Dancing at the Edge of the World Read online

  ALSO BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

  FICTION

  The Earthsea Cycle:

  A Wizard of Earthsea

  The Tombs of Atuan

  The Farthest Shore

  Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea

  The Left Hand of Darkness

  The Lathe of Heaven

  The Dispossessed

  Malafrena

  The Eye of the Heron

  The Beginning Place

  Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

  The Word for World Is Forest

  Always Coming Home

  Four Ways to Forgiveness

  World of Exile & Illusion, an omnibus including

  Rocannon’s World

  Planet of Exile

  City of Illusions

  SHORT STORIES

  The Compass Rose

  Orsinian Tales

  The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

  Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand

  A Fisherman of the Inland Sea

  Unlocking the Air and Other Stories

  POETRY AND NONFICTION

  Hard Words

  Wild Oats and Fireweeds

  Wild Angels

  The Language of the Night

  Blue Moon over Thurman Street

  Going Out with Peacocks and Other Poems

  The Twins, The Dream (with Diana Bellessi)

  Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching

  FOR CHILDREN

  The Catwings Series:

  Catwings

  Catwings’ Return

  Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings

  Jane on Her Own

  Tom Mouse and Ms. Brown

  A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back

  Fish Soup

  Fire and Stone

  A Visit from Dr. Katz

  Soloman Leviathan’s 931st Trip Around the World

  DANCING

  AT THE

  EDGE

  OF THE

  WORLD

  THOUGHTS ON WORDS, WOMEN, PLACES

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Copyright © 1989 by Ursula K. Le Guin

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Le Guin, Ursula K., 1929–

  Dancing at the edge of the world : thoughts on words, women, places / by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.E42D36 1988

  814’54—dc19 88-11266

  ISBN 978-0-8021-3529-2

  eISBN 978-0-8021-6566-4

  Designed by Irving Perkins Associates

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  15 16 17 18 9 8 7 6

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  ALSO BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  TALKS AND ESSAYS

  1976 The Space Crone

  Is Gender Necessary? Redux

  1978 “Moral and Ethical Implications of Family Planning”

  1979 It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

  Working on “The Lathe”

  1980 Some Thoughts on Narrative

  1981 World-Making

  Hunger

  Places Names

  1982 The Princess

  A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be

  Facing It

  1983 Reciprocity of Prose and Poetry

  A Left-Handed Commencement Address

  Along the Platte

  1984 Whose Lathe?

  The Woman Without Answers

  The Second Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadanh of Derb

  1985 Room 9, Car 1430

  Theodora

  Science Fiction and the Future

  The Only Good Author?

  1986 Bryn Mawr Commencement Address

  Woman / Wilderness

  The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

  Heroes

  Prospects for Women in Writing

  Text, Silence, Performance

  1987 “Who is Responsible?”

  Conflict

  “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”

  1988 Over the Hills and a Great Way Off

  The Fisherwoman’s Daughter

  REVIEWS

  1977 The Dark Tower, by C. S. Lewis

  1978 Close Encounters, Star Wars, and the Tertium Quid

  1979 Shikasta, by Doris Lessing

  1980 Two from “Venom”

  Freddy’s Book and Vlemk, by John Gardner

  The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five, by Doris Lessing

  Kalila and Dimna, retold by Ramsay Wood

  Unfinished Business, by Maggie Scarf

  Italian Folktales, by Italo Calvino

  1981 Peake’s Progress, by Mervyn Peake

  1983 The Sentimental Agents, by Doris Lessing

  1984 Difficult Loves, by Italo Calvino

  “Forsaking Kingdoms”: Five Poets

  1985 The Mythology of North America, by John Bierhorst

  1986 Silent Partners, by Eugene Linden

  Outside the Gates, by Molly Gloss

  Golden Days, by Carolyn See

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  KEY: Feminism Social Responsibility Literature Travel

  INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  This is a collection of talks, essays, occasional pieces, and reviews from the past ten years. An earlier book of my nonfictional writings, The Language of the Night, edited by my friend Susan Wood, has been in print during this same decade. I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.

  The pieces are arranged in chronological order (except for the reviews, which are all together at the end). This may be a rather simplistic arrangement, but it does provide a sort of mental biography, a record of responses to ethical and political climates, of the transforming effect of certain literary ideas, and of the changes of a mind.

  Writers get asked to make speeches on all kinds of topics. Being sometimes weak of will, I sometimes agree to speak. Being a writer but not a speaker, I have to write out what I’m going to say, if it’s longer than eight words. Thus I have the texts of talks that might otherwise (mercifully?) have passed with the occasion. These “public” pieces reflect matters personally important to me, in that I agreed to talk about them. Other pieces, such as the commencement addresses, the travel diaries, and the essays, reflect my own interests more directly.

  Writing is the only thing besides housework that I really know much about; therefore it is the only thing I feel competent to teach. When asked to be didactic in public, I try to limit myself to topics on which, without claiming expertise or wisdom, an effort to think honestly and feelingly might do some good, or matters on which I think I ought to stand up and be counted, lest silence collude with injustice. A number of such pieces are in this book, and they are going to bother people who are able, as I am not, to make clear distinctions between Art
and Politics, between High Art and low stuff, between being a woman and being a feminist, and so on. My goal always being to subvert as much as possible without hurting anybody’s feelings, I have devised a system whereby readers may find what they want and avoid what they don’t. In the Table of Contents, small symbols will be seen to follow the titles—as in the Guide Michelin or AAA handbooks, where little knives and forks and beds and wineglasses tell you what to expect. The Guide Ursuline has four symbols indicating the principal character or bent of each piece:

  (a woman): feminism

  (the world): social responsibility

  (a book): literature, writing

  (a direction): travel

  I hope these are useful, as indicating which way or ways a piece tends, and so steering readers unsympathetic to that tendency away from it—unless, of course, they’re willing to take whatever the landlady offers.

  Brief introductory notes of time and place are provided where needed; footnotes, mostly rather erratic, I fear, will be found at the end of the piece they belong to. The date at the head of each piece is the year it was written (sometimes different from the year of publication, which can be found in the Acknowledgments). Where the text differs from a published text, it is usually because I follow my manuscript, not the edited version; occasionally because I emended a fault or patched a glitch while preparing this book.

  TALKS AND ESSAYS

  1976–1988

  THE SPACE CRONE

  (1976)

  The menopause is probably the least glamorous topic imaginable; and this is interesting, because it is one of the very few topics to which cling some shreds and remnants of taboo. A serious mention of menopause is usually met with uneasy silence; a sneering reference to it is usually met with relieved sniggers. Both the silence and the sniggering are pretty sure indications of taboo.

  Most people would consider the old phrase “change of life” a euphemism for the medical term “menopause,” but I, who am now going through the change, begin to wonder if it isn’t the other way round. “Change of life” is too blunt a phrase, too factual. “Menopause,” with its chime-suggestion of a mere pause after which things go on as before, is reassuringly trivial.

  But the change is not trivial, and I wonder how many women are brave enough to carry it out wholeheartedly. They give up their reproductive capacity with more or less of a struggle, and when it’s gone they think that’s all there is to it. Well, at least I don’t get the Curse any more, they say, and the only reason I felt so depressed sometimes was hormones. Now I’m myself again. But this is to evade the real challenge, and to lose, not only the capacity to ovulate, but the opportunity to become a Crone.

  In the old days women who survived long enough to attain the menopause more often accepted the challenge. They had, after all, had practice. They had already changed their life radically once before, when they ceased to be virgins and became mature women/wives/matrons/mothers/mistresses/whores/etc. This change involved not only the physiological alterations of puberty— the shift from barren childhood to fruitful maturity— but a socially recognized alteration of being: a change of condition from the sacred to the profane.

  With the secularization of virginity now complete, so that the once awesome term “virgin” is now a sneer or at best a slightly dated word for a person who hasn’t copulated yet, the opportunity of gaining or regaining the dangerous/sacred condition of being at the Second Change has ceased to be apparent.

  Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life’s over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness. Curiously, this restriction of significance coincided with the development of chemicals and instruments that make fertility itself a meaningless or at least secondary characteristic of female maturity. The significance of maturity now is not the capacity to conceive but the mere ability to have sex. As this ability is shared by pubescents and by postclimacterics, the blurring of distinctions and elimination of opportunities is almost complete. There are no rites of passage because there is no significant change. The Triple Goddess has only one face: Marilyn Monroe’s, maybe. The entire life of a woman from ten or twelve through seventy or eighty has become secular, uniform, changeless. As there is no longer any virtue in virginity, so there is no longer any meaning in menopause. It requires fanatical determination now to become a Crone.

  Women have thus, by imitating the life condition of men, surrendered a very strong position of their own. Men are afraid of virgins, but they have a cure for their own fear and the virgin’s virginity: fucking. Men are afraid of crones, so afraid of them that their cure for virginity fails them; they know it won’t work. Faced with the fulfilled Crone, all but the bravest men wilt and retreat, crestfallen and cockadroop.

  Menopause Manor is not merely a defensive stronghold, however. It is a house or household, fully furnished with the necessities of life. In abandoning it, women have narrowed their domain and impoverished their souls. There are things the Old Woman can do, say, and think that the Woman cannot do, say, or think. The Woman has to give up more than her menstrual periods before she can do, say, or think them. She has got to change her life.

  The nature of that change is now clearer than it used to be. Old age is not virginity but a third and new condition; the virgin must be celibate, but the crone need not. There was a confusion there, which the separation of female sexuality from reproductive capacity, via modern contraceptives, has cleared up. Loss of fertility does not mean loss of desire and fulfillment. But it does entail a change, a change involving matters even more important—if I may venture a heresy—than sex.

  The woman who is willing to make that change must become pregnant with herself, at last. She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone. Not many will help her with that birth. Certainly no male obstetrician will time her contractions, inject her with sedatives, stand ready with forceps, and neatly stitch up the torn membranes. It’s hard even to find an old-fashioned midwife, these days. That pregnancy is long, that labor is hard. Only one is harder, and that’s the final one, the one that men also must suffer and perform.

  It may well be easier to die if you have already given birth to others or yourself, at least once before. This would be an argument for going through all the discomfort and embarrassment of becoming a Crone. Anyhow it seems a pity to have a built-in rite of passage and to dodge it, evade it, and pretend nothing has changed. That is to dodge and evade one’s womanhood, to pretend one’s like a man. Men, once initiated, never get the second chance. They never change again. That’s their loss, not ours. Why borrow poverty?

  Certainly the effort to remain unchanged, young, when the body gives so impressive a signal of change as the menopause, is gallant; but it is a stupid, self-sacrificial gallantry, better befitting a boy of twenty than a woman of forty-five or fifty. Let the athletes die young and laurel-crowned. Let the soldiers earn the Purple Hearts. Let women die old, white-crowned, with human hearts.

  If a space ship came by from the friendly natives of the fourth planet of Altair, and the polite captain of the space ship said, “We have room for one passenger; will you spare us a single human being, so that we may converse at leisure during the long trip back to Altair and learn from an exemplary person the nature of the race?”—I suppose what most people would want to do is provide them with a fine, bright, brave young man, highly educated and in peak physical condition. A Russian cosmonaut would be ideal (American astronauts are mostly too old). There would surely be hundreds, thousands of volunteers, just such young men, all worthy. But I would not pick any of them. Nor would I pick any of the young women who would volunteer, some out of magnanimity and intellectual courage, others out of a profound conviction that Altair couldn’t possibly be any worse for a woman than Earth is.

>   What I would do is go down to the local Woolworth’s, or the local village marketplace, and pick an old woman, over sixty, from behind the costume jewelry counter or the betel-nut booth. Her hair would not be red or blonde or lustrous dark, her skin would not be dewy fresh, she would not have the secret of eternal youth. She might, however, show you a small snapshot of her grandson, who is working in Nairobi. She is a bit vague about where Nairobi is, but extremely proud of the grandson. She has worked hard at small, unimportant jobs all her life, jobs like cooking, cleaning, bringing up kids, selling little objects of adornment or pleasure to other people. She was a virgin once, a long time ago, and then a sexually potent fertile female, and then went through menopause. She has given birth several times and faced death several times—the same times. She is facing the final birth/death a little more nearly and clearly every day now. Sometimes her feet hurt something terrible. She never was educated to anything like her capacity, and that is a shameful waste and a crime against humanity, but so common a crime should not and cannot be hidden from Altair. And anyhow she’s not dumb. She has a stock of sense, wit, patience, and experiential shrewdness, which the Altaireans might, or might not, perceive as wisdom. If they are wiser than we, then of course we don’t know how they’d perceive it. But if they are wiser than we, they may know how to perceive that inmost mind and heart which we, working on mere guess and hope, proclaim to be humane. In any case, since they are curious and kindly, let’s give them the best we have to give.

  The trouble is, she will be very reluctant to volunteer. “What would an old woman like me do on Altair?” she’ll say. “You ought to send one of those scientist men, they can talk to those funny-looking green people. Maybe Dr. Kissinger should go. What about sending the Shaman?” It will be very hard to explain to her that we want her to go because only a person who has experienced, accepted, and acted the entire human condition—the essential quality of which is Change—can fairly represent humanity. “Me?” she’ll say, just a trifle slyly. “But I never did anything.”

  But it won’t wash. She knows, though she won’t admit it, that Dr. Kissinger has not gone and will never go where she has gone, that the scientists and the shamans have not done what she has done. Into the space ship, Granny.