Review: The Language of the Night

 The Language of the Night is Ursula Le Guin's essays on writing --- collected from fairly early on to the I want to say around the 1990s. These essays were not written all at once, and over time, you could see her evolution of views on various topics as she grew and matured. For instance, her stance on pronouns changed dramatically over time and she goes back and adds footnotes to her own essays rather than changing the text of her essays to reflect her views at the time of editing.

She is critical of modern society and its aversion to fantasy or science fiction. She connects science fiction and fantasy as being aesthetic, complexity and remoteness. (Kindle loc 464) Her view of how the typical b businessman views fiction is great:

To read War and Peace or The Lord of the Rings plainly is not “work”—you do it for pleasure. And if it cannot be justified as “educational” or as “self-improvement,” then, in the Puritan value system, it can only be self-indulgence or escapism. For pleasure is not a value to the Puritan; on the contrary, it is a sin. Equally, in the businessman’s value system, if an act does not bring in an immediate, tangible profit, it has no justification at all. Thus the only person who has an excuse to read Tolstoy or Tolkien is the English teacher, who gets paid for it. But our businessman might allow himself to read a bestseller now and then: not because it is a good book, but because it is a bestseller—it is a success, it has made money. To the strangely mystical mind of the money changer, this justifies its existence; and by reading it he may participate, a little, in the power and mana of its success.  (kindle loc 642)

More than her evolution on gender, pronouns and her approach to her work, I loved her interpretation of Frodo, Gollum, and Sam in Lord of the Rings:

Frodo and Gollum are not only both hobbits; they are the same person—and Frodo knows it. Frodo and Sam are the bright side, Smeagol-Gollum the shadow side. In the end Sam and Smeagol, the lesser figures, drop away, and all that is left is Frodo and Gollum, at the end of the long quest. And it is Frodo the good who fails, who at the last moment claims the Ring of Power for himself; and it is Gollum the evil who achieves the quest, destroying the Ring, and himself with it. The Ring, the archetype of the Integrative Function, the creative-destructive, returns to the volcano, the eternal source of creation and destruction, the primal fire. When you look at it that way, can you call it a simple story? I suppose so. Oedipus Rex is a fairly simple story, too. But it is not simplistic. It is the kind of story that can be told only by one who has turned and faced his shadow and looked into the dark. (kindle loc 1065)

Her point is that you can only write great fiction when you come to terms with both your shadow side and your bright side. And of course, that's the entire theme of A Wizard of Earthsea. And obviously nobody who has tried to adapt that novel into visual medium has succeeded.

In terms of weakness, the problem with this book is that there are way too many introductions. There's an introduction by someone who's not Ursula Le Guin, then Ursula Le Guin's introduction, and her addendum years after for the latest edition, and this is repeated for nearly every essay and each section in the book. I felt like the text had more introductions than actual material. Essays, like short stories, should be left to speak for themselves with the author's footnotes addended, not introduced to death.

Nevertheless, it was worth reading. Recommended.