Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing

by Ursula K. Le Guin

What are your thoughts on writing across difference, writing as a different race, gender, or otherwise, the risks and potential rewards of it? UKL: Oh, David, that’s a real can of worms. People have been talking about this for decades now. How far can you speak for a person of a culture not your own? My father was an anthropologist and ran smack into this. When does an attempt to understand become co-optation? This was of course extremely, egregiously visible when white people wrote in the person of Indians, from Fenimore Cooper on. They were co-opting the voice of the Indians, who had no literary voice at that time, but certainly had their own oral literature, their own voice and their own opinions. Those went unheard. They had to be interpreted through the whites. This goes on. Men have been speaking for women for thousands of years, when women had no voice whatsoever, in literature or anywhere else. And that still goes on. But then, okay, if you politicize that to the extent that you say nobody can speak for anybody else, then you get into a mess. Because what we need to say is nobody can speak for anybody who doesn’t have a voice. Of course this is where it gets sticky with animals. Of course, they don’t have a voice. That is their being. They don’t use language as we do. So to what extent can we speak for them? To a very limited extent. On the other hand you don’t have to be like the behavior scientists who say that because we don’t understand their feelings they don’...