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A review by aegagrus
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
4.0
Penguin's 2019 paperback edition of The Left Hand of Darkness commemorates the celebrated novel's 50th anniversary. Among the testimonials printed on the back cover, from The Guardian: "A quietly revolutionary study in gender." This assessment intrigues me.
To be sure, the novel revolves around the cultural disconnect between Gethen, a world without sexual dimorphism or fixed gender, and "bisexual" (i.e. sexually dimorphic) worlds, including our own. Our two narrators are the Terran envoy Genly Ai and the Gethenian nobleman (politician?) Estraven. Each narrator's voice is compellingly nuanced. Ai is ignorant of and oblivious to much, but self-consciously so. Being aware of ignorance in an unfamiliar cultural setting doesn't necessarily improve one's ability to operate in spite of it; in some cases Ai's constant rumination on ignorance leads him to his most ill-advised judgements. Estraven, meanwhile, seems a quintessential statesman: blessed with clarity of forethought and decisive judgement, but laden with an almost somber sense of his limited power over the currents of history (the choice of pronouns being Le Guin's).
Our narrators are complex and thoughtful people, and Le Guin is good at world-building, paying attention to Gethenian culture, politics, climate, and history, along with their androgynous life-cycles. As a consequence, it is seldom entirely clear how essential the question of gender is to the difficulties Ai and Estraven have in understanding one another. They speculate as to its potential influence on each other's actions or worldview, but cannot do more than speculate. In truth, Le Guin's story is rich enough that her protagonists might equally misapprehend one another without physiological difference. The ambiguity is important and fruitful; we learn a lot more by never having the historical impact of gender explicitly settled. However, it is hard not to wonder how "revolutionary" this all is, if politics and weather and so on are equally important drivers of the novel's plot.
Further compounding things, Ai's attitudes towards gender seem quite tethered to 1969, the year of the novel's original publication. For today's reader this can be odd, although it certainly does make the cultural difference at play more obvious or more extreme. But as Charlie Jane Anders notes in the 2019 edition's afterword, Le Guin isn't actually questioning biological essentialism at all: the Gethenians' society only differs insofar as their biology differs, and all of her characters, in their own ways, draw fairly straight lines between biology and what we would call gender. So, in what ways does The Left Hand offer anything revolutionary?
I think the answer is also to be found in Jane Anders' afterword. Anders notes that "unresolved sexual tension" is a fundamental and productive force throughout the novel, and it's true. Not only is the moment of greatest mutual understanding between Ai and Estraven brought aboutby Estraven entering kemmer (a cyclical estrous state) during their shared odyssey across the Great Continent's ice shelf , but the trust Estraven places in the extraterrestrial Ai, and the pair's complex but strong impulses towards one another, ultimately represent a vague and unrealized eroticism (as they themselves will realize). In this way, The Left Hand of Darkness seems, to me, more of a "quietly revolutionary" study in sexuality, than in gender -- a thought experiment about the latent sexual forces that play unexpected social roles as society changes and diversifies.
David Mitchell's foreward cites loved ones' "benign transphobia" as an example of the kind of cultural difference Le Guin writes about overcoming, and he's not entirely wrong. There are moments of kindness and solidarity in the face of difference-- the most touching, for me, was Ai's ability to share meaningful space and time with a dying Gethenian convict in a prison camp, the pair brought together by circumstance and almost entirely incapable of understanding each other. But I'll remember this book more following Anders' train of thought than Mitchell's.
All of that being said, it's quite good. Le Guin's thought-provoking Author's Note, first published in 1976, is an added delight.
To be sure, the novel revolves around the cultural disconnect between Gethen, a world without sexual dimorphism or fixed gender, and "bisexual" (i.e. sexually dimorphic) worlds, including our own. Our two narrators are the Terran envoy Genly Ai and the Gethenian nobleman (politician?) Estraven. Each narrator's voice is compellingly nuanced. Ai is ignorant of and oblivious to much, but self-consciously so. Being aware of ignorance in an unfamiliar cultural setting doesn't necessarily improve one's ability to operate in spite of it; in some cases Ai's constant rumination on ignorance leads him to his most ill-advised judgements. Estraven, meanwhile, seems a quintessential statesman: blessed with clarity of forethought and decisive judgement, but laden with an almost somber sense of his limited power over the currents of history (the choice of pronouns being Le Guin's).
Our narrators are complex and thoughtful people, and Le Guin is good at world-building, paying attention to Gethenian culture, politics, climate, and history, along with their androgynous life-cycles. As a consequence, it is seldom entirely clear how essential the question of gender is to the difficulties Ai and Estraven have in understanding one another. They speculate as to its potential influence on each other's actions or worldview, but cannot do more than speculate. In truth, Le Guin's story is rich enough that her protagonists might equally misapprehend one another without physiological difference. The ambiguity is important and fruitful; we learn a lot more by never having the historical impact of gender explicitly settled. However, it is hard not to wonder how "revolutionary" this all is, if politics and weather and so on are equally important drivers of the novel's plot.
Further compounding things, Ai's attitudes towards gender seem quite tethered to 1969, the year of the novel's original publication. For today's reader this can be odd, although it certainly does make the cultural difference at play more obvious or more extreme. But as Charlie Jane Anders notes in the 2019 edition's afterword, Le Guin isn't actually questioning biological essentialism at all: the Gethenians' society only differs insofar as their biology differs, and all of her characters, in their own ways, draw fairly straight lines between biology and what we would call gender. So, in what ways does The Left Hand offer anything revolutionary?
I think the answer is also to be found in Jane Anders' afterword. Anders notes that "unresolved sexual tension" is a fundamental and productive force throughout the novel, and it's true. Not only is the moment of greatest mutual understanding between Ai and Estraven brought about
David Mitchell's foreward cites loved ones' "benign transphobia" as an example of the kind of cultural difference Le Guin writes about overcoming, and he's not entirely wrong. There are moments of kindness and solidarity in the face of difference
All of that being said, it's quite good. Le Guin's thought-provoking Author's Note, first published in 1976, is an added delight.