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LEGUIN_AGAIN

                                             March 18, 2022

Going through one
of my old pages:                      That was part of the
                                      original late-80s "doomfile".
  LEGUIN
                                                              HISTORY

   I'm still substantially in agreement with Delany's
   criticism of "The Dispossessed", but I can think of
   a few points you might raise in response:

   (1) Delany seems to feel that the the intellectual
   achievements of the genius-hero Shevek (and perhaps
   also the "philosophy of Odo") aren't really worth
   taking seriously.

   I suspect if you *did* take Shevek seriously-- I can't
   say that I do-- then some of the "van Vogtian babble"
   that Delany complained about at the outset of the
   novel might work better. That stuff about how the wall
   "degenerated into mere geometry, an idea of a
   boundary" looks like a nod toward the abstract world
   of mathematics.

   (2) Delany's rejection of much of the novel's grasp
   of gender differences is stated as though it's
   entirely rooted in Delany's experiences, but you
   could argue it's *also* rooted in an ideological
   position: Delany is a hard-core environmental
   determinist in these matters, and while that's not
   at all a bad place to start (or at least, not in
   my opinion) I think we ought to be able to do a
   little better than rely on Delany's personal             My current under-
   experience.                                              standing: gender
                                                            differences are not
   Just to pick one thing Delany picks on: Le Guin          *all* "cultural
   presumes that are women are softer and curvier           constructs", but we
   than men-- Delany essentially argues that's a            do have a tendency
   cultural bias, and the kind of culture Shevek            to exaggerate the
   comes out of would not have it.  I wouldn't want         strength of the
   to presume either way myself, but I'd like to hear       "biological" and
   from anthropologists doing cross-cultural                hide our cultural
   analysis: is Le Guin right in general, on average,       biases behind it.
   for most cultures, or is Delany correct that she
   was being parochial?


On that old page I floated an idea for a project to
do a direct comparison of the objections Delany and          POMPOUS_ROSE
Benford/Platt both raise to Le Guin-- it's not
clear to me why I didn't just do it...

In some ways it's very simple: they both accuse Le Guin
of being out-of-touch with reality, but Delany comes at
her from the left (accusing her of what now might be
called "gender essentialism"), and Benford/Platt come at
her from the right, accusing her of ignoring the
limitations built into human nature.





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