[Vwoolf] Le Guin and Woolf

[Jean Mallinson]

Thanks for this. It is very illuminating and  shows  how and why Le 
Guin's fiction went beyond genre to  become literature.

Jean


On 1/27/2018 9:18 AM, Matthew Cheney wrote:
> Hello Woolfians,
>
> Here’s some more Le Guin on Woolf—
>
> Le Guin was one of the science fiction writers asked by /The 
> Guardian/ to choose “their favourite author or novel in the genre” and 
> Le Guin chose Woolf, saying:
>
>     You can't write science fiction well if you haven't read it,
>     though not all who try to write it know this. But nor can you
>     write it well if you haven't read anything else. Genre is a rich
>     dialect, in which you can say certain things in a particularly
>     satisfying way, but if it gives up connection with the general
>     literary language it becomes a jargon, meaningful only to an
>     ingroup. Useful models may be found quite outside the genre. I
>     learned a lot from reading the ever-subversive Virginia Woolf.
>
>     I was 17 when I read /Orlando/. It was half-revelation,
>     half-confusion to me at that age, but one thing was clear: that
>     she imagined a society vastly different from our own, an exotic
>     world, and brought it dramatically alive. I'm thinking of the
>     Elizabethan scenes, the winter when the Thames froze over.
>     Reading, I was there, saw the bonfires blazing in the ice, felt
>     the marvellous strangeness of that moment 500 years ago – the
>     authentic thrill of being taken /absolutely elsewhere/.
>
>     How did she do it? By precise, specific descriptive details, not
>     heaped up and not explained: a vivid, telling imagery, highly
>     selected, encouraging the reader's imagination to fill out the
>     picture and see it luminous, complete.
>
>     In /Flush/, Woolf gets inside a dog's mind, that is, a non-human
>     brain, an alien mentality – very science-fictional if you look at
>     it that way. Again what I learned was the power of accurate,
>     vivid, highly selected detail. I imagine Woolf looking down at the
>     dog asleep beside the ratty armchair she wrote in and thinking
>     /what are your dreams?/ and listening . . . sniffing the wind . .
>     . after the rabbit, out on the hills, in the dog's timeless world.
>
>     Useful stuff, for those who like to see through eyes other than
>     our own.
>
> source: 
> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/14/science-fiction-authors-choice
>
> (This was reprinted in her book /Words Are My Matter/ as “Learning to 
> Write Science Fiction from Virginia Woolf”)
>
> Woolf was always central to Le Guin, back to the day when she was 
> about 14 and her mother gave her a copies of /A Room of One’s Own/ and 
> /Three Guineas/. (She discusses this briefly in this interview: 
> https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/spring-2013-growing/song-herself) 
> References to Woolf’s work pop up throughout her nonfiction 
> especially, but I see traces in her fiction, too.
>
> This topic is close to my heart, as it was probably via Le Guin that I 
> discovered Woolf myself when I first read, at a 
> much-too-young-to-understand-it age Le Guin’s essay “Science Fiction 
> and Mrs. Brown”, and then, to try to understand it better, sought out 
> “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”. (For the curious, I’ve written about 
> that a bit at my blog 
> <https://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2018/01/ursula-le-guin-in-your-dreams-in-your.html>.) 
> I sent a completed first draft of a dissertation to my committee on 
> Woolf’s birthday, a dissertation that is 1/3 about Woolf, and which 
> would not have been possible, in so many ways, without Le Guin. 
> Foremothers, grandmothers, greats.
>
> Matthew Cheney
>
>
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