The Strange Friendships of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness”

I never met Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight, in Portland, Oregon, her home for many years. And yet we became good friends during the last two months of her life, entirely by way of e-mail. I inaugurated the correspondence on November 21, 2017, and she replied on November 24th. After that we exchanged letters sixteen times, until her final letter of January 16, 2018, which concluded:

One of the things I like least about being very old is the unreliability of my energy. Up one day, down the next, bleh! Working at poetry or a story is, always has been, the job I want to be doing, the work that keeps me steady and content. But too often there just isn’t the wherewithal. I suspect your work is central to your wellbeing in much this way, and hope you aren’t suffering such periods of enforced idleness.

I value our friendship.
Ursula

I replied after an interval, during which I was very ill, on January 23, 2018, not yet knowing that Ursula had died the day before. I hope, in tribute to her, that I live to edit her poems for the Library of America, thinking that she might have wanted me to do that.

Though I have written about “The Left Hand of Darkness” before, in 1987 and again in 2000, I have forgotten what I said and do not want to consult it now, but, rather, make a fresh start on this marvellous romance. In one of her letters, Ursula remarked that writing “The Dispossessed” was liberating for her, and she seemed to prefer it to “The Left Hand of Darkness.” Rereading both, I find myself torn between the two. The protagonist, Shevek, in “The Dispossessed,” is far more interesting than anyone in the earlier book, and yet he and his story manifest something of the ambivalence of Le Guin’s subtitle: “An Ambiguous Utopia.”

In a fierce introduction to “The Left Hand of Darkness,” Le Guin charmingly remarks, “A novelist’s business is lying.” She adumbrates:

I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.

The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.

Always in Le Guin we hear reverberations of Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching,” which she translated, with J. P. Seaton, as “A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way” (1997). We corresponded about her understanding of the Tao, yet I had to confess my permanent difficulty in absorbing this way that is not a way. I myself always keep to hand a copy of “The Bhagavad-Gita” as rendered by Barbara Stoler Miller, which I purchased in the autumn of 1986, the year of its publication. After hundreds of readings, I think I know what Krishna means by “dark inertia,” “passion,” and “lucidity,” but a dozen readings of the Le Guin-Seaton “Tao Te Ching” have left me muttering that I do not apprehend the water and stone of the Way. Is it that I am not enough open to my own female component? That seems not right. I am more my late mother than my late father. What moves me most in Ursula is the serenity. I lack it utterly.

Commenting upon the fascinating vision of sexuality in “Left Hand,” Le Guin continues in gusto:

This book is not about the future. Yes, it begins by announcing that it’s set in the “Ekumenical Year 1490-97,” but surely you don’t believe that?

Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

The burden of “Left Hand” is whether Genly Ai can persuade the king of Karhide on the planet Gethen, or Winter, to join the Ekumen, or union, of many planets in exchanges of trade and culture. Genly Ai speaks much of the book, but frequently Le Guin moves into third-person narration. Though Ai is a man of good will and adequate intelligence, he can never quite understand the consciousness of the androgynes whom he seeks to win over. Here Le Guin is admirably subtle. She tended to distrust Freud, since her heart and mind were with the Tao, and yet she shows what he meant in observing that, for almost all of us, thought could not be liberated from its sexual past.

Rather wickedly, Le Guin devotes Chapter 7 to the field notes of one Ong Tot Oppong, a female investigator on behalf of the Ekumen who lands on Gethen/Winter to study “the Question of Sex.” Oppong speculates that whoever colonized this odd planet practiced human genetic manipulation in order to produce Gethenian sexual physiology:

The sexual cycle averages 26 to 28 days (they tend to speak of it as 26 days, approximating it to the lunar cycle). For 21 or 22 days the individual is somer, sexually inactive, latent. On about the 18th day hormonal changes are initiated by the pituitary control and on the 22nd or 23rd day the individual enters kemmer, estrus. In this first phase of kemmer (Karh, secher) he remains completely androgynous. Gender, and potency, are not attained in isolation. A Gethenian in first-phase kemmer, if kept alone or with others not in kemmer, remains incapable of coitus. Yet the sexual impulse is tremendously strong in this phase, controlling the entire personality, subjecting all other drives to its imperative. . . . With the cessation of lactation the female reenters somer and becomes once more a perfect androgyne. No physiological habit is established, and the mother of several children may be the father of several more.