The Language of the Night, page 1
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INTRODUCTION TO THE LANGUAGE OF THE NIGHT
by Ken Liu
(2024)
More than any other value, Ursula K. Le Guin stands for liberty.
In her 1977 introduction to The Word for World Is Forest (which is collected in this volume), Le Guin asks the question: Why do artists bother creating art at all? Like all important questions, it’s as relevant today as it was in 1977, in 1907, and in 907 BCE.
In her usual mordant style, Le Guin begins by noting Freud’s theory, which she considers both “funny” and “comforting,” that artists are solely motivated by the desire for “honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women.” (Like modern AI chatbots, Freud could always be counted on to confidently opine on any topic about which he knew nothing.) Le Guin then turns to someone with rather more authority to speak on the subject, Emily Brontë:
Riches I hold in light esteem
And Love I laugh to scorn
And lust of Fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn—
And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is—“Leave the heart that now I bear
And give me liberty.”
I could stop right here. Brontë’s poem serves as the perfect introduction to this collection of essays (and for that matter, to the entirety of Le Guin’s body of work as critic, poet, novelist, translator, short story writer, and more). You are perfectly justified to skip over the rest of my intro and get to Le Guin’s essays if you wish.
Still here?
There is one good reason to read an introduction to a monumental classic—a book of criticism so influential that it has become a work of art itself, which is to converse with a fellow reader who also admires that classic. In the Daoist framework to which Le Guin subscribed, our understanding grows ever deeper when it is in motion, like a living river, and that requires speaking as well as listening, leading to discourse, communion, gathering (referring to the Indo-European root of “logos”).
When reading, we don’t converse only with the writer, but also with our fellow readers. As much as we in the West have emphasized the sovereignty of the individual, the good life isn’t lived alone, but in flowing conversation—and Le Guin’s conception of liberty is, in particular, not solitary, static, or stable, but communitarian, dynamic, anarchic.
You can see some of this in the way Le Guin has, over the years, conversed with herself in the footnotes to these essays upon the publication of new editions. The Language of the Night is her first collection of criticism, and some of the essays were written decades ago. Over the years, some of the ideas she relied on proved to be false or exaggerated (e.g., the work on Senoi Dream Theory), she changed her mind on a number of issues (e.g., using or refusing to use certain pronouns, and the significance thereof), and some of the things she once said she later preferred to say differently. And so she corrects herself, pushes herself, forgives herself—this is what a living understanding looks like, instead of dead dogma. We should all be so willing to collaborate with our old selves throughout our life journey.
For Le Guin, “the pursuit of art… by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty.”I However, this liberty is not mere license to do whatever seizes one’s fancy: frame a can of soup, push a button on Poem-O-Matic, photocopy a photocopy, and scribble your initial on it. Indeed, the sort of pseudo-liberty defined by the “almost limitless freedom of form available to the modern artist” is, for Le Guin, a “trivialization of art.”II And trivialization can be even worse than outright oppression. (Likewise trivial, I would argue, is the also almost limitless freedom of forms of consumption for the modern audience.) The kind of emphasis on “self-expression” that leads to “cover[ing] a cliff with six acres of plastic film” presumes and accepts deep entanglement with the mechanisms of capitalism; requires riches, fame, power, status (if not honor), and maybe even love of a sort; but is ultimately devoid of moral significance. However, when “art is taken seriously by its creators or consumers, that total permissiveness disappears, and the possibility of the truly revolutionary reappears.”III
Le Guin’s emphasis on liberty, serious liberty, demands much of the artist as well as the audience. Throughout her life, she never stopped pushing for the audience to be more discriminating, to not settle for mere recycled “adventures,” to push fantasy and science fiction—long dismissed as puerile make-believe by outsiders and often defiantly defended as such by fans—to fulfill their true potential. Le Guin has no patience or kind words for cowardly audiences who refuse to take responsibility for tolerating bad art. “Within the SF ghetto, many people don’t want their books, or their favorite writers’ books, judged as literature. They want junk, and they bitterly resent aesthetic judgment of it.”IV Similarly, she pushed herself and her fellow artists to work harder, to explore and go beyond the known boundaries, to always do (not merely try) their best. “In art, the best is the standard.”V For an artist, “there are just two ways to go: to push toward the limit of your capacity, or to sit back and emit garbage.”VI She turned Sturgeon’s law, which states that 95 percent of anything is trash, from an ironic acceptance of mediocrity into a rallying cry for renewed artistic commitment: “The Quest for Perfection fails at least 95 percent of the time, but the Search for Garbage never fails.”VII
For Le Guin, aesthetics is ethics. In order for art to be free, it must be moral, a constant revolution.
This insistence on a moral imperative for art pits Le Guin against the dominant ideology of our Western modernity: the sacrosanct “will” of the market. Under this view, the artist is a producer no different from a baker of cakes or digger of ditches, and the audience is no different than any other kind of consumer, free to vote with their money for what gives them the most pleasure. Art—now renamed “Entertainment”—is justified by the degree to which it adds to the GDP. As Le Guin puts it, “[O]ur businessman might allow himself to read a bestseller now and then: not because it is a good book, but because it is a bestseller—it is a success, it has made money.”VIII Since everyone is acting in the most rational manner in this little drama, revealing their entertainment preferences with their dollars, how can the market not be free? Isn’t this the very definition of liberty?
Well, no. When artists depend on the whims of the market for their next meal, for that room of one’s own, for self-respect, Le Guin astutely observes that they are also subjected to a different kind of censorship. Not the overt kind practiced in totalitarian societies where disobedience is met with imprisonment or death; not the kind of book-banning and library-cleansing led by petty demagogues backed by insecure mobs wishing to exert power over marginalized groups; not even the sort of collective censure that has been pejoratively termed “identity politics” or “cancel culture”; but censorship by “the idols of the marketplace:… a form of censorship [that] is unusually fluid and changeable; one should never feel sure one has defined it. Suppressions occur before one is aware of them; they occur behind one’s eyes.”IX
This form of censorship is particularly dangerous to artists in a democracy because it’s invisible and never talked about. It feels simply like the inevitable way things work out. Le Guin speaks of artists like Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin, who risked everything in his ceaseless pursuit of liberty and who ultimately succeeded in escaping the Soviet censors even if his novel We, which Le Guin considered the best single work of science fiction yet written, could not be published in his homeland. His life was a tragedy. In contrast, Le Guin also writes of another artist, unnamed, in our land of the free, who put the great novel that he dreamed of writing on hold because he needed to eat; he wanted to have money; he wanted to be famous—or at least he believed he wanted those things. He wrote books like Deep Armpit and scripts for Hollywood, wrote “for the market,” and then he died, without having published his greatest novel in his homeland, because he never wrote it. His life was a farce. “He accepted, unquestioning, the values of his society. And the price of unquestioning acceptance is silence.”X
When success in art is defined as success in the market, the pursuit of liberty is corrupted by the pursuit of Will this sell? The relentless pressure to be commoditized—rather comically reframed as the drive to be “professional”—pervades every aspect of the contemporary practice of art. Since writers are paid by the word, we boast to each other of our “productivity,” evidenced by the number of words we write each day, as though we are miners digging for ore. We envy those who have gotten big advances or sold a million copies, as though these arbitrary indicia of commerce confer some incontrovertible validation of artistic worth. If movies make more money than books and are consumed by more people, then it necessarily follows that movies are superior as art, and if your work hasn’t been elevated by a screen adaptation, you must be a failure. I have seen writers speak with pride of the “business” of writing as though it is of the same importance or even more important than writing itself. By submitting to the judgment of the market, we debase ourselves into
Genuine newness, genuine originality, is suspect. Unless it’s something familiar rewarmed, or something experimental in form but clearly trivial or cynical in content, it is unsafe. And it must be safe. It mustn’t hurt the consumers. It mustn’t change the consumers. Shock them, épater le bourgeois, certainly, that’s been done for a hundred and fifty years now, that’s the oldest game going. Shock them, jolt them, titillate them, make them writhe and squeal—but do not make them think. If they think, they may not come back to buy the next can of soup.XI
I would add to this that the audience has been taught to not expect much from art. If we say that we want more than giant alien robots shooting lasers at villainous prehistoric sharks while the heroes—all beautiful, all young, all so rich, famous, and powerful—reassure us that the answer to everything is Love, Recycling, and Violence (because it’s the American Way), we’re laughed at for daring to expect Hollywood to be better than it is. Why should we hold such low expectations? Is it not just an excuse for our continuing mediocrity as artists and as an audience? Shame on us.
“To sell” has never been the purpose of art, no more than a price tag has ever been of any use in ascertaining the value of something. More than any other modern critic, Le Guin articulates with conviction and clarity the moral imperative of art as fantasy, as the pursuit of liberty. Drawing on Tolkien, Le Guin affirms fantasy as an “escape” from the oppressive structures of the so-called “Real World”:
Yes, he said, fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.XII
In this act of defiant escape—for the artist and the audience—the Real World is revealed to consist of nothing more than our own mental constructs, walls and shackles fashioned out of anti-imagination (what is money but a collective hallucination, a lie repeated so often it begins to sound like truth?).
(Not coincidentally, fantasy’s power to break us free from the shackles of oppressive reality also demolishes the supposed incompatibility between Art [intentionally capitalized] and “fun.” Those fans who react with defensive rage to Le Guin’s admonishment that they’re tolerating bad science fiction and bad art call her elitist and claim that she wants to drive “fun” out of their beloved genre. But to qualify as an escape, the prisoners must get to somewhere better than their prison, somewhere more desirable, more true, more fun. “[W]e’re escaping a world that consists of Newsweek, Pravda, and the Stock Market Report, and asserting the existence of a primary, vivid world, an intenser reality where joy, tragedy, and morality exist.”XIII The purported dichotomy between “fun” and “Art” is nonsense. “To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, is neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.”XIV)
How can artists effectuate an entertaining and moral escape, an escape worthy of being called Art? Answers to this question form the backbone of every essay in this volume. An artist who chooses to work in the ancient empire of fantasy, and more specifically science fiction, which is that empire’s newest province, full of untamed metaphors and wild dreams uniquely suited to our cyborg present and posthuman futures, must go beyond the phony, trivial escapes of SF’s pulp past (the “Golden Age” of square-jawed starship captains saving honey-tressed damsels from little green barbarian aliens with slanted eyes, the spirit of which age lives on in our blockbuster films that require us to turn off our brains); must go beyond the equally false (but confident and simple, and therefore attractive) escapes offered by “ideologies,” which Le Guin dismisses as “the reactionary, easy-answer schools of SF, the technocrats, scientologists, ‘libertarians,’ and so on,… [as well as] the chic nihilism affected by many talented American and English writers of my generation”;XV and embrace, instead, the only escape that is mythic, eternal, and real: the journey inside our collective unconscious.
The great fantasies, myths, and tales are indeed like dreams: they speak from the unconscious to the unconscious, in the language of the unconscious—symbol and archetype. Though they use words, they work the way music does: they short-circuit verbal reasoning, and go straight to the thoughts that lie too deep to utter.XVI
This is the language of the night. To speak it requires the artist to go on a harrowing journey toward the interior, where the wordless dreams and voiceless music that have been with us since the caves of Lascaux, since Kakadu and Maros-Pangkep, still reign supreme; where our shared evolutionary history allows us to understand one another without speech; where we step into the dream time of the Athsheans in The Word for World Is Forest; where we recognize that there is one collective Jungian Self shared by all humanity; where we immerse ourselves in the language beneath the language, and the soul finds no partition between imago and ego.
“Human beings all look roughly alike; they also think and feel alike. And they are all part of the universe.”XVII This is the truth to be rediscovered each time we journey inside, the revelation that propels us out of our rational solitude and into communion with all in the time before time, “where we all meet… the source of true community; of felt religion; of art, grace, spontaneity, and love.”XVIII
As Le Guin notes, this “sounds mystical, and it is, but it’s also exact and practical.”XIX This is the source of the power of art. Imprisoned in our skulls, isolated in our quirky cells of semi-rationality, how can any single mind, no matter how capacious, discern a true and beautiful escape route applicable to any other mind? The answer is obvious: we share that boundless interior; there is only one Self. Artists explore that vast terra incognita of our shared inner world, and then try, as Laozi and Zhuangzi both note, to paint that which cannot be caught with pigments, to sing that which cannot be confined by words, to dance down the path—the Dao, the escape hatch—that cannot be walked. “The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”XX
Those who would try to do this, the artists, essentially, must have the courage as well as the imagination to seek answers to the hardest questions—about justice, love, mercy, faith, pain, evil, and so on. The answers require poetry.
[I]f you want to enter the House of Poetry, you have to enter it in the flesh, the solid, imperfect, unwieldy body, which has corns and colds and greeds and passions, the body that casts a shadow… [I]f the artist tries to ignore evil, he will never enter into the House of Light.XXI
There it is. The problem of evil. Every attempt at progress leaves behind a shadow. Even in The Word for World Is Forest, where Le Guin’s anger at the American war in Vietnam causes her to come close to writing a moralizing story instead of a moral story (“I knew, because of the compulsive quality of the composition, that it was likely to become a preachment, and I struggled against this”XXII), she manages to recognize the evil within every noble heart, the shadow cast by every act of resistance, the death that darkens the pursuit of liberty. The truth is complicated, paradoxical, dialectical, and slips from too firm a grasp—just like the yin-yang fish.
Compared to the deep answers, those myths and symbols of fantasy, the answers from ideologues are laughably shallow. This is because ideologies, by their nature, refuse to recognize the existence of shadows, of the evil within themselves. At most they come up with some allegory but no myth, which requires facing one’s own darkness. The “easy-answer schools” that Le Guin dismisses dare not go inward; they’ll never be inside the House of Poetry. (“I am a petty-bourgeois anarchist, and an internal emigrée,” says Le Guin, contemptuous of ideological labels. Elsewhere, she calls herself “an unconsistent Taoist and a consistent un-Christian,”XXIII playfully but also seriously. I love these social media–ready bios.)
