Review: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
To try and write about The Left Hand of Darkness is a paralyzing experience: There are so many possible places to begin, so many meaningful threads you could pull. What's so remarkable about the novel, at least to me, is the way its many layers -- the exploration of sex and gender, of friendship, of self and other, of political nationalism -- fit together. It's hard to disentangle the web because the novel's many preoccupations fold into each other so seamlessly.
I was struck, on my most recent reread for a book club, by the way in which the novel puts storytelling itself under scrutiny. Winter is a society in which oral storytelling is clearly central, and LHOD's secondary narrative, told through the fables and "hearth-tales" that our narrator and protagonist gathers, isn't just "world-building." It's more like a constant reminder that Genly Ai's version of events -- as he warns us on the very first page of the book -- is not necessarily HIS story, even though he's been shoved into the role as narrator.
The myths and legends woven into the main narrative don't have an author. They are communal, anonymous and, in that way, alien to modern societies like ours that put so much emphasis on authorship, on ownership of stories. They are very unlike a novel, yet here they are, archived within one.
LOHD is metafictional but not in a clumsy or obnoxious way. It does, I think, want us to consider the implications of trying to pin down and classify and dissect the Gethenian mythology in the way that Genly, as an envoy of the Ekumen, inevitably does. It's not a coincidence that the other major paratext besides the fables is a report on the physiology and sociology of the Gethenians from an outsider's perspective. We're trained to think of that kind of scientific text as authoritative. But in this context, it's just another type of story -- and not necessarily more "accurate" than the Gethenian mythology.
Anyway in conclusion the book is a fucking banger and I see something new every time I re-read it.
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