The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
1969

Introduction

The basic principle of The Left Hand of Darkness is one that started in Ursula K. Le Guin's first novel in 1966 and runs through several of her early works: that of the interplanetary expansion started by the first race of humanity on the planet Hain and expanded across the universe, forming the League of All Worlds, eventually expanding to the eighty-three-world collective called the Ekumen. This novel takes place in the year 4870 and concerns an envoy, Genly Ai, who is on a planet called Winter ("Gethen" in the language of its own people) to convince the citizens to join the Ekumen. Winter is, as its name indicates, a planet that is always cold, and its citizens are neither female nor male: they only have gender identities or sexual urges once a month. These conditions have affected the ways that civilizations on Winter have developed, with the most obvious effect being that there has never been a war on the planet. There are, however, arcane rules of politics and diplomacy that the envoy must learn in order to survive. His fortune changes quickly, according to what political faction is in power at the time in the country he is residing in: in one country, for instance, the Prime Minister arranges an audience with the king for him, but the next day the Prime Minister is exiled for treason; in another he has trouble determining which factions among the thirty-three Heads of Districts support him and which want to use him to gain political power. The struggle of Genly Ai as he tries to understand the ways of these people and survive on this hostile planet gives Le Guin the chance to explore what life would be like without the dualities, such as summer and winter or male and female, that form our way of thinking: the book's title comes from a Gethen poem, which begins, "Light is the left hand of darkness …" This book received the most prestigious awards given to science fiction writing: a Hugo Award in 1969 and a Nebula Award in 1970.

Author Biography

Ursula K. Le Guin was born on October 29, 1929, in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her father was Alfred Kroeber, an internationally-known anthropologist whose influence may have nurtured her understanding of cultural artifacts and traditional myths and legends. Her mother, Theodora Kracaw Kroeber Quinn, was a writer of several biographies and children's books. Le Guin attended Radcliffe College, where she received her B.A., and Columbia University, where she received a master's degree in romance literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a French historian, in 1953. Her first short stories appeared in science fiction magazines as early as 1962, and she published three novels, including the first one in her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy, in the three years between 1966 and 1968. It was The Left Hand of Darkness, though, that made her famous, winning the major science fiction awards: in 1969 the book won the Nebula Award, and in 1970 it earned her a Hugo Award. She has defined herself as a feminist, but not a radical feminist: she has spoken out for women's rights in life and, as in The Left Hand of Darkness, she has studied the roles of the genders in her science fiction, but most of her protagonists have been males, especially in her early books. One of the earliest lessons she learned in regard to self-identity and gender came in the same year that this book was published, when Playboy magazine published her story "Nine Lives." They asked her to publish it under the name "U. K. Le Guin": she did it, but she went on to resent having had to hide who she was. In her career Le Guin has published over eighty short stories, two collections of essays, ten books for children, seven volumes of poetry, and sixteen novels. She has written a screenplay for The Left Hand of Darkness that has not yet been produced.

Plot Summary

In Karhide: Chapters 1-5

Genly Ai, a somewhat naive young black man from Terra, or Earth, is an envoy from the Ekumen, an organization of more than eighty worlds, representing 3,000 countries, spanning one hundred light years from border to border, whose purpose is to develop commerce, communications and, possibly, mystical unity. Ai's mission is to convince the country of Karhide on the distant planet called Gethen to join the Ekumen. His story of that mission consists mainly of his own observations with interpolated chapters of Karhide tales and myths, Ekumen data, sayings from Orgoreyn (Karhide's neighbor), and excerpts from the diary of Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, prime minister of Karhide to mad King Argaven XV.

The planet Gethen is called Winter by the Ekumen because it is in the grip of an Ice Age. Ai is constantly challenged by the unrelenting cold, by the Karhide custom of shifgrethor, and by the androgynous nature of all the people who populate Winter. In Ai's dealings with Estraven, he fails to understand shifgrethor, a method of saving face by avoiding confrontation. When Estraven is exiled, thanks to his rival Tibe who convinces the King that Estraven is a traitor, Ai fails to understand the reason. He has an interview with the King and discovers that Estraven had been in favor of the Ekumen, although Ai thought he'd been against it. Through future miscommunications and clarifying explanations concerning Estraven, Ai eventually understands shifgrethor.

Estraven's androgynous nature further obscures him to Ai. Although all of Winter's androgynes are referred to as "he," the fact is they are neither "he" nor "she" until they enter kemmer, a state of estrus lasting a few days a month, analogous to a woman's cycle. Then, depending on the chemistry between partners, one will develop as a male, the other as a female. The same person can be a child-bearing mother to some children and a father to others. No wonder Ai is confused. However, the people of Winter are confused by Ai and can't believe everyone in the Ekumen is either a male, like Ai, or a female. Ai is considered a pervert, a creature always in kemmer. The androgynous biology, which eliminates sexual issues of male dominance and female dependency due to child bearing and rearing, is the underpinning for the culture and politics on Winter, a planet that has no word for war and no experience of it. Yet, despite this, the two countries of Karhide and Orgoreyn seem to be on the brink of war over disputed territory. This gives Ai's peaceful purpose and patient approach elements of tension and timeliness.

In Orgoreyn: Chapters 6-14

Estraven is exiled as a traitor for putting the planet's good over the country's good by wanting to give the disputed territory to neighboring Orgoreyn. He has only a limited time to leave Karhide under pain of death. He must race to the Orgoreyn border where he ends up losing his identification and being exploited as a factory worker. Finally he is discovered by some Commensals, politicians of high status somewhat like senators, and introduced into the socialist politics of Orgoreyn. Ai also travels to Orgoreyn. Since the King has rejected his proposal to join the Ekumen, he thinks perhaps the neighboring country will be interested. Orgoreyn is considerably different from Karhide, a bureaucracy compared to a monarchy; Orgoreyn's Yomesh religion denies the dark yet is an offspring of Karhide's Handdara which espouses both light and dark for "[l]ight is the left hand of darkness"; Orgoreyn's people are supposedly more progressive and yet they live under a corrupt political system with the darkness of secret police and concentration camp prisons and, on the whole, have less humane values than the people of Karhide. Although Estraven tries to warn Ai of the shifting politics here, again Ai doesn't understand. He ends up being betrayed by a politician with ties to the secret police and is taken away in a truck with other unfortunates to Kundershaden Prison. All are naked, freezing, and hungry. To make matters worse, the technology here isn't even up to present-day standards in the United States, although the point of this is that Winter's people have respected the ecology with each advance. Still, the truck moves slowly, lengthening the torture. Once imprisoned, Ai has little to look forward to until he is rescued through the daring of Estraven. Unfortunately, the road back to Karhide is over the Gobrin Ice.

The Gobrin Ice and Back to Karhide: Chapters 15-20

Ai and Estraven battle the snow and ice, glacier and crevasse, wind and night. Through cooperation, for Ai is physically superior to Estraven while Estraven has superior survival skills, the two become closer. Ai realizes that while Estraven is a forced exile, he himself has chosen to exile himself from his family, friends, and, in fact, several generations by being a space traveler. Ai is 127 earth years old, but because of timejumping is not quite 30.

Ai teaches Estraven telepathy, or mindspeak. Estraven hears Ai's voice as that of his dead brother Arek to whom he swore kemmering. Although incest between siblings in not taboo, they are forbidden to swear allegiance for life. Ai begins to understand Estraven better. When Estraven goes into kemmer, although both avoid a sexual relationship, Ai sees the full womanly side of Estraven and finally understands his friend as a complete person, and, by extension, understands the androgynous people of Gethen.

When the two return to Karhide, the exiled Estraven is discovered, and as he skis to the Orgoreyn border, he skis straight into the guards who shoot him, a seeming suicide. This too is a Karhide taboo. Estraven dies in Ai's arms asking Ai to clear his name. Ai is successful in convincing the King to join the Ekumen, but when the crew from the spaceship alight, Ai is repulsed by their overt sexuality. In the final chapter he visits Estraven's family who are distraught because Estraven is still considered a traitor. Ai had not cleared his name as he promised, because he didn't want to jeopardize his mission, Gethen's entry into the Ekumen, a mis-sion for which Estraven gave his life. However, Estraven's son Sorve by his dead brother shows the same kind of curiosity as his father, the kind which characterizes human progress: he asks Ai to tell him about other worlds and other lives he has seen.

Characters

Genly Ai

Ai is the main character of the story, often called "Genry" by the Gethenians, who have trouble pronouncing the letter "l" in their language. At the start of the book, he has been on Gethen for two years, trying to become accustomed to the ways of the planet's inhabitants and to get them accustomed to the idea of him. He arrived with basic information about the language and culture because a team of investigators from the Ekumen had come before him and lived among the Gethenians without revealing their identities or their mission. Still, Ai's obstacles are many. For one thing, he knows that it will not be easy to explain to people who have never even thought of air flight that men can arrive from space. In Karhide, the king is reluctant to acknowledge him or discuss his diplomatic mission because admitting the existence of beings who have mastered travel and communications would diminish the king's importance. The new Prime Minister is bound to oppose Ai because the old Prime Minister, who is being forced out of power, supported him. Moving to another country, Orgoreyn, Ai is accepted more easily by the political leaders and believes that they will help him to accomplish his mission; it turns out, though, that their political system is more complex and subtle than Karhide's, and, while he is trying to sort out which factions are sincere about offering help and which have a hidden agenda, Ai is arrested, stripped of his clothes, drugged and sent to a work camp to die of exhaustion. He is rescued by Estraven, the deposed Prime Minister of Karhide, and he realizes that cultural differences had kept him from understanding their relationship previously: he had not understood advice when it was given because Estraven had not stated it directly, thinking that doing so would offend him. During their eighty-one day journey across the frozen land to return to Karhide, where people would cooperate with him now (if only to embarrass Orgoreyn), Ai gets to know and love Estraven and he sees how he has looked to the people of this planet. One day while Estraven is in his sexual cycle, and is being distant so that they will not become involved, Ai realizes how he had misread the situation. "And I saw then, 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." He realizes that this fact has made him unable to give his trust and friendship to Estraven because of this dual personality, and that this has been his fatal flaw.

Media Adaptations

• An audiocassette version of The Left Hand of Darkness, read by the author, was released by Warner Home Audio in 1985.

Argavan XV

In the first chapter, Estraven, trying to imply that Orgoreyn might be a better place for Ai to look for acceptance, tells him, "the Commensals of Orgoreyn are mostly sane men, if unintelligent, while the king of Karhide is not only insane but rather stupid." Chapter 3, in which Ai finally is granted an audience with Argavan after half a year's wait, is titled "The Mad King." The book is never clear, however, whether the king is mad or stupid, or if he is just working from a different set of assumptions than everyone else. In being protective of his people, he appears to Ai to be small-minded and frightened: while Ai can see no reason for him to turn down an alliance with the Ekumen, the king sees great reason to be suspicious of the strange alien who makes promises, especially with hostilities against the neighboring country of Orgoreyn increasing and the great chance that Ai's story is just a trick to humiliate him. Added to his natural suspicions is the advice of his Prime Minister, Tibe, who recently ascended to his position precisely because he encouraged the king's fears. At the end of the story, when Argavan agrees to host a landing party of Ai's comrades, he is disappointed that Ai called them before asking permission, but other than that he seems to believe that all that has happened was according to his plan: "You've served me well," he tells Ai. Again, it is not clear whether he is delusional or cunning.

Ashe

Estraven's Kemmering, or spiritual partner, for seven years, Ashe bore two sons with him. Ashe left three years earlier to join a Fastness at Orgny and became celibate. Before Ai goes to Orgoreyn, Ashe gives him money to take to Estraven.

Estraven

See Therem Harth rem ir Estraven

Faxe

Faxe is the leader of the Handdarata, a religious sect living in the area known as Ariskostor Fastness. A Fastness is a religious place like a monastery, where people can retreat from the world, spending "the night or a lifetime." Faxe is the Weaver of the Foretellers of the Handdarata, which means that he is at the center of the spiritual ceremony they use to foretell what will happen in the future. He is the one to weave the power of the other participants—the Zanies, the Pervert, the Celibates, etc.—into an answer for the question asked. He is also the one to explain, later, that knowing the future is generally useless: the reason the Handdarata developed Foretelling, he says, was "to exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question." In the end, when Ai has called his ship to come to Gethen, Faxe shows up as a council member from the Indwellers of Handdarata Fastness, a sign that he was worried about what Tibe had been doing to the government.

Obsle

One of the thirty-three Commensals in Orgoreyn, he is cheerful, amused at seeing Estraven in his exile. He recalls the old times that they had together when Estraven was Prime Minister, but the pattern to his seemingly innocent questions implies that he is most interested in finding out information about the situation in Karhide.

Therem Harth rem ir Estraven

In the beginning of the book, Genly Ai is indebted to Estraven for having arranged an audience with the king, but he is also frustrated because he sees Estraven as being cold and aloof, and he is angry because he feels that, as Prime Minister, he should have done more to make the audience go more smoothly. What Ai does not realize at the time is that Estraven is out of favor with the govern-ment, and in fact will be sent into exile the next morning. Several of the book's chapters are written as excerpts from Estraven's diaries, so readers are able to develop a sense of what he is trying to accomplish and what he feels his limitations are, which is an understanding that Ai is incapable of. Estraven accepts his exile almost passively: he takes a menial job in Orgoreyn, and when the Commensal rescues him and he is taken to be a dependent of Commensal Yegey, he does not use the opportunity to sell out the government that banished him. Throughout the story, Estraven works diplomatically to help Ai achieve his goal, but his maneuvering is so diplomatic that Ai does not recognize its implications, and counts him as untrustworthy, if not actually a foe. When he risks his life to save Ai from the prison farm in Pulefen, there can be no doubt that his loyalty is to Ai's cause. On the trip across the ice to safety, Ai learns that Estraven, far from being a self-serving politician, is actually a spiritual man whose actions were hard to understand, in part, because he was not acting for the good of his country (as a politician should) but for the good of the whole world. It is Estraven's planning that makes it possible for them to cross back into Karhide, and even though Ai promises to have his exile called off when the treaty between planets is put into place, he still charges into armed guards, knowing that they would have orders from Tibe to kill him, after an old friend has betrayed his trust.

Thessicher

At the very end of their journey back into Karhide, when they are out of supplies, Ai and Estraven run into Thessicher. When he was Prime Minister, Estraven helped Thessicher buy his farm, so Thessicher repays him by allowing them to stay the night, even though he could be in serious trouble for harboring an exile. His kindness turns out to be treachery, though, when Estraven overhears him on the radio alerting Tibe's troops that Estraven is there.

Tibe

The cousin of King Argavan, who is made Prime Minister by having Estraven exiled. Although there has never been a war on the planet Winter, it seems that one could erupt at any moment: Tibe works to incite hostilities and border disputes between his country and Orgoreyn. At one point, Estraven points out that Tibe's political style is like that of the Orgota in its "new-style" deception and efficiency. In the end, when the king wants to take credit for the aliens landing and bringing new wonders to the world, Tibe is exiled for having opposed the idea.

Pemmer Harge Tibe

See Tibe

Themes

Growth and Development

In establishing the basic facts of life on Gethen, this novel raises the fundamental question of "nature" versus "nurture": which cultural traits are learned and passed on from generations, and which are direct results of one's immediate surroundings? Since the people on this planet have no gender distinctions, their society is less restrictive about where citizens can go and what jobs they can take; the phrase "The king is pregnant" may sound strange to Earth ears because the associations that go with the word "king" are not the same as those that go with "pregnancy," but nobody on Gethen is fazed by the announcement. What does startle them is that humans are capable of sexuality every day, instead of being on monthly cycles. The effects of having sexuality kept aside for certain occasions are, first, that when they are in their "kemmer" or their sexual cycle, they are overpowered by it, and that without its distraction throughout most days they are able to concentrate on wholeness and not differences. The spiritually enlightened Gethenians have developed the ability to band together and tell the future, although they see no real benefit in it; the advanced members of the Ekumen know how to reach out to the minds of others, a skill developed from the basic concept of differences. The other main factor influencing development on Winter is the fact that it is in an Ice Age. There are no birds, and so they have no model for air flight, and therefore no basis for space flight; much of their body energy goes toward producing heat, leaving them with somewhat underdeveloped muscles; and, as indicated by the Creation Myth in Chapter 17, in which a house made of the corpses of Edondurth's brothers provides warmth, they have learned all their lives to be more careful with resources than cultures are when waste is not a matter of life and death.

Sex Roles

When asked by his Gethenian friend how women on Earth are different from men, Genly Ai responds, "It's extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones. Even where women participate equally with men in the society, they still do all of the childbearing, and so most of the child-rearing…." After mulling over how little the differences are between men and women, yet how different their roles in society, he concludes, "In a sense, women are more alien to me than you are. With you I share one sex, anyhow…." One of the most discussed ideas in this novel is that it creates a race of people on Gethen who are not encumbered with having to live up to the expectations of gender identity, and so their characteristics develop in response to environment and situation. This makes it difficult for Genly Ai, raised on Earth, to be an effective envoy, because he has trouble determining what they are thinking. He is used to thinking of human identity as divided into two separate groups, to seeing people as either like him or unlike him, and this leads him to some bizarre and unfounded conclusions about his hosts. For example, he finds the lack of war in their history to be more of a fault than an achievement: "They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants." His inability to see them for who they really are makes him disappointed early in the book, when Estraven is not as aggressive with the king on his behalf as he thinks he could be. Because they do develop sexual identities every twenty-six days, and pregnancy can fix a Gethenian into the maternal role during the time of carrying and nursing the child, it is not accurate to say that they are asexual: they are ambisexual. Rather than having no sexes, they have experience with both roles. Because of the limitations of the English language, it is difficult for readers to get a true sense of this sexlessness, because the narrative continually describes characters as "he."

Topics for Further Study

• In the novel, Genly Ai draws the "yin and yang" symbol for Estraven. Study the ancient Chinese Naturalist movement that developed the philosophy of yin and yang, and explain it in a way that would help readers understand this book better.
• Research the problems of extreme cold faced by Arctic expeditions, such as Admiral Robert Peary's expedition to the North Pole in 1909. Write your findings in the form of a guide for travelers.
• Many people feel that an envoy from another world may have already visited Earth. Search the Internet or supermarket tabloids for stories from people who claim to know things about alien visitors. Devise a scale that will help observers test how true these stories are.
• Several science fiction books have used a device like the ansible communicator that would be able to transmit messages instantly across space. Is such a thing possible? Why or why not? Discuss the scientific principles involved.

Politics

Because Genly Ai is a stranger, he does not know the cultural expectations in Karhide or Orgoreyn, but as a diplomat he is required to live among the highest levels of government and therefore experiences concentrated forms of each culture's thought patterns. In Karhide, where the government is a monarchy, people are more direct about what they think. It is the Karhide government that allows Ai to live openly as an alien from another planet, that broadcasts news about his arrival on the radio. While Ai feels that Estraven, as the Karhidian Prime Minister, was not entirely open with him, it is later learned that Estraven behaved that way out of politeness, not for personal gain: in a country so dominated by one man's will, there is not much to be gained by tricky political maneuvering. Similarly, in Orgoreyn there is much to be gained by deception: with thirty-three Commensals, the balance of power is subject to change quickly. The Orgota are friendlier with Ai, but that is because friendliness is necessary when one is surrounded by enemies, and the Commensals are in a constant state of siege from each other. When the faction that opposes Ai comes to power, he is not publicly exiled, as Estraven is from Karhide; he is dragged away naked in the night and the world is told that he has died.

Survival in Nature

Most of the last half of the book is a detailed account of the trip that Ai and Estraven make across the ice in order to reach relative safety in the country that they both left under threat. It is only in fighting the elements together that they are able to learn about each other, observing strengths and weaknesses that lead them to conclusions about the other's culture. Isolated in their tent at night, they tell stories and give opinions that they never had the chance to share when they were in society, to such an extent that the mind-speaking technique that Ai teaches has strange results: to Estraven, Ai's voice sounds just like Estraven's brother's, and when Ai hears Estraven he thinks that the voice he is hearing is his own. Relying on each other for survival, they form a bond unlike any that they could have formed when they were both playing social roles and at the same time trying to guess what social role the other was playing.

Style

Structure

The structure of this novel is a cluster of information from various sources. The main one, in terms of quantity and prominence, is the report of Genly Ai to the Stabile on Ollul, which, as he explains as the first chapter starts, is presented in the form of a first-person narrative, "because I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination." Alternating with these chapters are chapters taken from the journals kept by Estraven. The journals are also written in the first person, but since they were not created for public consumption they offer a more candid impression of Estraven than Ai gives from his observations. Juxtaposing the two against each other gives a rounded view of the self/other conflict that is at the heart of the story. Also interwoven between the chapters dominated by these two characters are fragments of civilization on Gethen/Winter: ethnological reports, accounts of native myths and legends, and descriptions of religious ceremonies. These fragments allow the culture that Genly Ai encounters to speak for itself, so that readers are not forced to know it only from his limited experiences and biased perspective. The relevance of these fragments to the overall story is sometimes easy to guess—for instance, the chapter titled, "Estraven the Traitor," an ancient East Karhidish tale, clearly reflects the support that Estraven in the novel gives Ai. Others, such as the story of Meshe in Chapter 11, are less directly related to the action, and are therefore more open to the interpretation of the reader, just like ancient myths and legends in our own world are.

Point of View

The central consciousness of this novel is Genly Ai: he is the one who is strange to the ways of the people of Winter, and readers experience the planet through his eyes. Since he is from Earth, he can report his experiences in relation to how they affect a body that his reader can understand. A temperature of negative ten degrees, for instance, might be uncomfortable to a Karhidian or to the Hainish, but to Earthlings it is dangerous. This Earthly perspective makes it difficult, at first, for readers to tell the truth of the situation that is being presented. "If this is the Royal Music," he says in Chapter 1, "no wonder the kings of Karhide are all mad," little expecting that the last half of the book will be a desperate three-month race through sub-Arctic conditions to the safety of the "mad" king. In the same chapter he notes, "I don't trust Estraven, whose motives are forever obscure; I don't like him; yet I feel and respond to his authority as surely as I do the warmth of the sun." The people that he does like and trust, such as Commensals Obsle and Yegey in Orgoreyn, arrange for him to disappear from society and be sentenced to death. If this book had been written in a more objective point of view, the turns in the plot would not come as surprises to readers, and the point of how difficult it is for a person to enter into another world would be lost.

Setting

During the chapters that take place in urban settings, the extreme cold that prevails over this planet is not very relevant. Housing accommodations in Erhenrang, the capital of Karhide, and in the Orgoreyn capital of Mishnory are slightly different than Earth's, more collective in order to conserve heat, but in general social life is not much different than it would be in a cold city like Minneapolis or Buffalo. The coldness of Winter may have affected the way that civilizations on the planet developed, but it is not an important consideration until Ai is taken away to the Pulefen Commensality Third Voluntary Farm and Resettlement Community. Patterned on Siberia, the frozen province of northeast Russia where political dissidents were sent, Pulefen has an isolation that would never be possible in an area that was habitable; also, an escaped prisoner in a more reason-able climate would be hunted down and caught, rather than being left to die. It is the struggle against the brutal elements that brings Ai and Estraven to finally form a bond of trust, as they have to depend on each other's strengths and defer to each other's weaknesses. The physical details of their trek across the ice evokes a solid sense of reality that is different from that felt in the earlier chapters, which is appropriate, for the physical world is more real to the characters, too, in these chapters.

Historical Context

The Space Race

The year that The Left Hand of Darkness was published, 1969, was the year that the first human, Neil Armstrong, set foot on the moon. The idea had, of course, been present in science fiction for hundreds of years, in books by authors ranging from Daniel Defoe to Edgar Allan Poe. One of the most realistic early works about space travel was Jules Verne's 1865 novel From Earth to the Moon, which was the basis for one of the earliest silent movies made at the beginning of the twentieth century; another was H. G. Wells' The First Men on the Moon, published in 1901. The first real progress in space exploration came in 1957, when Americans found out with a shock that the Soviet Union, the world's other super power, had put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. Later in 1957, when the Russians put a living being, a dog, into space in Sputnik 2, the race to put a man on the moon immediately became a priority with the U.S. government, which poured millions of dollars into the space program. The National Aeronautics and Space Agency, NASA, was established in 1958, and in 1959 it had started work on Project Mercury, with the goal of sending animals into space, then robot-operated flights, and finally manned flights. The first human to go into space was the Russian Yuri Gagarin, in April of 1961; the first American was Alan Shepard, the following month. In an address to Congress in May of that year, President Kennedy made a historic declaration that determined the course of the space program: "I believe that this Nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth," he said. At the same time that the Mercury project was being carried out, NASA began a separate project, code-named Apollo, with the intent of putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. The one-man rockets of Mercury were replaced with two-man Gemini craft in 1964, but at the same time the Soviets announced that the three-man Voslhod I had been in space. In the middle 1960s the Soviets fell behind, pushing their old technology while the Americans made new advances and gained new ground.

The Feminist Movement

One of the reasons that critics took the androgyny in this novel to be such a strong feminist statement was that the Feminist Movement had not yet made much progress at the time it was published, in 1969. During the 1950s and 1960s, the American public's attention was drawn to racial inequality by the Civil Rights Movement, which was led by such dynamic leaders as Medgar Evers, Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. During those years, hundreds of thousands of white Americans were made aware of the unequal treatment of blacks. One of the greatest achievements of the Civil Rights Movement was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which changed the face of American society. The bill received strong unexpected supported from President Lyndon Johnson, although, as a rich Texas politician, he had never seemed to be particularly zealous about the rights of minorities before. The Civil Rights Act did not put an end to discrimination, but it made it illegal. While most people focused on the act's provisions regarding racial minorities, it also included language that prohibited discrimination in employment on the basis of sex. As the 1960s progressed, many who had been made politically aware by the struggle for racial equality shifted to other concerns. Some organized the young people on college campuses in the struggle against the Vietnam War; some went from the non-violent tactics of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference to militant racial groups such as the Black Panthers; some focused their attention on the unequal treatment of women. In 1966, feminist leader Betty Friedan and others formed the National Organization for Women as a result of their frustration over the fact that, three years later, the sex-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act were not being enforced. There were companies that would only advertise for men to fill open positions, professional organizations that would not admit women members, and open verbal and sexual harassment of females in the workplace. One of NOW's primary missions was to pass an amendment to the Constitution, the Equal Rights Amendment, that would assure fair treatment for women all across the United States—Congress approved the ERA in 1972, but it was not ratified by enough states after ten years and it expired in 1982.

Compare & Contrast

• 1969: The Woodstock Music festival took place on a farm outside of Bethel, New York, drawing between 300,000 and 500,000 young people from across the country to hear three days of music from acts including Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and the Jefferson Airplane. The event was surprisingly peaceful, given that many more people showed up than anticipated.
  
  Today: Modern marketing techniques have tried to reproduce such a massive event, with no luck.
• 1969: The largest anti-war demonstration in the history of Washington, D.C., occurred on November 15th, when 250,000 people marched on the capitol. Another 200,000 protesters gathered at the same time in San Francisco.
  
  Today: Lacking outrage at government policies, citizens tend not to band together in such large groups to protest; instead, large demonstrations are often intended to draw attention to areas in which ordinary people can make a difference in their communities. The Million Man March of 1995 is estimated to have brought between 600,000 and 850,000 black men to Washington to demonstrate a commitment to family and personal responsible behavior.
• 1969: Finding the Students for a Democratic Society to be too complacent, a group calling itself the Weather Underground split off to protest the war by violent means, such as bombing army recruitment offices.
  
  Today: Anti-government terrorism is more likely to come from right-wing separatists, as shown by the bombing that killed 169 people in Oklahoma City in 1995.
• 1969: The gay rights movement began when police raided the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village, New York. The gay patrons resisted arrest, leading to a three-day riot in the street.
  
  Today: Gay activists have made strides in securing the right of gays to gather in public, but they still struggle for rights such as employment security and the benefits enjoyed by legally married couples, such as family medical insurance and the right to adopt children.
• 1969: The University of California at Los Angeles, in response to a Defense Department order, developed a computer network "node" in order to decentralize information, so that it would not be vulnerable to computer attack. By 1975, over 100 universities and government research facilities had research nodes that shared computer information, and in 1985, the National Science Foundation created a network to link regional networks of academic and research sites in a new Internet.
  
  Today: Over 180 million Americans have access to the Internet at home, at school, or on the job.

Critical Overview

Since the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin has been respected by critics both inside and outside of the science fiction genre and by the general reading audience. She was the first female writer to build her reputation within the science fiction world, although other women, notably Doris Lessing, had crossed over into the genre before her. Philippa Maddern credited Le Guin as "the one writer who did the most" to take science fiction "away from adventure stories and the cerebral solutions of physical problems and toward the contemplation of anthropological, ethnological and psychological truths." The Left Hand of Darkness is the book that caught critics' attention. As thought-provoking as most reviewers found it to be, many still confined the book and its author in the narrow category of her gender even as they admitted that the importance of her work went beyond the narrow category of science fiction. Perhaps because of her pioneer status, coupled with the ambisexuality of the Gethenians in her book, critics have tended to categorize Le Guin as a feminist. As Barbara J. Bucknall pointed out in her 1981 book, however, the feminism in Le Guin's works is not the driving force: it is always secondary to her examination of politics. Keith N. Hull, writing in Modern Fiction Studies in 1986, made the point that The Left Hand of Darkness is simply too well-written to focus on one aspect and act as if it has no more purpose or significance than that: his long examination asserts that the book "integrates its lesson so thoroughly with Gethenian culture, biology and geography that … the main theme is too rich to be sentimental, no matter how uplifting it may sound when abstracted." Le Guin herself does not categorize herself as a feminist, but as a theorist. In the famous Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness she describes the androgyny of the characters as a "thought-experiment," not as a policy or a statement about what the world will eventually come to. "Science fiction is not predictive," she explains, "it is descriptive." It is this kind of dedication to human matters over matters of the physical world that has made her work speak to a far broader audience than her predecessors were able to capture.

Aside from disagreements about her political or social views, criticisms of the quality of Le Guin's works are very rare. When they do come up, they seem to be slightly condescending, praising her on the one hand for being a good science fiction writer while faulting her for not being a better writer in general. Weak plotting and excessive wordiness seem to be the most frequently mentioned problems. Noel Perrin, in a review of a 1982 book of Le Guin's short fiction, offered an explanation for her weaknesses that had to do with her literary rise: she appeared to still, even with the mainstream praise she had received, write like a science fiction writer of the old days. To him, this meant that she overwrote and underrevised, a practice dating back to when science fiction writers had to work hard and publish constantly just to make a living; given the economic comfort her fame produced, Perrin suggested that she could afford to be more considered and careful.

Criticism

Chloe Bolan

Bolan is an English instructor, playwright, essayist and fiction writer, who has published science fiction. In the following essay, she explores the problems of androgyny as it relates to the plot, pronoun usage, and the missing scene in The Left Hand of Darkness.

An Androgyne is a person possessing the traits of both sexes, a hermaphrodite—strictly speaking, a sexual aberrant. But on the planet Winter in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, everyone is an androgyne, fully functioning as a male at certain times, a female at others, and favoring neither sex. This intriguing notion, so brilliantly conceived by the author, has elevated the Hugo-and Nebula-winning novel to classic status. Yet, androgyny is the element most often criticized in this landmark work, androgyny as it relates to plot and the choice of pronoun. The plot might have been made whole, although the pronoun problem remains, had Le Guin fleshed out a missing scene.

World-famous science fiction writer and critic Stanislaw Lem, of Poland, and critic David Ketterer have both questioned whether androgyny in The Left Hand of Darkness is integral to the plot. Ketterer gives a plot summary without mentioning androgyny as a way to demonstrate this. Even Le Guin, in her earlier defense of the issue in the essay "Is Gender Necessary? Redux," claimed the most fundamental theme of the novel was betrayal and fidelity. Her whole purpose in using androgyny was to eradicate sexual tensions of male dominance and female compliance and describe how a world would evolve without them. On Winter (or Gethen), the country of Karhide contrasts with that of Orgoreyn religiously, politically, and culturally, despite their androgyny, but neither has experienced war, nor is there a word for it in their separate tongues. However, Le Guin, ever the dualist, undercuts this argument by suggesting war is coming and the only hope of stopping it is to join the Ekumen. Seemingly, not even androgyny can forestall the inevitable eruption of combat among supposedly intelligent beings. This would make androgyny a side issue and not integral to the plot.

The main issue of this novel is survival—political, cultural, physical, and psychological. Ai and Estraven have a plan to ensure Winter's peaceful survival which will favorably impact the cultures of Karhide and Orgoreyn instead of turning them against each other; Ai and Estraven have physically conquered the Gobrin Ice and resolved the psychological impediment to their friendship when Estraven dies. What remains is hope for the planet through the Ekumen, the memory of the deep friendship between a human and an androgyne, and a bright future in the person of Estraven's son who asks Ai to tell him stories of other worlds. So, Estraven could have been a man whom Ai was struggling to understand, and the ending would have been the same.

But Estraven isn't a man and yet his manliness lingers—which leads to the question of the pronoun. Why did Le Guin refer to the androgynes as "he"? Until the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, in a general statement where sex was not imperative, "he" represented "he" and "she." With consciousness raising, "he/she" and sometimes "she" began to replace the all-purpose "he." Although this came into vogue after Le Guin had written her novel in 1969, she missed an opportunity to impact English at its root. Despite her genius for inventing words, she chose not to "mangle" the language, as she says in her original version of "Is Gender Necessary? Redux." She later regretted this choice and experimented with "she" and even invented pronouns for a screenplay of The Left Hand of Darkness, but the novel remains unchanged.

Feminists have long criticized Le Guin for using "he" and exacerbating this issue by her focus on the stereotypical male roles of Estraven. As prime minister of Karhide exiled under pain of death, as an exploited factory worker in Orgoreyn, as a daring rescuer of Genly Ai from prison, and as an adventurer crossing the Gobrin Ice in a death-defying journey, Estraven evokes the masculine ideal. He's a modern-day action figure, a latter-day James Bond, an early-twentieth-century Hemingway code hero. He's never seen with a child or tidying up a hearth. And if this isn't enough, the protagonist, Genly Ai, is another "he."

Although it seems "she" would be as ineffective as "he," in fact, "she" would better describe the creature that appears to have sprung whole from Le Guin's fertile imagination. According to Le Guin, the androgyne of Gethen has a 26- to 28-day cycle, paralleling a woman's cycle. Kemmer, or estrus, begins on the twenty-first day, and the sexual role of male or female is determined by hormonal dominance in one partner, which determines the opposite role in the other partner. Still, an androgyne has an equal chance of becoming a mother or a father. Nevertheless, when the androgyne becomes a mother, that role is extended by pregnancy and lactation; therefore, an androgyne spends more time as a female than a male. Also, the mother's line of descent prevails. Finally, Estraven sounds close enough to the female hormone estrogen to subliminally suggest his feminine side. But even if "she" presents a better case than "he," neither pronoun describes the androgyne.

The pronoun "it" is used for inanimate objects or animate ones whose sex is not known or apparent. "It" would certainly be appropriate for an androgyne, especially the ones in The Left Hand of Darkness where sex is an issue for only one-fifth of their lives. Considering that sleep takes up one third of a human life, one fifth seems a short time. Yet the implication of "it" denotes a lack of per-sonhood and suggests the androgynes are relegated to the position of beasts. "They," on the other hand, a non-specific sex pronoun, could well describe this group, but not in the singular. Le Guin explains in her essay, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux," that until the sixteenth century "they" was the singular and is still used that way colloquially. However, this choice would have been more confusing than illuminating.

Nevertheless, Estraven's uniqueness should be able to shine through. His personality and character do, but any references to sexual characteristics are supplied by Ai, whose "eye" is clouded by bias. This leads to another pronoun, the point of view pronoun in this novel, "I." Aside from the chapters supplying cultural information, most of the novel is narrated in the first person and most of the time that first person is Ai. He approaches Estraven as a man approaches a man, and whenever Estraven acts in what Ai considers a stereotypically feminine way, Ai criticizes him. This perspective characterizes Ai quite well: a man defensive of his knowledge based on human sexuality; prejudiced against the unknown but, nevertheless, knowable androgyne; and unperceptive in general, partially due to the Karhide custom of shifgrethor or face saving. Possibly, too, since an androgyne also means an effeminate man, Ai's perspective is justified, although this doesn't speak well for Terra (Earth). Estraven doesn't clarify matters when he becomes narrator, but then he has no need to explain himself.

What Do I Read Next?

• Three of Le Guin's novels that follow the same cycle as this one—Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions—have been collected into one volume by Nelson Doubleday Inc., called Three Hainish Novels.
• Besides this novel, the book by Le Guin that is most often examined in literature and political science classes is The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, published in 1974.
• Orson Scott Card's classic 1985 science fiction novel Ender's Game also uses the ansible as a tool for interplanetary communication, but it examines the effects of travel and communication on war, not diplomacy.
• One of the greatest science fiction novels is Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), which has led to a series of interrelated novels about a richly-imagined world.
• Doris Lessing is generally linked to Le Guin because they were among the first women to gain popular attention for their science fiction writing. Not all of Lessing's work is sci-fi: some is fantasy, and some is straight literary fiction. A sampling of Lessing's work can be gained from The Doris Lessing Reader, published in 1988.
• Most of Le Guin's introductions to her novels are as thought-provoking as the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. Many of them, along with some original essays on the craft of science fiction, are collected in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, published in 1989 by HarperCollins.

Perhaps the most disappointing section of the novel occurs when Estraven enters kemmer (as a female naturally). Both Ai and Estraven in their separate accounts merely mention they chose not to have a sexual relationship. Their use of the past tense means kemmer is over and the chance has passed. Ai further says he had a revelation of Estraven as a complete person after seeing "him" as a female. But this doesn't explain Estraven. Somehow, the core issue of single versus dual sexuality is missing. If kemmer is as intense as it's been described, and these two beings love each other as friends and respect each other for their similar goals, and trust each other with their lives, wouldn't the temptation to consummate their feelings be seen as the most passionate struggle of their lives? Or has Estraven's brother Arek intervened as he had in mindspeak? But then, if Estraven so closely identifies the voice of Ai with Arek, wouldn't his passion be doubled? On the other hand, maybe Ai has an extremely low sex drive. Never does he long for a woman nor explain his own sexual needs. The first woman he sees walking off the spaceship seems strange to him. But speculation aside, the real reason a more explicit scene seems necessary is that Ai tells the reader he understands Estraven through his androgyny, but that is all the reader is told. The reader is shown nothing. Despite the clever argument that this scene is left to the reader's imagination, so that the complaining reader risks being called unimaginative, wouldn't it be better if the author presented it? The author—who's made up the alien elements and who's drawn such an important conclusion from them? If this scene had been fleshed out, Ai would never again use "he" for Estraven. On the other hand, Estraven's femininity, felt by a man who's never known anything but his own masculinity, might have been so unforgettably intense that "she" would have been the perfect description of Ai's evolving understanding of androgyny. Another possibility is Ai inventing a pronoun because of his experience. "He" remains an impediment and any new ideas Le Guin might have found by facing the scene are lost forever. The scene is left out, and the reader is left on the right hand of light.

Still, many a great novel has minor flaws. The weak integration of androgyny to the plot doesn't weaken Le Guin's creative concept of androgyny; the pronoun choice doesn't take away from Le Guin's great courage in writing a feminist-rooted novel for her overwhelmingly male audience; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has one line devoted to the famous professor bringing his creature to life—a scene that dominates every movie on the subject—and her book has been in publication for more than one hundred years. Besides, Ursula Le Guin's masterpiece has lifted the standard in the world of science fiction and left all of literature the chill of a wintry planet, the warmth of a beautifully evolved but tragic friendship, and the taunt of an androgyne's tantalizing sex life.

Source: Chloe Bolan, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

Barbara Brown

In this excerpt, Brown maintains that The Left Hand of Darkness explores the past, present, and future aspects of androgyny, recognizing that individuals can only become fully human when sexual differences are transcended.

Much of the impact of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) results from the fact that the novel is an exploration of the concept of the dichotomous/androgynous one on three time levels: future, present, and past. First and most obviously, it is future directed, presenting a possible androgynous world on the planet Winter. Second, it is rooted in the present. As Le Guin affirms in her introduction to the Ace edition, the purpose of her science fiction is descriptive, not predictive: "I'm merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of the day … we already are [androgynous]." Third, The Left Hand of Darkness is directed to the past. In her exploration of androgyny, Le Guin examines a subject whose origins are buried deep in our mythic past….

The very origins of the word, lying in our past, in ancient Greece suggest a beginning definition. Androgyny is a combination of andro meaning male and gyn meaning female. It suggests by its form a blending in which human characteristics of males and females are not rigidly assigned. One might simply assert then that the androgyne is the dichotomous one, incorporating male and female psychological duality in one physical entity. There are, though, more complex ideas currently associated with the word. Androgyny is an affirmation that humanity should reject all forms of sexual polarization, emerge from the prison of gender into a world in which individual behavior can and is freely chosen….

In practical terms, then, the theory of androgyny affirms that we should develop a mature sexuality in which an open system of all possible behavior is accepted, the temperament of the individual and the surrounding circumstances being the determining factors, rather than gender….

The preceding interpretation of androgyny in the present is certainly part of what concerns Le Guin. However, her presentation of the androgynous beings in The Left Hand of Darkness also encompasses the original archetypes. These arche-types express the underlying human conviction that man had once experienced a unity that is now denied by the basic division into male and female. Any review of the creation myths reveals an astounding number of androgynous situations…. Some of the more obvious examples are briefly referred to here. Consider that the Bible includes two versions of creation. In Genesis I, it is an androgynous God who creates both man and woman in his image. In the second version in Genesis, it is the hermaphroditic Adam who produces Eve from his side….

Similarly, this concept of the paradoxical, split yet unified, male and female principle is found in Chinese mythology. This traditional belief is embodied in the I Ching or Book of Changes dated sometime between 2000 to 1300 B.C. Here the supreme ultimate generates the primary forms, the Yin and the Yang. All nature then consists of a perpetual interplay between this primordial pair. They are Yang and Yin, heat and cold, fire and water, active and passive, masculine and feminine….

According to the perceptions of many writers, we are, indeed, male and female. This recognition of androgyny as our ideal is buried in our mythology, in our literature, in our subconscious, and in our cells. Ursula Le Guin draws upon this past tradition of the mythic and literary androgyne and her recognition of the androgynous behavior in our present society when she writes her future-based novel, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Le Guin is aware how difficult her readers will find acceptance of the androgynous principle. To make explicit the need for such a non-Western interpretation of experience, she first establishes the movement from duality to unity on all levels of Genly Ai's experience, then depicts his increasing sensitivity to the peripheral ambiguities of truth that contradict the central facts.

We begin with duality into unity in terms of imagery, setting, characters, action, and philosophy. Traditionally, the right side has been associated with light representing knowledge, rationality, and the male principle; the left with darkness, ignorance, and the female principle. In The Left Hand of Darkness the initial description of the setting immediately establishes this light/dark, left/right polarity. The novel opens with "Rain clouds over dark towers … a dark storm-beaten city." Yet there is one vein of slowly winding gold. This is the parade. Genly, the protagonist, sees these as contrasts, separate facets of the scene. They are, though, part of one unified vision of the world of Winter.

The wider universe is depicted in terms of light and dark. The mad Argaven, King of Karhide, mentions that the stars are bright and blinding, providing a traditional account of the universe. Continuing the description, he expands it, insisting on the surrounding void, the terror and the darkness that counterpoint the rational light of the interplanetary alliance of the Ekumen that Genly symbolizes. The glacier, the heart of Winter, is so bright on the Gobrin Ice it almost blinds Genly and his travelling companion, Estraven, the proscribed first minister of Karhide. Yet it is dark and terrible when they are caught between Drumner and Dremegale, the volcanos, spewing out black smoke and ash.

The action in the novel is often described in terms of dualities. At Arikostor Fastness, Genly specifically mentions the thin strips of light that creep across the circle. They are the counterpoints of the slats of dimness. The weaver, Faxe, a man, is seen as a woman dressed in light in the center of darkness. The foretellers are a part of a bright spider web, light against dark.

Toward the conclusion of his journey, both Genly and the reader perceive the merging pattern of dualities on these levels of setting and action. Light and dark, left and right, and, by implication, male and female become whole. Estraven quotes Tormer's Lay to Genly:

  Light is the left hand of darkness and darkness the right hand of light.
  Two are one, life and death, lying together like lovers in kemmer,
  like hands joined together,
  like the end and the way.

Genly and Estraven yearn for the dark of the shadow when they are in the antarctic void of the white darkness. Without shadow, without dark, there is a surfeit of light. They cannot see ahead to avoid the threatening changes in the terrain. In total understanding, Genly draws for Estraven the Yang and the Yin, the light and the dark. "Both and one," he says; "A shadow on snow." Both are necessary. Ultimately, Genly recognizes their crossing of the ice is both success and failure: union with the Ekumen, death for Estraven. Both are necessary.

But light and dark, left and right are not the only polarities that are unified as preparatory patterns for the central sexual unification. There is political duality in the opposed states of Orgoreyn and Karhide. Karhide has a slow steady pace of change. In many ways it is disunited. While it speaks to the people's sense of humanity, fostering a sense of strong individualism and family loyalty based on the conception of the hearths, like many democracies it harbors within it the possibility of the rise of fascism and a susceptibility to demagogues.

Orgoreyn is more socialist. Burdened down by the rivalries of its Commensalities, the extensive-ness of its bureaucracies, the pettiness of its inspectors, it nonetheless is ordered and unified. It conveys a sense of progress. Still, it terrifies Genly with its failure to respect the rights of the individual. These political polarities exist not only between the two states but also within each, since the individual systems are at the same time both rational and irrational.

Genly, disgusted with this ambiguity, embraces Karhide, then rejects it; accepts Orgota, then flees from it. He seeks a consistent rational pattern. There is none. This is precisely Le Guin's thesis. Ambiguous duality must exist if unification is to occur.

This state of political polarity is unified by the agency of the Ekumen. Not a kingdom but a co-ordinator, it serves as a clearinghouse for trade and knowledge for the eighty-three nations within its scope. Mystical in nature, the Ekumen works slowly, seeking consensus. Estraven immediately recognizes that the Ekumen is a greater weaver than the Handdara. It has woven all aliens into one fabric that reflects both the unity and diversity of the civilized world.

This pattern of unifying dualities is clearly related to the central concern of androgyny. Without an awareness of the possibility of unifying opposites on the imaginative, physical, and political levels, we would not be as willing to alter the present sexual dichotomy we experience. According to Ursula Le Guin, at times we already perceive the androgynous possibilities within us. She suggests we are, nonetheless, unable to explore fully this unified duality. One reason for this limitation is the restrictive way the western mind interprets human experience. (A similar view is promulgated by Taoism and Zen.) This linear approach, characterizing western thought, focuses on scientifically provable facts. As a result it is narrow and exclusive. It fails to incorporate our peripheral senses which, through intuition and mystical awareness, also contribute to knowledge [according to Alan W. Watts in his The Way of Zen]. Through the action in The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin suggests that by utilizing this peripheral vision we, like Genly, can learn to accept life with all its ambiguities, its paradoxes, its flow, its unknowable qualities, with all its androgyny.

At the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly is limited by the western mode of thought. As a scientist observing a subject, there is a tacit assumption of superiority on his part. He admits early in the first chapter that he judges the Gethenians as aliens. His detached manner leads him mistakenly to assert that the rivalry between Tibe, the traitorous cousin of the King, and Estraven is irrelevant to his cause. He dislikes Estraven because he is obscure, not an easy subject for scientific research. Notably, Genly's poor judgment of Winter's cultures results from his desire to gather the facts and proceed to logical conclusions. He is skeptical of anything that cannot be labeled and categorized.

Only by abandoning his divisive scientific approach can Genly achieve the unification of the warring philosophical and sexual elements within him. First, however, there are many ambiguities he must accept. One of these is Shifgrethor, an ambiguous conveying of information and intent. Not lying, it is a viable mode of behavior, conveying one aspect of truth. The wheel of experience, as Estraven insists, is not factually knowable. It turns independent of human control. On the Gobrin Ice, Genly must accept this ambiguity. No one can predict his success or failure on the glacier. As well, Genly eventually perceives that opposites are not exclusive, not contradictory. Estraven is both patriot and traitor. Genly is both patriot and traitor. Loyal to his mission, he brings Winter into the Ekumen; yet he betrays Estraven by permitting the landing of the starship before forcing Argaven to recall Therem's condemnation. Life is not linear as Genly first believes. Since it is process, the Gethenian system of measuring time is not alien but rather a logical emphasis of the individual's perception as the center of meaningful experience.

Finally, Genly accepts the ambiguous flow of events that makes it an impossibility to contain truth in language. In discussing Therem's behavior with Argaven, he says, "As I spoke I did not know if what I said was true. True in part; an aspect of truth." Often it is the west that affirms that there is one truth that can be logically explicated. It is the east that perceives that truth is flowing and ebbing, inexplicably diffuse, androgynous.

Ironically, this recognition of the many facets of truth is revealed in the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness. Here the enlightened Genly, now looking back with wisdom on his experiences on Winter, declares that truth is a matter of the imagination (eastern) but one can write a report on events (western) containing facts (western). However, those facts, since they are neither solid nor coherent, will glow or dull according to the speaker (eastern).

The unification of all these dualities, the acceptance of these ambiguities, prepares both Genly and the reader to accept the central thematic unity of the sexual hermaphroditism of the Gethenians. In his response to the aliens, Genly reveals what Le Guin assumes the reader's feelings might be to these dichotomous characters. Estraven is first described as "the person on my left." Appropriately he is involved in feminine intrigue; however, he is wearing green, gold, and silver. These are colors not usually associated with both the right (the masculine) and with the left (the feminine). By page 122 Estraven is on Genly's right, all male now, but defying the traditional symbolism of right and left, he is a dark, shadowy figure. Associated with both light and dark, with left and right in a deliberately reversed symbolic order, Estraven is also an ambiguous figure. Neither Genly Ai nor the reader can interpret such a character according to traditional concepts. This world of Winter denies the established polarities of the light and dark, left and right, male and female.

Initially, the mobile responds to this confusion on the basis of his cultural conditioning. While he is repelled by the sexual duality of the Karhiders, he can neither overtly reveal his feelings to his hosts nor covertly admit his distaste to himself. His language, his responses, though, record his uneasiness. Genly first describes Estraven in these revealing terms declaring he was "Annoyed by [his] sense of effeminate intrigue." Later he calls Estraven a strange alien. He is oblivious to the fact that Estraven is the Karhider who has most attempted to befriend him. In a patronizing manner, Genly mentions that his landlady seems male on first meeting but also has "fat buttocks that wagged as he walked and a soft fat face, and a prying, spying ignoble, kindly nature…. He was so feminine." In commenting on the lack of war on Gethen, Genly observes, "They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize. They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men or ants." Finally, in describing Therem in their later relationship, he affirms, "There was in his attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the given which displeased me."

At the beginning of The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly divides these unified creatures into polarities. He perceives the Gethenians in single bodies responding as both male and female. This merging of the stereotyped roles and responses first shocks and then revolts him.

The completion of his mission, however, brings him to full understanding of the nature of all dualities. They are extremes on a continuum, separated but nonetheless joined, unified. Duality can be unity. Genly must accept this fact and find ease in it. For him the crossing on the ice is a journey to self and universal knowledge. Genly begins by sharing supplies with Estraven; moves to encompassing him with mindspeak; concludes by totally accepting Estraven's nature and, by extension, the androgyny of his own. Toward the conclusion of their journey, Genly admits,

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.

By later drawing the symbol of the Yang and the Yin, light and dark, masculine and feminine, Genly makes visible his emotional and intellectual acceptance of Estraven: the two in the one.

Le Guin, however, does not conclude with Genly's recognition of the androgynous possibility. Her ending suggests that this state of unified duality is a preferable, superior state of existence. In the final chapter, Genly no longer relates to his own species nor they to him. He is alien to the Terran arrivals. Uneasy in his new perceptions, Genly calls the representatives of the Ekumen "a troupe of great, strange animals of two different species, great apes with intelligent eyes, all of them in rut, in kemmer…." He is happy to return to the company of the young Gethenian physician who is described in these terms: "… and his face, a young serious face, not a man's face and not a woman's, a human face, these were a relief to me, familiar, right."

In The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula Le Guin suggests we too should accept as right, as familiar, the archetypal androgyny within us. Transcending male, transcending female, we can become fully human.

Source: Barbara Brown, "The Left Hand of Darkness: Androgyny, Future, Present, Past," in Extrapolation, Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall, 1980, pp. 227-235.

Robert Scholes

Scholes, author of Structural Fabulation, holds the premise that Le Guin forces readers to examine how sexual stereotyping affects all personal relationships and individual personalities.

Ursula K. Le Guin works in a very different manner from John Brunner. Her fiction is closer to fantasy than naturalism, but it is just as grounded in ethical concerns as Brunner's work, despite its apparent distance from present actualities. Though some would argue that her political novel, The Dispossessed (1974), is her best work, and others might favor her ecological romance, The Word for World is Forest (1972, 1976), or her young people's fantasy, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), today's critical consensus is still that her best single work is The Left Hand of Darkness (1969).

In The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin moves far from our world in time and space, to give us a planet where life has evolved on different lines from our own. This world, which happens to be in a period of high glaciation, has evolved political institutions in two adjoining countries that resemble feudalism on the one hand, and bureaucracy on the other. But the most important difference between this world and our own is that its human inhabitants are different from us in their physical sexuality. All beings on the planet Gethen have both male and female sexual organs. In a periodic cycle like estrus in animals, Gethenians become sexually aroused—but only one set of sexual organs is activated at this time. These people are potentially hermaphroditic. Most of the time they are neuter, but then they may briefly become a man or a woman, and in that time beget a child or conceive one. Thus the same person may experience both fatherhood and motherhood at different times. There is no privileged sex, exempt from child-bearing and child-rearing. This difference has many ramifications in political and social structure, and in personal behavior—far too many to attempt a discussion of them here. But the major effect of Le Guin's imagining such a fictional world is to force us to examine how sexual stereotyping dominates actual human concepts of personality and influences all human relationships. "What," one of her characters from a "normal" planet asks, "is the first question we ask about a new-born baby?" What indeed? We all know the answer. The real question of course, is "Why?" Why must we know of any new person what their sex is before we can begin to relate to them? The answer to this involves our realization of how deeply our culture is coded along sexual lines, how much must be undone if a person is to be judged as a person—even in the eyes of the law, which has never kept its blindfold tight enough to ignore the sex of those who appear before it.

Ursula Le Guin has been attacked by radical feminists for not going far enough, for using male protagonists, as she does even in The Left Hand of Darkness, and for putting other issues, both political and environmental, ahead of feminism. In fact, it is probably wrong to think of her as a feminist. But I know of no single book likely to raise consciences about sexism more thoroughly and convincingly than this one. And that this is done gently, in a book which manages also to be a fine tale of adventure and a tender story of love and friendship, makes the achievement all the more remarkable. There are few writers in the United States who offer fiction as pleasurable and thoughtful as Ursula Le Guin's. It is time for her to be recognized beyond the special provinces of fantasy and science fiction or feminism as simply one of our best writers.

Source: Robert Scholes, "Science Fiction as Conscience: John Brunner and Ursula K. Le Guin, in The New Republic, Vol. 175, No.17, October 30, 1976, pp. 38-40.

Sources

James W. Bittner, "A Survey of Le Guin Criticism," in Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, Kennikat Press, 1979, pp. 31-49.

Barbara J. Bucknall, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ungar, 1981.

Keith N. Hull, "What Is Human? Ursula Le Guin and Science Fiction's Great Themes," Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 32, no. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 65-74.

David Ketterer, "Ursula K. Le Guin's Archetypal 'Winter-Journey,'" in Modern Critical Views: Ursula K. Le Guin, Chelsea House, 1986, pp. 11-21.

Ursula Le Guin, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux," in her Dancing at the Edge of the World, Harper & Row, 1989, pp. 7-16.

Philippa Maddern, "True Stories: Women's Writing in Science Fiction," Meanjin, Vol. 44, no. 1, March, 1985, pp. 110-23.

Noel Perrin, "Ursula Le Guin: Striking Out in a New Direction," Washington Post Book World, September 5, 1982, p. 5.

For Further Study

Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, Free Press, 1998.

The author, who has published in almost all genres and is a cult figure in science fiction, has produced an insightful, well-researched, and entertaining history.

John Griffiths, Three Tomorrows: American, British and Soviet Science Fiction, Barnes and Noble Books, 1980.

This exercise in comparative sociology gives readers a good sense of where notions of the unreal come from in the imaginations of authors, including Le Guin's.

N. B. Hayles, "Androgyny, Ambivalence, and Assimilation in The Left Hand of Darkness," in Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg, Tap-linger, 1979, pp. 97-115.

This essay looks in depth at the issues in its title, offering an advanced, scholarly study.

Suzanne Elizabeth Reid, Presenting Ursula Le Guin, Twayne, 1997.

Reid gives a clear overview of the author's career and insightful interpretations of her works.

Karen Sinclair, "Solitary Being: The Hero as Anthropologist," in Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, edited by Joe DeBolt, Kennikat Press, 1979, pp. 50-65

This early exploration of Le Guin's characters draws upon parallels and themes that are not evident to the reader of just one novel.

George Edgar Slusser, The Farthest Shores of Ursula Le Guin, Borgo Press, 1976.

This early study of Le Guin's career, published when she had been publishing for just thirteen years, offers a good overview of the ideas addressed in the Hainish novels.