Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  People ask if she told stories like these to her children. She read to us, but it is her aunt Betsy and my father whose storytelling I remember. Only a few times do I recall her making the “breakthrough into performance,” as Dell Hymes calls it. Once when she was eighty or so, six or eight kids and grandkids at table, John Quinn presiding, one of us asked her about her experiences as a child of nine on a visit to San Francisco when the great earthquake of 1906 struck. All the storytelling power of her books got unleashed, and none of us will forget that hour. But usually it was conversational give-and-take that she wanted and created among family and friends. And one sees her valuation of written narrative as “higher” or more “finished” than oral—the conventional and almost universal judgment of her time both in literature and anthropology—in her notes to The Inland Whale.

  Still, it is very like her to have chosen from all the stories of the peoples of California nine stories about women, at a time when even in anthropology the acts of women were easy to dismiss as secondary, women being subsumed (oddly enough) in Man. From her mother Phebe and other strong women of her late-frontier Western childhood, Theodora had a firm heritage of female independence and self-respect. Her sense of female solidarity was delicate and strong. She made her daughter feel a lifelong welcome, giving me the conviction that I had done the right thing in being born a woman—a gift many woman-children are denied. But also she would say that she “liked men better than women”; her temperament inclined her to the conventional supporting roles of wife and mother; and she detested the direct opposition of a woman’s will to a man’s. She must have thought her loving empire was endangered by feminism, for her intolerance of what she called “women’s lib” went beyond her general distrust of ideologies. But all the same, in her life as a writer, I think she was a true feminist.

  Look for Native American women in White literature before 1960: if you find any at all, you generally find something called a “squaw.” There are no squaws in The Inland Whale—only human beings. This is not freedom from racist stereotyping only, but also freedom from masculinist prejudice, and a deliberate search for the feminine. Theodora kept telling me to write about women, not men, years before I (the “women’s libber”) was able to do so. She did so herself from the start, not only because the feminists of her mother’s generation had freed us both, but also because she was true to her being, her perceptions, her female humanity. In all her different lives she was entirely woman.

  The book was written and published, and Ishi was begun, while Alfred was alive. After his death came her life as widow, soon famous in her own right for her great book Ishi; and then a new life, and new directions in writing, as Mrs. John Quinn. She never wrote till she was over fifty and she never stopped writing till she died at eighty-three. I wish she had started earlier: we might have had more books from her; her novels might have found a publisher; and she wouldn’t have had to wait for validation and self-confidence till a time in life when most artists are at ease with their craft and are getting the recognition they deserve. I know she regretted having started writing so late. But not bitterly. She wasn’t a regretter, or a blamer. She kept going on, out of an old life, into a new one. So I imagine she goes now.

  SCIENCE FICTION AND THE FUTURE

  (1985)

  In February of 1985 the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry invited me to participate on a panel, Science Fiction and the Future, and the following was my prepared statement for that discussion.

  We know where the future is. It’s in front of us. Right? It lies before us—a great future lies before us—we stride forward confidently into it, every commencement, every election year. And we know where the past is. Behind us, right? So that we have to turn around to see it, and that interrupts our progress ever forward into the future, so we don’t really much like to do it.

  It seems that the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes see all this rather differently. They figure that because the past is what you know, you can see it—it’s in front of you, under your nose. This is a mode of perception rather than action, of awareness rather than progress. Since they’re quite as logical as we are, they say that the future lies behind—behind your back, over your shoulder. The future is what you can’t see, unless you turn around and kind of snatch a glimpse. And then sometimes you wish you hadn’t, because you’ve glimpsed what’s sneaking up on you from behind…. So, as we drag the Andean peoples into our world of progress, pollution, soap operas, and satellites, they are coming backwards—looking over their shoulders to find out where they’re going.

  I find this an intelligent and appropriate attitude. At least it reminds us that our talk about “going forward into the future” is a metaphor, a piece of mythic thinking taken literally, perhaps even a bluff, based on our macho fear of ever being inactive, receptive, open, quiet, still. Our unquiet clocks make us think that we make time, that we control it. We plug in the timer and make time happen. But in fact the future comes, or is there, whether we rush forward to meet it in supersonic jets with nuclear warheads, or sit on a peak and watch the llamas graze. Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

  The future is not mere space. This is where I part company with a whole variety of science fiction, the imperialistic kind, as seen in all the Space Wars and Star Wars novels and films and the whole branch of sf that reduces technology to hi-tech. In such fictions, space and the future are synonymous: they are a place we are going to get to, invade, colonize, exploit, and suburbanize.

  If we do “get to” space, it’s not unlikely that that’s how we’ll behave there. It is possible that we will “conquer” space. But it is not possible that we will “conquer” the future, because there is no way we can get there. The future is the part of the spacetime continuum from which—in the body and in ordinary states of consciousness—we are excluded. We can’t even see it. Except for little glimpses over the shoulder.

  When we look at what we can’t see, what we do see is the stuff inside our heads. Our thoughts and our dreams, the good ones and the bad ones. And it seems to me that when science fiction is really doing its job that’s exactly what it’s dealing with. Not “the future.” It’s when we confuse our dreams and ideas with the non-dream world that we’re in trouble, when we think the future is a place we own. Then we succumb to wishful thinking and escapism, and our science fiction gets megalomania and thinks that instead of being fiction it’s prediction, and the Pentagon and the White House begin to believe it, and we get True Believers conquering the future by means of SDI.

  As a science-fiction writer I personally prefer to stand still for long periods, like the Quechua, and look at what is, in fact, in front of me: the earth; my fellow beings on it; and the stars.

  THE ONLY GOOD AUTHOR?

  (1985)

  When writing about the work of a living author, some critics send their article, chapter, or book to that author, either in draft, for comment, or when printed, as a courtesy. Other critics do not. It is my impression that the ones who do not are getting more numerous. Trying to imagine their reason for ignoring the existence of the person probably most interested in their work, I have come up with several possible lines of argument.

  1. Live authors have an unfair advantage over dead authors, which can be removed by treating live authors as if they were dead.

  This is a nice idea, but I don’t think it motivates a great many critics.

  2. Critics know better than most authors what the work means to the reader, as a thing in itself, as a part of literature, as an event in the history of literature or ideas.

  This is, or ought to be, true. The author’s responses, however, might still be of interest; and if critics know better than the author, then they will know when to discount the author’s responses as arising from wishful thinking, defensiveness, or ignorance.

  3. Critics are objective about the work; the author cannot be.

  This I suspect to be the usual rationale. I want to question it radically, as follows
:

  Is it true? In all cases? In which cases?

  What is meant by “objectivity” in literary criticism? If it means something other than the vigilant effort to think clearly and eschew fad, partiality, bigotry, and judgmentalism, what does it mean?

  If by “objectivity” is meant an imitation or application of the scientific method, is this method clearly understood by the critic? Does the critic firmly believe it to be appropriate to the study of literature, and, if appropriate, adequate?

  4. If the critic were in correspondence with the author or intended from the start to ask the author for a response, the critic’s thinking and writing might be affected, influenced, changed.

  This I believe to be true, even though most critics are pretty sure of their ideas and not easily shaken by a mere author. It is also true that such a correspondence, an undertaking of mutual responsibility, can be hard going, hard work for both parties, often unsettling or distressing, and sometimes unrewarding. Yet I do think it humanly and intellectually altogether preferable to the lack of communication, the stupid, embarrassed, perhaps resentful silence that seems to be increasingly taken for granted. Critics whose principal goal or interest is power will of course not share this preference; I am talking only to those whose principal interest as critics is their work.

  My judgment in the matter is based mostly on “anecdotal” or “soft” data, to use the currently fashionable unexamined pejoratives; that is to say, on my own experience, which has ranged from the satisfaction of giving useful answers to intelligent questions concerning both fact and theory or intention, to the frustration of reading errors of fact, date, order, and sense, and erroneous assertions of influence or intention, all of which could have been set straight very easily, and then reading the same errors repeated by other critics who choose to get their data anywhere but from the horse’s mouth; sometimes indeed it would seem from the other end. Even a direct quote from the author can mislead when taken from something written a decade or two ago and used without historical context, as if the author’s mind were incapable of change.

  But perhaps some critics are simply reluctant to pester; their rationale would be:

  5. Critics should allow authors to get on with new work.

  I wish grade-school teachers would ponder this one instead of giving out the pestering of authors as an assignment (the result being such letters as one I got recently: “We all have to write some author, I have not read your book actually but the cover is very interesting …”). Some authors welcome spontaneous letters, from kids or from critics. Others don’t; they refuse to be bothered, and let the questioner know it either by not responding or by a few rude words. We must all expect a few rude words from time to time; if we are either authors or critics, more than a few.

  But even when both critic and author desire cooperation, intellectual or temperamental disagreement may be so strong, or the theoretical approach so different, that useful interchange is impossible. In this case the author can really do nothing but sulk and fume while the critic gallops on. It is worth remembering that the critic is always in control in this situation—choosing what to show the author, when to show it, and whether to give the author’s responses any weight at all. There is absolutely no risk unless the critic chooses to take it.

  What there might be to gain, that risk taken, is well expressed in the paragraph that enabled me to write this statement, and to whose author I am very grateful. Explaining that she sent a draft of the relevant section of her critical work For the Record (Women’s Press, 1984) to each of the feminist theorists whose ideas she discussed, Dale Spender writes:

  Initially, it was a theoretical consideration which led me to adopt this method and, in practice, I have learnt that it makes an enormous difference to what one writes. It has astonished me just how much more care I have taken to be accurate, how much more thoughtfully I have perused the texts (and how often I have completely revised my opinion and evaluation) simply because my portrayal of a particular woman’s ideas was going to her for comment. I have learnt a great deal from the exercise…. We need to devise more means of dialogue and validation in a society where these are not readily sought.

  BRYN MAWR COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

  (1986)

  Thinking about what I should say to you made me think about what we learn in college; and what we unlearn in college; and then how we learn to unlearn what we learned in college and relearn what we unlearned in college, and so on. And I thought how I have learned, more or less well, three languages, all of them English; and how one of these languages is the one I went to college to learn. I thought I was going to study French and Italian, and I did, but what I learned was the language of power—of social power; I shall call it the father tongue.

  This is the public discourse, and one dialect of it is speechmaking—by politicians, commencement speakers, or the old man who used to get up early in a village in Central California a couple of hundred years ago and say things very loudly on the order of “People need to be getting up now, there are things we might be doing, the repairs on the sweathouse aren’t finished and the tarweed is in seed over on Bald Hill; this is a good time of day for doing things, and there’ll be plenty of time for lying around when it gets hot this afternoon.” So everybody would get up grumbling slightly, and some of them would go pick tarweed—probably the women. This is the effect, ideally, of the public discourse. It makes something happen, makes somebody—usually somebody else—do something, or at least it gratifies the ego of the speaker. The difference between our politics and that of a native Californian people is clear in the style of the public discourse. The difference wasn’t clear to the White invaders, who insisted on calling any Indian who made a speech a “chief,” because they couldn’t comprehend, they wouldn’t admit, an authority without supremacy—a non-dominating authority. But it is such an authority that I possess for the brief—we all hope it is decently brief—time I speak to you. I have no right to speak to you. What I have is the responsibility you have given me to speak to you.

  The political tongue speaks aloud—and look how radio and television have brought the language of politics right back where it belongs—but the dialect of the father tongue that you and I learned best in college is a written one. It doesn’t speak itself. It only lectures. It began to develop when printing made written language common rather than rare, five hundred years ago or so, and with electronic processing and copying it continues to develop and proliferate so powerfully, so dominatingly, that many believe this dialect—the expository and particularly the scientific discourse—is the highest form of language, the true language, of which all other uses of words are primitive vestiges.

  And it is indeed an excellent dialect. Newton’s Principia was written in it in Latin, and Descartes wrote Latin and French in it, establishing some of its basic vocabulary, and Kant wrote German in it, and Marx, Darwin, Freud, Boas, Foucault—all the great scientists and social thinkers wrote it. It is the language of thought that seeks objectivity.

  I do not say it is the language of rational thought. Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective thought. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner. The essential gesture of the father tongue is not reasoning but distancing—making a gap, a space, between the subject or self and the object or other. Enormous energy is generated by that rending, that forcing of a gap between Man and World. So the continuous growth of technology and science fuels itself; the Industrial Revolution began with splitting the world-atom, and still by breaking the continuum into unequal parts we keep the imbalance from which our society draws the power that enables it to dominate every other culture, so that everywhere now everybody speaks the same language in laboratories and government buildings and headquarters and offices of business, and those who don’t know it or won’t speak it are silent, or silenced, or unheard.

  You came here to college to l
earn the language of power—to be empowered. If you want to succeed in business, government, law, engineering, science, education, the media, if you want to succeed, you have to be fluent in the language in which “success” is a meaningful word.

  White man speak with forked tongue; White man speak dichotomy. His language expresses the values of the split world, valuing the positive and devaluing the negative in each redivision: subject/object, self/other, mind/body, dominant/submissive, active/passive, Man/Nature, man/woman, and so on. The father tongue is spoken from above. It goes one way. No answer is expected, or heard.

  In our Constitution and the works of law, philosophy, social thought, and science, in its everyday uses in the service of justice and clarity, what I call the father tongue is immensely noble and indispensably useful. When it claims a privileged relationship to reality, it becomes dangerous and potentially destructive. It describes with exquisite accuracy the continuing destruction of the planet’s ecosystem by its speakers. This word from its vocabulary, “ecosystem,” is a word unnecessary except in a discourse that excludes its speakers from the ecosystem in a subject/object dichotomy of terminal irresponsibility.

  The language of the fathers, of Man Ascending, Man the Conqueror, Civilized Man, is not your native tongue. It isn’t anybody’s native tongue. You didn’t even hear the father tongue your first few years, except on the radio or TV, and then you didn’t listen, and neither did your little brother, because it was some old politician with hairs in his nose yammering. And you and your brother had better things to do. You had another kind of power to learn. You were learning your mother tongue.

  Using the father tongue, I can speak of the mother tongue only, inevitably, to distance it—to exclude it. It is the other, inferior. It is primitive: inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited, trivial, banal. It’s repetitive, the same over and over, like the work called women’s work; earthbound, housebound. It’s vulgar, the vulgar tongue, common, common speech, colloquial, low, ordinary, plebeian, like the work ordinary people do, the lives common people live. The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation, a word the root of which means “turning together.” The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting. It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity; it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone, like the outbreath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart. John have you got your umbrella I think it’s going to rain. Can you come play with me? If I told you once I told you a hundred times. Things here just aren’t the same without Mother, I will now sign your affectionate brother James. Oh what am I going to do? So I said to her I said if he thinks she’s going to stand for that but then there’s his arthritis poor thing and no work. I love you. I hate you. I hate liver. Joan dear did you feed the sheep, don’t just stand around mooning. Tell me what they said, tell me what you did. Oh how my feet do hurt. My heart is breaking. Touch me here, touch me again. Once bit twice shy. You look like what the cat dragged in. What a beautiful night. Good morning, hello, goodbye, have a nice day, thanks. God damn you to hell you lying cheat. Pass the soy sauce please. Oh shit. Is it grandma’s own sweet pretty dear? What am I going to tell her? There there don’t cry. Go to sleep now, go to sleep…. Don’t go to sleep!