Ursula K. Le Guin=The Awesome
I just watched Goro Miyazaki’s Tales of Earthsea/Gedo Senki again with some friends. Although this was a much better version with much better subtitles, it didn’t really change my thoughts about the film, which I discussed here. But afterwards I was doodling around a little on Ursula K. Le Guin’s web site afterward and came across a short essay entitled “What Makes A Story.” Now, I’ve read a very similarly titled essay, “What is a Short Story?” by Marion Zimmer Bradley, another writer I respect a lot. Bradley’s essay made me mad with the limiting definition it gave for the “commercial” short story. Someday I may write more about that, but suffice it to say that I was little bit hesitant when I clicked on this link on Le Guin’s page.
I was silly to worry. Not only are her meditations on what a story is beautiful and expansive enough to include all the stories I love, she wonderfully encapsulated what I think is so wrong about traditional attempts to define the story by writing:
“A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end:” This comes from Aristotle, and it splendidly describes a great many stories from the European narrative tradition, but it doesn’t describe all stories. It’s a recipe for steak, it’s not a recipe for tamales.
I think the best antidote for restrictive definitions of stories is just to read a lot of different stories from different cultures and see for yourself how false they really are. Le Guin captures that idea marvelously.
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