Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Serious investigation of animal linguistic capacity has become almost impossible in the present climate; funding for such investigation was cut off years ago. But the animal participants in the experiments were not only emotionally responsive, highly intelligent, sensitive, but also temperamental, nondomesticable, formidable creatures, neither pet nor wild; rare; extremely valuable for medical experimentation; and expensive. So, when the experiments were closed down, what became of them?

  In some cases the trainer has kept a relationship with the animal at the cost of career and even of normal human relationships. Janis Carter took the chimpanzee Lucy (raised as a “baby” by a couple who gave her to the training center) to an island in an African river, where the woman must live in a cage while two groups of chimpanzees roam free. Trying to rid Lucy of her human dependence, Janis Carter will not use sign language with her. Washoe and her trainer are keeping a low profile in the Pacific Northwest. Koko, the one gorilla involved in the first generation of language experiments, is still being zealously and jealously guarded by her trainer and interlocutor, Penny Patterson. The experiment is going on, but its results have been so selectively released that the most sympathetic scientist would have trouble defending Patterson’s work against charges of incompetence or fraud. Without access to the evidence, it is easy to make such accusations and impossible to disprove them. This is an intellectual loss that may yet be made good; and at least Koko is as well off as she ever was. But Ally has vanished, nameless, into a maze of laboratories, Nim is in a kind of protective solitary confinement, and various lesser-known language-trained chimps are in the care of a tough-minded lab man, James Mahoney, of LEMSIP laboratories, who says, “Once you know that money is the determining factor, you know what is going to happen.”

  So these days the Centers for Disease Control can announce without excuse or comment that chimpanzees have been “successfully infected” with AIDS. From the point of view of these researchers the success is complete. Older laboratory animals, having been subjected to previous experiments (even if the experiments were intellectual not medical), are less valuable, hence appropriate for use in “terminal studies.” Mahoney, asking for a kind of retirement colony for the older animals, is in a minority; most medical experimenters find “destruction” easier and cheaper (indeed, one is tempted to think they save their imagination for inventing euphemisms). Linden’s discussion of such difficult issues is exemplary. Only a prejudiced mind will accuse this book of bias or naiveté. But probably some such accusations will be made, for some members of the scientific establishment react negatively to even the discussion of the possibility of language use by animals.

  That language—genuine language including syntactics, jokes, lies, and disinterested or aesthetic observation—may prove to be a skill accessible in some degree to several species: this is an idea so distasteful to certain behaviorists and linguists that they attack not only the results of experiments but the investigation of the subject. Academic territorialism plays a part in this tabooing, but its basis seems to be a need to believe in human uniqueness, human supremacy. Critics of this kind of “speciesism” suggest that it is about as useful to science as a need to believe that the sun goes around the earth. (Linden may be unwise to call it “humanism,” as he does in his last paragraph, for that word has become the shibboleth of religious fundamentalists, who, since they assert the God-ordained superiority of Man over Beast, would in this usage be humanists.)

  The attitude of the human supremacist is expressed in a vocabulary very close to that of the male supremacist, and both positions probably rise from a terror of losing control of “nature” defined as an object of human exploitation. That animals might exist independently as subjects capable of cognition, emotion, pain—this perception so threatens some Alpha Males of our species that at any hint of it they go into full aggression display, baring their canines, beating their chests, ignoring the evidence. These displays are undeniably impressive, if unedifying. Meanwhile, one is left with the unforgettable images of an animal inside a cage saying, “Drink! Food! Hurry!” to a man outside the cage who doesn’t know the language—and of a woman inside a cage refusing to talk to an animal outside the cage in the only language that animal knows. Such grotesque miseries bespeak a sickness of our times. Kind, quiet, and fair, Eugene Linden’s book is both a diagnosis of and an antidote to the cruelty and confusion it describes. It is pleasant to hope that its success might be a sign of returning health.

  Note: Professor H. S. Terrace sent me in October of 1986 a copy of a letter stating his strong opposition to Silent Partners and my review of it, and correcting two errors of fact. Professor Terrace says that “both David Premack and Duane Rumbaugh have reversed their originally positive assessments of an ape’s grammatical competence. Yet both continue to be funded by significant federal grants,” thus disproving my statement that “serious investigation of animal linguistic capacity has become almost impossible in the present climate; funding for such investigation was cut off years ago.” (It does seem interesting that the continued funding is for two researchers whose “assessments of an ape’s grammatical competence” are negative.) And Professor Terrace is justifiably annoyed at Linden’s failure to check with him about Nim, who is not in “solitary confinement” as I, following Linden, reported; Professor Terrace reports that “since 1983, Nim has been housed with Sally, his mate, in a specially built, spacious home. I can attest personally that both appear to be happy and in good health.”

  Eugene Linden, Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments (New York: Times Books, 1986).

  OUTSIDE THE GATES

  by Molly Gloss

  (1986)

  Seeing fantasy trilogies tumble off the production lines as bright-colored and disposable as plastic toys, we curmudgeons hanker for the days when a fantasy novel was a rare, shy creature that lurked in the Mildew section of used bookstores and was usually by MacDonald, Dunsany, Eddison, or one Morris or another. As art it was both odd and considerable—the passionate expression of a truly unusual mind. Without in the least meaning to, Tolkien changed all that by the sheer force of his genius. To the publishing industry genius means profit. Sauron showed the industrialists where money was to be made, and so fantasy novels are now a modestly profitable industrial product, each one very like all the others.

  The rare, odd, real stuff remains, of course, but has found new shadows to lurk in, far from the hype factories. “Young Adult” fiction can be such a place. Although the label is clearly that of a consumer item, although the prizes in the field can bring in real money, and although a YA book may have, over the years, an immense readership, still YA novels, like all “genre” fiction, remain unnoticed by the heavy advertisers and the powerful literary critics. YA means no more than quiche to the Real Men who control Real Books. So far even feminist criticism has done nothing to change this. We kiddilitters remain outsiders. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe a book like Outside the Gates can only happen outside the gates.

  The passionate expression of a truly unusual mind, Molly Gloss’s first novel moves with the certainty of experience. Its fictional world is established without preamble or apology: this is the way it is here. The gates of human society, kinship, compassion, are shut upon the child gifted with uncommon power, whose “Shadow” is his truest strength. He must die in the wilderness or find there a new kinship, a deeper compassion. Every adolescent knows this country outside the gates and is living there right now; adolescence is exile. Without using the heroic commonplace of One-defeats-Many, Gloss’s story is that of the child alone in the world; it strikes upon deep, universal troubles and fears.

  Beside the orphan Vren there are archetypal figures such as the Animal Helper familiar in folktales worldwide, here a loyal and engagingly wolfish wolf. Vren’s “Shadow” is the power of mutual understanding with animals. Only when a perverted magic exaggerates this gift at cost of everything else in Vren’s mind and body does it become the fairy-tale gift
of the speech of the beasts—power over the animals. Such moral accuracy is characteristic of the book.

  The sense of animal presence is strong throughout the story, mostly delightful, but when Vren obeys the perverse will of the Spellbinder, terrible. Human presence is even more vivid, though there are only four characters of any substance. Rusche, an older outcast who becomes father/brother/friend to Vren, a kind, timid, silent man, is so real a person that one accepts his ability to control the local weather as quite plausible. So, again, there is a sudden and terrific power in the climactic scene when the Spellbinder turns Rusche’s mild magic into this:

  Rusche’s face was dark and terrifying and unfamiliar. When he opened his mouth, he let out a great, terrible breath, a dark billowing cloud, oyster-colored and huge and angry. The thing rose from his mouth and, with a long, heavy thundering, spread itself under the overcast sky.

  The single female character, an older woman, is both central and elusive. At the end of the book, Vren and Rusche are returning to her, but they don’t reach her before the story ends; the gesture of reaching out, of embrace, is incomplete. There may be an element of incompleteness here in the book itself; but after all, Gloss is writing about loneliness and aloneness.

  The Spellbinder, slave of his own power, is completely believable, a short, dark, bald-in-front, ordinary man whose banal spell catches the reader just as it does young Vren—before you know it. The chapter “Whispers,” describing the effects of that spell, is extraordinary. Throughout the book the writing is skillful, the wording compact and exact, the tone quiet and, except for a few over-compressed phrases, musical. As in a well-made chair, each line is true, and counts.

  The ethical concerns of the story are intense but unstated. No preachments. Nor is life here perceived as war, as “conflict,” as it is in so much of our literature that critics have actually taken conflict to be the essential element of narrative. The guiding image of this narrative may be discovery: finding home, finding strength, finding one another. There is indeed a final struggle between power used well and power used ill; it is almost without physical violence, but the moral violence, the intensity of guilt, despair, rage, is almost unbearable when the Spellbinder forces friend to betray friend. Evil defeats itself, but at a high cost. There are no cheap victories. I find the book moving and valuable, and I think young readers will find it so, because in conception and narration it is emotionally honest—clear through.

  Molly Gloss, Outside the Gates (New York: Atheneum Press, 1986).

  GOLDEN DAYS

  by Carolyn See

  (1986)

  A prepublication press release for Golden Days tells us that “against a sharply satirical background of the California life style,” the heroine “comes to sun-and-fun country,” where she meets “the end of everything.” In its perfect obtuseness, this publisher’s description shows what West Coast writers keep running up against: a wall—the wall Easterners build in their minds to separate Reality from California. When they come to live in California they leave the wall standing and float around in their swimming pool reading the Wall Street Journal and saying, “Man, this is unreal.” Some of them have based whole novels on this insight.

  The material of Carolyn See’s novel is a lot more interesting than that, but I have to wonder if anybody east of Barstow is going to be willing to see it. The point is, she is writing as a Californian. The novel’s narrator doesn’t “come to sun-and-fun country,” some Vacationland motel strip; she comes home. She was born there, it’s where she lives, it’s her country. And it’s real. There’s a lovely chapter, just before the nuclear war starts, about carless, careless teenage girls walking in Los Angeles in the fifties. (Nobody walks in Los Angeles, everybody in New York knows that.)

  Where did those girls walk? They walked for miles in the center of the city…. They walked northeast and down a long sweet incline to where Griffith Park Boulevard and Los Feliz and Fletcher Drive met…. They walked the old streets, Hyperion over to Vermont, stopping at the grocery store at … Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard … walking the width of the town they knew, over to La Brea, … and then another long, long walk home.

  The streets are named for the love of saying their names. The girls walk in love.

  There is a “sharply satirical” note in the book, all right, but it isn’t for California; it’s for Wall Street and D.C. and their “life style,” for the corridors of power and the men who strut in them. “If women are opposite to men,” Carolyn See proposes, “and California with its easy money and easy ways was opposite to the fierce, demanding East …”—and on this questioningly poised opposition she balances her extraordinary book.

  I had heard all my life that “California” was irrational. How could I dare say that it was not? But as a woman, and having seen, all my adult life, grim-lipped men jerking at their missiles … having seen their aimless horrid rage when the stuff dripped out of them: having that, as I say, designated by default as “rational,” I suppose there was a conspiracy of brain cells on my part to say that maybe there was something else; death’s opposite.

  So she offers California as life; reality as “California.” This is a soundly, sweetly anti-Puritan novel.

  It is also quite funny, and takes incredible risks, and gets away with at least half of them. We are so well supplied at present with fiction that takes no risks at all, bone-dry minimalism, tough, lean, hard, all the euphemisms that mean “safe,” that there may be readers yearning for some juice and pizzazz, some literary hang-gliding over Topanga Canyon. They’ll like Golden Days. For all its glib wise-guy tone, this is a juicy, soft, and tender book; the strength of its feminism enables it to take the risk of being vulnerable. It isn’t safe, but it’s fearless.

  A serious novel that has World War III about three-quarters of the way through its plot and lets the heroine live through its hideous afterdays happily—that book isn’t playing safe.

  Over the past forty years plenty of after-the-bomb stories have been written; the premise of many is that war purifies, radiation cleans, the tough survive. The lean, the hard, the minimalists, the real men, Puritans, safe and saved, rebuild Law ’n’ Order on the glowing ruins after eliminating the eight-fingered gibbering Muties. Carolyn See takes this old sack of macho and dumps it.

  “On the whole, they say, people got what they expected,” says the narrator. Not what they deserved—just what they expected. When the bombs fell,

  the generals and the military were very hard hit. A certain kind of women and children were devastated…. The ones I knew who lived were the ones who had been making love, or napping, or fixing dinner … the ones far out windsurfing who dove beneath the waves and felt the whole Pacific turn warm …

  Making love, not war…. A fairy tale? Of course! People get what they expect. Those who expect to end crammed in a bomb shelter shooting it out with the Commies, the Muties, or the Joneses, may do so. That’s their fairy tale. Carolyn See has the artist’s right to endow a greater expectation with the authority of imagination. Her vision has a crazy majesty—the whole Pacific turning warm. It has a stinging exactness—the word “devastated,” the words “far out.” If her tale is that love, not hate, is what lives, this is a pretty good time to be telling and hearing that tale.

  The sophistication of thought in the novel is considerable, cool, and Californian. The rigid European fixation of much East Coast thinking doesn’t encompass the real East at all. Concepts such as satyagraha and wu wei, barely mentioned but structurally essential to the book, may be invisible to readers to whom they’re just foreign words, something they do out West, or maybe in Selma. No harm in that, unless it leaves the book underestimated by critics who should know better. It’s a fast, flip, funny read, a good summer book; it’s also something more, and deserves notice. Trying to write nonviolently about the ultimate act of violence, See bases her novel in very old nonviolent traditions; writing as a woman about a “man’s world,” she grounds her anger in feminine solidarity and hu
man kindness. On these firm foundations in the California earth, she has built a Watts Tower of a book, fragile, brilliant, and surprising.

  Carolyn See, Golden Days (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “The Space Crone” copyright © 1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in The CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review), Summer 1976.

  “Is Gender Necessary?” copyright © 1976 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Janice Anderson, eds., Aurora: Beyond Equality (New York: Fawcett Publications, 1976). “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” Copyright © 1987 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  “ ‘Moral and Ethical Implications of Family Planning’ ” copyright © 1978 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or, Why Are We Huddling About the Campfire?” copyright © 1979 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, Autumn 1980.

  “Working on ‘The Lathe’ ” copyright © 1979 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in Horizon, January 1980.

  “Some Thoughts on Narrative” copyright © 1980 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction.

  “World-Making” copyright © 1981 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in Marilyn Yalom, ed., Women Writers of the West Coast (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983).

  “Hunger” copyright © 1981 by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  “Places Names” copyright © 1981 by Ursula K. Le Guin. One section first appeared under the title “Riding Shotgun” in Antaeus 61, Fall 1988.

  “The Princess” copyright © 1982 by Ursula K. Le Guin.