The Left Hand of Darkness

*There are spoilers ahead, so read at your own risk.*

I don’t know what I expected from Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness, but I’m really delighted with what I got.  This is the first book of hers I have read, and I found it to be intelligent, rich, complex, beautiful, and strange.

The story follows two men, Genly Ai and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, on the planet of Gethen, sometimes called Winter by Genly.  Genly is an alien to Gethen, an envoy from the Ekumen, an alliance of planets throughout the galaxy with the goal of establishing trade relationships with all the inhabited planets.  When contact is made with a prospective member, the Ekumen sends a single representative, an envoy, to make contact.  The Ekumen knows that one alien is a curiosity while two are an invasion.  At the start of the novel, Estraven is the right hand of King Argaven, ruler of Karhide, one of the two major nations on the planet of Gethen.

 While all the inhabited planets the Ekumen has visited seem to be populated by humans, Gethenians are the only known humans to be monosexual.  For most of the month, they are sexless.  Then for a week or so they enter what they call “kemmer” and become sexual.  Two Gethenians in kemmer will find each other and one will develop female organs while the other develops male organs.  Gethenians consider only the parent that carried and bore them their parent.  The sexual role any Gethenian takes during kemmer varies, so one might have male parts in one encounter and female parts in the next.

LeGuin has an anthropological mind and does a phenomenal job of playing out how such a being would structure society differently than our bisexual society.  As a point of contrast, Genly is obviously sexist in his thinking.  His default pronoun for the Gethenians is “he,” and when something annoys him about a Gethenian he attributes it to something feminine about them.  The Gethenians don’t bifurcate the world into masculine and feminine as Genly (and bisexual earthlings) do, and they especially don’t give those divisions opposing valences: strength and weakness, good and bad, scientific and emotional, etc. etc. etc.  Gethenian society expects everyone to take a week off each month to experience kemmer without shame or judgment.  Kemmerhouses are common so people in kemmer can find each other to mate.  Pregnancy and child bearing aren’t stigmatized as everyone on the planet is expected to be pregnant and be the main child rearer at some point in their lives.  At one point, Estraven notes that Genly has an odd hang-up about crying in front of other people, and much of the misunderstanding between the two is due to Genly’s deep commitment to ideas of masculinity.  The language barrier is nothing compared to the cultural assumptions and misinterpretation of subtext.

The dismantling of gender assumption results in a really bold approach to a science fiction civilization, and I imagine the book made quite a few waves in 1969.  Because LeGuin has Genly gender everyone on the planet male by default, the romance scenes all have a trace of homoerotica.  The entire second half of the book involves Estraven and Genly alone in a dangerous trek across the northern country to avoid capture, and the two “men” grow very close.  Estraven of course enters kemmer on the trip and the sexual tension thickens.  There is a love that grows between the two, and it is a very touching relationship.  That relationship is not something that happens in passing, but is a major focus of the novel, and like Romeo and Juliet, these two people from different worlds have a love that is doomed.  The two chapters in which this love blossoms and is recognized by the two protagonists (chapters 16 and 18) are some of the most beautiful and moving chapters that I have read.

Genly grows to understand that all his assumptions are wrong.  Here’s a passage from chapter 18, “On the Ice,” in which Genly makes the critical move from being a mere envoy to being a man of genuine understanding and acceptance:

And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man.  Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was.  Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality.  He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted.  For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being; who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance.  I had not been willing to give it.  I had been afraid to give it.  I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.

That resonates as much today as it must have in 1969 as gender norms are being challenged daily by all who refuse to say that we are, as a people, binary creatures.  And that’s what science fiction can always do, make the everyday alien in order to see it, analyze it, and discuss it.

I want to share another passage from that same chapter because I think it is important, although I can’t quite tell you why.  It’s something I keep thinking about.  The passage is Genly’s answer to Estraven, when asked why the Ekumen made everything difficult by sending Genly alone instead of giving him support on the planet:

It’s the Ekumen’s custom, and there are reasons for it.  Though in fact I begin to wonder if I’ve ever understood the reasons.  I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself post no threat, change no balance; not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy.  But there’s more to it than that.  Alone, I cannot change your world.  But I can be changed by it.  Alone, I must listen as well as speak.  Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political.  Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou.  Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical.  In a certain sense, the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic.  It considers beginnings to be extremely important.  Beginnings, and means.  Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means.  It proceeds, therefore, by subtle ways, and slow ones, and queer, risky ones; rather as evolution does, which is in certain senses its model.

And Genly is changed thoroughly.  Whereas early in the novel, the monogender of Gethenians is constantly irksome, the opposite is true in the final chapter of the novel.  Reunited with other’s from the Ekumen, he finds their voices too deep or too high, too masculine or too feminine.  He is in deep mourning for the loss of his lover and friend and is truly between worlds, tragic but better for it.

LeGuin introduces us to the world through Genly as a first-person narrator, but she wisely gives us other perspectives as well.  Estraven has his own voice through the diary he keeps, and he is equally present as Genly.  In addition to these two voices, there are a number of chapters that present Gethenian legends and folktales.  Through these tales, LeGuin creates an impressively complete world, both physically and sociologically.  I get the sense that LeGuin has considered every aspect of culture that would develop from such humans existing in such an environment.  She has a full geography and history in her head, and unlike some writers, she never throws it all on the page because she did all the work to figure it out.  She presents only what is relevant and meaningful with the ghost of other events, places, and meanings haunting the edges of what is said and what is left unsaid.

The Left Hand of Darkness tackles half a dozen other subjects as well.  There is certainly a study to be made of how the novel fits into its historical moment, namely the cold war and the Vietnam war.  The people of Gethen have never had a war and have no word for war.  This seems intimately tied into the notion of have a monosex culture as it is uncommon on Gethen to see duality rather than unity in the world.  A male-female split naturally creates an us-vs.-them in a way that monosexuality on Gethen doesn’t.  But Gethen is on the verge of change as the new right hand to King Argaven, Tibe, is seeking to push the king toward war through a newly developed sense of nationalism.  Orgota, the opposing country, is similarly poised to turn nationalism into a tool for war.  It is against this impending change to the world that Estraven is fighting to save the people of Gethen from themselves.  Estraven’s position as an outsider, a “traitor,” is yet another element of this larger discussion encouraged by the novel.

Another topic in the novel are the Handara notion of ignorance as the only thing that makes life bearable.  And what of the ability to see into the future, power coming from knowing what questions not to ask?  And what do we make of the incestuous love affair between Estraven and Arek, and the lack of taboo about incest on Gethen?  What about “perverts” and “normals” in Gethenian society and in our society?  Why does Genly sound like Arek in Estraven’s head when he mindspeaks?  What is LeGuin saying about humanity when she posits that all the populated worlds have the same essential humanity throughout the galaxy? All of these categories feel closely related and simultaneously distinct.  I love when I finish a book and feel that there is a lot of meaning to be mined from it, and The Left Hand of Darkness delivers that feeling like a bouquet of unbloomed flowers.  In fact, this is one of the few books that upon finishing, we (my wife and I, to whom I had read the book aloud) started back at chapter one.