Thought in response to Jo Walton's blog post on the Left Hand of Darkness and the ensuing discussion: To me the question at the center of Left Hand of Darkness was always, 'if you take away gender, what's left' – or as Le Guin herself put it it 'is gender necessary'. Which makes it a touch ironic that it has come to be seen as the prototypic book 'about' gender. In my course, a few years ago, on a history of Modern Europe, I was introduced to the concept of 'enclosure' as a societal strategy for managing disruptive elements – it seems to me that Le Guin practiced a kind of narrative enclosure of gender in LHD in her invention of kemmer, to free her to write about other things. What went out were aspects of the masculine, epitomized by warlike behavior, but also certain aspects of the feminine (a thought I must unpack further). What remained were politics, culture, creativity, imagination, love, vision and sacrifice, not even the complete list but already a grand lot.
To me, the thought at the centre of The Left Hand of Darkness was “What does it mean to be human?”
To the humans living on Gethen, they were so alone in the world: there were no other large mammals, and very few animals of any kind. There’s a skeleton on display in the Royal British Columbia Museum that I and several friends have seen; John Herbert says “It has five fingers! It has arms and legs! It looks like us!”
The people on Gethen have had so many human identifiers taken away from them — it is clear that they were PUT on that planet in the distant path, in isolation, and that they were MADE to be an ambisexual race. Whether or not this creation of the Gethen race was one of the sins in the long past of the human homeworld Hain, it was certainly one of the Hainish experiments.
They were made to be alone, a stripped-down form of humanity. When gender is not taken away, but is experienced in kemmer, given time apart from every day, how does that affect how people behave?
Remember the primary focus of the long-standing spiritual discipline on Gethen: the un-learning of preconceptions. A secondary focus of this discipline was the creation of a group of people to answer a question with the Weaver at the centre. Their purpose was to demonstrate the futility of knowing the answer to the wrong question.
LHD is not about gender.
It’s about being the human element in a cold, grand universe. As Stan Rogers wrote in his song “Northwest Passage” –tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage —