Ursula Le Guin - The Wave in the Mind

“Off the Page” was a talk for a conference on Women and Language held by graduate students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley, in April 1998. In getting it ready for this book, I didn’t change the informality of the language, since the piece not only is about reading aloud to a live audience but was written for performance. The audience was by no means all women, but they were more receptive to uncomforting remarks about gender equality than most academic groups. I have performed the poem “Loud Cows” at that meeting, in New York, and elsewhere, and it appears as a frontispiece in The Ethnography of Reading, edited by Jonathan Boyarin.

What happened to stories and poems after the invention of printing is a strange and terrible thing. Literature lost its voice. Except on the stage, it was silenced. Gutenberg muzzled us.

By the time I got born the silence of literature was considered an essential virtue and a sign of civilisation. Nannies and grannies told stories aloud to babies, and “primitive” peoples spoke their poems, poor illiterate jerks, but the real stuff, literature, was literally letters, letterpress, little black noiseless marks on paper. And libraries were temples of the goddess of silence attended by vigilant priestesses going Shhhh .

If you listen to the first Caedmon tape of poets reading, which was a landmark, you’ll hear T. S. Eliot going adduh, adduh in this dull grey mutter, and Elizabeth Bishop going gnengnengne in a low flat whine. They were good poets who’d been taught poetry was to be seen not heard, and thought the music in their verse should be a secret between the poet and the reader—like the music that people who know how to read music hear when they read a score. Nobody was playing the music of poetry out loud.

Until Dylan Thomas. You know the Caedmon tape of him reading at Columbia in 1952? I was there at that reading, and you can hear me—in the passionate silence of the audience listening to that passionate voice. Not a conspiracy of silence, but a participatory silence, a community collaboration in letting him let the word loose aloud. I left that reading two feet above the ground, and it changed my understanding of the art forever.

So then there were the Beat poets, all posing and using and screwed up by testosterone, but at least audible, and Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which from the title on is a true performance piece that will not lie down quietly on the paper and be good. And ever since then, our poets have been noisy. Now God knows there are too many open-mike readings in the world; but better drivel at an open mike than silence from a closed mouth. And we have the voices of all recent poets on tape, so we can hear their word on their breath, with their heartbeat in it. Whereas of the greatest English writer of the twentieth century we have one tiny BBC recording: about ninety seconds of Virginia Woolf’s voice reading a little essay. But in it you hear an invaluable hint of the rhythm that she said was where all the words began for her, the mysterious rhythm of her own voice.

It wasn’t till the seventies, I think, that publishers realised they could sell more books by sending the author to two hundred cities in eight days to sign them—and then realised that people like not only to see the author sit and grin and write its name, but also to hear the author stand up and read its story. So now you here in Berkeley have Black Oak and Cody’s, and we in Portland have Powell’s and the Looking Glass, and Seattle has Elliott Bay Books running two readings a day every day of the week, and people come. They come to be read to. Some of them want books signed and some of them want to ask weird questions, but most of them want to be read to. To hear the word.

One reason I think this is a restoration of an essential function of literature is that it is reciprocal: a social act. The audience is part of the performance. A lecture isn’t reciprocal, it’s a talking-to. There were professors at Harvard when I was there who would give you a C if you breathed during a lecture. But the hush during a performance is alive and responsive, as at the theater. Nothing kills a play like a dead audience. This response is recognised and called for in all oral literatures. Zunis listening to a narrative recital say a word, eeso , meaning yes, OK, about once a minute and whenever appropriate. In oral cultures generally, kids are taught to make these soft response-noises; if they don’t, it’s assumed they weren’t listening and they’re sent out in disgrace. Any Baptist preacher who doesn’t hear Yes Lord! and Amen! pretty often knows he’s lost the congregation. In poetry readings, big groups or small, the convention is mostly a little soft groan or hahh at a striking line or at the end. In prose readings the response convention is even subtler, except for laughter, but there are audible responses which the reader counts on just as the actor does.

I learned that once for all at a reading I did in Santa Barbara. They had no lights on the audience, so I was facing this black chasm, and no sound came out of it. Total silence. Reading to pillows. Despair. Afterwards the students came around all warm and affectionate and said they’d loved it, but it was too late, I was a wreck. They’d been so laid back or so respectful or something they hadn’t given me any response, and so they hadn’t been working with me; and you can’t do it alone.

It was men who first got poetry off the page, but the act was of great importance to women. Women have a particular stake in keeping the oral functions of literature alive, since misogyny wants women to be silent, and misogynist critics and academics do not want to hear the woman’s voice in literature, in any sense of the word. There is solid evidence for the fact that when women speak more than 30 percent of the time, men perceive them as dominating the conversation; well, similarly, if, say, two women in a row get one of the big annual literary awards, masculine voices start talking about feminist cabals, political correctness, and the decline of fairness in judging. The 30 percent rule is really powerful. If more than one woman out of four or five won the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, the Booker—if more than one woman in ten were to win the Nobel literature prize—the ensuing masculine furore would devalue and might destroy the prize. Apparently, literary guys can only compete with each other. Put on a genuinely equal competitive footing with women, they get hysterical. They just have to have their voices heard 70 percent of the time.

Well, when feminism got reborn, it urged literary women to raise their voices, to yell unladylikely, to shoot for parity. So ever since, we have been grabbing the mike and letting loose. And it was this spirit of hey, let’s make a lot of noise that carried me into experimenting with performance poetry. Not performance art, where you take your clothes off and dip yourself in chocolate or anything exciting like that, I’m way too old for that to work at all well and also I am a coward. But just letting my own voice loose, getting it off the page. Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill , all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.

I read this piece, “Loud Cows,” on tape at first but then didn’t know what to do with the tape, so I do it live; and it’s never twice the same, and though it has been printed, it really needs you, the audience, to be there, going eeso, eeso! So I’ll end up now by performing it, in the hope of sending you away from this great conference with the memory of seeing an old woman mooing loudly in public.