Sunday Pages: "The Left Hand of Darkness"

A novel by Ursula K. Le Guin

Dear Reader,

I read Nineteen Eighty-four in 1984. I was in sixth grade. It was the first “real” book I ever consumed. I was too young to grasp the nuances or understand the political allegories, but George Orwell’s magnum opus left an indelible impression on me—not least because I shared a set of initials with Eric Blair’s pseudonymous alter ego. For years after, I recalled characters, dialogue, and scenes of the book in great detail. I even wrote a song about it.

The mass market paperback copy that I read—bought at a book fair at Drew University—is now lost. It literally fell apart. I replaced it with a lovely deckle-edged paperback that Harcourt Brace put out in 2003, for the centennial of Orwell’s birth. Thomas Pynchon, the quirkily brilliant and reclusive novelist, contributed the foreword, which on its own is well worth the cover price.

“Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same,” Pynchon wrote 20 years ago, “and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell’s case.” He continues:

There is a game critics like to play, worth maybe a minute and a half of diversion, in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn’t “get right.” Looking around us at the present moment, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of “law enforcement,” familiar to us from countless televised “crime dramas,” themselves forms of social control—and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to “interactive” cable systems, circa 2003.

Twenty years later, of course, most Americans carry a miniature, portable two-way telescreen in their pocket, in those rare moments when the device is not in use. The Gravity’s Rainbow novelist goes on:

News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. “Wow, the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?” “Orwellian, dude.”

Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own—the corruption of the spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power, were already in place, all well-known aspects of the third Reich and Stalin’s USSR, even the British Labour party—like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?

Something, huh? Wow, does that paragraph resonate a lot more now than it did when I first read it two decades ago. We might say that Pynchon in 2003 understood that despite the well-known warnings of Orwell (arguably the most famous fiction writer of the 20th century and inarguably a staunch Leftist who wrote that “[e]very line of serious work that I’ve written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I know it”), fascism, like all ugly but pervasive trends from our halcyon days, was primed for a nostalgia-tinged comeback. Twenty years ago, he saw deeper than most of us into the human soul—although no one, not even the literary prophet who wrote The Crying of Lot 49, could have predicted the plump, orange, short-fingered, vulgar form through which the American strain of fascism would choose to express itself.

I bring up the prophecy/prediction distinction because, during the “Afterhours” broadcast following The Five 8 season finale, the talk turned to science fiction— perhaps because I had wardrobe-changed into my Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep t-shirt. I don’t know what my favorite work of science fiction is—I don’t know what my favorite work of anything is; I am too fond of too many things—but Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness is on my short list, with Nineteen Eighty-four and Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land.

Written in 1968, published a year later, and set thousands of years in the future, The Left Hand of Darkness concerns a visit by one Genly Ai, who despite having a name Elon Musk would give his child is an Earth man, to the remote planet of Gethen. Ai is an ambassador of the Ekumen, the governing body of the known universe, and his task is to get the Gethenians to join the confederation. Within that framework, the story goes in unexpected places, eschewing the genre’s then-prevailing—and male-author-dominated—narrative conventions. As Le Guin herself put it, “Its style is not the journalistic one that was then standard in science fiction, its structure is complex, it moves slowly, and even if everybody in it is called he, it is not about men. That’s a big dose of ‘hard lit,’ heresy, and chutzpah, for a genre novel by a nobody in 1968.”

The inhabitants of Gethen are human, but not the sort of human that Ai is familiar with. He is puzzled during the course of his stay by the sexual habits and the lack of gender distinctions. The Gethenians are ambisexual—what we might now call gender fluid. Le Guin used the “he” pronoun for all of the characters on this planet, but Gethen is a world of They/Them, a woke planet where Ron DeSantis’s hateful politics goes to die. This, to me, is not prediction but prophesy, LeGuin the year before the Summer of Love feeling and extrapolating the collective human vibrations. The Gethenians have their problems too, all humans do, but they have the gender stuff figured out.

There’s plenty of standard sci-fi content in the book. The ansible, for example, is what Le Guin calls the technological device through which interplanetary travel is possible. Like all great science fiction, Left Hand blends in elements of fantasy. In his original blurb, Frank Herbert extols the high quality of “the mythology, psychology [and] the entire creative surround.”

Here is one short scene, late in the book, in which the narrator Ai and his fellow prisoners—one of whom has just died—are being transported across cold terrain:

Counting the corpse there were twenty-six of us, two thirteens. Gethenians often think in thirteens, twenty-sixes, fifty-twos, no doubt because of the 26-day lunar cycle that makes their unvarying month and approximates their sexual cycle. The corpse was shoved up tight against the steel doors that formed the rear wall of our box, where he would keep cold. The rest of us sat and lay and crouched, each in his own space, his territory, his Domain, until night; when the cold grew so extreme that little by little we drew together and merged into one entity occupying one space, warm in the middle, cold at the periphery.

There was kindness. I and certain others, an old man and one with a bad cough, were recognized as being least resistant to the cold, and each night we were at the center of the group, the entity of twenty-five, where it was warmest. We did not struggle for the warm place, we were simply in it each night. It is a terrible thing, this kindness that human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and the cold, it is all we have. We who are so rich, so full of strength, we end up with that small change. We have nothing else to give.

The novel is full of hauntingly beautiful passages like this: wise, poetical, patient, tinged with melancholy.

Her poetry I’ve shared before. As I started to write this, I checked the archive, to make sure I hadn’t covered Left Hand already, and was surprised to find that I had. It was two summers ago—right after instead of right before my short hiatus. At the time, Hurricane Ida was threatening to make landfall over Louisiana and Mississippi, a climate disaster that has become more familiar. I’m going to end today’s “Sunday Pages” with my sentiments from two Augusts ago. I still feel the same way:

Because despite all the evidence to the contrary, I believe in the essential goodness of humanity. I believe in our collective intellect. I believe that when we work together, we can solve any problem. I believe in the triumph of the better angels of our nature. I believe that love will win the day. The name of this site is not “See? I Told You We Are Doomed.”

The simple truth is that you can’t have light without darkness. In her sublime science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin includes this short poem, which came to mind this morning. (“Kemmer” is the means by which the creatures on her distant planet reproduce):

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.

We will get through this. We always have. We survived 1860-5 and 1941-5 and four years of a mob money launderer in the White House; we’ll survive this. We shall prevail. And we shall do so together.

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Photo credit: NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech. The artist’s concept depicts Kepler-186, the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone.