摘抄

 But I know also that by that partiality, that independence, that distancing from the shared experience, it will be new: a revelation. It will be a vision, a more or less powerful or haunting dream. A view in ,not out. A space-voyage through somebody else’s psychic abysses. It will fall short of tragedy, because tragedy is the truth, and truth is what the very great artists, the absolute novelists, tell. It will not be truth; but it will be imagination.
Truth is best. For it encompasses tragedy, and partakes of the eternal joy. But very few of us know it; the best we can do is recognize it . imagination-to me –is next best. For it partakes of Creation, which is one aspect of the eternal joy.
(later revised)
 We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel—or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel—is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become. A person who had never know another human being could not be introspective any more than a terrier can, or a horses; he might (improbably)keep himself alive, but he could not know anything about himself, no matter how long he lived with himself. And a person who had never listened to nor read a tale or myth or parable or story, would remain ignorant of his own emotional and spiritual heights and depths, would not know quite full what it is to be human. For the story—from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.(from “Prophets and Mirros: Science Fiction as a Way of Seeing,” The Living Light 7:3(Fall 1970)
 I don’t’ think of sf writhers merely play with scientific or other ideas, merely speculate or extrapolate; I think—if ther’re doing their job—they get very involved with them. They take them personally, which is precisely what scientists must forbid themselves to do. They try to hook them in with the rest of existence. A writher’s ability to find a genuine theme （and the great writhers’ ability to develop profound and complex themes out of very simple materials）seems to be a function of his capacity to see implications, to make connection.(from “On Theme,”in Robin Scott Wilson,ed.,Those who Can(New York:NAL Mentor,1973))
 The novel, as she defines it and as she tries to create it , also speaks to , and of , the individual. Thus it is important, because “in its stubborn assertion of human personality and human morality, [it]does seem even now to affirm the existence of hope”
 The Creation of Imaginary Worlds
 Like all our evil propensities, the imagination will out. But if it is rejected and despised, it will grow into wild and weedy shapes; it will be deformed. At its best, it will be mere ego-centered daydreaming ;at its worst, it will be wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it is taken seriously.
 The trilogy is , in one aspect, about the artist. The artist as magician. The trickster. Prospero.
 The ego, the little private individual consciousness, knows this, and it knows that ti f it’s not to be trapped in the hopeless silence of autism it must identify with something outside itself, beyond itself, larger than itself. If it’s weak, or if it’s offered nothing better what it does is identify with the “collective consciousness.” That is Jung’s term for a kind of lowest common denominator of all the little egos added together, the mass mind, which consists of such things as cults, creeds, fads, fashions , status-seeking, conventions, received beliefs, advertising, popcult, all the isms, all the ideologies, all th hollow forms of communication and “togetherness” that lack real communion or real sharing. The ego, accepting these empty forms, becomes a member of the “lonely crowd. “ to avoid this ,to attain real community, it must turn inward, away from the crowd, to the source: it must identify with its own deeper regions, the great unexplored regions of the Self. These regions of the psyche Jun calls the “collective unconscious,” and it is in them, where we al meet, that he sees the source of true community: of felt religion; of art, grace, spontaneity, and love.
 Unadmitted to consciousness, the shadow is projected outward, onto others. There’s nothing wrong with me—it’s them. I’m not a monster, other people are monsters. All foreigners are evil. All communists are evil. All capitalist are evil It was the cat that makde me kick him, Mummy.
 The normal adolescent ceases to project so blithely as the little child did; he realizes that you can’t blame everything on the bad guys with the black Stetsons. He begins to take responsibility for his acts and feelings. And with it he often shoulders a terrible load of guilt. He sees his shadow as much blacker, more wholly evil, than it is . the only way for a youngster to get past the paralyzing self-blame and self –disgust of the stage is really to look at that shadow, to face it ,warts and fangs and pimples and claws and all-to accept it as himself-as part of himself. The ugliest part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. The guide inward and out again; downward asn up again; there, as Bilbo the Hobbit said and back again the guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.
“Lucifer” means the one who carries the light.
 (killing the animal)Apparently the meaning of this is that when yyou have followed the animal instincts far enough, then they must be sacrificed, so that the true self, the whole person, may step forth from the body of the animal, reborn. That is von Franz’s explanation, and it sounds fair enough……
 Or you get that business about “there is a little bit of bad in the best of us and a little bit of good in the worst of us,” a dangerous banalization of the fact, which is that there is incredible potential for good and for evil in every one of us.
 They still do not realize that a symbol is not a sigh of something know, but an indicator of something not known and not expressible otherwise than symbolically. They mistake symbol (living meaning ) for allegory ( dead equivalence).
 (superman and others) Their roots are the roots of myth, are in our unconscious—that vast dim region of the psyche and perhaps beyond the psyche, which Jung called “collective” because it is similar in all of us, just as our bodies are basically similar. Their vigor comes from there, and so they cannot be dismissed as unimportant. Not when they can help motivate a world movement such as fascism!—But neither can they furnish material useful to art. They have the vitality of the collective unconscious, but nothing else, no ethical, aesthetic, or intellectual value. They have no element of the true myth except its emotive, irrational “thereness.”
 Like any artist, the science fiction writer is trying to make and use such a connection or bridge between the conscious and the unconscious—so that his readers can make the journey too. If the only tool he uses is the intellect, he will produce only lifeless copies or parodies of the archetypes that live in his own deeper mind and in the great works of art and mythology. If he abandons intellect, he’s likely to submerge his own personality and talent in a stew of mindless submyths, themselves coarse, feeble parodies of their archetypal origins. The only way to the truly collective, to the image that is alive and meaning ful in all of us, seems to be through the truly personal. Not the impersonality of pure reason; not the impersonality of the “the masses”; but the irreducibly personal—the self. To reach the others, the artist goes int himself. Using reason,he deliberately enters the irrational. The farther he goes into himself, the closer he comes to the other.
If this seems a paradox it is only because our culture overvalues abstraction and extraversion. Pain, for instance, can work the same way. Nothing is more personal, more unshareable, than pain; the worst thing about suffering is that you suffer alone. Yet those who are cut off in cold isolation from their fellow men. Pain, the loneliest experience, gives rise to sympathy, to love: the bridge between self and other, the means of communion. So with art. The artist who goes into himself most deeply—and it is a painful journey—is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.
Of all the great psychologist, Jung best explains this process, by stressing the existence, not of an isolated “id,” but a “collective unconscious.” He reminds us that the region of the mind/body that lies beyond the narrow, brightly lit domain of consciousness is very much the same in all of us. This does not imply a devaluing of consciousness or of reason. The achievement of individual conscious, which Jung calls “differentiation,” is to him a great achievement, civilization’s highest achievement, the hop of our future. But the tree grows only from deep roots.
 Scholars can have great fun, and can strengthen the effect of such figures, by showing their relationship to other manifestations of the archetype in myth, legend, dogma, and art. These linkages can be highly illuminating. Frankenstein’s monster is related to the Golem; to Jesus; to Prometheus. Tarzan is a direct descendant of the Wolfchild/noble Savage on one side, and every child’s fantasy of the Orphan-of-High-Estate on the other. The robot may be seen as the modern ego’s fear of the body, after the crippling division of “mind” and “body”, “ghost” and “machine”, enforced by post-Renaissance mechanistic thought. In “The Time Machine” there is one of the great visions of the End, and archetype of eschatology comparable to any religious vision of the day of judgment. In “nightfall” there is the fundamental opposition of dark and light, playing on the fear of darkness that we share with our cousins the great apes. Through Philip K.Dick’s work one can follow an exploration of the ancient themes of identity and alienation, and the sense of the fragmentation of the ego. In Stanislaw Lem’s works there seems to be a similarly complex and subtle exploration of the archetypal Other, the alien.
 Then there’s the other side of the same coin. If you hold a thing to be totally different from yourself, your fear of it may come out as hatred, or as awe-reverence. So we get al those wise and kindly being who deign to rescue Earth from her sins and perils. The Alien ends up on a pedestal in a white nightgown and a virtuous smirk---- exactly as the “good woman “did in the Victorian Age.
 If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself—as man have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation---you may hate it , or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality, and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished you own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.
 The original and instinctive movement of fantasy is , of course, inward. Fantasy is so introverted by nature that often some objective “hook” is necessary to bring it out into the open and turn it into literature. Classically, satire provide this hook, as in Ariosto or Swift. Or the reforming impulse shaped the dreamworld into a rational Utopia. Or identification with nature enabled the Romantic fantasist to speak, at leat briefly, out of the silence of the moors. Nowadays it is science that often gives fantasy a hand up from the interior depths, and we have science fiction, a modern, intellectualized, extraverted form of fantasy. Its limitations and strengths are those of extraversion: the power and the intractability of the object.
 Here, Le Guin gives a candid account of how easily “a pure pursuit of freedom and the dream “ can be misdirected by “the lure of the pulpit,” as powerful a limitation as the lures of fame and money.
 The impermasuit is a good example of where fantasy and science fiction don’t shade gracefully into one another. A symbol from collective fantasy—the Cloak of Protection (invisibility, etc.) _is decked out with some pseudoscientific verbiage and a bit of vivid description, and passed off as a marvel of Future Technology. This can be done triumphantly if the symbol goes deep enough( Well’s Time Machine), but if it’s merely decorative or convenient, it’s cheating. It degrades both symbol and science; it confuses possibility with probability, and ends up with neither.
 Am I to sacrifice the ideal of truth and beauty in order to make an ideological point?
Again, the radical feminist’s answer may be, Yes. Though that answer is sometimes identical with the voice of the Censor, speaking merely for fanatic or authoritarian bigotry, it may not be: it may speak in the service of the ideal itself. To build, one must tear down the old. The generation that has to do the tearing down has all the pain of destruction and little of the joy of creation .The courage that accepts that task and all the ingratitude and obloquy that go with it is beyond praise.
But it can’t be forced or faked. If it is force it leads to mere spitefulness and self-destructiveness; if it is faked it leads to Feminist Chic, the successor to Radical Chic. It’s one thing to sacrifice fulfillment in the service of an ideal; it’s another to suppress clear thinking and honest feeling in the service of an ideology. And ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling.
 The modern literary cliché si: Bad people are interesting, good people are dull. This isn’t true even if you accept the sentimental definition of evil upon which it’s based; good people, like good cooking, good music, good carpentry, etc., whether judged ethically or aesthetically, tend to be more interesting, varied, complex, and surprising than bad people, bad cooking, etc. the lovable rogue, the romantic criminal, the revolutionary Satan are essentially literary creation, not met with in daily life. The are embodiments of desire, types of the soul; thus their vitality is immense and lasting; but they are better suited to poetry and drama than to the novel. People in novels, like those in daily life, tend to be all more or less stupid, meddling, incompetent and greedy, doing evil without exactly intending to ;,among them the full-blown Villain seems improbable( just as he does in daily life). It takes a very great novelist to write a character that is both truly and convincingly evil, such as Dickens’s Uriah Heep, or, more subtly, Steerforth. Real villains are rare; and they never, I believe occur in flocks. Herds of Bad Guys are the death of a novel. Whether they’re labeled politically, racially, sexually, by creed, species, or whatever, they just don’t work.
 The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty. The reason Bronte does not mention it is probably that it was never even a temptation to her, as it was to here sister Charlotte. Emily did not give a damn about other people’s morals. But many artists, particularly artists of the word, whose ideas must actually be spoken in their work, succumb to the temptation. They began to see that they can do good to other people. They forget about liberty, then, an instead of legislating in divine arrogance, like God or Shelley, the begin to preach.
 …..It is a very strong lure to a science fiction writer, who deals more directly than most novelists with ideas, whose metaphors are shaped by or embody ideas, and who therefore is always in danger of inextricably confusing ideas with opinions.
 ….The work must stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and despair, toward justice, or with or grace, or liberty.
 In a story so conceived, the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrifice, nor is there any built-in dead end: thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.
 Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.
 “The truth against the world!”---Yes. Certainly. Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it ,serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places…..
 But it is words that make the trouble and confusion. We are asked now to consider words as useful in only one way: as signs. Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact which is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and ---ideally ---quantifiable.
 I talk about the gods, I an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
The only truth I can understand or express, logically defined,, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.
 Words can be used thus paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolic or metaphoric usage. ( They also have a sound---a fact the linguistic positivists take no interest in. a sentence or paragraph is like a chord or harmonic sequence in music: its meaning may be more clearly understood by the attentive ear, even though it is read in silence, than by the attentive intellect.)
 What our problem might be, God knows; I only know we would have them. But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation—exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth. Our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from ying. Instead of a search for balance and integration, there is a struggle for dominance. Divisions are insisted upon, interdependence is denied. The dualism of value that destroys us ,the dualism of superior/inferior, urler/ruled, owner/owned, user/used, might give way to what seems to me, from here, a much healthier, sounder, more promising modality of integration and integrity.
 There is no heroics in Dick’s books, but there are heroes. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness, and patience of ordinary people. The flashier qualityies such as courage are merely contributory to that dull, solid goodness in which—alone—lies the hope of deliverance from evil.
 The shy offer of a cigarette is a thoroughly Dickian gesture of salvation. Nobody ever saves the Galactic Empire from the Tentacles Andromedans. Something has indeed been saved, but only a human soul. We are about as far from the panoply of space opera as we can get. And yet Dick is a science fiction writer—not borrowing the trappings to deck out old nonsense with shiny chromium fittings, but using the new metaphors because he needs them ;using them with power and beauty, because they are the language appropriate to what he wants to say, to us, about ourselves. Dick is no escapist, and no “futurist.” He is a prophet, yes, but in the I Ching sense, in the sense in which poets are prophets: not because he plays fortelling games, with Rand, extrapolates the next technological gimmick, but because his moral vision is desperately clear, and because his art is adequate to express that vision.
 The cult of personality, prevalent in art as in politics, is simply not her game.
 It is a truism to say that a writer(or any artist) cannot depend, in any profound sense, on the judgment of others; he has got see his own mistakes and his own virtue. But what is not said so often-and is very hard to say to the young, the ambitious, the impatient-is that this takes not only will, not only work, but time. And intellectual decision can be reached quickly, a rational perception can be made all at once, but in order to be useful to the artist, it has all got to get down into the unconscious, and ferment in the darkness, and work slowly back into the ligh. The artist’s judgment of his own work-upon which the value of his work depends- is made with his entire personality, and until the personality is formed, and the psychic processes are perfected, the judgment will be incomplete.
 Well, I call this escapism: a sensationalist raising of a real question, followed by a quick evasion of the weight and pain and complexity involved in really ,experientially, trying to understand and cope with that question.
 Where the market reigns, fashion reigns. The fine arts, like the arts of costume, cooking, furnishing, etc., become subject to a constant pressure to change, since novelty, regardless of quality, is a marketable value, a publicizable value. It is , of course , avery limited kind of novelty.
 The almost limitless freedom of form available to the modern artist is , I think, a function of this trivialization of art. If art is taken seriously by its creators or consumers, that total permissiveness disappears, and the possibility of the truly revolutionary reappears…..But if art is seen as having moral, intellectual, and social content, if real statement is considered possible, then, on the artist’s side, self-discipline becomes a major element of creation.
 Novels of despair are intended, most often, to be admonitory, but I think they are, like pornography, most often escapist, in that they provide a substitute for action, a draining-off of tension. That is why they sell well. They provide and excuse to scream, for writer and reader. A gut reaction, and nothing further. An automatic response to violence—a mindless response. When you start screaming, you have stopped asking questions.
 When art shows only haw and what, it is trivial entertainment, whether optimistic or despairing. When it asks why, it rises from mere emotional response to real statement, and to intelligent ethical choice. It becomes, not a passive reflection, but an act.
And that is when all the censors, of the governments and of the marketplace, become afraid of it.
 (Zamyatin) Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken—errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machines, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! …….if there were anything fixed in nature, if there were truths, all this would of course, be wrong. But, fortunately, all truths are erroneous; this is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.
虽然有很细微的地方我和她意见不一致，可是从总体来说，是一本非常有教益的好书。