The Left Hand of Darkness
By Ursula K. LeGuin
A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a
world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid.
His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic
civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views
and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters...
I had a friend growing up, her
family always felt weirdly stepford-ish to me, not in the sense that
they were this 1950s picture perfect family, but like, they were always
together, and going on camping trips and seemed cheerful and upbeat and
the children excelled in school and they never seemed, I don't know,
sloppy or stupid or mean. The kind of people who would talk about the
philosophical meaning of a book at dinner. I have not read it, but the way people describe the Austin family in A Ring of Endless Light (also, incidentally, a book my friend owned) sounds about right. A little smug, and saccharine. I feel like this is the kind
of person who would read Left Hand of Darkness and enjoy it. And
yes, as far as I know, my friend did read Ursula K. LeGuin (although
whether she read this particular one is unknown to me), and there's
certainly nothing wrong with being a perfect human being, I'm
just saying if you read for pleasure instead of enlightenment, I am not
going to recommend this book. Look, I like high-handed literature in its
place (I think Ulysses is the finest work ever written in the
English language but someone's comment that "I read every single word on
every page" felt very reminiscent of my own adventure into it) but this
was an awful drag.
Left Hand takes the
bulk of its substance from the anthropologically-tended experience of
Genly Ai, an alien envoy to Winter, a planet which is cold all the time.
His main contact is Estraven, a prime minister of Karhide, who is
summarily exiled for treason in the first chapter. The most, and only,
interesting thing about Winter, besides the fact that no one would ever
want to vacation there, is that the people are basically sexless most of
the time, and then once a month they go into heat, so to speak, and can
become male or female for sex. So biologically speaking, they're not he
or she*.
I found the idea to be interesting,
but the execution of it heavy-handed and simplistic. Ai - unclear if
serving as a mouthpiece for LeGuin - suggests that war and rape have
been eliminated because of this. I thought that was silly and
immediately ridiculous, even before we get to Orgoreyn, where they
chemically castrate people. And it also felt sometimes inconsistent too?
In the gulag scenes, we find out they chemically prevent people from
going into heat, because there may not be someone else in sync, and
going through it alone is awful. But then we find out that Estraven is
in kemmering while he and Ai are together on their escape journey, and
that it takes approximately 78 days, but also they never have sex. So
are we meant to assume that the Orgoreyn's lied? Estraven basically acts
like he's got a hard-on he wants to go away when he's in kemmering, so
not...pleasant but also not awful.
And
there's a point at which Estraven is mortally offended by the way Genly
Ai gives him some money, but absolutely no indication as to how he would
have preferred the transfer take place. In fact, we're told A LOT about
how Genly is offending people or misinterpreting them, but then I don't
know what else he could have done...? Like, aside from knowing
Gethenian politics, i.e., that the Karhide king discards prime ministers
like tissue paper, and the Orgoreyn secret police are vying with the
Free Trade faction, how is Genly meant to be doing any better than he
is?
What I mean to say is, all the sex and
gender and honor stuff just seems like a big red herring: sure, we're
supposed to think it's the reason for Genly not understanding these
people and why he winds up in prison, but honestly, that doesn't seem to
have anything to do with his problem. Nor is there some huge breach of
manners that he made. It's simply a case of his arrival being used as a
tool by various factions of various governments, which could happen
anywhere.
So it feels like we spend time on
the political machinations at the expense of the anthropological
details, and time on the sex stuff at the expense of actual plot, and
get short shrifted on both. Now, maybe I'm coming into this biased from
having the benefit of sci-fi/fantasy literature in the last fifty years,
but it just didn't feel that fresh or exciting or groundbreaking. The
gulag scenes parts felt like a rip off of Solzhenitsyn, the story like a
cold, watered down Dune.
And I feel like we
really lose out on ideas like, how do people dress if sometimes they
grow boobs and sometimes not? What if someone has the Gethenian
equivalent of PCOS? What if they don't want to just go out and do
someone? What, if any, IS Genly's effect on kemmering? What do people's
sex organs look like? Can we distinguish the physical from the cultural (maybe this is the whole point,
but clearly Karhide and Orgoreyn handle the whole thing differently,
and I couldn't tell what was actually physically possible/impossible
versus what was simply taboo). If someone is pregnant (and therefore in
kemmering state) do they go around triggering everyone else's
kemmering? Because it seems like in the book, kemmering and physical
desire are one and the same, so being in a male/female state means being
aroused, but then we'd be like, segregating pregnant people, since no
one around them would be able to get any work done. So... anyway, I have
questions.
Left Hand was just not my bag. Send it to the Austins, I'm sure they'll love it.
*I
found fault with the book's default use of the pronoun "he" since it
clearly implied masculine characters where supposedly there were none,
but according to later sources, LeGuin did this at the time to avoid
confusion, and has since looked into other alternatives. I wished she'd
just stuck with "them" or "ze" or whatever, since it would have
highlighted this feature, but hindsight is 20/20 and for a book written
in 1969, I suppose even "he" was revolutionary.
37: A Book about Gender Identity
