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I don't think I've ever gotten into as many literary arguments on any topic as I have when discussing Ursula le Guin. Trying to get people who read Harry Potter to read Earthsea has been a challenge, despite the fact that Harry Potter (which I won't criticise as I haven't read them) seems to borrow so heavily from Earthsea - an economically disadvantaged young orphaned boy discovers he has magical aptitude and has his life change dramatically after attending Wizard School(TM), then saves the world. I think the Earthsea novels aren't short, they are succinct. Le Guin wrote them like the Hemingway of fantasy, using simple, terse, and at times even aphoristic sentences. If any of you haven't had the misfortune of watching the unbearable live action screen adaptation, and you value your faith in humankind, save yourself the pain. Not only are the protagonists now all white, there is actually a token black guy on the island - a remote fishing/farming island with a tiny population, with 1 black person living there somehow. Not that the choice to make the main characters of Earthsea various coloured tones instead of white was a deliberate political statement; le Guin herself commented that every fantasy series just seems to have white characters by default. She felt that of the ranges of colours people can be, she could just choose whichever she wanted, and she wanted hers to be a range from copper to brown to black to whatever she felt like. In a way, the ability to simply choose her characters' skin colours without an intentional political message attached to it is a powerful message on its own: a kind of post-racial understanding that colour can be a mere background detail like descriptions of foliage and sunsets, rather than a plot point to which some implicit importance and conflict is attached. In the foreword she wrote for my edition of The Dispossessed (I think, it may have been Left Hand of Darkness) she discussed her concept of integrity in writing, which has persisted with me since. This idea is that integrity consists in using only elements which belong, and are necessary. Use the words that tell the story you want to tell; the language used must be necessary, but sufficient. It aligns with Chekov's Gun, or Einstein's concise statement of Occam's razor - every explanation should be as simple as possible but no simpler. This foreword, plus maybe Politics and the English Language, should be required reading before anyone is allowed to commit pen to paper. I had an English teacher in elementary school who told an un-listening classroom that poetry was the most succinct form of human expression through language, which I took to mean was because layers of meaning could be encoded almost like a puzzle; that the range of interpretation and emotion conveyed in so few words, although sometimes encrypted like a puzzle, was almost a form of data compression. Prose can aspire to the same brevity and impact. I think this thread is going to make me visit amazon next, there's some books I need to buy.
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Oct 29, 2013 19:40
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 09:09 |
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