UKL: I figure, “Okay, I’ve got six minutes.” And I am talking to some of the powers that be in American literature in that room in New York. All my publishers were there. And there was an Amazon table, and all the rest of them. So I felt an onus upon me to say something meaningful. But how to say it in a very brief time without it being just a rant? Because I have strong feelings about what has been happening in literature, particularly in certain aspects of publishing, how certain things were going in the absolutely wrong direction. I wanted to talk about this. And then there is the sense that we all have, and of course we have it more intensely since the election, that the times are changing very fast. And they are very unpredictable and pretty scary. Whatever may happen to the arts in bad times, the verbal arts, at least, tend to become very important. It’s really important what you say in the bad times. I think about a book that has been so important to me, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. That book is the product of a very bad time in China. It was called the Warring States Period. A time of civil war and invasion. And he was, in fact, going into exile. In the mythology about him, that was why he wrote the book. Staying at an inn on the border, before he crossed over into “the outer world,” he took a night or two to write this book. So, I thought, okay, you do your testimony when things are getting bad. And I wanted to do that. I needed to figure out what I really, really wanted to say.
DN: And for people who might not be aware, your speech became a viral phenomenon and giant news story around the globe.
UKL: Yeah, it was my fifteen minutes of fame. I was completely taken aback. I really thought nobody would be listening except for the people in that room. But I forgot that a lot of the people in that room were journalists and knew a story when they heard one.
DN: After this discussion of your views on the positioning of the mind and the ego in relationship to art, I returned to the poem at the beginning of Words Are My Matter, entitled “The Mind Is Still.” It begins: “The mind is still. The gallant books of lies / are never quite enough. / Ideas are a whirl of mazy flies / over the pigs’ trough.” It seems particularly fitting now looking at it through this lens.
UKL: I hope so. The title for the book comes from that poem. It was written quite a long time ago, so I hoped it would make sense in context.
DN: If we are looking at the different ways your work is received in relationship to ideas and the mind, you have this really interesting essay about your book The Dispossessed, one of your more well-known novels. You talk about some of the scholarly work around this novel and say that you resist the idea that novels spring from an originating idea, also the idea that science fiction is the literature of ideas, and that you’d rather be prasied for your efforts to resist the didactic than for your failures to do so. Did this arise from a dissatisfaction with how The Dispossesed was being received, or how it was being discussed in scholarly works?
UKL: No, not really. Actually, that essay was written as an introduction for a book, a collection of essays, about the novel The Disposssessed. I was kind of amazed to discover most of those discussions were not only highly intelligent and professional but also simpatico, using feeling as well as idea. I have nothing against ideas per se—I am an intellectual, after all—but when they become didactic, self-righteous, or just opinion then they get tiresome. What I was struggling against was not the reception of The Dispossessed in particular, though it is often treated as if there is nothing in it but ideas, but the tendency to intellectualize not only science fiction but all literature. It is often taught with questions like “What is the author saying?” and “What is his message?” [Sighs with exasperation.] Any work of art consists of more than verbal thoughts that can be paraphrased verbally. There is something more going on that has got to be included in the criticism. You can’t reduce any novel or poem to an intelligible single meaning.
DN: In “The Operating Instructions,” which comes from a 2002 talk at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts, you write really wonderfully about an American-specific fear of imagination. In one of our past talks I mistakenly confused this with our resistance to considering genre fiction as literature. I wondered then if, now that genre fiction was finally breaking those walls down, that meant America was coming to terms with imagination in a healthier way. You pushed back and said that the question of America and imagination is a bigger and broader one than the question of genre fiction and literature but we never went further at the time. What is it about the American spirit that makes us fearful of the imaginative spirit?
UKL: That old essay is called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” and it was written specifically about the American tendency to dismiss all fantasy, all highly imaginative fiction, as for kids, or as unimportant because it isn’t about what the stock market is doing today. The immediate profit attitude toward life. Dickens talks about it in his novel Hard Times, making fun of the completely “realistic” businessman who can’t think of anything but immediate use and profit and therefore loses any sense of there really being any future. This mind-set, as it comes through in education (Dickens was very clear about that too), is crippling to a child’s whole development. Because the imagination is simply a very large part of the way our minds function. To stint or stunt or be contemptuous of the imagination is a terrible thing to do, particularly to a young developing mind that needs to be able to think about anything—to imagine things, and be clear about the difference between what is imagined and what is real. I think children are much better at that than most adults give them credit for. They know when it is a fairy tale. And they often know when it is a lie. But still, both reason and imagination need training. They need exercise just like the body does. We train some of the rational faculties, but less and less is the imaginative given any place in American education. I think that is very scary.
A poet has been appointed ambassador. A playwright is elected president. Construction workers stand in line with office managers to buy a new novel. Adults seek moral guidance and intellectual challenge in stories about warrior monkeys, one-eyed giants, and crazy knights who fight windmills. Literacy is considered a beginning, not an end
…Well, maybe in some other country, but not this one. In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order. Poetry and plays have no relation to practical politics. Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don’t work. Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples. Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions. I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.
DN: You say something in your talk “The Operating Instructions” that fascinates me. That “home” isn’t your family, nor is the house where you live. Home is instead imaginary. And by imaginary you don’t mean illusory, but in some respects more real than any other place. You write, “Home, imagined, comes to be. It is real, realer than any other place, but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—whoever your people are.” Can you unpack that a little for us, the ways humans imagine “home,” create groups, invent ways to live, and imagine as a means of thriving?