Dancing at the Edge of the World
Page 3
I regret even more certain timidities or ineptnesses I showed in following up the psychic implications of Gethenian physiology. Just for example, I wish I had known Jung’s work when I wrote the book: so that I could have decided whether a Gethenian had no animus or anima, or both, or an animum…. [For another example (and Jung wouldn’t have helped with this, more likely hindered) I quite unnecessarily locked the Gethenians into heterosexuality. It is a naively pragmatic view of sex that insists that sexual partners must be of opposite sex! In any kemmerhouse homosexual practice would, of course, be possible and acceptable and welcomed—but I never thought to explore this option; and the omission, alas, implies that sexuality is heterosexuality. I regret this very much.] But the central failure in this area comes up in the frequent criticism I receive, that the Gethenians seem like men, instead of menwomen.
This rises in part from the choice of pronoun. I call Gethenians “he” because I utterly refuse to mangle English by inventing a pronoun for “he/she.” [This “utter refusal” of 1968 restated in 1976 collapsed, utterly, within a couple of years more. I still dislike invented pronouns, but I now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammarians, for until the sixteenth century the English generic singular pronoun was they/them/their, as it still is in English and American colloquial speech. It should be restored to the written language, and let the pedants and pundits squeak and gibber in the streets. In a screenplay of The Left Hand of Darkness written in 1985, I referred to Gethenians not pregnant or in kemmer by the invented pronouns a/un/a’s, modeled on a British dialect. These would drive the reader mad in print, I suppose; but I have read parts of the book aloud using them, and the audience was perfectly happy, except that they pointed out that the subject pronoun, “a” pronounced “uh” [ǝ], sounds too much like “I” said with a Southern accent.] “He” is the generic pronoun, damn it, in English. (I envy the Japanese, who, I am told, do have a he/she pronoun.) But I do not consider this really very important. [I now consider it very important.] The pronouns wouldn’t matter at all if I had been cleverer at showing the “female” component of the Gethenian characters in action. [If I had realized how the pronouns I used shaped, directed, controlled my own thinking, I might have been “cleverer.”] Unfortunately, the plot and structure that arose as I worked the book out cast the Gethenian protagonist, Estraven, almost exclusively in roles that we are culturally conditioned to perceive as “male”—a prime minister (it takes more than even Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi to break a stereotype), a political schemer, a fugitive, a prison-breaker, a sledge-hauler…. I think I did this because I was privately delighted at watching, not a man, but a manwoman, do all these things, and do them with considerable skill and flair. But, for the reader, I left out too much. One does not see Estraven as a mother, with his children [strike “his”], in any role that we automatically perceive as “female”: and therefore, we tend to see him as a man [place “him” in quotation marks, please]. This is a real flaw in the book, and I can only be very grateful to those readers, men and women, whose willingness to participate in the experiment led them to fill in that omission with the work of their own imagination, and to see Estraven as I saw him [read: as I did], as man and woman, familiar and different, alien and utterly human.
It seems to be men, more often than women, who thus complete my work for me: I think because men are often more willing to identify as they read with poor, confused, defensive Genly, the Earthman, and therefore to participate in his painful and gradual discovery of love.
[I now see it thus: Men were inclined to be satisfied with the book, which allowed them a safe trip into androgyny and back, from a conventionally male viewpoint. But many women wanted it to go further, to dare more, to explore androgyny from a woman’s point of view as well as a man’s. In fact, it does so, in that it was written by a woman. But this is admitted directly only in the chapter “The Question of Sex,” the only voice of a woman in the book. I think women were justified in asking more courage of me and a more rigorous thinking-through of implications.]
Finally, the question arises, Is the book a Utopia? It seems to me that it is quite clearly not; it poses no practicable alternative to contemporary society, since it is based on an imaginary, radical change in human anatomy. All it tries to do is open up an alternative viewpoint, to widen the imagination, without making any very definite suggestions as to what might be seen from that new viewpoint. The most it says is, I think, something like this: If we were socially ambisexual, if men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles, equal legally and economically, equal in freedom, in responsibility, and in self-esteem, then society would be a very different thing. What our problems might be, God knows; I only know we would have them. But it seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation—exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth. Our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from yin [and the moralization of yang as good, of yin as bad]. Instead of a search for balance and integration, there is a struggle for dominance. Divisions are insisted upon, interdependence is denied. The dualism of value that destroys us, the dualism of superior/inferior, ruler/ruled, owner/owned, user/used, might give way to what seems to me, from here, a much healthier, sounder, more promising modality of integration and integrity.
“MORAL AND ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF FAMILY PLANNING”
(1978)
This talk was read to a Planned Parenthood symposium in Portland in March 1978. The quotations—somewhat abridged and manipulated for oral presentation—are from the chapter “The Second Apple” in Irene Claremont de Castillejo’s Knowing Woman (Harper & Row, Colophon Books, 1974), pp. 93–94.
I wondered how the Moral Implications and the Ethical Implications in our title actually differed, so I looked in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary, and it told me: Ethics, the Ethical, is “the science of morals” (1602), “the science of human duty … including the science of law …” (1690), and “rules of conduct” (1789). The Moral, Morals, are “of or pertaining to character or disposition; of or pertaining to the distinction between right and wrong, or good and evil,” and that usage is from Middle English, so you see that English morals are four or five hundred years older than English ethics.
Now, when I was trying to think what to say to this meeting, every woman friend I talked to, when I said, “What am I going to say, I am in the Planned Parenthood discussion about the Ethics of Family Planning”—every single woman said, with indignation, “What has it got to do with ethics?”
I think they were afraid, as I am afraid, that because ethics is a set of rules or rational theories, it will lead us straight into the same old arguments, the same sterile discussions, where people say, “This is right” and “That is wrong,” and don’t listen to anybody else. Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, very often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.
The dictionary’s primary meaning of “moral” refers to character, to the person; and a moral choice is, I believe, an act performed by one person. It may or may not conform to law. It may or may not coincide with the edicts or advice of a government, a church, or a body of concerned people like us.
A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.
This arises, surely, from the biological, but we are not biological beings only, and “survival” does not necessarily mean the personal, physical survival of the individual. Death may be chosen, for the sake of moral survival as opposed to moral destruction, or for the sake of what is perceived as spiritual value or the undying soul. Death may be chosen for the sake of the survival of the clan, the nation, the species, or life itself.
The survival of our species and of all higher forms of life on the planet now depends primarily and, as
I understand it, very urgently upon the limitation of the human population. It appears that we really have only three options: strict family planning to reach zero population growth and then a decline until we get back into ecological balance; or plague and/or famine; or World War III.
I don’t include as an option the scenario of Science saving us with miracle soybeans or artificial asteroids to migrate to, or anything of that kind, because unfortunately all that is—as of now—science fiction.
So there seem to be only three options; and the trouble with using ethics to tell us which one to choose is, it doesn’t work: the rules are out of date, they were not made for this situation. We can sit around arguing with the Right-to-Life people, and trying to get fundamentalists to use their minds, and trying to overcome all the huge machinery of antiquated law with arguments and reasons, until Doomsday; which won’t be long in coming. We are in a bind. Our reasons are good, but they are not enough. We need an appropriate morality. We need people who are able to make the choice in favor of life.
I think one place we have to look for such people is among women.
After all, almost all the rules, laws, codes, and commandments we have—all our ethics—were made by men: by men and for men. Until just a generation or two ago, this was entirely and literally true. Women had no voice, no vote. We let the men make all the choices. There are reasons why we did so; they seemed adequate. They no longer seem adequate. Our survival, and our children’s survival, is on the line.
Where man-made ethics differ most radically from female morality, from what women think and feel to be right and wrong, is precisely in this area where we need a new morality: the area in which men and women differ: the area of sexuality, of conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and the responsibility for children. I must admit that to me personally most of the rules men have made on these matters seem, if not simply irrelevant, disastrous. And yet we are still pretending that it’s a “man’s world,” still letting that myth run us. And it’s going to run us right into the ground.
I suppose a morality that arises from and includes the feminine will have to be invented as we go along. Rigidity and codification are exactly what we want to get away from, after all. But here—for it’s so easy to talk about things like “a new morality” and so hard to show what one means—here, perhaps, is a suggestion of the kind of thing I and many, many others are groping towards. In her book Knowing Woman, Irene Claremont de Castillejo writes:
Woman, who is so intimately and profoundly concerned with life, takes death in her stride. For her, to rid herself of an unwanted foetus is as much in accord with nature as for a cat to refuse milk to a weakling kitten. It is man who has evolved principles about the sacredness of life … and women have passionately adopted them as their own. But principles are abstract Woman’s basic instinct is not concerned with the idea of life, but with the fact of life. The ruthlessness of nature which discards unwanted life is deeply ingrained in her.
You see, she is trying to show how a woman’s desire to have children, and to love and care for them, can be twisted all out of shape by ethical coercion, until it becomes a bondage, a hideous sentimental trap. Here she offers an example of natural, unperverted feminine morality:
I have been struck with the spontaneous reaction of many women and girls to the thalidomide tragedies. So often they exclaim with absolute conviction, “Of course they should be aborted! It is criminal to make a woman carry a deformed child.” [And pressed further, they say,] “It is monstrous that men should decide whether a woman should or should not have her own baby.”
That is not ethics. But it is morality.
If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust in ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong—not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck—if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we’ll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival.
Note (1988): Castillejo’s statements still seem as strong as any I have read on this subject, but they do, in equating woman-mother with cat-mother, run the risk of implying that women are “natural,” that their morality is “natural” or “instinctive” (and hence “lower” than that of “civilization,” i.e., male-dominated society). I have found Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) one of the most useful guides into the difficult area of the cultural determination and enforcement of differences between male and female moral perception.
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT; OR, WHY ARE WE HUDDLING ABOUT THE CAMPFIRE?
(1979)
This talk was the last paper read at a three-day symposium on narrative held at the University of Chicago in 1979. Some of the obscurer bits of it are incorporations of and jokes about things read or said by other participants in the conference, the proceedings of which may be found in Critical Inquiry (vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1980). I had bought my first and only pair of two-inch-heeled shoes, black French ones, to wear there, but I never dared put them on; there were so many Big Guns shooting at one another that it seemed unwise to try to increase my stature.
It was a dark and stormy night
and Brigham Young and Brigham Old
sat around the campfire.
Tell us a story, old man!
And this is the story he told:
It was a dark and stormy night
and Brigham Young and Brigham Old
sat around the campfire.
Tell us a story, old man!
And this is the story he told:
It was a dark and stormy night
and Brigham Young and Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote,
sat around the campfire,
which is not quite the way my Great-Aunt Betsy told it
when we said Tell us another story!
Tell us, au juste, what happened!
And this is the story she told:
(It was a dark and stormy night, in the otherwise unnoteworthy year 711 E.C. (Eskimo Calendar), and the great-aunt sat crouched at her typewriter, holding his hands out to it from time to time as if for warmth and swinging on a swing. He was a handsome boy of about eighteen, one of those men who suddenly excite your desire when you meet them in the street, and who leave you with a vague feeling of uneasiness and excited senses. On a plate beside the typewriter lay a slice of tomato. It was a flawless slice. It was a perfect slice of a perfect tomato. It is perfectly boring. I hold out my hands to the typewriter again, while swinging and showing my delicate limbs, and observe that the rows of keys are marked with all the letters of the English alphabet, and all the letters of the French alphabet minus accent marks, and all the letters of the Polish alphabet except the dark L. By striking these keys with the ends of my fingers or, conceivably, a small blunt instrument, the aging woman can create a flaw in the tomato. She did so at once. It was then a seriously, indeed a disgustingly flawed tomato, but it continued to be perfectly boring until eaten. She expires instantly in awful agony, of snakebite, flinging the window wide to get air. It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling in on the typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a metabear. She writes the story while reading it with close attention, not sure what to expect, but collaborating hard, as if that was anything new; and this is the story I wrote:
It was a dark and stormy night
and Brigham al-Rashid sat around the campfire with his wife
who was telling him a story in order to keep her head on her shoulders,
and this is the story she told:
The histoire is the what
and the discours is the how
but what I want to know, Brigham,
is le pourquoi.
Why are we sitting here around the campfire?
Tell me a story, great-aunt,
so that I can sleep.
Tell me a story, Scheherazade,
so that you can live.
Tell me a story, my soul, animula, vagula, blandula,
little Being-Towards-Death,
for the word’s the beginning of being
if not the middle or the end.
“A beginning is that which is not itself necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end, that which is naturally after something else, either as its necessary or usual consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after one thing and has also another after it.”1
But sequence grows difficult in the ignorance of what comes after the necessary or at least the usual consequent of living, that is, dying,
and also when the soul is confused by not unreasonable doubts of what comes after the next thing that happens, whatever that may be.
It gets dark and stormy when you look away from the campfire.
Tell me what you see in the fire, Lizzie, Lizzie Hexam,
down in the hollow by the flare!
I see storm and darkness, brother.
I see death and running water, brother.
I see loving-kindness, brother.
Is it all right to see that, teacher?
What would Alain Robbe-Grillet say?
Never mind what he says, Lizzie.
Frogs have a lot of trouble with the novel,
even though kissed right at the beginning by the Princesse de Clèves;