A family quarrel: #LoveHain

‘Das Eismeer’ (1823-4) by Caspar David Friedrich

The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula Le Guin.
Orbit Books, 1992 (1969).

Karhide is not a nation but a family quarrel. Early on in Le Guin’s famous speculative novel Estraven characterises his home nation as a place of potentially internecine conflict, but it proves to be universally applicable on the planet Gethen as Genly Ai, the Envoy from the Ekumen, discovers, to his cost.

Genly’s task as Envoy is to encourage first the rulers of Karhide, and then of Orgoreyn, to consider joining the Ekumen – a kind of United Nations of many worlds – for mutual benefit; but he has to contend with in-fighting, with claims that it’s all a hoax, even with his own imprisonment.

And then there’s the question of trust: he tries to be as open as possible, to persuade the powers that be of his own peaceable intentions, but as time goes on he doesn’t know who to put his faith in. On a chilly planet justifiably known as Winter he has, paradoxically, to judge whether he’s going from a frying pan into a fire.

Photo by Dylan Thompson on Pexels.com

Following covert observation of a new world it’s Ekumen practice to avoid suspicion, antagonism or panic on inhabited planets by overtly sending a single Envoy to put the case for joining the interstellar association. Our principal narrator Genly Ai has volunteered to make the introductions on Gethen. After waiting some time to have an audience with the monarch of Karhide – the largest polity on Gethen – internal faction-fighting means that his facilitator, Prime Minister Estraven, suddenly falls out of favour, forced into exile on neighbouring Orgoreyn. When Genly decides to visit Orgoreyn his stay there ends in a confinement that may lead to his death.

Regardless of the politicking on Gethen, which is no different from what one may expect on our world, what makes its inhabitants distinctive is that they’re androgyne, being neither male nor female but both genders; unlike hermaphrodites their sexual organs aren’t external or visible, but they periodically become sexually receptive (‘in kemmer’) with a partner, taking on corresponding female or male characteristics. While Genly considers this may be the result of a Hainish breeding experiment eons ago, his clearly male physique and dark skin means Gethenians often look askance at him.

Writing this novel in the 60s the author opted to use ‘he/him’ pronouns as a supposedly ‘neutral’ descriptor of all Gethenians, though she later regretted this choice. Still, it’s interesting that the principal protagonists in most of her early Hainish stories tend to be male, especially when she usually invests them with thoughts and considerations that largely reflect her own philosophic viewpoint; so here I suspect that Genly (one assumes the ‘g’ in his name is hard, as with Ged in the Earthsea novels) is actually meant to be a stand-in for Le Guin herself but with the syllables reversed.

Le Guin’s map of the two main polities of Gethen

Because the underpinning of Genly’s appraisal of Gethen is ultimately Daoist – at one point he draws Estraven’s attention to the ancient Terran yin-yang symbol – much of the novel focuses, symbolically as well as physically, on dualistic concepts (light and dark, fear and courage, cold and warmth, female and male) being subsumed into what Arthur Koestler called a holon, a ‘whole’ that is simultaneously part of a larger ‘whole’. As a visual example, one of Le Guin’s Gethen maps shows the planet’s Great Continent shaped like a mermaid’s purse, with Orgoreyn as yin to Karhide’s yang; and at one point Estraven quotes Tormer’s Lay, a phrase from which furnishes the title of the novel.

“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.”

Tormer’s Lay

I’ve read The Left Hand of Darkness at least three times over the years, and twice new aspects and previous misrememberings are revealed to me, almost as if I was then reading the novel anew. This time, for example, I was reminded of how political an animal Le Guin was: writing at the height of the Cold War she clearly had the Commensals of Orgoreyn reflecting Soviet or Chinese Communist systems and Karhide the differently flawed democracies of the West; similar political overtones were reflected in her Orsinian narratives and would be repeated in Hainish stories like The Dispossessed.

Much of The Left Hand of Darkness is taken up with journeys – from Karhide to Orgoreyn and then back again to Karhide over frozen wastes, an epic Arctic trek by Genly and Estraven dominating the final stages of the novel. But what most struck me this time – even more than Le Guin’s worldbuilding which, incidentally, is magisterial – was the theme of connection: between families, friends, lovers, humans, even aliens. Connection is what we yearn for, connection with that which complements us, makes us somehow more whole than we are when alone. This is what I take from this superb fiction, the theme which makes up its abiding leitmotif.

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#LoveHain #UKLGsf

The next #LoveHain discussion will be on The Word for World is Forest, scheduled for Friday 26th May, and that will be followed by a repost of my review from 2017.