Book Report 12/11/24

Lyta Gold, Ursula K. Le Guin

Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality, Lyta Gold, 2024

Just before the election,

Lyta Gold

speculated in her newsletter that a Democratic victory would turbocharge the culture war while Trump’s return to power would push cultural disputes to the backburner in the face of the real horrors he hopes to unleash. I don’t agree with this entirely—I expect a lot of conservatives have mired in grievance for so long that they’ll continue wanting to yell about how the live action Snow White is woke even as mass deportations begin, and a lot of mainstream libs remain much more comfortable defending culture war issues than anything material—but it proved true for me in the short term. Dangerous Fictions was released on October 29 and my copy didn’t arrive until the day before the election; by the time it was next in my queue Trump had won and suddenly reading a history of book bannings and moral panics around fiction felt a lot less appealing.

This is a shame and I hope my reaction is an outlier because not only is this book very good but describing it in those terms sells the scope of its project short. Starting from the observation that fiction has long been considered potentially dangerous, an avenue for the youth to be indoctrinated or corrupted, Gold sets about trying to answer what exactly fiction is and why it might be capable of influencing us so profoundly, how it is capable of being “both real and fake: real because they’re a way of grasping the real reality, the “might be” or “wish it were,” that lies beyond given reality, and fake because, obviously, nothing in them ever happened or could happen right now.”

In the following chapters, Gold covers a lot of ground. She discusses Don Quixote, that archetypal “corrupted reader” and the transition he represents from the old chivalric romance stories he read to the modern novel, an assertion Gold disputes convincingly¹ while arguing that the romance never died, it simply took on new garb as fantasy and science fiction. For an example of actually dangerous fiction she examines fascist art like The Turner Diaries and Stephen Miller’s favorite book, The Camp of the Saints. Standout line: “I tend to be relatively libertarian about freedom of speech, and mostly in favor of prison abolition, but when I finished The Camp of the Saints, I felt that everyone who read it, including myself, should be in jail.”

In the book’s best chapter, Gold turns to a more fraught question: how fiction might threaten capitalism and American empire. She walks readers through the role the CIA played in the creation of “literary fiction” in the postwar period and how the values the form emphasized stood in contrast to the principles of Soviet art. In what ways are our imaginations constrained, she asks, in ways we don’t even notice, by literary fiction’s emphasis on realism and psychological believability? What sorts of stories have never been written, have never been allowed to be written, because of the assumptions about what fiction should be that still linger from the 50s and 60s? This is a hard question to answer, Gold notes, because it’s hard to perceive what’s not there. But she does manage to point to one major topic that remains circumscribed outside the bounds of realist fiction: revolution.

This is one of the real forbidden territories, as well as one of the lingering differences between literary and genre fiction: only in genre fiction could we see anything like a revolution if it hasn’t already happened in the historic past. Only outside the “given reality” are characters allowed to alter the fabric of daily life rather than just learn to cope with it. This isn’t to say that genre fiction always depicts real change, or does so in interesting ways, but that it technically can go there in a way that literary fiction mostly can’t. Literary fiction has lately escaped its former realist boundaries, and yet if we look at contemporary literary/genre crossovers, we can often see how the ideas implicit in postwar serious fiction still limit possibility… Kazuo Ishiguro, probably the best known of these novelists, writes gorgeously and elegiacally from the near-future point of view of clones and robots: they live quiet lives and die quietly too, against the backdrop of crumbling dystopian realities that can’t be changed or altered. These aren’t bad novels; in many ways, they’re very good ones. But they embody a kind of political helplessness, a sigh before the lights go out.

The quotations I’ve used so far should give you a sense of the writing, which I think is great. Gold is very funny (shoutout to when she introduces Jordan Peterson as a “lifestyle guru and steak advocate) and is not afraid to move through material in a chatty vernacular until the serious analysis kicks in and she elevates her register to work through headier points. Her project requires a ton of exposition about various cultural disputes and kerfuffles like the Rockism vs Poptimism debate in music criticism and the Gamergate harassment campaign; her bloggy tone makes getting through all the info dumping as pleasant and rewarding as the commentary that follows.²

I can’t speak for Gold’s exact politics but she was formerly an editor at Current Affairs so I think it’s fair to say she falls fairly far to the left. I was gratified that, in discussions of these cultural products and discourse, she never loses sight of the material conditions at play. That boom in postwar fiction was propped up by a ton of money sloshing around; now writers are trapped by the values of that era even as the money has dried up. The corporate consolidation of Hollywood has strangled mid-budget movies because profit is the only point. One of the book’s most persistent throughlines is an attack on praising fiction for its use-value—for promoting empathy, or being necessary for democracy, or whatever—in Gold’s estimation this is so much Calvinist, Protestant Work Ethic nonsense. Her view is not trite “art for art’s sake” but something more: if we recognize writing and fiction in all its sublime mysteriousness we allow it to remain itself and give it power to act in the world. “If we take art seriously as art, and artists seriously as artists, and labor itself as something that deserves respect and compensation, then we start moving toward a view of human existence that’s bigger and stranger and more alive than anything the last four centuries have allowed for or could understand.”

Tales From Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin, 2001

Tales from Earthsea, the fifth book in the series, is a story collection rather than a novel. In her foreword, Le Guin writes that she had thought that Tehanu, the fourth book, was to be the end of the series but in the following years had found herself wondering not only what happened next but what had happened before, before Ged and Tenar and King Lebannen’s time. So these stories move through time, backward and forward, to answer both “next” and “back then.”

The first story, “The Finder,” a 150-page novella, drops back hundreds of years to a period when the Archipelago, without a king, had degenerated into a feudal state of piracy, petty lordship, and a lot of slavery. Wizardry is just another form of mercenaryship, as one’s only viable option is to pledge oneself to one of this pirate-lords and work on their behalf. Our protagonist, Otter, is discovered to have the gift and is enslaved as a finder, working for a mad wizard to locate deposits of cinnabar that will be smelted to release their trace quantities of mercury. Otter escapes, aided by a young woman named Anieb who is too far gone with mercury poisoning and dies not long after. He carries her memory as part of himself and wonders what could have happened if her magical abilities had been tutored. He wonders why wizards can’t band together and share their learning. This search takes him to Roke, where he ultimately helps found the house of learning that will establish it as the Isle of the Wise and unite wizards as a political faction capable of upsetting the balance of power in Earthsea.

Women are central to this second half. It’s Anieb’s mother and aunt who tell him of a secret society of women who keep magical knowledge alive. It’s primarily women who live on Roke when he arrives, the men having been massacred by their hostile neighbor island some years before. Most of the practical, everyday applications of magic are “women’s work:” healing, mending, easing childbirth. But as the Roke School attracts more and more adepts, factions emerge, particularly a group of chauvinists who believe that women have no place learning at the school and that consorting with them drains their vital energy and magical powers³. This faction ultimately wins out and establishes the rule that women are not to be taught formally, consigning gifted women to the low role of village witch reliant on whatever folk practices are passed down to her.

This ending is oddly rushed and under-detailed—despite descriptions of how the community engages in discussion and uses conflict resolution techniques that will be familiar to anyone interested in anarchism, the misogynists just kind get their way without much justification. I suppose that’s how patriarchy often operates but it didn’t quite play for me. I could say the same about Otter’s life after reaching Roke. He enters a relationship with a woman named Ember and they make a life together but she’s also quite underdeveloped. I expected Le Guin to mine more from the tension of Otter giving himself over to their relationship while still holding Anieb so vividly in his head but this passes unremarked on. One gets the sense that Le Guin was feeling uncomfortable with the length the story was stretching to and just decided to wrap it up.

“On the High Marsh” takes place during Ged’s tenure as Archmage (that is, between The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore) and concerns a Summoner who was consumed and destroyed by his power over others. Across the stories in this volume, Le Guin is at great pains to reiterate that summoning is by far the most perilous of the wizardly arts. “The Bones of the Earth” shows us Ged’s teacher Ogion as a younger man and introduces us to his teacher, Dulse, who was trained by a female mage. He has held a spell from her all his life, an irrevocable transformation spell that allows him to become one with the earth itself; this is not a high, airy spell of Roke but something of the Old Powers of the Earth, which are heavily associated with femininity. The language Le Guin uses to describe him merging with the land and easing the tension of two tectonic plates to stop an earthquake is evocative of childbirth and midwifery—one wonders who and what Dulse felt himself to be in the moments before he became part of the bones of the earth.

The final story, “Dragonfly,” pushes us into the future. Ged and Tenar are together on Gont, Arren has taken the throne as King Lebannen, but still the world is chaotic and the Master Patterner can see nothing but great change coming. I wrote several paragraphs explaining the plot and potent lore elaborations this story provides but it’s too in-the-weeds. Suffice it to say that after beginning the book with the story of how women were excluded from Roke’s teaching, Le Guin ends by telling how a woman enters the Great House, brings simmering problems to a head, rights a great unnaturality in the world, and points us toward the final book in the series. I find it notable that this story, set in the “present,” feels much more urgent and intense than any of the others. Even “The Finder,” with its shocking cruelty, still has a certain feeling of being history, its events slightly preordained, compared to “Dragonfly,” where it really feels like we’re in the moment and the situation could go any number of ways and Irian’s choices really matter.

There’s a danger, when an author goes back to fill in gaps and history like this, that they will end up telling just-so stories that cheapen and demystify rather than expand and deepen their creation. Le Guin was certainly aware of these hazards. In her foreword, after a rousing attack on junky commercialized fantasy that bastardizes and sanitizes, she lists her three principles for returning to Earthsea: 1) things change; 2) authors and wizards are not always to be trusted; and 3) no one can explain a dragon. I was thinking in particular of that first rule when I read the argument in Dangerous Fictions that realist literature cannot show things changing. The arc of Tales from Earthsea is the correction of an injustice—the exclusion of women from formal magical education. The world is changed for the better. Good things can happen. In the hands of a storyteller and thinker as sophisticated as she, this feels quite satisfying and, yes, realistic.

1. Her argument, contra Harold Bloom, comes from The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody, which I now need to read.

2. Also the Substacker representation in the citations is insane: Patrick Nathan, Brandon Taylor, Brian Merchant, Becca Rothfeld, Max Read, BD McClay, Phil Christman, Adam Fleming Petty. Hi guys!

3. That’s right, Le Guin invented semen retention guys