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halojedhaThis has been billed as one of those Books I Should Read for so many decades now that I kind of forgot I hadn't read it? It's the one about the planet of androgynes who are sexually neuter most of the time but go into kemmer once a month, at which point they develop distinctive genitals and a sex drive until they're out of kemmer and go back to neuter. Except it's not actually about that at all, really: it's hugely thematically rich, and the gender stuff is a fairly minor note in a book which is otherwise extremely beautiful and philosophically interesting. It was written in 1969, which makes it both pioneering, and also kind of dated.
Gender stuff
Le Guin chose to use he pronouns and "man" for all the Gethenians, which takes a lot of the impact out of the gender exploration. It basically makes it sound as it if it's a planet of men who are able to reproduce with each other. The idea of pregnant and breastfeeding men would have been pretty radical then, but as someone immersed in trans culture it didn't make me catch my breath. She got a lot of criticism from feminists who thought she hadn't gone far enough, and she later said she wished she'd been braver.
I can see three reasons why she might have made the choice to gender all the Gethenians male:
Overall I think this choice plays directly into the way "man" is treated as the human default in a way that reinforces patriarchy, which unfortunately feels like it cancels out a lot of the interesting gender stuff. Obviously "they" would read as the most natural solution these days, but even back then it wouldn't have been hard for her to have Ai use "he" to show his gender bias, but to have Estraven use a neopronoun in their first person POV chapters. It also would have worked pretty well, in my opinion, for Ai to switch between "he" and "she" depending on how he's reading any given character, because he does so keep insisting on assigning a binary gender to the Gethenians he meets, even as it flickers back and forth in a way he finds deeply uncomfortable.
I absolutely do not believe that this is Le Guin's internalised misogyny, not least because no such commentary appears in Estraven's chapters; it's purely Ai's POV. However, because the narrative doesn't challenge it, I suspect that many male readers took it entirely at face value and saw it as narrative truth, not a revealed flaw of Ai's character. If Ai is meant to satirise misogyny, I think it lands a bit like a rape joke that intends to satirise rape culture, but ends up normalising it.
I was also annoyed that the Gethenian sexual process is so heteronormative - you go into kemmer, you latch onto a person you like, and the two of you polarise to male/female physiology based on Vibes, but it's different each time and you don't know what to expect. I mean, OK, there's kind of a cool metaphor here for butch/femme dynamics and the way that queer folk intentionally play sex games with gender, but I don't think she meant it that way, I think she's just sooooo straight it didn't occur to her that the Gethenians might ever end up with same-sex sexual attraction. Aslirazel recently wrote, 'Sometimes I'm reading a writer and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. There are some people who are just so straight. So straight." And Le Guin is one of them.'
There's a whiff of Aquinas' idea of "logical sex" here: sex is only valid when it's procreative, otherwise let's not bother. But if this idea of humans being in heat is based on animals, lots of animals have same-sex pairings and non-procreative sex! Having said that, the relentless "he" pronouns and everyone being "man", "king", and "brother" did give the whole thing a kind of normalising m/m sex and romance vibe that I kind of enjoyed.
Thematic stuff
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.
As a read, I found this book a bit hard to get into, and it dragged in the middle section where Ai was in Orgoreyn, but once he gets kidnapped by the secret police the story takes off like a bullet, and the whole second half of the book is completely unputdownable. I liked the way that a lot of the narrative is told through insert chapters telling myths and stories of the planet that illuminate the unspoken aspects of the culture and backstories of the characters. The trek across the Ice is breathtaking, memorable, joyful, an extraordinary story and almost certainly the main reason this book is so well-loved.
The Big Twist on the last page, however, fucked me right off: there's meant to be this big Reveal that Estraven had a kid with their sibling Arek, who died, and Ai comes to that conclusion as soon as Estraven's dad introduces Sorve as "my son's son", but it's totally unclear how he gets there. Why not assume that Sorve is Arek's kid with another parent, or Estraven's kid with another parent? It was clear what the story was telling me, but in the moment of the reveal it just didn't show its working, and that annoyed me. It was only the earlier myth about the two 'brothers' that vow kemmer to each other resulting in tragedy, and all Estraven's hints about their sibling Arek, that helped it come together for me, but I still think the way Ai is shown to realise it makes no sense.
What I did like about the ending was the last line: Sorve's questions to Ai, which Ai has been longing to be asked all book: "Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars - the other men, the other lives?" Answering this question is what Le Guin is doing, her raison d'etre as an author. It's also a nice counterpoint to the "wrong" questions asked of the Foretellers, the "what will happen" type questions that reveal little, open themselves to unhelpful answers, and pave the way for self-fulfilling tragedy. This more open question, perhaps, is the right kind of question to ask.
Gender stuff
Le Guin chose to use he pronouns and "man" for all the Gethenians, which takes a lot of the impact out of the gender exploration. It basically makes it sound as it if it's a planet of men who are able to reproduce with each other. The idea of pregnant and breastfeeding men would have been pretty radical then, but as someone immersed in trans culture it didn't make me catch my breath. She got a lot of criticism from feminists who thought she hadn't gone far enough, and she later said she wished she'd been braver.
I can see three reasons why she might have made the choice to gender all the Gethenians male:
- she didn't think the book would sell if she'd used a neuter pronoun (although they were around; thon was coined in 1858)
- she was aware that the patriarchal literary community of the 1960s would respond better to a book where "he" is neuter than a book where "she" is neuter
- the main character, Genly Ai, a Terran man, is a raging misogynist, and the book is mostly told from his POV.
Overall I think this choice plays directly into the way "man" is treated as the human default in a way that reinforces patriarchy, which unfortunately feels like it cancels out a lot of the interesting gender stuff. Obviously "they" would read as the most natural solution these days, but even back then it wouldn't have been hard for her to have Ai use "he" to show his gender bias, but to have Estraven use a neopronoun in their first person POV chapters. It also would have worked pretty well, in my opinion, for Ai to switch between "he" and "she" depending on how he's reading any given character, because he does so keep insisting on assigning a binary gender to the Gethenians he meets, even as it flickers back and forth in a way he finds deeply uncomfortable.
The most jarring thing for me was Ai's overt misogyny.
Every time he reads a Gethenian as "effeminate" or "womanish" it's described in derogatory, almost disgusted, stereotypically sexist tones. He reads his superintendent as a 'landlady' because they are 'voluble', with 'fat buttocks that wagged as he walked, and a soft, fat face, and a prying, spying, ignoble, kindly nature.' The King 'laughed shrilly like an angry woman pretending to be amused', 'less manly than he seemed', with a 'shrill fake laugh'. Ai says, 'I thought that at table Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of substance, specious and adroit.' Estraven keeps Ai alive on the ice, with their expertise in cold-weather survival, but when Ai compares their strength with pulling the sledge he thinks of himself as a 'stallion' and Estaven as a 'mule'. Ai characterises Estraven's skill with managing their survival rations as 'either house-wifely or scientific'. When Estraven asks Ai what women are like, Ai has no idea how to answer - he finds himself for the first time confronting the constructed nature of gender. Yet he still comes out with, 'They don't often seem to turn up mathematicians, or composers of music, or inventors, or abstract thinkers.'I absolutely do not believe that this is Le Guin's internalised misogyny, not least because no such commentary appears in Estraven's chapters; it's purely Ai's POV. However, because the narrative doesn't challenge it, I suspect that many male readers took it entirely at face value and saw it as narrative truth, not a revealed flaw of Ai's character. If Ai is meant to satirise misogyny, I think it lands a bit like a rape joke that intends to satirise rape culture, but ends up normalising it.
I was also annoyed that the Gethenian sexual process is so heteronormative - you go into kemmer, you latch onto a person you like, and the two of you polarise to male/female physiology based on Vibes, but it's different each time and you don't know what to expect. I mean, OK, there's kind of a cool metaphor here for butch/femme dynamics and the way that queer folk intentionally play sex games with gender, but I don't think she meant it that way, I think she's just sooooo straight it didn't occur to her that the Gethenians might ever end up with same-sex sexual attraction. As
lirazel recently wrote, 'Sometimes I'm reading a writer and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. There are some people who are just so straight. So straight." And Le Guin is one of them.'There's a whiff of Aquinas' idea of "logical sex" here: sex is only valid when it's procreative, otherwise let's not bother. But if this idea of humans being in heat is based on animals, lots of animals have same-sex pairings and non-procreative sex! Having said that, the relentless "he" pronouns and everyone being "man", "king", and "brother" did give the whole thing a kind of normalising m/m sex and romance vibe that I kind of enjoyed.
Thematic stuff
- Time: Being at the center of time - everything else rippling out into past and future. Always being at Year One. The Foretellers tapping into the everything that is always happening right now, the eternal present - reminiscent of the principle of Simultaneity from The Dispossessed.
- Journey over destination: vehicles on Gethen travel very slowly - no more than 25 miles an hour - because the quality of presence is more important than the idea of making quick progress. Being is more important than going. Ai marvels at this, but the Ekumen demonstrates the same principle in how they make contact with new inhabited planets. They send an individual Envoy rather than a team, even though that Envoy is less likely to be believed or successful, because it's a more vulnerable venture, a display of non-dominance. As an individual, the Envoy makes connections with the inhabitants of the planet one-to-one. They listen as much as they talk. All new planetary relationships are thus founded on individual relationships, on personal intimacy. If the first Envoy is killed, later a second one will be sent, who is more likely to be believed. What's important isn't getting the result sooner, it's doing it right. If it's not worth doing right, it's not worth doing. The means are the end: the goal is to undertake the process in the right way. The desired outcome is whatever outcome emerges from doing it right.
- Mysticism: This theme of process over goal has echoes in the mysticism of the Handdarata, who prize unknowing, unasking, uncertainty, unseeing, unmoving, and through embracing stillness and ignorance are able to access carefully controlled berserker strength at need, and to come together in chaotic ritual to create clear seeing of the future. In a reversal of the idea that you need to believe magic works to be able to do it, successful foretelling is only made possible through a belief that asking questions is useless: the only certainty is death, and the mystery and magic of live is lived through uncertainty.
- National identity: Karhide and Orgoreyn are clearly influenced by the Cold War - a bit reminiscent of Anarres and Urras. Karhide is hierarchical, monarchic, ruled by a crazy King, where Prime Ministers come and go in a continual political drama; steeped in tradition and ritual, with good food and a generous principle of hospitality but cold rooms and uncomfortable beds, the society organised into family clan Hearths and founded on the principle of shifgrethor, which is a specific kind of honour. Orgoreyn is a collectivist, orderly, nationalised society organised into Commensals, all property reverts to the state at your death, everyone starts equal; collective child-rearing, everyone given work, no-one goes hungry, crap food but comfortable beds, everyone's papers checked at checkpoints by Inspectors any time they go anywhere. Orgoreyn is ostensibly non-hierarchical but subject to the underhand politics and betrayals of the Thirty-Three councillors/oligarchs who rise and fall in power, and enforced by the Sarf, the secret police who arrest people in the dead of night and take them to Voluntary Farms, prison camps where they are under-dressed for the Ice Age weather, drugged, interrogated, and worked until they die. What's worse: the overt, capricious violence of a monarch, or the clandestine, orderly violence of an authoritarian state? Both Estraven and Ai are fascinated by questions of patriotism and nationalism. What does it mean to be a patriot? Can you love your country without being xenophobic? How do you take a contiguous landscape and draw a line across it, saying that one country, culture, ideology and language ends here, and another starts? People are the same everywhere, so how have we made this fallacy of difference so real?
- Exile: Ai is outlawed in Orgoreyn and Estraven is outlawed in Karhide. Estraven is estranged from their Hearth because of their incestuous relationship with their 'brother', which shamefully resulted in suicide. Ai is dozens of decades away from Earth thanks to near-light-speed travel, all the friends and family he knew on earth dead. The only place the two of them feel at peace is on the Ice, that lethal, bleak, unpeopled, beautiful landscape across which they journey together.
- Yin and yang: The title, and the poem that comes from it, express the recurring Daoist theme of polarised forces that are equivalent and held in balance, eternally generating and containing each other. We see this in the continually fluid masculinity and femininity of the Gethenians; Ai and Estraven connecting as exiles and aliens who each find familiarity and resonance within the other; the myriad similarities and differences between Karhide and Orgoreyn, Gethen and the Ekumen. The clarity and ignorance, passivity and strength of the Handdarata. The brutality and beauty of Gethen; the violence and generosity of its people. The contrasting, complementary, mutually supportive strengths and characteristics of Ai and Estraven that enable them to undertake an impossible polar journey together. Aside from these multiple layers of contrast and echo there's the literal theme of light and darkness: the intolerable brightness of the polar winter, the Unshadow weather where diffuse snowfall in bright conditions removes all shadow and makes it impossible to see; the creation myth that holds that the universe began in brightness and will end in darkness.
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.
As a read, I found this book a bit hard to get into, and it dragged in the middle section where Ai was in Orgoreyn, but once he gets kidnapped by the secret police the story takes off like a bullet, and the whole second half of the book is completely unputdownable. I liked the way that a lot of the narrative is told through insert chapters telling myths and stories of the planet that illuminate the unspoken aspects of the culture and backstories of the characters. The trek across the Ice is breathtaking, memorable, joyful, an extraordinary story and almost certainly the main reason this book is so well-loved.
The Big Twist on the last page, however, fucked me right off: there's meant to be this big Reveal that Estraven had a kid with their sibling Arek, who died, and Ai comes to that conclusion as soon as Estraven's dad introduces Sorve as "my son's son", but it's totally unclear how he gets there. Why not assume that Sorve is Arek's kid with another parent, or Estraven's kid with another parent? It was clear what the story was telling me, but in the moment of the reveal it just didn't show its working, and that annoyed me. It was only the earlier myth about the two 'brothers' that vow kemmer to each other resulting in tragedy, and all Estraven's hints about their sibling Arek, that helped it come together for me, but I still think the way Ai is shown to realise it makes no sense.
What I did like about the ending was the last line: Sorve's questions to Ai, which Ai has been longing to be asked all book: "Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars - the other men, the other lives?" Answering this question is what Le Guin is doing, her raison d'etre as an author. It's also a nice counterpoint to the "wrong" questions asked of the Foretellers, the "what will happen" type questions that reveal little, open themselves to unhelpful answers, and pave the way for self-fulfilling tragedy. This more open question, perhaps, is the right kind of question to ask.
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Date: 2024-10-29 09:54 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2024-10-30 08:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-29 08:19 pm (UTC)...I couldn't help thinking about how slugs mate, heh. Although I don't know whether they only mate once, or whether there are repeat opportunities.
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Date: 2024-10-30 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-30 07:18 pm (UTC)Also: gotta love David Attenborough narrating. And also, whoever did the sound effects for that segment did an incredible job. Same goes for the filmmakers!