@estão-lendo @Odranoel
Estou lendo um livro ótimo da Ursula Le Guin: Tha Language of The Night, de ensaios sobre literatura. Em um deles ("Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown"), ela conta como escreveu Os Despossuídos. Como esse foi um livro que gostamos tanto, vou colar aqui o trecho. Está em inglês, mas quem precisar é só usar o Google Translate ou outro tradutor.
(A "Mrs. Brown" que ela cita é uma expressão de Virgina Woolf, sobre uma personagem viva como uma pessoa, que idealmente aparece para quem escreve, e todo o livro é uma consequência dessa pessoa visualizada.)
The origin of my book The Dispossessed was equally clear, but it got very muddled before it ever came clear again. It too began with a person, seen much closer to, this time, and with intense vividness: a man, this time; a scientist, a physicist in fact; I saw the face more clearly than usual, a thin face, large clear eyes, and large ears—these, I think, may have come from a childhood memory of Robert Oppenheimer as a young man. But more vivid than any visual detail was the personality, which was most attractive—attractive, I mean, as a flame to a moth. There, there he is, I have got to get there this time…
My first effort to catch him was a short story. I should have known he was much too big for a short story. It’s a writer’s business to develop an infallible sense for the proper size and length of a work; the beauty of the novella and novel is essentially architectural, the beauty of proportion. It was a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice. This scientist was escaping from a sort of prison-camp planet, a stellar Gulag, and he gets to the rich comfortable spoiled sister planet, and finally can’t stand it despite a love affair there, and so re-escapes and goes back to the Gulag, sadly but nobly. Nobly but feeble-mindedly. Oh, it was a stupid story. All the metaphors were mixed. I hadn’t got anywhere near him. I’d missed him by so far, in fact, that I hadn’t damaged him at all. There he stood, quite untouched. Catch me if you can!
All right. All right, what’s your name. What is your name, by the way? Shevek, he told me promptly. All right. Shevek. So who are you? His answer was less certain this time. I think, he said, that I am a citizen of Utopia.
Very well. That sounded reasonable. There was something so decent about him, he was so intelligent and yet so disarmingly naïve, that he might well come from a better place than this. But where? The better place; no place. What did I know about Utopia? Scraps of More, fragments of Wells, Hudson, Morris. Nothing. It took me years of reading and pondering and muddling, and much assistance from Engels, Marx, Godwin, Goldman, Goodman, and above all Shelley and Kropotkin, before I could begin to see where he came from, and could see the landscape about him—and yes, in a way it was a prison camp, but what a difference!—and the other people, the people whom his eyes saw; and the place, the other place, to which he was going, and from which I now knew, as he had always known, why he must return.
Thus in the process of trying to find out who and what Shevek was, I found out a great deal else, and thought as hard as I was capable of thinking, about society, about my world, and about myself. I would not have found out or been able to communicate any of this if I had not been doggedly pursuing, through all byways and side roads, the elusive Mrs. Brown.
The book that resulted is a Utopia, of sorts; it is didactic, therefore satirical, and idealistic. It is a thematic novel, in Angus Wilson’s definition, in that it does not entirely manage to “disseminate the moral proposition so completely in a mass of living experience that it is never directly sensed as you read but only apprehended at the end as a result of the life you have shared in the book. This,” Mr. Wilson goes on, “is the real challenge and triumph of the novel” (The Wild Garden). I did not fully meet that challenge or achieve that triumph. The moral proposition of The Dispossessed is sometimes fully embodied, sometimes not. The sound of axes being ground is occasionally audible. Yet I do believe that it is, basically, a novel, because at the heart of it you will not find an idea, or an inspirational message, or even a stone ax, but something much frailer and obscurer and more complex: a person. I have been strengthened in this belief by noticing that almost every reviewer, however carried away in supporting or attacking or explaining the book’s themes and ideas, somewhere in the discussion has mentioned its protagonist by name. There he is!—there, if only for a moment. If I had to invent two entire worlds to get to him, two worlds and all their woes, it was worth it. If I could give the readers one glimpse of what I saw: Shevek, Mrs. Brown, the Other, a soul, a human soul, “the spirit we live by…”
