April in Paris

Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them).

Today we'll be looking at Le Guin's first professional publication, the short story "April in Paris," published in 1962 in the magazine Fantastic. She was paid $30, which is the equivalent of $280 today. That's not too far off the current rate of $.08 per word paid today by Amazing Stories, which absorbed Fantastic in the 80s. It was the first "genre" piece, that is, a work of science fiction or fantasy, that she had written since age 12. It was republished along with her other early genre short stories in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters in 1975.

This is a story about two men living in the same apartment in Paris five centuries apart. Barry Pennywither is a professor in 1961 who has gotten a leave from teaching to come to Paris to do archival research. Jehan Lenoir is an alchemist in 1482, working on a treatise about the elements. Lenoir casts a spell and summons Pennywither to his room. The two men find that they have a surprising amount in common, as they're both interested in obscure topics and eager to have someone to talk to. They become close friends, living together in 1482. Eventually they decide that they also need some female companionship, so they summon two more individuals who have lived in the same place -- Bota, a Gaulish slave of a Roman commander, and Kislk, an archaeologist from seven thousand years in the future. They also summon a dog. The story ends with the four of them happily enjoying an April day in Paris.

As you can tell from my short summary, the plot of this story is pretty minimal. There's no grand conflict or great character arcs. It's a story about images and ideas, and makes a good illustration of what she would later call her carrier bag theory of fiction.

Since this is Le Guin's first published "genre" piece, let's start by talking about genre. Le Guin became famous and successful writing science fiction and fantasy, sometimes put under the umbrella of simply "genre" along with things like romance and westerns, in contrast to realist fiction, the genre that isn't a genre, the unmarked norm of genres. In her 2004 essay "Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love," she roasts the pretentiousness of readers and professors who look down their nose at "genre" literature. She mockingly imagines reversing the disdain: "Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and conventional subject matter. Re-Fi [Realistic Fiction] is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check." She's being sarcastic here, though of course, there are people who think just such disdainful things about realist literature, including myself at earlier points in my life, though they aren't usually the elites of the literary world. Le Guin argues that specific genres, like science fiction or fantasy, are useful devices because they train readers and writers how to handle certain tropes and ideas. She notes how badly realist writers tend to flop when they presume that since science fiction is a "lower" form of literature, they can easily write it without having been immersed in it. At the same time, she notes that the most exciting writing today crosses genre boundaries.

So which genre is "April in Paris"? Is it science fiction, because it's about time travel and involves an astronaut from another planet? Or is it fantasy, because it involves a magic spell with a pentagram and incantations? I am a skeptic of the idea that there's some fundamental or intrinsic distinction between science fiction and fantasy. To me, the difference is more about aesthetic or marketing than anything about the deep nature of the story. And I would cite Le Guin as an example, because I think her fantasy stories like Earthsea are more similar to than different from her science fiction like the Hainish series. They're part of a spectrum of ways to write about things that are impossible in our real world.

Le Guin herself thought there was an important difference. She was dissatisfied with the way her first novel, Rocannon's World, mixed science fiction and fantasy elements. As she wrote in an introduction to a later edition of it, "But of course fantasy and science fiction are different, just as red and blue are different; they have different frequencies; if you mix them (on paper -- I work on paper) you get purple, something else again. ... red is red and blue is blue and if you want either red or blue, don't mix them."

It's dangerous to disagree with someone so much smarter and more successful than yourself, especially when talking about her own work, but you know, life is short, might as well take some risks. Let's look at different ways that authors can handle incorporating impossible things into their stories, and how -- in my view -- they don't necessarily line up with traditional distinctions between science fiction and fantasy.

The first point to note is that "impossible" is a relative term. We're talking about things that are impossible according to the culture and scientific understanding of the author and their intended audience. This is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical of people like Stephen R Donaldson who argue that ancient epic literature like Beowulf or the Odyssey are fantasy. Whatever other similarities they may have to modern fantasy when read by modern readers, they would have been viewed by their authors and audience at the time as describing real, or at least perfectly possible, events. Homer thought the cyclops was real whereas Tolkien was aware he was making up ents. The relativity of impossible things is also important when looking at literature from contemporary people who have a different cultural background. Luckily for this podcast, Le Guin and I broadly share a Western secular cultural heritage. But I would need to be careful in analyzing, say, a work of Christian fiction where Jesus performs miracles in the story, or a work by an indigenous author where human characters communicate with animals or storms. What I view as impossible is not necessarily the same as what the author views as impossible.

I would say there are at least four different ways that impossible things can manifest in science fiction and fantasy, and they don't necessarily line up with the aesthetic or marketing distinctions of traditional genre or subgenre labels.

First, you have what I'll call extrapolated technology. This is where the story makes an effort to demonstrate that, while we haven't developed this specific technology yet, it's consistent with the known laws of the real world. Stories like this can teach you some science. As a side note, some of the most fascinating examples in this category come from past writers who extrapolated from what the science of their time said, but which current science says is incorrect. And when I say "science" here, I don't just mean the physical or natural sciences, the kind of extrapolation that gets labeled "hard" science fiction. You can build an extrapolated technology story around social science, like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series or George Orwell's 1984.

Second is what I'll call presumed technology. Here the story asserts that the technology is consistent with the laws of the real world, but doesn't make an effort to explain exactly how. Genre conventions have given authors a bunch of "freebies," that is, technologies we're willing to accept are plausible without needing a justification. This includes things like faster than light travel or suspended animation. The story here is about what people do with the technology, or how they handle situations that are only possible because of this impossible technology.

Third you have systematic magic. I use the term "magic" with some trepidation here, because it's not always referred to as magic in the text, and plenty of works with science fiction aesthetics really fall into this category. The original Star Wars trilogy, for example, mixed presumed technology with the systematic magic of The Force. What distinguishes this category is that the impossible things are governed by rules or laws that don't exist in the real world, but operate in a consistent way in the story's world. The laws can be interacted with and manipulated in the same way that known laws like gravity can be.

And finally, you have what I'll call enchantment. Here impossible things happen in ways that aren't governed by any real or invented law or rule. They happen in ways that are narratively interesting but beyond the grasp of the characters. The characters can react, but they don't presume to understand or control.

Where, then, does "April in Paris" fall? It seems to me to be a work of enchantment, at least with respect to its primary "impossible" event, the spell that summons the various characters to Lenoir's apartment. Lenoir is an alchemist, engaging in systematic magic from our point of view, or extrapolated technology from his own. And at first he seems to be approaching the summoning spell as an act of this kind of magic, manipulating some sort of supernatural forces to produce an effect. But look at the results. He summons not just any old person, but someone who he was intensely compatible with, someone who was lost and in need of just what he could provide, and vice versa. The magic is doing its own thing.

Understanding the summoning magic as this kind of enchantment takes a bit of the edge off the summoning of girlfriends for the two main male characters. Certainly this story is another example of Le Guin's early-career tendency to write about male characters from a masculine point of view. I was shipping Pennywither and Lenoir, but I know Fantastic wouldn't have published an overtly queer story in 1962. Yet Lenoir and Pennywither are not just going out to obtain wife-objects for their own benefit, like the male rabbits in Watership Down raiding Efrafa to get does. The nature of the summoning spell is to bring together people who need each other. Bota and Kislk aren't shoved into relationships with the men -- rather, they were looking for exactly what the spell brought them just as much as the men were.

Near the end of the story, Pennywither demands that Kislk explain the spell, since she has another seven thousand years of scientific advancement to draw on, far more even than the gap between Lenoir's alchemy and Pennywither's chemistry. She insists that "I've never seen nor heard of an authenticated case of magic." It seems that this spell is unique, operating outside of any sort of law of the universe. No amount of research by any of the three academic characters could ever uncover its rules.

If the spell is grabbing on to the need or incompleteness that each character feels, let's look at what that means for each of them.

We first meet Pennywither. His life feels empty. He's alone in a cold apartment, unable to recapture the excitement of his research trips abroad earlier in his career, and wondering whether anyone cares about his theory about what happened to the poet Francois Villon. As it happens, Lenoir is able to quickly confirm that Pennywither was wrong, and the conventional wisdom was right, about Villon. He laments "Nobody loved Dr. Pennywither, either; not even Dr. Pennywither. Why should he? An unsocial, unmarried, underpaid pedant, sitting here alone in an unheated attic in an unrestored tenement trying to write another unreadable book." Definitely a feeling that those of us in academia can relate to.

Lenoir is in many ways in a similar predicament. He is working on a treatise asserting the primacy of the element fire, but he despairs of being able to really prove it. He fears that his life, like Pennywither's, is pointless.

His initial reaction to the successful summoning is to imagine he has achieved the control over nature that he sought as an alchemist. He declares "Yes, I brought you here. If Nature will yield me no knowledge, then I can conquer Nature herself, I can work a miracle! To the Devil with science, then. ... I'm a sorcerer, a black magician, Jehan the Black! Magic works, does it? Then science is a waste of time." But having said that, he adds in a softer voice "I wish it hadn't worked." He can tell that mastery of nature is not what he really needed.

Pennywither and Lenoir seem at first to be able to offer each other exactly the kind of knowledge they want. Lenoir's study is packed with manuscripts that would be priceless historical treasures in Pennywither's time. And since Pennywither comes from the Atomic Age, he can enlighten Lenoir with knowledge of basic modern chemistry. But upon returning Pennywither to the twentieth century, Lenoir laments "But I learned so little! And a friend like that -- a real friend." The next day, he summons Pennywither again, and finds the historian excited to be reunited. He says "you weren't there -- I thought, my God, what have I done? I'd sell my soul to get back there, to him -- What can I do with what I've learned? Who'll believe it? How can I prove it?" They have both realized that knowledge and academic success can't fill the hole left by a lack of friendship. And Lenoir realizes that his spell was, to use my terminology from earlier, an enchantment rather than an act of systematic magic. He says "How -- after all -- how did this happen? That we're both men. No devils. No pacts in blood. Two men who've lived in this room ..."

The desire for female companionship is presented as growing out of the men's satisfaction with their friendship. "So they were happy for the first time in their lives; so happy, in fact, that certain desires always before subjugated to the desire for knowledge, began to awaken." They both excuse their bachelorhood with some frankly sexist assessments of the quality of women available in their own times, combined with self-doubt tied to their former feelings of meaninglessness. So, they set about seeking partners from other times.

Bota is summoned first, and her need is straightforward. She was a slave, and is impressed by the kindness that Pennywither offers here. The story is scant on the specifics of her sufferings in slavery in the Roman era, but we readers can fill in the details ourselves. As Pennywither's partner, she blossoms. Lenoir seems to be experiencing what we today would call compersion, happiness that his partner has also found love with another.

The depiction of Bota is honestly kind of a cheap device. She's the damsel in distress who falls in love with her rescuer. Pennywither gets to be the good guy because he clears the very low bar of not keeping her enslaved. In some ways this plot point echoes the way heroes in so much classic genre fiction are rewarded by "getting the girl" at the end after they save her, and the world. The one difference is that Pennywither is no hero. If we remember Le Guin's comments in "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," we can see that this story doesn't fit the heroic narrative very well -- it's not driven by conflict that the hero must overcome. So it's an illustration of how Le Guin was repeating problematic genre conventions while starting to rework and rethink them.

Le Guin can certainly be criticized here for a simplistic discussion of slavery. This is a good topic to put a pin in and revisit when we come to some of her later works that address slavery in more detail -- particularly the story suite Five Ways to Forgiveness and the young adult novel Powers.

Kislk is a bit more like Pennywither and Lenoir. In her future time, human biology and social organization have been perfected. Everyone is tall and healthy and beautiful, with no racial discrimination. Society is perfectly organized, with each person steered from childhood into training for the role best suited to their skills and personality. Kislk became an archaeologist because she's an introvert who prefers to have less interaction with other people. And yet despite the apparent perfection, she is dissatisfied with her life. Coming to 1482 is thus a revelation for her. As she says, "People bored me. All like me on the outside, all alien to me on the inside. When everything's alike, which place is home? ... But now I've seen a cathedral not in ruins. Now I've met a living man who's shorter than me, with bad teeth and a short temper. Now I'm home, I'm where I can be myself, I'm no longer alone!" The perfection of the future society left her in a state of anomie, an inability to connect with people or place.

I'm glad we only get a very brief glimpse of Kislk's home society. Le Guin is able to use the trope of the sterile perfect society to make a point that reinforces the themes of the story. But she's spared the temptation to become heavy-handed about it. The idea of perfection as dystopia is a well-worn one in the science fiction genre, and it's very hard to do well, without sounding preachy.

Bota and Kislk provide bookends to the range of experiences that Pennywither and Lenoir have had. They both discovered that finding genuine human connection was more important than their accomplishments or material circumstances. This remains true for the person who did have a perfect life, as well as for the slave who lived in misery that was caused by her lack of human connection, that is, by her master's refusal to see her as fully human.

The spell in this story is very clearly tied to place. It can range across thousands of years of history, but only at the exact location where it was cast. Pennywither and Lenoir occupy literally the same apartment 500 years apart, while Bota and Kislk live before and after the building, respectively, but were in that exact location when summoned.

The spell's connection to place prompts us to think about the characters' relationships to place. The three who travel through time are described as feeling disconnected from their place as much as they are from human relationships. Pennywither finds his apartment cold and unwelcoming. He wonders what he's doing so far away from his home in the United States. The impressive view of Notre Dame from his window doesn't impress him. Bota's home is described as a muddy, undeveloped island -- not a place that's very appealing to live even if you aren't enslaved there. And Kislk has experienced Paris only as ruins. There's some archaeological interest, but it isn't her home.

Lenoir isn't described as being quite so dissatisfied with his place, which may be why everyone ends up joining him in 1482. He is at most a bit bored of it, as shown by his idle graffiti while taking Pennywither on a tour of Notre Dame in its full medieval glory. His care for the place is reawakened by the others, who help him to see it through fresh eyes.

This brings us around to understanding the title, "April in Paris." The story is, of course, set in Paris, in April of four different years. But why name it after that? It's a title that carries romantic connotations. April in Paris sounds like a perfect place for a honeymoon (much better than October in Boston, which was my honeymoon). But this isn't a love story in the conventional sense, even though it does contain one strong homosocial bond and two successful heterosexual relationships.

Paris was, of course, where Le Guin met and married her husband. She did an undergrad and master's degree studying French literature. But she didn't stay. Paris wasn't home for her, the way northern California was, and Oregon would be. This question of what place can be home, can be in a relationship with you, resonates through her work. Her earliest explorations of the theme in this story and her Orsinian tales look to Europe, but that doesn't last. Le Guin isn't European, even if Pennywither, Lenoir, Bota, and Kislk in the end are.

Following "April in Paris," Le Guin published several more genre stories in various magazines. We're going to wait to talk about those when we come to the publication of her collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters, which brings together all of her early science fiction and fantasy short stories. In the next episode we'll be looking at the story "Semely's Necklace," which she would later repurpose into the prologue to her first novel, Rocannon's World.