Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  And yet old. Before—once you think about it, surely long before—the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger—for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in—with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.

  This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.

  That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

  Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

  If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again—if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

  Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.

  It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.

  It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

  It’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly to the lips as the killer story does; but still, “untold” was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels …

  The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.

  I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

  One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag / belly / box / house / medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

  Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

  That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

  So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?

  If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. “Technology,” or “modern science” (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).

  If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.

  It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

  Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
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  HEROES

  (1986)

  For Elizabeth Arthur and Joy Johannessen

  For thirty years I’ve been fascinated by books about the early explorations of the Antarctic, and particularly by the books written by men who were on the expeditions: Scott, Shackleton, Cherry-Garrard, Wilson, Byrd, and so on, all of them not only men of courage and imagination but excellent writers, vivid, energetic, exact, and powerful. As an American I wasn’t exposed to the British idolization of Scott that now makes it so chic to sneer at him, and I still feel that I am competent to base my judgment of his character, or Shackleton’s, or Byrd’s, on their own works and witness, without much reference to the various biases of biographers.

  They were certainly heroes to me, all of them. And as I followed them step by frostbitten-toed step across the Ross Ice Barrier and up the Beardmore Glacier to the awful place, the white plateau, and back again, many times, they got into my toes and my bones and my books, and I wrote The Left Hand of Darkness, in which a Black man from Earth and an androgynous extraterrestrial pull Scott’s sledge through Shackleton’s blizzards across a planet called Winter. And fifteen years or so later I wrote a story, “Sur,” in which a small group of Latin Americans actually reach the South Pole a year before Amundsen and Scott, but decide not to say anything about it, because if the men knew that they had got there first—they are all women—it wouldn’t do. The men would be so let down. “We left no footprints, even,” says the narrator.

  Now, in writing that story, which was one of the pleasantest experiences of my life, I was aware that I was saying some rather hard things about heroism, but I had no desire or intention to debunk or devalue the actual explorers of Antarctica. What I wanted was to join them, fictionally. I had been along with them so many times in their books; why couldn’t a few of us, my kind of people, housewives, come along with them in my book … or even come before them?

  These simple little wishes, when they become what people call “ideas”—as in “Where do you get the ideas for your stories?”—and when they find themselves in an appropriate nutrient medium such as prose, may begin to grow, to get yeasty, to fizz. Whatever the “idea” of that story was, it has continued to ferment in the dark vats of my mental cellars and is now quite heady, with a marked nose and a complicated aftertaste, like a good ’69 Zinfandel.

  I wasn’t aware of this process until recently, when I was watching the Public Broadcasting series about Shackleton (as well conceived, cast, and produced as the series about Scott and Amundsen was shoddy). There were Ernest Shackleton and his three friends struggling across the abomination of desolation towards the Pole, two days before they had to turn back only ninety-seven miles short of that geometrical bindu which they desired so ardently to attain. And the voice-over spoke words from Shackleton’s journal: “Man can only do his best. The strongest forces of Nature are arrayed against us.” And I sat there and thought, Oh, what nonsense!

  That startled me. I had been feeling just as I had always felt for those cold, hungry, tired, brave men, and commiserating them for the bitter disappointment awaiting them—and yet Shackleton’s words struck me as disgustingly false, as silly. Why? I had to think it out; and this paper is the process of thinking it out.

  “Man can only do his best”—well, all right. They were all men, of course, and a long way from the suffragists back home; they honestly believed that “man” includes women, or would have said they did if they had ever thought about it, which I doubt they ever did. I am sure they would have laughed heartily at the proposal that their expedition include women. But still, Man can only do his best; or, to put it in my dialect, people can only do their best; or, as King Yudhisthira says in the great and bitter end of the Mahabharata, “By nothing that I do can I attain a goal beyond my reach.” That king whose dog’s name is Dharma knows what he is talking about. As did those English explorers, with their clear, fierce sense of duty.

  But how about “The strongest forces of Nature are arrayed against us”? Here’s the problem. What did you expect, Ernest? Indeed, what did you ask for? Didn’t you set it up that way? Didn’t you arrange, with vast trouble and expense, that the very strongest “forces of Nature” would be “arrayed against” you and your tiny army?

  What is false is the military image; what is foolish is the egoism; what is pernicious is the identification of “Nature” as enemy. We are asked to believe that the Antarctic continent became aware that four Englishmen were penetrating her virgin whiteness and so unleashed upon them the punishing fury of her revenge, the mighty weaponry of wind and blizzard, and so forth and so on. Well, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that Nature is either an enemy, or a woman, to humanity. Nobody has ever thought so but Man; and the thought is, to one not Man, no longer acceptable even as a poetic metaphor. Nobody, nothing, “arrayed” any “forces” against Shackleton except Shackleton himself. He created an obstacle to conquer or an enemy to attack; attacked; and was defeated—by what? By himself, having himself created the situation in which his defeat could occur.

  Had he reached the Pole he would have said, “I have conquered, I have achieved,” in perfectly self-justified triumph. But, forced to retreat, he does not say, “I am defeated”; he blames it on that which is not himself, Nature. If Man wins the battle he starts, he takes the credit for winning, but if he doesn’t win, he doesn’t lose; “forces arrayed against” him defeat him. Man does not, cannot fail. And Shackleton, speaking for Man, refuses the responsibility for a situation for which he was responsible from beginning to end.

  In an even more drastic situation for which he was even more responsible, in his last journal entry Scott wrote:

  We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

  I have seriously tried to find those words false and silly; I can’t do it. Their beauty is no accident.

  “Things have come out against us” sounds rather like a projection of fault (like the “forces arrayed against us”) but lacks any note of accusation or blame; the underlying image is that of gambling, trusting to luck. “Providence,” which is how Scott referred to God, does seem to come in as the “Other,” a will opposed to Scott’s will as Nature was opposed to Shackleton’s; but something you call by the name of Providence is not something you perceive as an opponent or an enemy—indeed, the connotations are maternal: nurturing, sheltering, providing. The man may be speaking like a child, but not like a spoiled child. He takes responsibility for the risks taken, and beyond hope finds duty unalterable: “to do our best to the last.” Like Yudhisthira, he knew what “the last” meant. Nothing in me finds this contemptible, and I can’t imagine ever finding it contemptible. But I don’t know. I have found so many things silly that just a few years ago seemed fine…. Time to bottle the wine: if you leave it too long in the wood it sours and is lost. I don’t want to go sour. All I want to do is lose the hero myths so that I can find what is worth admiration.

  All right: what I admire in Shackleton, at that moment on the Barrier, is that he turned back. He gave up; he admitted defeat; and he saved his men. Unfortunately he also saved his pride by posturing a bit, playing hero. He couldn’t admit that his weakness was his strength; he did the right thing, but said the wrong one. So I go on loving Shackleton, but with the slightest shade of contempt for his having boasted.

  But Scott, who did nearly everything wrong, why have I no such contempt for Scott? Why does he remain worthy in my mind of that awful beauty and freedom, my Antarctica? Evidently because he admitted his failure completely—living it through to its end, death. It is as if Scott realized that his life was a story he had to tell, and he had to get the ending right.

  This statement may be justly seen as frivolous, trivializing. The death of five people isn’t “just a story.”

  But then, what is a story? And what does one live for? To stay alive, certainly; but only
that?

  In Amundsen’s practical, realistic terms, the deaths of Scott and his four companions were unnecessary, preventable. But then, in what terms was Amundsen’s polar journey necessary? It had no justification but nationalism/egoism—“Yah! I’m going to get there first!”

  When Scott’s party stopped for the last time, the rocks they had collected for the Museum of Natural History were still heavy on the sledge. That is very moving; but I will not use the scientific motives of Scott’s expedition to justify his polar journey. It was a mere race too, with no goal but winning. It was when he lost the race that it became a real journey to a real end. And this reality, this value to others, lies in the account he kept.

  Amundsen’s relation of his polar run is interesting, informative, in some respects admirable. Scott’s journal is all that and very much more than that. I would rank it with Woolf’s or Pepys’s diaries, as a personal record of inestimable value, written by an artist.

  Scott’s temperament was not very well suited to his position as leader; his ambition and intensity drove him to lead, but his inflexibility, vanity, and unpredictability could make his leadership a disaster, for example in his sudden decision to take four men, not three, on the last lap to the Pole, thus oversetting all the meticulous arrangements for supplies. Scott arranged his own defeat, his death, and the death of the four men he was responsible for. He “asked for it.” And there were certainly self-destructive elements in his personality. But it would be merely glib to say that he “wanted to fail,” and it would miss what I see as the real heroism: what he made of his failure. He took complete responsibility for it. He witnessed truly. He kept on telling the story.

  “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”