No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

Would You Please Fucking Stop?

March 2011

I KEEP READING books and seeing movies where nobody can fucking say anything except fuck, unless they say shit. I mean they don’t seem to have any adjective to describe fucking except fucking even when they’re fucking fucking. And shit is what they say when they’re fucked. When shit happens, they say shit, or oh shit, or oh shit we’re fucked. The imagination involved is staggering. I mean, literally.

There was one novel I read where the novelist didn’t only make all the fucking characters say fuck and shit all the time but she got into the fucking act herself, for shit sake. So it was full of deeply moving shit like “The sunset was just too fucking beautiful to fucking believe.”

I guess what’s happened is that what used to be a shockword has become a noise that’s supposed to intensify the emotion in what you’re saying. Or maybe it occurs just to bridge the gap between words, so that actual words become the shit that happens in between saying fucking?

Swearwords and shockwords used to mostly come out of religion. Damn, damn it, hell, God, God-damned, God damn it to hell, Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ Almighty, etc. etc. A few of them appeared, rarely, in nineteenth-century novels, usually as —— or more bravely as By G—! or d—n! (Archaic or dialect oaths such as swounds, egad, gorblimey were printed out in full.) With the twentieth century the religious-blasphemy oaths began to creep, and then swarm, into print. Censorship of words perceived as “sexually explicit” was active far longer. Lewis Gannett, the book reviewer for the old New York Herald Tribune, had a top-secret list of words the publisher had had to eliminate from The Grapes of Wrath before they could print it; after dinner one night Lewis read the list out loud to his family and mine with great relish. It couldn’t have shocked me much, because I recall only a boring litany of boring words, mostly spoken by the Joads no doubt, on the general shock level of titty.

I remember my brothers coming home on leave in the Second World War and never once swearing in front of us homebodies: a remarkable achievement. Only later, when I was helping my brother Karl clean out the spring, in which a dead skunk had languished all winter, did I learn my first real cusswords, seven or eight of them in one magnificent, unforgettable lesson. Soldiers and sailors have always cursed—what else can they do? But Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead was forced to use the euphemistic invention fugging, giving Dorothy Parker the chance, which naturally she didn’t miss, of cooing at him, “Oh, are you the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck?”

And then came the sixties, when a whole lot of people started saying shit, even if they hadn’t had lessons from their brother. And before long all the shits and fucks were bounding forth in print. And finally we began to hear them from the lips of the stars of Hollywood. So now the only place to get away from them is movies before 1990 or books before 1970 or way, way out in the wilderness. But make sure there aren’t any hunters out in the wilderness about to come up to your bleeding body and say, Aw, shit, man, I thought you was a fucking moose.

I remember when swearing, though tame by modern standards, was quite varied and often highly characteristic. There were people who swore as an art form—performing a dazzling juncture of the inordinate and the unexpected. It seems weird to me that only two words are now used as cusswords, and by many people used so constantly that they can’t talk or even write without them.

Of our two swearwords, one has to do with elimination, the other (apparently) with sex. Both are sanctioned domains, areas like religion where there are rigid limits and things may be absolutely off-limits except at certain specific times or places.

So little kids shout caca and doo-doo, and big ones shout shit. Put the feces where they don’t belong!

This principle, getting it out of place, off-limits, the basic principle of swearing, I understand and approve. And though I really would like to stop saying Oh shit when annoyed, having got on fine without it till I was thirty-five or so, I’m not yet having much success in regressing to Oh hell or Damn it. There is something about the shh beginning, and the explosive t! ending, and that quick little ih sound in between…

But fuck and fucking? I don’t know. Oh, they sound good as curses too. It’s really hard to make the word fuck sound pleasant or kindly. But what is it saying?

I don’t think there are meaningless swearwords; they wouldn’t work if they were meaningless. Does fuck have to do with sex primarily? Or sex as male aggression? Or just aggression?

Until maybe twenty-five or thirty years ago, as far as I know, fucking only meant one kind of sex: what the man does to the woman, with or without consent. Now both men and women use it to mean coitus, and it’s become (as it were) ungendered, so that a woman can talk about fucking her boyfriend. So the strong connotations of penetration and of rape should have fallen away from it. But they haven’t. Not to my ear, anyhow. Fuck is an aggressive word, a domineering word. When the guy in the Porsche shouts Fuck you, asshole! he isn’t inviting you to an evening at his flat. When people say Oh shit, we’re fucked! they don’t mean they’re having a consensual good time. The word has huge overtones of dominance, of abuse, of contempt, of hatred.

So God is dead, at least as a swearword, but hate and feces keep going strong. Le roi est mort, vive le fucking roi.

Readers’ Questions

October 2011

I RECENTLY GOT a letter from a reader who, after saying he liked my books, said he was going to ask what might seem a stupid question—one I need not answer, though he really longed to know the answer to it. It concerned the wizard Ged’s use-name Sparrowhawk. He asked, Is this the New World sparrowhawk, Falco sparverius, or one of the Old World kestrels, also Falco, or their sparrowhawks, which are not Falco but Accipiter?

(Warning: You can get into something of a tangle with these birds. Many people use the words sparrowhawk and kestrel interchangeably, but kestrels, Eurasian or American, are all falcons, while not all sparrowhawks are kestrels, or vice versa. You see what I mean? I am only sorry we lost the beautiful British name windhover. But we have G. M. Hopkins’s poem.)

I immediately answered the letter as best I could. I said it seems to me it can’t be any of the above, because it’s not an Earth bird but an Earthsea bird, and Linnaeus did not go there with his can of names. But the bird I saw in my imagination when I was writing the book was definitely like our splendid little American sparverius, so maybe we could call it Falco parvulus terramarinus. (I didn’t think of parvulus [small] when I wrote the letter, but it should be there. A sparrowhawk is a quite small falcon. Ged was a scrappy boy, but short.)

After I’d answered the letter, I thought about how promptly and with what pleasure I’d done so. And I looked at the never-decreasing stack of letters waiting to be answered and thought how much I wanted to put off answering them, because so many of them would be so difficult, some so impossible… Yet I very much wanted to answer them, because they were written by people who liked or at least were responding to my work, had questions about it, and took the trouble to tell me so, and thus deserve the trouble—and sometimes the pleasure—of an answer.

What makes so many letters-to-the-author hard to answer? What have the difficult ones in common? I have been thinking about it for some days. So far, I’ve come up with this:

They ask large, general questions, sometimes stemming from some branch of learning the writers know way, way more about than I do, such as philosophy or metaphysics or information theory.

Or they ask large, general questions about how Taoism or feminism or Jungian psychology or information theory has influenced me—questions answerable in some cases only with a long PhD thesis, in others only with “Not much.”

Or else they ask large, general questions based on large, general misconceptions about how writers work—such as, Where do you get your ideas from? What is the message of your book? Why did you write this book? Why do you write?

This last question (which is in fact highly metaphysical) is often asked by young readers. Some writers, even ones who don’t actually write for a living, answer it “For money,” which certainly stops all further discussion, being the deadest of dead ends. My honest answer for it is “Because I like to,” but that’s seldom what the questioner wants to hear, or what the teacher wants to find in the book review or the term paper. They want something meaningful.

Meaning—this is perhaps the common note, the bane I am seeking. What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story… ? Tell me what it Means.

But that’s not my job, honey. That’s your job.

I know, at least in part, what my story means to me. It may well mean something quite different to you. And what it meant to me when I wrote it in 1970 may be not at all what it meant to me in 1990 or means to me in 2011. What it meant to anybody in 1995 may be quite different from what it will mean in 2022. What it means in Oregon may be incomprehensible in Istanbul, yet in Istanbul it may have a meaning I could never have intended…

Meaning in art isn’t the same as meaning in science. The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn’t changed by who reads it, or when, or where. The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is.

Writing is a risky bidness. No guarantees. You have to take the chance. I’m happy to take it. I love taking it. So my stuff gets misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted—so what? If it’s the real stuff, it will survive almost any abuse other than being ignored, disappeared, not read.

“What it means,” to you, is what it means to you. If you have trouble deciding what, if anything, it means to you, I can see why you might want to ask me, but please don’t. Read reviewers, critics, bloggers, and scholars. They all write about what books mean to them, trying to explain a book, to achieve a valid common understanding of it useful to other readers. That’s their job, and some of them do it wonderfully well.

It’s a job I do as a reviewer, and I enjoy it. But my job as a fiction writer is to write fiction, not to review it. Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains. (Or so it seems to me, which is why I have a problem with the kind of modern museum art that involves reading what the artist says about a work in order to find out why one should look at it or “how to experience” it.)

I see a potter’s job as making a good pot, not as talking about how and where and why she made it and what she thinks it’s for and what other pots influenced it and what the pot means or how you should experience the pot. She can do that if she wants to, of course, but should she be expected to? Why? I don’t expect her to, I don’t even want her to. All I expect of a good potter is to go and make another good pot.

A question such as the one about sparrowhawks—not large, not general, not metaphysical, and not personal—a question of detail, of fact (in the case of fiction, imaginary fact)—a limited, specific question about a particular work—is one most artists are willing to try to answer. And questions about technique, if limited and precise, can be intriguing for the artist to consider (“Why did you use a mercury glaze?” or “Why do you/don’t you write in the present tense?” for instance.)

Large, general questions about meaning, etc., can only be answered with generalities, which make me uncomfortable, because it is so hard to be honest when you generalize. If you skip over all the details, how can you tell if you’re being honest or not?

But any question, if it is limited, specific, and precise, can be answered honestly—if only with “I honestly don’t know, I never thought about it, now I have to think about it, thank you for asking!” I am grateful for questions like that. They keep me thinking.

Now, back to Hopkins and “The Windhover”—

Ah, we could explain that, and talk about what it means, and why and how it does what it does, forever. And we will, I hope. But the poet, like the falcon, leaves that to us.

Kids’ Letters

December 2013

PEOPLE SOMETIMES LOOK surprised when I say that I love to get fan letters from children. I’m surprised that they’re surprised.

I get some very lovable letters from kids under ten who write me on their own, mostly with a little parental input. They often describe themselves as “Your Hugest Fan,” which makes me imagine them as towering amiably over the Empire State Building. But most of the letters come from school classes that read the Catwings books. I try to answer these letters at least by thanking every child by name. I can’t usually do much more than that.

Some are problematic: the teacher has told the kids to “write an author,” making the assignment a requirement without regard for the students’ feelings or capabilities—or mine. One desperate ten-year-old forced to write the author told me: “I have read the cover. it is prety good.” What am I to say to him? His teacher put both him and me on the spot and left us there. Not fair.

Frequently teachers tell the students to tell the author what their favorite part of the book is and to ask a question. The favorite part is fine, the kid can always fake it; but asking a question is pointless unless the student really has one. It’s also inconsiderate, raising the impossible expectation that a working author can write back with answers to twenty-five or thirty different questions, even if most of them are variations on two or three standard themes.

When teachers let the kids write whatever they want, if they want to write anything, it works. The questions are real, though some of them would stump the Sphinx. “Why do the catwings have wings?” “Why did you ever write books?” “I want to know how you make some of the words on the cover slanted.” “My cat Boo is nine. I am ten. How old is your cat? Is it fair to catch mice?” And there are interesting criticisms. Kids are forthright, both positively and negatively; their comments tell me what interests and what disturbs them. “Did James ever get better from the Owl?” “I hate Mrs Jane Tabby she made her kitens go away from hom.”

The class mailings I enjoy most are those where the teacher has encouraged the kids to draw their own pictures of scenes in the book, or to write sequels and continuations of the adventures of the Catwings.

“Catwings 5” and “Catwings 6” on ursulakleguin.com, posted quite a while back, are examples of one approach to this: the teacher has guided/collaborated with the students in making up the story, and has chosen the pictures to illustrate it. This is an admirable exercise in teamwork on an artistic project, and the result is charming. Adult control, however, inevitably tames the wild unpredictability of stories and pictures that come straight from each child’s imagination. Such illustrations, stories, and booklets give me almost unalloyed delight.

The occasional alloy is in the now inevitable stories that imitate electronic games, a more alarming instance of adult control. In these, the Catwings go through “a portal” into the middle of an incoherent adventure involving battles and the slaughter of enemies, monsters, etc., by the million. Evidently this is the only story the child knows. It’s scary to see a mind trapped in an endless repetition of violent acts without meaning or resolution, only escalation to keep the stimulus going. So far this kind of thing has come only from boys, which may be, in its way, a hopeful sign. I remember hearing my next older brother in 1937 making up and acting out his own adventure stories in his room—shouts of defiance, muffled thuds, cries of “Get him! Get him!” and machine-gun fire. My brother came through all this mayhem as a quite unviolent adult. But the games of instantly rewarded destruction, in which the characters and action are ready-made “action figures” and the only goal is “winning,” are designed to be addictive, and therefore may be hard to outgrow or replace. Compelled into an endless, meaningless feedback loop, the imagination is starved and sterilized.

As for the joy I get from the stories and booklets, a large part of it is in seeing that so many kids are perfectly willing to write a book (the book may be about fifty words long). They are confident about doing it and about illustrating it. They take obvious pleasure in giving it chapters, and a table of contents, and a cover, and a dedication. And at the end, they all write “The End” with a proud flourish. They should be proud. Their teacher is proud of them. I am proud of them. I hope their family is proud of them. To have written a book is a very cool thing, when you are six or eight or ten years old. It leads to other cool things, such as fearless reading. Why would anybody who’s written a book be afraid of reading one?

As an experienced connoisseur, I can say the best letters and books by kids are entirely handmade. A computer may make writing easier, but that’s not always an advantage: ease induces haste and glibness. From the visual point of view, the printout, with all idiosyncratic characters blanded into a standard font, is drably neat, while the artisanal script is full of vitality. Computer spell-checking takes all the flavor out of the nonprescriptive, creative spelling that can give great delight to a reader. In a printout, nobody tells me what their favrit pert of the book is, or their favroit prt, or faevit palrt, or favf pont. In a printout, nobody asks me Wi did you disid to writ cat wigs? And there are no splendid final salutations, such as “Sensrle,” which had me stumped, until “San serly” and “Sihnserly” gave me the clue. Or “Yours trully,” also spelled “chrule.” Or, frequently, echoing young Jane Austen, “Your freind.” Or the occasional totally mysterious farewells—“mth frum Derik,” “Fsrwey, Anna.”

Frswey, brave teachers, brave children! (And thank you for the quotations!)

mth frum Ursula.

Having My Cake

April 2012

THE INABILITY TO understand proverbs is a symptom of something—is it schizophrenia? Or paranoia? Anyhow, something very bad. When I heard that, many years ago, it worried me. Everything I ever heard about a symptom worries me. Do I have it? Yes! Yes, I do! Oh God!

And I had proof of my paranoia (or schizophrenia). There was a very common proverb that I knew I’d never understood.

My personal logic said, How can you eat a cake you don’t have?

And since I couldn’t argue with that, I silently stuck to it, which left me in a dilemma: either the saying didn’t make sense (so why did intelligent people say it?) or I was schizophrenic (or paranoid).

Years passed, during which now and then I puzzled over my problem with the proverb. And slowly, slowly it dawned on me that the word have has several meanings or shades of meaning, the principal one being “own” or “possess,” but one of the less common connotations is “hold on to,” “keep.”

Oh!

I get it!

It’s a good proverb!

And I am not a paranoid schizophrenic!

But it seemed odd that I hadn’t arrived sooner at the “keep” meaning of have. I puzzled over that for a while too, and finally came up with this:

For one thing, it seems to me that the verbs are in the wrong order. You have to have your cake before you eat it, after all. I might have understood the saying if it was “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”

And then, another kind of confusion, having to do with have. In the West Coast dialect of English I grew up with, “I had cake at the party” is how we said, “I ate cake at the party.” So “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” was trying to tell me that I couldn’t eat my cake and eat it too…

And hearing it that way as a kid, I thought, Hunh? but didn’t say anything, because there is no way, no possible way, a kid can ask about everything grownups say that the kid thinks Hunh? about. So I just tried to figure it out. And once I got stuck with the illogic of the cake you have being the cake you can’t eat, the possibility never occurred to me that it was all about hoarding vs. gobbling, or the necessity of choice when there is no middle way.

I expect you’ve had quite enough cake by now. I’m sorry.

But see, this is the kind of thing I think about a lot.

Nouns (cake), verbs (have), words, and the uses and misuses of words, and the meanings of words, and how the words and their meanings change with time and with place, and the derivations of words from older words or other languages—words fascinate me the way box elder beetles fascinate my friend Pard. Pard, at this point, is not allowed outside, so he has to hunt indoors. Indoors we have, at this point, no mice. But we have beetles. Oh yes Lord, we have beetles. And if Pard hears, smells, or sees a beetle, that beetle instantly occupies his universe. He will stop at nothing—he will root in wastebaskets, overturn and destroy small fragile objects, push large heavy dictionaries aside, leap wildly in the air or up the wall, stare unmoving for ten minutes at the unattainable light fixture in which a beetle is visible as a tiny moving silhouette… And when he gets the beetle, and he always does, he knows that you can’t have your beetle and eat it too. So he eats it. Instantly.

I know, though I don’t really like knowing it, that not many people share this particular fascination or obsession. With words, I mean, not beetles. Though I want to point out that Charles Darwin was almost as deeply fascinated by beetles as Pard is, though with a somewhat different goal. Darwin even put one in his mouth once, in a doomed attempt to keep it by eating it. It didn’t work.[1] Anyhow, many people enjoy reading about the meaning and history of picturesque words and phrases, but not many enjoy brooding for years over a shade of significance of the verb to have in a banal saying.

Even among writers, not all seem to share my enjoyment of pursuing a word or a usage through the dictionaries and the wastebaskets. If I start doing it aloud in public, some of them look at me with horror or compassion, or try to go quietly away. For that reason, I’m not even certain that it has anything to do with my being a writer.

But I think it does. Not with being a writer per se, but with my being a writer, my way of being a writer. When asked to talk about what I do, I’ve often compared writing with handicrafts—weaving, pot-making, woodworking. I see my fascination with the word as very like, say, the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers—people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what’s been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.

Yet when I compare my craft with theirs, I feel slightly presumptuous. Woodworkers, potters, weavers engage with real materials, and the beauty of their work is profoundly and splendidly bodily. Writing is so immaterial, so mental an activity! In its origin, it’s merely artful speech, and the spoken word is no more than breath. To write or otherwise record the word is to embody it, make it durable; and calligraphy and typesetting are material crafts that achieve great beauty. I appreciate them. But in fact they have little more to do with what I do than weaving or pot-making or woodworking does. It’s grand to see one’s poem beautifully printed, but the important thing to the poet, or anyhow to this poet, is merely to see it printed, however, wher­ever—so that readers can read it. So it can go from mind to mind.

I work in my mind. What I do is done in my mind. And what my hands do with it in writing it down is not the same as what the hands of the weaver do with the yarn, or the potter’s hands with the clay, or the cabinetmaker’s with the wood. If what I do, what I make, is beautiful, it isn’t a physical beauty. It’s imaginary, it takes place in the mind—my mind, and my reader’s.

You could say that I hear voices and believe the voices are real (which would mean I was schizophrenic, but the proverb test proves I’m not—I do, I do understand it, Doctor!). And that then by writing what I hear, I induce or compel readers to believe the voices are real too… That doesn’t describe it well, though. It doesn’t feel that way. I don’t really know what it is I’ve done all my life, this wordworking.

But I know that to me words are things, almost immaterial but actual and real things, and that I like them.

I like their most material aspect: the sound of them, heard in the mind or spoken by the voice.

And right along with that, inseparably, I like the dances of meaning words do with one another, the endless changes and complexities of their interrelationships in sentence or text, by which imaginary worlds are built and shared. Writing engages me in both these aspects of words, in an inexhaustible playing, which is my lifework.

Words are my matter—my stuff. Words are my skein of yarn, my lump of wet clay, my block of uncarved wood. Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.

Papa H

June 2013

I WAS THINKING about Homer, and it occurred to me that his two books are the two basic fantasy stories: the War and the Journey.

I’m sure this has occurred to others. That’s the thing about Homer. People keep going to him and discovering new things, or old things, or things for the first time, or things all over again, and saying them. This has been going on for two or three millennia. That is an amazingly long time for anything to mean anything to anybody.

Anyhow, so The Iliad is the War (actually only a piece of it, close to but not including the end), and The Odyssey is the Journey (There and Back Again, as Bilbo put it).

I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War, by not taking sides.

The Trojan war is not and you cannot make it be the War of Good vs. Evil. It’s just a war, a wasteful, useless, needless, stupid, protracted, cruel mess full of individual acts of courage, cowardice, nobility, betrayal, limb-hacking-off, and disembowelment. Homer was a Greek and might have been partial to the Greek side, but he had a sense of justice or balance that seems characteristically Greek—maybe his people learned a good deal of it from him? His impartiality is far from dispassionate; the story is a torrent of passionate actions, generous, despicable, magnificent, trivial. But it is unprejudiced. It isn’t Satan vs. Angels. It isn’t Holy Warriors vs. Infidels. It isn’t hobbits vs. orcs. It’s just people vs. people.

Of course you can take sides, and almost everybody does. I try not to, but it’s no use, I just like the Trojans better than the Greeks. But Homer truly doesn’t take sides, and so he permits the story to be tragic. By tragedy, mind and soul are grieved, enlarged, and exalted.

Whether war itself can rise to tragedy, can enlarge and exalt the soul, I leave to those who have been more immediately part of a war than I have. I think some believe that it can, and might say that the opportunity for heroism and tragedy justifies war. I don’t know; all I know is what a poem about a war can do. In any case, war is something human beings do and show no signs of stopping doing, and so it may be less important to condemn it or to justify it than to be able to perceive it as tragic.

But once you take sides, you have lost that ability.

Is it our dominant religion that makes us want war to be between the good guys and the bad guys?

In the War of Good vs. Evil there can be divine or supernal justice but not human tragedy. It is by definition, technically, comic (as in The Divine Comedy): the good guys win. It has a happy ending. If the bad guys beat the good guys, unhappy ending, that’s mere reversal, flip side of the same coin. The author is not impartial. Dystopia is not tragedy.

Milton, a Christian, had to take sides, and couldn’t avoid comedy. He could approach tragedy only by making Evil, in the person of Lucifer, grand, heroic, and even sympathetic—which is faking it. He faked it very well.

Maybe it’s not only Christian habits of thought but the difficulty we all have in growing up that makes us insist justice must favor the good.

After all, “Let the best man win” doesn’t mean the good man will win. It means, “This will be a fair fight, no prejudice, no interference—so the best fighter will win it.” If the treacherous bully fairly defeats the nice guy, the treacherous bully is declared champion. This is justice. But it’s the kind of justice that children can’t bear. They rage against it. It’s not fair!

But if children never learn to bear it, they can’t go on to learn that a victory or a defeat in battle, or in any competition other than a purely moral one (whatever that might be), has nothing to do with who is morally better.

Might does not make right—right?

Therefore right does not make might. Right?

But we want it to. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”

If we insist that in the real world the ultimate victor must be the good guy, we’ve sacrificed right to might. (That’s what History does after most wars, when it applauds the victors for their superior virtue as well as their superior firepower.) If we falsify the terms of the competition, handicapping it, so that the good guys may lose the battle but always win the war, we’ve left the real world, we’re in fantasy land—wishful thinking country.

Homer didn’t do wishful thinking.

Homer’s Achilles is a disobedient officer, a sulky, self-pitying teenager who gets his nose out of joint and won’t fight for his own side. A sign that Achilles might grow up someday, if given time, is his love for his friend Patroclus. But his big snit is over a girl he was given to rape but has to give back to his superior officer, which to me rather dims the love story. To me Achilles is not a good guy. But he is a good warrior, a great fighter—even better than the Trojan prime warrior, Hector. Hector is a good guy on any terms—kind husband, kind father, responsible on all counts—a mensch. But right does not make might. Achilles kills him.

The famous Helen plays a quite small part in The Iliad. Because I know that she’ll come through the whole war with not a hair in her blond blow-dry out of place, I see her as opportunistic, immoral, emotionally about as deep as a cookie sheet. But if I believed that the good guys win, that the reward goes to the virtuous, I’d have to see her as an innocent beauty wronged by Fate and saved by the Greeks.

And people do see her that way. Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal.

I don’t know if such nobility of mind (in the sense of the impartial “noble” gases) is possible to a modern writer of fantasy. Since we have worked so hard to separate History from Fiction, our fantasies are dire warnings, or mere nightmares, or else they are wish fulfillments.

I don’t know any war story comparable to The Iliad except maybe the huge Indian epic the Mahabharata. Its five brother-heroes are certainly heroes, it’s their story—but it’s also the story of their enemies, also heroes, some of whom are really great guys—and it’s all so immense and complicated and full of rights and wrongs and implications and gods who interfere even more directly than the Greek gods do—and then, after all, is the end tragic or is it comic? The whole thing is like a giant cauldron of ever-replenished food you can dive your fork into and come out with whatever you need most to nourish you just then. But next time it may taste quite different.

And the taste of the Mahabharata as a whole is very, very different from that of The Iliad, above all because The Iliad is (unjust divine intervention aside) appallingly realistic and bloodthirstily callous about what goes on in a war. The Mahabharata’s war is all dazzling fantasy, from the superhuman exploits to the super­duper weapons. It’s only in their spiritual suffering that the Indian heroes become suddenly, heartbreakingly, heart-changingly real.

As for the Journey:

The actual travel parts of The Odyssey are related or ancestral to all our fantasy tales of somebody setting off over sea or land, meeting marvels and horrors and temptations and adventures, possibly growing up along the way, and maybe coming back home at the end.

Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalized such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though these generalities can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important—but we’ve merely recognized it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing.

Odysseus’s travels involve such a terrific set of adventures that I tend to forget how much of the book is actually about his wife and son—what goes on at home while he’s traveling, how his son goes looking for him, and all the complications of his homecoming. One of the things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s understanding of the importance of what goes on back on the farm while the Hero is taking his Thousand Faces all round the world. But till you get back there with Frodo and the others, Tolkien never takes you back home. Homer does. All through the ten-year voyage, the reader is alternately Odysseus trying desperately to get to Penelope and Penelope desperately waiting for Odysseus—both the voyager and the goal—a tremendous piece of narrative time-and-place interweaving.

Homer and Tolkien are both also notably honest about the difficulty of being a far-traveled hero who comes home. Neither Odysseus nor Frodo is able to stay there long. I wish Homer had written something about how it was for King Menelaus when he got home, along with his wife Helen, whom he and the rest of the Greeks had fought for ten years to win back, while she, safe inside the walls of Troy, was prissing around with pretty Prince Paris (and then when he got bumped she married his brother). Apparently it never occurred to her to send Hubby #1, Menelaus, down there on the beach in the rain, an email, or even a text message. But then, Menelaus’s family, for a generation or two, had been rather impressively unfortunate or, as we would say, dysfunctional.

Perhaps it isn’t only fantasy that you can trace right back to Homer?

A Much-Needed Literary Award

January 2013

I FIRST LEARNED about the Sartre Prize from “NB,” the reliably enjoyable last page of the London Times Literary Supplement, signed by J.C. The fame of the award, named for the writer who refused the Nobel in 1964, is or anyhow should be growing fast. As J.C. wrote in the November 23, 2012, issue, “So great is the status of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal that writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre.” He adds with modest pride, “The Sartre Prize itself has never been refused.”

Newly shortlisted for the Sartre Prize is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who turned down a fifty-thousand-euro poetry award offered by the Hungarian division of PEN. The award is funded in part by the repressive Hungarian government. Ferlinghetti politely suggested that they use the prize money to set up a fund for “the publication of Hungarian authors whose writings support total freedom of speech.”

I couldn’t help thinking how cool it would have been if Mo Yan had used some of his Nobel Prize money to set up a fund for the publication of Chinese authors whose writings support total freedom of speech. But this seems unlikely.

Sartre’s reason for refusal was consistent with his refusal to join the Legion of Honor and other such organizations and characteristic of the gnarly and countersuggestible existentialist. He said, “It isn’t the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to let himself be turned into an institution.” He was, of course, already an “institution,” but he valued his personal autonomy. (How he reconciled that value with Maoism is not clear to me.) He didn’t let institutions own him, but he did join uprisings, and was arrested for civil disobedience in the street demos supporting the strikes of May 1968. President de Gaulle quickly pardoned him, with the magnificently Gallic observation that “you don’t arrest Voltaire.”

I wish the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal could have been called the Boris Pasternak Prize for one of my true heroes. But it wouldn’t be appropriate, since Pasternak didn’t exactly choose to refuse his 1958 Nobel. He had to. If he’d tried to go accept it, the Soviet government would have promptly, enthusiastically arrested him and sent him to eternal silence in a gulag in Siberia.

I refused a prize once. My reasons were mingier than Sartre’s, though not entirely unrelated. It was in the coldest, insanest days of the Cold War, when even the little planet Esseff was politically divided against itself. My novelette The Diary of the Rose was awarded the Nebula Prize by the Science Fiction Writers of America. At about the same time, the same organization deprived the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem of his honorary membership. There was a sizable contingent of Cold Warrior members who felt that a man who lived behind the iron curtain and was rude about American science fiction must be a Commie rat who had no business in the SFWA. They invoked a technicality to deprive him of his membership and insisted on applying it. Lem was a difficult, arrogant, sometimes insufferable man, but a courageous one and a first-rate author, writing with more independence of mind than would seem possible in Poland under the Soviet regime. I was very angry at the injustice of the crass and petty insult offered him by the SFWA. I dropped my membership and, feeling it would be shameless to accept an award for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance, took my entry out of Nebula competition shortly before the winners were to be announced. The SFWA called me to plead with me not to withdraw it, since it had, in fact, won. I couldn’t do that. So—with the perfect irony that awaits anybody who strikes a noble pose on high moral ground—my award went to the runner-up: Isaac Asimov, the old chieftain of the Cold Warriors.

What relates my small refusal to Sartre’s big one is the sense that to accept an award from an institution is to be co-opted by, embodied as, the institution. Sartre refused this on general principle, while I acted in specific protest. But I do have sympathy for his distrust of allowing himself to be identified as something other than himself. He felt that the huge label “Success” that the Nobel sticks on an author’s forehead would, as it were, hide his face. His becoming a “Nobelist” would adulterate his authority as Sartre.

Which is, of course, precisely what the commercial machinery of bestsellerdom and prizedom wants: the name as product. The guaranteed imprint of salable Success. Nobel Prize Winner So-and-so. Best-Selling Author Thus-and-such. Thirty Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List Whozit. Jane D. Wonthe­pulitzer… John Q. MacArthurgenius…

It isn’t what the people who established the awards want them to do or to mean, but it’s how they’re used. As a way to honor a writer, an award has genuine value, but the use of prizes as a marketing ploy by corporate capitalism, and sometimes as a political gimmick by the awarders, has compromised their value. And the more prestigious and valued the prize, the more compromised it is.

Still, I’m glad that José Saramago, a much tougher Marxist nut than Sartre, saw fit not to refuse the Nobel Prize. He knew nothing, not even Success, could compromise him, and no institution could turn him into itself. His face was his own face to the end. And despite the committee’s many bizarre selections and omissions, the Nobel Prize for Literature retains considerable value, precisely because it is identified with such writers as Pasternak, or Szymborska, or Saramago. It bears at least a glimmer reflected from their faces.

All the same, I think the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal should be recognized as a valuable and timely award, and what’s more, one pretty safe to remain untainted by exploitation. I wish somebody really contemptible would award me a prize so I could be in the running for a Sartre.

TGAN and TGOW

September 2011

WHEN I WAS a young novelist, fairly often a reviewer would get fervent and declare that an obscure book such as Call It Sleep, or a hugely successful one such as The Naked and the Dead, was The Great American Novel. By writers the phrase was used half jokingly—What are you writing these days? Oh, you know, The Great American Novel. I don’t think I’ve seen the phrase used at all for a couple of decades at least. Maybe we’ve given up on greatness, or anyhow on American greatness.

I began quite a while ago to resist declarations of literary greatness in the sense of singling out any one book as TGAN, or even making lists of the Great American Books. Partly because the supposed categories of excellence omitting all genre writing, and the awards and reading lists and canons routinely and unquestioningly favoring work by men in the eastern half of the United States, made no sense to me. But mostly because I didn’t and don’t think we have much idea of what’s enduringly excellent until it’s endured. Been around quite a long time. Five or six decades, to start with.

Of course the excellence of immediate, real impact, of an art that embodies the moment, is an excellent kind of excellence. Such a novel speaks to you now, this moment. It tells you what’s going on when you need to know what’s going on. It speaks to your age group or social group that nobody else can speak for, or it embodies whatever the current anguish is, or it shows a light at the end of the tunnel of the moment.

I think all the enduringly excellent books began, in fact, as immediately excellent, whether they were noticed at the time or not. Their special quality is to outlast the moment and carry immediacy, impact, meaning, undiminished or even increasing with time, to ages and people entirely different from those the novelist wrote for.

The Great American Novel… Moby-Dick? Not greatly noticed when published, but canonized in the twentieth century; no doubt A Great American Novel. And The Great (canonical) American Novelists—Hawthorne, James, Twain, Faulkner, etc., etc… . But two books keep getting left off these lists, two novels that to me are genuinely, immediately, and permanently excellent. Call them great if you like the word. Certainly they are American to the bone.

I won’t talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, much as I love and admire it, because I want to talk about the other one.

If somebody came up to me in a dark alley with a sharp knife and said, “Name The Great American Novel or die!” I would gasp forth, squeakily, “The Grapes of Wrath!”

I wouldn’t have, a year ago.

I first read it when I was fifteen or sixteen. It was utterly and totally over the head of the little Berkeley High School girl (maybe “under her radar” is better, but we didn’t know much about radar in 1945 unless we were in the navy). I liked the chapter with the tortoise, early in the book. The end, the scene with Rose of Sharon and the starving man, fascinated and frightened and bewildered me so much that I couldn’t either forget it or think about it.

Everything in the book was out of my experience, I didn’t know these people, they didn’t do things people I knew did. That I had been going to Berkeley High School with the children of the Joads simply did not occur to me. I was socially unaware as only a middle-class white kid in a middle-class white city can be.

I was dimly aware of changes. In the forties, the shipyards and other war employment brought a lot of people into Berkeley from the South and southern Midwest. What I mostly noticed was that, with no discussion or notice taken that I was aware of, the high school lunchroom had become segregated—self-segregated—white kids this side, black kids that side.

So OK, that’s how it was now. When my brother Karl, three years older than me, was at BHS, the president of the student body had been a black kid—a Berkeley kid. That little, artificial, peaceable kingdom was gone forever. But I could keep living in it. On the white side of the lunchroom.

I lived in it with my best friend, Jean Ainsworth. Jean’s mother, Beth, was John Steinbeck’s sister. A widow with three children, Beth worked for Shell Oil and rented out rooms in their house, higher in the Berkeley Hills than ours, way up Euclid, with a huge view of the bay. The peaceable kingdom.

I got to know Uncle John a little when I was in college in the East and Jean was working in New York City, where he then lived. He was fond of his beautiful red-headed niece, though I don’t know if he quite realized she was his equal in wit and heart.

Once I sat hidden with him and Jean under a huge bush at a huge wedding in Cleveland, Ohio, and drank champagne. Jean or I foraged forth for a new bottle now and then. It was Uncle John’s idea.

At that wedding I had first heard, spoken in all seriousness, a now-classic phrase. People were talking about Jackie Robinson, and a man said, heavily, threateningly, “If this goes on, they’ll be moving in next door.”

It was after that that we hid under the bush with the champagne. “We need to get away from boring people and drink in peace,” Uncle John said.

He did a bit too much of both those things, maybe, in his later life. He loved living high on the hog. He never went back to the austerity of his life when he was working on The Grapes of Wrath, and who can blame him, with fame and money pouring in on him? Maybe some books he might have written didn’t get written and some he wrote could have been better.

I respect him for never jumping through all the hoops at Stanford, even if he kept going back and letting people like Wallace Stegner tell him what The Great American Novel ought to be. He could write rings around any of them, but they may have helped him learn his craft, or at least showed him how to act as if he had the kind of writerly confidence that life on a farm in Salinas didn’t provide. Though it provided a great deal else.

Anyhow, when Jean and I were still in high school, 1945 or thereabouts, I read her famous uncle’s famous novel and was awed, bored, scared, and uncomprehending.

And then sixty-some years later I thought, Hey, I really ought to reread some Steinbeck and see how it wears. So I went to Powell’s and got The Grapes of Wrath.

When I got toward the end of the book, I stopped reading it. I couldn’t go on. I remembered just enough of that ending. And this time I was identified with all the people, I was lost in them, I had been living with Tom and Ma and Rose of Sharon day and night, through the great journey and the high hopes and the brief joys and the endless suffering. I loved them and I could not bear to think of what was coming. I didn’t want to go through with it. I shut the book and ran away.

Next day I picked it up and finished it, in tears the whole time.

I don’t cry much anymore when I read, only poetry, that brief rush when the hair stirs, the heart swells, the eyes fill. I can’t remember when a novel broke my heart the way music can do, the way a tragic play does, the way this book did.

I’m not saying that a book that makes you cry is a great book. It would be a wonderful criterion if only it worked, but alas, it admits effective sentimentality, the knee-jerk/heartstring stimulus. For instance, a lot of us cry when reading of the death of an animal in a story—which in itself is interesting and significant, as if we give ourselves permission to weep the lesser tears—but that is something else and less. A book that makes me cry the way music can or tragedy can—deep tears, the tears that come of accepting as my own the grief there is in the world—must have something of greatness about it.

So now, if somebody asked me what book would tell them the most about what is good and what is bad in America, what is the most truly American book, what is the great American novel… a year ago I would have said—for all its faults—Huckleberry Finn. But now—for all its faults—I’d say The Grapes of Wrath.

I saw the movie of The Grapes of Wrath, and yes, it’s a good movie, faithful to the elements of the book that it could handle, and yes, Henry Fonda was fine.

But a movie is something you see; a novel is something made out of language. And what’s beautiful and powerful in this novel is its LANGUAGE, the art that not only shows us what the author saw but lets us share, as directly as emotion can be shared, his passionate grief, indignation, and love.

TGAN Again

November 2013

A QUESTION FROM New Bookends, “Where is the great American novel by a woman?,” got an interesting answer from the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid.[2]

I like this very much.

But there’s something coy and coercive about the question itself that made me want to charge into the bullring, head down and horns forward.[3] I’d answer it with a question: Where is the great American novel by anybody? And I’d answer that: Who cares?

I think this is pretty much what Mr. Hamid says more politely, when he says that art

Three cheers and Amen to that.

But I want to add this note: To me, the keystone of the phrase “the great American novel” is not the word American but the word great.

Greatness, in the sense of outstanding or unique accomplishment, is a cryptogendered word. In ordinary usage and common understanding, “a great American” means a great American man, “a great writer” means a great male writer. To regender the word, it must modify a feminine noun (“a great American woman,” “a great woman writer”). To degender it, it must be used in a locution such as “great Americans/writers, both men and women…” Greatness in the abstract, in general, is still thought of as the province of men.

The writer who sets out to write the great American novel must see himself as a free citizen of that province, competing on equal ground with other writers, living and dead, for a glittering prize, a unique honor. His career is a contest, a battle, with victory over other men as its goal. (He is unlikely to think much about women as competitors.) Only in this view of the writer as a fully privileged male, a warrior, literature as a tournament, greatness as the defeat of others, can the idea of “the” great American novel exist.

That’s a good deal to swallow, these days, for most writers over fourteen. I’ll bet the whole notion of “the great American novel” is nothing like as common and meaningful an idea among authors as it is among readers, fans, PR people, reviewers, those who don’t read but know authors by name as celebrities, and people who need something to blog about.

Now this may get me told off by women who value competitiveness and feel the problem with women is that they think they shouldn’t or can’t compete, but I’ll say it all the same. It makes perfect sense to me that I’ve never heard a woman writer say she intended, or wanted, to write the great American novel.

Tell you true, I’ve never heard a woman writer say the phrase “the great American novel” without a sort of snort.

Whatever the virtues of competitiveness, women are still deeply trained by society to be cautious about laying claim to greatness greater than the greatness of men. As you know, Jim, a woman who competes successfully with men in a field men consider theirs by right risks being punished for it. Literature is a field a great many men consider theirs by right. Virginia Woolf committed successful competition in that field. She barely escaped the first and most effective punishment—omission from the literary canon after her death. Yet eighty or ninety years later charges of snobbery and invalidism are still used to discredit and diminish her. Marcel Proust’s limitations and his neuroticism were at least as notable as hers. But that Proust needed not only a room of his own but a cork-lined one is taken as proof he was a genius. That Woolf heard the birds singing in Greek shows only that she was a sick woman.

So as long as men need to “be reflected at twice their natural size,” a woman writer knows that open competition with them is dangerous. Even if she wants to write the, or a, great American novel, she’s unlikely to announce (as male writers do from time to time) that she plans to or has written it. And if she feels she deserves a Pulitzer or Booker or Nobel, or anyhow wouldn’t mind having one, she knows most literary awards are weighted so heavily in favor of men that the social efforts involved in most major awards, the networking and careful self-presentation, are a great expense for an unlikely return.

But risk avoidance isn’t all there is to it. Because competition for primacy, for literary supremacy, doesn’t seem as glamorously possible for women as it does for men, the whole idea of singular greatness—of there being one great anything—may not have the hold on a woman’s imagination that it has on a man’s. The knights in the lists have to believe the prize can be won and is worth winning. Those relegated to the preliminary jousts and the sidelines can see more clearly how arbitrary the judgment of championship is, and can question the value of the glittering prize.

Who wants “The” Great American Novel, anyhow? PR people. People who believe that bestsellers are better than other books because they sell better than other books and that the prizewinning book is the best book because it won the prize. Tired teachers, timid teachers, lazy students who’d like one text to read instead of the many, many great and greatly complex books that make up literature.

Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.

The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum

May 2012

THE NARRATIVE GIFT, is that what to call it? The storyteller’s knack, as developed in writing.

Storytelling is clearly a gift, a talent, a specific ability. Some people just don’t have it—they rush or drone, jumble the order of events, skip essentials, dwell on inessentials, and then muff the climax. Don’t we all have a relative who we pray won’t launch into a joke or a bit of family history because the history will bore us and the joke will bomb? But we may also have a relative who can take the stupidest, nothingest little event and make it into what copywriters call a gut-wrenchingly brilliant thriller and a laugh riot. Or, as Cousin Verne says, that Cousin Myra, she sure knows how to tell a story.

When Cousin Myra goes literary, you have a force to contend with.

But how important is that knack to writing fiction? How much of it, or what kind of it, is essential to excellence? And what is the connection of the narrative gift with literary quality?

I’m talking about story, not about plot. E. M. Forster had a low opinion of story. He said story is “The queen died and then the king died,” while plot is “The queen died and then the king died of grief.” To him, story is just “this happened and then this happened and then this happened,” a succession without connection; plot introduces connection or causality, therefore shape and form. Plot makes sense of story. I honor E. M. Forster, but I don’t believe this. Children often tell “this happened and then this happened,” and so do people naively recounting their dream or a movie, but in literature, story in Forster’s sense doesn’t exist. Not even the silliest “action” potboiler is a mere succession of unconnected events.

I have a high opinion of story. I see it as the essential trajectory of narrative: a coherent, onward movement, taking the reader from Here to There. Plot, to me, is variation or complication of the movement of story.

Story goes. Plot elaborates the going.

Plot hesitates, pauses, doubles back (Proust), forecasts, leaps, doubling or tripling simultaneous trajectories (Dickens), diagrams a geometry onto the story line (Hardy), makes the story Ariadne’s string leading through a labyrinth (mysteries), turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time (the novel in general)…

There are supposed to be only so many plots (three, five, ten) in all fiction. I don’t believe that either. Plot is manifold, inexhaustibly ingenious, endless in connections and causalities and complications. But through all the twists and turns and red herrings and illusions of plot, the trajectory of story is there, going forward. If it isn’t going forward, the fiction founders.

I suppose plot without story is possible—perhaps one of those incredibly complex cerebral spy thrillers where you need a GPS to get through the book at all. And story without plot occurs occasionally in literary fiction (Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall,” perhaps)—oftener in literary nonfiction. A biography, for instance, can’t really have a plot, unless the subject obligingly provided one by living it. But the great biographers make you feel that the story of the life they’ve told has an aesthetic completeness equal to that of plotted fiction. Lesser biographers and memoirists often invent a plot to foist onto their factual story—they don’t trust it to work by itself, so they make it untrustworthy.

I believe a good story, plotted or plotless, rightly told, is satisfying as such and in itself. But here, with “rightly told,” is my conundrum or mystery. Inept writing lames or cripples good narrative only if it’s truly inept. An irresistibly readable story can be told in the most conventional, banal prose, if the writer has the gift.

I read a book last winter that does an absolutely smashing job of storytelling, a compulsive page-turner from page 1 on. The writing is competent at best, rising above banality only in some dialogue (the author’s ear for the local working-class dialect is pitch-perfect). Several characters are vividly or sympathetically portrayed, but they’re all stereotypes. The plot has big holes in it, though only one of them really damages credibility. The story line: an ambitious white girl in her early twenties persuades a group of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964, to tell her their experiences with their white employers past and present, so that she can make a book of their stories and share them with the world by selling it to Harper and Row, and go to New York and be rich and famous. They do, and she does. And except for a couple of uppity mean white women getting some egg on their face, nobody suffers for it.

All Archimedes wanted was a solid place to put the lever he was going to move the world with. Same with a story trajectory. You can’t throw a shot put far if you’re standing on a shaky two-inch-wide plank over a deep, dark river. You need a solid footing.

Or do you?

All this author had to stand on is a hokey, sentimental notion, and from it she threw this perfect pitch!

Seldom if ever have I seen the power of pure story over mind, emotion, and artistic integrity so clearly shown.

And I had to think about it, because a few months earlier, I’d read a book that brilliantly demonstrates a narrative gift in the service of clear thought, honest feeling, and passionate integrity. It tells an extremely complicated story extending over many decades and involving many people, from geneticists cloning cells in cloistered laboratories to families in the shack-houses of black farming communities. The story explains scientific concepts and arguments with great clarity while never for a moment losing its onward impetus. It handles the human beings it involves with human compassion and a steady, luminous ethical focus. The prose is of unobtrusive excellence. And if you can stop reading it, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. I couldn’t stop even when I got to the notes—even when I got to the index. More! Go on! Oh please tell me more!

I see a huge difference in literary quality between these two hugely readable books, which certainly has to do with specific qualities of character—among them patience, honesty, risk-taking.

Kathryn Stockett, the white woman who wrote The Help, tells of a white girl persuading black women to tell her intimate details of the injustices and hardships of their lives as servants—a highly implausible undertaking in Mississippi in ’64. When the white employers begin to suspect this tattling, only an equally implausible plot trick lets the black maids keep their jobs. Their sole motivation is knowing their stories will be printed; the mortal risk they would have run in bearing such witness, at that place in that year, is not seriously imagined, but merely exploited to create suspense. White Girl’s motivation is a kind of high-minded ambition. Her risks all become rewards—she loses malevolent friends and a bigoted boyfriend and leaves Mississippi behind for a brilliant big-city career. The author’s sympathy for the black women and knowledge of their everyday existence is evident, but, for me, it was made questionable by her assumption of a right to speak for people without earning that right, and killed dead by the wish-fulfilling improbability of her story.

Rebecca Skloot, the white woman who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, spent years researching a vastly complex web of scientific research, thefts, discoveries, mistakes, deceits, cover-ups, exploitations, and reparations, while at the same time trying, with incredible patience and good will, to gain the trust of the people most directly affected by the one human life with which all that research and profit-making began—the family of Henrietta Lacks. These were people who had good reason to feel that they would be endangered or betrayed if they trusted any white person. It took her literally years to win their confidence. Evidently she showed them that she deserved it by her patient willingness to listen and learn, her rigorous honesty, and her compassionate awareness of who and what was and is truly at risk.

“Of course her story is superior,” says Mr. Gradgrind. “It’s nonfiction—it’s true. Fiction is mere hokum.”

But oh, Mr. Gradgrind, so much nonfiction is awful hokum! How bad and mean my mommy was to me before I found happiness in buying a wonderful old castle in Nodonde and fixing it up as an exclusive gourmet B&B while bringing modern educational opportunities to the village children…

And contrarily, we can learn so much truth by reading novels, such as the novel in which you appear, Mr. Gradgrind.

No, that’s not where the problem lies. The problem—my problem—is with the gift of story.

If one of the two books I’ve been talking about is slightly soiled fluff while the other is solid gold, how come I couldn’t stop reading either of them?

It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is

June 2011

THE QUOTATION, FROM G. K. Chesterton, is from an interesting article by Bernard Manzo in the Times Literary Supplement of June 10, 2011 (he didn’t give the source in Chesterton’s writings). It got me to thinking about how imaginative literature, from folktale to fantasy, operates, and to wondering about its relationship to science, though I’ll only get to that at the very end of this piece.

The fantastic tale may suspend the laws of physics—carpets fly; cats fade into invisibility, leaving only a smile—and of probability—the youngest of three brothers always wins the bride; the infant in the box cast upon the waters survives unharmed—but it carries its revolt against reality no further. Mathematical order is unquestioned. Two and one make three, in Koschei’s castle and Alice’s Wonderland (especially in Wonderland). Euclid’s geometry—or possibly Riemann’s—somebody’s geometry, anyhow—governs the layout. Otherwise incoherence would invade and paralyze the narrative.

There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature. The child “telling a story” roams about among the imaginary and the half-understood without knowing the difference, content with the sound of language and the pure play of fantasy with no particular end, and that’s the charm of it. But fantasies, whether folktales or sophisticated literature, are stories in the adult, demanding sense. They can ignore certain laws of physics but not of causality. They start here and go there (or back here), and though the mode of travel may be unusual, and here and there may be wildly exotic and unfamiliar places, yet they must have both a location on the map of that world and a relationship to the map of our world. If not, the hearer or reader of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or, worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author’s wishful thinking.

It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say, “Anything goes”—that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven, or whuddevva, and the story doesn’t “add up,” as we say. Fantasy doesn’t say, “Nothing is”—that’s nihilism. And it doesn’t say, “It ought to be this way”—that’s utopianism, a different enterprise. Fantasy isn’t meliorative. The happy ending, however enjoyable to the reader, applies to the characters only; this is fiction, not prediction and not prescription.

It doesn’t have to be the way it is is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to “being real.” Yet it is a subversive statement.

Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that things are as they have to be. Fantasy not only asks “What if things didn’t go on just as they do?” but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise—thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.

So here imagination and fundamentalism come into conflict.

A fully created imaginary world is a mental construct similar in many respects to a religious or other cosmology. This similarity, if noticed, can be deeply disturbing to the orthodox mind.

When a fundamental belief is threatened the response is likely to be angry or dismissive—either “Abomination!” or “Nonsense!” Fantasy gets the abomination treatment from religious fundamentalists, whose rigid reality-constructs shudder at contact with questioning, and the nonsense treatment from pragmatic fundamentalists, who want to restrict reality to the immediately perceptible and the immediately profitable. All fundamentalisms set strict limits to the uses of imagination, outside which the fundamentalist’s imagination itself runs riot, fancying dreadful deserts where God and Reason and the capitalist way of life are lost, forests of the night where tigers hang from trees by the tail, lighting the way to madness with their bright burning.

Those who dismiss fantasy less fiercely, from a less absolutist stance, usually call it dreaming, or escapism.

Dream and fantastic literature are related only on a very deep, usually inaccessible level of the mind. Dream is free of intellectual control; its narratives are irrational and unstable, and its aesthetic value is mostly accidental. Fantastic literature, like all the verbal arts, must satisfy the intellectual as well as the aesthetic faculty. Fantasy, odd as it sounds to say so, is a perfectly rational undertaking.

As for the charge of escapism, what does escape mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?

“Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?” To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.

I know that to philosophers what I’m saying is childishly naive, but my mind cannot or will not follow philosophical argument, so I must remain naive. To an ordinary mind not trained in philosophy, the question—do things have to be the way they are/the way they are here and now/the way I’ve been told they are?—may be an important one. To open a door that has been kept closed is an important act.

Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is—more than any other kind of writing—subversive by nature. It has proved, over many centuries, a useful instrument of resistance to oppression.

Yet as Chesterton pointed out, fantasy stops short of nihilist violence, of destroying all the laws and burning all the boats. (Like Tolkien, Chesterton was an imaginative writer and a practicing Catholic, and thus perhaps particularly aware of tensions and boundaries.) Two and one make three. Two of the brothers fail the quest, the third carries it through. Action is met with reaction. Fate, Luck, Necessity are as inexorable in Middle-earth as in Colonus or South Dakota. The fantasy tale begins here and ends there (or back here), where the subtle and ineluctable obligations and responsibilities of narrative art have taken it. Down on the bedrock, things are as they have to be. It’s only everywhere above the bedrock that nothing has to be the way it is.

There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.”

Utopiyin, Utopiyang

April 2015

THESE ARE SOME thoughts about utopia and dystopia.

The old, crude Good Places were compensatory visions of controlling what you couldn’t control and having what you didn’t have here and now—an orderly, peaceful heaven; a paradise of hours; pie in the sky. The way to them was clear, but drastic. You died.

Thomas More’s secular and intellectual construct Utopia was still an expression of desire for something lacking here and now—rational human control of human life—but his Good Place was explicitly No Place. Only in the head. A blueprint without a building site.

Ever since, utopia has been located not in the afterlife but just off the map, across the ocean, over the mountains, in the future, on another planet, a livable yet unattainable elsewhere.

Every utopia since Utopia has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgment, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.

In the yang-yin symbol each half contains within it a portion of the other, signifying their complete interdependence and continual intermutability. The figure is static, but each half contains the seed of transformation. The symbol represents not a stasis but a process.

It may be useful to think of utopia in terms of this long-lived Chinese symbol, particularly if one is willing to forgo the usual masculinist assumption that yang is superior to yin, and instead consider the interdependence and intermutability of the two as the essential feature of the symbol.

Yang is male, bright, dry, hard, active, penetrating. Yin is female, dark, wet, easy, receptive, containing. Yang is control, yin acceptance. They are great and equal powers; neither can exist alone, and each is always in process of becoming the other.

Both utopia and dystopia are often an enclave of maximum control surrounded by a wilderness—as in Butler’s Erewhon, E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. Good citizens of utopia consider the wilderness dangerous, hostile, unlivable; to an adventurous or rebellious dystopian it represents change and freedom. In this I see examples of the intermutability of the yang and yin: the dark mysterious wilderness surrounding a bright, safe place, the Bad Places—which then become the Good Place, the bright, open future surrounding a dark, closed prison… Or vice versa.

In the last half century this pattern has been repeated perhaps to exhaustion, variations on the theme becoming more and more predictable, or merely arbitrary.

Notable exceptions to the pattern are Huxley’s Brave New World, a eudystopia in which the wilderness has been reduced to an enclave so completely dominated by the intensely controlled yang world-state that any hope of its offering freedom or change is illusory; and Orwell’s 1984, a pure dystopia in which the yin element has been totally eliminated by the yang, appearing only in the receptive obedience of the controlled masses and as manipulated delusions of wilderness and freedom.

Yang, the dominator, always seeks to deny its dependence on yin. Huxley and Orwell uncompromisingly present the outcome of successful denial. Through psychological and political control, these dystopias have achieved a nondynamic stasis that allows no change. The balance is immovable: one side up, the other down. Everything is yang forever.

Where is the yin dystopia? Is it perhaps in post-holocaust stories and horror fiction with its shambling herds of zombies, the increasingly popular visions of social breakdown, total loss of control—chaos and old night?

Yang perceives yin only as negative, inferior, bad, and yang has always been given the last word. But there is no last word.

At present we seem only to write dystopias. Perhaps in order to be able to write a utopia we need to think yinly. I tried to write one in Always Coming Home. Did I succeed?

Is a yin utopia a contradiction in terms, since all the familiar utopias rely on control to make them work, and yin does not control? Yet it is a great power. How does it work?

I can only guess. My guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth.

THE ANNALS OF PARD