More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Ursula Le Guin is (‘is’ because her best work will long outlast her death) a thought-experimenter.
Isaiah Floyd liked this
In The Left Hand of Darkness it is, “What if gender was not fixed but serially mutable?”
Alex fierro rick had you CLOCKED
Isaiah Floyd liked this
(This physiology gives rise to the novel’s most memorable line, ‘The king was pregnant.’)
Isaiah Floyd liked this
Is gender at the core of the self, or is there a deep-down ‘Gethenian layer’ where we, too, are neither male nor female?
Le Guin created her worlds with an anthropologist’s eye not only for language, but for rituals, myths and influence of geography on culture.
but the true antagonists of The Left Hand of Darkness are very human bigotry, politicking and the harshness of the Gethenian climate.
It must be rough when clever allegories and metaphors become straighr up predictions. First anais mitchell now this
Isaiah Floyd liked this
What heroism he possesses is about surviving failure and failing better.
A lesser chemist of the heart would emphasise the common ground of their joint humanity. Le Guin recognises that it’s the difference that is the point; that no bridge between two people – no friendship, no love – can exist without difference.
There is no difficulty or achievement in understanding someone who is already very like you.
Le Guin’s 1960s analyses of bigotry, xenophobia and dog-whistle politics have not dated one whit. I think they never shall.
Correct
Isaiah Floyd liked this
‘The king was pregnant’.
Heinlein renders one corridor strange: Le Guin reconfigures society.
TALK THAT TALK
Which is not to suggest that it is ‘only’ about gender: it’s a poised and sensitive love story of social control, understanding and misunderstanding, faithfulness and betrayal.
Im actually so excited for this
there is in the beautiful conceit of the ‘ansible’, a device allowing instantaneous communication across impossible distances, a utopian kernel.
HOLY COW A CONCEIT ?!
All its aspects, in Le Guin’s words, ‘are involved with its sex/gender aspects quite inextricably’.
Because in these pages kings become pregnant.
Havent heard that one before
like Estraven, his closest companion, who accompanies him on an arduous journey.
Ok samwise and frodo we all know what happened
‘That novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, is the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking.’
The book remains radical and affecting – and that is if we read the Gethenians now, half a century on from their birth, in an era shaped by decades of feminist struggle, gay politics, trans voices, militant gender trouble, of growing insistence on the fluidity and performance of sexuality.
The book. Remains. Radical.
‘They wanted me to have been braver. I guess I wish I had been.’
On rethinking, Le Guin accepts various feminist criticisms, allowing that ‘women were justified in asking more courage of me’, that the exploration of Gethenian homosexuality hadn’t occurred to her.
Divas it was 1969 cut her some slack maybe
To raise questions, to agree or even to disagree with the text or its commentary is to take part in a conversation that Le Guin herself has invited. It is to love the book.
A pregnant king.
Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.
Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honoured in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried).
HA
It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
Odysseus would be a wonderful novelist
In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane – bonkers.
Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?
I talk about the gods; I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.
Sick way to close an intro
But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.
I remark to the person on my left, “It’s hot. It’s really hot.” The person on my left—a stocky dark Karhider with sleek and heavy hair, wearing a heavy overtunic of green leather worked with gold, and a heavy white shirt, and heavy breeches, and a neck-chain of heavy silver links a hand broad—this person, sweating heavily, replies, “So it is.”
Read the room dude
watching the king-bee work
King bee i love
They are anything but a phlegmatic people, yet they are obdurate, they are pertinacious, they finish plastering joints.
I love the snarkiness + witty tone
I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own.
Damning his effeminate deviousness,
Even in a bisexual society the politician is very often something less than an integral man.
Preach
Orgoreyn.
Keep reading this as ogygia
