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.

That last sentence must have delighted Ursula K. Le Guin, whose capacity for amiable irony is almost unsurpassed. It certainly pleases me! Going on eighty-eight, I am beyond all this, but even if I were twenty-eight it might send me to the nearest bar. Since King Argaven of Karhide is both crazy and pregnant, Genly Ai’s quest seems foolish, yet it is earned by a sacrifice of the book’s hero, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven.

Estraven is introduced to us in the first chapter, but we see and hear him only through the misconceptions of Genly Ai. The noble Estraven is a prime minister on the way out—no surprise to him, because he candidly remarks that King Argaven is both crazy and stupid. But he is in some danger from rivals and has concern that Ai may be in danger also. After a rather frightening meeting with the king, Genly Ai begins to understand Estraven’s concern for him and vows to leave Karhide for Orgoreyn, Karhide’s rival and neighbor. He goes east to seek information from the Foretellers. My favorite chapter in “Left Hand” is five, “The Domestication of Hunch,” the chapter of the Foretellers. Their leader is Faxe, a benign follower of the Old Way, who eventually will attain power in Karhide. Faxe is a weaver, a craft associated with the preternatural throughout human history. I always think of the delightful Bottom the Weaver, in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” who is the only human who can see and apprehend the faerie world of Titania, Puck, Oberon, Mustardseed, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Moth.

Faxe the Foreteller centers an amazing scene, in a high hall, surrounded by eight other proleptic figures, two of them being quite insane and one a curious male pervert. In return for two rubies, Genly Ai asks the question: Will Karhide join the Ekumen within five years? Suddenly a woman appears merged with Faxe, bathed in silver light, encased in silver armor, and bearing a sword. She screams aloud, in pain and terror, a triple yes! She vanishes. The answer is that five years hence Gethen will be a member of the Ekumen.

The ultimate wisdom of Faxe the Foreteller seems to me Ursula’s eloquent evasion of the Freudian maxim that we must make friends with the necessity of dying:

“The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. . . . Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?”

“That we shall die.”

“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. . . . The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

To me that seems an aesthetic formulation: the only thing that makes it possible to read and reread the best novels is not knowing what comes next, even though we have read them before. In Le Guin, as much the novelist and poet as were Victor Hugo and Emily Brontë, the poetry itself becomes Foretelling. We don’t have to pay her two rubies; we need only read and reread.

The novel’s plot resumes with fresh intensity when Estraven seeks out Genly Ai in Orgoreyn and warns him not to be used by any faction in that country. Later, Estraven rescues Genly from a prison farm, and their escape takes them on a tremendous trek across the ice, pulling a sledge together. In that adventure they become overwhelmingly close friends and develop a poignance in their mutual understanding that takes them to the border of sexual love, where they pause. At that moment Le Guin creates a remarkable excursus:

As I am in kemmer I would find it easier to ignore Ai’s presence, but this is difficult in a two-man tent. The trouble is of course that he is, in his curious fashion, also in kemmer: always in kemmer. . . . I explained my silence, with some embarrassment. I was afraid he would laugh at me. After all he is no more an oddity, a sexual freak, than I am: up here on the Ice each of us is singular, isolate, I as cut off from those like me, from my society and its rules, as he from his. . . . After a while he too came to speak of isolation, of loneliness.

“Your race is appallingly alone in its world. . . . Philosophically, emotionally: to be so solitary, in so hostile a world: it must affect your entire outlook.”

. . . “Well, in the Handdara . . . Maybe they are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more occupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part.” Tormer’s Lay had been all day in my mind, and I said the words,

Light is the left hand of darkness
And darkness the right hand of light
Two are one, life and death, lying
together like lovers in kemmer,
like hands joined together,
like the end and the way.

My voice shook as I said the lines, for I remembered as I said them that in the letter my brother wrote me before his death he had quoted the same words.

Le Guin’s Taoist poem gives her more than a title. It is the book, the woman, the spirit unappeasable and peregrine that I recall saluting in the last letter I sent to her, unknowingly written the day after her death. She gives Genly Ai his finest moment in expressing an understanding of the love between Estraven and himself:

For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.

This is so precisely phrased that the voice is Le Guin’s. She also is unsure if they were right, and as her reader I, too, am uncertain. It would be a very different book if they had become lovers in the complete sense. Somewhere Le Guin remarks that her true subject is marriage, and here she gives us a Shakespearean marriage of true minds. Le Guin being Le Guin, she does not stop there. One of her inventions is mindspeech, by which two empathics can communicate without speech, a praxis that Ai teaches Estraven:

I felt his sleep as if it were my own: the emphatic bond was there, and once more I bespoke him, sleepily, by his name—“Therem!”

He sat bolt upright, for his voice rang out above me in the blackness, loud. “Arek! is that you?”

“No: Genly Ai: I am bespeaking you.”

His breath caught. . . . “You called me—It was my brother. It was his voice I heard. He’s dead. You called me—you called me Therem? I . . . This is more terrible than I had thought.” He shook his head, as a man will do to shake off a nightmare, and then put his face in his hands.

“Harth, I’m very sorry—”

“No, call me by my name. If you can speak inside my skull with a dead man’s voice then you can call me by my name! Would he have called me ‘Harth’? Oh, I see why there’s no lying in this mindspeech. It is a terrible thing. . . . Why do you speak in my brother’s voice?” His voice was strained.

“That I can’t answer. I don’t know. Tell me about him.”

“Nusuth . . . My full brother, Arek Harth rem ir Estraven. He was a year older than I. He would have been Lord of Estre. We . . . I left home, you know, for his sake. He has been dead fourteen years.”

The two Estravens had been lovers, incest not being a Gethenian taboo. They had sworn faithfulness to one another and had a son. Therem will join Arek in death when he attempts valiantly to make his escape from Karhide:

But he was off, downhill: a magnificent fast skier, and this time not holding back for me. He shot away on a long quick curving descent through the shadows over the snow. He ran from me, and straight into the guns of the border-guards. . . . He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, “Arek!” Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.

It is a tribute to Le Guin’s art that every time I reread this I become very sad. In some ways Genly Ai plays Horatio to Therem Estraven’s Hamlet, but Shakespeare’s Hamlet dies upward in an apotheosis, whereas Therem descends to icy darkness, crying out the name of his long-dead brother as though Genly has fused with Arek.

“The Left Hand of Darkness” concludes with Genly Ai visiting the Hearth of the Lord of Estre, who had borne both Arek and Therem.

The old lord looked at the boy, then at me.

“This is Sorve Harth,” he said, “heir of Estre, my sons’ son.”

There is no ban on incest there, I knew it well enough. Only the strangeness of it, to me a Terran, and the strangeness of seeing the flash of my friend’s spirit in this grim, fierce, provincial boy, made me dumb for a while. When I spoke my voice was unsteady.

“The king will recant. Therem was no traitor. What does it matter what fools call him?”

The old lord nodded slowly, smoothly. “It matters,” he said.

“You crossed the Gobrin Ice together,” Sorve demanded, “you and he?”

“We did.”

“I should like to hear that tale, my Lord Envoy,” said old Esvans, very calm. But the boy, Therem’s son, said stammering, “Will you tell us how he died?—Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars—the other kinds of men; the other lives?”

Le Guin had a special genius for endings. In the boy Sorve’s voice we hear Therem’s spirit speak again, and we realize freshly the ironic necessity of his dying, a sacrifice to open up his closed society to otherness, indicated by the triple repetition of the refrain “other.”

This essay was drawn from “The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread,” by Harold Bloom, out this November, from Knopf.