Let the record show that Ursula K. LeGuin is possibly my favorite science fiction author, certainly the one I most admire. I spazzed out on one of my writer friends the other day and insisted she read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas before I died of a heart attack.
So it is difficult to write about The Left Hand of Darkness. It is a masterpiece, just like the blurb says. And you know if some fancypants magazine like Newsweek is bothering to pay attention to a little old genre novel, it’s really something special.
The novel takes place on a world called Gethan, or Winter, where all people bisex- not that they are both sexes at the same time, but rather that most of the time their sex organs are retracted, and they are sterile and uninterested in procreation, but after nearly 26 days they reach the fertile part of their cycle, and become either a man or a woman for a few days, depending. So a Gethian who is the mother of three children could also very well be the father of three more.
A human man named Genly Ai comes to Gethan to try to convince the Gethians to join the Ekumen, a confederation of planets united by their willingness to share knowledge with one another. That is the plot. The real story is about Genly learning to accept and trust these Gethians, these alien others, who are neither male nor female, but both, and who by and large consider Genly an unfortunate pervert for being always in heat, so to speak.
Of all the Gethians Genly meets, only one is willing and able to accept him for what he is- one part of a duality. And Genly’s real struggle, his inner struggle that he fights even harder than he tries to convince the Gethians to join the other people in the stars, is to be able to accept the Gethian who accepts him, to see past issues of gender, so important and yet so superficial, to the reality of the soul.
Light, we learn, is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the left hand of light. As we read, we consider the darkness within ourselves, the subterranean masculity of our external female, the hidden femininity of our maleness. That person, buried deep within our psyche, who is us, who is the mirror image of us, and thus the reflection, and thus the opposite. This motif is repeated over and over, in the concept of shifgrethor, a deadly important game of honor, in the ancient lore of the land without shadow, in the Handdarata religion where the gift of foretelling is both used and regarded as useless, in the names of the days of the 26 day cycle, which, after the first 13 days are the same name over again with the prefix Od- Op- Ot- or On- added to them, which means “Un-.”
The end result of such a thorough weaving of story and theme is that one pauses after nearly every paragraph to both savor and digest what LeGuin is saying. In short, The Left Hand of Darkness succeeds at what all art strives to do- it holds up the mirror to ourselves, forcing us to contemplate what we are, what that means, and what, in a different world, it could mean.
