The Moral Metaphors of Fantasy
By now, Ursula K. Le Guin’s legacy as one of the greatest speculative fiction authors in history is secure. She passed away in 2018 but the stories she told, the characters she created, and the worlds she crafted continue to be celebrated by millions of fans across the world. Her work has reached and inspired a new generation of readers (and writers). There is no doubt about her place as one of the genre’s pioneers.
A lot of people may wonder what exactly made her so good as a fantasy author. The answer is obvious. It is, in fact, a lot of things. Her plotting was tight and tense. Her characters were complex and well-written. High-quality prose in her novels was a given. Social, political, and gender themes were also always a key feature of her work. She created many of the tropes of modern fantasy including wizard schools and magical names. She was also the first to write stories centered on non-white characters. In fact, for decades, she had to fight with publishers who would forcibly put white-passing character images on her novel covers to sell more, a series of acts that prompted her to disallow any cover for her books.
But here, we will briefly look at just one small aspect of what made Le Guin the giant that she was. To borrow Le Guin’s own words, we call this aspect the moral metaphors of fantasy. What this really implies in simple terms is that Ursula K. Le Guin was using fantasy to articulate thoughts that no one else during her time, and perhaps even after her, had attempted to do so. She trusted her readers to be good enough to follow her into this approach. This alone puts her in a league of her own. We will highlight one of her major fantasy works here, and keep the discussion of her equally important sci-fi stories for another time.
When Le Guin first entered the adult fantasy genre as a writer, she did not have much to build upon. The genre’s template had been set up by J.R.R. Tolkien not long ago. Aside from him, other storytellers were writing fantasy more in line with the tropes of sword-and-sorcery and horror. The tradition of fantasy that she had inherited envisioned these stories as essentially a saga of a war between good and evil, between two opposing forces. In her own words:
“Hero tales and adventure fantasies traditionally put the righteous hero in a war against unrighteous enemies, which he (usually) wins. This convention was and still is so dominant that it’s taken for granted — “of course” a heroic fantasy is good guys fighting bad guys, the War of Good Against Evil.”
And this vision of fantasy-as-war continues to permeate most of the mainstream modern fantasy, even in stories where significant moral ambiguities exist (such as ASOIAF or the First Law trilogy). Le Guin refused to indulge in war as a metaphor. Her reasons for this were simple. She could already perceive back then how war was a limiting metaphor and had the adverse effect of holding back the potential of fantasy as a genre. She herself explains it beautifully in her retrospective essay on her first Earth Sea novel:
“My mind doesn’t work in terms of war. My imagination refuses to limit all the elements that make an adventure story and make it exciting — danger, risk, challenge, courage — to battlefields. A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media, the mechanical slaughter of endless battalions of black-clad, yellow-toothed, red-eyed demons. War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might”.
Le Guin’s eyes were looking at facets of fantasy far beyond wars and clearly defined violent conflicts. And this is obvious from her first Earthsea novel, A Wizard of Earthsea. The protagonist of this novel, Ged, is a talented sorcerer from an island who eventually ends up studying at an academy of Wizards in a world mired by multiple political conflicts. On first look, this story seems set for a typical war saga. But here in this narrative filled to the brim with dragons, dark shadows, magic, lore, political intrigue, tragedy, and a worldwide scope, war is not the defining feature. That is not to say that Le Guin is afraid to pull any punches. Violence is always there, hiding beneath the exterior of the plot and often jumping out when called for. But there is no singular enemy or group of enemies our protagonist and his allies have to fight. The core conflict of AWOES is internal. It is between Ged and something that is rooted deeply within him. There is no firmly established moral dichotomy in Earthsea. Only humans (and other creatures) doing what they can to live. The story carries nearly all the human emotions of kindness, love, envy, pain, anger, cruelty. And it concludes with a discovery that in Le Guin’s words “brings him [Ged] victory, the kind of victory that isn’t the end of a battle but the beginning of life.”
This same approach is built up further in her later novels. AWOES was Le Guin’s first attempt at fantasy and therefore she did not believe it was as good as she would’ve liked. But in later novels, she further expanded her scope to incorporate a wide range of moral metaphors using fantasy. These later novels also reflect Le Guin’s growth as a person herself as she believed that she had finally learned feminism and developed her political beliefs further. She was no longer writing stories about just men based on templates set by other men. This is particularly mirrored in her final two Earthsea novels — Tehanu and The Other Wind. But this is a theme for another discussion.
For now, it is worth remembering that all this was possible because Le Guin, unlike many of her contemporaries and successors, trusted her readers. And it is important to recognize what Le Guin’s metaphors of fantasy did for the genre. She did not let fantasy be confined to the white-centric, heroic saga tropes it had been subjected to (and still is, despite the efforts of Le Guin and those who came after her). She understood the immense potential of fantasy in exploring the nuances of human morality. She refused to engage in the pointless discussion of ‘child’ vs. ‘adult’ fantasy. It simply did not matter to her. What mattered was writing a meaningful story that captures the human condition in all its complexity and messiness. The simplistic reduction of humanity to fighting clear cut wars was not enough. The moral lessons to be learned from stories were not meant to be simplistic or superficial. Beating enemies through force is not sufficient to find conclusions for our problems in real life. Why should this be the case in fantasy then? Are fictional worlds supposed to be simplistic? What does a good moral position look like? Le Guin probed these questions in her fantasy and then answered them emphatically.
And this effort to make fantasy into a complete, multi-layered, complex affair is one of Le Guin’s most important contributions. Her politics, her writing, her characterization were all engaged with and emanated from this core effort. On 21st October 2020, Le Guin would’ve been 91 years old. But she isn’t here anymore. She is gone. In her stead, she has left an entire legacy of powerful fantasy storytelling. Our way to pay tribute to her is to read the stories she crafted and to learn the nuanced lessons she taught us. And then say thank you to her. RIP Ursula K. Le Guin, the queen of fantasy fiction.
