(no subject)

[rymenhild]

MindMap

shellefly links to a speech on fantasy by Ursula LeGuin. I posted the following comment on shellefly's journal:

Le Guin has definite points to make about the racial makeup of fantasy literature, the constant use of a rewritten medieval England as a setting, etc. I am concerned, though, by the tone she uses -- it seems to come down to an argument about how her writing is morally superior to most fantasy. On some level, it probably is. And yet...

Le Guin is a good writer, a careful writer, much more precise in language and in plot than other fantasy authors I know and love (JK Rowling is obviously one of her major targets here), but somehow, I never found Le Guin's work seductive. There's another part to fantasy literature besides its political stance and its complexity of moral outlook, and that is its capacity to lead readers to wonder. Sometimes, in her focus on an anthropologically accurate world, Le Guin loses track of the sheer fun involved in writing and reading.

Meanwhile, terebinth has a hilarious post on the Ninth Circuit and Barbie, and half my friendsfriendslist is ranting about the utter stupidity of the recently announced title of Harry Potter 6.

I'm busily studying basic Hebrew; in a week and two days of classes, we have covered all but two of the grammatical features of Hebrew I'd learned in ten years of Hebrew school and five summers at Camp Ramah. This says something about the speed of my current class, but it also speaks to the way my previous Hebrew classes flowed at the same rate as glass at room temperature.

Comments

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Hrm. She has a point about the race thing, but I can't help thinking "Am I then only good if I write about non-whites? What about the fact that I am white (which is not a sin) and want to have a character who is pretty much like me (since nothing I write is entirely non-personal) and want to write about European myth? Am I evil? Is it only PC to write about non-whites now?"

This kind of pisses me off. Oh well, the heroine in The Labyrinth is blue. And red. And green. And...

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

Of course, Asians usually get lumped in with whites in this little scenario, too. They aren't "people of color," they don't count. Not to mention that not all Europeans are particularly white. I, for example, am Sicilian. I like to write about obscure myth--and Arabic myth certainly doesn't center around white people. But the ancient Persians were pretty pale. So what the hell is an earnest poet-novelist to do?

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The inhabitants of Le Guin's archipelago aren't African so much as Indonesian, I rather think. Le Guin, being the child of a famous anthropologist, is actually thinking about non-whites rather than blacks.

That being said, the responsibility of an earnest poet-novelist, I think, is to write what one's called to write. Describe Persians, Arabs, Sicilians, multicolored surrealist heroines, whatever the stories want -- and don't worry about enforcing a quota system on your characters. I really don't think it's useful.

[yuki-onna.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply she was talking about blacks specifically, but that in today's world there are certain minorities which are PC to write about and say you are multicultural, and certain ones which are just considered shades of white. Which denigrates all cultures, in my opinion. But LeGuin doesn't seem to be saying write what you are called to write, but that if you write about the things she thinks are naughty, you are perpetrating bad literature.

[a-trick-mind.livejournal.com]

Love your Mind Map. Very kewl.

I hope sometime when I am back that I will be able to find the time to take a few Yiddish courses. I speak a little, but not enough. I would love to be able to really converse in Yiddish.

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Can you read Hebrew? Really, that is the biggest block to stumble over. Yiddish, once you get the basics, is quite like English (easy to us, hard to the rest of the world) written in Hebrew, with borrow-words from predominantly German, Hebrew, Polish, Russian and Czech.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I wish I could speak Yiddish, too. I am the first generation in my family not to know any Yiddish except a few loanwords here and there. It's rather sad, actually. My great-grandparents were fluent and used the language most of the time; my grandparents were fluent but only spoke it in their childhood homes. My parents knew enough Yiddish to understand what their grandparents were saying, and no one bothered passing the language down to me.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

I keep hearing (admittedly not *frequently*) that Yiddish is dying as a conversational, passed-through-families thing. T or F, in your opinion?

There's some medieval romance stuff in Yiddish, IIRC, but I can't remember whether it's Arthurian or a version of Kudrun (which'd make it Volsung/Nibelung-related).

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

Absolutely true. It is a language of the elderly, the Vorwart, YIVO, some shop signs in Queens and those of us who are privileged in their access to Universities.

It was a people's vernacular, and those people are gone. It's like Manx.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Medieval romance? I'd rather thought Yiddish wasn't that old, but I haven't studied its history very much at all.

There are medieval romances in Hebrew (including some translations of Marie de France, I believe), which is a good part of the reason I'm taking Hebrew right at the moment.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that my family's experience is pretty typical, and that yes, Yiddish is dying. Various people are working to keep it alive -- check out Zackary Sholem Berger's blog for a site that frequently and educatedly discusses Yiddish reclamation efforts.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, in her focus on an anthropologically accurate world, Le Guin loses track of the sheer fun involved in writing and reading.

I'm going to borrow literary criticism terminology learned by talking with an English lit grad student friend. I would argue that this is often a problem in High Art that is intended as High Art, and that it is less often a problem in Low Art. For whatever reason. I guess if you're super-serious about something, and trying to make it Of The Quality, then you have less energy for sheer creativity and entertainment.

I'm reminded of a comment Lois McMaster Bujold made that indicated she was once self-conscious of the fact that she writes what can be described as fluffy space operas.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I think you're right. I also think that art for purposes of entertainment is undervalued among the makers of art; creating something that the masses might enjoy is perceived as dumbing one's work down. I don't approve of dumbing down work, but I think there's a line between trying to make something intellectual and trying to make it boring.

fleurdelis28 and I have had some very long discussions about how various writers (and other artists) project their anxiety about the levels of art they make. Dorothy Sayers, who wrote wonderful intellectual mysteries but longed to go back to academia to produce deep thoughts. Eventually she did return to academia, but none of her academic work was nearly as good as the "lower" mysteries she'd previously produced.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Yes, I remember this situation. My amazing sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Campbell, referred to it once, actually. I think it is particularly interesting how, in Gaudy Night, Sayers appeared to answer the question in favor of writing mystery novels with the occasional treatise on Sheridan LeFanu on the side... and ended up returning to academia anyway.

Anxiety is an interesting phenomenon.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

It's especially interesting since IIRC, Sayers intended Gaudy Night to be her last Peter/Harriet novel. I may be wrong, but I think Busman's Honeymoon was a later idea.

Maybe Sayers decided academia was right for herself but not for Harriet? It's easy to conflate the two, but they're very much not the same. If nothing else, Dorothy Sayers wasn't engaged to Peter Wimsey!

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

...much to her distress...

(What does IIRC mean?)

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

If I Recall Correctly

[obopolsk.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with what you've said about LeGuin -- although I read many of her books a few years ago, I barely remember them, while I still think about other fantasy writers whose works I liked (Rowling, Cooper, Pullman, Duane) all the time.

And on an unrelated note -- I like Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince as the title of Book 6. Especially now that we know it doesn't refer to Harry or Voldemort.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

The title doesn't catch my attention in the same way Order of the Phoenix did... but we'll have a better idea whether it's good or bad when we know to whom it refers.

[the-paper-nun.livejournal.com]

Look, I'm really big on that mappy thingy!!

I suppose that's because you prefer the dumbed down, yet entertaining types. ;)

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

...Yeah, that's me, drugged on the opiates of the masses. Or something.

[ah-rosencrantz.livejournal.com]

Opiates? Don't mind if I do, thanks.

[mydearguil.livejournal.com]

A poet once, high on opium, thought he saw Xanadu. He subsequently ran out of drugs and discovered he was still there. Now, which was real, the drugs or the pleasure-domes?

[the-paper-nun.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. am I an Opiate, or a Mass? *waxes philosophical, smokes giant hookah*

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I'm so very tired but I'm going to take a stab. Have to thoroughly disagree about almost everything that's been said on Le Guin here. Firstly, I disagree that her work is forgettable or unseductive. Sure, it's not for everyone. It's rarely "fun." But I think it's absurd to reduce her fantasies (which I find mind-blowing for their world-building, subtlety of character, and the sheer poetic beauty of her prose) to a "focus on an anthropologically accurate world," as if she were writing some sort of textbook. All those things are important in her work, but there's more than that.

Secondly, all of the above is irrelevant when it comes to evaluating Le Guin as a critic, a capacity in which I have even more respect for her than as a writer, if possible. She has written some of the most marvelous essays on speculative fiction I have ever read, and they would remain so whether I liked her creative work or not. In this essay, basically a redux of more complex and thoughtful essays of hers I've read, she doesn't lay out "do's" and "don'ts" as others seemed to have thought, but rather noted three major assumptions writers, readers, and others make about fantasy. And she's right, too: those assumptions so dominate the general perception of fantasy.

She doesn't say never to write about white characters or never to write in a pseudo-medieval setting or never to write about a battle between good and evil. In fact she praises Lord of the Rings which does all these things (and is frequently racist as well, something you'd think she would object to). She doesn't advocate some kind of quota system. What she says is not to assume that fantasy has to be all these things. I think she's write. I have tremendous respect for Le Guin, for many reasons, not the least of which is the way she thoughtfully re-evaluated her writing when the feminist movement made her begin to question the assumptions about gender that she had made in her earlier works, and integrated those thought processes into her later fantasies.

"Watch out for assumptions" seems like excellent advice to take regarding almost anything.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Oh I need sleep. "All those things are important in her work" in my first paragraph originally referred to what I had written as "political stance, complexity of moral outlook, and... focus on an anthropologically accurate world", then deleted. And later I meant "do dominate" not "so dominate"... and "I think she's right," not "I think she's write." Gahh.

I also think that Le Guin's fantasies absolutely have the capacity to lead readers to wonder.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Thanks for coming and arguing! There's no reason for us all to agree on all books.

I agree with you on Le Guin as critic. Over the last twenty years, she's been one of the most constant and most interesting scholars examining fantasy as a discipline. That doesn't mean that I agree with everything she says, but I read it and consider it.

We're probably not going to agree on what we think of Le Guin's fiction, but that's perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned.

Need to sleep now - but we should continue discussing.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't agree with everything she says either. For one thing, in this most recent essay, I massively disagree with her on the subject of the LoTR movies. :-)

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd forgotten about her essays. I'm not sure why, as I've been recently reminded of them. Her essays have been some of the most inspiring I've come across, and here I am referring solely to the one where she talks about Ego and Shadow, because it was that good.

(Incidentally -- I wasn't actually referring to LeGuin specifically. I'm not sure where I would place LeGuin's fiction. I've read only a few books beyond the Earthsea series, and that not very recently. I don't have much to say about her specifically other than that I found some of her stuff was wonderful and some was not; which seems entirely normal to me, since no one writes brilliantly all the time. Now, you want to get into Steven Brust, I can offer strong and excited opinions.)

In my confusion over how to deal with generally agreeing with all arguments, I find that I am left wondering what everyone means by "wonder" and "seductive".

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I've actually read a lot more of her non-fiction than fiction, so I feel a lot more comfortable discussing her as a critic than as a fantasy author. I think you and rymenhild both have read considerably more of her fantasy than I have, so I'll just let that go. :)

As for your comments above about High Art and Low Art, in general and not with regards to Le Guin specifically, I absolutely agree. And yay, Lois McMaster Bujold!!

Have to get back to you re: "wonder" and "seductive".