Ursula Le Guin

[white_hart]

Every so often, over the last couple of years, I would find myself remembering how old Ursula Le Guin was and thinking "I am going to be devastated when we lose her."

And yes, I am devastated. No, I didn't know her personally (though I would have loved to) but she was such a huge influence on me, and knowing that she was alive always made the world seem like a slightly better place. And now she isn't, and it's like a sun has been eclipsed.

I was probably about eight when I first read the Earthsea Trilogy, as it was then. I didn't understand it all, at that age; it wasn't straightforward like Tolkien, but it was full of magic and I read everything of hers I could find throughout my childhood and teens. Recently, I've been re-reading a lot of her works, and reading others which I missed first time round (the last three Earthsea books, among others) and the magic hasn't diminished at all. If anything, it's grown.

And she's so much a part of me. The Dispossessed and 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas', between them, pretty much account for my whole political worldview. If I have a spiritual worldview, it owes a huge debt to Always Coming Home (that's the one I went and grabbed last night, once I'd stopped crying enough to want to read some of her words). And then there's A Very Long Way From Anywhere Else, which is a bit of an oddity, really; it's a realistic, contemporary-set novella about a friendship between two geeky teenagers, not SF or fantasy at all. But it was the only book, ever, that felt like it was directly addressing the muddled-up person I was at 13, or 14, or 15, whenever it was that I first found it. It was a book that said it was OK to be different and strange, and that maybe one day I'd meet people who were like me. It said I wasn't alone; I wasn't the only person walking around in a fog of depression, or spending more time inside my own head than out of it. And it convinced me that it might actually be possible to build a good enough working model of being human to get by, without having to bend myself out of shape pretending to be a normal I barely understood. I don't actually think it's hyperbole to say that it's a book that probably saved my life (in a fairly undramatic way; just that my teens weren't good, and having that book stopped them getting worse).

I also love and admire her for being so unafraid to admit that she might have got things wrong in her earlier work, and to do what she could to fix it. There are so many works that may have been progressive for their time, but seem far less so to a modern eye, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred everyone just shrugs and moves on. But Le Guin revisited Earthsea and realised that, for all its positives, she'd created a patriarchy, and so she wrote Tehanu and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind and explicitly addressed that, took it apart and looked at Earthsea instead from a female (and feminist perspective). She realised that using the pronoun "he" for the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness obscured their androgynous nature, so she wrote 'Winter's King', where "she" is used instead; and then she realised that The Left Hand of Darkness implies that all Gethenian sex is heterosexual sex and wrote 'Coming of Age in Karhide' which makes it very clear that that is not the case.

And, finally, I often think of this post on her blog, written shortly after the 2016 US election, when the world was a very dark place, and which felt like a ray of light in that darkness. "I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace", she wrote, and it helped me to see a way through.

A Meditation

The river that runs in the valley
makes the valley that holds it.

This is the doorway:
the valley of the river.

~

What wears away the hard stone,
the high mountain?
The wind. The dust on the wind.
The rain. The rain on the wind.

What wears the hardness of hate away?
Breath, tears.

~

Courage, compassion, patience
holding to their way:
the path to the doorway.

Comments

[callmemadam]

This may interest you.

[jinty]

Great link - and I particularly liked this bit at the end of that post: "In the late 1980s Le Guin revised her conception of Earthsea and its system of balance in magic in a major feminist self-assessment. I was selling books at the time and ordered this new Earthsea novel, Tehanu, for myself, and adored it and the other books that followed. Going back to the original novels, I could now see all the references to women as if they were written in bold highlighter, and how limited they were: witches being inferior to wizards, women as aunts, mothers, servants, cooks, wives, nothing more. As Le Guin realised and discussed in several important essays, when she was writing in the 1960s she simply excluded women from agency and power in her fiction. (Though, to be fair, she did tackle women’s magic in The Tombs of Atuan, which is all about the exclusion and confinement of women.) Revising how women and magic worked together in Tehanu was a marvellous, affirmative turnaround, and a challenge to the gendered writing of magic that no-one else had really done much about at this point. I still love the pre-feminist boy Ged, all sulks and arrogance and terrified skill, but I am also fond of Ged the Archmage, before and after the dragons returned to the Archipelago."

Very much matches my feeling on a recent re-read of all the Earthsea books & stories.

[bookwormsarah]

I have read some really interesting things about Ursula Le Guin over the last few days and it makes me think I should give her another go. I read the Earthsea trilogy when I was about 11 and although I liked The Tombs of Atuan but wasn't particularly keen on the third. I wonder whether I would appreciate them more as an adult.

[white_hart]

I struggled with The Farthest Shore as a child and much preferred the first two. When I re-read it last year I was amazed I'd got through it back then - it's a fabulous book but sad and complicated and as much about aging and accepting the inevitability of death as it is a traditional fantasy quest, and I wasn't remotely equipped to relate to that at 8 or 9, when I first read the trilogy.

Also, Tehanu is amazing, but again I think really needs an adult perspective to be properly appreciated.