AN URSULINE, ULTRAFEMINIST FANTASY-DEFENDER

I don’t want to take a lot of shots at the late author’s ultrafeminism. I will note that it’s curiously more intense than most Second-Wave feminism, and often resembles the later waves, particularly the current one, in which male priorities and fantasies are ceaselessly attacked. “Is Gender Necessary?”  reads like a very current screed, excelled only by the rhetoric of the short-lived 1970s organization “Women Against Pornography.” And although LeGuin apparently hated sword-and-sorcery with a passion, space opera was at least her second favorite thing to hate.  In “A Citizen of Mondath” the author chronicles her early repugnance at the male-centered nature of most SF magazines:

If I glanced at a magazine, it still seemed to be all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery.

She also showcases her animadversions to the genre’s supposed penchant for “pointy breasted brainless young women” throughout LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT.  Nowhere in the collection does LeGuin entertain the notion that the genre might be reformed to become more woman-friendly, as arguably happened not only with later prose serials like THE EXPANSE but with movies like STAR WARS (which LeGuin reviled in a non-LOTN essay).

Most of LeGuin’s anti-male rhetoric is shallow, but “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” manages to dovetail her feminism with her defenses of the interlocked genres of fantasy and science fiction. Given that I’d been forced to defend the metaphenomenal genres more than once, I’m sure that in my initial reading of LOTN I enjoyed her attack on the tendency of Americans to validate only realistic works of literature, so I had to agree when she claimed that, “We tend, as a people, to look upon all works of the imagination either as suspect or as contemptible.” And I have to admire the concision of her rebuttal: “Fake realism is the escapist literature of our time.”

However, as I reread the way she tends to blame this tendency on “the men who run the country,” I believe that her defense is based in false premises. Often she seems to talking less about the actual tastes of actual persons, and more about some “Puritan work ethic” boogieman. It is also, it seems, a boogieman that infects only men with a lack of imaginative vigor, which leads to their disinterest not only in Tolkien but also in Tolstoy, as well as to their preference for “sterile” works like “bloody detective thrillers on the television” or best-seller fiction.

Although one might assume that American women would become just as influenced by something as pervasive as the “work ethic,” the ladies get a pass. LeGuin tells us that even women read material no less imaginatively impoverished, like “soap operas” and “nursy novels,” they simply haven’t been given the chance to nourish their imaginations, living as they do in a sort of “Femiinine Mystique” America.

The main problem of the “Dragons” essay is that LeGuin is entirely too dismissive of the appeal of verisimilitude in itself, whether it appears in a Tolstoy novel or in a “bloody detective thriller.” Throughout most of its history, American students were raised, as were students in many European cultures, to value naturalistic works of art above those dependent on “imagination.” I’m sure LeGuin would hold Tolstoy blameless insofar as his accomplishments provided support for the position of the “naturalism-first” crowd. I, however, consider WAR AND PEACE to be just as guilty of encouraging the marginalization of the metaphenomenal as any best-seller or “nursy novel.”

LeGuin’s antipathy for the commercial side of book-selling lies at the roots of her skewed rhetoric. She can’t conceive that the naturalistic form of artistic fiction might have a deleterious effect upon Americans’ ability to dream of dragons; it has to be the work of those evil fiction-factories and their soulless hacks. In truth, though, there’s no one to blame. As Northrop Frye wrote, all of literature aligns itself along a spectrum ranging from the purest “verisimilitude” to what Frye called “myth”—which, for him, included beings who could do anything, in contrast to mortal limitations. A critical viewpoint unable to recognize how much the reader of Harold Robbins has in common with a reader of Tolstoy and Zola remains, in the final analysis, no more sophisticated than that of an Edmund Wilson who rejects hobbits and dragons as a matter of course.

Elsewhere in "Dragons," LeGuin cites a definition of the imagination that seems to borrow from both Kant and Tolkien:

By imagination, then, I personally mean the free play of the mind, both intellectual and sensory. By "play" I mean recreation, re-creation, the recombination of what is known into what is new. By "free" I mean that the action is done without an immediate object of profit-- spontaneously.

Philosophically, I have no serious problem with this statement, but only with LeGuin's elitist application of the position. She immediately hedges her "sponteaneity" argument to claim that "the free play of an adult mind" can be something as sophisticated as Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE. Okay, but Tolstoy was a landed aristocrat; he had a lot of free time for his free play, and though he didn't need to write for a living, he certainly wanted his work to have some effect on society. To say that only the object of "profit" invalidates an author's intentions for his work strikes me as special pleading as defined thusly:

Applying standards, principles, and/or rules to other people or circumstances, while making oneself or certain circumstances exempt from the same critical criteria, without providing adequate justification.  Special pleading is often a result of strong emotional beliefs that interfere with reason.

In the process of LeGuin's project to defend imaginative art, she has chosen to blame Americans' supposed preference for realistic art on their seduction by Puritanism and the Protestant work-ethic. But the work-ethic came about in large part because America had few or no aristocrats; almost everyone had to work for a living. And thus a lot of people don't want to "work" for their entertainment as well as for their daily bread. If they reject both Tolstoy and Tolkien in favor of current bestsellers, it may just be that they have a taste for verisimilitude because they don't want to work too hard to be amused. I don't mind challenging such tastes. But I think LeGuin merely sought to create a new aristocracy of taste to replace the more plebeian version she opposed-- and that, for all her highflown rhetoric about imagination, she herself failed to imagine the position of her perceived opponents.