The Language of the Night, page 15
Planet of Exile was written in 1963–64, before the reawakening of feminism from its thirty-year paralysis. The book exhibits my early, “natural” (i.e., happily acculturated), unawakened, un-consciousness-raised way of handling male and female characters. At that time, I could say with a perfectly clear conscience, indeed with self-congratulation, that I simply didn’t care whether my characters were male or female, so long as they were human. Why on earth should a woman have to write only about women? I was unselfconscious, without sense of obligation: therefore self-confident, unexperimental, contentedly conventional.
The story starts with Rolery, but presently the point of view shifts off to Jakob and to Wold, and then back to Rolery, and off again: it’s an alternating-viewpoints story. The men are more overtly active, and far more articulate. Rolery, a young and inexperienced woman of a rigidly traditional, male-supremacist culture, does not fight, or initiate sexual encounters, or become a leader of society, or assume any other role which, in her culture or ours of 1964, would be labeled “male.” She is, however, a rebel, both socially and sexually. Although her behavior is not aggressive, her desire for freedom drives her to break right out of her culture-mold: she changes herself entirely by allying herself with an alien self. She chooses the Other. This small personal rebellion, coming at a crucial time, initiates events which lead to the complete changing and remaking of two cultures and societies.
Jakob is the hero, active, articulate, rushing about fighting bravely and governing busily; but the central mover of the events of the book, the one who chooses, is, in fact, Rolery. Taoism got to me earlier than modern feminism did. Where some see only a dominant Hero and a passive Little Woman, I saw, and still see, the essential wastefulness and futility of aggression and the profound effectiveness of wu wei, “action through stillness.”
All very well; the fact remains that in this book, as in most of my other novels, the men do most of the acting, in both senses of the word, and thus tend to occupy the center of the stage. I “didn’t care” whether my protagonist was male or female; well, that carefreeness is culpably careless. The men take over.
Why does one let them? Well, it’s ever so much easier to write about men doing things, because most books about people doing things are about men, and that is one’s literary tradition… and because, as a woman, one probably has not done awfully much in the way of fighting, raping, governing, etc., but has observed that men do these things… and because, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, English prose is unsuited to the description of feminine being and doing, unless one to some extent remakes it from scratch. It is hard to break from tradition; hard to invent; hard to remake one’s mother tongue. One drifts along and takes the easy way. Nothing can rouse one to go against the stream, to choose the hard way, but a profoundly stirred, and probably an angry, conscience.
But the conscience must be angry. If it tries to reason itself into anger it produces only guilt, which chokes the springs of creation at their source.
I am often very angry, as a woman. My feminist anger is an element in, a part of, the rage and fear that possess me when I face what we are all doing to each other, to the earth, and to the hope of liberty and life. I still “don’t care” whether people are male or female, when they are all of us and all of our children. One soul unjustly imprisoned, am I to ask which sex it is? A child starving, am I to ask which sex it is?
The answer of some radical feminists is yes. Granted the premise that the root of all injustice, exploitation, and blind aggression is sexual injustice, this position is sound. I cannot accept the premise; therefore I cannot act upon it. If I forced myself to—and my form of action is writing—I would write dishonestly and badly. Am I to sacrifice the ideal of truth and beauty in order to make an ideological point?
Again, the radical feminist’s answer may be yes. Though that answer is sometimes identical with the voice of the Censor, speaking merely for fanatic or authoritarian bigotry, it may not be: it may speak in the service of the ideal itself. To build, one must tear down the old. The generation that has to do the tearing down has all the pain of destruction and little of the joy of creation. The courage that accepts that task and all the ingratitude and obloquy that go with it is beyond praise.
But it can’t be forced or faked. If it is forced it leads to mere spitefulness and self-destructiveness; if it is faked it leads to Feminist Chic, the successor to Radical Chic. It’s one thing to sacrifice fulfillment in the service of an ideal; it’s another to suppress clear thinking and honest feeling in the service of an ideology. An ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling.
Feminist ideology has been immensely valuable to me in this respect. It has forced me and every thinking woman of this generation to know ourselves better: to separate, often very painfully, what we really think and believe from all the easy “truths” and “facts” we were (subliminally) taught about being male, being female, sex roles, female physiology and psychology, sexual responsibility, etc., etc. All too often we have found that we had no opinion or belief of our own, but had simply incorporated the dogmas of our society; and so we must discover, invent, make our own truths, our values, ourselves.
This remaking of the womanself is a release and relief to those who want and need group support, or whose womanhood has been systematically reviled, degraded, exploited in childhood, marriage, and work. To others like myself, to whom the peer group is no home and who have not been alienated from their own being-as-woman, this job of self-examination and self-birth does not come easy. “I like women; I like myself; why mess it all up?”—“I don’t care if they’re men or women”—“Why on earth should a woman have to write about only women?” All the questions are valid; none has an easy answer; but they must, now, be asked and answered. A political activist can take her answers from the current ideology of her movement, but an artist has got to dig those answers out of herself, and keep on digging until she knows she has got as close as she can possibly get to the truth.
I keep digging. I use the tools of feminism, and try to figure out what makes me work and how I work, so that I will no longer work in ignorance or irresponsibly. It’s not a brief or easy business; one is groping down in the dark of the mind and body, a long, long way from Schenectady. How little we really know about ourselves, woman or man!
One thing I seem to have dug up is this: the “person” I tend to write about is often not exactly, or not totally, either a man or a woman. On the superficial level, this means there is little sexual stereotyping—the men aren’t lustful and the women aren’t gorgeous—and the sex itself is seen as a relationship rather than an act. Sex serves mainly to define gender, and the gender of the person is not exhausted, or even very nearly approached, by the label “man” or “woman.” Indeed both sex and gender seem to be used mainly to define the meaning of “person,” or of “self.” Once, as I began to be awakened, I closed the relationship into one person, an androgyne. But more often it appears conventionally and overtly, as a couple. Both in one: or two making a whole. Yin does not occur without yang, nor yang without yin. Once I was asked what I thought the central, constant theme of my work was, and I said spontaneously, “Marriage.”
I haven’t yet written a book worthy of that tremendous (and staggeringly unfashionable) theme. I haven’t even figured out yet what I meant. But rereading this early, easygoing adventure story, I think the theme is there—not clear, not strong, but being striven toward. “I learn by going where I have to go.”
INTRODUCTION TO CITY OF ILLUSIONS
(1978)
Once upon a time I set out to write a story about a man with two different minds in his head, to be called The Two-Minded Man. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Always the book one imagines and the book one writes are different things. The one exists objectively, a scribbled manuscript or so many thousand printed copies. The other exists subjectively. It is the other’s first cause and final cause. Toward it the written book, during its writing, continually strives, like the image in a mirror approaching the person moving toward it. But they do not merge. Only in poetry, which breaks all barriers, do the two ever meet, each becoming the other.
When I reread a work of my own I have always before my mind’s eye the book I imagined before I wrote this one. And that book is the better one. All the strengths and beauties of this one are only shadows and reflections of the power, the splendor, I saw and could not keep.
When the discrepancy is particularly huge, it is comforting to think Platonically that that subjective or visionary book is itself a mere shadow of the ideal Book, which nobody can ever get to.
But meanwhile, the first publisher went and called it City of Illusions, a title which I sometimes fail to recognize at all, though I don’t think I’ve yet got to the point where I ask who wrote it.
* * *
This book has villain trouble. It’s not the only one, in SF or out of it.
The modern literary cliché is: bad people are interesting, good people are dull. This isn’t true even if you accept the sentimental definition of evil upon which it’s based; good people, like good cooking, good music, good carpentry, etc., whether judged ethically or aesthetically, tend to be more interesting, varied, complex, and surprising than bad people, bad cooking, etc. The lovable rogue, the romantic criminal, the revolutionary Satan are essentially literary creations, not met with in daily life. They are embodiments of desire, types of the soul; thus their vitality is immense and lasting; but they are better suited to poetry and drama than to the novel. People in novels, like those in daily life, tend to be all more or less stupid, meddling, incompetent, and greedy, doing evil without exactly intending to; among them the full-blown Villain seems improbable (just as he does in daily life). It takes a very great novelist to write a character that is both truly and convincingly evil, such as Dickens’s Uriah Heep, or, more subtly, Steerforth. Real villains are rare; and they never, I believe, occur in flocks. Herds of Bad Guys are the death of a novel. Whether they’re labeled politically, racially, sexually, by creed, species, or whatever, they just don’t work. The Shing are the least convincing lot of people I ever wrote. It came of trying to obey my elder daughter’s orders. Elisabeth at eight came and said, “I thought of some people named Shing, you ought to write a story about them.” “What are they like?” I asked, and she said, with a divine smile and shining eyes, “They’re bad.”—Well, I fluffed it. A troop of little Hitlers from Outer Space; the guys in the black hats. I should have made Elisabeth tell me how to do it. She could have, too. Eight-year-olds know what bad is. Grown-ups get confused.
* * *
Every novel gives you a chance to do certain things you could not do without it; this is true for the writer as for the reader. Gratitude seems the only fit response. Some things I am grateful to this book for:
The chance to invent the patterning frame (I wish I had one).
The chance to use my own “translation” (collation-ripoff) of the Tao Te Ching.
The chance to imagine my country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our species as it was five hundred years ago; the vastness of this land, the empty beauty of it; here and there (random, the pattern broken) a little settlement of human beings; a buried supermarket or a ruined freeway made mysterious and pathetic as all things are by age. The sense of time, but more than that the sense of space, extent, the wideness of the continent. The wideness, the wilderness. Prairie, forest; undergrowth, bushes, grass, weeds; the wilderness. We talk patronizingly now of “saving the wilderness” for “recreational purposes,” but the wilderness has no purpose and can neither be destroyed nor saved. Where we tame the prairie, the used-car lots and the slums arise, terrible, crowded, empty. The wilderness is disorder. The wilderness is the earth itself, and the dust between the stars, from which new earths are made.
The chance to play with forests. The forest of the mind. Forests one within another.
The chance to speak of civilization not as a negative force—restraint, constraint, repression, authority—but as an opportunity lost, an ideal of truth. The City as goal and dream. The interdependence of order and honesty. No word or moment or way of being is more or less “real” than any other, and all is “natural”; what varies is vividness and accuracy of perception, clarity, and honesty of speech. The measure of a civilization may be the individual’s ability to speak the truth.
Thus, the chance to remark that programmed pigs may talk ethics but not truth.
The chance to take another journey. Most of my stories are excuses for a journey. (We shall henceforth respectfully refer to this as the Quest Theme.) I never did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B—or, more often, from A to A—by the most difficult and circuitous route.
The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it.
The chance to build a city across the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.
The chance to argue inconclusively with the slogan “reverence for life,” which by leaving out too much lets the lie get in and eat the apple rotten.
The chance to give Rolery and Jakob Agat a descendant.
The chance to begin and end a book with darkness, like a dream.
INTRODUCTION TO THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST
(1977)
ON WHAT THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH
There is nothing in all Freud’s writing that I like better than his assertion that artists’ work is motivated by the desire “to achieve honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women.” It is such a comforting, such a complete statement; it explains everything about the artist. There have been artists who agreed with it; Ernest Hemingway, for instance; at least, he said he wrote for money, and since he was an honored, powerful, rich, famous artist beloved by women, he ought to know.
There is another statement about the artist’s desire that is, to me, less obscure; the first two stanzas of it read,
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.”
Emily Brontë wrote those lines when she was twenty-two. She was a young and inexperienced woman, not honored, not rich, not powerful, not famous, and you see that she was positively rude about love (“of women” or otherwise). I believe, however, that she was rather better qualified than Freud to talk about what motivates the artist. He had a theory. But she had authority.
It may well be useless, if not pernicious, to seek a single motive for a pursuit so complex, long-pursued, and various as art; I imagine that Brontë got as close to it as anyone needs to get, with her word “liberty.”
The pursuit of art, then, by artist or audience, is the pursuit of liberty. If you accept that, you see at once why truly serious people reject and mistrust the arts, labeling them as “escapism.” The captured soldier tunneling out of prison, the runaway slave, and Solzhenitsyn in exile are escapists. Aren’t they? The definition also helps explain why all healthy children can sing, dance, paint, and play with words; why art is an increasingly important element in psychotherapy; why Winston Churchill painted, why mothers sing cradle-songs, and what is wrong with Plato’s Republic. It really is a much more useful statement than Freud’s, though nowhere near as funny.
I am not sure what Freud meant by “power,” in this context. Perhaps significantly, Brontë does not mention power. Shelley does, indirectly: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This is perhaps not too far from what Freud had in mind, for I doubt he was thinking of artists’ immediate and joyous power over their material—the shaping hand, the dancer’s leap, the novelist’s power of life and death over characters; it is more probable that he meant the power of the idea to influence other people.
The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty. The reason Brontë does not mention it is probably that it was never even a temptation to her, as it was to her sister Charlotte. Emily did not give a damn about other people’s morals. But many artists, particularly artists of the word, whose ideas must actually be spoken in their work, succumb to the temptation. They begin to see that they can do good to other people. They forget about liberty, then, and instead of legislating in divine arrogance, like God or Shelley, they begin to preach.
In this tale, The Word for World Is Forest, which began as a pure pursuit of freedom and the dream, I succumbed, in part, to the lure of the pulpit. It is a very strong lure to a science fiction writer, who deals more directly than most novelists with ideas, whose metaphors are shaped by or embody ideas, and who therefore is always in danger of inextricably confusing ideas with opinions.
I wrote The Little Green Men (its first editor, Harlan Ellison, retitled it, with my rather morose permission) in the winter of 1968, during a year’s stay in London. All through the sixties, in my home city in the States, I had been helping organize and participating in nonviolent demonstrations, first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Vietnam. I don’t know how many times I walked down Alder Street in the rain, feeling useless, foolish, and obstinate, along with ten or twenty or a hundred other foolish and obstinate souls. There was always somebody taking pictures of us—not the press—odd-looking people with cheap cameras: John Birchers? FBI? CIA? Crackpots? No telling. I used to grin at them, or stick out my tongue. One of my fiercer friends brought a camera once and took pictures of the picture-takers. Anyhow, there was a peace movement, and I was in it, and so had a channel of action and expression for my ethical and political opinions totally separate from my writing.
