Thought in response to Jo Walton's blog post on the Left Hand of Darkness and the ensuing discussion: To me the question at the center of Left Hand of Darkness was always, 'if you take away gender, what's left' – or as Le Guin herself put it it 'is gender necessary'. Which makes it a touch ironic that it has come to be seen as the prototypic book 'about' gender. In my course, a few years ago, on a history of Modern Europe, I was introduced to the concept of 'enclosure' as a societal strategy for managing disruptive elements – it seems to me that Le Guin practiced a kind of narrative enclosure of gender in LHD in her invention of kemmer, to free her to write about other things. What went out were aspects of the masculine, epitomized by warlike behavior, but also certain aspects of the feminine (a thought I must unpack further). What remained were politics, culture, creativity, imagination, love, vision and sacrifice, not even the complete list but already a grand lot.
Tag Archives: Ursula Le Guin
Ursula Le Guin, Whalesong, and Sigmund Freud
I expect I betray a peculiar sense of humour, but this, from Ursula Le Guin’s “Collectors, Rhymesters, and Drummers”, had me giggling helplessly over pizza in Romeo’s restuarant.
As to why the whales sing, it is certainly significant that they sing the most, or the males sing most, in mating season. But if you can say a song lasting half an hour performed by a hundred individuals in chorus is a mating call, then you can say a Beethoven symphony is a mating call.
Sometimes Freud sounds as if that’s what he thought. If (as he said) the artist is motivated to make art by the desire for “fame, money, and the love of beautiful women,” then indeed Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because it was mating season. Beethoven was marking his territory.
It’s probably the image of the wonderful, but very brassy Beethoven Ninth as a mating call. I wonder what it would attract: something extrovert, no doubt, unlike the forlorn prehistoric relic of Bradbury’s “The Foghorn.” It’s hard to say what exactly is the subject of the essay, since from paragraph to paragraph it moves from the nature of beauty to rhythm in nature and art, and in her introduction Le Guin said she wrote it for her own entertainment – and it is fun.
Freud never did seem to have much time for artists, although upon a recent glancing enounter with him in last year’s history of modern Europe course, I decided that he was one. One of our assigned reads was a long passage of Freud’s about how he could not go to Rome, and his analysis of what Rome represented to him. Plainly, he was not going to just get over it and go to Rome (ie, do the experiment), until he had extracted the maximum possible creative juice out of not going to Rome. It’s one of those artist things: falling in love with unattainable people, and writing poetry about it, leaving home and yearning to return, and writing novels about it.