Ursula K. Le Guni's The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness is a fascinating and provocative work concerning the visit of a human, Genly Ai, to the planet Gethen, some seventeen light years away from the nearest other member of the Ekumen, a collection of 83 planets that coordinates and fosters trade in goods and ideas (Le Guin, 17, 34, 35). Genly Ai is on Gethen, also known as Winter, to invite their world to join the Ekumen. During the two-plus years the novel spans, Ai spends time in the nations of Karhide and Orgoreyn; rival nations that appear to be headed toward war, something that has never before existed on Gethen. All of the inhabitants of Gethen are androgynous. They are neither male nor female and they are sexually active only a few days every month, when they are in kemmer, a state roughly equivalent to when animals are in heat.

Le Guin tackles themes of friendship, love, betrayal, trust, and, gender and its impact on one's identity. She utilizes a dazzling array of literary devices to propel the reader's journey, including estrangement, metaphor, shifting viewpoints, and a series of info-dumps in the form of Gethenian myths that provide the reader with a deeper understanding of the planet and its cultural history. Estrangement is accomplished through the use of unfamiliar names for people and places, the invention of technologies that do not yet exist, and, most effectively through the elimination of gender. Writing in Extrapolation, John Pennington addresses estrangement, or what he refers to as "disequilibrium" this way:

In other words, the novel forces readers to become androgynous readers: readers are asked to resist reading from any gendered perspective. The result of such a request is to keep the reader continuously off guard and unsettled, mirroring Genly Ai's predicament in the novel, as he is forced to confront gender from his own limited perspective. Consequently, Le Guin's novel keeps readers in constant disequilibrium, provoking them into a powerful reader response. (352)

The entire novel can be seen as a metaphorical exploration of our own society. As Pennington suggests in the above quote, the reader takes a journey of discovery along with Genly Ai and in looking at and learning about this different world we are better able to see and evaluate our own. What does it mean to be in a world with no gender? Or, in a world that has never known war? How difficult it is for us to even imagine such a world. In her 1987 essay "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" Le Guin identifies three factors about Gethen she finds particularly interesting: "First: the absence of war... Second: the absence of exploitation. The Gethenians do not rape their world... Third: the absence of sexuality as a continuous social factor" (Dancing, 11/12). Regarding this third factor, there is a truly stunning passage. The chapter entitled "The Question of Sex" consists of a report filed by an Investigator of the first Ekumenical landing party to explore Gethen, in which she writes, "One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience" (95).

One of the more striking features of The Left Hand of Darkness is Le Guin's use of two first-person narrators - Ai, the alien visitor, and, Estraven, a Karhider who is exiled to Orgoreyn and who, in the end, not only saves Ai's life, but sacrifices his own, thereby paving the way for Gethen to make an alliance with the Ekumen. Initially, these shifting viewpoints can be somewhat confusing or jarring, but they help put the reader in a similar place as Ai - both the character and the reader must experience the story as it develops, learning new things along the way. Christine Cornell notes, "Not until the concluding section of the novel does Genly narrate any chapters back to back" (322). The five Gethenian myths and one report from a previous visitor - which might be considered info-dumps - that are peppered throughout the novel serve to bolster that sense of disequilibrium, while also giving the reader valuable information about Gethen and Gethenian culture.

Le Guin announces her intentions regarding shifting viewpoints right up front in the second paragraph when Ai says, "This story is not all mine, nor told by me alone" (1). She let's us struggle along with Ai's challenge of how to deal with a genderless society even before we fully understand that Gethenians are genderless as when Ai relates, "...man I must say, having said he and his..." (Emphasis in original, 5).

Le Guin seems to delight in setting a sort of trap for readers and then tripping them up when a particular truth is revealed. For example, Ai's race is not even hinted at until the third chapter when Argaven, the King of Karhide, questions Ai about other humans, asking, "Are they all as black as you?" (35). Addressing this quite directly, Le Guin has admitted, "I saw myself as luring white readers to identify with the hero, to get inside his skin and only then find out it was a dark skin" (Le Guin, qtd. in Rashley, 41). This toying with readers' biases extends to the gender question quite powerfully as well. As Lisa Hammond Rashley recently wrote:

Ai's tendency to see androgynous characters as primarily male, and his use of masculine pronouns to represent them in the narrative, tends to affect the reader's interpretation of those characters as well, outweighing one of the most truly revolutionary aspects of the novel, the estrous cycle that allows this androgynous people to develop both male and female sexual and reproductive organs. (23)

While I'm not at all sure I agree with her assertion that the "use of masculine pronouns" has the effect of "outweighing one of the most truly revolutionary aspects of the novel," it certainly does make the reader constantly think about gender.

Le Guin grapples with this issue extensively in her essay "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" and I highly recommend a full reading. What I'd like to share from her essay now, however, is not her defense of the masculine pronoun but a concise and articulate explanation of some of her thinking behind what she has referred to as the "thought-experiment" that is this novel (LHOD, xii). In the essay, she writes, "I eliminated gender, to find out what was left. Whatever was left would be, presumably, simply human. It would define that area that is shared by men and women alike" (Dancing, 10).

Nora Barry and Mary Prescott have observed, "By positing an alternative to the dualism that characterizes Western thinking and behavior, she demonstrates that a reliance upon dualism satisfies the demands of logical thought but leads to political, philosophical, and ethical dead ends" (163). Sarah LaFanu addresses this larger theme when she shares her sense that the novel is "...concerned more than ever with questions of fear and mistrust between individuals and nations" (par. 2).

The novel also contains plenty of adventure and danger and action. LaFanu observes:

The journey that they Frankenstein, and finds echoes in other great stories of endurance in sub-zero temperatures, such as Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World and Joe Simpson's Touching the Void. (par. 8)

Reading the chapters about their harrowing journey across the ice, I couldn't help but think about Ernest Shackleton and his 1914 Trans-Imperial Antarctic Expedition that failed in its goal but succeeded in the extraordinary rescue of every man on the mission. Le Guin confirms the connection when she reveals in her essay "Heroes," "...I wrote The Left Hand of Darkness, in which a Black man from Earth and an androgynous extraterrestrial pull Scott's sledge through Shackleton's blizzards across a planet called Winter" (Dancing, 171).

The ice crossing and the several other harrowing journeys that both Ai and Estraven undertake inform an additional theme, that of the journey itself, or the way. Late in the book, Ai writes, "It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end" (220). This might properly be thought of as Ai's moment of enlightenment. Prior to this moment, Ai was far more concerned with the end than with the journey. Cornell addresses this when she asserts, "This Taoist-influenced emphasis on the way not the end has significant implications for the reader as well as the characters" (322).

Sarah LaFanu suggests, "More than politics, more than science, The Left Hand of Darkness is a rich and complex story of friendship and love" (par. 11). I largely agree with her characterization, and offer the following Estraven narrated scene from their time on the ice as evidence:

I don't mean to be unjust, Estraven--"
"Yet you are. It is strange. I am the only man in all Gethen that has trusted you entirely, and I am the only man in Gethen that you have refused to trust."
He put his head in his hands. He said at last, "I'm sorry, Estraven." It was both apology and admission. (199)

The deep and abiding friendship that develops between Ai and Estraven changes the former forever. When Ai's ship and their crew finally land on Gethen, Ai describes the moment of the crew disembarking this way:

Out they came, and met the Karhiders with a beautiful curtsey. But they all looked strange to me, men and women, well as I knew them. Their voices sounded strange: too deep, too shrill. They were like a troupe of great, strange animals, of two different species; great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer... (296).

With this passage, Ai sees humans with something close to Gethenian eyes. The ability to see ourselves as others see us is a great gift, and if willing to accept it, it's a gift Le Guin bestows upon her reader with The Left Hand of Darkness.

WORKS CITED

Barry, Nora & Mary Prescott. "Beyond Words: The Impact of Rhythm as Narrative Technique in The Left Hand of Darkness." Extrapolation. 33.2 (1992): 154-165. Gale Literary Database. Roosevelt U. Lib., Chicago. 14 July 2007.
Cornell, Christine. "The interpretative journey in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness." Extrapolation. 42.4 (2001): 317-327. Gale Literary Database. Roosevelt U. Lib., Chicago. 14 July 2007.
LeFanu, Sarah. "The King is Pregnant." The Guardian. 3 January 2004. Google Search. 14 July 2007.
Le Guin, Ursula K. "Is Gender Necessary? Redux." Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 7-16.
---. "Heroes." Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 171-175.
---. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace Trade Edition. New York: Ace Books, 2000.
Pennington, John. "Exorcising gender: Resisting readers in Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness." Extrapolation. 41.4 (2000): 351-358. Gale Literary Database. Roosevelt U. Lib., Chicago. 14 July 2007.
Rashley, Lisa Hammond. "Revisioning Gender: Inventing Women in Ursula K. Le Guin's Nonfiction." Biography. 30.1 (2007): 22-47. Questia Online Library. 14 July 2007.