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This is an article by Ursula K Le Guin that you all might be interested in reading (and discussing).
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Food for thought. I do reread a lot of books I liked as a kid---not all, but mostly, SF or fantasy---and do find deeper meaning, or subtle overtones, in them that I failed to grasp at the time. I don't think a year goes by where I haven't reread The Lord of the Rings.
I can extend it to movies and TV. I just picked up a DVD set of the first season of "Saturday Night Live." I've run through a few old favorite sketches, and plan to look more in depth later on. But I found something I hadn't noticed in one sketch. Briefly, it had John Belushi as a detective, where a prospective client questions how he will conduct a case, and they repeatedly burst into an old song ("I Will Follow Him.") I remembered the sketch quite well.
But, till I reran it a few days ago, I had completely missed that Belushi was doing a Jack Nicholson / "Chinatown" imitation.
(I wonder if the Harry Potter books will hold up that well. Now that it looks like the last book will be coming soon---the title was just announced---I may break down and pick up the volumes I don't have.)
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If I ever read them at all, the HP books will have certainly held up very well indeed.
I still enjoy reading Encyclopedia Brown stories. Those are pretty much the only "kids books" I ever liked much as a kid. Very soon after I learned to read (at about three years old, if I recall) I started reading books. It was the bane of my schoolwork, that I read constantly. I also liked what I liked and disliked what I disliked, no matter who had written it, which made me the bane of my literature supervisors.
I'm surprised that Le Guin would mistake imaginitive fiction for primary rather than primitive. Perhaps primal would be a better word. But imaginitive fiction touches (or fails to touch) something deep within us, it isn't a basis for something we'll learn or read later.
I think that she unfairly slams the fable, as when she despises the children's stories of Oscar Wilde or Hans Christian Anderson. Ironic, as much of her own work is clearly fable. The "serious" message couched in fantasy is one of the strongest wellsprings of "emotionally honest" imaginative work, even though the emotions are about something quite different from the fanciful situations in the story. Of course, I've always been able to see through fables, so I never had to go through the disillusionment of finding out that the authors were really talking about something quite different. And it doesn't hurt that Wilde was such a master of the English language, a lot of "Churchhill" quotes in common circulation are actually Wilde (which is all the more astonishing since it is hard to imagine Churchhill ever saying those things to anyone).
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That is ironic. She's pretty didactic. (I think of her work more as thought experiment. Exception is Earthsea, especially Atuan.)
Posts: 2830 | Registered: Dec 2004
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Using Le Guin as an example...I remember and have reread-with-enjoyment some of her early stuff (the first three Earthsea books, "The Left Hand of Darkness," some short stories)---her later stuff I found, by and large, impenetrable. But my favorite of hers was a non-SF non-fantasy young-adult novel, the title of which escapes me...I remember plot and fine details well, I think, but I haven't reread it in at least twenty years...
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