Happy 82, Ursula Le Guin

Occasionally, this blog will celebrate a birthday. It’s not something I do often, for fear of turning into a literary calendar. The birthday post is a tradition I carried over from Chaosbogey, my personal blog, where I wrote them to remind my friends that I love them. Here, they’re usually written upon the winds of posterity, to remember writers I worship. Today is the fortunate day I get to do both. Happy 82, Ursula Le Guin. Thank you for existing. One day I will have the courage to reread The Dispossessed. Till then, you’ve written my Favourite Novel of All Time. The Dispossessed is set on the planet of Annares. It is the story of Shevek, the anarchist inventor of a gadget called the ansible. For all its eccentric virtues, The Dispossessed is a cumbersome book. Le Guin builds her worlds like jigsaws, a hint here and a fact there, but never anything resembling a ‘full’ picture. The Dispossessed, however, bustles with information, and the shift can be disorienting for someone accustomed to her distinctive economy. This book caps the early Le Guin, and reads like it was composed by someone eager to explore every limit of her profession all at once. It’s an extremely geeky book, stuffed with ruminations about Class and Innovation and Ideology and Space-Time. It was, if you will, a journal of discovery — of the voyage a writer called Ursula took with a physicist called Shevek. [caption id=“attachment_113582” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“American novelist, Ursula Le Guin. Getty Images”]  [/caption] There are plenty of Le Guin stories that are objectively better than The Dispossessed, a rambling rant if there ever was one. Most fans would direct you to either Left Hand of Darkness or her Earthsea books. Devotees would point you towards The Birthday of the World and Always Coming Home. The chronologically inclined would venture into Planet of Exile; I’d recommend City of Illusions to someone starting to read her. Le Guin has always been a writer of sweeping vision, and her books bring together tropes from science fiction and fantasy alike. She was several books old when The Dispossessed was published, and her twin experiments — Earthsea and Ekumen — were well under way. For a broad classification, Earthsea is fantasy country. It runs on sorcery, and is populated by wizards and dragons. Ekumen is an interplanetary community interlinked by the ansible (think cosmic smart phone). Despite their genres, the two series are more alike than apart. They share an ethical framework and a moral fabric; most of all, they share a similar approach to history. In Ursula Le Guin’s worlds, the past and the future are two sides of the same coin. Both are, she wrote in one essay, “modes of perception rather than action, of awareness rather than progress.. The past is what you know, in front of you, under your nose.. The future is what you can’t see, unless you turn around and kind of snatch a glimpse”. As in Hindi, yesterday and tomorrow are one word; they transform only with context and implication. Ursula Le Guin’s work, like a lot of speculative fiction, is heavily influenced by language and etymology. It is a truism of civilisation that how a people talk reflects how they think and what they believe, and Le Guin explores the implications of this linguistic relativity in her books. In The Dispossessed, the Annaresti have invented a ‘socialist’ language, Pravic, which has no metonyms for concepts like profit and uses the same word to denote work and play. How, she asks her reader, can you think about what you cannot compare? Or even define? Le Guin’s fascination with words is as evident in her non fiction. She begins her review of Italo Calvino’s Italian Tales with a history of the word “fairy” — “fata” in Italian, from the root “that which is spoken”. Thus, she tells us, these tales relate how Fate may turn to Fairy by the magic of Fable. It is all that really needs to be said about Calvino’s classic; as Le Guin notes elsewhere, to describe the uses of a fable is like stating the meaning of a fish. I began birthday blogging with “ literary twins ”. Today’s writers come in triplets. The novelist Hal Duncan celebrates his 40th, while the poet Coleridge is likely hooking up with a chemist somewhere in hell. I finish this post with his lesson about “feet”, the syntax of poetry. In verse, a foot is a combination of syllables that allow the poet to create rhythm and continuity between lines. The most common is the ‘iamb’ — Ti-tum, like when you say es/cape — but there are dozens of variants, as Coleridge proves in the first part of “Metrical Feet”: Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot! yet ill able Ever to come up with Dactyl’s trisyllable. Iambics march from short to long. With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng. One syllable long, with one short at each side, Amphibrachys hastens with a stately stride — First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.