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timidteller · 2 days ago

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I've just finished TLHOD, and I have something to say. I may lack the proper articulation (oh boy am I rusty at putting my thoughts down in coherent, easy-to-follow way), and I doubt that any part of my analysis would bear any novelty, but. Otherwise I am going to Explode, so here we go. Also I don't have any clear structure in mind, just a swell of half-formed, swarming ideas in my brain begging to be let out, but y'know, praise the creation unfinished.

First things first, the sheer brilliance of worldbuilding in this book is breathtaking, and it knocked the air out of my lungs more times than I could count. And it's not that Le Guin dedicates much time to long-winded, elaborate rants, rich and heavy with detail, explaining the world she created. No. Instead of leaning into the didactic, she lets her subtle worldbuilding make a statement. Quite a lot of statements, to be frank, and all of them relevant to what her text is saying, to its themes. Worldbuilding and storytelling go hand-in-hand (see how even what I say becomes thematically suitable), the environment which the story occupies shapes the story, as much as the story — its environment. Ursula created a perfect vessel for her 'thought experiment', truly. Gethenian culture, mentality and ways of living are defined by the planet's character, her climate and geography, which in turn are influenced by what Ursula had to say, most literraly writing her messages into the face and complexion of Winter. Beautiful stuff.

The same principal of ambiguity Le Guin applies to her storytelling, exploration of which evidently resides on the metatextual level, is prevalent within the narrative, in the concept of nusuth, the unknown and unknowing. Silence pouring in between the lines and blank spaces left in descriptions lets the reader's gaze in, taking us along on a ride of curiosity and pondering, spurring our imagination. Through the act of withholding and careful omission Le Guin encourages our participation in the act of creation. These maybe the principles that predicate Ursula's writing style on the whole, but I do find myself wondering how much of it was a conscious choice, metatextual symbolism affected by the contents of the story. Does it matter? Nusuth.

" Of all the dark, obstructive, enigmatic souls I had met in this bleak city, his was the darkest. "

From his introduction to the very end, Estraven's character is an enigma — to us, to Genly, and even the king and numerous allies he picks up in Orgoreyn couldn't crack him and his intentions, forever obscure. Whereas Genly's own path is clear-cut, defined since the very first line as the book is told by him in retrospect as a recollection of his experiences, and the ceirtanty of his outcome is then reinforced in the Foretelling scene, Estraven's fate and arc were cast in darkness, obscured by polyphonic misreading of his character and made murky by his own silence and reservation. Where the finish line lay for him was hard to predict, and it made me watch his every move with utter fascination.

" The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. "

Uncertainty, by the teaching of Handdarata, in whose tradition Estraven for one was reared and trained, is the base of life. Estraven's character is uniquely shaped, palpable and alive, because we as readers have got to make an effort conjuring his image from the shadows of unknown surrounding him. He is intimately linked to the main principal underlying the "dark religion" of his homeland, and captures the concept of willing ignorance brilliantly. Him, his presence and his past, which we know virtually nothing of even after having spent half the book observing the story through his eyes, may be ever vague, but not his actions. Estraven's line of action was hard to foretell, as I said, but not impossible.

" 'Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable — the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?'

'That we shall die.' "

The hints of Estraven's eventual death are abundant, generously sprinkled all over the text. Not knowing how to deal with the Feels, I went back to obsessively reread all of the earliest chapters and, met with so many evident clues staring at me from the page, found myself wretchedly wondering just how I missed all of those. Estraven's charm and fascination as a character comes largely from the same place as the beauty of life itself, explained by Faxe: ignorance is the ground of thought, unproof — of action. And just as we are left ignorant of Estraven's past tragedy, the only thing is certain: he shall die. The fact that I was unable to predict such an outcome, although given all the tools to reach the right conclusion, makes for me in and of itself a very poignant notion. The questions of Estraven's past and future, perhaps, are not the questions the reader should seek answers to. Instead, we should meet and understand him as he is, in the present, so valued by the people of Winter.

Having said that, I don't mean to say that those questions are unanswerable. The folk tale chapters supply wonderfully rich material for satisfying our curiosity and making assumptions. Here and now I'll venture into the territory of the obvious, so please bear with me while I'm getting it out of my system. I need to.

The folk tales included in the text are an explanatory device, introducing another point of view, the cultural, mythical, primordially intuitive one. The myths helped me understand things on a different level, beyond that of a rational and straightforward narrative; they are the undercurrent of the story, and Karhidish and Orgota culture both are steeped in these waters. And lending a new outlook on the events of the book, they also bring as closer to understanding Estraven, a character not only closely linked to the philosophy of unknowing, but also to the intuitive, untaught and natural, things that reside in the shadowy recesses of psyche and speak in whispers.

" The tragedy is so old that its horror has leached away and only a certain air of faithlessness and melancholy clings to the stones and shadows of the house. "

The folk tale that caught my attention first was not even in its seperate chapter, but the one about Emran the Illfated, that Genly reminisces about on his way to Estraven's home. Surely there are tales that are much more evidently relevant to Estraven's character, and still I cannot shake the impression that this one has to do with him, too. For me it was a first hint — of what? Of bitter, aged tragedy clinging to Estraven like a shadow, elusive yet present and felt, of a past that casts his image in an inexplicable light of melancholy? Or was it the first warning sign, a premonition about his poor fate, marred by the shadow of the man who once occupied the halls of Estraven's home? I can't say with certainty, but it did feel relevant, and important. A hunch, if you will. When dealing with a character like Estraven's, I couldn't help but lean into what conclusions my intuition brought me. And even that found its reflection in the text.

" What one is after when farfetching might be described as the intuitive perception of a moral entirety; and thus it tends to find expression not in rational symbols, but in metaphor. "

The connections between ideas kept slowly building upon themselves, the intricately woven web of symbolism gradually expanding, untill it blew my mind. Just as Estraven relies for guidance on a general intuintion when he acts, following the turn of the will, so is the reader guides his understanding of him, this ambiguity impersonated, by a set of premonitions given by a number of folk tales, which are at best only distantly related to him. We are never directly told what his past was like, and are left to wonder what his future might hold. Not straight-forward answers, not, as Genly puts it, rational symbols, but metaphor. And so the reader is told to treat the interspersed myths as metaphor, which, when applied to Estraven's character, tells his story in an indirect, allegorical way. How did Arek lose his life? Did Estraven in fact attempt suicide? What ill omens holds the tale about the foretelling of death? What sacrifice did Estraven make for his brother and kemmering's sake? The answers aren't blunt, plain-spoken, but assumed, felt on a level beyond logic and reason. The text itself then even advises the reader not to take the folk tales at face value:

" 'Then you don't call him Estraven the Traitor?'

'Nor ever did.' "

The story about Estraven the Traitor does not tell the tale of Therem Harth — though at the same time, it does. It is, of course, a metaphor. As explained in the chapter On Time and Darkness, spiritually, and in The Gethenian Calendar and Clock, pragmatically, Gethenian time is bound to the present. What was and what is yet to come, forever is. The repetitiveness of Gethenian folk narratives is, in a way, an expression of such a mentality. The past of the man whose name Estraven bears foretells his future, in an obscure, intuitive, parabolic and allusive way that the myth explains present reality: saying more about the mind of the beholder than what is beheld. Estraven is a vessel of this cultural code, and he repeats the history of his namesake. He warms a man who thought himself Estraven's enemy back to life (there's a profuse emphasis on how Estraven's presence, despite all of Genly's earliest misconceptions about him, brings warmth to him; it's endearing), he's proclaimed a traitor for a righteous act, an act of patriotism where the borders cease to apply, he vows kemmering to his brother, he is eventually widowed and stranded. When he is shot, do you think he is wounded on the chest and neck?

" ... 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. "

Genly Ai's journey to understand and love Estraven begins along with their journey to and across the Ice, and lies primarily not in the ability to parse Estraven's confusing ambiguity, solve his enigmatic character, but the willingness to see him whole, acceptance of what is, and, through it, what isn't. Genly is as fallible as any human being in his desire to understand, to categorise. This intrinsic desire is largely attributed to how humanity perceives itself in relation to the world, introducing dichotomies and the concept of otherness. It is within our nature to understand ourselves and our surroundings through a system of juxtappositions, thus forming a sense of self-identity based on a dialogue between what we are and what we are not.

" Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. <...> it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. "

Interestingly, I think those traits that made Genly qualified to become the Ekumen's envoy actually hindered his mission on Gethen. His inquiring, pragmatic mind proves itself a serious impediment in the world of equivocations and paradoxical integrity of the vague and ambiguous, of darkness, ice, archaic silence and perceptive uninterference. In his struggle to understand the part, Genly more often than not forsakes the whole. Across the narrative he repeatedly would try and force what he doesn't understand about the people of Gethen into his own value system, in the process mutilating the solid wholeness; wholeness of that which is not one thing nor the other in the false dichotomy, but both things at once and then something inherently more than strictly and simply their unity.

" I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. "

The fact that Genly sees Estraven truly, as he is, for the first time somewhere in between the break-out of the Pulefen Farm and their reaching the Gobrin Glacier is very meaningful. It is a time when Estraven exhibits most evidently both behaviours traditionally ascribed to the feminine or the masculine respectively, showcasing that he is fundamentally "a man who is a woman, a woman who is a man", though his nature transcends the bisexual binary. Genly comes to appreciate Estraven's humanity fully, but not in contrast to and inspite of his alienness — as a part of it. It is a time when both characters are heavily relient on Estraven's extraordinary natural sense of intuition, too, and that intuition being linked to the Handdara, as I explained (or tried to do so) earlier, brings me to my next point.

" So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness. "

It is no coincidence, I think, that Genly and Estraven learn to bespeak each other while at the height of sexual tension between them, two or three days after their agreement to not view the other as a viable kemmer/sex partner. This tension brings their experiences with the telepathy close in my mind to the act of Foretelling, which both attempt in an effort to learn the ways of their travel companion more intimately, more truthfully. But as it has already been established, straightforwardness of a plain-worded prognosis or prediction doesn't apply or do much good when it comes to the matters of human nature, and so Genly, seeking answers, is only met with the frustration of more questions arising about the man he is learning to trust. The lesson he at that stage of their relationship still needs to take in is that he can't understand Estraven by understanding his shadow. He can by accepting it as an integral part of him, and then forsake the need to categorise and compartmentalise altogether. Not a part, but a whole. And by extending his effort to understand the other, Genly inevitably comes to important realisations about himself, his role as the Envoy, and Gethenian culture on the whole. Genly Ai and Estraven never meet in kemmer, but they "have touched, in the only way they could touch". It is very "to be loved is to be changed" to me, for Genly is truly changed through his love towards Estraven, they both in fact are. Let's put a mental pin on it and hold this thought, I'll talk about it some more a little later.

Now, I want to diverge my attention to the next foreboding hint of Estraven's death: the omissions.

" 'I am Estraven the Traitor. I have nothing whatever to do with you.'

'At first.'

'At first,' he agreed.

'You'll be able to hide out, if there is danger at first?'

'Oh yes, certainly.' "

With all of Estraven's meticulous planning and sharp clairvoyance, born of experience and his intuitive nature, why didn't he plan his own escape from Tibe's men once back in Karhide? I theorise that all along he knew what would become of him if he were ever to show up in his country again, as well as knew that his heart belonged to this land and he wouldn't sell that love out for welfare. I can't help feeling like he never actively intended to flee back across the border into Orgoreyn and spend the rest of his days in exile, nor did he actively plan for it. Towards the end of Genly and Estraven's journey, when the relevance of the question of how he was going to secure his safety grew with the proximity of the Karhidish border, he seemed to shut his mind off from Genly. Was it because he feared his friend might find out he wasn't prepared for what comes next, because he didn't really believe he would live to see it come? I don't know, I speculate. But there was an edge of urgency in Estraven's insistence that Genly follows through with the plan he laid out, as if he was making sure Genly would stick to it when he is no longer around.

" I was born to live in exile, it appeared, and my one way home was by way of dying. "

Upon his return to Karhide, although his motherland won't take him back, Estraven does come home; back into Arek's embrace. Into the Place Inside the Blizzard, where those who take their own lives go. Although we know nothing of Arek's fate beyond the fact that he died before his time, leaving Estraven widowed, there is some ground for me to assume that he too committed suicide. The only solid explanation I could supply this reading with is with what morbid eagerness Estraven met his end, not running away from it, but rushing towards it. Was he afraid that he would be captured and then killed by the guards, or worse tortured to death, hence he took the matter into his own hands, when there still was a chance of an afterlife spent near the love of his life? For what is just one more taboo broken for a man who has already crossed all the final lines? Estraven has made it his life's business to see Genly's mission to its completion, and beyond this goal, it seems, there was little to nothing left for him in existence. Not when he looked back upon his life and saw a ruin of broken promises and failures. He also probably sees that there is no way to untangle himself from Genly and his mission, not when Genly refuses to let go of him after the months spent on the Ice, and he sacrifices himself to clear the Envoy's name of the threat of being affiliated with the infamous Traitor. But perhaps, in the end, Estraven's love for Arek outweighed whatever love he might have had for Genly, for he never truly learned to extricate the image feelings for Genly cast into the shadows of his heart from an after-image of Arek.

The way Estraven and Genly's roles start to intermingle and overlap towards the end is what I find utterly fascinating. They, of course, abstained from kemmering with each other, likely out of sense of deep mutual respect, but the implication that they came together in order to give birth to some new life still lingers heavy over the text.

" 'They are the same,' said Stokven, and laying his palm against Estraven's showed it was so: their hands were the same in length and form, finger by finger, matching like the two hands of one man laid palm to palm. "

Kemmer's intrinsic cultural value to a Gethenian arises from viewing of it both as an act of creation and, though expressed somewhat more vaguely, as resonance between two beings, an act of recognition of self through another. Genly eventually grows to understand Estraven and the Gethenians at large, but not without undergoing essential changes in his own set of values and worldview. These changes, however subtly they may have arrived, turned out to be drastic enough for his crewmates, when they come on Gethen, to fail to recognise him in the crowd, and for him in turn to slightly recoil from the Terrans and how alien they became to him in their two years long separation. Things come full circle when he sets off to the land of Kerm, probably (let me be delusional) settling down in Estraven's home hearth as a result: Estraven dies, repeating the fate of many first envoys to be sent to an alien world, but succeeds in bringing about the New Epoch of Gethen, opening it to the rest of mankind; Genly, carrying out his "fool's errand" to find solace, comes to the Estre Hearth to mourn its banished heir's death.

" I lay there beside my friend in a sort of stupor, trying to remember the words he had quoted to me once: Two are one, life and death, lying together... "

Estraven walked across the Ice together, witnessing the world creating itself, and through the labour and hardships of their journey they achieved creation of an entirely new world on Gethen. And you see, without blood the arch would fall. Estraven's sacrifice is the blood that upholds the change, keeping the door opened.

#the left hand of darkness #tlhod #genly ai #therem harth rem ir estraven #can you tell how my lack of vocabulary needed to express what i want to express #becomes more and more evident with time #nevermind #dropping this into the void #yea i created this account just to share this #please come talk to me about this book i am desperate #also can you tell i am in dire need of a physical copy

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