A Little Fear

"That may be why I was attracted to all of those. Wrightson is a writer who got in trouble eventually for using Australian aboriginal mythic materials. At the time she started writing, that didn’t seem to be controversial, appropriating another culture, but by the end of her career, she kind of got erased for having done that. She was a proponent of bringing back native cultures and her thinking was probably filtered through the kinds of narratives that she was familiar with. She was very interested in how you inhabit the Australian continent if you’re a European who’s come in and whose stories don’t quite fit there. They’re like ill-fitting garments. And, yet, you don’t have ownership or rights to the stories that are already there, on the land. So a lot of what she did was to try to find some sort of crossover, some sort of mediation. I think she was probably as successful in this little book, A Little Fear, as in any of them because it doesn’t try to make any claims for the indigenous materials. They stay unassimilated and independent, and yet have to be confronted. Le Guin was writing probably not intentionally Jungian structures but she has a creature or an entity called the Shadow, so it’s pretty hard to escape Jung on that. And then there’s a lot of Daoism , the kind of sense of the balance forces of the universe. What does a wizard do in that kind of a world? And again, especially with death, which is the ultimate fear that keeps coming back throughout the Earthsea books. The formulation of how you deal with it changes from book to book. I think one of the great things about that series is that she didn’t erase anything she’d done before, but she kept rethinking and complicating the relationships."