Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

I don’t know that the filmmakers had much choice about it. Movie audiences have been trained to expect whiz-bang pacing, an eye-dazzling ear-splitting torrent of images and action leaving no time for thought and little for emotional response. And the audience for a fantasy film is assumed to be young, therefore particularly impatient.

Watching once again the wonderful old film Chushingura , which takes four hours to tell the (comparatively) simple story of the Forty-seven Ronin, I marveled at the quiet gait, the silences, the seemingly aimless lingering on certain scenes, the restraint that slowly increases tension till it gathers tremendous force and weight. I wish a Tolkien film could move at a pace like that. If it was as beautiful and well written and well acted as this one is, I’d be perfectly happy if it went on for hours and hours…. But that’s a daydream.

And I doubt that any drama, no matter how un-whiz-bang, could in fact capture the singular gait that so deeply characterises the book. The vast, idiosyncratic prose rhythms of The Lord of the Rings , like those of War and Peace , have no counterpart in Western theatrical writing.

So all I wish is that they’d slowed down the movie, every now and then, even just held still for a moment and let there be a rest, a beat of silence….

This piece was written as a contribution to the anthology Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales , edited by Kate Bernheimer in 1998. Francine Prose’s piece about the Sleeping Beauty, which I mention here, is also in that anthology. My story “The Poacher” can be found in my collection Unlocking the Air.

Influence—the anxiety of influence—it’s enough to give you influenza. I’ve come to dread the well-intended question, “What writer or writers influenced you as a writer?”

What writer or writers didn’t? How can I name Woolf or Dickens or Tolstoy or Shelley without implying that a hundred, a thousand other “influences” didn’t matter?

I evade: telling the questioners they really don’t want to hear about my compulsive reading disorder, or changing the playing field—“Schubert and Beethoven and Springsteen have had a great influence on my writing”—or, “Well, that would take all night, but I’ll tell you what I’m reading right now,” an answer I learned from being asked the question. A useful question, which leads to conversation.

Then there was the book The Anxiety of Influence. Yes, I know who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf. Still I’m faintly incredulous when I hear that phrase used seriously. The book about being anxious because you learned things from other writers came out at the same time that a lot of us were energetically rejoicing in the rediscovery and reprinting of older and earlier woman writers, the rich inheritance that had been withheld from all writers by the macho literary canon.

While these guys were over there being paranoid about influence, we were over here celebrating it.

Well, all right; if some authors feel threatened by the very existence of other, older writers, what about fairy tales? Stories so old they don’t even have writers? That should bring on a regular panic attack.

That the accepted (male) notion of literary influence is appallingly simplistic is shown (first—not last, but first) by the fact that it overlooks, ignores, disdains the effect of “preliterature”—oral stories, folktales, fairy tales, picture books—on the tender mind of the prewriter.

Such deep imprints are, of course, harder to trace than the effect of reading a novel or a poem in one’s teens or twenties. The person affected may not be conscious of such early influences, overlaid and obscured by everything learned since. A tale we heard at four years old may have a deep and abiding effect on our mind and spirit, but we aren’t likely to be clearly aware of it as adults—unless asked to think about it seriously. And the person affected may be deeply unwilling to achieve consciousness of such influences. If “seriousness” is limited to discourse of canonical Literature, we may well be embarrassed to mention something that some female relative read aloud to us after we’d got into bed in our jammies with our stuffed animals. Yet it may have formed our imagination more decisively than anything we ever read.

I have absolutely no idea of when I first heard or read the tale of the Sleeping Beauty. I don’t even remember (as I do for some stories) the illustrations, or the language, of a certain edition. I certainly read it for myself as a child in several collections, and again in various forms when I was reading aloud to my own children. One of those versions was a charming Czech-made book, an early example of the Pop-Up genre. It was good magic, the way the thorny paper rose hedge leapt up around the little paper castle. And at the end everybody in the castle woke, just as they ought to, and got right up off the page.

But when did I first learn that that was what they ought to do?

The Sleeping Beauty is one of the stories that I’ve “always known,” just as it’s one of the stories that “we all know.” Are not such stories part of our literary inheritance? Do they not influence us?

Does that make us anxious?

Francine Prose’s article on the Sleeping Beauty elegantly demonstrates, by the way, that we don’t know the stories we think we’ve always known. I had the twelfth fairy and the whole spindle business clear in my mind, but all that after-the-marriage hanky-panky was news to me. As I knew it, as most Americans know it, the story ends with the prince’s kiss and everybody getting ready for the wedding.

And I wasn’t aware that it held any particular meaning or fascination for me, that it had “had any influence” on me, until, along in my sixties, I came on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s evocation of the tale in a tiny poem (it is in her Collected Poems ):

As poetry will do, those words took me far beyond themselves, straight through the hedge of thorns, into the secret place.

For all its sweet brevity, the question asked in the last two lines is a total “revisioning” of the story, a subversion of it. Almost, it revokes it.

The pall of sleep that lies upon the house and grounds is supposedly the effect of a malicious spell, a curse; the prince’s kiss that breaks the spell is supposed to provide a happy ending. Townsend Warner asks, was it a curse, after all? The thorn hedge broken, the cooks growling at their porridge pots, the peasants laboring again at their sowing or harvesting, the cat leaping upon the mouse, Father yawning and scratching his head, Mother jumping up sure that the servants have been misbehaving while she was asleep, Beauty staring in some confusion at the smiling young man who is going to carry her off and make her a wife—everything back to normal, everyday, commonplace, ordinary life. The silence, the peace, the magic, gone.

Really, it is a grand, deep question the poet asks. It takes me into the story as no Freudian or Jungian or Bettelheimian reduction of it does. It lets me see what I think the story is about.

I think the story is about that still center: “the silent house, the birdsong wilderness.”

That is the image we retain. The unmoving smoke above the chimney top. The spindle fallen from the motionless hand. The cat asleep near the sleeping mouse. No noise, no bustle, no busyness. Utter peace. Nothing moving but the slow subtle growth of the thorn bushes, ever thicker and higher all about the boundary, and the birds who fly over the high hedge, singing, and pass on.