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DerynifanK

March 17, 2024, 03:48:44 PM
Happy St Patrick's Day. Enjoy the one day of the year when the whole world is Irish.

Think Ursula LeGuin ever regretted her short-sighted bashing of KK 42 years ago?

Started by macsorcery, May 26, 2015, 01:28:28 PM

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macsorcery

referencing this article: From Elfland to Poughkeepsie

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzA5KaXxLuv6YjI2M2M1ZTMtOTYwZS00MjNiLTgzNWUtMGUyYWZmOTJkOTUy/edit?authkey=CIfm6_MP&ddrp=1&pli=1&hl=en

KK has defintely proven (and been copied enough to prove it) that "more political intrigue, less sorcery & unicorns" can make for a truly wonderous fantasy environment. If this has been discussed before, I apologize. I did a search and didn't see any mention of it. I read and became KK fan after the release of Saint Camber and I have always felt she was neglected when giving nods to fantasy pioneers (female or male). Even now, this article kind of sets me off, though it was early in KK's career..
Holder of Codex #38 - I live in The Land, Gwynedd, and Aldur's Vale.

Aerlys

Just one of many who have wrongly predicted the failure of people who eventually became famous.

"Loss and possession, death and life are one, There falls no shadow where there shines no sun."

Hilaire Belloc

Evie

I don't think I've read this actual article, although someone else here recently posted another article which referenced this one, so it's good to see the original article that was referenced, even if I vehemently disagree with it.  :)
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!

Evie

Just read a little bit further in this article.  So sad to think that Alaric will never be a hero....  *grinning, ducking, and running very, very fast, all the while wondering if LeGuin has any idea just how many Alaric fanbabes there are out there!*
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!

revanne

Quote from: Evie on May 26, 2015, 02:38:07 PM
Just read a little bit further in this article.  So sad to think that Alaric will never be a hero....  *grinning, ducking, and running very, very fast, all the while wondering if LeGuin has any idea just how many Alaric fanbabes there are out there!*

Well we know he's not the real hero of course ;)

I think LeGuin is profoundly mistaken in her analysis in that it is the overlap between "elfland" and reality which makes fantasy so compelling. So in LOTR it is not Aragorn who is the true hero but Frodo, or even according to one of Tolkein's letters, Sam Gamgee.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
(Psalm 46 v1)

Shiral

I keep re-reading the Deryni books....but not Ursula LeGuin's books. So at very least, Ursula LeGuin and I are hardly on the same wave length.   :) I don't bear Ms. LeGuin any ill-will, but I do think she misjudged the staying power of the Deryni books and dismissed them rather too quickly.

Melissa
You can have a sound mind in a healthy body--Or you can be a nanonovelist!

drakensis

It's interesting that she also says she has trouble with the changing tones of Roger Zelazny's works. Yet I've always considered that one of the subtleties of his writing. Take Corwin, perhaps one of his most famous characters:

With bitterness do I regard your memory, mad brother. You almost destroyed us. You nearly toppled Amber from her lofty perch on the breast of Kolvir. You would have shattered all of Shadow. You almost broke the Pattern and redesigned the universe in your own image. You were mad and evil, and you came so close to realizing your desires that I tremble even now. I am glad that you are gone, that the arrow and the abyss have claimed you, that you sully no more the places of men with your presence nor walk in the sweet airs of Amber. I wish that you had never been born and, failing that, that you had died sooner. Enough! It diminishes me to reflect so. Be dead and trouble my thinking no more.

That's his internal dialogue and that's the voice of a minstrel and a poet, which we know Corwin was once. But he covers that part of himself because he's grown paranoid and cold through years or centuries of family quarrels and thus when he speaks we get:

"I am going to tell you something Benedict should have told you long ago," I said. "Never trust a relative. It is far worse than trusting strangers. With a stranger there is a possibility that you might be safe."

I can't find the quote offhand but at one point he's asked about one of his old compositions and he says something along the lines of 'that part of me is gone'. And that's just a fantastic character moment because of course he's lying, hiding that part of himself to protect it.

So sorry, Ms LeGuin. That language speaks and speaks well. And similarly, Nigel and Morgan speak like politicians because they ARE politicans, in this context. And so their discussion of politics sounding like something that might be said in Westiminster is appropriate to convey that.

Laurna

I read the first part of this article over my work lunch hour, but after page 148, I lost my temper and gave up. First, I was appalled at her generalization of the term Elfland, which she chooses to use to encompass all worlds in the fantasy genre. It is a very demeaning word that implies either the Land of Christmas or some elementary school level story. It is not as if fantasy began in the 1970's, when this article came out. LOTR was written in the 1930's. Elves, not Elfs had already been around for decades. Middle-Earth should never be insulted by being called Elfland, (Nor should they be called Elvenland but at least that would be better.) And the Eleven Kingdoms are closer to earth history with a magical twist than to any Elfland, there are certainly no Elfs in sight. Her theory is  that every fantasy world should be completely unrelated to our world, and she gives an example of really badly written Elfland speech to impart that difference. After a few sentences, I had to skip her example as being unreadable. I would never read a whole book written that way.

Quote from: drakensis on May 27, 2015, 03:03:34 AM
So sorry, Ms LeGuin. That language speaks and speaks well. And similarly, Nigel and Morgan speak like politicians because they ARE politicans, in this context. And so their discussion of politics sounding like something that might be said in Westiminster is appropriate to convey that.
Yes, Drakensis! Your exactly  right!

Quote from: revanne on May 26, 2015, 03:51:36 PM
Quote from: Evie on May 26, 2015, 02:38:07 PM
Just read a little bit further in this article.  So sad to think that Alaric will never be a hero....  *grinning, ducking, and running very, very fast, all the while wondering if LeGuin has any idea just how many Alaric fanbabes there are out there!*

Well we know he's not the real hero of course ;)
Wait just a minute, Alaric is not our hero? Then why, oh why, after 35 years, have I reread his story as many times as I have reread LOTR. I have never even heard of the titles Ms. Le Guin is claimed to have written.

On top of all of this, she calls Alaric "The I told you so" character type.    AACK!!!

It seems this person never actually read Deryni Rising and only opened the pages to a random quote. For myself, KK's fantasy world is not so different from our own, which may be the reason it is not so easily forgotten.  From the first book on, KK had something in her style that this Ms. Le Guin didn't understand: quality, taste and substance. Good science fiction is about turning the reader's feelings, emotions, politics, and social cultures inside out and viewing them from a perspective outside their own world. Good fantasy does all this but also offers the reader a form of escapism into a different environment. However, it is the connections to our world that make a fantasy world come to life. Not some over-inflated, impossible-to-read "Elfland Dialect."

I am so glad that 1970's point of view has changed. And I suspect that KK's novels had something to do with that change.
May your horses have wings and fly!

revanne

Just to say that I wasn't impugning Alaric, it's just that he's not Duncan.

Seriously though Laurna, beautifully put and you say all that I want to.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
(Psalm 46 v1)

Elkhound

Ms. LeGuin is a fine writer and important to the history of science fiction/fantasy.  Yet her works have not worn as well as JRRT or CSL or KK.  She is a period piece whose period has passed, and she's degenerated into a curmudgeon.

Evie

While I also share LeGuin's love of fantasy that has a strong sense of the numinal (as CS Lewis was known to phrase it, or was it Tolkein? Either way, both wrote highly numinal fantasy), where I disagree with her is primarily in her assertion that stories more grounded in settings that are more relatable to our own world (such as KK's work, which takes its inspiration from our own medieval world rather than from the realm of Faerie) are no longer fantasy. I think they very much are fantasy, if not the sort of fantasy that LeGuin prefers, and they appeal to those of us who enjoy such stories precisely because of those flashes of the numinous that show up here and there against the otherwise familiar trappings of those worlds.

For instance, from our first introduction to KK's fictional universe, one might think at first one is reading in the genre of historical fiction rather than fantasy, but then suddenly one is introduced to the Deryni, with their power to stop hearts at a distance, invest a boy King with mystical powers beyond our comprehension, fight Duels Arcane, glow with quasi-Divine auras, etc. All of these things clue the reader in to the fact that we're not just in some unknown kingdom of our own world anymore, but we  have been allowed a glimpse into a world in which wonders and miracles still happen, both benevolent and perilous, and on a fairly regular basis. It awakes in the reader's heart a wish that such things could happen for us, even if in our minds we know they will not, or at least not in the same way. In the readers' hearts it is almost like getting a peek through the veil that shrouds our mundane reality from a Higher Reality we yearn for--that is to say, that Other Realm which evokes our sense of wonder and awe.  IIRC, the word "numinous" has its root in the sense of the Divine Reality, so as Lewis postulated, when we are drawn to the numinous in fantasy stories, that is our soul's deep yearning for something higher and better than our own mundane experience.

And does one need fancy language and high-flown Victorian-era style fantasy to evoke that sense of wonder?  Well, that's a subjective, individual thing. LeGuin apparently did, at least when she wrote her article.  (I have no idea if her concept of fantasy evolved over time.) I do not. I can read an urban fantasy set in a gritty world and yet when a glimmer of something Elvish and ethereal appears amidst the concrete and grime, I am still hooked. I can read about medieval warriors and a boy-king in a 12th Century world and appreciate that as alternate history, but the moment one of those heroes conjures up handfire or utters an invocation seeking divine protection and suddenly four Archangels show up to honor the request, it is like catching a glimpse of a whole different realm that is both transcendent and immanent, forever seemingly just out of reach and yet somehow with the hope of eventually attaining it. I am outside of Eden, with an angel barring the gate, and yet I can still catch a glimpse of Paradise just beyond reach.

That feeling, I think, is what draws LeGuin to fantasy, and that feeling is the same thing that draws me in as well.  I think the main difference is that I don't require the story to be thoroughly immersed in that sense of Otherworldliness in order to perceive the numinous Light within it and have it call to me.  For that matter, even mundane reality is full of glimpses of the Numinous, if one only keeps an eye open for them. :)
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!

revanne

Quote from: Evie on May 27, 2015, 09:05:05 AM
I am outside of Eden, with an angel barring the gate, and yet I can still catch a glimpse of Paradise just beyond reach.

That feeling, I think, is what draws LeGuin to fantasy, and that feeling is the same thing that draws me in as well.  I think the main difference is that I don't require the story to be thoroughly immersed in that sense of Otherworldliness in order to perceive the numinous Light within it and have it call to me.  For that matter, even mundane reality is full of glimpses of the Numinous, if one only keeps an eye open for them. :)

Each to their own but for me it is the stories that are not thoroughly otherworldly that best convey the numinous or at least best call to my heart. Because they open the possibility of glimpses of that deeper reality within my own mundane world; the utter otherworldly give me no point of contact.

In his foreward to "That hideous strength", which he calls a modern fairy story, C.S, makes the point that what we see as being part of the mystery and romance of traditional fairy stories, medieval castles, princesses, woodcutters, wolves etc were in their origin just the mundane stuff of everyday life - or if not everyday at least this worldly. It is into this mundane reality that the magical happens just as in KK's novels.

At a slightly different level but the same point I think, my sister sold a family trip to see Shakespeare's Richard II to my non-historically minded DD1 as "The West Wing" in costume. Shakespeare purists would probably be horrified but of course in essence she was right. The same power struggles and personality clashes then as now.
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
(Psalm 46 v1)

Elkhound

I wonder if it is significant that LeGuin is an avowed atheist?  Is she perhaps seeking in fantasy what others do in spirituality?

Maven

LeGuin had a point, though not necessarily a fair one, considering that Tolkien spent ten or fifteen years polishing his prose (and had previously spent decades developing the background). After all that time, it should be remarkable.

It is not required that every writer be an accomplished stylist - Edgar Rice Burroughs certainly was not, but he churned out series after series of entertaining page-turners. (Given the advances in scientific knowledge, his Barsoom books now have to be classified as pure fantasy. They were never very far from it even in his own time.)

KK had a serious style problem for years, and I'm not sure she has overcome it completely even yet: at least once per book, she would throw in a crashing anachronism that jolted me right out of the story, and it would take me a while to work my way back in. But she does keep the pages turning and, really, that's the important thing.

Evie

Yes, KK has extremely compelling characters and plots which overcome any deficits in style (and as you say, her style improved over the course of her writing--first novels in particular tend to be at least a little clunkier than later work, though by the time she got to HD she seemed to be hitting her stride). I've always read the stories as fantasies inspired by medieval history rather than as historical fantasies (the difference in my mind is that the first category places uses history to inspire the worldbuilding without insisting on slavish adherence to it, whereas I tend to think of the second category as being more focused on historical accuracy than the fantasy aspects), so the anachronisms don't really bother me. My mind takes note of a few, like Richenda's lace kerchief, but they don't throw me out of the story because I see the world of the Deryni as taking place in an alternate universe Earth in which some things happened the same way they did here, but others happened very differently. Universities formed earlier than in our world, the general populace was more literate despite not having access to the Gutenberg press yet, etc. But I'm cool with that, since the alternate universe Earth setting makes it by default a primarily fantasy world to me that just happens to be historically similar in a few ways to our own. On the other hand, in fantasies set in our own historical settings with just a dash of fantasy tossed in, I tend to be bothered more by anachronisms because I expect a story that is primarily meant to be history-based (or an equal mix of both) to show more attention to the research.

I think the Barsoom novels would be classified now as space opera (i.e. primarily fantasy set in space, which clads it in a thin science-fictiony veneer, such as the Star Wars saga).
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!