Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Post-Holocaust story must be in part rehearsal, or acting out, variously motivated. One motivation is unmistakably desire. Rage, frustration, and infantile egoism play out the death wish: Let’s press that button and see what happens! Another motivation is fear, the obsessive anxiety that keeps the mind upon the worst that could happen, dwelling on it, in the not entirely superstitious hope that if I talk enough about it maybe it won’t happen. Rationally controlled, this fear motivates the cautionary tale: Look what would happen if— ! so don’t! And the stories where people flee the Earth altogether would seem to be pure wish fulfillment, escapism.

  Very few After-the-Bomb tales seem to have come out of South America, I wish I had time to speculate why; but a great many have come from America and England. (One might propose Samuel Beckett as the prophet of the post-apocalypse; his writings are drawn towards, yearn towards, the condition of utter silence.) European science-fiction writers have done their share, but across the Iron Curtain writers seem not to write about World War III. It may be the government demanding optimism, censoring speculation. Or perhaps those Russian and Polish science-fiction writers who are not timid yes-men, and often use use their art to say quite subversive and unacceptable things, feel it ethically wrong to write about nuclear holocaust, because by doing so they would trivialize and familiarize the ultimate act of evil.

  And this is a real issue, I think: the question of “the unspeakable.” If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.

  The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography; the power fantasies of the survivalists, which seem to originate in certain works of science fiction such as Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, are pornographic. But for the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which, as a friend of mine puts it, you learn that there’s nothing to be afraid of if you’ve stockpiled lots of dried fruit.

  The question is that of false reassurance. Is the writer “facing it” or, by pretending to face it, evading, lying? In many cases it’s not easy to decide. Those stories in which Life Goes On, even though two-headed and glowing faintly in the dark, may be seen as false reassurance or may find justification in the necessity of hope. However ill-founded, however misguided, hope is the basic stratagem of mortality. We need it, and an art that fails to offer it fails us.

  Still, I see much current fantasy and science fiction in full retreat from real human needs. Where a Tolkien prophetically faced the central fact of our time, our capacity to destroy ourselves, the present spate of so-called heroic fantasy, in which Good defeats Evil by killing it with a sword or staff or something phallic, seems to have nothing in mind beyond instant gratification, the avoidance of discomfort, in a fake-medieval past where technology is replaced by magic and wishful thinking works. But the science-fiction books about endless wars in space, where technology is magic and the killing proceeds without moral or psychological justification of any kind, probably are written from the same unadmitted despair. The future has become uninhabitable. Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as a responsible being among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need, to found our hope upon.

  RECIPROCITY OF PROSE AND POETRY

  (1983)

  This talk was written for and given as part of the 1983 Poetry Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Jean Nordhaus, who was running the series, needed a title to put in her flyer long before the talk was written, so I said off the top of my head, “Oh, call it ‘Reciprocity of Prose and Poetry,’ ” figuring that “reciprocity” was one of those Humpty Dumpty words that can mean anything you like while sounding deeply meaningful. Unfortunately it is not only a meaningful word but a strong-minded one, and every time I turned a corner in the writing of my talk, there was Reciprocity waiting for me with a stern expression, saying, “What, exactly, do you mean?”

  People who read use the words “prose” and “poetry” with perfect confidence, and generally without trying to define them either in themselves or in contrast to each other. In this they are probably wise. The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. It has been no-man’s-land ever since the Bourgeois Gentleman blundered into it in Molière’s play, three hundred years ago.

  M. JOURDAIN: I want you to help me write a little billydoo.

  THE PHILOSOPHY TEACHER: Certainly. Would you like it to be poetry?

  M. JOURDAIN: No. No poetry.

  THE PHILOSOPHY TEACHER: Prose, then.

  M. JOURDAIN: No. Not poetry, and not prose.

  THE PHILOSOPHY TEACHER: It has to be one or the other.

  M. JOURDAIN: Why?

  THE PHILOSOPHY TEACHER: Well, sir, the only means of expression we possess are prose and poetry.

  M. JOURDAIN: There isn’t anything besides prose and poetry?

  THE PHILOSOPHY TEACHER: Correct. Whatever is not prose is poetry; and whatever is not poetry is prose.

  M. JOURDAIN: But, talking—what’s talking?

  THE PHILOSOPHY TEACHER: Prose.

  M. JOURDAIN: What? You mean, when I say, “Hey, Nick, bring my slippers and get me a hot toddy”—that’s prose?

  THE PHILOSOPHY TEACHER: Yes, sir.

  M. JOURDAIN: By God! I’ve been talking prose for forty years and never knew it!1

  Now, here is a remarkably similar conversation from the much admired Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1967):

  POETRY: 1. The art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts. 2. Literary work in metrical form; verse. 3. Prose with poetic qualities….

  PROSE: 1. The ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse. 2. Matter-of-fact, commonplace, dull expression….

  The vigorous ignorance of the Bourgeois Gentleman may be a better guide through the minefield than the certainties of the Philosophy Teacher and the dictionary. Indeed the dictionary seems to create its own fog. Definition 1 of poetry is rather fine, but is badly undercut by Definition 1 of prose, which limits rhythm to “metrical structure” and limits prose to being ordinary (although things get worse in Definition 2, which asserts it is dull). These definitions when applied to cases would unequivocally put Jane Eyre and Our Mutual Friend into the category of poetry, while excluding from it the Cantos and The Waste Land. Evidently we need some devices to probe for mines with, such as a clear and practicable conception of what rhythm in language is and where it coincides with metrics; after which we could begin to explore the vast area in which a rhythmic structure or pattern exists in language but does not coincide with metrics.

  In 1917 William Patterson of Columbia University wrote a book called The Rhythm of Prose, an interesting attempt to use experiment to supplement opinion and authority, and an excellent summary of the theories and research on the subject in his day. It remains so far as I know the only book on the subject of prose rhythms. There is need for a book on the rhythms of literature or artfully used language—rhythms in the largest sense, as organizing or patterning principles—and their relation to the rhythms of ordinary speech, prose in the Bourgeois Gentleman’s sense. Fascinating studies in this latter area exist, mostly in the specialized journals of linguistics. The research of such scholars as the Drs. Scollon in Alaska on spoken rhythms is related to the work done by such scholar-poets as Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock in bringing the oral literatures of other cultures into the English ken, and, in so doing, examining the whole nature of the artful use of language. If
this work could be brought together into a “state of the art,” as Patterson did sixty-five years ago, it would be a very exciting book.

  Without it, all I can do is blunder on through the minefield. At once I step straight onto Gertrude Stein, and leap into the air.

  Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not.

  And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun.

  Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns….

  So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.2

  That is a charming hand grenade, but the pin’s missing, I think. To define poetry as naming not telling—to exclude narrative—was useful fifty years ago, seventy years ago, when poetry was ridding itself of regular meter, rhyme, and a fixed poetic diction and matter. Poetry had to be redefined as independent of verse (an independence still ignored by Definition 2 of poetry and Definition 1 of prose in the Random House Dictionary). Like all revolutions, this one broke down barriers indiscriminately; like all revolutions, its acts of freedom tended to harden into dogmas. Poetry was defined not only as independent of metrical verse but as exclusive of and superior to it—which is historically nonsense; poetry was further defined as exclusive of narration, exposition, discussion, and drama—which is demented. The lava had hardened to basalt by the time I came to Gertrude Stein’s college; she was off in Paris happily digging holes in English prose, but in English-A we were solemnly informed that “a poem must not mean, but be.” Some of us wanted to ask, Why? Why can’t it do both, if it likes, or perhaps something else entirely? But freshmen, especially freshwomen, did not ask questions like that where the Lowells spoke only to the Cabots and you know who the Cabots spoke to; so we swallowed the dogma in class, and spat it out at the door. The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.

  Pursuing the Snark of definition through the fog, one comes upon a statement by Huntington Brown that is far more cautious, specious, and dangerous than Gertrude Stein’s.

  If it be asked wherein a poet’s attitude toward his matter differs from that of a prose writer, my answer would be that in prose the characteristic assumption of both writer and reader is that the subject has an identity and an interest apart from the words, whereas in poetry it is assumed that word and idea are inseparable.3

  This one ticks.

  As a distinction of fantasy from realistic fiction, it would be of considerable interest, but as a distinction of poetry from prose it is very odd. I do not think Mr. Brown meant to imply that the subject or matter of poetry is unidentifiable and of no inherent interest, though he comes very near saying so; but there is in his definition an implication that cannot be avoided and should be made clear: It is the language that counts in poetry and the ideas that count in prose. Corollary: Poetry is untouchable, but prose may be freely paraphrased.

  This is indeed a very common assumption, shared by readers and writers alike: Mr. Brown is absolutely correct in that. But I question the assumption, which he does not.

  The integrity of a piece of language, poetry or prose, is a function of its quality; and an essential element of its quality is the inseparability of idea and language. When a thing is said right it is said right, whether in prose or poetry, formal discourse or cursing the cat. If it is said wrong, if it lacks quality, if it is stupid poetry or careless prose, you may paraphrase it all you like; chances are you will improve it. But how are word and idea to be separated in this?

  “What child is it?” cried several ladies at once, and, among the rest, Nancy Lammeter, addressing Godfrey.

  “I don’t know—some poor woman’s who has been found in the snow, I believe,” was the answer Godfrey wrung from himself with a terrible effort. (“After all, am I certain?” he hastened to add, silently, in anticipation of his own conscience.)

  “Why, you’d better leave the child here, then, Master Marner,” said good-natured Mrs. Kimble, hesitating, however, to take those dingy clothes into contact with her own ornamented satin bodice. “I’ll tell one o’ the girls to fetch it.”

  “No—no—I can’t part with it, I can’t let it go,” said Silas, abruptly. “It’s come to me—I’ve a right to keep it.”

  The proposition to take the child from him had come to Silas quite unexpectedly, and his speech, uttered under a strong sudden impulse, was almost like a revelation to himself: a minute before, he had no distinct intention about the child.4

  That the subject of that passage has an identity and interest apart from the words is true, but to what degree is it genuinely separable from them? If they are separable, it should be easy to make a satisfactory paraphrase of Godfrey’s curious aside, which though set in parentheses and qualified as silent, is written as if spoken out loud, almost as if the others could hear him thinking, or as if he thought they could hear him thinking…. It should be easy to write another sentence characterizing the good-natured Mrs. Kimble who sees the clothes, not the child, touch her breast; and to rewrite Silas’s speech, all broken monosyllables; and to find equally appropriate words in which to express the ideas of the final paragraph.

  I do not believe that any of this is easy, or possible; in fact, I believe that any tampering with that passage would be as offensive as tampering with a bit of Shakespeare or Keats. And not only was the passage taken truly at random—the first novel my hand touched in the bookcase, opened to the page it chose to open at—but it is a fragment out of context from a large-scale work that gains its power and the real “identity and interest of its subject” less from the sense and sound of any sentence or paragraph than from the pacing and rhythm of paragraphs and chapters and the shape and pace of the actions described: large, slow movements, taking real time to read, and occupying considerable psychological and intellectual space. Eliot was certainly not a great stylist, like Dickens, but she wrote prose: and no paraphrase or rewrite or update or Cliffs Notes can do anything to it but weaken and destroy it.

  This “characteristic assumption” that poetry is the beautiful dumb blonde, all words, and prose is the smart brunette with glasses, all ideas, is certainly a common one; it lurks at the heart of the poem that must not mean but be, as well as in the tiny mind of the average best-seller writer. But here is somebody who I think does not share it. This is Gary Snyder, being asked by an interviewer what is the difference between his poetry and his prose.

  My own prose … does not have the musical phrase or the rhythm behind it. Nor does it have the constant density or the complexity [of my poetry]…. I don’t really think of them as different so much—I adopt whatever structure seems to be necessary to the communication in mind. And I try to keep a clear line between, say … journal jottings and poems—and again, the real line is in the music and the density—although again, to be fair, not all my poems are that dense in terms of content analysis, but have maybe a musical density sometimes.5

  The modesty and candor of that reply is an essential element of its meaning, I think. Snyder brings out what he thinks characterizes poetry—rhythm and density—so that one can make a kind of definition from his statement: Poetry tends to be more rhythmic and denser in texture than prose. But clearly they aren’t, in his mind, “all that different”—the difference is of degree not kind.

  For that kind of easy, laid-back attitude, and for moving easily between poetry and prose, Snyder gets put down. He lacks rigor. To which I would reply, at least he isn’t rigid. My concern here is personal. I also write both prose and poetry and move freely between them, and so am curious to know why and how I know that I write both, and how I know that they are not the same thing. And I
am interested because, although I wrote and published poetry first, my reputation was made as a prose writer, and I find my poetry quite often dismissed on the sole ground that it was written by “a novelist” and so cannot be taken seriously.

  Are prose and poetry activities so far from being reciprocal that they are incompatible, then? Poets have to defend poetry with fierce intelligence against the dead weight and corruption of non-poetry and anti-poetry, as Sidney and Shelley did, and renew that defense in every generation. But poetry is not anti-prose; and intelligent defense is not mere territorialism. Sometimes a Westerner like myself even gets the impression that the territory of poetry lies east of the Mississippi … but generally it seems more like a big fish tank, and its inhabitants come rushing out of their nests of weed like sticklebacks in mating season, shouting, Out! Out! Go write novels, go tell stories, go write plays and libretti and screenplays and television scripts and radio dramas and descriptions of the universe and histories and speculations on the nature of mankind and the cosmos and all that prose, but keep out of our territory where nothing is allowed to happen except poetry which is none of the above! In here we are poets: and we write for one another.

  Goethe wrote both prose and poetry, in large quantities and of indisputable quality; and he said, “Occasional poetry is the highest form.” I am sure he didn’t mean the kind of stuff that poet laureates emit to please the ruling classes, but a poetry that escapes the private, the confessional, and the merely esoteric, by observing—in lament or celebration, in drama or description or narration or lyric, in any mode or tone—a shared occasion. Such poetry may be mysterious but is not idiosyncratic. Its movement is outward from the individual center to the center of a larger whole, a community. That movement is the energy of all theater, and of all oral literatures, performance of which, whether ritual or casual, is their own occasion. It is surely the native movement or gesture of poetry.