[Vwoolf] Le Guin and Woolf and FaceTime

[Stuart N. Clarke]

She had read E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”?

Stuart

From: Byrne, Anne (Soc & Pol) 
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2018 8:03 PM
To: Matthew Cheney ; vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu 
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Le Guin and Woolf and FaceTime

‘One of these days d’you think you’ll be able to see things at the end of the telephone?’ Peggy said, getting up.

The Years (1937)

How did she know?

Anne 
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From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces+anne.byrne=nuigalway.ie at lists.osu.edu> on behalf of Matthew Cheney <mcheney at gmail.com>
Sent: 27 January 2018 17:18:04
To: vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Le Guin and Woolf 

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.) 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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