Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  NEW YORK

  First Read-Through with the Actors

  Thursday morning we all meet in the ballroom of a truly weird hotel on West End Avenue, with plastic azaleas and ancient ladies also partly plastic, I believe, and you have to get the key to the toilet from the caterer, who looks like a native of some perhaps ammonia-atmosphere planet. The ballroom is hung with dusty chandeliers all smearily ablaze, and set about at intervals with phthisical chairs and a white piano with a hernia. Here we will rehearse, because the director can mark out the floor with tape to the size of the shooting area of each scene, and move chairs about to represent sets, and so on. I don’t suppose anything he did would matter much to the management of this hotel.

  Enter our “Heather,” Margaret Avery, incredibly elegant, quiet, fierce, fragile. Enter our “George,” Bruce Davison, blue jeans and thick, fair hair and clear, complicated eyes. Enter our “Dr. Haber,” Kevin Conway, red Irishman, erect, intense, intelligent, formidable. Enter into the increasingly complex mixture of personalities Fred Barzyk, the director, who always seemed such a calm quiet fellow. One must see the beast in its native habitat….

  Rehearsals

  Fred’s copy of the script is the thickness of the Manhattan phone book. It’s interleaved, many extra pages for each page of script: sketches of the set or location, where the camera can be or must be, what kind of light at what time of day, what’s outside the windows, what movements are possible—endless information; and all this he, with the most self-effacing, easygoing courtesy, tells the actors as they begin to walk through the scene; and he moves around and among them with his hands up before his face forming a square: the camera eye, to which they play. It sounds awkward, but it’s lovely to watch. It is choreography at the moment of creation. What I see is that the stage, fixed and oriented in one direction, audience-ward, becomes infinite. The orientation can be to any side, at any height, any distance, and so the actors’ “dance” is, by so much, more complex and subtle. In this enlargement of possibility, this openness, film is surely more of our time than regular theater (and theater in the round is a sorry compromise, to my taste). I had to see how it’s done before I could realize that. I wonder if when I watch the actual filming I will still be able to see what’s really going on; probably I’ll be confused by mere machinery, the cameras and lights and booms and so on. But here I did see how it’s done, and it’s beautiful.

  DALLAS

  The Man with the Boom

  We got here on Tuesday at four in the afternoon. They were taking the Alien apart. They had just finished that day’s shooting, which had begun at one in the morning. That was an uncommonly long day (they’d been shooting in the Hyatt Hotel and had done as much as possible in the dead of night so as not to disturb the hotel’s routine, especially since this was the scene where everybody is grey), but all their days are twelve hours at least—8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., six days a week.

  A domestic touch: in the hall there’s a huge coffee urn, a carton of apples and bananas, and various great boxes of doughnuts and cookies and other innocent victuals, and the crewpeople, most of whom are pretty young, eat like the orangs and the elephants in the zoo; they just sort of vacuum-clean their way through twenty dozen doughnuts, schloop, gone….

  The Damned Augmentor

  We’re shooting with one camera, which is, I am told, the classy way, but also the hard way. It means essentially that each scene, each take, is shot first as wide as possible, the whole scene, and then up close. If it’s a dialogue, in the close take the camera stays on George throughout the scene, then it goes around to the other side and takes Haber throughout the same scene. And each of these angles is usually shot twice, and possibly five or six times if anything goes wrong, and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Especially the Augmentor—Dr. Haber’s dream machine. I truly wish Dr. Haber and I had never invented the damned thing. The different takes will be spliced when the film is edited—a bit from this take and a bit from that, George’s face while he talks and Haber’s while he answers and then a cut to the Augmentor showing George’s brain scan—and so each take has to be like all the other takes in every detail. So that while George is saying a certain line of dialogue, the exact same bit of electronic jiggery-pokery has to be running on the various readout screens of the Augmentor every time he says that line, in each retake of the scene. All the same, that was simple compared to the mashed potatoes.

  The Mashed Potatoes, or, The Glamorous Life of the Film Star

  Hey, baby, you wanna be in the movies?

  Imagine yourself sitting in a crowded cafeteria in Dallas, Texas. You are wearing kind of funny clothes and transparent plastic shoes that don’t fit, but so is everybody else. Two people jammed against your back at the next table are muttering, “What is the name of thisyere movie? The Way to Heaven?” “No, it’s The Lake of Heaven, but Ah sure’s hell can’t figure what it’s about.” To your right is your fifteen-year-old son; across from him your husband; next to your husband is his eighty-year-old aunt Ruby, who lives in Dallas and decided to come help us shoot the movie. Husband looks like lemme-out-of-here, but Ruby is as merry as a grig. At the end of the table is a beautiful Black woman deep in conversation with a fair-haired man. In front of each of them, in front of everybody in the whole cafeteria, is a tray, and everybody’s tray is exactly the same: on it is a pile of old, cold mashed potatoes, a pile of old, cold boiled carrots, and a cup of something that once might have been tea. Now imagine that you are a movie star, well anyhow an extra, and you are eating your old, cold mashed potatoes and talking and smiling while you do so. O.K.? You can do that, sure. It’s easy to be an actor. Yes, but that was Take 1. Now we have to do Take 2. And if you ate some mashed potatoes in Take 1, you have to eat some mashed potatoes in Take 2, don’t you, because the action has to be the same so they can splice shots. So a sadist comes and puts a nice new pile of old mashed potatoes on your tray. And then there’s Take 3 … and Take 4 … and Take 10…. Actually we extras were only in a few shots and only got slightly sick, and Ruby insisted she liked the carrots. Margaret was clever and only toyed with her food; but Bruce sat there for three mortal hours re-eating stale mashed potatoes and laughing. If the life of the film stars is glamorous, believe me, they earn it!

  I sure hope they don’t cut Aunt Ruby.

  THE MUSIC OF THIS WORK

  The filming took a few weeks; the editing, months. At last the edited film went in cassette form to the composer. And a couple of months after that, we find the composer, Michael Small, standing pipe in mouth behind a drafting table amidst a storm-tossed sea of score, conducting. Some thirty musicians sit among trains, trails, endless entrails of electric cord; shadows of microphone booms stand angular and elegant on the fibrous walls of the recording studio. On a small TV set facing Michael a scene of the film runs in silence, subtitle numbers ticking off hour/minute/second/frame. Crescendo: a subtle theme I have learned to listen for emerges, changes, returns, and fades.

  “O.K.,” says Michael. “Could you violins sound a little more otherworldly in bar fifteen?”

  “No sweat,” says an altogether this-worldly Violin.

  “Hey,” says the Trumpet to the Synthesizer, snidely, “you still plugged in over there?”

  Ian the Synthesizer, knowing that he’s the one who’s really going to melt Portland, smiles, serene.

  “Seymour,” says Michael to the Cello, whose part has one of those eerie tweedling passages strings can do, “how long can you go on playing those sixteenth notes?”

  “Till Tuesday, if you want me to,” says the Cello. I believe him.

  “Rosin!”—a strangled cry from the Percussion enclosure, also known as the Jungle, where the percussionist is bowing temple bells.

  “That last note you have,” Michael says to the Oboe, “that was beautiful, could you hold it a while?”

  “A while,” the Oboe says modestly. I believe him.

  “O.K., let’s make it,” says Michael, raising his baton.<
br />
  Guinness Book of Records please note: the longest sustained note ever held by a human oboist was played at the National Recording Studio on West Forty-seventh Street on September 13, 1979, by Henry Schuman during the taping of The Lathe of Heaven score. These guys can do anything.

  And the music is beautiful. The rawboned beast of a movie we have worked on so long is transformed, transfigured, by the music; the music for this scene, this moment; the music of this work. It comes together, now, at last. All the months; all the money; all the machinery; all the many people. It comes together. We have made it.

  SOME THOUGHTS ON NARRATIVE

  (1980)

  This paper incorporates parts of the Nina Mae Kellogg Lecture given at Portland State University in the spring of 1980.

  Recently, at a three-day-long symposium on narrative, I learned that it’s unsafe to say anything much about narrative, because if a poststructuralist doesn’t get you a deconstructionist will. This is a pity, because the subject is an interesting one to those outside the armed camps of literary theory. As one who spends a good deal of her time telling stories, I should like to know, in the first place, why I tell stories, and in the second place, why you listen to them; and vice versa.

  Through long practice I know how to tell a story, but I’m not sure I know what a story is; and I have not found much patience with the question among those better qualified to answer it. To literary theorists it is evidently too primitive, to linguists it is not primitive enough; and among psychologists I know of only one, Simon Lesser, who has tried seriously to explain narration as a psychic process. There is, however, always Aristotle.

  Aristotle says that the essential element of drama and epic is “the arrangement of the incidents.” And he goes on to make the famous and endearing remark that this narrative or plotly element consists of a beginning, a middle, and an 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.

  According to Aristotle, then, narrative connects events, “arranges incidents,” in a directional temporal order analogous to a directional spatial order. Causality is implied but not exactly stated (in the word “consequent,” which could mean “result” or merely “what follows”); the principal linkage as I understand it is temporal (E. M. Forster’s story sequence, “and then … and then … and then …”). So narrative is language used to connect events in time. The connection, whether conceived as a closed pattern, beginning-middle-end, or an open one, past-present-future, whether seen as lineal or spiral or recursive, involves a movement “through” time for which spatial metaphor is adequate. Narrative makes a journey. It goes from A to Z, from then to then-prime.

  This might be why narrative does not normally use the present tense except for special effect or out of affectation. It locates itself in the past (whether the real or an imagined, fictional past) in order to allow itself forward movement. The present not only competes against the story with a vastly superior weight of reality, but limits it to the pace of watch hand or heartbeat. Only by locating itself in the “other country” of the past is the narrative free to move towards its future, the present.

  The present tense, which some writers of narrative fiction currently employ because it is supposed to make the telling “more actual,” actually distances the story (and some very sophisticated writers of narrative fiction use it for that purpose). The present tense takes the story out of time. Anthropological reports concerning people who died decades ago, whose societies no longer exist, are written in the present tense; this paper is written in the present tense. Physics is normally written in the present tense, in part because it generalizes, as I am doing now, but also because it deals so much with nondirectional time.

  Time for a physicist is quite likely to be reversible. It doesn’t matter whether you read an equation forwards or backwards—unlike a sentence. On the subatomic level directionality is altogether lost. You cannot write the history of a photon; narration is irrelevant; all you can say of it is that it might be, or, otherwise stated, if you can say where it is you can’t say when and if you can say when it is you can’t say where.

  Even of an entity relatively so immense and biologically so complex as a gene, the little packet of instructions that tells us what to be, there is no story to be told; because the gene, barring accident, is immortal. All you can say of it is that it is, and it is, and it is. No beginning, no end. All middle.

  The past and future tenses become useful to science when it gets involved in irreversible events, when beginning, middle, and end will run only in that order. What happened two seconds after the Big Bang? What happened when Male Beta took Male Alpha’s banana? What will happen if I add this hydrochloric acid? These are events that made, or will make, a difference. The existence of a future—a time different from now, a then-prime—depends on the irreversibility of time; in human terms, upon mortality. In Eternity there is nothing novel, and there are no novels.

  So when the storyteller by the hearth starts out, “Once upon a time, a long way from here, lived a king who had three sons,” that story will be telling us that things change; that events have consequences; that choices are to be made; that the king does not live forever.

  Narrative is a stratagem of mortality. It is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality; it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time (as lyric poetry does). It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful. If the human mind had a temporal spectrum, the nirvana of the physicist or the mystic would be way over in the ultraviolet, and at the opposite end, in the infrared, would be Wuthering Heights.

  To put it another way: Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in origin, an artifact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story.

  I would guess that preverbal narration takes place almost continuously on the unconscious level, but pre- or nonverbal mental operations are very hard to talk about. Dreams might help.

  It has been found that during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the recurrent phase of sleep during which we dream abundantly, the movement of the eyes is intermittent. If you wake the dreamer while the eyes are flickering, the dreams reported are disconnected, jumbled, snatches and flashes of imagery; but, awakened during a quiet-eye period, the dreamer reports a “proper dream,” a story. Researchers call the image-jumble “primary visual experience” and the other “secondary cognitive elaboration.”

  Concerning this, Liam Hudson wrote (in the Times Literary Supplement of January 25, 1980):

  While asleep, then, we experience arbitrary images, and we also tell ourselves stories. The likelihood is that we weave the second around the first, embedding images that we perceive as bizarre in a fabric that seems to us more reasonable. If I confront myself, while asleep, with the image of a crocodile on the roof of a German Schloss, and then, while still fast asleep, create for myself some plausible account of how this implausible event has occurred, I am engaged in the manoeuvre of rationalisation—of rendering sensible-seeming something that is not sensible in the least. In the course of this manoeuvre, the character of the original image is falsified….

  The thinking we do without thinking about it consists in the translation of our experience to narrative, irrespective of whether our experience fits the narrative form or not…. Asleep and awake it is just the same: we are telling ourselves stories all the time, … tidier stories than the evidence warrants.

  Mr. Hudson’s summary of the material is elegant, and his interpretation of it is, I take it, Freudian. Dreamwork is rationalization, therefore it is falsification: a cover-up. The mind is an endless Watergate. Some primitive “reality” or “tr
uth” is forever being distorted, lied about, tidied up.

  But what if we have no means of access to this truth or reality except through the process of “lying,” except through the narrative? Where are we supposed to be standing in order to judge what “the evidence warrants”?

  Take Mr. Hudson’s crocodile on the roof of a German castle (it is certainly more interesting than what I dreamed last night). We can all make that image into a story. Some of us will protest, No no I can’t, I can’t tell stories, etc., having been terrorized by our civilization into believing that we are, or have to be, “rational.” But all of us can make that image into some kind of story, and if it came into our head while we were asleep, no doubt we would do so without a qualm, without giving it a second thought. As I have methodically practiced irrational behavior for many years, I can turn it into a story almost as easily waking as asleep. What has happened is that Prince Metternich was keeping a crocodile to frighten his aunt with, and the crocodile has escaped through a skylight onto the curious, steep, leaden roofs of the castle, and is clambering, in the present tense because it is a dream and outside time, towards a machicolated nook in which lies, in a stork’s nest, but the stork is in Africa, an egg, a wonderful, magical Easter egg of sugar containing a tiny window through which you look and you see— But the dreamer is awakened here. And if there is any “message” to the dream, the dreamer is not aware of it; the dream with its “message” has gone from the unconscious to the unconscious, like most dreams, without any processing describable as “rationalization,” and without ever being verbalized (unless and until the dreamer, in some kind of therapy, has learned laboriously to retrieve and hold and verbalize dreams). In this case all the dreamer—we need a name for this character, let us call her Edith Driemer—all Edith remembers, fleetingly, is something about a roof, a crocodile, Germany, Easter, and while thinking dimly about her great-aunt Esther in Munich, she is presented with further “primary visual (or sensory) experiences” running in this temporal sequence: A loud ringing in the left ear. Blinding light. The smell of an exotic herb. A toilet. A pair of used shoes. A disembodied voice screaming in Parsee. A kiss. A sea of shining clouds. Terror. Twilight in the branches of a tree outside the window of a strange room in an unknown city …