SOMETHING LURCHING THIS WAY COMES...

I assume you know what an “ansible” is and I assume you know who Ursula LeGuin is, so it will make sense to you that this English scifi newsletter is called “the ansible” and that LeGuin would post there.

I also know that you probably are aware that there is a huge thrashing fight between the “genre” litcrits and the “literary” litcrits, comparable to what the Blackfeet deduced happened between the “water bull” (diplodocus or tyrannosaurus?) and the “terrible bird” (pterosaurus or diatryma?) when they found the bones of these creatures jumbled together. The short version of the fight is that “literary” types who learned to write some place like the University of Iowa, sneer at the “genre” types who learned to write by reading Westerns or mysteries. Here in Montana we appear to be squarely on the boundary between the two, so the battle is probably moot for us.

Anyway, Le Guin takes an anthropologist’s daughter’s delight in teasing the pompous, which is easy when one makes a metaphor absolutely realistic.

http://news.ansible.co.uk/a240.html#leguin

On Serious Literature

Ursula Le Guin sends a cry from the heart:

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.' Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs -- somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly ... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again -- the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door.

As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics -- the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy -- although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust -- could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring.

She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem -- but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead.

She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.

copyright © Ursula K. Le Guin, 2007

I’m assuming Le Guin won’t be upset if I reprint this so long as it’s for the right audience and not for profit.