Dancing at the Edge of the World

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  [The serpent] would roar almighty challenges to the Lord God Himself. He would spew chaos among the stars; and he would whirl his tail with such power that when it hit the earth, that planet would be cracked from its fixed position at the center of things to spin like nonsense going nowhere…. He himself would make of his earth prison a puny mockery. He would make it little among the planets and nothing among the suns. He would snatch purpose from its being, giving it a loose, erratic, meaningless course to travel. He would surround it with cold, empty space. And he would cancel heaven from above it.

  I told you he was BAD. Like Copernicus. Like Galileo. Like Newton, like Einstein—BAD right to the core.

  I’ll bet that smelly serpent even thinks women are people. Nobody else in the book does. Females are beyootiful, dootiful, divinely inspired at times, and God made them to Help Men. (God help those who help themselves!) Leaders, of course, are male. All leaders. Even when we’re talking about ants (this is an animal fable, not the Old Testament), the Leader of the Ants has to be a Man Ant. Yep.

  The hero has a coop full of hens, but his relations with the hens are kind of glided over. Then he falls in love with the beyootiful, dootiful, and divinely inspired heroine hen, and she bears his children. Guess which sex. Would a hero and a heroine have female chicks?

  The book is so sloppy it’s hard to talk about. Almost worse than Joan Didion. (I said almost.) For instance, there’s a “Language of Power,” which is Latin. Latin has indeed been a language of power, first secular, then religious, which makes its use in an outside-world-time fable either grossly tendentious or grossly inept, unless it is used with great care. If there’s one thing about languages of power that we might all agree on, it’s that they have to be used right. Right? Well, my Latin’s not so hot, but I know that the adjective potens would have a plural, something like potentes, so that the phrase “crows potens,” to mean powerful cockadoodles, doesn’t hold together. And the allegorical dog’s name, Mundo Cani, sounds like that Italian movie Mondo Cane but seems to mean “dog-world,” in the ablative case, for some reason. If the author meant “dog of the world,” I think it would be Mundi Canis. But I don’t know what he meant. He doesn’t seem to care. Faith is all you need. On page 157 he says, “Be it known that neither Basil nor Paprika nor any other Turkey had a sense of smell.” On page 159 he says, “But Turkeys have a most impartial sense of smell.” Credo quia absurdum!

  Inside this silly, sexist, sentimental, specious book there’s a good thing: a subversive weasel, struggling to get out. The weasel is true and funny. The rest is Cream-of-Christian cant.

  —MOM DE PLUME

  Ursula K. Le Guin, The Beginning Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Walter Wangerin Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).

  FREDDY’S BOOK

  and

  VLEMK THE BOX-PAINTER

  by John Gardner

  (1980)

  Freddy’s Book is a brilliant novel about a sixteenth-century Swedish knight who, with the Devil’s assistance, helps Gustav Vasa gain the throne and then, with a Bishop’s assistance, kills the Devil. Going strictly by internal evidence, one might suppose Freddy’s Book to be the work of the offspring of an illicit but delightful union between Ingmar Bergman and Isak Dinesen; but it was written by John Gardner (who, characteristically, insists that it was written by Freddy).

  They say that inside every fat man is a thin man trying to get out. Inside John Gardner, whose jacket photographs show what looks like a very sizable fellow, there must be a really enormous man trying to get out, and succeeding. The narrator of the fine Gothic tale that introduces the main story is a tall and bulky professor, who meets (in strange circumstances) Freddy, a giant, who has written a book about an eight-foot Swedish knight. All this height and girth might seem a bit obsessive, but it is in fact enjoyable. We have had lots of books about little creeps, and after all Mr. Sammler is not the only inhabitant of his planet. It should also be observed that the Devil is even larger, very much larger, than the other big fellows in Freddy’s Book. He is one of the largest and most convincing devils to be found in modern literature; he is very stupid and very subtle; and his eventual murder at the hands and bone knife of the knight is an event of great dramatic power and originality, and of most devious and echoing implications. The tale left me mystified and satisfied to the highest degree. Who could ask for anything more?

  Freddy’s Book is illustrated in darkly appropriate black and white by Daniel Biamonte. Catherine Kanner’s illustrations to Vlemk the Box-Painter are elegant and intelligent but vitiated by Beardsleyism. One must wonder why so many illustrators of fantasy seem scarcely to use their powers of fantasy, the concrete visual imagination that is their birthright as artists, but limit themselves to the style and mannerisms of Beardsley, Rackham, Nielsen, and other late-Victorian and Edwardian minor artists. A tradition there must be, but why might it not start from Dürer, or Rembrandt, or Géricault, or Klee? Why must fantasy characters and fantasy places always be drawn so clean pretty shiny and twee? Is there no dirt in Middle Earth?

  So I arrive grumpily at Vlemk, which is what I think one must call a minor work. It has charm and interest; it plays in narrative form with some of the ideas discussed in Gardner’s On Moral Fiction and with some other ideas all its own; but it does not seem to arrive anywhere. It remains in between. It sets off in a manner suited to adult or child, that straightforward narrative mode of the tale told aloud: “Once a man and wife lived in a vinegar jug by the sea,” “There was once a king of the Sakya clan,” “There once was a man who made pictures on boxes….” But the matter is intended for a highly sophisticated readership, and so the folktale manner soon sounds affected; nor is it consistently maintained.

  In the same way, the setting, the time/place where it happens, is neither here nor there. In On Moral Fiction Gardner makes it plain that “truth of place” is something he can cheerfully dispense with, going so far as to say that “truth is useful in realistic art but is much less necessary to the fabulous.” Alas, I could not disagree more strongly. Effective works of fantasy are distinguished by their often relentless accuracy of detail, by their exactness of imagination, by the coherence and integrity of their imagined worlds—by, precisely, their paradoxical truthfulness. (I assert this not only of The Lord of the Rings or Le Petit Prince but of Beowulf in the latter case the “truth of place” being not visual but psychological.) An infallible sign of amateur or careless fantasy writing is the blurred detail, the fudged artifact, the stupid anachronism that proclaims, “This is just a fantasy, folks, so it doesn’t really matter.” It matters more in fantasy than anywhere else, since in fantasy we stand on no common mundane ground but have only the fantasist to trust. The writer is our only space ship, and all our hippogriff. If the fantasist’s truth fails us—ffft. So I found most grievous Gardner’s coy or careless references to garbage men and biologists in his stock Generic Medieval setting. And why does the box-painter take thirty mortal pages to carry the talking picture to the princess? Because if he did it sooner, if, in other words, he behaved like a human being, it would subvert the allegory. But why make the story a bloody allegory? It’s a lovely idea, the fierce little miniature portrait that talks back. If only Gardner had told it with faith in its reality, if only he had honored his fable with confidence in its truth! This need not have been a minor work.

  But everybody, no matter how major, is allowed their minor works; and anyhow we may all rejoice that we’ve got Freddy’s Book and its inexhaustible author, Gardner Son of Grendel’s Mother.

  John Gardner, Freddy’s Book, illustrated by Daniel Biamonte (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980); Vlemk the Box-Painter, illustrated by Catherine Kanner (Northridge, Calif.: Lord John Press, 1979).

  THE MARRIAGES BETWEEN ZONES THREE, FOUR, AND FIVE

  by Doris Lessing

  (1980)

  With a sigh that she refused to deepen into a groan, she again saw him as her fellow prisoner, and marvelling that
this taut, grief-marked man could be the gross and fleshy Ben Ata of their first days, she enclosed him, as he did her, and their lovemaking was all a consoling and a reassurance. When his hand felt for their child, now responding quite vigorously to their lovemaking, as if wishing to share in it—as if it were the promise of a festival—it was with respect and a promise not to an extension of himself, or of her, but a salute to the possibilities of them both; a considered and informed salute, at that, for Al·Ith, feeling the delicately contained strength of those enquiring fingers, knew that the potentialities he acknowledged were for the unknown and the unexpected, as well as for familiar delight. For this union of incompatibles could not be anything less than a challenge.

  A challenge it is, and a reward. The second of the Canopus in Argos series of novels is a finer-grained and stronger book than Shikasta, the first. The Marriages may be read for the pure pleasure of reading it, a tale unencumbered by metaphysical machinery. The Canopans and Sirians, the superhuman powers of good and evil of Shikasta, stay offstage this time. The manipulations of the Sirians are only hinted at; the powers of good, here known as the Providers, emit directives by Voice (like Joan of Arc’s Voices) and, entertainingly, by beating an invisible drum. The Providers—I kept thinking of Scott’s Antarctic crew, who referred to Providence, upon which they depended quite consciously if not always successfully, as “Provvy”—the Providers command Al·Ith, ruler of Zone Three, and Ben Ata, ruler of Zone Four, to marry. Both obey the order not happily but unquestioningly. Theirs not to reason why. (Why not?) Once they meet, however, the two human beings begin to behave very humanly indeed, and what might have been a fable enacted by wooden puppets twitching on the strings of allegory becomes a lively and lovable novel. A novel in the folktale mode, bordering on the mythic.

  The theme is one of the major themes of both myth and novel: marriage. Lessing’s treatment of it is complex and flexible, passionate and compassionate, with a rising vein of humor uncommon in her work, both welcome and appropriate. Marriage in all modes. Marriage sensual, moral, mental, political. Marriage of two people, an archetypally sensitive lady and an archetypally tough soldier. Marriage of female and male; of masculine and feminine; of intuitional and sensational; of duty and pleasure. Marriage of their two countries, which reflect all these opposites and more, including the oppositions wealth/poverty, peace/war. And then suddenly a marriage with Zone Five is ordered, a second marriage, a tertium quid, startling and inevitable.

  It may be worth noting that this series of oppositions does not overlap very far with the old Chinese system of opposites, the yin and yang. At female/male and perhaps at intuitional/sensational they coincide; otherwise Lessing simply omits the dark, wet, cold, passive, etc., the whole yin side of the Tai Chi figure. Her dialectic of marriage takes place almost wholly in terms of yang. Its process therefore is Hegelian, struggle and resolution, without the option of a maintained balance (the marriage cannot last). This is illustrative of the extreme Westernness of Lessing’s ethic and metaphysic. The Canopus books propose a cosmic viewpoint: but it turns out to be so purely European an explanation of human destiny that anyone even slightly familiar with other religious or philosophical systems must find it inadequate, if not presumptuous. In her introduction to Shikasta, referring to “the sacred literatures of all races and nations,” Lessing said, “It is possible we make a mistake when we dismiss them as quaint fossils from a dead past.” Possible, indeed. Who but a bigot or an ignoramus would do so? Lessing is neither, but the parochialism is disturbing.

  The landscapes and societies of Zones Three, Four, and Five (and, most tantalizingly, Two) are sketched, not detailed. One cannot live in these lands, as one can in Middle Earth. These are the countries of parable, intellectual nations which one can only visit in a closed car; but the scenery is vastly interesting, and one may wish one could at least stop and get out. The quick-paced plot is kept distanced by several devices: by use of the folktale ambience of faraway lands once upon a time; by frequent reference, in a kind of stop-frame effect, to paintings of the events recounted; and by having the tale told by an elderly male Chronicler of Zone Three.

  At first the protagonists also appear at a distance, a bit larger than life, all of a piece, heroic. Perhaps the Ben Hur lurking in the name Ben Ata is even deliberate (though I wish the Alice trying to lisp her way out of Al·Ith were not so audible). As the two enter upon their difficult marriage, however, and are driven through all the changes of fear, patience, lust, rage, liking, masochism, ecstasy, jealousy, rebellion, dependence, friendship, and the rest, they become smaller, more distinct, more complicated. They get older. Their heroism is no longer easy, it has become painful, it has become real. By having the courage to use these great stock characters, the Queen and the King, and to take them seriously as people, Lessing has presented a personal drama of general significance, skillfully and without falsification. Her portrait of a marriage is perfectly clear-sighted and admirably inconclusive. Moralist that she is, she makes no judgment here. Character is destiny: her characters make themselves a human destiny, far more impressive than any conceivable pseudo-divine Five-Year Plan for the good of Zones Three to Five. They might even have risen to tragedy, had the author not opened heaven’s trapdoor to them to prevent that chance.

  Though accurate, that last sentence is probably unfair. After all, The Marriages aspires to myth, not to tragedy. Zone Two is certainly an unconventional and attractive heaven, or stage on the way to heaven; one may be content to leave Al·Ith to it at last. Perhaps it is only mean-mindedness that makes me distrust Zone One, fearing that it will turn out to be not simply better but Perfectly Good, and therefore longing to find something wrong with it: just as we discovered, gradually, guided gently by our author, what was wrong with the utopian Zone Three, that now quite familiar country where nobody is possessive or destructive or macho or has bad taste in furniture.

  The Manichaean-Calvinistic hierarchy, the closed system implied by the structure and the more vatic bits of Shikasta, seems here to give way to an open source of relative values—a way, a human way. Or does Lessing not agree with the Chronicler who tells her tale so well? I think she does.

  We chroniclers do well to be afraid when we approach those parts of our histories (our natures) that deal with evil, the depraved, the benighted. Describing, we become….

  I tell you that goodness—what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent—these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides….

  In those high places there is a dark side, and who knows but that it may be very dark….

  But the tale is not a fearful one. It is kindly, careful, cheerful. Its teller, knowing the darkness, faces the light.

  Doris Lessing, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).

  KALILA AND DIMNA

  retold by Ramsay Wood

  (1980)

  In order to be happy with a place or a person or a book, some of us need to know where we are and where we stand, while others are perfectly content to float free. Floaters will enjoy this book more than standers. As an old stander, I felt frustrated by the breezy sketchiness of the information granted us (by Doris Lessing in a friendly introduction and by the author in a brief afterword) concerning what, exactly, the book is. A translation, one gathers, of part of—of what? Well, one can’t say exactly, because it turns out not to be a translation at all, but a collation, reworking, and modernification of various earlier translations of—of what? Well, at this point I went to the library (a good place to make a stand) and established to my own satisfaction that Kalila and Dimna and the Fables of Bidpai and the Tales of Pilpay and all the rest are versions of a single original: a very old Sanskrit collection of stories, the Panchatantra, upon which translations and variations have grown and overgrown like vines on an ancient temple in the forests of India. Two hundred versions, over the centuries, in over fifty languages, s
ays my library source; twenty English translations alone in the century 1788–1888, says Lessing. Many of the stories are now familiar—to Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Christians—as folktales, and probably many of them started out as folktales; but the Panchatantra and its Persian, Arabian, and other recensions are not folklore but literature. The book was a “Mirror for Princes”—a lively manual of political advice, Machiavellian in its realism and psychological astuteness, making and marking its points by animal fables.

  Dull books do not become global millennial best sellers. (Our great animal fable is Orwell’s Animal Farm, a worthy continuation of the tradition.) The stories are trenchant, funny, charming, cruel. Part of the success of this collection surely lies in the way the stories are presented, an exquisitely tormenting Chinese box technique, which Ramsay Wood has preserved. The frame story involves a King and a Wise Man. When we are quite deep into the story of these two, the Wise Man says, “O King! permit me to illustrate my point with the tale of the Bull and the Lion,” and starts telling it. Just as we are getting really interested in the fate of the Bull, a Jackal says to the Lion, “O Lion, do you remember the story of the Mice that ate the Iron?” and starts telling it, and just as we’re really into that one—and on it goes. The most rigid and determined stander must consent to float free while this ramification of suspense from suspense proceeds. It provides a salutary exercise of intellect and spirit for both kings and commoners. Recent practitioners of forms of the Chinese box narrative technique include Italo Calvino, Gene Wolfe, and Russell Hoban, all masters of sudden corner-turnings, intricate proliferation, and the final (or semifinal) reward—when the Iron, the Mice, the Lion, the Jackal, the Bull, the Wise Man, and the King are all brought back rapidly in order in the most brilliantly satisfying fashion. In this, Ramsay Wood follows his originals closely, and slips with skill in and out of stories as elegantly interfolded as the petals of a rose.