The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

I just finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness a couple of days ago and have found myself pondering it quite a bit (this could be because I've been stuck at home for the most part with an injury). Any book that leaves me thinking tends to wind up in my favorites list. This book in particular has me thinking in a slightly new way about subjects that have taken up much of my thinking time in the past, namely the concepts of duality, unity and wholeness.

In her introduction Le Guin states:
“ ...I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.”
That is exactly it. In this lie of a fictional world we find truth, truth in the form of questioning what we currently hold to be true.

On the world of Gethen the people have no permanent sex. They live in a state of neuter until the mating part of their cycle when they lean one way or the other with no predetermination or consistency. It is hard to imagine this state of being in our own world so set on the mutually exclusive nature of sex (though it is not the rule). But I find that by calling into question this particular dualism, Le Guin is also questioning dualism in general.

One of the main characters, Estraven, reflects that, “To be an atheist is to maintain God. His existence or his nonexistence, it amounts to much the same, on the plane of proof. Thus proof is a word not often used among the Handdarata, who have chosen not to treat God as a fact, subject either to proof or to belief: and they have broken the circle, and go free.” The Handdarata, a religious group on Gethen, escape the circle by not thinking in opposites, relieving themselves of duality, and therefore just being. We, humanity, are often caught up in dualistic thinking. And through this duality are caught.

We create duality through the idea of feminine and masculine, through love and hate, etc. But these opposites are only points on a gradation and there can never be something that is all one thing because there is always that relationship to the opposition. Opposites cannot exist without each other. It is impossible to know what one thing is without having another thing to contrast with. Sanity cannot exist without insanity. Insanity cannot exist without sanity. The two coexist to the point that they are the same thing, to the point that neither exists because there is nothing to compare them to.

Le Guin shows us, as she calls it, a “thought-experiment” in which we can a imagine moving away from dualism and towards unity and wholeness, not only through the gender-less(full) beings of her made up world, but also through the relationship and experiences of unlikely leading pair, both alien to each other, but still able to love. “But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us.”

Perhaps the experiment is to find unity and wholeness not through, completely denying our tendency towards duality (like the Handarrata of the book), but to accept everything we see as opposites as merely opposite sides of the same thing. Or beyond that opposites as the essence of being of each other. Light is “the left hand of darkness.”

Le Guin also says in her introduction:
“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we are done with it, we may find-if it's a good novel-that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”
I find Le Guin to be genius in her writing precisely because her writing accomplishes this so well. Though I may not be able to say very well how this book as change and developed my way of thinking about the world, it has most definitely made an impression. I will continue to ponder the words while I place this book back on my shelf among my favorites.