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.

The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, was Ursula K. Le Guin's third published novel, and arguably her best ever. It won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1969, and the Hugo Award in the same category the next year.

Background

The book takes place on the planet Gethen, a world deep in an ice age. It follows the efforts of Genly Ai, an envoy from the Ekumen, an association of human worlds. His mission is to offer the Gethenians membership...if he can get them to believe he is from offworld.

Gethen, or Winter, as the Ekumen sometimes refers to it, is clearly written as a political parallel to Earth in the mid to late Twentieth Century. There are two major nations, the Kingdom of Karhide and the Commensality of Orgoreyn, engaged in intense rivalry. The technology is also very Earthlike, with cars and radios, factories and streetlights.

But the people of Gethen have one significant difference from most humans: they are not men and women. Most of the time, they are neuter, but once a month they go into kemmer and become either male or female. No physiological habit is established; the mother of children may be the father of several more.

Plot

The story opens as Ai's attempts to convince the King of Karhide to join the Ekumen are beginning to go wrong. His chief ally, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, abandons his cause. Estraven is shortly banished to Orgoreyn, sentenced to death if he ever returns. Ai finds himself increasingly isolated. His audience with the King is a failure.

After travelling through Karhide, he tries his luck in Orgoreyn. Unlike the King, the Orgota politicians believe he is who he says he is, and fear him because of it. He is soon in grave danger, and barely escapes with his life. To get away, he and Estraven journey across a vast glacier back to Karhide and eventual reckoning.

The book uses a multi-layered narrative style.¹ Some chapters are in Ai's voice, some in Estraven's. Some contain Gethenian folktales or ethnographic notes by Ekumen investigators. Some peripheral points are never spelled out. For instance, Estraven's relationship with his brother, a powerful bit of characterisation, is only hinted at in two of the fairy tales.

Themes

Surprisingly (especially for Le Guin's work), this book is not primarily about gender. She touches on it, for instance by equating the Gethenians' sexual nature with their failure to discover war. And Ai is certainly staggered by the Gethenians' genderlessness, but the reader is not.

Some of the impact of a gender-neutral world is lost because Le Guin uses the masculine pronoun for Gethenians. They are always referred to as "he" and "him"², because (as she explains in the introduction) she has no patience with made-up pronouns. Although this detracts from the strangeness of the society, it improves the book's readability substantially.

The story is partly a meditiation on the nature of loneliness and isolation. Ai struggles throughout the book to see the Gethenians as fellow humans, to trust them, and to love them. It's a good book to read when you're in culture shock.

It's also about politics and nationalism. It was published at the height of the Cold War, and Le Guin uses it to question the rivalry inherent in the patriotism of the time.

What is love of one's country? Is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession...Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate.

I think her questions still stand.

Lastly, and most deeply, it is a book about friendship, and Ai's and Estraven's relationship deepens throughout the book. Through it, and through Ai's eyes, the reader is led to love Estraven, and to care about his eventual fate.

1. Unlike in her later book, Always Coming Home, Le Guin doesn't sacrifice the plot to the idea of multi-voiced narrative here. Every chapter advances the reader's understanding of the story.
2. To address the imbalance that writing about Gethenians in the masculine created, Le Guin published a short story using feminine pronouns. The story, Winter's King, is included in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, and gives a nice balance to The Left Hand of Darkness.

When she first began designing Gethen, the world that would eventually become the setting for The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin did not actually intend to make her characters hermaphrodites. Her initial intention was to write a book about a planet without war. Later, she would come to the conclusion that war is fundamentally connected to gender -- more specifically, masculinity -- and that in order to get rid of the former it is necessary to get rid of the latter.

This attitude toward gender, groundbreaking in the 1960s, is now seen (even by Le Guin herself) as naive and deeply problematic. The Left Hand of Darkness was an attempt to challenge the reader's assumptions about gender, but in the end it only manages to reinforce them. The idea that certain attitudes and behaviours are 'masculine' and that others are 'feminine' manages to infect everyone in the book, even the supposedly sexless inhabitants of Gethen.

The protagonist of the book is not a Gethenian but an Earthling named Genly Ai, a diplomat sent to Gethen as a representative of the Ekumen, or "league of planets." His task is to persuade the Gethenians to join the league, but he is ill-prepared to do so, and his own preconceptions about gender make it very difficult for him to relate to his hosts.

Now it is tempting to suggest that the flaws in the book are Genly's, not Le Guin's, and that our bigoted narrator is responsible for all the misconceptions about gender that we find in the novel. However, I maintain that it is possible to detect problems that run much deeper than the characters, and which must be traced back to the author herself.

I'm hardly the first person to notice this by any means. As early as 1971, only two years after the appearance of the novel, Stanislaw Lem accused Le Guin of creating a world

where there are no women, but only men ... garments, manners of speech, mores, and behavior, are masculine ... the male element has remained victorious over the female one.¹

What did Lem mean by this? In order to understand his critique, it is necessary to take a brief detour into the world of Gethen itself.

Gender and Gethen

The inhabitants of Gethen are not quite like anything on Earth. They resemble animals more than humans in that they have estrus cycles. Think of a cat in heat, for example; a female cat will only have sex when she is in estrus, and a male cat will not approach her until her heat cycle begins. Similarly, it is only during estrus (known in the native language as "kemmer") that Gethenians are capable of having sex. If one person in a couple goes into kemmer, the other member will immediately follow, and they will switch into opposite sexes until their mating is complete. Gethenians who are not in a couple can go to "kemmerhouses" where they can find someone else in kemmer to satisfy their desires.

Unlike Earth-animals, however, Gethenians are sexually neuter when they are not in kemmer. A female cat is female whether she is in heat or not, and there is no way that she will ever grow a penis. Gethenians, by contrast, are sexless until kemmer, at which point a sex is (temporarily) determined for them and their body physically changes to reflect that. Over the course of hir life, a Gethenian will become both sexes numerous times. As a result, every individual Gethenian can both sire and bear children.

All of this has some interesting side effects for the society. Rape, for example, is impossible: since lust arises out of kemmer, it is only possible for a Gethenian to have sex when both s/he and hir partner are (physically and psychologically) prepared for it. It also means that gender roles are meaningless, which in turn means that there are no institutional power imbalances or sexual stereotypes to damage the society.

Why, then, did Stanislaw Lem say that men are the only inhabitants of Le Guin's world? And why am I asserting that the problem is on a meta-level, with the book itself, and not with its protagonist's misunderstandings of the culture he is encountering within the book?

Gender and Le Guin

The primary problem, which has been addressed in numerous critiques of the novel and eventually admitted by Le Guin herself,² is in the author's choice to use the pronouns "he" and "him" universally when referring to Gethenian characters. Early on, Le Guin justified this decision by claiming that using a new pronoun would drive the reader crazy. She was probably right -- in 1969, there was no real awareness of Spivak pronouns or any of the other alternatives to gender-exclusive English terms that are being considered today. (Of course, even now their use is highly controversial.) Still, it strikes me as strange that she was willing to fill her novel with made-up words and byzantine alien politics (many of which did drive reviewers crazy) while the arguably much more important pronoun change was a step she was unwilling to take.

The unfortunate consequence of Le Guin's decision is that every single character in this book is encoded as male. No reader, when seeing a parade of "he"s and "him"s, will have a vision of a truly neuter alien character. (I actually believe that "he" and "him" have never been truly neuter in English -- but that's an argument for another node.) At any rate, using those specific words to describe aliens in a science fiction novel is an explicit decision to mark them as male, since the pronouns are not designed to deal with hermaphroditism.

This decision of Le Guin's affects the characters in numerous subtle ways. Consider the fact that every named Gethenian who goes into kemmer within the novel goes into kemmer as female. This means that Le Guin herself subconsciously treated the male gender as the "default"; she imagined kemmer as "switching" genders and that that "switch" can only go in one direction. Though male-kemmer is implied by her worldbuilding, it never happens onstage. Even though becoming male is an equally valid change from the neuter status of a standard Gethenian, foregrounding this change did not come naturally to Le Guin.

Consider, too, the fact that Le Guin consistently makes the utterly incomprehensible decision to use words like "son" and "brother" instead of "child" or "sibling" -- choosing, in other words, to pursue a masculine default even when other, non-controversial options were available to her. Though I understand her reasons for choosing masculine pronouns like "he" and "him" (I do not agree with them, but I understand them), her decision to aggressively resort to male-centred language in these other cases is genuinely bizarre. How is any reader supposed to accept the sexually-neuter status of characters who are sons and brothers and fathers?

Furthermore, the appearance of feminine traits in Gethenian characters is always treated as surprising and disgusting. The choice of what traits qualify as "feminine" are also questionable. For example:

• Genly's land"lady", "a voluble man," has "fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, ... [a] soft fat face, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature."
• The inmates at a labour camp are marred by their "gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge"; they are gossips, "flabb[y] and coarse". Genly calls them eunuchs, which implies a lack of maleness but which paradoxically also presumes maleness.
• The king, a profoundly unsympathetic character and one of the antagonists of the story, laughs "shrilly like an angry woman," or he is sullen "as an old she-otter in a cage."³

So it seems that being feminine means... um... being fat. And petty. And ugly. It is impossible for me to ascribe all these perspectives to Genly's character; the novel itself never challenges these judgements, and simply takes for granted the default (and positively-valenced) maleness of everybody on Gethen. This problem is aggravated by the fact that Le Guin pays little attention to 'feminine' roles; pregnancy is mentioned only in passing, and there are no descriptions whatsoever of the process of childrearing or any other aspect of domestic life.

Genly's relationship with Estraven, the prime minister of the country of Karhide and Genly's only political ally, is the most complex and problematic of all. Genly simply can't get past the fact that Estraven has a substantial amount of political power (a "masculine" trait) while also possessing "soft supple femininity," along with "charm and tact and lack of substance" (!); later he complains that Estraven is "built more like a woman than a man, more fat than muscle" (!!).

The second half of the book develops Genly's relationship with Estraven as they travel alone across the icy wastes of Gethen. They talk about sex and friendship and loyalty as they pull the sledge that contains their worldly possessions across an unforgiving landscape. Many readers find these conversations powerful and moving, but for me they were deeply troubling. Genly admits that women are harder for him to understand than Gethenians are, since he has at least one sex in common with Gethenians. Rebecca Rass observes that this is another example of Le Guin's assumption that Gethenians are basically male with "something added" -- as opposed to women, who are "alien" both to the man from Earth and to the literal aliens.

Eventually Estraven goes into kemmer (as a woman, of course), but Genly finds himself unable to have sex with his friend. Le Guin does not really develop the reasons for this -- throughout the book, in fact, she is curiously stingy with details of intimacy on Gethen -- but I am forced to wonder whether the strictly heterosexual Genly can't really think of Estraven as a woman at all. I don't blame him; neither can I.

The Left Hand of Darkness: The Fallout

I am not saying anything in this node that Le Guin herself has not admitted. Though at first she defended her authorial decisions (her initial response to Lem, published in 1976, accused him of sexism, claiming that he only called her characters masculine because he could not imagine women running countries or pulling sledges), eventually she would admit that she made some serious mistakes when she was writing the novel. To her credit, she realizes that The Left Hand of Darkness was a product of its time, and that she was severely limited by her culture's ideas about gender even as she tried to overturn them.

Unfortunately, though, that means that today the book for me is practically unreadable. At every page I am frustrated by the overwhelming maleness of Le Guin's world; I find the characters unpersuasive and the plots one-dimensional. Questions that I want to ask about sexuality and relationships are stubbornly ignored by the novel, and I am unsatisfied with what is left over. I respect Le Guin for engaging in this experiment, but in the end I have to judge the experiment as a failure.

¹ Lem published his article in the November 1971 issue of Science Fiction Commentary.

² See Le Guin's essays "Is Gender Necessary?", published in 1976, and "Is Gender Necessary? Redux", published in 1987.

³ I drew these examples from the excellent analysis of the novel at this site by Rebecca Rass at Pace University.