Earlier this week the writer Ursula K. LeGuin died in Portland at age 88. There were obituaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and Scientific American. She was best known for her novels (particularly the Earthsea series), but also rewrote a book about writing in 2015 - Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story. Its first chapter starts with:
“THE SOUND OF THE LANGUAGE IS WHERE it all begins. The test
of a sentence is, Does it sound right? The basic elements of language are
physical: the noise words make, the sounds and silences that make the rhythms
marking their relationships. Both the meaning and the beauty of the writing
depend on these sounds and rhythms. This is just as true of prose as it is of
poetry, though the sound effects of prose are usually subtle and always
irregular.
Most children enjoy the sound of language for its own sake.
They wallow in repetitions and luscious word-sounds and the crunch and slither
of onomatopoeia; they fall in love with musical or impressive words and use
them in all the wrong places. Some writers keep this primal interest in and
love for the sounds of language. Others ‘outgrow’ their oral/aural sense of
what they’re reading or writing. That’s a dead loss. An awareness of what your
own writing sounds like is an essential skill for a writer. Fortunately it’s
quite easy to cultivate, to learn or reawaken.
A good writer, like a good reader, has a mind’s ear.”
Le Guin also wrote essays. Her most recent collection from
2017 is titled No Time to Spare (thinking about what matters). I read it
earlier this month. Much earlier I read her 1979 collection, The Language of
the Night (essays on fantasy and science fiction). It contains a 1973 essay
titled Dreams Must Explain Themselves about her well-known Earthsea trilogy of
young adult novels: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest
Shore. Her discussion of A Wizard of Earthsea mentions:
“Wizards are usually elderly or ageless Gandalfs, quite
rightly and archetypically. But what were they before they had white beards?
How did they learn what is obviously an erudite and dangerous art? Are there
colleges for young wizards? And so on.
….There are words, like rushwash tea, for which I can offer
no explanation. They simply drink rushwash tea there; that’s what it is called,
like lapsang soochong, or Lipton’s here. Rushwash is a Hardic word, of course.
If you press me, I will explain that it comes from the rushwash bush, which
grows both wild and cultivated everywhere south of Enlad, and bears a small
round leaf which when dried and steeped yields a pleasant brownish tea. I did
not know this before I wrote the foregoing sentence. Or did I know it and
simply never thought about it. What’s in a name? A lot, that’s what.
….I said that to know the true name is to know the thing,
for me, and for the wizards. This implies a good deal about the ‘meaning’ of
the trilogy, and about me. The trilogy is, in one aspect, about the artist. The
artist as magician. The Trickster. Prospero. That is the only truly allegorical
aspect it has of which I am conscious. If there are other allegories in it
please don’t tell me: I hate allegories. A is ‘really’ B, and a hawk is ‘really’
a handsaw – bah. Humbug. Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality
to it can ‘really’ be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before
breakfast.
Wizardry is
artistry. The trilogy is then, in this sense, about art, the creative experience,
the creative process. There is always this circularity in fantasy. Dreams must
explain themselves.”
Her best-known speech is the commencement address she gave at Mills College in 1983.
I think I first encountered Le Guin via the 1980 film made
for PBS from her 1971 novel, The Lathe of Heaven. You can watch it on YouTube.
The image was adapted from a 1939 Story Hour WPA poster at
the Library of Congress.
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