Radical Fictions: Le Guin and Russ
Over at matociquala's LJ a discussion is raging about a post on the the feminist sf blog. The post is about Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
To start with, I think people are misreading the feminist.sf post. It doesn't say that The Left Hand of Darkness is the most radical book ever and why aren't there more books with that impact.
It says will people please stop talking about The Left Hand of Darkness as the most radical book ever, because look at all these other unbelieveably [more] radical books...
And oh the relief to hear other people say this.
Even at 15 I recognised that the Left Hand of Darkness was based on lies.
Lie number one: a romance between a gender other and a man would look just like a heterosexual romance.
Lie number two: when people's genitals changed in kemmer they would of course behave like stereotyped early 1960s women.
Lie number three: any gender-fuck relationship that diverts from it's society's norms will inevitably end badly.
As a teen only very slowly becoming aware that I probably wasn't straight (ironically, an open and tolerant family can make it more difficult to figure this out), I knew that this book was somehow playing me false. It didn't help by the way that feminine qualities were consistently described in negative terms. I accept that the story is told from the point of view of a man, but I have always doubted that this was why.
In contrast, when I read The Female Man a year later, i felt like someone had punched me in the gut. To start with, for the first time I had a label-not a tomboy, but a Female Man. A woman who could walk the walk and talk the talk but seemed to be paying a price I hadn't quite figured out for being, in a lot of company, An Honorary Male. Second, Russ's disessction of collaborative behaviour is so on the nail that I was watching the way I walked and talked for a year. I still find her lessons invaluable for working out why certain interactions are odd: the unbelievably handsome male colleague who took a dislike to me on our first meeting for example when I hadn't even spoken with him. I realised later that I just hadn't reacted the way he is used to women reacting. I hadn't given him the right signals.
To go with all of this, and why I have always come down on the Russ/Le Guin side of the divide (and there is a divide), I've never got why people say "ah, but Le Guin is a really good story teller, and Russ is so didactic".
Le Guin is one of the greatest set designers in science fiction, but she is a bloody awful character writer. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Le Guin's work (see Foundation 53) I must have read those books ten or more times in eighteen months, and I can remember a handful of characters. When some people say she is cold, I think that in part is what they mean. For a writer who clearly (from her criticism) knows how character should work, she isn't actually very good at it. Even Jed in The Wizard of Earthsee is a piece of cardboard marked "angst".
[After the dissertation I was so put off by Le Guin I never returned to her work except when forced. In contrast, Heinlein, who I had also been writing about, became a firm favourite.]
Compare this to Russ. Anyone for adventures with Alyx? Miss P came very close to being called Jael (those little knives she possesses, but we didn't want to encourage her); I had a crush on Janet for years and my first real love looks a lot like Janet; the Abbess protecting her flock, or Maria in the Mystery of the Young Gentlemen; Irene and Zubadeyeh in The Two of Them. Each of them fierce and vibrant and bright and different.
As for story: Le Guin's stories are fine. They use all the conventional story patterns: what if we change the world; what if we go on a journey etc. etc., Russ is more like my other favourite writer, Diana Wynne Jones: what if the story is fucked? What if I refuse to go along with your storying of the world? Tiptree has this quality as well, so do writers like Edith Nesbit, Terry Pratchett and M. John Harrison, Samuel R. Delany and Steve Cockayne. As my inclusion of Pratchett indicates, it isn't even an attribute of serious or not. It's just a way of seeing the world "through the wavy glass of Bristolia" as I wrote somewhere else. But it doesn't mean that there isn't a story, it just means that you are going to have to work a hell of a lot harder. In Russ's The Two of Them, Irene falls out with her partner, Ernst, and Russ shows them making up. Then she says (and I paraphrase here), but that's not what happened. She shot him.
See? Still a story, just not the one that you expected.
One last annecdote: a few years back I was at Hollins, guesting at the children's lit programme. I gate crashed Chip Sullivan's class on The Wizard of Earthsea and Elfland to Poughkeepsie. To Chip's shock, many of the students (in their twenties) did not like Le Guin's work. They thought it didactic. He tried to defend her as passionate on the issues. They pointed out that many other people were passionate about issues, but it was LeGuin who insisted that people who didn't agree with her were Wrong.
What I think happens in the Le Guin/Russ (and others) discussion is that Le Guin resonates with people because she is radical in ways they are ready to accept, that fits their analysis of the world they experience. She also allows people to make exceptions; all men are like this, but this man/my man is different. Niceness mitigates oppression.
Russ on the other hand challenges even your radical analysis. What do you mean your man is different? Difference isn't enough. Niceness isn't enough. Niceness merely pads the cell. Only rage is enough.
And this is why reading Le Guin can be reaffirming, and reading Russ can be exhausting. Emotional roller coasters are exhausting.
One last comment: I don't loan out copies of The Female Man. I used to. When I asked for them back I'd be told, "I didn't really enjoy it but I was telling a friend about it and she asked if she could borrow it, I hope you don't mind...."
Now I just collect second hand copies and hand them out to anyone who asks.
Go little book.....
To start with, I think people are misreading the feminist.sf post. It doesn't say that The Left Hand of Darkness is the most radical book ever and why aren't there more books with that impact.
It says will people please stop talking about The Left Hand of Darkness as the most radical book ever, because look at all these other unbelieveably [more] radical books...
And oh the relief to hear other people say this.
Even at 15 I recognised that the Left Hand of Darkness was based on lies.
Lie number one: a romance between a gender other and a man would look just like a heterosexual romance.
Lie number two: when people's genitals changed in kemmer they would of course behave like stereotyped early 1960s women.
Lie number three: any gender-fuck relationship that diverts from it's society's norms will inevitably end badly.
As a teen only very slowly becoming aware that I probably wasn't straight (ironically, an open and tolerant family can make it more difficult to figure this out), I knew that this book was somehow playing me false. It didn't help by the way that feminine qualities were consistently described in negative terms. I accept that the story is told from the point of view of a man, but I have always doubted that this was why.
In contrast, when I read The Female Man a year later, i felt like someone had punched me in the gut. To start with, for the first time I had a label-not a tomboy, but a Female Man. A woman who could walk the walk and talk the talk but seemed to be paying a price I hadn't quite figured out for being, in a lot of company, An Honorary Male. Second, Russ's disessction of collaborative behaviour is so on the nail that I was watching the way I walked and talked for a year. I still find her lessons invaluable for working out why certain interactions are odd: the unbelievably handsome male colleague who took a dislike to me on our first meeting for example when I hadn't even spoken with him. I realised later that I just hadn't reacted the way he is used to women reacting. I hadn't given him the right signals.
To go with all of this, and why I have always come down on the Russ/Le Guin side of the divide (and there is a divide), I've never got why people say "ah, but Le Guin is a really good story teller, and Russ is so didactic".
Le Guin is one of the greatest set designers in science fiction, but she is a bloody awful character writer. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Le Guin's work (see Foundation 53) I must have read those books ten or more times in eighteen months, and I can remember a handful of characters. When some people say she is cold, I think that in part is what they mean. For a writer who clearly (from her criticism) knows how character should work, she isn't actually very good at it. Even Jed in The Wizard of Earthsee is a piece of cardboard marked "angst".
[After the dissertation I was so put off by Le Guin I never returned to her work except when forced. In contrast, Heinlein, who I had also been writing about, became a firm favourite.]
Compare this to Russ. Anyone for adventures with Alyx? Miss P came very close to being called Jael (those little knives she possesses, but we didn't want to encourage her); I had a crush on Janet for years and my first real love looks a lot like Janet; the Abbess protecting her flock, or Maria in the Mystery of the Young Gentlemen; Irene and Zubadeyeh in The Two of Them. Each of them fierce and vibrant and bright and different.
As for story: Le Guin's stories are fine. They use all the conventional story patterns: what if we change the world; what if we go on a journey etc. etc., Russ is more like my other favourite writer, Diana Wynne Jones: what if the story is fucked? What if I refuse to go along with your storying of the world? Tiptree has this quality as well, so do writers like Edith Nesbit, Terry Pratchett and M. John Harrison, Samuel R. Delany and Steve Cockayne. As my inclusion of Pratchett indicates, it isn't even an attribute of serious or not. It's just a way of seeing the world "through the wavy glass of Bristolia" as I wrote somewhere else. But it doesn't mean that there isn't a story, it just means that you are going to have to work a hell of a lot harder. In Russ's The Two of Them, Irene falls out with her partner, Ernst, and Russ shows them making up. Then she says (and I paraphrase here), but that's not what happened. She shot him.
See? Still a story, just not the one that you expected.
One last annecdote: a few years back I was at Hollins, guesting at the children's lit programme. I gate crashed Chip Sullivan's class on The Wizard of Earthsea and Elfland to Poughkeepsie. To Chip's shock, many of the students (in their twenties) did not like Le Guin's work. They thought it didactic. He tried to defend her as passionate on the issues. They pointed out that many other people were passionate about issues, but it was LeGuin who insisted that people who didn't agree with her were Wrong.
What I think happens in the Le Guin/Russ (and others) discussion is that Le Guin resonates with people because she is radical in ways they are ready to accept, that fits their analysis of the world they experience. She also allows people to make exceptions; all men are like this, but this man/my man is different. Niceness mitigates oppression.
Russ on the other hand challenges even your radical analysis. What do you mean your man is different? Difference isn't enough. Niceness isn't enough. Niceness merely pads the cell. Only rage is enough.
And this is why reading Le Guin can be reaffirming, and reading Russ can be exhausting. Emotional roller coasters are exhausting.
One last comment: I don't loan out copies of The Female Man. I used to. When I asked for them back I'd be told, "I didn't really enjoy it but I was telling a friend about it and she asked if she could borrow it, I hope you don't mind...."
Now I just collect second hand copies and hand them out to anyone who asks.
Go little book.....