Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

It is the secret garden; it is Eden; it is the dream of utter, sunlit safety; it is the changeless kingdom.

Childhood, yes. Celibacy, virginity, yes. A glimpse of adolescence: a place hidden in the heart and mind of a girl of twelve or fifteen. There she is alone, all by herself, content, and nobody knows her. She is thinking: Don’t wake me. Don’t know me. Let me be….

At the same time she is probably shouting out of the windows of other corners of her being, Here I am, do come, oh do hurry up and come! And she lets down her hair, and the prince comes thundering up, and they get married, and the world goes on. Which it wouldn’t do if she stayed in the hidden corner and renounced love marriage childbearing motherhood and all that.

But at least she had a little while by herself, in the house that was hers, the garden of silence. Too many Beauties never even know there is such a place.

Townsend Warner’s lines haunted my mind for some while before I realised that her question had led me not only into the folktale of the Sleeping Beauty but into a story I had to write about it. In this case, the influence was almost direct. I am not anxious about it in any way. I am cheerfully grateful.

My story is called “The Poacher.” Its title describes exactly what I, the author, was doing: poaching on the folktale’s domain. Trespassing, thieving. Hunting. Tracking down something that happened in the place where nothing happens.

In my story a peasant boy lives at the edge of a forest where he poaches and gathers a very poor living for himself, a nasty father, and a gentle stepmother. (I find reversing stereotypes a simple but inexhaustible pleasure. The stepmother is not much older than he is, and there is a sexual yearning between them that can find no solace.) He discovers the great hedge where it cuts across a far part of the forest. This impenetrable, thorny, living wall fascinates him. He keeps going back to it, exploring along it. When he realises that it forms a circle, a complete defense of something within it, some other place , he resolves to get through it.

As we know from the tale, the magic hedge is yards thick, yards high, and regrows two razor-thorned shoots for every one that’s cut, so anybody trying to get through it gives up pretty soon. The twelfth fairy’s spell decreed that it would stand for a hundred years. Only when the hundred years are up will a certain prince appear with a certain sword, which will cut through the monstrous tangle like a hot knife through butter.

Our peasant boy doesn’t know that, of course. He doesn’t really know anything. He is dirt poor and ignorant. He has no way out of his life. There is no way out of his life. He starts trying to cut through the hedge.

And he keeps it up for years, with the poor tools he has, slowly, slowly defeating the ever-regrowing vitality of the thorn trees, pushing a narrow, choked opening through the trunks and branches and endless shoots and tangles, doggedly returning and returning; until at last he gets through.

He does not break the spell; that is what the prince will do. He has broken into the spell. He has entered it.

It is not he who will revoke it. Instead, he will do what the prince cannot do. He will enjoy it.

He wanders about the fields and gardens inside the great hedge wall, and sees the bee sleeping on the flower, and the sheep and cattle sleeping, and the guardians asleep by the gate. He enters the castle (for in the tale as I knew it, Beauty’s father is the king of the realm). He wanders among the sleeping people. My poacher says then, “I knew already that they were all asleep. It was very strange, and I thought I should be afraid; but I could not feel any fear.” He says, “I knew I trespassed, but I could not see the harm.”

He’s hungry, as he has been all his life. “The venison pastry that the chief cook had just taken out of the oven smelled so delicious that hungry flesh could not endure it. I arranged the chief cook in a more comfortable position on the slate floor of the kitchen, with his hat crumpled up for a pillow; and then I attacked the great pie, breaking off a corner with my hands and cramming it in my mouth. It was still warm, savory, succulent. Next time I came through the kitchen, the pastry was whole, unbroken. The enchantment held. Was it that, as a dream, I could change nothing of this deep reality of sleep?”

So he stays there. He has always been alone, that is nothing new; and now he is not hungry. Not even sexually, for he shares a sleeping peasant girl with her sleeping lover, and she smiles with pleasure in her sleep, and there is no harm in it, for the spell holds: nothing can be changed, or broken, or hurt. What more can he desire?

Speech, perhaps, which he never had much of in his old life either. Here there is no one to answer if he speaks; but he has vast leisure, time without end, and so he teaches himself to read. He reads the princess’s book of fairy tales. He knows then where he is. Perhaps he knows what more there is to desire.

He knows who the princess is. “I knew that she, she alone in all the castle, might wake at any moment. I knew that she, alone of all of them, all of us, was dreaming. I knew that if I spoke in that tower room, she would hear me: maybe not waken, but hear me in her sleep, and her dreams would change.” He knows that to break the spell, all he need do is move the spindle in her hand so that its tip does not prick into her thumb. “If I did that, if I moved the spindle, a drop of red blood would well up slowly on the delicate little cushion of flesh above the joint. And her eyes would open. Her eyes would open slowly; she would look at me. And the enchantment would be broken, the dream at an end.”

My story, like Townsend Warner’s poem, merely asks a question. It does not alter anything. All will go on as told. The prince will come; his kiss will wake his virgin bride. I and my poacher had no desire to change the story. We were both just glad to get into it. To be there, awake.

Thinking about it now, I believe that the tale is as impregnable and unassailable as its hedge of thorns. We can play variations round about it, imagine peasant trespassers, or rapist princes, happy or unhappy endings, as we please. We can define it; we can defile it. We can retell it to improve its morality, or try to use it to deliver a “message.” When we’re done, it will still be there: the place within the thorn-hedge. The silence, the sunlight, the sleepers. The place where nothing changes. Mothers and fathers will read the tale to their children, and it will have an influence upon those children.

The story is, itself, a spell. Why would we want to break it?

POSTSCRIPT (2003):

I want to take this opportunity to pay a little further tribute to Sylvia Townsend Warner, whom I had the great good fortune to meet. When we were in England in 1976, our friend Joy Finzi knew how much I admired Sylvia’s work, and thought she might enjoy meeting me. So, after talking me up a bit, I imagine, and giving Sylvia some of my poems, she drove me to the cottage on the river in Dorset where Sylvia had lived for many years, first with her lover Valentine Ackland, then alone. The place is marvelously described in her letters and turns up in several of her stories. It was a sort of a naiad of a house that seemed to be only partly above water, with bits of beautiful, muddy, unkempt garden, and the murmur of the river all around it. We had a cup of tea in a sort of sunroom at the front of the house. Antiquities from Valentine’s antiques shop still stood or lay about here and there, or possibly they were part of the furniture. Sylvia smoked more or less continuously, as she had done for sixty years or so, and it was impressive to see the golden-brown walls of the interior rooms, which had been white; smoke varnish lay so thick on the glass of the pictures that you couldn’t make out the pictures. Of course, some of it may have been wood smoke from the fireplaces, too, in that dank place. Sylvia was old, and tired, and reserved, and kind, and keen as a splinter of diamond. She said she liked one of my poems, “Ars Lunga,” which is about being a storyteller, and since then I have liked that poem better myself. I asked her about one of her stories, which I had read long ago in the New Yorker and had forgotten the name of, about a nice English family on a picnic. At the end of the story, a stranger sees them: one of them is wearing a bloodstained Indian shawl, two of them are in eighteenth-century costume, the father is sitting on the ground listening to an enormous music box, while the mother approaches with a bird cage. All this has come to seem perfectly reasonable to us, as it does to the family, because we know why it is so, but the stranger does not, and the reversal of viewpoint is revelatory and ravishingly funny. Sylvia smiled happily at my description and said, “Oh yes I do remember that,” but she couldn’t remember what it was called either, or where I could find it. No wonder. She had published nine volumes of stories (and this is not in any of them; it is “A View of Exmoor,” in the posthumous collection One Thing Leading to Another ). She also published seven novels, of which Lolly Willowes is perhaps still the most amazing, though I love The True Heart and The Corner That Held Them as well. Her last major work was a stunning biography of T. H. White. Her poetry has been collected at last, her brilliant letters and her heartbreaking journal have been published. I think she is still esteemed at something like her worth in her own country, though she seems largely forgotten here, where most of her stories were first published. I hold it one of the dearest honors of my life that I knew her for an hour.