Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  As for poetry, the Beats brought the breath of life back to it, and then Caedmon Records, with that first Dylan Thomas recording; and these days all poets tell you earnestly that they write to be heard. I’ve become a bit skeptical. I think some of them write to be printed on the pages of magazines, because their stuff goes kind of stiff, or kind of limp, performed. Other stuff that doesn’t look like much lying on the page comes to terrific life embodied in the voice. But since poets become poets by publishing in the magazines, the premium is still on the work that works silently. The poem that works better orally can be dismissed as a “performance piece,” with all the usual disparagements of oral texts: primitive, crude, repetitive, naive, etc., etc., etc. Some techniques proper to oral poetry stick out awkwardly in print (just as eye-poetry devices like a series of one-word lines or typographical trickery are useless or worse in performance). The poets who really work in both modes at once, like Ted Hughes or Carolyn Kizer, aren’t common (but tend to be looked down upon as “common” by the magazine mandarins). My impression is that at present women are more interested in voice-poetry than men. Women may turn to the living voice, the ephemeral, subversive performance, deliberately to escape the macho-mandarin control over “literature.” One of the poems that started me thinking about this is Judy Grahn’s “She Who,” in The Work of a Common Woman (St. Martin’s Press, 1978), a poem that must be read aloud, cannot be read silently: its appearance in print is like music notation—an indication of performance.

  She Who

  She, she SHE, she SHE, she WHO?

  she - she WHO she - WHO she WHO - SHE?

  She, she who? she WHO? she, WHO SHE?

  who who SHE, she - who, she WHO - WHO?

  she WHO - who, WHO - who, WHO - who, WHO - who…..

  She. who - WHO, she WHO. She WHO - who SHE?

  who she SHE, who SHE she, SHE - who WHO —

  She WHO?

  She SHE who, She, she SHE

  she SHE, she SHE who.

  SHEEE WHOOOOOO

  (When I was planning this talk I found, in a book by the Tai Chi master Da Liu, a description of Taoist breathing: “the sounds hu, shi, … blowing and breathing with open mouth … evoking harmony.” Hear that, Judy?)

  With stuff like that around, I began to wonder why I had to work in silence all my life, as if I were writing in a giant library with a giant librarian always going ssshhh. …

  My last book, Always Coming Home, is about a nonexistent Californian people called the Kesh, who had a lively tradition of both oral and written literature, never having scrapped one in favor of the other. Many of the translations from the Kesh in the book (the Kesh language, incidentally, came into being only after most of the translations from it were made) are texts of performance pieces, notations of verse, narrative, or drama that properly exists, like music, as sound. There is a piece of a novel, which, like our novels, exists primarily in writing to be read in silence, and equally there are transcriptions of stories told aloud, from the improvised to the fixed ritual recitation. Most Kesh poetry was occasional—the highest form, according to Goethe—and much of it was made by what we call amateurs, people doing poetry as a common skill, the way people do sewing or cooking, as an ordinary and essential part of being alive. The quality of such poetry, sewing, and cooking of course varies enormously. We have been taught that only poetry of extremely high quality is poetry at all; that poetry is a big deal, and you have to be a pro to write it, or, in fact, to read it. This is what keeps a few poets and many, many English departments alive. That’s fine, but I was after something else: the poem not as fancy pastry but as bread; the poem not as masterpiece but as life-work.

  I don’t believe that such an attitude towards poetry leads, as it might seem to, to any devaluing of the poet’s singular gift, or patient craft, or sullen art. After all, Shakespeare wrote when every gent was scribbling sonnets; the common practice of an art indeed may be the surest guarantee of quality in professional practice of it.

  A “secondary” professional—a critic or an English professor—might be inclined to say that the standards of nonprofessional poetry are lower. But the Kesh did not use higher and lower as values; nor do I. They used central and less central, to state where their values were, what they prized and praised; and poetry was at the center. So, not surprisingly, it is for me.

  But I would certainly agree that the standards must be different. Very different. Insofar as our poetry and its criticism has been “professional,” which is to say male-dominated, I am out to subvert it wherever I can. A masculine poetics depends ultimately upon the absence of women, the objectification of Woman and Nature. If Kesh verse does nothing else, at least it spits in the eye of Papa Lacan.

  After translating from the Kesh for a couple of years, I came back to English as a First Language—but changed. I had been talking womantalk, and I went on wanting to work with the voice, not the silent word. At the same time, having done a little work with technicians in sound studios, I was greatly impressed with their gifts and arts; and the two interests naturally tended to come together on tape. Audio tape of course is used principally to reproduce, to make infinite copies. But it can be used as an artistic medium in itself, working with the speaking voice, using dynamics, pitch change, doubletracking, cutting, and all the dodges and delicacies of the sound technician’s craft and the resources of increasingly refined instruments. Poets can play new games here, just as they did when printing (also a technology of reproduction) was new. Unless the poet can afford the machineries and becomes a technician, the work has to be a collaboration; but then, all performance is collaboration. Poetry as the big solo ego trip is only one version of the art; there are others, equally enjoyable and demanding.

  Audio poetry is not, of course, performance: if you buy the tape you have the reproduction, not the event. You have the unmortal shadow. But at least it isn’t silent; at least the text was woven with the living voice.

  * Barre Toelken and Tacheeni Scott, “Poetic Retranslation and the ‘Pretty Languages’ of Yellowman,” in Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations, ed. Karl Kroeber (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981). This anthology, and the work of Dell Hymes in “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), of Dennis Tedlock in The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) and Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuñi Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), and of others concerned with the translation of works in the great oral verbal traditions, were my only guide into the fascinating and complex subject matter of this talk when I wrote it, except for Walter J. Ong’s The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981). To enter the subject from Native American verbal art is to bypass all assumptions of the superiority or primacy of written literature, and the arrogant dismissal of performance as a secondary, unimportant aesthetic category. This saves one a great deal of time, which can be wasted in worrying over such statements as this: “Meanwhile the truth is simple and clear: ‘There are many performances of the same poem—differing among themselves in many ways. A performance is an event, but the poem itself, if there is any poem, must be some kind of enduring object’ ” (Elizabeth Fine quoting Roman Jakobson quoting Wimsatt and Beardsley). I think it is fair to say that the longer one considers that statement, the less clear, the less simple, and the less true it reveals itself to be.

  After I had reworked the talk for this volume, I came upon Fine’s splendid The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), which not only led me to Richard Bauman’s Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984) and Arnold Berleant’s The Aesthetic Field (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), but which summarizes and synthesizes current work and theory in the whole area with genuine clarity
and simplicity, though without claim to final truth. If my piece leads any readers to her book, or to the wonderful things that are happening to literary theory and practice in the realms of Native American literature both old and contemporary, it will have served a good purpose.

  “WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?”

  (1987)

  In the spring of 1987, Pamela Sargent, Ian Watson, and George Zebrowski asked several writers for a response—to be printed in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America—to the following question: “What should science fiction be? Is that what it is? Who is responsible for its current state?”

  I was at first hesitant about answering at all, because although I am a science-fiction writer, I am not only a science-fiction writer, and will perhaps never know the field so purely from within as the writers whose entire work is there; so who am I to tell them what’s what? But then I realized that this had never bothered me until some people who write about sf began saying that I had “turned my back on science fiction,” ratted out, gone mainstream, headed for Fame and Money in the Eastern Literary Establishment, and generally played apostate, all of which had made me a bit self-conscious, as well as a bit cross. Facing that self-consciousness, I decided that though I didn’t have a whole lot to say on this particular subject, I’d go ahead and say it, and not let myself be silenced; for although I am not only a science-fiction writer, I am a science-fiction writer, and as such am entitled to the usual passionate feelings about the whole thing.

  “What should science fiction be? Is that what it is?”

  All my noisiest ego-people, the moralist, the preacher, the legislator, the know-it-all, love an invitation to say what something “should” be, and they drown out the softer voices of my mind, the storyteller, the poet, the feminist, the clown, who aren’t all that sure what science fiction should be or even what it is. But all of us in here agree on the third question, “Who is responsible for its current state?” To that I reply unanimously: Nobody’s responsible for science fiction, surely, but the people who write it and the people who read it.

  Editors, publishers, agents, booksellers, promoters, book clubs, fan organizations, awards boards, reviewers, critics, teachers of literature and of writing, all have immense influence on what is written and read in sf; and editors, publishers, and chain bookstores in particular have a great deal of control over it. But all the same I don’t think they’re responsible for it. Control is a matter of power-over; it’s when you have the power-to that you’re responsible.

  The market’s, marketers’, or censors’ area of control over what’s printed and the writer/reader’s area of autonomy and responsibility may overlap happily or conflict destructively. In this country, though the market pressure is enormous and there is indirect censorship, I think the size of our area of power is pretty much up to us (us being the writers and readers). Of course, if we hand over control of our work, at any stage, to them (them being the middlemen), they’ll take it, and the area of our autonomous action will shrink. To accept the responsibility of writing and reading not what they tell us is wanted / will sell / other people want / we “should,” but what we choose to write and read, is to increase the area of our power, both personal and as members of a community of writers and readers.

  At present it seems that many people are allowing market control over sf to dominate other options and values, and correspondingly the feeling of community among sf people seems rather weaker than it was. But whether we choose to write for the market, for the critics, for love, for fans, for survival, or for all of that or none of that or a mixture, I don’t see how anybody can be blamed or praised or held responsible for our words but ourselves.

  CONFLICT

  (1987)

  From looking at manuals used in college writing courses, and from listening to participants in writing workshops, I gather that it is a generally received idea that a story is the relation of a conflict, that without conflict there is no plot, that narrative and conflict are inseparable.

  Now, that something or other has to happen in a story, I agree (in very general, broad terms; there are, after all, excellent stories in which everything has happened, or is about to happen). But that what happens in a story can be defined as, limited to, conflict, I doubt. And that to assert the dependence of narrative on conflict is to uphold Social Darwinism in all its glory, I sadly suspect.

  Existence as struggle, life as a battle, everything in terms of defeat and victory: Man versus Nature, Man versus Woman, Black versus White, Good versus Evil, God versus Devil—a sort of apartheid view of existence, and of literature. What a pitiful impoverishment of the complexity of both!

  In E. M. Forster’s famous definition (in Aspects of the Novel), this is a story:

  The King died and then the Queen died.

  And this is a plot:

  The King died and then the Queen died of grief.

  In that charming and extremely useful example, where is the “conflict”? Who is pitted against what? Who wins?

  Is the first book of Genesis a story? Where is the “conflict”?

  Has War and Peace a plot? Can that plot be in any useful or meaningful way reduced to “conflict,” or a series of “conflicts”?

  People are cross-grained, aggressive, and full of trouble, the storytellers tell us; people fight themselves and one another, and their stories are full of their struggles. But to say that that is the story is to use one aspect of existence, conflict, to include and submerge other aspects which it does not include and does not comprehend.

  Romeo and Juliet is a story of the conflict between two families, and its plot involves the conflict of two individuals with those families. Is that all it involves? Isn’t Romeo and Juliet about something else, and isn’t it the something else that makes the otherwise trivial tale of a feud into a tragedy?

  I for one will be glad when this gladiatorial view of fiction has run its course. I may then have time to find out how and when the tremendous word “epiphany,” which I thought meant the coming of the Holy into the holy place, began to be thrown around in writing courses to mean, I gather, something like the high point of the plot, the crux or noeud, the moment when it all comes together, in such stories as have such a moment. This is a pretty hifalutin word for a pretty ordinary narrative event. I wonder if James Joyce is responsible for its cheapening; I seem to recall that he talked about “having epiphanies” in his bathroom. I guess you have to have a fairly high opinion of yourself and your bathroom to talk that way.

  “WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS FROM?”

  (1987)

  With thanks to my students in the fiction workshops at Haystack, Clarion West, and Humboldt Community College, in the summer and fall of 1987, whose work and talk enabled me to write this.

  Whenever I talk with an audience after a reading or lecture, somebody asks me, “Where do you get your ideas from?” A fiction writer can avoid being asked that question only by practicing the dourest naturalism and forswearing all acts of the imagination. Science-fiction writers can’t escape it, and develop habitual answers to it: “Schenectady,” says Harlan Ellison. Vonda N. McIntyre takes this further, explaining that there is a mail order house for ideas in Schenectady, to which writers can subscribe for five or ten or (bargain rate) twenty-five ideas a month; then she hits herself on the head to signify remorse, and tries to answer the question seriously. Even in its most patronizing form—“Where do you get all those crazy ideas from?”—it is almost always asked seriously: the asker really wants to know.

  The reason why it is unanswerable is, I think, that it involves at least two false notions, myths, about how fiction is written.

  First myth: There is a secret to being a writer. If you can just learn the secret, you will instantly be a writer; and the secret might be where the ideas come from.

  Second myth: Stories start from ideas; the origin of a story is an idea.

  I will dispose of the first myth as quickly as possible. The “secret” is skill. If you h
aven’t learned how to do something, the people who have may seem to be magicians, possessors of mysterious secrets. In a fairly simple art, such as making pie crust, there are certain teachable “secrets” of method that lead almost infallibly to good results; but in any complex art, such as housekeeping, piano-playing, clothes-making, or story-writing, there are so many techniques, skills, choices of method, so many variables, so many “secrets,” some teachable and some not, that you can learn them only by methodical, repeated, long-continued practice—in other words, by work.

  Who can blame the secret-seekers for hoping to find a shortcut and avoid all the work?

  Certainly the work of learning any art is hard enough that it is unwise (so long as you have any choice in the matter) to spend much time and energy on an art you don’t have a decided talent for. Some of the secretiveness of many artists about their techniques, recipes, etc., may be taken as a warning to the unskilled: What works for me isn’t going to work for you unless you’ve worked for it.

  My talent and inclination for writing stories and keeping house were strong from the start, and my gift for and interest in music and sewing were weak; so that I doubt that I would ever have been a good seamstress or pianist, no matter how hard I worked. But nothing I know about how I learned to do the things I am good at doing leads me to believe that there are “secrets” to the piano or the sewing machine or any art I’m no good at. There is just the obstinate, continuous cultivation of a disposition, leading to skill in performance.