∞-lecture

The left hand of darkness

Première publication : 1969

Lu du 10/08/2021 au 10/09/2021, à Rennes, Lannilis

Dans la bibliothèque

« I write science-fiction, and science-fiction isn't about the future. I don't know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less. [...]
I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist's way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find — if it's a good novel — that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this *in words*. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
Words can be used paradoxically because they have, along with a semiotic usage, a symbolical or metaphorical usage. (They also have a sound — a fact the linguistics positivists take no interest in. A sentence or a 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, rather than by the attentive intellect.)
All fiction is metaphor. Science-fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life — science, all the sciences and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlooks, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors ; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology ; the future is another. The future, in function, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel ; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination. »

P. 20

« How does one hate a country, or love one? [...] I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love when the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope. »

P. 212