Le Guin On Fantasy as a Literary Ghetto

The website tinhouse.com recently published the transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin from 2000 entitled “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” in which she discussed a number of things about writing fantasy. I'll come back to some of them later, but for now I want to focus on her thoughts on fantasy (and genre fiction more generally) as being placed in a literary"ghetto".

This is a theme that arises repeatedly when talking to both fans and authors of genre writing. In earlier posts, I have discussed reactions to this phenomenon by C.S. Lewis and Terry Pratchett, and so it is interesting to see how Le Guin compares.

The relevant (lengthy) except from her talk:

I wrote a piece years ago called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” In it I talked about how so many Americans distrust and despise not only the obviously imaginative kind of fiction we call fantasy, but also all fiction, often rationalizing their fear and contempt with financial or religious arguments: reading novels is a waste of valuable time, the only true book is the Bible, etc. I said that many Americans have been taught “to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful. . . . They have learned to fear [the imagination]. But they have never learned to discipline it at all.”

I wrote that in 1974. The millennium has come and we still fear dragons. Our fear has taken some forms I’d like to talk about.

One is the tactic of infantilizing fantasy. Fantasy is for children. It’s kiddilit. It’s cute. But fantasy also has shown that it can make money. Gotta take that seriously. So the Harry Potter books—amiable, conventional children’s fantasies—were praised for their originality by reviewers utterly ignorant of the tradition they derive from: a tradition that descends from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the One Thousand and One Nights and Beowulf and the Tale of Monkey and medieval romance and Renaissance epic, through Kipling and Borges and Calvino and Rushdie: a form of literature that is not well described as cute, not to be dismissed as “entertainment,” “great fun for the kiddies,” or “well, at least they’re reading something.” The Potter phenomenon was a godsend to those who want fantasy to be childish, not to be taken seriously.

American critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction, The Lord of the Rings. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it, because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is.

What American critics and teachers call “literature” is still almost wholly restricted to realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical, regional, you name it—are dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, doesn’t bother those who live in ivory towers. Magic realism, though—that does bother them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians dancing up in the attic, and they think maybe they should do something about it. Perhaps they should give that fellow who teaches the science fiction course tenure? Oh, surely not.

To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention. I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted (and, incidentally, very puritanical) proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay. This has been a genuine popularity, not a matter of academic canonizing. People really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography fine, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the most popular—the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.

To put a high value on story drawn directly from personal experience is a logical extension of our high value for realism in fiction. If fiction is expected to cling to actual experience, if faithful imitation of reality is its great virtue, then memoir is far more virtuous than fiction. The memoir writer’s imagination is subordinated to the hard facts. It may connect them aesthetically and draw from them a moral or intellectual lesson but is understood to be forbidden to invent. If there’s nothing in the story outside familiar experience, emotion may certainly be roused but imagination may scarcely be called upon. Recognition, rather than discovery, is the reward.

True recognition is a true reward. The personal essay is a noble and difficult discipline. I’m not knocking it. I admire it with considerable awe. But I’m not at home in it.

I keep looking for dragons in this country, and not finding any. Or only finding them in disguise.

Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in hopeless poverty, cruel fathers, incompetent mothers, abused children, misery, fear, and loneliness. But is all this the property of nonfiction? Poverty, cruelty, incompetence, dysfunctional families, injustice, degradation—that is the very stuff of the fireside tale, the folk tale, stories of ghosts and vengeance beyond the grave—and of Jane Eyre, and David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, and Cien años de soledad. The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.

The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in too many personal essays and autobiographies, that’s what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognize our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognize something I never saw before. I want something terrible and blazing to leap out at me. I want the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.

Experience is where ideas come from. But a story isn’t a mirror of what happened. Fiction is experience translated by, transformed by, transfigured by the imagination. Truth includes but is not coextensive with fact. Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation.

To be valuable in a factual history, the raw material of experience has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but also fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes, which may be only indirectly related to rational thinking—so that the whole thing may seem to be pure invention. A girl chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a monster. A mad captain and a white whale. A ring that confers absolute power. A dragon.

But there’s no such thing as pure invention. Invention is recombination. We can work only with what we have. It all starts with experience. There are monsters and leviathans and chimeras in the human mind; they are psychic facts. Dragons are one of the truths about us. The only way we may be able to express that particular truth is by writing about dragons—admitting their existence. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The idea that fantasy and science fiction are harder to write than literature because the require greater feats of imagination has come up before. Le Guin gives a very eloquent take on it.

Le Guin also has some interesting things to say about imagination and the stakes in fantasy novels:

But many fantasies, works of so-called imaginative fiction, suffer from the same thing: imaginative poverty. The writers haven’t actually used their imaginations, they don’t make up anything—they just move archetypes around in a game of wish fulfillment..

In fantasy, since the fictionality of the fiction—the inventions, the dragons—are all right out in front, it’s easy to assume that the story has no relation at all to experience, that everything in a fantasy can be just the way the writer wants. No rules, all cards wild. All the ideas in fantasy are just wishful thinking—right? Well, no. Wrong. It may be that the further a story gets away from common experience and accepted reality, the less wishful thinking it can do, and the more firmly its essential ideas must be grounded in common experience and accepted reality..

Serious fantasy goes into regions of the psyche that may be very strange territory to the reader, dangerous ground; and for that reason, serious fantasy is usually both conservative and realistic about human nature. Its mode is usually comic, not tragic; that is, it has a more-or-less happy ending but, just as the tragic hero brings his tragedy on himself, the happy outcome in fantasy is earned by the behavior of the protagonist. Serious fantasy invites the reader on a wild journey of invention, through wonders and marvels, through mortal risks and dangers—all the time hanging on to a common, everyday, realistic morality. Generosity, reliability, compassion, and courage: in fantasy these moral qualities are seldom questioned. They are accepted, and they are tested—often to the limit, and beyond..

The people who write the stuff on the book covers obsessively describe fantasy as “a battle between good and evil,” but in commercial fantasy the battle is all it is; the white wizards and the black magicians are both mindlessly violent. It’s not a moral struggle, just a power struggle. This is about as far from Tolkien as you can get..

But why should moral seriousness matter, why do probability and consistency matter, when it’s “all just made up”? Well, moral seriousness is exactly what makes a fantasy matter. The made-up story is inevitably trivial if nothing real is at stake. That’s my problem with Harry Potter; the powerful people are divided into good ones and bad ones, all of whom use their power for mere infighting and have nothing to do with people without power. Such easy wish fulfillment has a great appeal to children, who are genuinely powerless, but it worries me when adults fall for it. In the same way, the purer the invention, the more important is its credibility, consistency, and coherence. The rules of the invented realm must be followed to the letter. All wizards, including writers, are extremely careful about their spells. Every word must be the right word. A sloppy wizard is a dead wizard. Serious fantasists delight in invention, in the freedom to invent, but they know that careless invention kills magic. Fantasy happily flouts fact, but it is just as concerned with truth as the direst realism.

I think the whole talk is fascinating and I will have more to say on it tomorrow. Nevertheless, the article got under the skin of some people, particularly its depiction of academic study of Tolkien. Robin Anne Reid over at file770.com write a stirring response Praising or Burying Tolkien. In essence, she argues:

Le Guin isn’t wrong that a lot of critics and academics want to dismiss Tolkien: what leaves me frustrated by her comments is that she completely glosses over and ignores the forty or more years during which *some* academics and critics have been resisting that tendency.

and is frustrated by

Le Guin’s ongoing dismissal of “academics and critics”

Reid then goes on to illustrate both the paucity of academic study of Tolkien in the period after its publication until 1975, and how it has grown since. Compiling data from the Modern Languages International Bibliography, she find that

If I limit the search for publications on Tolkien’s work to only those publications appearing during the years 1950-1975 (the final date being chosen because it was 40 years ago) on Tolkien, I get:.

177 publications during those in 25 years.

I’ve read quite a few of them, and there are some interesting patterns to discuss, including the fact that the earliest academic anthologies on Tolkien’s work tended to try to “dismiss the fans,” and explain how Tolkien’s work was really GOOD despite its popularity, and to hope that the popularity diminished so “real” scholarship could be done..

So clearly those early academics’ hopes that popularity would diminish have failed miserably!.

A subject search on Tolkien criticism and scholarship from 1976-2015:.

2,242 results (these include periodical articles, peer-reviewed articles, anthology chapters, books by single authors, and dissertations in the United States at least)..

I’d say the last forty years shows a spirited attempt by scholars and critics in multiple disciplinary areas to *bring Tolkien into the canon of literary works.*.

By canon, I mean those works that are discussed by academics and critics, in a variety of cultural spaces, including peer-reviewed journals, and those works that are taught in schools.

I am not sure how much to make of these numbers. Yes, there have been many more works about Tolkien since 1975, but there has been an explosion of scholarship of all sorts, and a proliferation of publication outlets. Nonetheless, I am quite confident that Reid is correct that there has been growth in Tolkien scholarship above what we might have otherwise expected.

In sum, I don't think Reid really disagrees with Le Guin on anything of importance. Fantasy and genre fiction are still in a ghetto, but perhaps the walls of the ghetto are starting to crumble a little bit.