Lundi 22 Janvier 2018 mourrait Ursula K. Le Guin, auteure majeure de la littérature anglophone, accessoirement connue pour des œuvres dites de "Science-fiction" et de "Fantasy".
Féministe de toujours elle avait prêté une attention particulière à la couleur de peau de ses personnages.
Discrètement elle inventait des formes de récit sortant de l'ordinaire : la fresque de "La vallée de l'éternel retour" ou le scénario de King Dog publié pour que chaque lecteur soit le metteur en scène de son propre film.
Avec la même discrétion elle savait s'exprimer sur les embardées de la société et maintenir un point de vue moral nécessaire par les temps que nous connaissons.
En quelques jours la dizaine de médias anglophones que je consulte régulièrement a publié une vingtaine d'articles (voir ci-dessous) et même Libération lui a consacré une double page, assez convenue et peu intéressante au demeurant.
Elle avait de plus des liens personnels avec la France.
Pas une ligne dans Mediapart. Partagerait-on les préjugés usuels contre la littérature "de genre" ou tout simplement la littérature populaire ?
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43326-fantasy-novelist-ursula-le-guin-who-explored-resistance-and-change-dies-at-age-88
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43326-fantasy-novelist-ursula-le-guin-who-explored-resistance-and-change-dies-at-age-88#15168380961421&action=collapse_widget&id=0&data=
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/146736/rip-ursula-le-guin
https://slate.com/culture/2018/01/appreciation-and-obituary-of-ursula-k-le-guin.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html
https://www.salon.com/2018/01/23/american-novelist-ursula-k-le-guin-dies-at-88/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/24/ursula-k-le-guin-margaret-atwood-tribute
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/25/ursula-le-guin-david-mitchell-earthsea
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/14/she-makes-the-ordinary-feel-as-important-as-the-epic-the-gift-of-ursula-le-guin
https://www.thenation.com/article/i-came-with-a-calling-remembering-ursula-k-le-guin/
https://www.thenation.com/article/video-ursula-k-le-guin-on-listening-to-the-unheard-voices/
https://www.thenation.com/article/ursula-le-guin-has-stopped-writing-fiction-but-we-need-her-more-than-ever/
https://www.truthdig.com/videos/science-fiction-writer-ursula-k-le-guin-movingly-warns-against-the-dangers-of-capitalism-video/
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/truthdigger-late-great-ursula-k-le-guin/
https://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11388736/ursula-leguin-blurb-letter
https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/1/23/16925542/ursula-k-le-guin-obituary
https://www.wired.com/story/remembering-ursula-le-guin/
https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/araz-hachadourian/ursula-k-leguin-calls-on-fantasy-and-sci-fi-writers-to-envision-alt
https://www.thecanary.co/global/2018/01/25/something-missing-obituaries-literary-icon/
https://www.thenation.com/article/video-ursula-k-le-guin-on-listening-to-the-unheard-voices/
Son discours d'acceptation du "National book Award" en 2014 qui a fait grand bruit. Elle terminait par un effort que la gauche oubie ttrop souvent : réclamer le mot "liberté".
"To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who've been excluded from literature for so long - my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.
Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality.
Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this - letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.
Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
I've had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don't want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the nameof our beautiful reward isn't profit. Its name is freedom."
Un poème de son dernier recueil. A rapprocher du dernier entretien avec Zoe Carpenter.
Disremembering
In Alice’s wood where things forgot their names
and fawn and child walked together fearless,
a stone might flower, a spring burst into flames,
a heavy human soul go light and careless.
But through the forest of the failing mind
where words decay like leaves, and paths long trodden
are lost, the soul plods onward to no end,
fawns, children, flowers, flames forgotten.