On Violence, Utopia, Ethics and Sex:

It is by losing the egocentric life that we save the hitherto latent and undiscovered life which, in the spiritual part of our being, we share with the divine Ground. This new-found life is "more abundant" than the other, and of a different and higher kind. Its possession is liberation into the eternal, and liberation is beatitude. Necessarily so; for the Brahman, who is one with the Atman, is not only Being and Knowledge, but also Bliss, and after Love and Peace, the final fruit of the spirit is Joy. Mortification is painful, but that pain is one of the pre-conditions of blessedness. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (106; ch. 6)

From 1969 through 1985, Ursula K. Le Guin published several important works that deal significantly with large-scale violence: "Winter's King" (1969), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Word for World Is Forest (1972), The Eye of the Heron (1978), Stone Telling's story in Always Coming Home (1985), and, to a lesser extent, The Dispossessed (1974). For one of the bases of violence, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) is useful, as is "Nine Lives" (1969). And "The New Atlantis" (1975) and Tehanu (1990) are important for smaller-scale violence and for Le Guin's rethinking the question in more feminist terms. In this chapter, I wish to look at Le Guin's extended investigation of the roots of war and lesser forms of highly organized mass murder dystopian topics; and, true to Le Guin's frequent use of comparison and contrast, I'll examine also Le Guin on the opposite of dystopia ("bad place"), eutopia (a "good place").

Violence was a pressing topic in the United States of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Putting the matter crudely, human beings in general and Americans in particular were running out of excuses. Most of us, most of the time are peaceful enough, but a fair number of Americans every generation or so marched off to kill large numbers of other human beings, ordinarily to the applause of the fellow citizens of the killers.

Why?

Utopia was not a hot topic through the 1960s. The Right and Center in the American-led West have been militantly antiutopian for much of the twentieth century, and, as one radical in the late 1960s put it, the New Left was also very reluctant to talk about what things would be like the morning after the Revolution: "The two great utopians of the twentieth century were Hitler and Stalin ... ."¹ "Second wave" feminism seems to have changed that; whatever the cause, the early 1970s on have been a major period of utopian writing, especially works that include feminist utopias, often contrasted with masculinist dystopias: for notable examples, Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" (1972) and The Female Man (1975), Suzy McKee Charnas's "diptych" Walk to the End of the World (1974, dystopia) and Motherlines (1978, utopia), Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Samuel R. Delany's Triton (1976). ² Triton, subtitled "A Heterotopia," is most directly a response to Le Guin's The Dispossessed, "An Ambiguous Utopia," but all these works, and others, may be usefully seen, or heard, in a multi-voiced dialog occasionally, an argument. I'll suggest here only the obvious point that Le Guin until recently generally offered the liberal (feminist) ideal of integration, symbolized in the androgyne (and Daoist Yin-Yang), while Russ and Charnas preferred thought experiments using (and therefore making thinkable) more radical, separatist, women-only utopias.

SHORT STORIES: "Nine Lives" (1969 [again briefly]), "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971 [first pass]), "Winter's King" (1969 [first pass])," "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973)

"Nine Lives" has no human-against-human violence, nor does it analyze any societies, either utopian or dystopian. But "Nine Lives" makes one of Le Guin's most explicit statements about evolution and deals very elegantly with the problem of the stranger and our dread at meeting the stranger. Both points are important.

In Le Guin's future history, the near future of us Terrans is (generally) not good: it is a time of ecological disaster, of famine, plague. In "Nine Lives," the worst is famine:

Following Peter Kropotkin in Mutual Aid (1902) and putting the matter in more orthodox Darwinist terms, it is the fit who survive (by definition); and, in times of stress, the fittest social animals are those who are most sociable, the most cooperative as we civilized people are pleased to flatter ourselves, the most civilized (P. E. Smith 80-83; Bittner, Approaches 149 n. 49). In Le Guin's future worlds, White Americans and our descendants are rarely among the survivors. As a culture, the great White West has usually prized competitiveness over cooperation; when under grave pressure, we aren't in the habit of queuing up. In truly lean times, then, we are far less likely to survive than peoples who practice solidarity and mutual aid.^{[ 3]}

The question of the stranger is crucial for the problem of violence. For human violence, there must be an "I" and an "Other" an Other the "I" sees as both similar enough to be a competitor and different enough to be a threat. One temptation for utopia is to reduce the likelihood for violence between people by radically reducing differences: "There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger" any stranger (WTQ 121). A false utopian possibility, then, is to eliminate strangers. Within itself the John Chow tenclone accomplishes exactly that. The ideal of the melting-pot has been realized in the ten genetically identical and phenotypically very similar men and women of the self-sufficient clone: "Always to be answered when you spoke; never to be in pain alone. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.... That hard old problem was solved. The neighbor was the self: the love was perfect" (126).^{[ 4]}

Pugh's thinking here of the teaching on love of neighbor in the Holiness Code (Leviticus 19.18), quoted with approval by Jesus (Matthew 13.39). It is unfortunate that Jesus did not quote further: "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt . . ." (19.33-34). An even harder assignment than love of neighbor, someone like you: an injunction to love someone different. In any case, the clone eliminates differences, within the clone; and it eliminates active hostility toward those outside the clone: a self-sufficient entity can usually just ignore outsiders (WTQ 129-30).

If "Nine Lives" were a philosophical essay, Le Guin would have to justify why cloning "is all wrong" beyond the practical problem of a higher fatality rate if they all tend to do the same wrong thing (142, 134-36) and the social utility problem cited in Martin's rhetorical question, "What are a lot of duplicate geniuses going to do for us when they don't even know we exist?" (142). "Nine Lives" is not a philosophical essay, and homogenized humanity comes across as wrong because lack of difference eliminates sympathy (130), love (146-47), and manners (142). Manners are not more important than love but they are important. A. L. Kroeber comments on the Luiseño specifically, and (California) Indians more generally: "The Indian, beyond taboos and cult observances, centers his attention on the trivial but unremitting factors of personal intercourse;{sic} affability, liberality, restraining of anger and jealousy, politeness. He . . . sets up an open, even, unruffled, slow, and pleasant existence as his ideal. He preaches a code of manners rather than morals. He thinks of character, of its expression in the innumerable but little relations of daily life, not of right or wrong in our sense. It is significant that these words do not exist in his language" (Handbook 684; ch. 47). A. L. Kroeber's daughter, rejecting absolutes of "right" and "wrong," agrees (see Chuang Tzu ch. 23 [Giles 229]). .

For Le Guin circa 1969, the simplest model for a utopian community is not the tenclone but Martin, Pugh, and Kaph as we last see them: lonely individuals, whose pain in isolation is their motivation to reach out to one another, to attempt, in the darkness, human touch (147).

*

"Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971) takes a situation similar to that of "Nine Lives" a small group on an isolated, threatening planet but keeps in general shape close to old SF formulas. ⁵ Instead of a tenclone, we have ten literally mad scientists on a planet two lightcenturies beyond human exploration (WTQ 174), one where "All lifeforms were photosynthesizing or saprophagus, living off light or death, not off life. Plants: infinite plants . . ." (175). And then the isolated humans are threatened by something, something large and dangerous, where there are no intelligent creatures, no dangerous animals, nothing with voluntary movement no possible threats! A familiar enough SF premise, even one presented with some psychological sophistication in Forbidden Planet (1956), a film whose Monster from the Id lurks in the speculations about "psychic projections" and "Dark Egos" by "Vasters" mad explorers (182). The movement of the plot of "VEMS" identifies the threat as the planet's forest, one vast semi-sentient. The forest has sensed the fear and aggression of the humans and projected it back upon them, frightening them more and contributing to a vicious cycle. The forest is not conquered in the story but contacted by the human explorers' "Sensor," Osden, the hypersensitive empath of the group.

"'As Jean-Paul Sartre has said in his lovable way, 'Hell is other people'" ("A Trip to the Head," WTQ 160) and this statement is literally true for Osden, who has no "skin," so to speak, to keep other people out, so "touch" becomes for him a violation. Osden is most sensitive to the fear of his fellow humans, and to that of the forest. Osden resolves his own problems and those of the group, when he takes "the fear into himself, and, accepting, had transcended it. He had given up his self to the alien," to the forest, "an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil. He had learned the love of the Other, and thereby had been given his whole self" which "is not the vocabulary of reason" but is the language of the Perennial Philosophy, and is the resolution of this story (WTQ 199).

As a teaching story, "Vaster than Empires" makes explicit some important Le Guinian points on the human Shadow, Being, macho, aggression, and the one, the desperately egocentric individual man.

"What one fears," the Narrator tells us, "is alien. . . . not one of us. The evil is not in me!" (187). In "Vaster than Empires" the forest is radically alien, but it is not evil or a murderer. The forest is, on the contrary, associated symbolically with connectedness and identified with the ground of all connections. The forest is described as "Presence without mind. Awareness of being, without object or subject. Nirvana" (191) and explicitly called "the forest of being" (198). Indeed, what initially terrifies the forest is recognizing the mere existence of the humans: in its wholeness, the forest had never before encountered an Other. The forest is not conquered by the humans and hardly could be; the relatively happy resolution of the story comes in contacting, getting in touch with, the forest. Like City of Illusions, "Vaster than Empires" takes a standard sort of tale and retells it with radically different values, climaxing in a different idea of victory than defeating the Other; as in A Wizard of Earthsea, such victory as is possible comes not from conquering the apparent enemy, but the "mortification" of embracing the enemy.

This is a very unmacho idea, supported by some aspects of "Vaster than Empires." The Surveyors who go out exploring "Where no man has gone before" (in the classic Star Trek formulation) are "escapists, misfits" and "nuts" (WTQ 167), described early in the story as "wriggling through the coupling tube one by one like apprehensive spermatozoa trying to fertilize the universe" (167-68). So much for the Daniel Boone tradition and the central SF ideal of expansion into the Galaxy and for the image of the phallic rocket ship penetrating and impregnating space! (As in, for a highly relevant example, Stanley Kubrick's film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.) ⁶ On a more personal level, Osden tells one of his women colleagues that his "choice is to be hated or to be despised. Not being a woman or a coward, I prefer to be hated." Osden is at his sickest here, and in case we especially a male "we" miss that point, Le Guin goes on to undermine Osden by having him immediately go on to deny his humanity: "But I am not a man. . . . There are all of you. And there is myself. I am one" (177-78). ⁷

Osden has set up false oppositions, a false dilemma, and a false association of "woman" or the feminine with cowardice or weakness. He has identified himself against the group as a God-like One. He has yet to live the paradox of victory in "unreserved surrender" (WTQ 199), "losing the egocentric life." I will discuss the nature of that surrender in the discussion of "Vaster" in its context in Buffalo Gals. Here I wish to caution readers that Le Guin's self-description as an "unconsistent Taoist and . . . consistent unChristian" is somewhat modest; she is more consistent than most of us. ⁸ So we should be careful not to think of Osden's surrender as Christ-like sacrifice and Christian paradoxical triumph over an adversary. Osden is not imitating Christ, and he is not sacrificing himself; Le Guin does not approve of sacrifices in any religion, or self-sacrifice as an ideal. ⁹ Osden fulfills himself by finding in solitude relationship with the forest: with Nature, Being, the Dao.¹⁰ "Vaster than Empires" is not a story of Christ-like love, nor is it one of the analyses of the late 1960s and early 1970s that would find the solution to all problems in better communication or more sensitivity. Osden's problem is that he is too sensitive. The standard-issue human being is far from "a well of loving-kindness" (177), and "Vaster than Empires" makes even clearer than "Nine Lives" that some aggressiveness is a standard part of human interaction. Mannon, "the Soft Scientist," tries to explain Osden's obnoxiousness:

This speech gives us an approximate statement of Le Guin's position that aggressivity (as at least mild hostility to strangers) is a normal human trait: aggressivity the capacity for anger, even violent rage is part of the human repertoire. As with any trait, discounting for a moment free will, different people will be for aggressivity to greater and lesser degrees; as with any trait, aggressivity will be expressed in ways determined by the environment, most specifically for humans always and necessarily our cultures. The question then becomes, What are we going to do about it? What in human societies increases the probability of actual violence, especially large-scale violence? Can we build better and saner societies if not utopias, where violence is rare and war unknown?

*

Again, one way to such a utopia would be to eliminate the biological and cultural bases for violence: the differences that make people strangers to one another, the masculinity that provides the anatomy, hormone systems, and indoctrination that support macho violence. We know from The Lathe of Heaven that Le Guin dislikes a grey world without racial problems because it is without racial differences, but race is a minor matter genetically and by itself determines nothing culturally; there are other ways in which humanity could be homogenized. In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), and Le Guin's writing about it, Le Guin deals at length with the more ancient question of gender. What if that were eliminated? Before getting to the complexities of Left Hand, however, it will be well to look briefly at "Winter's King," written, Le Guin says a year before she began The Left Hand of Darkness but published the same year, and then revised for The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975) to change the pronouns for the Gethenians to the feminine, while keeping masculine titles, as one way to suggest their androgyny (WTQ 85). I will discuss "Winter's King" more completely in the context of Le Guin's three visits to the Karhidish city of Rer.

"Winter's King" is a Hainish story, set far into the future, two generations after The Left Hand of Darkness, which is itself set on the planet Gethen ("Winter"), ca. 4780 CE and long after the League of All Worlds has evolved into the Ekumen ("household") of Known worlds. ¹¹ The narrative's plot involves a political plot. King Argaven XVII of Karhide is kidnapped and brainwashed: "An induced paranoia. You might well have become a remarkably vicious ruler . . . . Not overnight, of course. . . . It would have taken several years for you to become a real tyrant . . ." (WTQ 100). To avoid this plot, Argaven leaves Gethen and goes to the Ekumenical world of Ollul and is cured of her incipient paranoia and then goes to school. Argaven's child, Emran, becomes king, and a bad one. When Argaven returns to Karhide, she comes to lead the rebellion against her child and regains her throne.

Three points here.

First, Argaven returning from her kidnapping has "Abdication, suicide, or escape" as "the only acts of consequences" she could choose of her own free will. Argaven's physician on Hain notes that her kidnapper's "counted on your moral veto on suicide" a major taboo on Gethen "and your Council's vote [veto] on abdication. But being possessed by ambition themselves, they forgot the possibility of abnegation, and left one door open for you" (101). That is, Argaven can renounce her rights to kingship and does (abnegation) and goes to Ollul for treatment as simple "Mr Harge." Such renunciation of egotistical demands for status and power is beyond the mindset of people possessed by ambition, by the desire for power, and it is the right answer for Argaven. She turns her back on kingship and walks away from dominion, and this path leads her to true power and proper usefulness to her people (103).

The second point is in a dialog between King Argaven and Mr. Axt, the Mobile of the Ekumen on Winter. Axt tells Argaven of ancient Hainish seeding of the galaxy with humans, and alludes to loss of contact among the worlds during the Age of the Enemy. Argaven asks, "The dream of the Ekumen, then, is to restore that truly ancient commonalty; to regather all that peoples of all the worlds at one hearth?" Axt agrees, saying, "To weave some harmony among them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives and bodies on them together they would make a splendid harmony." Young Argaven replies, mostly correctly, "No harmony endures"; Axt responds, "None has ever been achieved . . . . The pleasure is in trying" (97).

In 1960s sociological language, Le Guin's ideal is integration, not assimilation. She wants to bring the (human) family together in our "commonalty," not in some sort of homogeneous unity. She wants "a splendid harmony" a figure of speech from music, where harmony requires at least two different notes.

And she's willing to allow some dissonance. Less figuratively, there is violence among the humans on Gethen, much of it in this story lead by Le Guin's hero, Winter's true King; and this violence is no less in the version of the story Le Guin revised to make the Gethenians androgynous. People will fight to put down a tyrant, especially an incompetent tyrant; people will follow Argaven against Emran; under enough political pressure, a mother will pursue the child of her body even to the child's dishonorable death (WTQ 107-08). Putting the matter more positively, "when our sense of justice is offended," as Hannah Arendt argued in On Violence (1969, 1970), we may react with rage and with violence. Such violence "is neither beastly nor irrational" but possibly legitimate when we are "confronted with outrageous events or conditions," when violence "is the only way to set the scales of justice right again" (Arendt 63, 64). Such violence is simply never good.

*

Gethen during the struggle between Argaven XVII and Emran is far from utopia; Omelas is a utopia: a place of almost perfect peace, of high art and science, profound kindness, natural religion (and no clergy), a place without guilt, of pleasure, happiness, joy ("The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," 1973, WTQ 252-55). Having established this beautiful place, at the Festival of Summer no less, Le Guin's Narrator asks us, "Do you believe? do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing" (265) and she describes the cost of this utopia: the scapegoat, one child kept miserable in a locked room. "It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually." We are never told how the child's misery allows the happiness of Omelas how its mortification and pain allows Omelas's joy but we are told explicitly that this is the case. All the people of Omelas "understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery" (257). Now that the Narrator has made Omelas more credible, she has only "one more thing to tell, and this is quite incredible." Sometimes adolescents who go to see the child, sometimes older adults, "go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas . . . . into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas" (259).

This "psychomyth" (WTQ 251) is among my favorite short stories and has been immensely popular among anthologists and critics, and that may represent a failure of faith by many of us: a failure to believe in the possibility of "the city of happiness," our insistence that there must be a catch somewhere. Indeed, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (or free pizza delivery, to bring the saying up to date) but there are free gifts, starting with the universe and one's life, and large-scale human happiness, pretty-good societies, may be possible. ¹² However readers resolve the question of eutopia, it is clear Le Guin intends for us to consider seriously the philosophical question the story raises in the manner she raises it, as the parenthetical description under the title puts it, "Variations on a theme by William James." ¹³

In The Wind's Twelve Quarters headnote, Le Guin quotes from James's "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," most relevantly James's idea that James and his readers would find it "hideous" if utopian happiness for millions were achieved "on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment" (251). Le Guin follows James in reducing to its most radical case the Utilitarian doctrine of "The greatest good for the greatest number," and she attacks the "hard-headed" notion that in a nasty world one must sometimes use evil means to achieve good or, to multiply slogans: "The end justifies" or "will justify" "the means."

Le Guin suggests for etymologies for "Omelas," initially, "Salem, O[regon]," read backwards, but also "O melas," and "Homme hélas" ("Man, alas!"; WTQ 252). I will add to the possibilities, French homme plus Latin Hellas, for "man of Greece," and relate the name to the "Rationalist" part of the reference in The Lathe of Heaven (1971), to the "Judaeo-Christian-Rationalist West." Dr. Haber, after all, was, in that novel "a benevolent man. He wanted to make the world better for humanity" (82-83), which means, ideally, finding an Archimedean point outside the world from which to see the world objectively and analytically, and push it around rationally: giving it a shove toward an abstract, transcendent Good, finally to utopia (cf. "The New Atlantis" 88).

If its basic rationalism is one possible problem with Omelas, another is that the Omelites, however much they are "mature, intelligent, passionate adults" (254) might be gravely mistaken or, as Rebecca Adams suggests, a little crazy (41). Either way, we can help privilege Those Who Walk Away from Omelas by noting Le Guin's counting Odo among them (WTQ 260), and by associating them with a line of Le Guin's people who, if they could not be part of the solution where they were, at least walked away and ceased being part of the problem, or, if very lucky, went to better places to be: Lif and the widow and child in "Things," Luz in The Eye of the Heron, and Eve in "She Unnames Them" plus, in different ways, Leese Webster (the exiled, dispossessed spider) and "blank" in "A Trip to the Head." If will and reason have created a transcendent project in Omelas, then it might be well to leave Omelas. If some "transcendental power" has dictated the "sacrificial 'terms'" shown in the story (Adams 41), then it would be even more imperative to leave Omelas: Le Guin rejects the "Judaeo-Christian" and all similar transcendental powers.

I'll suggest that this far, if no further, we should put "The Ones Who Walk Away" in the tradition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and also Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (1729): More's Utopia should shame Europeans by showing how much more ethical Utopians are with only reason than Christian Europeans with both reason and revelation (J. H. Hexter, More's Utopia, 1952). The final turn of "A Modest Proposal" shows us that the Projector is a monster who would sell human baby meat to solve Ireland's economic problems and that he is more ethical than his rich Irish and English readers. Even so, we may, and should, identify with those who walk away from Omelas until we're "ambushed" by the thought that those who stay in Omelas are better people than Le Guin's generally privileged readers. ¹⁴ The Omelites live well from the suffering of only one child, and they are all conscious of the child's suffering (WTQ 257). The economy that sustains most of Western prosperity is based on the exploitation of many more, and those who suffer are virtually invisible to the privileged (see Le Guin's "Non-Euclidian View" 83-84).

Exploitation is one form of and one reason why there is violence among real-world humans, although in Omelas violence is limited to the victimization of one child. However mad the bargain of the Omelites, within the terms of the bargain, this is rational victimization, if we note that "rational" and "reason" come from ratio, "reckoning," and a simple calculation might indicate that the good of very many could outweigh the good of the one (to paraphrase a central thematic concern of the Star Trek movies). ¹⁵ Among those who believe in immortal souls of infinite value, the salvation of one such could outweigh all of human life. Would the goal of utopia, if achieved, justify violence against even one child? "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," in a rigorously constructed teaching story, says it would not.

Still, the dissidents on the road from Omelas exiles, émigrés do not try to overthrow the "city of happiness." They do not try to rescue the child. They do not resort to violence, perhaps because they know the anarchist teaching "that the means you use to attain your object soon themselves become your object" (Berkman 113) or "The means justify the end." It's unclear just what the Omelite exiles are going toward, although they "seem to know where they are going" (259). What is clear is that they reject the terms of Omelas's bargain: violence as a mysterious but rational price for utopia, even violence against one, the idea that good intentions can justify evil actions. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Therem Harth rem ir Estraven writes, "To oppose something is to maintain it" and quotes the saying of a foreign people s/he is now among that "all roads lead to Mishnory." S/he continues, ". . . if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road" I assume even while on the road away from Mishnory or away from Omelas. We will see below more of the possibilities of minimally turning and walking away from evil, and the possibility of, perhaps, even finding a new road, to "go somewhere else, and break the circle" and go free (LHD 153; ch. 11). ¹⁶

*

Let's begin with some jargon useful for discussing science fiction: "foregrounding the background" and "textualizing the subtext." In "realistic," down-to-Earth stories ("mundane fiction," in Samuel R. Delany's formulation), our main interest is in the characters and what they do; the setting is background. In what Northrop Frye called the modes of Romance and Satire, the characters and their doings must compete for our interest with the settings. So, in the modes where we usually find SF and emphatically in utopias and dystopias what is background in Comedy and Tragedy, the mere settings of narratives, may get a good deal of attention, be drawn, figuratively, into the foreground. Add to this the idea of the subtext of a play as all the things the director and actors have to know that the playwright doesn't tell us. For a classic instance, Shakespeare's script tells us nothing about Hamlet and Ophelia's sex life, if any; the actors playing Hamlet and Ophelia, however, must know the subtextual details; whether or not they have been physically intimate is important for how they react to one another. Similarly, SF authors need to know a great deal about the worlds they create that they don't have to tell us directly: history, geography, myths, customs all the things we usually teach aspiring writers to sneak in and not present in big, undigested, expository lumps.

Not as much as in Always Coming Home (1985; a downright future ethnography), but still to a great extent, The Left Hand of Darkness foregrounds the background and textualizes subtexts, expanding a simple plot to twenty chapters and an appendix by insisting that we look very closely at the world Le Guin has made and which Genly Ai presents to us in his "Report."

The plot falls into three parts correlating with the story's three main settings, followed by a brief conclusion. In the beginning of the story, Genly Ai is in Erhenrang, the capital of Karhide, a country on the planet Gethen, nicknamed Winter because it is at the cold end of the range in which human societies can survive. Ai's status is First Mobile of the Ekumen ("Household," League) of Known Worlds, and his mission is to invite the Gethenians to enter the Ekumen, re-establishing contact with the other known human species of the Galaxy. Ai believes he is about to have an audience with King Argaven XV, ruler of Karhide, to present the case. The audience has been arranged by Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, prime minister to Argaven and a supporter of Ai's mission. Ai has dinner with Estraven, who implies strongly that Ai might want to leave Karhide for Orgoreyn, the other country on Gethen's Great Continent. To just advise Ai to leave would be to insult him: adults do not advise other adults in Karhidish culture. ¹⁷ Ai gets his audience with King Argaven, but they meet only moments after Ai hears the announcement of Estraven's banishment, in part for trying to help Ai but more for becoming "Estraven the Traitor" for attempting the peaceful resolution of a border dispute with Orgoreyn (29-30; ch. 3 [and ch. 9]). Ai's audience with Argaven does not go well, and he soon goes off to see the countryside of Karhide -and see if there was anything to tales of Gethenian Foretellings; and then Ai crosses over into Orgoreyn, hoping his offer will be better received by the Orgota.

Estraven also has gone to Orgoreyn, just ahead of assassins sent by Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe, Estraven's successor as "King's Ear." Ai's mission soon becomes urgent. Tibe is pressing Karhide's claim in the border dispute, and Karhide and Orgoreyn are approaching a breakthrough in Gethenian history: war. Entry into the Ekumen by one of the countries would drag in the other, and it would be necessary for the two to cooperate in bargaining with the Ekumen. The Orgota leadership lacks the insight and courage to go a new way; so they go a very old way and have Ai arrested and sent to a "voluntary farm," a forced-labor camp.

Estraven rescues Ai, and the two of them attempt to return to Karhide the only way they can, across the Gobrin Ice that separates and connects Karhide and Orgoreyn. It is a long trip: the third section of the novel.

Surviving the journey on the Ice and arriving back in Karhide, Ai calls down his colleagues in their ship in orbit; and Estraven is betrayed by a person s/he has aided and has asked for help and skis into the guns of Tibe's agents. Since the Orgota had announced Ai's death, his arrival, alive, in Karhide is sufficiently embarrassing to require a rearrangement of the Orgota leadership, bringing into power those more in favor of peace with Karhide and entry into the Ekumen. Tibe resigns after learning of Estraven's death; Ai's ship lands safely; Karhide prepares to enter the Ekumen; and Argaven refuses at least just yet to revoke the order of exile on Estraven and rehabilitate Estraven's reputation. The book ends with Gethen at peace and Ai leaving the Karhidish capital and visiting Estraven's family and telling them his and Estraven's story.

What I have left out of this plot summary is that the Gethenians are androgynes: neither male nor female five-sixths of the time; either male or female when they go into kemmer: estrous, heat, rut and, of course, remaining female through pregnancy and nursing if they enter kemmer as female and get pregnant. ¹⁸ The key goal of the protagonists, Genly Ai and Estraven, is to prevent a war between the great nation-states of Karhide and Orgoreyn; and androgyny is second only to the climate among the reasons the Gethenians as yet have had no wars. Commenting on The Left Hand of Darkness in "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1976/1987), Le Guin says "At the very inception of the whole book, I was interested in writing a novel about people in a society that had never had a war. That came first. The androgyny came second. (Cause and effect? Effect and Cause)" (DEW 11). ¹⁹ Gethenian androgyny is not necessary and probably not sufficient for their lack of warfare, but it is the biological basis for much in their culture that has made warfare unlikely.

Warfare anywhere on our Earth is a biological luxury item, possible only among peoples who have surpluses to destroy. As Ong Tot Oppong, an Ekumenical Investigator notes, "The weather of Winter is so relentless, so near the limit of tolerability even to . . . [Gethenians], that perhaps they use up their fighting spirit fighting the cold. The marginal peoples, the races that just get by, are rarely the warriors. And in the end, the dominant factor in Gethenian life is not sex or any other human thing: it is their environment, their cold world. Here man has a crueler enemy even than himself" (LHD 96; ch. 7). On Gethen, humankind have a constant reminder, that "Heaven and Earth are not humane." ²⁰

Androgyny by itself might not have been sufficient to prevent war; the severe climate certainly helped limit large-scale violence, as did the relatively small numbers of Gethenians (96): mass violence requires masses. Also, Gethenian technology, like that of the Chinese, developed at a slow rate, their Machine Age having started up "gradually, without any industrial revolution, without any revolution at all. Winter hasn't achieved in thirty centuries what Terra once achieved in thirty decades. Neither has Winter ever paid the price that Terra paid" (LHD 99; ch. 8). ²¹ No industrial revolution suddenly and blatantly put a nation far enough ahead of the climate that warfare made sense. No industrial revolution made one Gethenian nation suddenly superior to another technologically. And androgyny by itself wouldn't preclude war any more than the production of a subspecies of XYY, testosterone-crazed supermales would guarantee war; warfare is not an instinct or behavior. As Konrad Lorenz argued in On Aggression (1966), war is an institution (275). Still, human beings are biological creatures, and (spiritual matters aside?) everything we are and do has to have biological bases. On Gethen, the biological basis for the cultural constellation that has prevented war and made for a rather good place in Karhide has been androgyny. Everything in Gethenian society "is shaped to fit the somer-kemmer cycle" of sexual latency and rut. "Room is made for sex, plenty of room; but a room, as it were, apart," as the Ekumenical Investigator Ong Tot Oppong, initially saw and elegantly expressed it. "The society of Gethen, in its daily functioning and in its continuity, is without sex" (93; ch. 7). And where there is sex among Gethenian humans, one's role might be female or it might be male; the Masculine and the Feminine, as defining categories, simply wouldn't exist and the "tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking" and is reinforced by Female/Male divisions is somewhat "lessened, or changed, on Winter" (94). ²²

Le Guin makes her points about gender, violence, and war in Left Hand by explicitly foregrounding background and textualizing subtexts. In Planet of Exile (1966), Le Guin had divided her narration among three point-of-view characters; but in The Left Hand of Darkness we not only have Ai and Estraven getting different chapters but the remainder going to still other voices, making explicit a good deal of what is usually implicit background and subtext. Of 20 chapters, Ai gets 10 (50%), Estraven gets 4 (20%), and miscellaneous others get 6 (30%) plus the appendix on "The Gethenian Calendar and Clock" (302-04). Of the "other voices," two of the chapters are identified as tales (chs. 2 and 9), and one as a story (ch. 4). Of interest to me here are the scientific report on "The Question of Sex," the theological piece "On Times and Darkness," and "An Orgota Creation Myth" of great antiquity.

Each of these chapters provides a transition in, and interruption of, the plot. "The Question of Sex" (ch. 7) is central in the section getting Genly Ai to Orgoreyn and the Orgota capital of Mishnory and rather more abruptly getting the exiled Estraven safely to Orgoreyn (chs. 6-8). "On Time and Darkness" (ch. 12) is central to the sequence of chapters moving Ai from Mishnory to the labor camp "Down on the Farm" and then his rescue by Estraven and their movement "To the Ice" (chs. 10-15). "An Orgota Creation Myth" (ch. 17) is told as Estraven and Ai move "Between Drumner and Dremegole," a geologically active area, and then "On the Ice" on their way home to Karhide and the resolution of the plot (chs. 16-19).

I will state directly what I see as Le Guin's answer to The Question of Sex, and Violence and War her basic answer from 1969 to at least 1985. As on Joanna Russ's Whileaway (1972, 1975), or among Suzy McKee Charnas's Riding Women in Motherlines (1978), violence is indeed possible in worlds without men, but it will tend to be direct, emotional, personal. What is specifically manly is not violence but warfare, which tends to be indirect, unemotional, impersonal: indeed, ideally, professional (see Arendt 62 n. 83). ²³ Alternatively, zealous soldiers, fighting for a cause, are willing to kill huge masses of total strangers as a means to the end of the kingdom of God or utopia or some abstract, ideal whatever so long as their zeal lasts. What is necessary for war is the mobilization of a large numbers of men to do the job of killing large numbers of strangers. For modern total war it is necessary to mobilize at least one entire society.

In "The Domestication of Hunch" (ch. 5), Genly Ai observes that Prime Minister Tibe

This is clear enough, and it is a theme upon which Le Guin will work variations for at least the next sixteen years. For the variation in The Left Hand of Darkness, picture Karhide and Orgoreyn on the Great Continent of Gethen as a giant geographical Yin-Yang symbol, with Karhide more toward Yinnish darkness and Orgoreyn more in Yangish light (see Barbour, "Wholeness" 167). Now picture the movement of Yin-Yang (and the Dao behind it) affecting or effecting obscurely all that happens on Gethen, right down to the Yin-Yang balance in Gethenian androgynes: "On Gethen, the two polarities we perceive through our cultural conditioning as male and female are neither, and are in balance . . . . and at the moment of the novel . . . [the balance] is wobbling precariously" (Le Guin, "Gender . . . Redux" 12); and this time, as the balance wobbles toward what we perceive as male, the civilized people of Gethen have the wherewithal for war.

Insofar as the question of warfare in The Left Hand of Darkness is a question of sex which is a great amount the placement of The Question of Sex" (ch. 7) is significant.

In chapter 5, "The Domestication of Hunch," Ai leaves Erhenrang for the countryside in contemporary American terms he goes to see "the real Karhide," beyond the Karhidish equivalent of the Washington, DC, Beltway. ²⁴ There Ai gets to experience Karhide at its economic roots, in its anarchic splendor at the old capitol of Rer (53), and at its most impressive: the ancient Fastness of Otherhord, where he attends a Foretelling. Ai asks the Weaver and the foretelling group whether Gethen will be part of the Ekumen in five years. ²⁵ The climax of the Foretelling shows Faxe, the Weaver, "in the center of all darkness," appearing as "a woman, a woman dressed in light. . . . And she screamed aloud in terror and pain, 'Yes, yes, yes!'" (66) "not so much a prophecy as an observation," and Ai is certain the "observation" is correct (67).

Chapter 6 gives a less good impression of Karhide: it is Estraven's first turn at narrating, and we get the story of Estraven's escape from Karhide and entry "One Way into Orgoreyn."

And then, chapter 7, the field notes of Ong Tot Oppong on Gethenian sexuality, giving us a large expository lump and repeating that the Gethenians "have never yet had what one would call a war. They kill one another readily by ones and twos; seldom by tens or twenties; never by hundreds or thousands" and asking, Why? (96). One possible reason: the Ancient Hainish colonizers had planned it that way, deliberately setting up a fairly elegant experiment in which they seeded Gethen with normally competitive humans but made them androgynes. But the experiment got sloppy over time when the Hainish had to withdraw and a new ice age came on.

Finally, as I'm dividing the chapters: chapter 8, significantly called "Another Way into Orgoreyn." The literal meaning of this title refers to Genly Ai's physical movement from Karhide to Orgoreyn important in the symbolic journey in the novel. More important, though, is Ai's description of the Karhide he's leaving and the Karhide coming into being under the regency of Tibe during King Argaven's pregnancy (100-01). ²⁶ Karhide is not a nation, not "a social unit, a mobilizable entity" (100); Tibe intends to make it one. Besides acting in the Sinoth Valley, Tibe propagandizes the people. Somewhat oddly for a Gethenian politician, Tibe did not talk about shifgrethor: "personal pride or prestige," etymologically and metaphorically, the shadow one casts, related to one's status, one's clout. ²⁷ Tibe "was deliberately avoiding talk of shifgrethor because he wished to rouse emotions of a more elemental, uncontrollable kind, He wanted to stir up something which the whole shifgrethor pattern was a refinement upon a sublimation of. He wanted his hearers to be frightened and angry. . . . He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, 'cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization.'" Ai denies that there is a veneer of civilization, denies "that civilization, being artificial, is unnatural: that it is the opposite of primitiveness .... Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth," perhaps, I'll add, part of human evolution, "and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war" and the peoples of Gethen had long ago chosen against war. Tibe wants a nation-state to rule, one like Orgoreyn, an "efficient centralized state," and s/he wants one now. One "means of mobilizing people rapidly and entirely is with a new religion; none was handy; he would make do with war" (102-03), although, of course, Tibe lacks both the word and a firm concept of what a war might be.

Tibe's way into Orgoreyn toward a modern authoritarian or totalitarian state is through the human Shadow: a sense of national superiority, hatred of the alien, fear disguised as courage, brutal anger rhetorically transmuted into something noble (102; ch. 8). But what justifies such a poor opinion of Orgoreyn, and how did Orgoreyn get to be what Orgoreyn is?

Politically, Orgoreyn is soon revealed as a nasty blend of oligarchy and bureaucracy, with a typically nasty secret police. Also, older readers might superimpose over the struggle between Karhide and Orgoreyn a historical model. Tibe comes across like Joseph Goebbels, the head of Nazi propaganda for the Third Reich. If that makes Karhide parallel to Hitler's Germany (1933-45), then Orgoreyn can be cast as Stalin's USSR and the Stalinist-Russia analogy holds when we finally see Orgoreyn, starting with the scene of docile people imprisoned by their own government in a cellar (111-112; ch. 8). Still, younger readers would probably do better seeing Tibe as a more generic demagogue, scaring the hell out of the people and making them feel brave to go off killing strangers with whom they have no quarrel.

How Orgoreyn got that way is handled by a couple of very direct satirical maneuvers and one subtle one. The Orgoreyn section of The Left Hand of Darkness is "Conversations in Mishnory" from Genly Ai's point of view and "Soliloquies in Mishnory" from Estraven's journal (chs. 10-11), and then "Down on the Farm," where Ai recounts his capture, transportation, and imprisonment in the Orgota forced labor camp, and "The Escape," a straight narration by Estraven of his rescue of Ai (chs. 13-14).

The first satirical move is having the Orgoreyn sequence begin with Ai in a cellar with Orgota refugees with no papers, then betrayed in tidy, sunny, Mishnory, sent to prison in a slow truck full of other prisoners, and then end up the sequence getting rescued from death in the "Pulefen Commensality Third Voluntary Farm and Resettlement Agency." Now, in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," we probably should accept the festival and the good sex, good drugs, and good life as real and significant, and balance against them the child kept miserable in the room. Le Guin balances the good of Omelas against the evil done to the child. She is not so fastidious in The Left Hand of Darkness. As George Slusser said in 1976, the real reality of Orgoreyn is the dark cellar and the truck (24) and slow death in the labor camp.

The subtle maneuver is preparing for the opening of the sequence (Ai's strained meeting with Estraven in Mishnory) with a visit to Ai from Estraven's ex-kemmering, Foreth, who wants Ai to bring money to Estraven in exile (104-06; ch. 8). Foreth asks Ai if Ai feels in Estraven's debt for Estraven's having supported Ai's mission. Ai replies that he does feel indebted, "in a sense. However, the mission I am on overrides all personal debts and loyalties." Foreth responds, "If so . . . it is an immoral mission." Foreth not only presents a view that might be expressed by "an Advocate of the Ekumen," but formulates a basic principle of Le Guin's moral system. The lesson here is that no abstract Mission, no transcendent project, should override the personal. To get people to allow loyalty to abstractions, particularly patriotic loyalty to the abstract State, routinely to override personal obligations, requires that they be rigorously trained in abstraction and conditioned to place value upon transcendence.

The second satiric move is the placement of chapter 12, "On Time and Darkness." In chapter 12 we find an excerpt from "The Sayings of Tuhlme the High Priest, a book of the Yomesh Canon, composed in North Orgoreyn about 900 years ago." In chapter 13 we have Genly Ai's arrest and mistreatment in Orgoreyn. Preeminently, we have the "Voluntary Farm," with its grotesquely euphemistic name, chemical spaying/castration of its prisoners, and slow attempted murder of Genly Ai and, for Le Guin, or any anarchist, the central damning fact of the "Farm" as a prison. The juxtaposition of "On Time and Darkness" and "Down on the Farm" (chs. 12/13) is significant. The juxtaposition is a post hoc: After this, therefore because of this a fallacy in logic but a standard device in literature. Accept the world-view of the Yomesh, the chapter order implies, accept their ideas on time, darkness, and epistemology, and you are only a few hundred years away from a mobilizable, patriotic Orgota State, the obscenity of the Sarf (the Orgota secret police), and prison farms.

From Goss at the Otherhord Fastness, we have learned that the Lord of Shorth had forced a group of Foretellers to attempt to answer the unanswerable question, "What is the meaning of life?" The Weaver of that Foretelling group was Meshe (60; ch. 5), and, according to the Yomeshta, the result of trying to answer that question was Meshe's enlightenment, Meshe's being placed "in the Center of Time":

Such a look, Le Guin has warned us, may be very dangerous: "Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios{sic}, every now and then" (Introd. to 1976 edition). ³¹ And the problem is not with just rationalist, pagan Apollo. God's first line in the Jewish creation myth is "Let there be light" and God sees "the light was good" (Genesis 1.3-4); and in The Revelation to John we learn that in the New Jerusalem "there shall be no night" (21.25).

If it were true that we really did live in a world without darkness, without shadows, with total certainty, action would be impossible; life would be impossible. So Faxe, the Weaver, who knows so much about the "eternal present," has told Genly Ai (71; ch. 5). So we see during the days of white weather, when Ai and Estraven "need the shadows in order to walk" on the Ice (260-61, ch. 18 ; 265-67, ch. 19). The Yomesh philosophy gives its followers a pernicious half-truth. With all that light they can think themselves certain of their knowledge, sure of their "way." They can know the ends and need not take much care in selecting means. As Eric Hoffer argues in The True Believer, such certainty is the foundation of the fanaticism of True Believer leaders and followers (75-82). With perfect rationality and calm, they can order and carry out atrocities. Unlike Terran anarchists and Le Guin's Ekumen and opposed to Le Guin's urDaoists, the Handdarata such people readily adopt "the doctrine that the end justifies the means" (259; ch. 18 [see Berkman 113]).

"Meshe is the Center of Time. . . . And in the Center there is no time past and no time to come. . . . The life of every man is in the Center of Time, for all were seen in the Seeing of Meshe, and are in his Eye. . . . Our doing is his Seeing: our being his Knowing" (162-63; ch. 12).³² For Meshe and all who see through his "Eye," there is no change: no history and no sequency; all is simultaneous.³³ Being and doing are not balancing and reinforcing aspects of mortal life but are conflated together in the purely rational Seeing and Knowing of Meshe. Such a view can greatly simplify politics. Given such a vision, people can set up a rational, orderly, efficient state, such as Orgoreyn. Anyone with views differing from Truth does not deserve to be heard. Anyone who cannot or will not fit into such a perfect institution is obviously a "defective" or an enemy of the people. Such a view of things, Le Guin suggests, is a step toward the dark cellar in which "nameless" people are imprisoned by their fellow citizens, and accept their imprisonment without complaint or protest (111-12; ch. 8) and toward the Sarf truck, where light has again given way to darkness and the perfect "commensality" is achieved: where naked prisoners have nothing left but their pain and a terrible kindness and merge into "one entity occupying one space" (170; ch. 13 [see also 109; ch. 8]). Most emphatically, we move toward the Voluntary Farm, with its "excess of light," where "social purpose" is achieved through the dehumanization of one's fellow human beings (174, 176-77; ch. 13).³⁴

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin has used not merely post hoc ergo propter hoc but also but the subtle, satiric, indirect "proof" of reduction to the grotesque. If Meshe is correct, Le Guin strongly implies, then we have no logical complaint if the Orgota embody Meshe's Truth in their New Epoch regime. If the New Epoch regime sickens us, we would do well to reject Meshe's view as a species of dangerous insanity.

*

The center of The Left Hand of Darkness, however, is not in Orgoreyn or Karhide but on the Ice between the two countries. It is time then to turn to the Ice and to the straightforward fact that chapter 17, "An Orgota Creation Myth" falls in the center of the story of the winter journey, in the balance point of chapters 15-16 and 18-19. In these chapters, Le Guin brings together in a series of significant juxtapositions her views on Being and becoming, patriotism and friendship (and treason), manhood and humanness, time and darkness (rightly understood), epistemology, ecology, evolution, death, pain, and ethics.

The origins of the Orgota creation myth "are prehistorical; it has been recorded in many forms. This very primitive version is from a pre-Yomesh written text . . ." (237; headnote to ch. 17). The creation myth, then, is part of the common cosmological heritage of all Gethen. For my purposes, there are four significant statements in it: (1) The ice-shape that says "I bleed" creates from the excrement of the sun "the hills and valleys of the earth." (2) The ice-shape that says "I sweat" creates in one act "trees, plants, herbs and grains of the field, animals, and men." (3) The ice-shapes sacrifice themselves to produce milk to wake the sleeping humans. (4) The entire last paragraph:

In creating hills and valleys, especially if we imagine the hills in sunlight and valleys in shade, "I bleed" has created two of the most primitive manifestations of Yang and Yin. In creating all living things in one act and from one source (soil plus sea-water), "I sweat" has established the interconnectedness of the web of life, including (in a way that would please Luz in Eye of the Heron) making people of mud. In sacrificing themselves, in allowing the sun to melt them to form milk, the three ice-shapes enact a little allegory of the sacrifice involved in the rise of consciousness. Human consciousness, since the myth informs us that ". . . milk is drunk by the children of men alone and without it they will not wake to life" (238). And the words to Edondurath of the nameless "younger brother, the father" point our way to the proper understanding of shadows and shifgrethor and several key images and themes in the journey on the ice.

In terms of this myth, we can say in general that the relatively young doctrine of the Yomeshta manages to get just about everything wrong; the really old-time religion of the Handdarata not only manage to understand the myth correctly but to improve upon it. As Tuhlme, the Yomesh High Priest, tells us, the Handdarata recognize that the darkness is "Source and End," that the world will not only fall into darkness at the end of time but also arose out of darkness in the beginning. In Daoist terms, the Handdarata recognize that beyond the Named Dao (Being) there is the darkness of the Unnamed Dao, Unbeing, the Void, in a continuing dynamic of creation and dissolution.³⁵

The Yomeshta do not err in valuing human consciousness, the consciousness for which the ice-shapes sacrificed themselves. Their error comes from valuing consciousness, the light, exclusively, and in failing to see that consciousness has its costs. If all we were were pure being, like the ice, then we would be eternal. To differentiate into individuality, to awake into consciousness, however, is to enter time, to become mortal. And to be mortal is to be part of the web of life. Here Meshe and his followers make their gravest error: they are blind to humanity's place as part of the scheme of things, blind to the true significance of our living "in the middle of time."³⁶

Estraven comments that "The Yomeshta would say that man's singularity is his divinity." Ai replies, "Lords of the Earth, yes. Other cults on other worlds have come to the same conclusion. They tend to be cults of dynamic, aggressive, ecology-breaking cultures. Orgoreyn is the pattern, in its way; at least they seem bent on pushing things around" (233; ch. 16). On the other hand, the Handdarata, as Estraven tell us, "are less aware of the gap between men and beasts, being more preoccupied with the likenesses, the links, the whole of which living things are a part" and then Estraven goes on to quote Tormer's Lay, the "source" of the title for The Left Hand of Darkness (233-34; ch. 16). The Yomeshta, seeing humans as "Lords of the Earth," misinterpret totally the basic fact of human existence. We are indeed in "the Center of Time" but that means that we are mortal, subject to pain and death.³⁷ Our mortality is the shadow that follows us, and it is that shadow that gives substance to our lives.³⁸ Moreover, each of us (even clones) must die individually, moving beyond the touch of our closest loves; and, as stressed particularly in The Dispossessed, it is that loneliness and pain of mortality that moves us to join with others. And in joining with other people (and with the world), we can perhaps move through pain to joy or at least reduce the pain enough to remain sane.³⁹

*

The themes of the Orgota creation myth are worked out and expanded in the winter's journey in The Left Hand of Darkness chapters 15-16 and 18-19. These five chapters, taken together, give us an insight into the ethical norms of Left Hand and of Le Guin's early canon in general.

Chapter 15 is narrated by Genly Ai and is parallel to the first part of Estraven's journal in chapter 16; the rest of chapter 16 is parallel to Ai's narration in chapter 18. The sequence begins with Ai's awakening and seeing Estraven "as he was" really seeing Estraven, in a kind of James Joycean "epiphany," especially seeing Estraven's face (200; ch. 15).⁴⁰ The movement of the sequence is toward Ai's and Estraven's acceptance of each other and their touching in what may be the only way possible for them (or possibly for Le Guin at that stage of her development) through love and through mindspeech, not sexually.⁴¹ Ai's vision of Estraven leads to his growing insight into Estraven's wholeness (202 and 203). Estraven is like a Daoist sage, like Ogion in the Earthsea series, George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven or like Faxe of the Handdarata: the simplicity of an uncarved block, the completeness of an animal (71; ch. 5). To be whole requires being part, and to be as whole as Estraven requires being in close touch with the universe. Genly Ai surprises us a bit by telling us that Estraven saw Estraven "so slow-thinking" s/he "had to guide his acts by a general intuition of which way his 'luck' was running, and that this intuition rarely failed him. . . . the gift is perhaps not strictly or simply one of Foretelling, but is rather the power of seeing (if only for a flash) everything at once: seeing whole" (203-04; ch. 15).

With such temporary vision, as opposed to Meshe's permanent Enlightenment, Estraven can see (feel?) what s/he must do, right down to he "vile crime" of theft, when s/he and Ai need food (205; ch. 15). Even so, Ai will later break custom and teach Estraven mindspeech and call his ship before he can be sure the Karhidish government will allow it to land in safety.⁴² All we can get is a "general intuition" of how our "luck" runs, of how the great wheel turns, but following this intuition, against convention or even law, is of crucial importance. It is how noncontemplatives can find the Dao and not have to depend upon abstract theories. If we deceive ourselves in the Yomesh fashion and hold that the wheel doesn't turn and that we can know with certainty what is, then it is just a step to a masculinist, Platonic, Apollonian True Belief of the sort that Le Guin shows us in Orgoreyn. But there is another way to go, a more utopian possibility shown in Estraven in him/herself and in the love that develops between Estraven and Ai (see Slusser 26).

When Estraven takes up the narration in chapter 16, the first point of discussion is Time and exile (221-22). Disjunction in time has alienated Ai from his homeworld. This alienation establishes the esthetic appropriateness for Ai's name as "a cry of pain" (229; ch. 16).⁴³ Disjunction in time, then, leads to isolation and pain; and, as in "Nine Lives" and The Dispossessed, and, allegorically, in The Farthest Shore, pain leads to the possibility of human touch, relationship (Remington, ". . . Suffering"). More immediately, the timejumping discussion leads to a couple of brief allusions to geological evolution and from there to organic evolution and the contrast and relationship between singularity and isolation. Out on the Ice, Estraven and Ai are both "singular, isolate," cut off from their societies and social rules. Estraven writes that they "are equals at last, equal, alien, alone" (ch. 16, p. 232). Ai speaks of the "isolation and loneliness," of themselves and of Estraven's species. He is especially impressed that the Gethenians developed a theory of evolution given the "unbridgeable gap" between them and "the lower animals" (233; ch. 16). This mention of evolution moves the discussion on to the differences between the Yomeshta and the Handdarata on ecology, and then on to Tormer's Lay.

Time and loneliness, evolution and ecology, wholeness and dualism, "myself and the other," "I and Thou" all come together in chapter 16 and are repeated in part in chapters 18 and 19 (from Ai's point of view). In chapter 18, Ai looks upon Estraven in kemmer in kemmer necessarily as a woman, since Ai is a "Pervert": in his case always male. Ai looks at this woman and does not deny the (now) obvious: "And I saw then again, and for good, what I had been afraid to see . . . in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was." A few minutes later they consummate their love by symbolically marrying, communicating in mindspeech (248-53).

When they are close to Karhide, to home, Ai will symbolize his union with Estraven, without totally realizing it, in the figure of Yin and Yang: "Light is The Left Hand of Darkness ... how did it go?⁴⁴ Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow" (267; ch. 19). Yin-Yang also symbolizes Estraven and Ai Female and Male when Estraven was in kemmer, two human beings who have reached enough unity in themselves to be able to balance each other, and thereby achieve further unity, wholeness, and balance (Barbour).

In the central philosophical chapters of The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin posits a universe based on nonbeing, Darkness in Western mythology, Chaos and Old Night. Out of this ultimate Darkness comes the primal Light and the Ice; out of nonbeing comes Being, the Dao that can be called at least, "the Way," the world of the eternal now. Out of Being come shadows and balance, Yin-Yang: the world of becoming, of "Mutabilitie," life, death, history, process, change, and evolution.⁴⁵ As Ged has assured Arren in The Farthest Shore, there is no danger in the flux itself including the evolution and acts of unconscious species (66; ch. 4, "Magelight"). The only potential problem is with conscious creatures, with human beings (cf. LoH 161; ch. 10). We do have moments in which we can see or feel past the flux to the roots of Being, and these moments are important: they are the moments that allow us individual wholeness and the brief fullness of the I-Thou relationship. These are, however, only moments, and we have neither the power nor the right to take a subjectively eternal moment and turn it into a permanent insight into the workings of the Whole. We have no right to attempt to freeze or deny time and stop change to deny flux and death and darkness and attempt to set up a New Epoch society of (anti-)utopian perfection.⁴⁶ We also have no right to try to push things around and try to consciously force change, to force the world, and other people, to obey our wills.⁴⁷

Which brings us back to the questions of war, violence, aggression, utopia, dystopia, and sex.

No Gethenian "is quite so thoroughly 'tied down' . . . as women, elsewhere, are likely to be psychologically or physically" by childbearing and child raising. More important for my concerns, no Gethenian is "quite so free as a free male anywhere else" (93-94; ch. 7 [see Russ, "Image" 39]). Anyway, no Gethenian is as free as a privileged Terran male from what Simone de Beauvoir discusses, quite negatively and at length, as the immanence of the life of women. Gethenians cannot give themselves totally to masculine transcendent projects because normal Gethenians go into kemmer every month (more or less), and all who are healthy have the privilege and risk of pregnancy, birthing, and nursing. Less so than Hainish-normal women but much more than Hainish-normal men, Gethenians are embedded in the world. And when you are in the world, it is hard to picture pushing it around. Gethenian anatomy and physiology did not determine the philosophy of the Handdarata but it made it easy to think that philosophy. And it took someone "blinded by the light," Meshe, to think transcendence. And with transcendence, large-scale violence is possible. People can then think abstractions like The State, The Nation, National Honor abstractions that dwarf our puny little existences and are worthy of dying for (see Trumbo, ch. 10). People can then dream up schematic utopias and push around others to try to build them.⁴⁸

The Yomeshta started playing such a wide-scale push-and-shove game some 2202 years before the action of The Left Hand of Darkness. But from their most ancient times the Gethenians have known they "were born in the house of flesh" and "death follows at their heels" (239; ch. 17); they know they are mortal and part of the world. And they are reminded of the flesh frequently. They may, indeed, be mobilizable for war. Tibe almost succeeds; the Orgota have established a real nation-state. But their violence is, so to speak, of the flesh, and it proves hard to idealize it and turn it toward warfare. More immediately important, there is the underlying basis for Karhidish culture in the views of the Handdara, especially as embodied in their "Old Men" at the Fastnesses: "It was an introverted life, self-sufficient, stagnant," from Genly Ai's rather American kind of view, "steeped in that singular 'ignorance' prized by the Handdarata and obedient to their rule of inactivity or noninterference. That rule," like wu wei for the Daoists is the Handdarata nusuth: "no matter," which "is the heart of the cult." Ai won't "pretend to understand it. But I began to understand Karhide better, after a halfmonth in Otherhord. Under that nation's politics and parades and passions runs an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent, the fecund darkness of the Handdara" (60; ch. 5). Gethen may find an Ekumenical peace because war, however rationally conducted, is always somewhat mad, and deep in the culture of Gethen lies a very ancient sanity.

*

In most of her canon, ethical action for Le Guin moves toward contact with the Dao, multiple integrations, and away from hatred and war. Ethical action in Le Guin's early and middle works is fairly explicitly based upon a vision of the world that accepts both simultaneity and sequency, Being and becoming and it is based upon a vision of reality that sees more than just one country or race or world. In short, ethical action with a lot of luck will move toward an Ekumen: a human society in which we can fulfill the Dao of Humanity and of nature a society in which we can be fully human. A society, perhaps, in which we "follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution" (TD, ch. 7, p. 177). A society in which we can consciously extend "the evolutionary tendency inherent in Being" (LHD, ch. 15, p. 211). Which thought, after I finish discussing Le Guin's work of the 1960s, will take us to The Dispossessed (1974).

* *

In a 1979 review-essay for Salem Press, I called The Left Hand of Darkness "one of the best literary works to come out of America in the late 1960's," and I stand by that assessment, although I will now admit that I've read far too few of the works of the 1960s to make so broad a statement.

Le Guin's major SF novels are clearly teaching stories and political works, and one criterion for judging them is whether or not the politics are correct, not "politically correct" but correct: right, decent. The Left Hand of Darkness, I think, is almost completely right: it promotes peace and freedom and attacks betrayal, autocracy, warmongering, authoritarian oligarchy, and bureaucracy. It offers an elegant analysis of war as an institution. It is an excellent book for helping male readers accept women as adult human beings and helping girls and women readers learn that they can be active, competent adults.

Still, there was sufficient controversy of The Left Hand of Darkness that Le Guin wrote "Is Gender Necessary?" (1976) and then reissued that essay with glosses as "Is Gender Necessary? Redux" (1987).⁴⁹ I shall very briefly epitomize that debate so that younger readers will have some idea of what the fuss was about. This is important to do. First, the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first seem likely to combine capitalist triumphalism with nationalistic and fundamentalist-religious reaction. In such a context, and from such a distance, liberal and radical feminists of the 1970s and 1980s may look indistinguishable. Second, Le Guin has accepted much of the criticism and has modified (arguably radicalized) her writing accordingly and, simultaneously, the women's movement has moved to accommodate a range of feminisms and welcome more enthusiastically heterosexual, married, liberal feminists. Third, the debate is significant for changing definitions of, or at least changing focuses for, politics in the United States, as the saying "The personal is the political" shifted from advice against hypocrisy, the injunction to live one's politics to an assertion of the political dimensions of issues in people's personal lives, especially the lives of women.

Let's examine, then, the 1976 Ace re-issue of the text.

The front and back covers feature what seem to be ice versions of Caribbean androgyne statues rising out of a glacier. Such imagery was probably unexceptionable with most feminists in 1976: in that year Pamela Sargent could hope that as more women write science fiction and "as more men deal thoughtfully with their female characters," SF will "become a more androgynous and human literature" (13). By 1978, however, Mary Daly had argued against androgyny as an ideal (Gyn/Ecology 386-88 and passim; ch. 10). Few feminists moving into the 1980s would be offended by the cover, but after Daly's book, some might not be reassured. The front blurbs announce that The Left Hand of Darkness has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as has Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Joanna Russ won her first Hugo for a novella in 1983, and women, other than Le Guin, did not start winning Hugos regularly under their own names until the 1980s. The situation is somewhat different for the Nebula Russ's "When It Changed" won the short story award in 1972, and Suzy McKee Charnas's "Unicorn Tapestry" won in 1980 but the pattern is the same. Especially before "James Tiptree, Jr." revealed herself as Alice Sheldon in 1977, it could seem like the major awards in SF were won by Men, Misc. Women, and Ursula K. Le Guin (The Ency. of S.F. "Hugo," "Nebula" and passim).⁵⁰ The dedication for Left Hand is "For Charles, sine quo non." The book is dedicated to Charles Le Guin, Ursula Le Guin's husband, "without whom, not; an indispensable requisite or condition." This is a loving and poetic thought, and readers familiar with Le Guin's work would recognize the valorizing of marriage, in a very wide sense. For a major relevant example, readers familiar with The Lathe of Heaven (1971) will know that little condemns Dr. William Haber as much as his being "a lone wolf," who wanted neither "marriage nor close friendships," prizing far too highly his unfettered will and "independence" (112; ch. 8). A suspicious reader, however, less immersed in Le Guin's canon than in the historical moment of the late 1970s through the 1980s, might see in this dedication to Charles Le Guin an unfeminist degree of dependence.

Moving into the text, one might ask, "Where are the women?" Genly Ai, whose point of view we get in half the chapters, is a man; and the Gethenians aren't women. They're androgynes, but they tend to come through, as Joanna Russ pointed out, as men: "It is . . . a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called 'he' throughout, but put that together with the native hero's personal encounters in the book [primarily with Foreth], the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men."⁵¹ One might also ask, "Where are the Black people?" since Genly Ai is as much <<ethnized>> White for most White readers as Estraven is gendered male, but Terran ideas of ethnicity are far less immediately relevant than gender on a planet of androgynes.

Coming to Chapter 5, we get the Foretelling at Otherhord, which includes, in a formal role, a "Pervert." That Hainish-Normal people, like us, would be perverts in Gethen is a very useful suggestion, but note the analogy Genly Ai uses. Gethenian perverts "are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies" (64). In the year 3850 CE, at the earliest, Genly Ai is aware of many societies in which homosexuals are contemned, behavior Ai might better know about from his "criminal ancestors," not from current events in the Ekumen. And Ai's use of "bisexual" for sexually dimorphic (basically two-sexed) societies eliminates a handy word for people who like sex with both men and women, and may be seen as an ignoring of that category of twentieth-century Terrans.⁵² In the 1987 re-issue of "Is Gender Necessary?", Le Guin notes correctly that she "quite unnecessarily locked the Gethenians into heterosexuality. It is a naively pragmatic view of sex that insists that sexual partners must be of opposite sex!" ("Gender . . . Redux" 14). At the Foretelling itself, the Pervert is a male; therefore the Celibate in kemmer becomes female, and their part of the Foretelling, with the Pervert importuning the Celibate for sex, can be read as one long scene of sexual harassment. And the rest of the people at the Foretelling perceive this extended interaction as intentional or inadvertent voyeurs (64, 65-66); and we, figuratively, watch them watching.

When we get to ch. 7, "The Question of Sex," we learn that Le Guin is serious about biology: the climax word in the chapter title isn't "Gender" a word from grammar in the 1960s, not politics but Sex. Some feminists of the 1970s and 1980s may still have had qualms about biology: Betty Friedan and others worked hard in the 1950s and 60s attacking "The Sexual Solipsism of Sigmund Freud" (ch. 5 of Feminine Mystique) and the whole idea that biology, if not strictly anatomy, was destiny. We also learn in this chapter that Karhidish culture privileges socially enforced heterosexual marriage just with changes in who is male during kemmer this month and who is female. Good anarchist fashion, there are no legal marriages; but still, "The whole structure of the Karhidish Clan-Hearths and Domains" is built upon the institution of monogamous marriage as we are told by Ong Tot Oppong; we do not see the Clan Hearths at work in Left Hand (92; ch. 7). We do see them, in "Coming of Age in Karhide" in 1995, where we see a hearth with a clan that does not vow kemmering and raises its children without fathers and, to a great extent, communally. Looking back, the Gethenians in 1969's Left Hand of Darkness do seem locked into what Adrienne Rich called "compulsory heterosexuality," and gays, lesbians, and the asexual (outside of the Handdarata) do not seem welcome.

Which gets us back to homosexuality and to the question, just why don't Ai and Estraven physically make love? They are intimate in their conversations on the Ice, and that comes through even in the audio cassette version of the story, where Le Guin cuts their mindspeech communication. Why not consummate their love in the flesh, however much they might feel at the moment that "to meet sexually would be" for them "to meet again as aliens" (248-49; ch. 18). The decision not to couple is plausible enough, but in context, Patricia Lamb and Diana Veith have found it suspect (229). If Lamb and Veith (et al.) are correct, Le Guin and her readers may be picturing Estraven as a man even when she is in kemmer with Ai in their tent and it might have been too daring, ca. 1969, to show or suggest a quasi-homosexual sex scene (248-49; ch. 18). Le Guin, as critic, notes that the sex here "would have been heterosexual after all" and as author says "that it was ultimately an aesthetic choice" to avoid sex here. "To 'marry' them" on the Ice "would have defused the story . . . . The story-energy would have gone into that story; and it wasn't the one I had to tell" (personal communication).

More basic problems for some readers would be Le Guin's anarchism and Daoism. In "Is Gender Necessary? Redux," Le Guin notes that anarchy "has historically been identified as female. The domain allotted to women 'the family,' for example is the area of order without coercion, rule by custom not by force" (12). Part of the radical feminist project has been resisting the traditional family precisely as an area of coercion and force, and many recent feminists have approved of using State power in support of that project. Additionally, feminists who wish to use the police powers of even the patriarchal State against rapists, pornographers, and other abusers of women, who wish to use the courts to force child support payments such feminists should feel at least ambivalent about ideals of anarchy. And the Daoist ideal of unaction is going to seem very problematic to women who have resisted the Freudian idea of "the male road of exploit" versus "the female road of nurture," the idea of "feminine passive" and "masculine active."⁵³ Le Guin's Daoism privileges much of the traditional feminine over the masculine, but the basic Daoist categories of Yin and Yang themselves reinforce division into "two polarities we perceive through our cultural conditioning" that make for a mischievous dualism ("Gender . . . Redux" 12). And moving into the 1980s, poststructuralist academics would be increasingly upset by any theory involving binary opposites, seen as basic to "the hierarchical relations that ground capitalist notions of power, desire, and value."⁵⁴

My last point on Daoism I will make quite tentatively.

Daoism is among the least "totalizing" and most dynamic of belief systems, but it is a total system: all that is is produced by the action of the Dao and the waxing and waning of Yin and Yang. And in the 1970s and 1980s "totalizing" and "closed system" were used as criticisms by many academics in the humanities, sometimes even smear words. Total systems and binaries were stressed in Structuralist teaching of the 1950s and 1960s and were out of date and, postStructuralists argue, politically dangerous. A major symbol of Daoism and the controlling symbol of The Left Hand of Darkness is the Yin-Yang: a closed circle containing that most famous of binary (if dynamic) opposed pairs.

We should note, though, that Le Guin was well aware of the problem of total systems she showed one very negatively among the Orgota and did not limit herself to the Yin-Yang symbol. In The Dispossessed the image became the unclosed circle of The Circle of Life; in Always Coming Home, the organizing symbol is the hinged spirals of the heyiya-if. As Le Guin's character Stone Telling will put it in Always Coming Home: "We must . . . remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void" (29).

*

The Left Hand of Darkness, and other early works by Le Guin, may indeed be "Feminism for Men," as Craig and Diana Barrow say, but "The Women Problem," is, at its core, a problem among men. Moreover, The Left Hand of Darkness is also feminism for nonfeminist women, and the generation I teach includes many women who begin sentences "I'm not a feminist, but." The Left Hand of Darkness was pretty radical stuff for nonfeminist readers in 1969, and for the generation raised in the Reagan-Bush years for students of mine who find The Song of Songs rather daring (with its very active female protagonist and extramarital love) it is still radical. To rephrase, then, my own conclusion on this book: of the works with which I'm familiar, The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the best and most important novels to come out of America in the late 1960's.

*

A Note on Mindspeech:

The condensation of The Left Hand of Darkness Le Guin herself read for the audio tape of the novel, and the play based on Left Hand both quietly dropped mindspeech, and Le Guin has not used the trope of mindspeech in her SF or fantasy since the late 1960s. She may prove me wrong by returning to it later, but I think I can suggest some straightforward reasons why we should note but not make too much of the lack of mindspeech after Left Hand.

Into the 1960s, those of us trained in scientific method could say that the proper attitude toward moderate claims of telepathy was an open-minded skepticism.⁵⁵ Moving into the 1970s, however, matters had changed. Several of the parapsychologist J. B. Rhine's "best performers were ultimately exposed as frauds" ("ESP"); and it was getting around that the idea that we humans used only 10% of our brains leaving a lot of spare capacity for telepathy and other paranormal skills was based on seriously flawed research: anesthetized rats used perhaps 10% of their brains, not waking, undrugged humans, and the whole idea of percentage of usage was losing meaning as memory and other brain functions were thought of increasingly less in metaphors of filing cabinets and more in terms of holographic pictures. After the 1960s, telepathy and other psi powers became more and more the province of Scientology and others who wished humans not to fulfill humanity but to transcend humanity, an occult association Le Guin seems unlikely to like.

Additionally, mindspeech had come across as a method of and metaphor for honest and direct, almost transparent communication, a communications system in which only the Shing the Enemy could lie. As literal telepathy became less plausible as a scientific concept, the metaphor of nonproblematic communication became more problematic. Men and women may speak "In a Different Voice," at least on ethical issues, as Carol Gilligan's book title suggests; and Gilligan may herself oversimplify by leaving out "perspectives such as class, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity" i.e., to the extent she had women <<speaking>> in "a different voice," from men, even just in terms of moral development, Gilligan herself may greatly oversimplify (Fraser and Nicholson 32). Communication between two individuals of the same gender may never be anywhere near transparent; even communication between two monozygotic siblings ("identical" twins et al.) may be far less than transparent; and so telepathy as a metaphor for unambiguous, true communication may include in itself a bit of a lie.

Perhaps more important, the period between the 1960s and 1990s saw what we might call <<a crisis in relationship(s)>> in the United States. Among my friends, anyway, a commonsensical and often-suggested first step toward resolving this crisis was summarized by joking about <<a failure in telepathy>>. I.e., we mockingly assigned blame in a relationship to person "B" for failing to read person "A's" mind when person "A" seemed to expect such mindreading. The joke was a reversal: people are not telepathic, and the fault here lay with person "A" for not speaking his or her mind. Some people really are close enough to others that they can anticipate the other's thoughts and desires very accurately; most of us are not, and you really loved me, you'd know what I want without my having to tell you! came to be seen, by my group (and some recovery groups), as a useful joke but a very bad idea in earnest.⁵⁶ Further, anticipating needs and desires is a virtue for servants, and it became an increasingly open question whether men should be good chivalric servants to mistresses (as in courtly love), and increasingly objectionable to say that women should be socialized to be sensitive servants to anyone.

In any event, between the late1960s and the 1990s, telepathy as fact, symbol or metaphor became problematic in biology, linguistics, politics, and everyday human relations. And during this period Le Guin dropped mindspeech from her Hainish universe.

* * *

THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST (1972)

Le Guin returned to questions of violence and war, treason and patriotism in The Word for World Is Forest. The plot of The Word for World begins near the end of the story, with a massacre of Terran colonists at a location they call Smith Camp on a planet they call New Tahiti. In chronological order, the story goes like this.

Not very long from now, our Earth is in the midst of an ecological disaster, and we Terran humans are saved by the humans from Hain-Davenant, who, among other things, give us Nearly As Fast As Light (NAFAL) ships to allow colonizing other worlds. Some twenty-seven lightyears from Earth is World 42, New Tahiti. The Terrans plant a colony, almost all males, under military organization and authority, to prepare the world for permanent settlers. The planet is mostly water, and the land is heavily forested. Preparation of the land for farmers means clearing the forests at great profit since wood is more prized on Earth than gold (7; ch. 1).⁵⁷ Aiding the Terrans is "The Voluntary Autochthonous Labor Corps" (63; ch. 3) enslaved men and women from the native species of humans: literally little green men (and women), who call their world Athshe, "Forest."

One of the Terran officers, Captain Don Davidson, rapes Thele, an Athshean woman, a rape from which she dies. "[A]cting without argument or speech," or only a bit of speech, Selver Thele, her husband, attacks Davidson and attempts to kill him: an act we may see, in Hannah Arendt's words, as "the only way to set the scales of justice right again" (On Violence 64 § 2). Davidson is a big "euraf" (WWF 79; ch. 4) from Cleveland and a professional soldier; he is hurt and scared by Selver's attack but defeats him in the fight and prepares to kill him. He is stopped by Raj Lyubov, an anthropologist who had worked with Selver, with Selver as a native informant. Selver leaves for the North Isle and lives on the coast of Kelme Deva where he sees the Terrans destroy the city of Penle, enslave some hundred of its inhabitants, and cut open the world (30; ch. 2). Commanding the Terrans at Kelme Deva Smith Camp is Captain Davidson. Selver organizes the Athsheans, and "after long talking, and long dreaming, and the making of a plan, we went in daylight, and killed the yumens of Kelme Deva with arrows and hunting-lances, and burned their city and their engines," killing some two hundred of the Terrans. Davidson gone to colonial headquarters at Centralville, mostly to get laid by one of the newly arrived women returns to find his camp destroyed. Selver attacks Davidson and is wounded by Davidson, but brings down the Terran and sings over him (19-20,ch. 1; 30-32, ch. 2).

There is an investigation at which we learn Athsheans are supposed to be "intraspecific nonaggressive" and have no real history of violence. The Terrans learn from visiting Cetian and Hainish officials that there is now a League of worlds, communicating by ansible, an instantaneous communication device. The brutal ways of Terran exploitation of Athshe are over.

Davidson is sent off to a distant outpost where he organizes a quiet atrocity against the local Athsheans. Lyubov continues his work, eventually encountering Selver at the Athshean town of Tuntar. Selver tells Lyubov to leave Centralville two days hence (96), and Lyubov forgets that advice and semiconsciously omits mentioning Selver in his report on his trip to Tuntar (109-10; ch. 5). Selver leads the Athsheans against Centralville, killing all the women thus "sterilizing" the Terrans and capturing most of the men. Lyubov is killed in the battle and Selver sees the body and/or the dying Lyubov (117-18; ch. 6).

Davidson kills his local commanding officer and refuses to stop fighting the Athsheans. Finally his position is over-run, and his men are killed. Selver and his comrades capture Davidson and handle him as they would an Athshean psychotic: they isolate him on an uninhabited island. Plot and story end with the return of a Terran ship and League representatives to pick up the remaining Terrans; the ship's commander and a League representative tell Selver that, in large measure because of Lyubov's work, Athshe "has been placed under the League Ban" and will no longer be subject to Terran colonizing or any other alien interference (165-67; ch. 8). Ironically, the least conventionally heroic of the trio of potential heroes in this book, the intellectual Dr. Lyubov, turns out to be highly effective; Lyubov's "inactive action" of anthropological scholarship is crucial for the long-term survival of the Athsheans.

*

The Word for World Is Forest might be seen as Planet of Exile (1966) shifted out of Romance and into the modes of Tragedy and Satire. Both stories use third-person, limited narration from the points of view of three main characters. In Planet, old Wold does what old people are supposed to do in Romances: he shuffles off on "his last foray," leading the women and children to a well-protected fort (87; ch. 10) and then shuffles off this mortal coil (123-24; ch. 14), leaving the stage clear for the (relatively) young couple of Rolery and Jakob Agat to consummate their marriage in fertility, and for a new and better world to coalesce around them: a world in which the native humans and the Terrans will integrate and prosper.⁵⁸ Jakob Agat looks around in joy at the end of the story and sees "his fort, his city, his world; these were his people. He was no exile here"; and he says to "the alien, the stranger, his wife" (122) the last words of Planet of Exile, "come, let's go home" (124).

The Word for World emphatically does not end in joy, integration, and coming home.

Selver in The Word for World corresponds to Rolery in Planet of Exile: the point of view nonTerran, native human; Davidson corresponds to Agat: a leader among the Terran colonists; and much less exactly Lyubov corresponds to Wold: the third member of a triangle. In Planet, we have a love triangle with the key apex occupied by Rolery, daughter to Wold and later wife to Agat, with Wold coming to love both his Summer-born daughter and son-in-law. In The Word for World, we get two love-hate triangles, with Selver emphasized. The first triangle is Selver-Thele-Davidson. Again, Davidson rapes and (indirectly) murders Thele, for which Selver tries to kill him. Lyubov saves Selver, earning Davidson's enmity. When the action of the plot begins, then, Selver and Davidson hate one another; Lyubov and Selver have come to love one another; Lyubov intensely dislikes Davidson, and Davidson despises Lyubov. To make The Word for World into a kind of Romantic Comedy would be easy enough: the "marriage" of the Athshean Selver and the Terran Lyubov would be central to a plot moving toward the conversion or defeat and expulsion of Davidson and reconciliation and friendship between the two peoples. We get a hint of this possibility in a savior motif in the central triangle. Lyubov saves Selver; Selver tries to save Lyubov by warning him of the attack on Central, and Selver does save his people; and Davidson consistently sees himself as a Messiah for the Terrans on Athshe. Which fits his name: Don, "world ruler," plus Davidson, "son of David" suggesting a descendent of King David, as a Messiah should be (see Matthew 1.1-17).

The plot moves away from integration and toward alienation and isolation: Lyubov is killed in the attack on Central; Davidson ends up isolated on an island; and the Athsheans will be isolated by the League for generations. And that is as happy an ending as we are going to get.

In her introduction to The Word for World Is Forest, Le Guin tells how she wrote the story under the title of The Little Green Men in 1968, while in England, "a guest and a foreigner" with "no outlet" for her anger at the war in Vietnam (LoN [1979]:151). I have suggested that Le Guin's inability to demonstrate directly her anger with her government and people led her take action in the old-fashioned Prophetic way of writing a mâshâl (plural: mâshâlim): "a likeness; . . . 'taunt,' or 'satire.' Whatever the translation, the 'likeness' in question is either the aptly stated analogue of a previously experienced reality, or it is the quasi-magical, verbal prefiguring of reality in the shape, for good and for ill, in which the utterer would like to encounter it" (Rabinowitz 320). The Word for World Is Forest is, in part, a mâshâl of the war in Indochina in the late 1960s. It is also the aptly stated analog of a long series of encounters between people sophisticated in the technology and political organization of violence (civilized people) and people with far fewer means for killing other people ("primitives"). In the physical and psychological territory of "Frontierland," we meet the Others and "the normal defensive-aggressive reaction between strangers meeting" can get very bloody (Erlich, ". . . Le Guin and . . . Clarke" 111). Le Guin's Narrator places an early scene in the book in a pretty clearing that "might have been Idaho in 1950 . . . . Or Kentucky in 1830. Or Gaul in 50 B.C." (see Siciliano 76). Or, I will add, the upper waters of Mill Creek in California, a few weeks after 15 August 1865, where White men under the command of R. A. Anderson ambushed one of the few remaining groups of Yahi Indians.⁵⁹ The limited action in the scene in the clearing in Word for World includes a distant bird saying, "Te-whet" (9; ch. 1). Kentucky and Gaul are among the many places where Terran tribal peoples were slaughtered by the civilized, and the immediate response to thoughts of Kentucky and Gaul is what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has assured us is the one decorous comment on massacres:

The best Le Guin can see for Indochina is, in a geopolitical sense, about what happened: that the United States would lose the war, and we would have to go home.

Where Le Guin proved optimistic was in the suggested body counts: Le Guin's imaginary war was far less bloody than the Terran reality (over 58,000 Americans killed, over two million Vietnamese and others). Where Le Guin was highly optimistic was in her utopian vision of the Athsheans, and in her Anarchistic faith that such a utopian culture could defeat a high-tech army. The Vietnamese did, indeed, defeat the U.S. military, but, as Le Guin well knew, they had a good deal of experience fighting off invaders. The Terran commanding officer in Word for World, Col. Dongh, a Vietnamese, mentions his people's spending "about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one after the other in the twentieth century" (133; ch. 6): the Japanese, the French, and then the USA, 1940s on.⁶⁰

*

Athshe is like an Earthsea where the Immanent Grove has spread out over the Archipelago to create a huge Yin-Yang symbol: "Ocean: forest. That was your choice on New Tahiti. Water and sunlight, or darkness and leaves" (7; ch. 1). And the people there are peaceful; like the Gethenians, they've never had a war. Unlike the Gethenians, they additionally don't have "assassinations, feuds, forays"; Athshean murders are committed only by extraordinarily rare psychopaths; even fights are rare and usually limited to adolescents ("Gender . . . Redux" 10; WWF 58, ch. 3). Most important, the Athsheans are Hainish Normal in their sexual anatomy and physiology: our Terran standard-issue, sexually dimorphic human beings.⁶¹ A bit more than the Gethenians, the Athsheans are sane and relevant.

With the Terran conquest, we see on Athshe a pattern of opposition Le Guin began as early as A Wizard of Earthsea" (1968) and continued into Always Coming Home (1985). The Athsheans are technologically primitive and organizationally simple, anarchistic, "communal . . . and somewhat introverted."⁶² Their populations are stable in size and stay put. "They have no nomadic peoples, and no societies that live by expansion and aggression . . . . Nor have they formed large, hierarchically governed nation-states" that can be mobilized for war. "Competition is ritualized, and, when ritual breaks down, the resulting violence does not become mass violence, remaining limited, personal." The Terrans are from a "hierarchically governed" world-state and are under military law and discipline.⁶³ And the Terrans are heavily armed and dangerous.

What the Terran officials have done is familiar enough and takes little interpretation: they have sent men (mostly) organized militarily and have given them rules, regulations, and orders. They are like US Army units on the Western frontier during the Indian Wars, the period my US military history book called the "nadir" of US Army history. One cause for some US war crimes in the Indian Wars was units operating independently under ambitious commanders, with George Armstrong Custer as the best-known example.⁶⁴ But the telegraph came through fairly early on in the American West, and Lyndon Johnson "micromanaged" US warfare in Vietnam; even so Le Guin introduces the ansible and Le Guin supplies a League government that is competent (as LBJ was), but also moral, relatively peace-loving, and well-intentioned. In the mâshâl of Vietnam, the League can be read as a wish for something like the United Nations to attempt to undo US damage in Indochina. In political terms, the point may be that a strictly political analysis is insufficient: even if the Terran military were absorbed into a good system with sane, ethical people giving orders from Earth the frontier and/or military culture would undermine the new system. More concretely, a charismatic traitor like Don Davidson could get enough support to cause a lot of trouble; and, of course, in Word for World he does. Whether 1849ers going to California for gold or future loggers going to New Tahiti for lumber, men who flee civilization and strike out for riches are not going to let native peoples stand in their way; as they think necessary, the invaders will destroy inconvenient natives through "disease, malnutrition, forced removal, massacre, aggravated rape . . ." (Buckley 438). Military organization and armaments mean that when an intelligent psychopath like Don Davidson takes over a group, he has a group organized and equipped for carnage (84; ch. 4).⁶⁵ And, finally, militarism, macho, and racism ("speciesism" here) can be mutually reinforcing. Davidson, anyway, believes that "The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he's just had a woman or just killed another man" (81; ch. 4). A macho mind, tightly compartmentalized, can feel both manly and guiltless raping human females not seen as really women and killing human males not seen as really men. In Davidson's head, such a mind can allow him to disobey orders and thereby endanger the Terran colony, assassinate his commanding officer, lead armed men to massacre a village generally engage in murder and treason and atrocities and still feel himself the only true patriot, the only truly sane, morally, and manly man.

And here I will stop discussing Don Davidson and the Terrans, whom Le Guin anatomizes in great detail. That's the dystopian satire in Word for World. The violated utopia of the Athsheans is equally interesting.

How do we get decent behavior out of human beings, a genus not notably "primitive, harmless, and peace-loving" (63; ch. 3)? One answer, as we've seen in The Left Hand of Darkness, is to be sure that they organize themselves anarchistically. In Left Hand, however, war was prevented (as things worked out) by the presence of outsiders: Ai and the Ekumen. War on Gethen would have been between two Gethenian peoples with sufficient sense of identity to have "two polarities we" and the Gethenians "perceive through our cultural conditioning" as patriot and traitor ("Gender . . . Redux" 12), and two polarities that the Gethenians through their cultural conditioning and we through reading Le Guin's novel perceive as Karhide and Orgoreyn. Genly Ai knows "the love of one's homeland" but beyond that he's not sure, from his own experience, what patriotism is. Estraven, soon to be exiled for treason explains it to him: "No, I don't mean love, when I say patriotism. I mean fear. The fear of the other. And its expressions are political not poetical: hate, rivalry, aggression" (19; ch. 1).⁶⁶ In the United States ca. 1969, Estraven's comments were highly relevant: lack of patriotism was a standard charge against the Peace Movement, the people trying to end US military adventures in Indochina; since antiwar actions were necessarily "giving aid and comfort to the enemy" in time of war however undeclared by Congress movement people were also traitors. The Left Hand of Darkness as a whole goes even further than just problematicizing words like "patriotism" and "treason"; as a whole, Left Hand emphatically puts personal loyalties and love of home over attachments to any abstraction (true treason is to betray a friend), but Le Guin gives us technologically sophisticated people on Gethen, living in a complex civilization: there is on Gethen the possibility for conflict between personal loyalty or loyalty to home and the loyalty patriotism requires to the State.

The Athsheans have not had to deal with conflicts in loyalty between concrete people and abstracts commonwealths because they have never had abstract states to be loyal to; they are not civilized people: i.e., they don't have cultures based on cities in the ways ancient Terrans developed civilization from city life.⁶⁷ What Athsheans call cities we'd call villages or towns, and the Gethenians might call Hearths; and no conqueror or other consolidator has come along to bind the villages into a confederation, set up his royal seat in a city, and continue expanding until he or a successor ran into another royal thug with similar ideas.⁶⁸ So: the immediate reason the Athsheans don't have big wars is that they can't; their social groups are too small. But those groups are small because they have no history of consolidation, and one reason they have no consolidation is they have no history of feuds and forays that could be organized into rational warfare for the purpose of large-scale theft. Apparently, it has never occurred to Athsheans to organize into groups to murder, maim, wound, and (thereby) terrorize others in order to steal the property or labor of those others. Put in such terms, this hardly appears a mystery, but it is a mystery. In Le Guin's Hainish universe, warfare has been fairly common; and the Hainish universe is a legitimate extrapolation from and fabulation upon human history on our Earth where, I believe, warfare began as highly organized theft with violence (see discussion of ACH). Why are there no feuds and forays on Athshe? Why are even fist fights uncommon? Why are they really nonviolent, really peaceful? Putting the matter formally: As human beings the Athsheans have as a trait aggressivity; to a greater or lesser degree they all are capable of getting very, very angry, so angry they desire to lash out. Further, "The Athsheans are carnivorous, they hunt animals" and can hunt in groups; and they have their rare psychotics and the concepts of rape and murder (61; ch. 3) and weapons. Why then is there so little aggression?⁶⁹

One reason is that politics among the Athsheans is controlled by old women, the Head Women of the villages: ". . . old women are different from everybody else, they say what they think" (98; ch. 5). In Earthsea terms, politics on Athshe are conducted in a True Speech. A second reason is that fights will not move into deadly violence because the Athsheans have "aggression-halting gestures and positions" (WWF 60) like those of Terran wolves and jackdaws (Lorenz 123-28). And it is highly unlikely a conflict would ever get to physical combat. Among men, anyway, they have a custom like Terran Inuit and use ritualized "singing to replace physical combat." Any Athshean man can, when angry, sublimate aggressivity into art and sing a song against his opponent a very literal mâshâl, in the sense of "taunt," "satire" the quality of the song depending upon the man's talent. Like the appeasement gestures, the singing contests also "might have a physiological foundation . . . ." However deep their roots (and there has to be a biological basis somewhere), Athshean aggression-halting and aggression-ritualizing customs make "an effective war-barrier," especially since there is relatively little positive motivation for warfare (60-61; ch. 3). The Athsheans have lit