Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  His self-sacrifice was not, I think, deliberate; but his behavior was sacrificial, rather than heroic. And it was as that unheroic creature, a writer, that he gathered, garnered, saved what could be saved from defeat, suffering, and death. Because he was an artist, his testimony turns mere waste and misery into that useful thing, tragedy.

  His companion Edward Wilson, whose paintings are perhaps the finest visual record of Antarctica, kept a diary of the polar journey too. Wilson was a far sweeter, more generous man than Scott, and his diary is very moving, but it has not the power of Scott’s—it is not a work of art; it records, but it does not ultimately take responsibility for what happens. Self-absorbed, willful, obsessed, controlling, Scott was evidently an artist born. He should never have been entrusted with a polar expedition, no doubt. But he was; and he had so fierce a determination to tell his story to the end that he wrote it even as he lay in the tent on the ice dying of cold, starvation, and gangrene among his dead. And so Antarctica is ours. He won it for us.

  PROSPECTS FOR WOMEN IN WRITING

  (1986)

  I was invited to sit on a panel called Women in the Arts, at the Conference on Women in the Year 2000, held in Portland in September of 1986. Each panelist was asked to make a ten-minute statement about the prospects for women in her particular field.

  It’s only been about two hundred years since women gained access to literacy and began to empower themselves with that great power, the written word. And they have written. The works of women acknowledged as “great”—Austen, the Brontes, Dickinson, Eliot, Woolf—make a high road for other women writers to follow, so wide and clear that even the conscious or unconscious misogyny of most critics and teachers of literature hasn’t been able to hide or close it.

  There is less sexism in book and magazine publishing than in any field I know about. Of course most publishers are men, but most publishers now aren’t even human: they’re corporations. Many editors and other human beings in publishing are women or unmacho men. And thirty to fifty percent of living authors are women. With talent and obstinacy, then, a woman can and will get her writing published; with talent, obstinacy, and luck, her writing will be widely read and taken notice of. But.

  As Tillie Olsen has demonstrated in Silences, although thirty to fifty percent of books are written by women, what is called “literature” remains eighty-eight to ninety percent male, decade after decade. No matter how successful, beloved, influential her work was, when a woman author dies, nine times out of ten she gets dropped from the lists, the courses, the anthologies, while the men get kept. If she had the nerve to have children, her chances of getting dropped are higher still. So we get Anthony Trollope coming out the ears while Elizabeth Gaskell is ignored, or endless studies of Nathaniel Hawthorne while Harriet Beecher Stowe is taught as a footnote to history. Most women’s writing—like most work by women in any field—is called unimportant, secondary, by masculinist teachers and critics of both sexes; and literary styles and genres are constantly redefined to keep women’s writing in second place. So if you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

  To find out what women writers are up against, if you want the useful blues, read Tillie Olsen, and if you want to get cheerfully enraged, read Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing or Dale Spender’s wonderful Man Made Language.

  To try to summarize my own experience: The more truly your work comes from your own being, body and soul, rather than fitting itself into male conventions and expectations of what to write about and how to write it, the less it will suit most editors, reviewers, grant givers, and prize committees. But among all those are women and men to whom the real thing, the art, comes first; and you have to trust them. You have to trust yourself. And you have to trust your readers.

  The writer only does half the job. It takes two to make a book. Many more women buy and read books than men. And in the last fifteen years there has been an increasing sense of strength and mutual validation among women writers and readers, a resistance to the male control over reading, a refusal to join men in sneering at what women want to write and read. Get hold of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and read it and then tell me women can’t show men how to write and what to write about! The English profs keep sweeping our work under the rug, but that rug is about three feet off the floor by now, and things are coming out from under it and eating the English profs. Housework is woman’s work, right? Well, it’s time to shake the rugs.

  Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Every little macho dodo, from Hemingway to Mailer. There is no more subversive act than the act of writing from a woman’s experience of life using a woman’s judgment. Woolf knew that and said it in 1930. Most of us forgot it and had to rediscover it all over again in the sixties. But for a whole generation now, women have been writing, publishing, and reading one another, in artistic and scholarly and feminist fellowship. If we go on doing that, by the year 2000 we will—for the first time ever—have kept the perceptions, ideas, and judgments of women alive in consciousness as an active, creative force in society for more than one generation. And our daughters and granddaughters won’t have to start from zero the way we did. To keep women’s words, women’s works, alive and powerful—that’s what I see as our job as writers and readers for the next fifteen years, and the next fifty.

  TEXT SILENCE. PERFORMANCE

  (1986)

  This talk was given for Composers Inc., on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1986. To prepare it for print I have had to truncate it and fiddle it around, since I had to omit most of the readings it was the matrix of (though I left in “She Who” as bait), and since my composer-collaborator Elinor Armer could not join me on the page as she did on stage to talk about the text/music piece we were about to premiere. But to smooth it all down into a proper essay seemed to be in bad faith towards its subject; it was a performance, and so on the page it has some of the queerness and incompleteness of all oral works written down.

  The printed word is reproducible. You can type the word “sunrise” or print it in type or on a computer screen or printout, and it’s the same word reproduced. If you handwrite the word “sunrise” and then I handwrite it, I’ve reproduced it, I’ve copied it, though its identity is maybe getting a little wrinkly and weird around the edges. But if you say “sunrise” and then I say “sunrise,” yes, it’s the same word we’re saying, but we can’t speak of reproduction, only of repeating, a very different matter. It matters who said it. Speech is an event. The sunrise itself happens over and over, happens indeed continuously, by way of the Earth turning, but I don’t think it is ever legitimate to say, “It’s the same sunrise.” Events aren’t reproducible. To say that the letters O and M “make” the word “OM” is to confuse sign and event, like mistaking a wristwatch for the rotation of the planet. The word “OM” is a sound, an event; it “takes” time to say it; its saying “makes” time. The instrument of that sound is the breath, which we breathe over and over, by way of being alive. Indeed the sound can be reproduced mechanically, but then it has ceased to be, as we say, live. It’s not the event, but a shadow of it.

  Writing of any kind fixes the word outside time, and silences it. The written word is a shadow. Shadows are silent. The reader breathes back life into that unmortality, and maybe noise into that silence.

  People used to be aware that the written word was the visible sign of an audible sign, and they read aloud—they put their breath into it. Apparently if the Romans saw somebody sitting reading silently to themself they nudged each other and sniggered. Abelard and Aquinas moved their lips while they read, like louts with comic books. In a Chinese library you couldn’t hear yourself think, any more than you can in a Chinese opera.

  So long as literacy was guarded by a male elite as their empowering privilege, most people knew text as event. What we call literature was recitation: t
he speaking and hearing, by live people gathered together, of a more or less fixed narrative or other formal structure, using repetition, conventional phrases, and a greater or lesser amount of improvisation. That’s the Odyssey, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Torah, the Edda, all myths, all epics, all folktales, the entire literature of North America, South America, and much of Africa before the White conquests, and still the literature of many cultures and subcultures from New Guinea to the slum streets.

  Yet we call the art of language, language as an art, “writing.” I’m a writer, right? Literature literally means letters, the alphabet. The oral text, verbal art as event, as performance, has been devalued as primitive, a “lower” form, discarded, except by babies, the blind, the electorate, and people who come to hear people give lectures.

  What, in fact, are we doing here—me lecturing, you listening? Something ever so ethnic. We’re indulging in orality. It isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty kinky. It’s disreputable, because oral text is held to be “inferior” to written—and written really now means printed. We value the power of print, which is its infinite reproducibility. Print is viral. (Virile is now subsumed in viral.) The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

  But the word, she squeaks, is not information. What is the information value of the word “fuck”? Of the word “OM”?

  Information is, or may be, one value or aspect of the word. There are others. Sound is one of them. Significance does not necessarily imply reference to an absent referent; the event itself may be considered significant: for example, a sunrise; a noise. A word in the first place is a noise. To the computers all aspects of the word other than information are “noise.” But we are not computers. We may not be very bright, but we are brighter than computers.

  It is high time that I did what I am talking about, so here is a fragment of a story from an oral literature, written in the form in which we usually read such literature.

  Then the great Grizzly Bear took notice of it. She became angry, ran out, and rushed up to the man who was scolding her. She rushed into his house, took him, and killed him. She tore his flesh to pieces and broke his bones. Then she went. Now she remembered her own people and her two children. She was very angry, and she went home.

  Franz Boas wrote the story for us that way, in that form, as information—part of the information he was gathering about Tsimshian culture. But before that, in the first place, he wrote it down in Tsimshian as he heard it, as it was spoken, performed for him; and then he did an interlinear word-for-word translation into English. And that translation, arranged in breath-groups, reads like this:

  Then she noticed it,

  the great Grizzly Bear.

  Then she came,

  being sick in heart.

  Then quickly she ran out at him,

  greatly angry.

  Then she went where the man was

  who scolded.

  Then into that place she stood.

  Then she took the man.

  Then all over she killed him.

  It was dead,

  the man.

  All over was finished his flesh.

  Then were broken all his bones.

  At once she went.

  She remembered her people,

  where her two cubs were.

  Then went the great Grizzly Bear.

  Angry she was,

  and sick at heart.

  As Barre Toelken (from whom I took these illuminating passages) says, the literal translation is direct, dramatic, strange.* It has a pace, a rhythm, that makes you hear it even reading it in silence on the page. What Boas did with the passage was turn it into prose. As the fellow in Molière says, “You mean I’ve been talking prose all my life?”—but in fact, he hadn’t. Prose is an artifact of the technology of writing. The Tsimshian text, and Boas’s first transliteration of it, is actually not prose, nor poetry, nor drama, but the notation of a verbal performance.

  Originally music was recited just as verbal text was (and we still say “recital” for a solo performance of music). It was performed from memory, by imitation and rote learning, more or less exactly repeating an original, with considerable latitude for variations, or else improvised according to strong guiding conventions of structure and technique.

  Notation—the writing of music and the means of printing it and now the photoreproduction technology that makes even manuscript infinitely reproducible—had a huge effect on both the composition and the performance of music. Yet there is a lot of music that actively resists or evades notation, including some of the liveliest contemporary music (jazz, synthesizer composition). And written music, in any case, did not replace performance. We don’t go to the symphony or the rock concert and each sit there reading a printed score in silence.

  But that’s exactly what we do in the library.

  Why did it happen to words and not to music? A dumb question, but I need an answer to it. Which, I guess, might be that the note is purely a sound, the word impurely a sound. The word is a sound that symbolizes, has significance; though it is not pure information, it is or can function as a sign. Insofar as it is a sign it can be replaced by another sign, equally arbitrary, and this sign can be a visual one. The note, having no symbolic value in itself, no “meaning,” can’t be replaced by a sign. It can only be indicated by one.

  Word spoken and note sung both enter the mind through that whorled and delicate fleshly gateway the ear. Poem written or song written come through that crystalline receiver of quanta the eye, in search of the inner, the mental ear. In music, this eye detour is a convenience, an adjunct only; music goes on being what is sounded and heard. But the written word found a detour past both outer ear and inner ear to nonsensory understanding. A kind of short circuit, a way around the body. Written text can be read as pure sign, as meaning alone. When we started doing that, the word stopped being an event.

  I’m not complaining, you know. If it weren’t for writing, for books, how could I be a novelist married to a historian? Written language is the greatest single technology of the storage and dissemination of knowledge, which is the primary act of human culture. It gives us all the libraries full of books of science, reference, fact, theory, thought. It gives us newspapers, journals. It gives us interoffice memos, catalogues of obscure forms of potholder and electric tempeh shredder, and the reports of federal committees on deforestation printed on paper that used to be a forest. That’s how it is—we’re literate. And we’re word processors now too, since information theory and the computer are hooked up together. That’s dandy. But why do we lock ourselves into one mode? Why either/or? We aren’t binary. Why have we replaced oral text with written? Isn’t there room for both? Spoken text doesn’t even take storage room; it’s self-recycling and does not require wood pulp. Why have we abandoned and despised the interesting things that happen when the word behaves like music and the author is not just “a writer” but the player of the instrument of language?

  The stage: yes. Plays get printed, but their life is still clearly in performance, in the actors’ breath, the audience’s response. But the drama isn’t central to our literature any more. Nor is the aesthetic power of the language of drama central to it, at present. The power and glory of Renaissance plays, or of a writer as recent as Synge, is the language; but for fifty years or more we’ve been satisfied in the theater by the mere selective imitation of common speech. I wonder if this isn’t partly the influence of movies and TV. A play is words, it is nothing but words; in film the words are secondary, the medium is a visual one where the strongest aesthetic values are not verbal at all.

  That doesn’t mean that words have to be as badly treated as they are in most film and TV drama. The media use words like they were sanitary landfill. Even radio, the aural medium par excellence, where in the early decades there was a lot of real wordplay, mostly uses words only to give the news and weather. Talk shows aren’t art, and
rock lyrics keep getting more rudimentary. Radio drama has made a small comeback on NPR, and NPR radio readings have led to a demand for cassettes of readings to play during commuter gridlock, but that’s still a tiny sideline to book publishing. Our text is still silent.

  Where have I heard language as art? In some, some few, speeches—Martin Luther King…. In some well-told ghost stories at the campfire, and some really funny dirty jokes, and from my mother at eighty telling us her experience in the 1906 earthquake when she was nine. From comedians with a great text, like Bill Cosby’s Chickenheart, or Anna Russell’s version of the Ring, aesthetically far superior to Wagner’s. From poets reading, live or on tape, and fiction writers performing—prose pros, you might call them. But from amateurs too. People reading aloud to each other. And here’s a point I’ve been aiming at: If you can read silently you can read aloud. It takes practice, sure, but it’s like playing the guitar; you don’t have to be Doc Watson, you can get and give pleasure just pickin’. And second point: A lot of the stuff we were taught to read silently—Jane! You are moving your lips!—reads better out loud.

  Reading aloud is of course the basic test of a kid’s book. If you apply it to literary works written for adults reading in the silent-perusal mode—that is, in prose—the results can be positively, or negatively, surprising. An example: The present-tense narrative so much in vogue, particularly in “minimalist” fiction, seems more casual and more immediate than the conventional narrative-past tense; but read aloud, it sounds curiously stilted and artificial; its ultimate effect of distancing the text from the reader becomes clear. Another example: Last spring after reading Persuasion to each other, my partner and I decided tentatively and unhopefully to have a bash at To the Lighthouse. When Austen wrote, people still read aloud a great deal, and she clearly heard her text and suited its cadences to the voice; but Woolf, so cerebral and subtle and … so, we found our only problem was that our reading got impeded by tears, shouts of delight, and other manifestations of intellectual exhilaration and uncontrollable emotion. I will never read Virginia Woolf silently again, if I can help it; you miss half what she was doing.