Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Why, after all, does there have to be a dust storm in the Sonora Desert just then? Why does everyone rush about screaming in three languages? The discovery of mysteriously just-abandoned World War II planes might very well take place quietly, eerily; and deserts aren’t noisy, crowded places, as a rule. But no. The wind and all the performers have to howl in unison.

  When humans and aliens finally communicate, it is by musical tones. In that one scene the noise gimmickry all comes together; it is at last a genuine climax. If it rose to true music, it would be a great moment.

  But even then it would not justify the rest of the soundtrack, which uses noise to whip up emotion, the same trick that’s so easy to do with electronically amplified instruments: decibellicosity. Exposed to aggression by loud noise, the body must continually resist its own fight/flight reaction, thus building up an adrenaline high, thus feeling surges of unfocused emotion, increased pulse rate, etc.—thrills and chills. No harm. Same kick as a rollercoaster. But a rollercoaster doesn’t pretend to have a message.

  On the other hand … Star Wars, which rather ostentatiously pretends not to have any message, may be even tricksier.

  The end of Star Wars kept bothering me after I saw it the first time. I kept thinking, such a funny silly beautiful movie, why did George Lucas stick on that wooden ending, a high-school graduation, with prizes for good citizenship? But when I saw it again I realized it wasn’t high school but West Point: a place crawling with boots and salutes. Aren’t there any civilians in this Empire, anyhow? Finally a friend who knows films explained to me that the scene is a nostalgic evocation or imitation of Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film of the 1936 Olympics, with the German winners receiving a grateful ovation from the Thousand-Year Reich. Having dragged Dorothy and Toto and that lot around the cosmos a bit, Lucas cast about for another surefire golden oldie and came up with Adolf Hitler.

  Anyhow, what the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hideyhole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Huck Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there’s a message there, I don’t think I want to hear it.

  There are gorgeous moments in Star Wars, especially on the desert planet (before everybody gets into uniform): the little desert people, the caravan, the behemoth, the town, R2D2 lost, and so on. Through the impasto of self-indulgence and the comic-book compulsion to move-move-move, there breaks a childlike, radical, precise gesture of the imagination: and you glimpse what a science-fiction movie might be like, when they get around to making one.*

  Close Encounters has science-fictional elements—the space ship is even more splendid than the ones in Star Wars—but it seems to me essentially an occultist movie. It’s much more amiable than the endless nasties about little girls possessed by devils; it’s definitely on the side of the angels. But the arrival of benevolent aliens in saucers is a theme science fiction hasn’t dealt with, except facetiously, for at least a generation. Fiction writers got out long ago, leaving the field to believers, faddists, amateur photographers, psychologists, and the Air Force. Saucerism has a lot to do with religion, as Jung pointed out, but nothing at all to do with either science or science fiction.

  Indeed, the movie seemed almost entirely irrational. Perhaps, being middle-aged and seeing it from a highly oblique angle, I missed some explanations. I ought to see it again before saying this; but my impression is that the plot abounds in giant loopholes, as the universe abounds in black holes. How does the U.S. government know when to expect the aliens? Why do they have a troop of—well, exchange students, I guess—all dressed up in red pantsuits (one woman, or was it two, in the whole troop) ready to go aboard the saucer? How do they know they’ll be wanted? What the dickens is François Truffaut doing there? And if he’s there, amidst all the security officers and dead sheep, why aren’t there any Mexicans or Chinese or Russians or Canadians or Peruvians or Samoans or Swahili or Thai? Why does the United States get to hog the cosmic show? Why does— Oh, well. Shoot. Why do you spoil it, asking questions? everybody snarls at me.

  Well, because both movies come on as science fiction, or as “sci fi,” anyhow; and I was brought up to believe that science fiction, whatever its shortcomings in the way of character, catharsis, and grammar, was supposed to try to be intellectually coherent: to have an idea and to follow it through. Neither of these movies would know an idea if they fell over it (which, of course, given their subject matter, they frequently do). Star Wars is all action and Close Encounters is all emotion, and both are basically mindless.

  The emotional bias interests me somewhat more—it’s a greater artistic risk to take. In Close Encounters sometimes the emotions do move. Children are genuinely important throughout it, and so there is a deep resonance for a moment when the aliens first appear, childlike, gracile, almost fetal forms bathed in pure light. But then Spielberg blows it with a disastrous close-up. His hand is so heavy! Nobody is allowed to do anything, even load a camera, quietly or easily; all movements are frenetic, violent, as if the characters were being pursued by giant sharks. Yet the actors are so good they establish personality and believable response against all the odds. You begin to feel with them, to go along with them … and then another load of hysteria gets dumped on and the volume gets turned up another notch.

  The end, for instance. I think we’re supposed to be sort of misty-eyed; but what about? I want to be clear about what I’m misty about. Is it because they didn’t blow us up? Because we didn’t blow them up? Because the hero’s doing what he wanted and going off in a really gorgeous supersaucer? But what happened to the other guys (and gal) in red pantsuits? They don’t seem to be going into the saucer with him. And why does the heroine express her emotion by suddenly ignoring her beautiful kid and shooting a full twenty-four-shot roll of snapshots, color slides no doubt, of the hero’s exodus? There she is, smiling through her tears, pressing the shutter again—and again—and again—and again— Is that an adequate dramatic expression of human emotion at a peak experience? Is it even appropriate? I find it pitiful: and, since this is a movie, grotesquely self-conscious. It happened, because it’s on film….

  Well, it’s real pretty. And some day they’ll make a science-fiction movie. Meanwhile, I think I’ll go back and see Dersu Uzala for the third time. Because that is a movie about a world and a time none of us will ever see; about aliens; about fear, and love; and because it lets us see that the universe really is endless, and terrible, and beautiful.

  *They did get around to making two, so far (1988)—Time Bandits and Brother from Another Planet.

  SHIKASTA

  by Doris Lessing

  (1979)

  Doris Lessing takes risks but does not play games. One does not turn to her books for humor or wit or playfulness, nor will one find in them any game-playing in the sense of one-upping, faking, posturing. In her introductory remarks to Shikasta she states with characteristic straightforwardness what she sees as the modern novelist’s debt to science fiction. Not even taking refuge in the respectability of “speculative fiction,” she presents her book as science fiction, and I shall review it as such, gratefully; for science fiction has wasted far too much time apologizing to the pretentious and explaining itself to the willfully ignorant.

  If I had read Shikasta without knowing who wrote it, I do not think I would have guessed it to be the work of an established author writing with some awkwardness in a new mode. I am afraid I would have said: A first novel, typically earnest and overambitious, badly constructed, badly edited, showing immense promise; when this writer has learned the art, we’ll have a first-ranker…. Novel-making is novel-making, whether imagination or observation dominates, and given Lessing’s experience with the fiction of ideas and with near-future settings, the unshapeliness of Shikasta is surprising; the rambling title is only too descriptive. To be sure, the subject is
no less than a history of human life on earth, past, present, and future, not the sort of thing novelists who play safe, winners of fictional parlor games, are likely to attempt. Lessing mentions Olaf Stapledon in her introduction, and in scope the book—especially as the first of a series—indeed vies with Last and First Men; but the almost obsessive organization, the unity of Stapledon’s thought, is wanting. The majesty of the vision is fitful. Sometimes it is majestic, sometimes it is little more than a pulp Galactic Empire with the Goodies fighting the Baddies. Then again it goes off into allegory, like C. S. Lewis, for a while; and there are moments—the bad moments, for me—when it all seems to have been inspired by the Velikovsky–Von Däniken school of, as it were, thought.

  The aesthetic incoherence is not due to the plurality of viewpoints, but it may be connected to Lessing’s use of the alien viewpoint: most of the events are recounted by an extraterrestrial witness. This is of course one of the basic devices of science fiction (and of prescientific ironic tales), but familiar as the technique is, it requires very great care. Only intense and continual imaginative effort by the author can keep the “alien” voice from sounding human, all too human—thus subverting the estrangement that is the goal of the technique, and so disastrously shrinking, instead of expanding, the universe. This is what has happened in those dreary backwaters of science fiction where the heroes fight the dirty (Commies) (Capitalists) from Aldebaran. Lessing commits no such political imbecilities; the trouble lies more with ethics, I think. The morality voiced by her aliens seems less universal than sectarian, and at times Canopus in Argos sounds strangely like a pulpit in Geneva.

  The villains of the piece, from a planet called Shammat, part of the Empire of Puttiora, remain offstage. Though Shammat is the author of evil on earth, all the agents of evil we meet in the book are human beings. But the agents of good we meet are not human; they come from Canopus. One is left in doubt whether mankind has any moral being at all; perhaps we are all puppets of either Shammat or Canopus. In any case, the logic of the book is inescapable: humanity is incapable of doing good on its own, without direct and continual prompting by Benevolences from Outer Space. (The behavior of these guardian angels I personally find, on the evidence given, paternalistic, imperialist, authoritarian, and male supremacist. The latter trait is particularly galling; they claim to be bisexual, but if you notice, they always impregnate human women and never permit themselves to be impregnated by human men.) The picture, then, is, or resembles, one currently very popular indeed, that of the chariots of the gods, or dei ex machina; and the message is: In us there is no truth or power. All great events on earth result from decisions made elsewhere; all our inventions were given us by extraterrestrials; all our religions feebly reflect the glory of an unhuman Founder. We have done, and can do, unaided and by ourselves, nothing. Except, perhaps—this is not clear—evil.

  To find this projective ethic stated by a considerable writer, no hack or crank, is disquieting to me. Though Shikasta is not a Christian book, I think it is a Calvinist one: it affirms the radical irresponsibility of mankind. Salvation not by works but by grace alone, not by the soul’s effort but by intercession/intervention—for a few, the chosen, the elect: the rest consigned to damnation by judgment/holocaust/apocalypse. The theme has recently been common in pseudoscience and of course is a cornerstone of fundamentalism. Its roots I suppose are in the Near East. It turns up in the West in hard centuries, whenever people seek the counsels of despair. It has no claim to universality, however, since it remains unsympathetic and essentially unintelligible to the great majority of people. It is not a position sympathetic to most artists, either, since it leaves no room in the world for tragedy, or for charity.

  There is much self-hatred in Shikasta—hatred of the feminine, the middle-class, the national, the White, the Western, the human—which all comes to a head in the strange episode of the Trial, late in the story, and there perhaps self-destructs. But there is no catharsis; the ethic of guilt forbids it. A brief utopian coda rings false to my ear—the usual Luddite prigs sharing everything with nary a cross word. And all through these final sections the protagonist, Johor, in his last incarnation as George, stalks about bearing the White Man’s Burden until you want to kick him. We never meet the Shammatians, we never meet the Sirians, and the Canopans are twits. But the humans … There is the story of Rachel; the story of Lynda; the story of “Individual 6”—the exact, brilliant, compassionate, passionate portrayal of human minds driven out of “sanity,” forced on beyond. In such passages, Lessing is incomparable. Does she need to write science fiction to achieve them? Would there not be more place for them in a conventional novel?

  She seems to have little real interest in the alien as such, little pleasure in it. Invention is an essential ingredient of science fiction, and she lacks or scants it, letting theory and opinion override the humble details that make up creation (primary or secondary). Canopus and the Canopans remain dead words, a world without a landscape, characters without character. No games, no play. The Canopans are angels, messengers of God, but Lessing’s concept of the divine excludes that Trickster who creates and destroys. No Coyote, no Loki, no Hermes. Life is real, life is earnest, and Shiva is not allowed to dance in this universe. Like Solzhenitsyn, like the late Victorians, Lessing denies the value of pure invention, permitting only the “meaningful.” The work will be not a mystery but a morality. And so it is. And yet—

  Every now and then she stops moralizing and looks around at the world she has got herself into; and at such times there is no doubt at all why she is there, or that she belongs there. She does not write conventional fiction because she does not have a conventional mind. She is not a realist at all. Nor is she a fantasist. The old distinctions are useless and must be discarded. Before the critics can do that, we novelists must get on past them ourselves, clear past. It is not easy; no wonder Lessing moves awkwardly. But she moves forward. I would not wish to dwell upon things like SOWF, or substance-of-we-feeling—is the phrase or its acronym worse?—but maybe we had to go through SOWF to get to Zone 6. Zone 6—which is Hades, and the landscape of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and certain remote territories of the unconscious mind, and the Borderland, and more—is magnificent in conception and in imagery.

  Intellectual fiction, the novel of ideas, all too often slides down into the novel of opinions. Science fiction gone self-indulgent rants and preaches, with no more right to, despite its vast subject matter, than any other kind of art. Lessing’s opinions, her diatribes against “science” and “politics” and so forth, are very nearly the ruin of the novel. But beneath and beyond the opinions, not fully under her control, perhaps even disobeying her conscious intent, is the creative spirit that can describe a terrorist’s childhood with the authority of a Dostoyevsky, or imagine the crowded souls crying at the gates of life—and the lurching, lumbering, struggling book is redeemed, is worth reading, is immortal diamond.

  Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argos—Archives. Re: Colonised Planet 5. Shikasta. Personal, Psychological, Historical Documents Relating to Visit by Johor (George Sherban) Emissary (Grade 9). 87th of the Period of the Last Days (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).

  TWO FROM “VENOM”

  (1980)

  A fat clod and a girl who can’t make up her mind how to spell her name get into these woods and go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until you want to scream, and then they go back and forth some more. Nobody in The Beginning Place can make up their mind about anything, not even what time of day it is. When they meet a dragon they can’t even make up their mind what sex it is. In order to leave a village populated exclusively by exquisitely boring Archetypes, they finally start going straight forth, but as usual they can’t make up their minds which way is forth, so it turns out to be back, after all. The climax of this thrilling narrative is when they find out that the way to get downtown is to take the bus. Recommended to persons with mild inner-ear disturbances and those who want very badly to be bran
ch reference librarians.

  * * *

  In the first place, The Book of the Dun Cow isn’t The Book of the Dun Cow. The Book of the Dun Cow is a twelfth-century Irish manuscript about a cattle raid—an appallingly primitive epic that you can find, if you’re lucky, in a beautiful English translation by the poet Thomas Kinsella, The Tain. Read it and decide if things have changed much in Ireland. Why did Walter Wangerin Jr. use the title for his book, which has nothing to do with Ireland ancient or modern? There is an allegorical dun cow in his book, but you can write a book with a whale in it without calling it Moby Dick. I guess he just liked the sound of it, and what it really is isn’t supposed to matter. Like Joan Didion writing The Book of Common Prayer. Kinda cute and like tasteless and I mean like who cares about those old books anyhow.

  So this book which isn’t The Book of the Dun Cow is about this

  Rooster (which shows that it’s American; if it was a British bird it would be a Cock, te-he, quoth she). The Rooster is Good. There is also an Evil Rooster. One is on God’s side—guess which one. The other is on the side of a mighty black serpent who lives under the earth. If this sounds familiar, please keep in mind that we are not discussing The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion or anyone else. Because he is evil, God damns the serpent, forcing him to live underground. No, no, dummy, the serpent is evil, not God. How do I know? Because the author says so. And because the serpent crawls and smells bad and lives in the dark. But God made him live there, so it’s not his fault— Shuddup. The serpent is BAD, and God is GOOD, and you take that on faith. You’d better, because when we finally get a reason, here it is: the serpent’s evil plan: