Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  To push mothers back into “private life,” a mythological space invented by the patriarchy, on the theory that their acceptance of the “role” of mother invalidates them for public, political, artistic responsibility, is to play Old Nobodaddy’s game, by his rules, on his side.

  In Writing Beyond the Ending, Du Plessis shows how women novelists write about the woman artist: they make her an ethical force, an activist trying “to change the life in which she is also immersed.”14 To have and bring up kids is to be about as immersed in life as one can be, but it does not always follow that one drowns. A lot of us can swim.

  Again, whenever I give a version of this paper, somebody will pick up on this point and tell me that I’m supporting the Superwoman syndrome, saying that a woman should have kids write books be politically active and make perfect sushi. I am not saying that. We’re all asked to be Superwoman; I’m not asking it, our society does that. All I can tell you is that I believe it’s a lot easier to write books while bringing up kids than to bring up kids while working nine to five plus housekeeping. But that is what our society, while sentimentalizing over Mom and the Family, demands of most women—unless it refuses them any work at all and dumps them onto welfare and says, Bring up your kids on food stamps, Mom, we might want them for the army. Talk about superwomen, those are the superwomen. Those are the mothers up against the wall. Those are the marginal women, without either privacy or publicity; and it’s because of them more than anyone else that the woman artist has a responsibility to “try to change the life in which she is also immersed.”

  And now I come back round to the bank of that lake, where the fisherwoman sits, our woman writer, who had to bring her imagination up short because it was getting too deeply immersed…. The imagination dries herself off, still swearing under her breath, and buttons up her blouse, and comes to sit beside the little girl, the fisherwoman’s daughter. “Do you like books?” she says, and the child says, “Oh, yes. When I was a baby I used to eat them, but now I can read. I can read all of Beatrix Potter by myself, and when I grow up I’m going to write books, like Mama.”

  “Are you going to wait till your children grow up, like Jo March and Theodora?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” says the child. “I’ll just go ahead and do it.”

  “Then will you do as Harriet and Margaret and so many Harriets and Margarets have done and are still doing, and hassle through the prime of your life trying to do two full-time jobs that are incompatible with each other in practice, however enriching their interplay may be both to the life and the art?”

  “I don’t know,” says the little girl. “Do I have to?”

  “Yes,” says the imagination, “if you aren’t rich and you want kids.”

  “I might want one or two,” says reason’s child. “But why do women have two jobs where men only have one? It isn’t reasonable, is it?”

  “Don’t ask me!” snaps the imagination. “I could think up a dozen better arrangements before breakfast! But who listens to me?”

  The child sighs and watches her mother fishing. The fisherwoman, having forgotten that her line is no longer baited with the imagination, isn’t catching anything, but she’s enjoying the peaceful hour; and when the child speaks again she speaks softly. “Tell me, Auntie. What is the one thing a writer has to have?”

  “I’ll tell you,” says the imagination. “The one thing a writer has to have is not balls. Nor is it a child-free space. Nor is it even, speaking strictly on the evidence, a room of her own, though that is an amazing help, as is the goodwill and cooperation of the opposite sex, or at least the local, in-house representative of it. But she doesn’t have to have that. The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That’s enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on the paper. In other words, that she’s free. Not wholly free. Never wholly free. Maybe very partially. Maybe only in this one act, this sitting for a snatched moment being a woman writing, fishing the mind’s lake. But in this, responsible; in this, autonomous; in this, free.”

  “Auntie,” says the little girl, “can I go fishing with you now?”

  Notes

  1. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.), p. 7.

  2. The edition of Little Women I used was my mother’s and is now my daughter’s. It was published in Boston by Little, Brown, undated, around the turn of the century, and Merrill’s fine drawings have also been reproduced in other editions.

  3. Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).

  4. Louisa May Alcott, Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890). The passages quoted are on pp. 203, 122, and 125.

  5. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d.), p. 41.

  6. Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1841, quoted in Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Dell, Laurel Editions, 1983), p. 227.

  7. This and the subsequent connected passages are from the Autobiography and Letters of Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, edited by Mrs. Harry Coghill (Leicester: Leicester University Press, The Victorian Library, 1974), pp. 23, 24.

  8. Joseph Conrad, quoted in Olsen, p. 30.

  9. Alicia Ostriker, Writing Like a Woman, Michigan Poets on Poetry Series (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 126.

  10. Käthe Kollwitz, Diaries and Letters, quoted in Olsen, pp. 235, 236.

  11. The talk, known in its revised form as “Professions for Women” and so titled in the Essays, was given on January 21, 1931, to the London National Society for Women’s Service, and can be found complete with all deletions and alternate readings in Mitchell Leaska’s editing of Woolf’s The Pargiters (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).

  12. Ostriker, p. 131.

  13. Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (New York: NAL, Plume Books, 1984), pp. 122–23. Also published under the title Thank You All Very Much.

  14. Du Plessis, p. 101.

  * A particularly exhilarating discussion of this issue is the essay “Writing and Motherhood” by Susan Rubin Suleiman, in The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Garner, Kahane, and Springnether (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Suleiman gives a short history of the nineteenth-century books-or-babies theory and its refinement in the twentieth century by such psychologists as Helene Deutsch, remarking that “it took psychoanalysis to transform moral obligation into a psychological ‘law,’ equating the creative impulse with the procreative one and decreeing that she who has a child feels no need to write books.” Suleiman presents a critique of the feminist reversal of this theory (she who has a book feels no need to have children) and analyzes current French feminist thinking on the relationship between writing and femininity/motherhood.

  * My understanding of this issue has been much aided by Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), as well as by Jean Baker Miller’s modestly revolutionary Toward a New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976). Gilligan’s thesis, stated very roughly, is that our society brings up males to think and speak in terms of their rights, females in terms of their responsibilities, and that conventional psychologies have implicitly evaluated the “male” image of a hierarchy of rights as “superior” (hierarchically, of course) to the “female” image of a network of mutual responsibilities. Hence a man finds it (relatively) easy to assert his “right” to be free of relationships and dependents, à la Gauguin, while women are not granted and do not grant one another any such right, preferring to live as part of an intense and complex network in which freedom is arrived at, if at all, mutually. Coming at the matter from this angle, one can see why there are no or very few “Great Artists” among women, when the “Great Artist” is defined as inherently superior to and not responsible towards others.

  REVIEWS

&nbs
p; 1977–1986

  As I went through my manuscripts in preparing this volume, I was surprised at what a very odd lot of books I was asked, and agreed, to review. I suppose it is because I am myself a genre-buster that I get invited to discuss books that don’t fit neatly into the pigeonholes; certainly these are often the books I can best appreciate.

  This section contains the only pieces I have ever published under a nom de plume. Some persons who shall be nameless, including myself, co-edited a brief-lived (two issues) journal of reviews of science fiction, called Venom. We felt that sf reviewing had become awfully milquetoasty; it was hard to tell the reviews from the blurbs—everything the greatest, the biggest, the best. Venom was to be an antidote (“Mithridates, he died old”). The precondition for becoming a reviewer for Venom was that you do a killer review of one of your own books, to be published in the magazine. Then you could cut loose on somebody else. So that nobody could know which were the suicides and which were the murders, you had to use a nom de plume. Mine was Mom de Plume.

  THE DARK TOWER

  by C. S. Lewis

  (1977)

  For eighty or ninety years a school of writing has flourished that might be called the Inside Club. Although its favored territory begins at the gates of the British public school, outsiders are quite welcome if they have very good brains and can adopt the manner. One reason why T. S. Eliot was sympathetic to Kipling, I suspect, was that he recognized another occasional visitor to the Club—a visitor of genius, to be sure, but his sympathy was perhaps less for the genius than for the manner, that easy, urbane manner which says, never in words, We are on the inside; we know. None of the Bloomsbury crowd ever even visited the Club, for a rebellious conscience disbars one automatically. The writing of detective fiction, on the other hand, is almost an entree; mysteries lend themselves all too well to the snobbery of superior knowledge. Mysteries of any kind: including the great mystery, the object of religion. Christianity itself can be taken as an exclusive club, those who know inside, the heathens in the outer dark. By breeding, education, profession, and conviction, C. S. Lewis was a resident member of the Inside Club, and unlike Eliot or Kipling, he seldom ventured out into the dark. He generally speaks from the position of knowing just a bit more than the reader knows. Modestly, of course, and entertainingly, with splendid imagination and wit. But there is a hollow sound, as of tinkling cymbals, in the background.

  These tales—one previously unpublished long fragment, three short fantasy pieces, and the unfinished “After Ten Years”—are none of them Lewis at his best; but there are some fine passages. The opening of “After Ten Years,” a torment of crowding, cramped muscles, sweat, fear, lust, daydream— Where are these men? In a ship? In a prison? Slowly, with beautiful slowness, one realizes that they are waiting out the night “in the narrow streets of Troy,” inside the belly of the wooden horse. This is a superb beginning, and the story of Menelaus’s reunion with a middle-aged Helen, if completed, might have fulfilled its promise—if Lewis had treated Helen as a human being. But would he have done so? The indications are that he was going to split her into two stereotypes, heartless beauty and soulless eidolon, the Witch and the Drudge, and would never have arrived at the woman, Helen.

  The spitefulness shown towards women in these tales is remarkable. “The Shoddy Lands” is as startling in its cruelty as in its originality; it is, on several levels, a truly frightening story. But the authentic Inside Club tone is at its braying clearest in “Ministering Angels,” a humorous piece. Two women volunteer to bring sexual solace to a team of male scientists on Mars. One is a decrepit whore and the other—“Its hair was very short, its nose very long, its mouth very prim, its chin sharp, and its manner authoritative. The voice revealed it as, scientifically speaking, a woman.” The true horror of the creature is revealed a page later: “She’s a lecturer at a redbrick university.” However petty, this is hate. The depth of it is proved in the final paragraph, where the Christian member of the team blissfully contemplates the conversion and salvation of the decrepit whore but never gives a thought to the soul of the “lecturer at a redbrick university.”

  There’s a good deal of hatred in Lewis, and it is a frightening hatred, because this gentle, brilliant, lovable, devout man never saw the need even to rationalize it, let alone apologize for it. He was self-righteous in his faith. That may be permissible to a militant Christian; but it is not permissible to a highly intelligent, highly educated man to be self-righteous in his opinions and his prejudices. Only membership in the Inside Club gives that sanction.

  J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis’s close friend and colleague, certainly shared many of Lewis’s views and was also a devout Christian. But it all comes out very differently in his fiction. Take his handling of evil: his villains are orcs and Black Riders (goblins and zombies: mythic figures) and Sauron, the Dark Lord, who is never seen and has no suggestion of humanity about him. These are not evil men but embodiments of the evil in men, universal symbols of the hateful. The men who do wrong are not complete figures but complements: Saruman is Gandalf’s dark-self, Boromir Aragorn’s; Wormtongue is, almost literally, the weakness of King Theoden. There remains the wonderfully repulsive and degraded Gollum.

  But nobody who reads the trilogy hates, or is asked to hate, Gollum. Gollum is Frodo’s shadow; and it is the shadow, not the hero, who achieves the quest. Though Tolkien seems to project evil into “the others,” they are not truly others but ourselves; he is utterly clear about this. His ethic, like that of dream, is compensatory. The final “answer” remains unknown. But because responsibility has been accepted, charity survives. And with it, triumphantly, the Golden Rule. The fact is, if you like the book, you love Gollum.

  In Lewis, responsibility appears only in the form of the Christian hero fighting and defeating the enemy: a triumph, not of love, but of hatred. The enemy is not oneself but the Wholly Other, demoniac. This projection leaves the author free to be cruel, and cruelty is the dominant tone of several of these stories. Ransom, the hero of Lewis’s trilogy, appears in the major work of the volume, “The Dark Tower.” His few remarks are in the true Club manner, very modest, very know-it-all. Give me Gollum any day.

  Lewis must be called a science-fiction writer if only for the central scenes of the first volume of his trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet. These descriptions of Martian landscapes and inhabitants are grand: vivid, emotionally powerful, genuinely unearthly. Science fiction has been imitating them ever since. There are hints of that visionary strength in “The Dark Tower,” but weakened by embarrassingly naive sexual overtones; he is not in control of his material. Nobody who draws upon deep unconscious material can be blamed for getting swamped by it at times; and this is one of Lewis’s nearest approaches to a venture into the outer (or inner?) dark. But it’s not science fiction. Though it is a time-travel story, the rationalization is drawn from the English Ladies of the Trianon and from J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time—occultism, not science. I am afraid that Lewis’s feeling about science is expressed by a character on page 48: “And who ever heard of a new scientific discovery which didn’t show that the real universe was even fouler and meaner and more dangerous than you had supposed?” So much for Galileo and Einstein; so much for Konrad Lorenz among the greylag geese. The speaker adds, “I never went in much for religion, but I begin to think Dr. Ransom was right.”

  Lewis never finished the story. He read the first chapters to his friends, then laid it aside for good. Walter Hooper, his biographer, who found the manuscript and published it—with excellent notes—surely did so from the purest motives of scholarship and admiration; but I begin to think Mr. Hooper was wrong.

  C. S. Lewis, The Dark Tower and Other Stories, edited by Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977).

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, STAR WARS, AND THE TERTIUM QUID

  (1978)

  A dark screen. The title, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, appears in silence. The sound begins very, very softly; rises slowly
; explodes into a roaring fortissimo—and stays there during the rest of the movie.

  The light is often at top brightness too, but it is almost impossible to make the light from a projector painful; and anyhow, we have eyelids. But no earlids. The light is used with variety and a great deal of beauty. The sound is used with brutality.

  Very seldom can one understand a complete sentence. Words are mumbled and slurred off, Method-style, shouted or screamed into dust storms, wind storms, helicopter backwash, yelled simultaneously in French and English, redoubled and self-effaced by loudspeaker echo. A few lines come through clear, and they are effective:

  “I didn’t want to see it.”

  “Yes, I saw you going up in the air, did you see me running after you?”

  And my favorite, whispered: “Mince alors …”

  Just enough comes through to convince the middle-aged moviegoer in the fourth row extreme left (does Pauline Kael ever have to sit in the fourth row extreme left?) that she isn’t going deaf and that the unintelligibility is deliberate. Perhaps it is used to disguise the banality of most of the dialogue. Certainly there were moments in Star Wars when one prayed in vain for unintelligibility…. Possibly the high proportion of noise to meaning has a meaning. But I am afraid that it serves merely to augment the hysterical tension established in the opening scene and never relaxed thereafter.