The Left Hand of Darkness

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