Interviewer: In Steering the Craft, you say–and you seem to be speaking as both a reader and a writer–“I want to recognize something I never saw before.”
Le Guin: It has something to do with the very nature of fiction. That age-old question, Why don’t I just write about what’s real? A lot of twentieth-century–and twenty-first-century–American readers think that that’s all they want. They want nonfiction. They’ll say, I don’t read fiction because it isn’t real. This is incredibly naïve. Fiction is something that only human beings do, and only in certain circumstances. We don’t know exactly for what purposes. But one of the things it does is lead you to recognize what you did not know before.
This is what a lot of mystical disciplines are after–simply seeing, really seeing, really being aware. Which means you’re recognizing the things around you more deeply, but they also seem new. So the seeing-as-new and recognition are really the same thing.
Interviewer: Could you elaborate on this idea just a little?
Le Guin: Not adequately! I can only muddle at it. A very good book tells me news, tells me things I didn’t know, or didn’t know I knew, yet I recognize them–yes, I see, yes, this is how the world is. Fiction–and poetry and drama–cleanse the doors of perception.
All the arts do this. Music, painting, dance say for us what can’t be said in words. But the mystery of literature is that it does say it in words, often straightforward ones.
–From John Wray’s interview with Ursula K. Le Guin in the Paris Review (issue 206)
Everything organizes itself under the looking glass!
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