The Thing about LeGuin
Aug. 17th, 2015 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpis that she for the most part has got two modes, and while she's tried other stuff, she's not really greeeeeeat at doing anything other than these two things. Like I think most writers, her work can be plotted with decent accuracy using only two thematic axes; thus, she need grind no other. For her, there's basically Anhedonic Mode and Self-Destructive Mode.
So, both axes are depression, basically. Sorry.
The Anhedonic Mode is what it sounds like: it's just kind of trying to wrestle emotion out of experiences and sensory impressions that ought to mean something to you but just don't, and maybe the problem's only that you Think Too Much About This Crap? (It's not - that's a symptom, not a cause - but I don't know if she agrees.)
The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are heavily Anhedonic. Which is why they don't actually appeal to me much! The latter makes its way over into Self-Destructive, in its way, and that does work, but in my opinion it's not the best use she makes of the progression.
The Self-Destructive Mode is also what it sounds like: a character entirely destroys themself or some part of themself because, somehow, nothing else can save them. In her stuff that appeals to me most, the character goes into, I guess, Ecstatic Self-Annihilation Mode, where they are really, really fucking into wrecking their own shit.
Earthsea, the Klatsand stories, and (my favorite) A Fisherman of the Inland Sea are mostly this. Their protagonists feel pleasure most sharply - maybe only - when they're ripping themselves to shreds. And so, naturally, they do it over and over, with one massive final orgy of personal scourging that leaves them finally free of suffering.
Sorta. Ged and Tenar do the thing really fucking overtly, they go hard: kill your double, kill your destiny; wreck your world, even death. But obviously, when we see them again after the Happy Ending, any Happy that was there didn't quite last, because they didn't actually End. Sorry, kids.
Whereas Fisherman is so sneaky that it's very easy to just go "well, that was a surprisingly happy ending!", and never realize just what the guy had been doing to himself. It helps a lot that it's first-person-retrospective and epistolary, because by Hideo's standards, he got a happy ending! He wanted to be like Urashima, throw everything away and disintegrate and be forgotten; drown himself in his childhood stream, which would itself soon change into a shape he couldn't recognize.
And everything worked out exactly the way he'd always wanted. As far as I can tell, the canonical Hain timeline is one in which he never left O, and no one ever got his letter.
The Left Hand of Darkness would have scooted neatly over into the Self-Destructive category had Estraven been the viewpoint character straight through. They did the thing; Genly only had the thing done to him. This is, apparently, not enough! Because there's a really sharp contrast between the sensory emptiness of the Anhedonic stuff, and the dully aching feeling of completion of their endings, and the raging pleasure in destruction of the Self-Destructive stuff.
Fuck knows what Hideo's wife really thought of him. With any (LeGuinian) luck, to her, he was also the tragic sacrifice she was making to drag meaning into herself, a source of irresolvable pain and longing to cut herself on every day.
So, both axes are depression, basically. Sorry.
The Anhedonic Mode is what it sounds like: it's just kind of trying to wrestle emotion out of experiences and sensory impressions that ought to mean something to you but just don't, and maybe the problem's only that you Think Too Much About This Crap? (It's not - that's a symptom, not a cause - but I don't know if she agrees.)
The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness are heavily Anhedonic. Which is why they don't actually appeal to me much! The latter makes its way over into Self-Destructive, in its way, and that does work, but in my opinion it's not the best use she makes of the progression.
The Self-Destructive Mode is also what it sounds like: a character entirely destroys themself or some part of themself because, somehow, nothing else can save them. In her stuff that appeals to me most, the character goes into, I guess, Ecstatic Self-Annihilation Mode, where they are really, really fucking into wrecking their own shit.
Earthsea, the Klatsand stories, and (my favorite) A Fisherman of the Inland Sea are mostly this. Their protagonists feel pleasure most sharply - maybe only - when they're ripping themselves to shreds. And so, naturally, they do it over and over, with one massive final orgy of personal scourging that leaves them finally free of suffering.
Sorta. Ged and Tenar do the thing really fucking overtly, they go hard: kill your double, kill your destiny; wreck your world, even death. But obviously, when we see them again after the Happy Ending, any Happy that was there didn't quite last, because they didn't actually End. Sorry, kids.
Whereas Fisherman is so sneaky that it's very easy to just go "well, that was a surprisingly happy ending!", and never realize just what the guy had been doing to himself. It helps a lot that it's first-person-retrospective and epistolary, because by Hideo's standards, he got a happy ending! He wanted to be like Urashima, throw everything away and disintegrate and be forgotten; drown himself in his childhood stream, which would itself soon change into a shape he couldn't recognize.
And everything worked out exactly the way he'd always wanted. As far as I can tell, the canonical Hain timeline is one in which he never left O, and no one ever got his letter.
The Left Hand of Darkness would have scooted neatly over into the Self-Destructive category had Estraven been the viewpoint character straight through. They did the thing; Genly only had the thing done to him. This is, apparently, not enough! Because there's a really sharp contrast between the sensory emptiness of the Anhedonic stuff, and the dully aching feeling of completion of their endings, and the raging pleasure in destruction of the Self-Destructive stuff.
Fuck knows what Hideo's wife really thought of him. With any (LeGuinian) luck, to her, he was also the tragic sacrifice she was making to drag meaning into herself, a source of irresolvable pain and longing to cut herself on every day.
no subject
Date: 2015-08-18 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-18 03:37 am (UTC)Depressive worldview, yeah, that'd do it. (This is also why I've given up reading Douglas Adams -- wonderful writing, but it leaves me feeling like shit for hours after reading him.)
no subject
Date: 2015-08-18 04:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-18 02:29 pm (UTC)Actually, I would have been content had she stopped with the first one, which blew the top of my head off the summer before I started college. The rest of the original three books grew increasingly =meh= as far as I was concerned, and when she revisited them some time later with Tehanu, I found myself really wishing she hadn't.
(Also, I was perhaps the only person of my acquaintance who liked The Dispossessed better than The Left Hand of Darkness. LeGuin managed to write the only Utopian society which I actually find believable -- I wouldn't actually want to live there, mind you, but I can believe in the possibility of its existence.)