Ursula le Guin

Ursula le Guin

	Ursula le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1971) is just one example of how, in recent years, serious (and particularly women) writers have turned to Science Fiction and Fantasy as a means of exploring contemporary human psychological and social issues in new and imaginative ways. These include writers such as Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time), and Angela Carter. This marked a radical departure within a genre which was often seen as a predominantly "male" domain, and one which was less frequently concerned with humans and human concerns. Le Guin herself has commented that, in the main, humans have been largely absent from science fiction, as a genre:
	"Science Fiction has mostly settled for a pseudo-objective listing of marvels and wonders and horrors which illuminate nothing beyond themselves and without real moral resonance; daydreams, wishful thinking and nightmares. The invention is superb, but self-enclosed and sterile"
	Whether you agree with le Guin (I don't, entirely), her novel certainly can be described as having invention and moral resonance. I'd like to begin by quoting from the Open University 'Popular Culture' course, U203, and Noel Coley's comments on the novel:
	Le Guin's own science fiction can be seen as confronting directly the reactionary representation of women in so much science fiction, and the failure to present 'the people' as other than the 'masses', mere fodder for military and political rulers. In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) she takes up the feminist aspect...
	The story is told from the point of view of a narrator sent as an emissary of the Ekumen, or the League of Known Planets, engaged in pacific explorations of their galaxy to the planet Gethen. Genly Ai (as the narrator is called) finds himself on a world characterised by some resemblances, and also sharply focused differences, between Gethen and the world of Le Guin's twentieth century readers. Gethen is extremely cold, and a pattern of life has evolved in which major energies of the inhabitants have to be exercised to sustain life under semi-arctic conditions. Social life resembles not the urban industrialised civilisations of our time so much as medieval Iceland, where family feuding and personal honour are the main concerns. But against this familiar, if also somewhat distanced parallel with the life of the modern reader, one contrast stands out vividly. The people of Gethen are androgynous, experiencing sexuality either as male or female, and only at certain periods. To them the male heterosexuality identity of Genly Ai, and the sexual differentiation of his race are disgusting. One of them remarks, 'you people are like animals on permanent heat.' (p. 143). Genly Ai's greatest difficulty in making his unofficial 'anthropological' exploration lies in the resulting uncertainty about what his personal relationships with Gethenians amount to. How can he really know anyone, when the sexual difference is absent? How then can he make a reliable report to his own people? The crisis of the story turns on a friendship with Estraven, who rescues him from imprisonment and certain death. But is Estraven man or woman? An epic escape journey across an ice-cap finally makes that question irrelevant, and when Genly Ai accepts that the masculine/feminine distinction inherent in his own sense of identity, is culturally relative, he is finally able to love Estraven to the degree that the latter's friendship deserves. The effect of this central narrative strand offers the remedy of an estrangement of the assumption that hard-and-fast gender roles are 'natural'. As Frederick Jameson has said:

"The obvious defamiliarisation with which such a picture confronts the lecteur moyen sensual is not exactly that of the permissive and counter-cultural tradition of male SF writing... Rather than a stand in favour of a wider tolerance for all kinds of sexual behaviour, it seems more appropriate to insist... on the feminist dimension of her novel, and on its demystification of the sex roles themselves. The basic point about Gethenian sexuality is that the sex role does not colour everything else in life, but is rather contained and defused, reduced to that brief period of the monthly cycle, when, as with our animal species, the Gethenians are in 'heat'."

	Le Guin's novel is striking in its ability to present a pattern of social and political existence, realized in a wide variety of supporting detail, built around the notion that 'the sex role does not colour everything in life'. While there are also elements of more ordinary science fiction invention, notably a form of space travel faster than light which obliterates time (at least in respect of the sending of messages), it is the social imagination at work through The Left Hand of Darkness that brings about the significant 'estrangement' effect."
(i)	I've quoted from this at length because I believe that it does provide a useful starting point into the novel. How much do you agree with this as a perspective? Do you feel that le Guin has successfully and inventively raised these issues of gender, nature and culture? If it had been you writing it what would you have altered, where would you have placed more emphasis, or less emphasis? Do you feel that this use of science fiction is a convincing and appropriate means of using imagined futures as a way of dealing with present issues and concerns?
(Ii)	The Left Hand of Darkness can, however, be seen as a more traditional variation of a sub-genre of Science Fiction, the Saga-Romance, yet one that uses the traditional vehicle of the adventure narrative as a means of bringing out political concerns.. One of the main themes of the novel is the portrayal of the political rivalry between these two semi-feudal states. As Patrick Parrinder, in Science Fiction, notes, " The two principal narrations of Gethen Orgoreyn and Karhide, in some ways resemble Tsarist Russia and imperial china - both vast and, in some areas, very bleak countries (The names Orgoreyn and Karhide, on the other hand, suggest Le Guin's home state of Oregon and its neighbour Idaho).... Furthermore, the fact that Gethen and the other worlds were seeded by the Hainish suggests a universe in which no truly alien intelligence exists. The difficulties of building the Ekumen are thus analogous to -if distinct from - those of bringing together different nations and cultures on earth". The Left Hand of Darkness is, he concludes, "a political fable, speaking with the slightly tedious explicitness of the utopia and - as Sir Thomas More said that he spoke - of 'things... that I wish rather than expect to see followed among our citizens.'...". Would you agree with this view? A great deal rests, of course, on how you read the purpose of the Ekumen and its mission (as articulated by Genly Ai): is it a form of intergalactic United Nations, struggling to deal with the problems of Third World modernization whilst remaining true to its moral idealism?
(Iii)	You could, of course, note the above two perspectives but decide that, ultimately, the novel is a romance, a fantasy and form of escapist entertainment. It does certainly contain many elements of the traditional romantic adventure. The climax of the novel, the journey across the ice, is but one of a number of "tales" within the novel, including the centuries-old tale of 'Estraven the Traitor". As Patrick Parrinder comments, the story's "affiliations to folk tales and legends are stressed by the inclusion in the narrative of actual Gethenian folk-tales collected by the Envoy." This is not to imply that The Left Hand of Darkness is "just" another folk story and legend, it is perhaps to affirm the value of such tales and myths within each society and culture.

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