paid. She let loose her formidable imagination on the science fiction world and later earned the acceptance of mainstream readers as well.
In quick succession, Le Guin published "Rocannan's World" (1966), "Planet of Exile" (1966) and "City of Illusion" (1967). Those early works articulate mythic themes of the journey/quest, combined with the Taoist motif of a balanced and ordered wholeness and the literary convention of a stranger in a strange land. They're the first in what became known as Le Guin's "Hainish Universe." The common background in this set of novels, novellas and short stories, which cover about 2,500 years of future history, is that people from a planet named Hain seeded this part of the galaxy with human life. Under pressure of different environments and some direct genetic intervention, they evolve a diversity of human physical forms and social structures.
In 1969 critics hailed "The Left Hand of Darkness" for its feminist themes and mythic storytelling. In the book, Le Guin conducts "a thought experiment" on the effects of gender (or lack of it) on society by exploring the implications of an androgynous race. In those early days of the feminist movement, she was forcing people to examine the roles of men and women in society. Le Guin wasn't sure she could sell the book or the idea. She thought men might feel figuratively castrated by the androgynous characters. Yet it became the best known and most honored of her works, winning a Nebula, a Hugo and a James Tiptree Jr. Retrospective Award.
Le Guin admits that in her earlier works she "wrote like an honorary man." She was initially cautious in her feminism. Even in "The Left Hand of Darkness," she still used "he" for the androgynous characters and rarely showed them in feminine roles. She told me that she regrets having allowed her characters only heterosexual relationships. But she feels she wrote the best book she could given the times. Le Guin credits reading "The Norton Book of Literature by Women" and her literary inspiration, Virginia Woolf, for allowing her to write like a woman and to feel liberated in doing so.
Leading the life of an academic family, the Le Guins took two sabbaticals in England, because "it's easier on the kids to go where they speak the same language." The first, in 1968, was at the height of the Vietnam War. Le Guin, a pacifist and Taoist, was "angry and frustrated." That year she wrote "The Word for World Is Forest," a story of brutal Terrans colonizing a planet occupied by a race of peaceful, green-furred natives. She was "a little uneasy that 'Word' was a preachy book and it would die with the cause. It is certainly the most overt political statement I have made in fiction." It won the 1973 Hugo Award.
Spurred by the social optimism of the late '60s and early '70s, Le Guin took a crack at utopian fiction. Her Hainish book "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia" (1974) won both the Hugo and the Nebula, giving Le Guin the distinction of being the only author to twice win both awards in the same year for a novel. "The Dispossessed" is her most densely textured work. Another thought experiment, it plays anarchism against capitalism. By sending a dissatisfied inhabitant from one society to the other, Le Guin examines how both work -- or don't. "They're imperfect utopias because the people in them are just people."
Le Guin has studied Laotzu and the Tao Te Ching since age 14, when she discovered her father's old edition. She has been seeking out and comparing translations ever since, captivated by the book's practical, nontheistic, easygoing approach. She finds the tenets "endlessly fruitful and nourishing to me as an artist," and she published her own translation, "Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way," in 1997. She describes the book as "the most lovable of the great religious texts, funny, keen, kind, modest, indestructibly outrageous and inexhaustibly refreshing." Her fascination with Taoism shows up early in her writing, most notably in her series "Books of Earthsea."
