The Problem of the Backward Glance

The conversation started in Ursula’s kitchen, which was the only room in the house where Toni seemed willing to sit still. Every other room had that Northwest light — the kind that suspends you, makes you feel like you’re inside a pearl — and Toni kept getting up, moving to the window, looking out at the rain on the cedars as though the trees were withholding something from her. In the kitchen, the light was ordinary. Yellow. There was a cast-iron skillet on the stove with a patina so deep it looked geological.

Ursula was making soup. Not performatively — the soup predated our visit. She stirred it with the handle-end of a wooden spoon because the bowl-end had cracked and she hadn’t replaced it yet. Toni sat with her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee she hadn’t drunk and said, “Orpheus.”

“Not Orpheus,” Ursula said, without looking up from the pot.

“No,” Toni agreed. “Not Orpheus. Everyone does Orpheus.”

“Everyone does Orpheus because Orpheus is convenient,” Ursula said. “He’s the artist-hero. He sings so beautifully that the laws of death bend. Writers love that story because it flatters them. It says: your voice is powerful enough to change the rules.”

“And the looking-back,” Toni said. “The hubris of the backward glance. Writers love that too because it lets them feel tragic about their own compulsions.”

I was sitting at the counter on a stool that wobbled slightly on the flagstone floor. I said I’d been thinking about Eurydice. About telling the story from her side.

Toni set the mug down. “Whose side? What side does a dead woman have?”

“That’s the question—”

“No, it isn’t. That’s the obvious question. The one they print on the back cover. ‘What if we heard from Eurydice?’ As if hearing from her is the same as knowing her. As if giving a dead woman words is the same as giving her a body.”

Ursula turned down the flame under the soup. “She’s right. The Eurydice-speaks-back version has been done. Sarah Ruhl did it well. The issue isn’t giving Eurydice a voice. The issue is that the myth is structured around his action — the looking-back — and everyone who retells it remains structured around that action, even when they switch the point of view. The center holds because no one actually moves it.”

“So move it,” I said.

“Where?” Ursula asked, and the question was genuine, not rhetorical. She sat down across from Toni with her own mug — tea, something that smelled like pine — and looked at me with the particular steadiness that she gives to questions she already has three answers to but wants to hear yours first.

I didn’t have an answer. Not yet. I said what I’d been carrying around: that I wanted to write a story told in multiple voices. That the risk card I’d drawn demanded it — multiple narrators, each genuinely different, the multiplicity architecturally central to meaning. That the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice seemed to want that treatment because the myth is always told from one vantage and collapsing into one moment.

“The moment of the glance,” Toni said. “That’s your traumatic center. Like 124 Bluestone Road. The thing everyone circles but no one can look at directly.”

“Except,” Ursula said, “in Beloved, the trauma is real. A child was killed. The haunting is a response to an act so terrible it breaks the fabric of time. What’s the trauma in the Orpheus myth? A man loved his wife and she died. That’s not trauma — that’s mortality. He goes to get her back and fails because he can’t control himself. That’s not a wound inflicted by history. That’s a failure of nerve.”

Toni was quiet for a moment. Then: “You’re reading the myth as a Greek would have read it. As a story about one man’s failure. But the myth isn’t about him. The myth is about the people who have to live in the world he wrecked.”

“Who?”

“The women who dismember him afterward. The Maenads. In most tellings they’re a footnote — crazed women, Dionysian frenzy, they tear him apart, the end. But think about it. Think about a community of women who have to listen to a man sing about his grief so beautifully that even the rivers stop flowing, and meanwhile their own grief — their children who died, their sisters who were stolen, the ordinary unbearable losses they carry every day — is inaudible. Drowned out by his music.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The soup made a sound like something thinking.

“The dismemberment isn’t madness,” Toni continued. “It’s the end of patience.”

Ursula nodded slowly. Not agreement exactly — acknowledgment. “That’s Morrison,” she said. “Community as character. The communal voice that has been silenced by the individual hero’s story. I can feel it. But I’d pull in a different direction.”

“Where?”

“After. What I always write about. After the quest. After the hero. Tehanu is a book about what happens when the great wizard comes home and he’s just a man. His power is gone and the question becomes: what was power for? Was it ever the important thing? In the Orpheus story — after he fails, after the Maenads kill him, after his head floats down the river still singing — there’s someone in a house somewhere putting a pot on the fire. Feeding a child. Mending a fence that the hero’s grief-music blew down. That person never enters the myth. I want them.”

“You want the domestic,” Toni said. It was not a diminishment.

“I want the day after the story ends. And the day after that.”

I said: both. Could we have both? The communal memory of the trauma — fractured, non-linear, the way Beloved circles 124 and what happened there — and also the slow, spare, domestic rebuilding that Tehanu gives us?

“Both means five voices, at least,” Toni said. “Each one carrying a piece of the event that none of them can hold entire. The woman who was there when the singer came through and the rivers stopped. The girl who was born after and only knows it as a story the older women tell in pieces. The man who lost his daughter to the river when it stopped flowing — because rivers are supposed to flow, and when they stop, the fish die, and when the fish die, the people who eat the fish die. Nobody in the myth talks about the downstream consequences of Orpheus’s beautiful voice.”

“The downstream consequences,” Ursula repeated. “That’s precise. That’s where the Beloved structure and the Tehanu themes meet — the aftermath that the grand narrative refuses to account for.”

“And the voices must be truly different,” I said. “Not the same narrator wearing different masks. Different syntaxes. Different relationships to the event.”

“Different relationships to language itself,” Toni corrected. “In Beloved, Denver speaks differently from Sethe, who speaks differently from the community chorus. It isn’t about dialect. It’s about what each person can bear to say aloud and what they can only circle. The syntax is the wound.”

Ursula pushed her tea aside. “Here’s where I’d resist. What you’re describing, Toni, is gorgeous — incantatory, fractured, the prose doing the emotional work at the level of the sentence. But in the voices I write, the emotional work is in what’s not said. The spare sentence. The gap between what happens and what’s described. If every voice is lyrical, you have a symphony. But a symphony is still one thing. I want at least one voice that’s dry. Practical. A voice that says, ‘The river came back on the third day and we lost two nets to the current.’ No metaphor. No music. Just the fact of it.”

Toni smiled. It was the kind of smile that concedes ground and gains ground simultaneously. “Your net-mender. She’s the voice that keeps the others honest.”

“She keeps the myth honest. Because the myth wants to be beautiful. Orpheus’s whole power is beauty. And the danger of a retelling — our retelling — is that we replace his beauty with our beauty. The lyric dismantling of the lyric hero. It’s seductive and it’s a trap.”

“So one voice refuses beauty.”

“At least one.”

I was scribbling — not notes, exactly, but images. The river that stopped. The dead fish. A fence blown down by sound. A girl who only knows the story secondhand. The mother who remembers. The practical voice counting lost nets. And Eurydice — or not Eurydice. The woman who was taken. Not taken to the underworld as punishment or fate, but taken in the way that women are always taken in myths: carried off, given no choice, made into the object of someone else’s quest.

“She doesn’t come back,” I said. “In our version. He fails the same way — he looks back, or he fails some other way — but the point is, she doesn’t come back. And the story isn’t about his failure. It’s about the community that has to absorb her absence.”

“Her absence and his noise,” Toni said. “Because he comes through their valley singing his grief, and his grief is so loud it stops the rivers and breaks the fences and kills the fish, and the community has to absorb that too. His grief is an invasion.”

Ursula stood up and went back to the soup. She ladled some into a bowl, tasted it, added salt. “The myth is always told as: Orpheus loved Eurydice so much that he went to the underworld. The retelling should be: Orpheus loved Eurydice so much that he destroyed a valley.”

“But not with malice,” I said.

“No. That’s essential. Without malice. With the most beautiful intentions in the world. His love is real. His grief is genuine. His music is the greatest art the world has ever produced. And it kills people’s fish and stops their water and tears apart the fabric of an ordinary community. The grand narrative costs something, and the people who pay the cost aren’t characters in the myth.”

“They are now,” Toni said.

There was a pause. Not an uncomfortable one. The kind of pause where an idea is settling into its shape and nobody wants to jostle it.

I asked about the world. Whether this should be a secondary world — a fantasy landscape — or something closer to a recognizable place.

“Secondary,” Ursula said, without hesitation. “If you set it in Greece, you’re doing classical retelling, and Miller has that territory marked. Secondary world, but grounded. Specific. Not medieval-Europe-default. I’m thinking of a valley — a particular valley, with a particular river, with fishing communities that have their own technologies, their own names for things, their own relationship to what they call divine.”

“And the divinity question,” Toni said. “Is Orpheus a god in this version? A wizard? A man with a gift?”

“A man with a gift,” I said.

“A man with a gift that other people call a gift and he calls his nature,” Ursula said. “The distinction matters. When power feels natural to the person who holds it, they can’t see its cost. That’s Ged in the later books. That’s the entire trajectory of Earthsea.”

“And the woman who was taken — she had power too,” Toni said. “Before. Some kind of power that the taking diminished. Or some kind of power that the community only recognizes after she’s gone.”

“What kind?”

“The kind that doesn’t look like power. The kind that keeps things running. The kind that — if I’m being honest about my own work — Sethe has. The power to survive. To keep children alive. To hold a household together by will alone. That’s not what myths are about, but it’s what lives are about.”

Ursula nodded. “In Tehanu, Tenar’s power is precisely this. Domestic. Invisible. The wizard Ged lost his grand magic and has to learn that Tenar’s power — the power of the house, the garden, the ordinary — was always the real power. He was just too blinded by his own to see it.”

“So the taken woman had this kind of power,” I said. “And the singer’s grand grief-music is, among other things, a refusal to see it. He loved her, yes, but he loved what she was to him — the object of his song, his muse, the shape of his art — not the woman who could keep the fishing nets in order and arbitrate disputes between neighbors and remember which herbs cured what ailment.”

“He loved Eurydice the myth,” Toni said. “Not Eurydice the person.”

“And the community loved Eurydice the person,” Ursula said. “That’s why they tear him apart. Not frenzy. Not madness. Grief of their own, finally expressed, because his singing has stopped long enough for them to be heard.”

The soup was ready. Ursula served it in three bowls that didn’t match, and we ate without talking for a while, which was its own kind of conversation. Outside, the rain continued its argument with the cedars. Inside, the story was taking its shape — not as a plot but as a pattern. Voices circling an absence. A river that stopped and started. A community that survived a myth.

I wanted to ask about the title, about the ending, about whether the woman who was taken should have her own section or only exist in the spaces between other voices. But Toni had started talking to Ursula about soup — specifically about the difference between a soup that’s good and a soup that’s correct, and whether the distinction mattered, and whether it was the same distinction as the one between a story that’s beautiful and a story that’s true. They went on like this for some time, and I let them, because the conversation had done what it needed to do and pushing it further would have been the kind of mistake that Orpheus made — the insistence on one more look, one more verse, when the right thing was to walk forward and trust what was behind you.