a close study
Ursula Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness is, like most of her work, a masterpiece that i'll be coming back to often, i think. i haven't done any sort of close reading or analysis since high school but i wanted to give this a shot - pick the book apart and see if i could present my thoughts in a mildly interesting way. still a work in progress, but we're getting there!
there is an introduction to this book that provides some context for the themes and worldbuilding, but i think i want to come back to it at the end and do a little compare and contrast with my own interpretation.
if you're here and you haven't read the book:
our story begins in the far future, when people are exploring the galaxy and making contact with distant planets and their cultures. an organization known as the Ekumen seeks to be a kind of benevolent secretary to the known worlds, facilitating peace and knowledge exchange through use of their ansibles, a technology that allows instantaneous communication at any distance across space. they don't have faster-than-light travel though, so the initial journey to an uncontacted planet has to be done the hard way, on stasis ships. for this, the Ekumen sends Envoys - people whose sole purpose it is to travel to a unknown world, study and understand the inhabitants and culture, then introduce themselves and offer Ekumenical membership.
our main character, Genly Ai, is an Envoy, and he has been sent to the planet Gethen (also simply called Winter). we follow him as he explores its two main polities: Karhide to the east, and Orgoreyn to the west.
we'll get much deeper into this as we get into the meat of the book, but one of the big Strange Things about Gethen is that its people spend most of their lives genderless, only coming into one gender or the other temporarily, once a month-ish, when they hit the active period of their sexual cycle. much of the book is about Genly Ai and his foil, a Karhidish politician called Therem Harth, learning to see each other clearly despite these differences.
a note on pronouns: the genderless inhabitants of Gethen are referred to by the author as 'he' rather than 'they.' i'm going to follow suit just for clarity, though there are discussions about the impact of this on the themes of the novel. i intend to look up some essays on this once i get through my initial close read, and i'll link them here when i do.
with all that established, let's get right on into it.
in which we learn a little bit about Gethenian politics and a lotta bit about Genly.
the first few paragraphs of this book are delicious on first read and particularly nutritious in hindsight. a quote to keep in mind: "...if at moments the facts [of the story] seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them are false, and it is all one story."
as the chapter title would suggest, we start the story in a parade filing through the streets of Ehrenrang. the destination is a nearly-completed arch, the final contruction of a massive roadbuilding campaign launched by the King, Argaven XV. the King himself walks in the parade, ready to ceremonially place and mortar the final piece of the arch, its keystone.
our dude Genly is in the parade, and he watches Argaven climb the scaffolding and get to work with a trowel and some weird pinkish cement. he asks the local next to him about it, who responds: "Very-long-ago a keystone was always set in with a mortar of ground bones mixed with blood. ... Without the bloodbond the arch would fall, you see." the man who answers him is Therem Harth rem ir Estraven. (we're just going to call him Estraven a lot.)
so yes, the book begins with the completion of a public work by uniting the two separate pillars of an
archway... with blood. foreshadowing is a literary device in which
here we also meet another important force in Karhide, the King's cousin, Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe. (again, we're gonna call him Tibe.) this guy is the slimy politician type, and Genly picks up on some animosity between Tibe and Estraven right away, though he's a little too far up his own ass to interrogate this in any useful way. "Power" he says "has become so subtle and complex a thing in the ways taken by the Ekumen that only a subtle mind can watch it work; here it is still limited, still visible."
Genly's kind of a jackass! Le Guin is fantastic at writing some of the most annoying men ever put to paper and this is not the first time Genly is going to completely miss the point. he does make one good observation here, though - even he can tell that Estraven is something different.
"In Estraven, for instance, one feels the man's power as an augmentation of his character; he cannot make an empty gesture or say a word that is not listened to." ah, so you trust Estraven, right Genly? "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 to the warmth of the sun." this will also not be the last time Genly pretends he doesn't have complicated feelings about Estraven.
after the parade, Estraven invites Genly to his home for a meal. how does Genly take this? "Estraven had done a great deal for me in the last six or eight months, but I did not expect or desire such a show of personal favor as an invitation to his house. Harge rem ir Tibe was still close to us, overhearing, and I felt that he was meant to overhear. Annoyed by this sense of effeminate intrigue..."
let me be clear that all Estraven has done at this parade is answer a bunch of Genly's questions and say simply "Will you have supper with me tonight, Mr. Ai?" but Genly, ignorant and insecure, is balking and flailing, resorting to attacking Estraven's perceived effiminacy. there's another motif: Genly uses femininity as an insult over and over and i want to bop him over the head every single time.
Genly does indeed join Estraven for supper, and we see that at least he is somewhat self-aware: "Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. ...I thought at the table that Estraven's performance has been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit. Was it in fact perhaps this soft supple femininity that I disliked and distrusted in him? For it was impossible to think of him as a woman, that dark, ironic, powerful presence near me in the firelit darkness, and yet whenever I thought of him as a man I felt a sense of falseness, of imposture: in him, or in my own attitude towards him?" by not taking the role Genly assumes of him, Estraven makes himself untrustworthy in Genly's eyes. interesting.
the last few pages of this chapter are Estraven trying desperately, in his own way, to cut through Genly's stubborn assumptions. this is made difficult by the Karhidish concept of shifgrethor, which at this point we the reader understand about as well as Genly does. it'll become more clear later, but essentially it's the concept that in Karhide, giving or receiving direct advice is a deep insult to the one who is advised. Estraven won't come out and tell Genly what to do (at least, not yet) but he will heavily hint and imply. alas, Genly is too busy ascribing his distrust to a useless gender binary, so this ends with Estraven confused and Genly frosty. what Genly hears is that Estraven is no longer on his side and won't be helpful in Genly's impending audience with the King, despite all the help he'd offered up to this point. what Estraven means is that the politics have shifted in such a way that Genly's offer of Ekumenical membership presents a danger to Gethen that Estraven can see from afar. even more confusing, Estraven claims a lack of patriotism, and that he's never truly served the King. "I'm not anyone's servant. A man must cast his own shadow..."
Genly leaves - confused, disappointed, faintly revolted by his interpretation of Estraven's actions - and the chapter ends. "I [Genly] was cold, unconfident, obsessed by perfidy, and solitude, and fear."
an oral folktale, recorded in Karhide many generations before the present story.
buckle in, we're gonna learn about kemmer. kemmer is the short peak of the Gethenian sexual cycle, when people are receptive and may become temporarily male or female given the right company. we'll learn a little later than being in kemmer and having no partner is a frustrating experience that some Gethenians avoid by taking kemmer-inhibiting drugs. to "vow kemmer" is to choose one person as your lifelong kemmering - this is optional but taken very, very seriously. remember though, when they're not in kemmer, Gethenians are sexless and genderless. we have a whole chapter on the topic coming up (chapter seven) but i think this should be enough context for this folktale.
so. we'll start how the chapter starts:
"About two hundred years ago in the Hearth of Shath in the Pering Storm-border there were two brothers who vowed kemmering to each other. In those days, as now, full brothers were permitted to keep kemmer until one of them should bear a child, but after that they must separate; so it was never permitted them to vow kemmering for life. Yet this they had done."
these brothers are named Getheren and Hode. when Hode bears a child, the Lord of Shath orders the pair to separate in keeping with the anti-incest code. at the thought of this, however, Hode kills himself. the blame for this crime of suicide is placed on Getheren, for breaking the kemmer code in the first place, and he is exiled from the hearth. before leaving, he says, "I am without a face among men. I am not seen. I speak and am not heard. I come and am not welcomed. There is no place by the fire for me, nor food on the table for me, nor a bed made for me to lie in. Yet I still have my name: Getheren is my name. That name I lay on this Hearth as a curse, and with it my shame. Keep that for me. Now nameless I will go seek my death."
this name-curse is a big deal, and some men of the hearth begin hunting Getheren ("for murder is a lighter shadow on a house than suicide") but he escapes north onto Karhide's great glacier, the Pering ice.
Getheren proceeds north across the ice, without shelter or food, and after the second night he finds his hands and feet frostbitten. he still feels pulled northward though, and he crawls on elbows and knees until something starts to change. he finds himself inexplicably warm, and when he looks around he sees that he has entered "the place inside the blizzard" where white trees and white grass grow in a white world, and he meets a white man whom he realizes is Hode. suicides go to the place inside the blizzard, and Getheren and Hode have found each other again.
Hode begs Getheren to stay with him, keeping kemmer forever in the white place inside the blizzard. but Getheren wants none of it. "I will not stay here. If you had come away with me from our Hearth into the southern lands we might have stayed together and kept our vow lifelong, no man knowing our trangression. But you broke your vow, throwing it away with your life."
and Getheren leaves, fleeing back across the ice until he's found, frostbitten and almost dead, and nursed back to health by a small Hearth just south of the glacier, though one of his hands had to be amputated. he calls himself Ennoch and, when he's strong enough, wanders south to live the rest of his life.
in his old age, Getheren bumps into a traveler from his home hearth, Shath. he asks after it and the traveler tells him that it's cursed with illness and blight and rot and has been for many years. at this point, Getheren tell his whole story - he tells the traveler his real name. "Tell them at Shath that I take back my name and my shadow."
"Not many days after this, Getheren took sick and died. The traveler carried his words back to Shath, and they say that from that time on the domain prospered again, and all went as it should go in field and house and hearth."
okay, so what do we take from this? allow me to use my beloved bullet points as a crutch:
i think this points to Gethenian culture, a product of its harsh and relentless environment, preferring a good hard fight to simply rolling over and giving up. the men of Shath would rather have the shame of Getheren's murder on their hearth than the cowardice of Getheren's own cast-off shame placed upon them. better for the brothers to have fought for their illicit love than to have given up and sought death as an alternative. better for Getheren to have owned his sorrow.
another point: what happened to Hode and Getheren's child? we know that he exists and nothing more. did he suffer along with the hearth when Getheren cursed it with his name? is this part of why Getheren's actions were so bad - because he neglected his child in his focus on Hode? i don't know; Le Guin doesn't say much about it. we'll keep this in mind though.
there are huge parallels in this chapter to some stuff we'll learn about Estraven, so we'll come back to reference it again later.
what follows is currently part notes and part draft!
we get more "ew effeminacy!" commentary from Genly, this time about the King. interesting how these two have similar attitudes of arrogant incredulity.
"As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information becomes unprofitable, sleep."
i feel like there's much more to be said about this chapter.
this is another oral folktale that introduces us to the Foretellers. we see a man go seek the date of his
death - the Foreteller says that he will die on Odstreth (Karhidish for the nineteenth day of the
month).
this man, Lord Berosty, is so mad that he didn't get a straight answer that he threatens to kill the
Foreteller, but the telling has been done and there's nothing to be done about it. Berosty goes back
home and shuts himself up in paranoia and despair. his kemmering, Herbor, is so distraught on Berosty's
behalf that he goes to the Foretellers himself and offers his life in exchange for a Foretelling.
foreshadowing is a literary device in which-- when Herbor pleads his case and explains the nature
of his question, he is allowed a Foretelling with no payment. how long, then, will Berosty live? "longer
than Herbor," is the answer he receives. naturally, he returns to his kemmering and gives him the news.
Berosty is not saddened, but enraged, and crushes Herbor's skull with a table. naturally there's nowhere
to go but down from here, Berosty goes insane and eventually hangs himself. on Odstreth.
i like this chapter. i think it's interesting that we are told Berosty's first name - Ashe - which is also the name of Estraven's kemmering. i don't feel like LeGuin wrote many coincidences.
this is a really meaty chapter from a worldbuilding perspective and it's all fascinating.
"We're a lot of newcomers, see, for my Lord Meshe was born 2,202 years-ago, but the Old Way of the Handdara goes back ten thousand years before that." the Handdarata have been Indwelling and Foretelling for over a myriad. this is comparable to how long humans have been practicing agriculture.
Genly is such a sexist piece of shit. more disparaging remarks about people's effeminacy. "I thought of him as my landlady, for he had fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, and a soft fat face, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature." bro SHUT UP?
Gethen doesn't have a concept of war yet, and Genly notes this, predictably, like a jackass: "They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants." men > ants > animals > women, got it.
we cross the mountains into eastern Karhide, to the plains of Rer. this is old, old country. "No landboat or car can enter Rer. It was built before Karhiders used powered vehicles, and they have been using them for over twenty centuries."
"Goss went light and quick, graceful as girl..." oh my stars we have a non-negative comparison to a woman.
we meet Faxe the Weaver here, and Genly is in awe of him. at the height of the Foretelling he even outright sees him as a woman: "...a woman, a woman dressed in light. The light was silver, the silver was armor, an armored woman with a sword."
a few more quotes, because i need to put together my thoughts about them later:
"The emphatic and paraverbal forces at work, immensely powerful and confused, rising out of the perversion and frustration of sex, out of an insanity that distorts time, and out of an appalling discipline of total concentration and apprehension of immediate reality, were far beyond my restraint or control. And yet they were controlled: the center was still Faxe."
"...he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present...."
now we move over to Estraven's point of view as he flees the country and prepares for his exile.
"...each time I thought of the folly of trying to go home. As well kill myself. I was born to live in exile, it appeared, and my one way home was by way of dying."
Estraven meets his old kemmering, Ashe, who begs to join him in exile. Estraven steadfastly refuses - "If I must be cruel no need to hide it, pretending kindness." Ashe is a Celibate, an Indweller of a Fastness.
"The only true vow of faithfulness I ever swore was not spoken, and the man I swore it to is dead and the promise broken, long ago." coupled with "I went on, and he did not follow me. But my brother's shadow followed me. I had done ill to speak of him. I had done ill in all things."
Estraven steals a rowboat to try and make a break for Orgoreyn, but Tibe's men are after him and he narrowly avoids being executed. he is saved by a ship captain who prioritizes the king's orders (and the few hours of grace that Estraven still has) rather than Tibe's orders to get Estraven out of the picture - he drops Estraven off (much worse for wear) in Orgoreyn.
"Behind every man in Orgoreyn comes the Inspector."
"Then I assume you will declare your intention to me to enter application for permission to obtain permanent residence in the Great Commensality of Orgoreyn pending your obtaining and retaining useful employment as a digit of the Commensality or Township?" holy unconstrained communism batman. "The new Alien Registry Law enacted in the month of Kus as a move in the shadow-fight with Karhide invalidated my registration and lost me my job, and I spent a halfmonth waiting in the anterooms of infinite Inspectors. My mates at work lent me money and stole fish for my dinner, so that I got re-registered before I starved; but I had heard the lesson. I liked those hard loyal men, but they lived in a trap there was no getting out of, and I had work to do among people I liked less. I made the calls I had put off for three months." this however sounds far more like late-stage capitalism to this undereducated little possum.
we finally get a look at the politics between Karhide and Orgoreyn from a much smarter source than Genly. there's a sort of arms race of aggression building between the two nations and everyone is scared of it. Estraven sees Genly's visit and the offer to join the Ekumen as a uniting force for the all the nations of Gethen.
this is an excerpt from the field notes of one of the first Ekumenical visitors to Gethen, long before Genly. we get a woman's point of view on Gethen!
"I am not sure of divorce rules in general; here in Osnoriner there is divorce, but no remarriage after either divorce or the partner's death: one can only vow kemmering once."
"Siblings are not however allowed to vow kemmering, nor keep kemmering after the birth of a child to one of the pair."
"The First Mobile, if one is sent, must be warned that unless he is very self-assured, or senile, his pride will suffer." oop. "One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience."
Genly travels around eastern Karhide for a while, but returns to west before the harsh winter sets in. we learn that the king is pregnant, cloistered in his summer palace, and Tibe has been named Regent in the meantime. naturally, Tibe goes full nationalist, and this does not bode well for Genly. "He was after something surer, the sure, quick, and lasting way to make people into a nation: war." Genly starts planning to leave for Orgoreyn.
Ashe visits Genly in an attempt to send some money to the exiled Estraven. Genly makes an ass of himself because he is so fucking bothered by (his misunderstanding of) Estraven's motives.
Genly makes it to Orgoreyn and stays at an inn right on the river border between the two countries. a group from the Karhide side attacks across the river and sets the town ablaze before retreating - Genly joins a group of refugees fleeing the scene, but he is picked up by Commensals who give him new papers and send him off to Mishnory.
in Mishnory, Genly is treated all kinds of special and he contrasts the way that Orgoreyn panders to his needs in comparison to Karhide's flat welcome into their customs. (of course, he doesn't see it quite this way - in his words "elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment.")
we end at a dinner, Genly and a bunch of Commensals who we'll learn more about later. Estraven appears in the shadow, turned away, unwilling to talk. "And it crossed my mind," Genly says, "though I dismissed the idea as baseless, that I had not come to Mishnory to eat roast blackfish with the Commensals of my own free will; nor had they brought me here. He had."
another Karhidish story, this one recorded by Genly himself.
this is a story from Kerm Land, which is the part of Karhide that our Estraven is from. names are about to get confusing, so bear with me.
Estre and Stok are two domains in Kerm Land, and at the time of this story, they are feuding. a young person from Estre goes on a hunting trip but falls through some ice. too cold to make it all the way back home and with the fog rolling in, they eventually stumble across a cabin where they are taken in and warmed up by a stranger. the unfortunate hunter is Arek of Estre (Estraven) and the good samaritan is Therem of Stok (Stokven).
Stokven and Estraven agree that they are mortal enemies, despite having never met, but they can't deny the connection between them and vow kemmer to each other. the next morning, more hunters from Stok arrive at the cabin, and recognizing Arek as the heir of Estre, kill him. Therem decides to indwell for a while at a Fastness. a year later, a stranger shows up to Estre with a baby - "This is Therem, the son's son of Estre." the lord of Estre, Lord Sorve, sees his lost son Arek in this child, and raises him and eventually declares him as heir. the other potential heirs rise against Therem, and he kills them but is gravely wounded. he wanders, seeking help, and stumbles across a cabin.
Therem of Estre is saved by Therem of Stok. they have a dialogue that mirrors Arek's and Therem's, but instead of vowing kemmer, they vow peace to each other.
Therem of Estre lives and goes on to rule the Domain of Estre, and he ends the feud with Stok by giving up a bit of borderland. this action gets him the nickname 'traitor,' but his name, Therem, continues to be given to people in Estre all the same.
there's so much to be said here about love of fellow vs. love of country. two people in love aren't enough to end generations of fighting. but loss and pain can grow fruit.
Genly and Estraven are properly reunited and, unsurprisingly, Genly misses the point of Estraven's quite wise advice. "You are the tool of a faction. I advise you to be careful how you let them use you. I advise you to find out what the enemy faction is, and who they are, and never to let them use you, for they will not use you well."
the rest of the chapter shows Genly very slowly coming to this same advice himself, unraveling the cross-politics of the Commensals, their factions, and the secret police known as the Sarf. he mentions quite presciently that nobody in Orgoreyn feels solid or real, "as if they did not cast shadows."
back in Estraven's perspective, as told through his journal.
