URSULA
K. LEGUIN'S LIFE AND WORK: AN INTERVIEW The writer and the woman.
Ursula K. LeGuin draws a sharp line between herself as a person, woman, wife and mother and herself as a writer. An introvert, she jealously keeps her private life to herself, shielding her family and her private self from the limelight.
In her entire body of stories and novels nothing is autobiographical. Her friends and family members will not find themselves in her books as is so often the case with fiction writers. Although the integration of polarities emerges as a central theme in her writing, it seems that hers is a sharply divided world between the private and the professional.
Her answer to my request for a telephone interview came in the form of a short letter, with a don't-call-me-I'll-call-you provision, ardently defending her telephone number as others defend their valuables.
Is this one reason why she writes science fiction, for the distancing effect that creates the maximum remoteness between LeGuin the writer and LeGuin the woman? "Is science fiction the best way to guard her privacy? "I don't want to write autobiographies," she said once. "I want to distance myself from my books. That's one of the reasons I write science fiction. I write about aliens."
Political activist.
So I was truly surprised to hear a warm and melodious voice over the telephone. She apologized for not calling the day before as agreed. I was happy she had not called then because on the previous day I had joined other writers in a demonstration for freedom of speech concerning the Salman Rushdie affair. "Oh, that's what we did here!" she exclaimed. (Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses had provoked Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to erder his assassination.)
Here was a glimpse of LeGuin the person, after all. It was typical of her, putting her writing aside and throwing herself into a social or political cause she believes in. In the 1960s she became involved in the peace demonstrations and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy and then George McGovern in their primaries. Her political activities in the peace movement led to a short novel, The Eye of the Heron, and to The Word for World Is Forest, and then to The Left Hand of Darkness, considered by many to be her best work.
No-war society.
Her voice was pleasant and relaxed as we talked about the genesis of her book. "It all started when I began to imagine a society without war, a people that does not think in terms of war. They have murders and forays but never wars. What kind of people would they be? I thought. Obviously, they'd be different from us. But in what way? That's how I came to the idea of an androgynous society. As one character says in the book, war is a displaced male-generalized activity, something that men do and women don't." War, as she defines it in her book, is "a vast Rape."
Why science fiction?
Still, the question of why a talented and versatile writer like herself has chosen science fiction, a genre considered by the mainstream literary world as marginal, is still there. One reason, as said before, is her need to distance herself and her private life from her subjects. But as with all else in Ursula LeGuin, the reasons for her writing science fiction are complex and many.
A journey inward.
At one time she explained that fantasy is the best medium to describe the journey inward to self-knowledge, because for her, the journey to other planets, to outer space, is a metaphor for the journey inward into the unconscious. This inner journey cannot be described in the language of rational everyday life, she said. Fantasy is the natural language for telling "the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul."
Childhood.
Perhaps the first reason for her writing can be traced to her childhood, growing up with parents who both were writers, scholars, and excellent story tellers. Born in Berkeley, California, on October 21, 1929, Ursula K. LeGuin was the youngest child of Theodora and Alfred Kroeber. Her mother, after earning her master's degree in clinical psychology, married, and three years later, with two babies, was widowed. Later she married Alfred Kroeber, and had another son and her youngest and only daughter, Ursula. When her own children were having their children, Theodora, now in her fifties, began to write, making a name for herself with the biography of the sole survivor of an Indian tribe wiped out by North Americans, Ishi in Two Worlds (1961).
Ursula's father, Alfred Kroeber, was an anthropologist who spoke several languages and was renowned for his work on the California Indians. Even before she could read, Ursula would listen to her father tell Indian legends and myths.
The making of a writer.
This home was an excellent greenhouse for nurturing a writer, and Ursula, from an early age, enjoyed the best training in psychology, anthropology, sociology, and writing. "I had an emotionally and psychologically and intellectually very rich and very serene childhood," she told me. "I loved where we lived. I had a large, warm family. It was a place where a small girl could grow and flourish like a flower in the garden."
As a child Ursula read everything she could get her hands on: myths, legends, fairy tales. Once, when she was about twelve, she picked up a book in the family's large library, and while reading it, she was struck by the realization that people were still making up stories and myths! It was a decisive moment. She had discovered her native country and her inner lands.
Beginning to write.
In fact, she had completed her first short story three years earlier, when she was only nine. It was about a man persecuted by elves. A year later she wrote her first science fiction story about time travel. She submitted it for publication but the story was rejected, and she did not try to publish her work again until the age of 19.
Reading
Instead, she plunged into reading, and there is no better apprenticeship for a writer than reading, She read mostly fiction, poetry, and science fiction, some of it trash, "because we liked trash." In her teens she stopped reading science fiction and did not read it for fifteen years, because it was too much about "hardware and soldiers"; instead, she turned to the classics.
Higher education.
She graduated from Radcliffe College with a major in French in 1951 and earned her master's degree in French and Italian from Columbia University in 1952. A year later she began to study for her <Ph.D>. and won a Fulbright grant to study in France.
Family life.
Crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, she met her future husband, Charles LeGuin, a professor of French history. Their marriage in Paris signaled the end of her doctoral studies and the beginning of a long and happy family life which later included two daughters and a son. In 1959 Charles was assigned to teach history at Portland State University and the family has lived in Portland, Oregon, ever since.
Rejected manuscripts.
Giving up her work on the doctorate allowed LeGuin more time to write. She kept writing and watching her drawers fill up with manuscripts and rejection slips. In ten years she had written, aside from poetry, five novels, some about a fantasy country in Central Europe named Orsinia, but none was accepted for publication. It became for her a matter of "publish or perish." Her fantasies did not fit any existing category, and if she wanted to publish she would have to find an acceptable form. She began to write science fiction.
Publication.
LeGuin admits that her "first efforts to write science fiction were motivated by a pretty distinct wish to get published." Not having much hard-core scientific knowledge she wrote "fairy tales decked out in space suits." It paid: she got them published. She was 32 when she managed to sell her first story, "April in Paris," to Fantastic magazine (1962). Her first science fiction novel to be published was Rocannon's World (1966). This signaled the beginning of a brilliant career that has produced science fiction stories and novels, children's and young adults' books, essays and poetry. "I have cut across so many boundaries that the critics don't know what to do with me," she laughs over the phone. "I write in so many categories."
Success.
Two more science fiction novels, Planet of Exile (1966) and City of Illusion (1967), followed almost immediately, but her real success came with the publication of A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) which won the prestigious Globe-Hornbook Award for Excellence. With the award came national recognition. Then, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and when her novel The Dispossessed (1974) appeared and also won the Hugo and Nebula, LeGuin became the first science fiction writer to have won both awards twice.
It would take too long to list all her books and stories and all the awards and prizes she has won. Just reaching her 60s, LeGuin no doubt will continue to add considerably to both lists.
Model feminist.
Many feminists have complained that Ursula LeGuin's characters are predominantly male, and even her Gethenians, the people on planet Winter, who are both men and women in one, appear to be basically male. However, her own life can serve as a model of the successful, modern, sophisticated, and liberated woman who has managed a brilliant career, successful marriage, and motherhood, without sacrificing any of them.
"When the kids were babies I wrote at night, from nine to eleven or as long as I could stay awake. Then, as they began school, I had the whole schoolday to work; I felt as if I grew wings. Now, I try to work in the morning, from about seven to two."
Partnership.
She could manage her writing because of the steady support of her husband. Theirs was a partnership with "mutual aid as its daily basis." They divided the work conventionally: she, the house, the kids, the cooking, the novels; he, the teaching, the bills, the car, the garden. Whe she needed help he gave it "without making it into a big favor"; when she wanted to complete a story, he would take the kids. "He never begrudged me the time I spent writing, or the blessing of my work." It is difficult for one person to do two full-time jobs but two people can do three full-time jobs, she said. "That's why I'm so strong on partnership. It can be a great thing."
No wonder that love, bonding, and intimate relationship take such a significant place in all her work! This is the one idea that overrides everything else in The Left Hand of Darkness. Moreover, in this book she carries the idea even further and maintains that true love between individuals must precede, and is the only basis for, national, international, or universal relations.
The male writer.
"Does your happy and fulfilled life refute the notion that a writer has to suffer in order to write?" I asked her. This made her burst out in peals of laughter. "I think that this notion seems to suit men wonderfully well. They love to smite their brow with their hand and say, 'Oh, how I suffer,' while some woman is actually doing all the work. I'm quite leery of this idea. I think writing is quite hard enough work without complaining about all the rest. I get impatient with Conrad or Flaubert who, while complaining, were actually being looked after very nicely. They were not really handling the complicated part of life that any woman has to handle if she has responsibilities for the household or of getting the meals. You know, as I watch women writers, I see them cope with it all along with their art, and we are talking here about real work, not psychological suffering."
The price of love.
LeGuin seems to have been blessed with a happy family life as a child and as an adult. Yet in her novels and essays she refers again and again to pain and suffering as a necessary price for happiness. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the moment Ai gains profound love he also loses it. Where had her experience of sorrow come from? I wondered.
Tragic sense of life.
There was silence at the other end of the line, and I wondered whether she was thinking the question over or looking for ways to avoid touching upon her private life. "I guess," she finally said, "one carries in oneself a tragic sense of life. If you believe, as I do, that the great tragedies, such as Sophocles' or Shakespeare's, were the truest things ever written, then you know that what is within our grasp is essentially tragic."
In The Left Hand of Darkness she wrote that the only certainty a person has is his mortality, the knowledge that he is going to die.
"Yes. No matter how lucky one can be, there is considerable suffering involved in being alive, in being human."
"There is a strong sense of inescapable tragedy in your book," I said.
"I agree. I realize that underneath everything I write there is this sense of the tragic. This is the way I'm made, how I see life. It doesn't mean I don't appreciate life. I see much of my writing, but mainly my poetry, as celebration and I like writing which is celebration."
We resumed talking about the genesis of the book. "A book like that," she said, "doesn't have any single beginning. As I mentioned before, first I had the idea of creating a society without war. This led me to the androgynous society. Then I had the characters. And as the characters began to interact I began to see the plot. I saw two people dragging a sledge across the ice."
"My favorite part in the book," I commented.
"Mine, too, "she said enthusiastically. "I had to do a great deal of work before I began writing. I had to figure out how an androgynous society actually works. Also, I had to do a good deal of reading about living in a very cold climate."
Winter.
"I never quite understood," I admitted, "how the bitter cold climate on Winter, which features so prominently in the book, is connected with the idea of androgyny?"
"I have no idea," came her clear answer. "One of those underground connections, I guess. I can probably explain it less well than a critic. I don't think it is particularly linked to the sexual issue. The link in my mind is to loneliness, Ai's loneliness for being one of his kind on the planet, and to Estraven's, because he has isolated himself. This is a story of extremely lonely people coming together, and the cold accentuates, and reflects their loneliness. Before I began writing I read Winter in Finland, which was very helpful. I wanted to know what one does when it's 30 below zero for a month!"
Preparation for the book.
"Also, I read what I could concerning the special sexuality of the people on the planet. I checked out human sexual physiology, but to tell you the truth, I didn't have the courage till after the book was printed, to take it to a doctor and ask: Is this plausible? It was our pediatrician. He read it and he gave it back to me, saying it's plausible but it's disgusting!" (She laughed merrily). "I thought it was charming. 'Yes, it did work,' he said, 'you did it pretty convincingly.'
"I also had to write the history of both countries on the planet Winter. It's not in the book, but it underlines it. How did the two countries get to where they are now? Why are they as they are?"
Stronger feminist.
"In your article 'Is Gender Necessary?' you write that The Left Hand of Darkness is not about gender but about betrayal and fidelity - "
"Have you seen the revised article?" she interrupted excitedly. "This is very important for me. I have a new book that just came out, Dancing at the Edge of the World, and in that you'll find a revised version. Nothing has been changed in the text, but notes and comments have been added, where I disagree violently with some of the things I myself have said there. I have become a much stronger feminist and my thinking is considerably clearer since I wrote the book, which was itself part of my becoming a feminist."
Several essays in Dancing at the Edge of the World present strong and clear feminist statements. In "Woman / Wilderness" LeGuin criticizes civilization for leaving out the experience of women as women, an experience unshared with men. "The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization," she wrote, excluded "the being of women." Another essay, "Prospects for Women in Writing" ends with a strong proclamation and a feminist commitment: "To keep women's words, women's works, alive and powerful - that's what I see as our job as writers and readers for the next fifteen years, and the next fifty."
A major flaw in The Left Hand of Darkness, as LeGuin herself came to admit and as many of her critics expressed, is as she says, "that the Gethenians seem like men, instead of men-women."
This flaw is mainly the result of her use of the masculine pronoun he. While LeGuin is very imaginative in her use of language-in inventing names and places and landscapes that do not exist-in this novel she has used a quite traditional grammatical structure which, in English, is strictly divided along masculine-feminine lines. Reluctant to invent a new pronoun to herald the new age of human beings, equal in life and in language (it would drive the reader mad, she claimed), she preferred to use the masculine pronoun, which, in many ways, negated the main idea in the book.
It is strange, even inexplicable, that even at times when she could have used the neuter "people" or "human being" or "person" or "child" or "youth," she stubbornly has used explicitly male words such as "man" and "son." Even the woman investigator in The Left Hand of Darkness admits that "the very use of the pronoun in my thoughts leads me continually to forget that the Karhider I am with is not a man, but a manwoman." And if the woman reporter who meets the Karhiders face to face prefers to call them "he" and not "she," one may conclude that as LeGuin presents them, they do resemble men. This greatly diminishes the overall impact of the original idea of a sexless society.
Parenthood.
It is interesting to note that the Gethenians, who can be both mother and father, feel closer to the children "of their flesh," those to whom they actually gave birth. Estraven writes to his son of the flesh but does not mention the other two children he has fathered. Likewise, King Argaven of Karhide, although he fathered seven children, is especially fervent about giving birth to a child of his flesh even at great risk to himself because of his age. Is LeGuin saying that the mother-child relationship is stronger than the father-child's?
Gender Redux.
LeGuin's recently revised article, "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" is her clear recognition of her flawed treatment of the gender in The Left Hand of Darkness. She tells me, "I wrote the original article in reaction against the kind of criticism that was bothering me very much because I was about to begin to agree with it; so I was quite defensive, and then my defenses broke down and I said, No, they are right. Estraven appears to be a man, I shouldn't have used the male pronoun. And then I revised the article."
About revisions.
"Have you ever considered revising The Left Hand of Darkness?" I asked her.
"I think that this would be almost impertinent. You have to let the whole work stand. You made a mistake, it's your mistake, then you go on and do better. I've had two opportunities to work on that. One is the short story directly related to The Left Hand of Darkness. I wrote it first then revised it for later publication."
The story she is talking about is "Winter's King," written about a year before The Left Hand of Darkness, and it concentrates on King Argavan of Karhide on Planet Gethen. In her first version of the story there is no mention of the ambisexual society. This idea came later and was incorporated in The Left Hand of Darkness. However, in response to the strong criticism of the use of male pronoun in the book, LeGuin revised "Winter's King," using the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians, while keeping the masculine titles such as King and Lord, to remind the reader of the ambiguity.
"The second opportunity I had was in the writing of the screenplay for The Left Hand of Darkness," she explained. "I've made up a pronoun. I referred to Gethenians not pregnant or in kemmer by the invented pronoun 'a' (pronounced "uh" [ ]) in the nominative case, 'a's' in the possessive case. I thought, 'Since it was to be used only for dialogues, you can do it without driving people mad.' You see, this is the main trouble with made-up pronouns, to read a whole novel with something in place of he or she is just not possible. Actually, they used to be the English genderless pronoun until the 17th or 18th century, when the grammarians declared the he was the generic, but it's quite arbitrary. In colloquial English we all still say, 'Anybody missing a notebook, will they stand up?' We say it all the time. But I couldn't refer to Estraven throughout the book as they. I did try to put in a made-up pronoun, but it leapt out of every sentence."
"Still, there are many times in the book that you wrote man or son, when you could easily have said people or children."
"Yes, over and over. There are many places I'd like to revise in that sense. I masculinized the book most unnecessarily. I agree with you. It gives me considerable pain now to see how easily I could have degendered it. But I feel a moral compunction about revising an old book."
"In this particular case, revision might well be a creative adventure," I suggested.
"It would be fun to try, I admit. The trouble is that the book has been in print ever since it was published; there has never been a time when it dropped out of print, when I could have done something about it."
Invented names.
"The name Ai, for the Envoy from Earth, carries triple meanings. But what about all the other invented names in the book?"
"No, they don't carry any meaning. They were picked purely for sound. Like a musical phrase."
"Except Argaven, maybe. I found him to be very aggravating."
She burst out laughing. "Oh, I never thought of it," she said in her sing-song voice." In Estraven people heard estrogen, which embarrasses me. Isn't that awful? Estraven is from Estre. So I thought, Estre-van, coming from Estre, what a pretty name, I liked the sound of it. It's purely aesthetic, my name making-up."
"Do you play music?"
"Well, not much, I played the recorder. But I've a musical daughter."
Critical response.
"I was surprised to find so few reviews of The Left Hand of Darkness, a book which had won two major science fiction awards, in the mainstream press. Does the press ignore science fiction now as much as it used to?"
"Very nearly. The newspapers, if they review science fiction at all, tend to put it in a little corner called sci-fi, you know. Since 1969, when the book appeared, the academics are paying much more attention to science fiction. And we do get articles, some highly intelligent, some very academic, but they too appear only in very specialized publications. But just ordinary newspapers, no; science fiction is still ghettoized pretty consistently.
"What has also changed is that since the early 70s, when the whole English curriculum was opening up, many science fiction courses are taught in schools. High school teachers have discovered that science fiction is a wonderful way to get high school kids to read and talk about what they have read. The Russians discovered it long before we did; they have been using science fiction as a teaching device for decades."
"Does it bother you," I asked her, "that you are categorized as a science-fiction writer and thus excluded from what is generally considered 'literature'?"
"This is a very complicated issue," she said. "I object very strongly to the genrefication of literature. There is an assumption that everything called genre is secondary. This is simply untrue. Are writers such as Marquez, Borges, or Calvino automatically second-rate because they aren't writing realistic literature or mainstream fiction?
"On the other hand, there is marketing. In order to get the books to the interested public, libraries and bookstores and publishers need categories. And there is another aspect. As a writer of a despised genre, you have a kind of freedom. You are not nagged by the academics and critics, you can do whatever you please. In some ways I do feel trapped when I'm called a science fiction writer, and in other ways I feel delighted. On the whole, I think that boundary lines are changing, although conservative people don't want to admit it."
"Any advice for a young science fiction writer?"
"Read, and read the best. One doesn't have to have scientific knowledge. My science background is pretty minimal, but I was brought up to have a healthy respect for science, for I was a daughter of a scientist. If I need to know anything for my story, I go to the library and read about it. I think that most science fiction writers work this way.
"Science fiction begins at the moment where science ends, and then you can go on and build on what is known. Therefore, science fiction is getting more and more difficult to write because science develops so fast that the science-fiction writer has difficulty coping with it. This is one reason why there is less and less technological science fiction written because technology has overtaken it. It's different if you use social science, as I do, because social science is very slow moving and the writer is much freer."
Is LeGuin romantic?
No doubt. If a political mission depends on a love relationship between two individuals, as is the case in The Left Hand of Darkness, LeGuin is certainly a romantic. We all know that this is not the way politics is done; that in reality human relationships are sacrificed for political goals. But as LeGuin writes in her introduction to the book, she deals with "what if," not with "what is." We are surrounded by "as is"; we need to speculate on alternatives that are rewarding and stimulating, even if they remain in the domain of "thought-experiment."
Themes In The Left Hand of Darkness
LeGuin's themes in The Left Hand of Darkness are many, complex, and interwoven.
The outer journey.
An Envoy from Earth is sent to a distant planet in order to convince its people to join the League of the Planets for the purpose of sharing communication, knowledge, and trade. His adventures, misunderstandings, dangers, final awareness, and his singular relationship with one person of the planet Gethen (also called Winter) comprise the plot of the book.
Most science fiction books feature journeys, usually from Earth to different planets. At first glance, LeGuin follows suit. But further reading reveals that her journey consists of other journeys.
Journey within a journey.
Ai's most important journey is not from planet Earth to planet Winter but his onerous and risky journey across the wastes of ice, together with Estraven, the native, the "Other." And this journey across the ice reflects another: Ai's true journey into himself. It is Ai's growing awareness of himself and of himself in relationship with the Other.
The outer and inner journeys.
Ai's outer journey parallels his inner journey. "The seat of the soul is there," said the German poet Novalis, "where the outer and the inner worlds meet." And the American anthropologist Joseph Campbell said "that the laws of outer space are within us, that outer space and inner space are therefore one and the same thing."
Journey as symbol.
The journey is one of literature's most prominent archetypal symbols, telling of man's journey through life. The journey, which is usually difficult and risky, is a learning experience, through which the hero-traveler searches for an answer to the meaning of life and to his own place in the world. By the end of the journey, the traveler gains maturity and self-awareness. It is a process of self-growth and self-discovery. One of the most famous journeys of antiquity, and one that has become a symbol for many others, in Homer's The Odyssey, in which Odysseus, triumphant after his conquest of Troy, travels for ten painful and arduous years to reach home, a metaphor for his soul and his anima.
Theme of love.
One can read LeGuin's book as an unusual love story, even as the ultimate romantic love story of the space age, Romeo and Juliet in a sophisticated, space-age version. The lovers are not from feuding families but from different planets. They are aliens, foreign to, and different from, each other in every possible way-mentally, culturally, and even physically-yet they find the way to mutual understanding and true love.
Impossible love.
In many ways, this is a tale of an impossible love, of love that transcends barriers and asserts itself in spite of its impossibility. The theme of love, mainly impossible-between brothers and between aliens-runs through the entire book, and underlies not only the Envoy's narrative but also the myths and legends of planet Winter.
The first impossible love is between brothers, specifically between Estraven and his brother Arek, that ends in the latter's suicide. The second impossible love is between two aliens, inhabitants of different worlds. This love too ends with death, possibly suicide. Is LeGuin's message that true love, even though unifying, is ultimately impossible and therefore tragic?
The self and the other.
The theme of the Self and the Other runs parallel with the theme of love, because only love can bridge the chasm between aliens and turn the Self and the Other into I and Thou.
The concept of the Self and Other is a complex one. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir maintains that it is in the human nature of people to treat those who do not belong to their group as "others." "Otherness," she writes, "is a fundamental category of human thought," and "as primordial as consciousness itself." Thus, people from out of town are "strangers," those from other countries are "foreigners," and people from other planets would be "aliens." Likewise, states de Beauvoir in her philosophical treatise about the condition of women, men treat women as the "Other."
Central theme.
The need to overcome this "otherness," to reach beyond it, to accept the Other wholeheartedly and to encompass the Other into the Self, is the central theme in The Left Hand of Darkness. Estraven and Ai are different from each other in every possible way. Although Estraven, the older, more experienced and educated of the two, has accepted Ai from the start, Ai, from Earth, has to go through an arduous process of education to be able to accept Estraven as a human being, as I and Thou.
I and Thou.
I and Thou is the central theme in Martin Buber's philosophical treatise of the same name (1925; 2nd ed. 1958). True relationships are possible, he maintains, only when they are based on I and Thou and not on I and It.
New definition of love.
In a way, LeGuin offers a new definition of love which does not call for the unification of the lovers, or for sexual consummation (an ironic comment on Freud's concept that sex is the basis of intimacy), but for total acceptance by each of the other person, with all his differences, as he is.
Gender.
To create a planet whose inhabitants are ambisexual, men and women in one, is LeGuin's most original invention. She has taken one of the most poignant contemporary issues, that of equality between men and women, to the very extreme: when men and women become completely equal they become the same, they become menwomen, people who possess the qualities of both male and female.
Androgyny.
The theme of androgyny (having the characteristics of both male and female) first appeared in ancient myths of both the East and the West as a symbol of completeness. Human life began as sexually undivided. In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes tells the fable of angelic, eight-limbed creatures who threatened the gods and as a punishment were severed into two halves. Since then, the two halves, which consist of men and women, are frantically looking for each other in order to regain their unity. The biblical story is similar: God created Adam, one complete human being, and only later He created woman from Adam's own flesh. This division into male and female is the root of sexuality and its consequence is the expulsion from Paradise.
The theme of androgyny, or hermaphroditism, as a symbol of wholeness can be found in many myths. For the Chinese it is the assimilation of yin and yang expressed in the figure of a holy woman; the Zuni Indians make their chief god, Awonawilona, a he-she being; the Greeks make the son of the gods Hermes and Aphrodite, Hermaphroditus, unite in his body the physical characteristics of both sexes; and Eros, the god of erotic love, was both male and female. Hence, androgyny is connected in myth as well as in the human mind with yearning for completeness, for a state of Paradise.
Modern science has proven that both men and women carry male and female hormones, that the fetus is first neuter and only later becomes either male or female.
Unisex.
Our contemporary society increasingly leans toward the unisex. Men and women not only wear similar clothes but are also encouraged to develop the qualities generally considered typical of the other sex: men to develop qualities such as gentleness, patience, love of peace, and the ability to nurture; and females to develop characteristics such as assertiveness and activeness.
Elimination of exploitation and war.
LeGuin's unisex eliminates what Simone de Beauvoir considers woman's inferior status and exploitation as the "second sex." The results are intriguing: the elimination of sexuality as a social factor results in the elimination of exploitation and of rape on the individual as well as on the national level (rape of the environment, of natural resources, etc.), and the complete elimination of war.
Balance and wholeness.
The implied message of The Left Hand of Darkness is that our lives would be greatly enriched if we, both men and women, were allowed to feel the entire range of human emotions and not be restricted to only some of them, the nature of which are dictated by tradition, prejudice, or misconception. In order to achieve peace and harmony in our personal life and in the world in general, we have to acknowledge and cultivate the female and male principles in each of us. LeGuin's manwoman idea is a metaphor for harmony, integration, and wholeness.
Balance and wholeness of the planet.
LeGuin takes her idea of harmony between the male and female principles onto a national level: her planet Gethen reflects the integration of, and the balance between, the only two nations on the planet.
The first, Karhide, is anarchic, based on the female principle. In the revision of her essay "Is Gender Necessary?" LeGuin explains that "anarchy has historically been identified as female. The domain alloted to women-'the family,' for example-is the area of order without coercion, rule by custom not by force." Karhide's society is decentralized, flexible, and circular. Diametrically opposite is Orgoreyn, based on the male principle. There, people create "structures of social power," make laws and break them. Their society is centralized, rigid, and linear.
On Gethen the two societies are in balance. The story begins when this balance is dangerously threatened.
Taoism: holistic view of the universe.
The Left Hand of Darkness embodies LeGuin's main belief, largely based on the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao (pronounced Dao), meaning "The Way." Since the 1960s, a decade known for its search for alternative ways of thinking and living, there has been a great interest in the West in Oriental philosophies such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism.
Taoism offers a holistic outlook of the way the universe works. "Tao is the course, the flow, the drift, or the process of nature," says Alan Watts in Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975). While in other cultures light opposes darkness, good opposes evil, life opposes death, each one struggling to eliminate the other, in the Tao both light and darkness, good and evil, positive and negative are essential for the continuation of life. Opposites are seen as the two edges of one and the same pole, as north and south: you cannot have the one without the other. The two poles of cosmic energy-yang, positive, active, male, and yin, negative, passive, female-are essential for harmonious balance.
Taoism and psychology.
Carl Jung explained Tao in the light of modern psychology: "If we take Tao as the method or conscious way by which to unite what is separated, we have probably come quite close to the psychological content of the concept." The value of Tao to modern psychology lies in its power to reconcile opposites on a higher level of consciousness, to reconcile in order to achieve a balanced way of living.
Taoism and The Left Hand of Darkness.
The entire story of The Left Hand of Darkness strives toward the establishment of harmony and wholeness on the personal, national, and cosmic levels. The book begins with the disruption of the balance between the two countries of planet Winter, which is threatened with the eruption of the first war in its history. The two protagonists, citizens of different planets, are widely apart. From that point on the story moves toward restoring the balance and harmony between the protagonists, between the two countries on Winter, and between Winter and the rest of the universe.