Subject: For the Commonplace Book: Le Guin on fiction

From: Glenn Vanderburg <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 1994 13:28:23 -0500

"The truth against the world!"---Yes.  Certainly.  Fiction writers, at
least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak
it, serve it.  But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way,
which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never
did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in
detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when
they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There!  That's
the truth!

...

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the
whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word
of it.  Finally, when we're done with it, we may find---if it's a good
novel---that we're a bit different from what we were before we read
it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new
face, crossed a street we never crossed before.  But it's very hard to
*say* just what we learned, how we were changed.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.

The artist whose medium is fiction does this *in words*.  The novelist
says in words what cannot be said in words.

   ---Ursula K. Le Guin, in her 1976 introduction to
      _The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness_ (1969)

--
Glenn Vanderburg
[email-masked]