#john plotz

Nobody would dare to boil down Ursula Le Guin’s marvelous writing—all that fantasy, all that science fiction, poetry, essays, translations—into one idea. But in a pinch I’d pick two sentences from her 2014 National Book Award speech: “Capitalism[’s] power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” Fantasy and science fiction never meant escapism for Ursula Le Guin. The dragons of Earthsea and the reimagined genders of The Left Hand of Darkness were always lenses, lenses she ground in order to sharpen her readers’ focus on everyday life. Indeed, for Le Guin, there was no difference between the stories she invented and everyday stories about the institutions governing our world. The dragons of Earthsea and capitalism are woven from similar material: it is imagination all the way down. James Baldwin said not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed without being faced. The word for facing things in Le Guin is recognition, or you might even say re-cognition. Her characters—and readers—find themselves forced to think again. When they do so, what had seemed a fundamental truth about their universe turns out to be anything but. [...] Here is what I learned from Le Guin: Imagination is a beautiful and a shadowy builder. Over the generations, it supplied language, gods, music, arts, pretty much everything we sum up as culture. But imagination’s power comes at a familiar price: all power corrupts. Looking at those delightful surfaces painted onto the world by past acts of imagination, it can become hard to catch sight of what is really there, underneath. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has a wonderful phrase: “a picture held us captive.” It applied to divine right of kings at one time, and may apply now to capitalism. Ending a picture’s captivity involves cracking common sense, and that is where some of my favorite writers come in. Jane Austen’s wit helped her readers peer beneath the surface of Regency England’s marriage market; Mark Twain’s Huck Finn tore aside the racial lies of 19th century America. During the Nixon era, Le Guin’s fantasy and her science fiction did the same: she pushed aside captivating pictures and let the light shine in. Then she returned to Earthsea decades later and did it all over again.

B-Side Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites as edited by John Plotz

"'Thing' is far better than any other word at summing up imponderable, slightly creepy what-is-it-ness. "Thing" is the term of choice for extreme cases when nouns otherwise fail us: witness the thingamagummy and the thingamabob. Thing theory is at its best, therefore, when it focuses on this sense of failure, or partial failure, to name or classify."

“By the 1920s there existed a strong model of a coherent inner self, knowable only in its encounter with a “truly objective” outer world (objectivity is represented in the case of the blots by pure meaninglessness). Hence, a single test of seemingly loquacious objective reality (Talk to the Blots!) was enough to elicit the whole of the person inside. The Rorschach blot, says Galliston, works only if the talkative object is so perfectly of the “objective” outer world that one can be sure that no other human agency was there before one — what one says about the objects makes one’s encounter with the pure outsideness of the world in all its delightful, and hence intensely meaning-laden, rigidity. “The [Rorschach blot test] means that the functions of subjectivation (how subjects are formed) and objectivation (how objects are formed) enter at precisely the same moment. To describe the cards (on the outside) is exactly to say who you are (on the inside).” The importance of Galliston’s reading resides in the close fit that the Rorschach blots produce with other early-twentieth-century texts on what it might mean for indisputably mute objects to “speak” the inner truth that they contain, to disgorge out of their abiding flatness some kind of depth that bespeaks the character of the people with whom they abide.”