The Gender of War

As someone who approached The Left Hand of Darkness expecting it to be, fundamentally, a gender-focused text, I was surprised at how much of the novel seemed either a) totally unrelated to the issue of gender or b) applicable only by forced contortions of analysis that I’m not entirely confident making. While the Gethenians’ ambisexuality is arguably their most famous trait, it was their total lack of war that inspired their creation. In a telephone interview I found online, LeGuin is quoted as claiming the following concerning her writing process:

It all started when I began to imagine a society without war, a people that does not think in terms of war. They have murders and forays but never wars. What kind of people would they be? I thought. Obviously, they'd be different from us. But in what way? That's how I came to the idea of an androgynous society. As one character says in the book, war is a displaced male-generalized activity, something that men do and women don't.

The mental leap from (relative) pacifism to androgyny is not one that strikes me as particularly natural. While the traditional stereotypes are there (men as aggressive and independent, women as passive and communal), I don’t think the lack of a wholly male presence is enough to explain this implied link between bisexuality and war. After all, despite its uniformity of gender, Gethen is a world rife with tension and dualism, the most dramatic being the competitive political divide between Karhide and Orgoreyn.

A more likely explanation (although one that, too me, seems even less understandable) is the connection that LeGuin draws between women and anarchy. In her essay, “Is Gender Necessary? (Redux)”, she claims that:

The ‘female principle’ has historically been anarchic; that is, 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 force. Men have reserved the structures of social power to themselves… (11-12).

According to this analysis, the “feminine” Karhide exists under a system of authority “without appeal to patriarchal ideals of divine right, patriotic duty, etc.” In this way, Tibe’s attempt to draw Karhide into a war as a quick and dirty way of mobilizing the land into a true “nation” by unifying the disparate “hearths” represents a shift from the feminine (or at least, balance) to the masculine.

Similarly, the concept of patriotism is a puzzle that haunts Ai and Estraven (and, by extension, the reader) throughout the text. Although Ai initially views it as a positive attribute (which seems fitting, as it is “male” according to LeGuin’s classifications, and Ai is the only truly male character), he comes to understand Estraven’s definition of patriotism as “the fear of the other” (19) and potentially “hate of one’s uncountry” (212). Taking the novel’s apparent endorsement of cooperation and interdependency into account, this seems to be a condemnation. By the end, Ai acknowledges, not precisely the evils of patriotism, but rather its potential for corruption. He notes: “And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend's voice arises: and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?” (280)

To sum up, LeGuin seems to imply that patriotism, as a divisive force, is both “masculine” and tied to war in such a way that, without men, there is no patriotism, and without patriotism, there is no war. While I still don’t entirely agree with this (I don’t think that concepts like “patriotism” can be assigned a gender), it’s a philosophy that seems consistent throughout the novel.

Interview source: http://www.angelfire.com/ny/gaybooks/lefthandofdarkness.html#interview

War, Technology, and their Reasons

While I'm sure that many of my classmates will write on gender dualities in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, I thought I might approach the topic on a different trajectory. Two facets of Gethenian society fascinate me: their apparent lack of war (until the time of Genly Ai's arrival) and lack of significant technology despite it being far enough into the future that our people (Terrans) have developed Nearly as Fast as Light (NAFAL) ships. Gethen is defined by it's expansive Arctic and Antarctic tundras and a generally cooler-than-Terra climate. However, despite this environment, the native Gethenians seem at best hesitant to adopt technology that would improve their quality of life.

"Gethen is defined by it's expansive Arctic and Antarctic tundras and a generally cooler-than-Terra climate"

While they have heating technology, advanced fabrics, and "excellent and economical" stove/heater/lamp units, ground vehicles are few (and usually reserved for snails-pace winter travel while air vehicles are nonexistent. Similarly, radio is widespread yet television is unknown. Thus it begs the question of why Gethenians, who are clearly technologically advanced in mechanics, chemistry, and fabrics, have failed to develop something such as the airplane. However, in their own words, why would Gethenians develop a flying machine if there was nothing on Gethen that would suggest that they could leave the ground (as there are no birds, etc...)? Similarly (but undiscussed in the book), why would they develop television if radio works just fine?

"I am skeptical that there was never a Gethenian who dreamed of flying"

The first point that these questions raise is "what is nature of human curiosity?" Throughout history, human curiosity has spawned the various branches of science, mathematics, art, literature, and engineering. Solitary inventors/artists/scholars work to understand or express our world and universe, and subsequently generate either physical products or knowledge which advance humanity. Using the aforementioned case of the Airplane, humans observed creatures flying and sought to emulate them. On Gethen though, there are no birds and thus this inspiration is lacking. Nonetheless, I am skeptical that there was never a Gethenian who dreamed of flying. More broadly, there is definitely not a lack of art, mythos, religion, or scientific understanding on Gethen. What then, has caused the technological rift between Terrans and Gethenians?

There is something to be said about technological advancement though, and that is that it is inexorably tied to military conquest and conflict. On Gethen, wars are nonexistent and the only conflicts (at least until Tibe becomes Prime Minister of Karhide) are between individuals and clans. On our Earth, pieces of technology have advanced beyond the prototype stage because we have sought newer and more efficient ways to either kill each other or to communicate our success and/or propaganda. Continuing our example, the airplane was not perfected until it was tested in the fires of two World Wars. On Gethen, the lack of conflict is hypothesized by Ai to be a byproduct of natives' androgyny, preventing a saturation of male-related aggressiveness, territoriality, and sex drive. In an androgynous society, there is not impetus for global conflict and thus no pressing need to further develop technology that lacks a clear survival purpose.

"They are vastly outclassed technologically by the Ekumen"

In this respect, I believe Le Guin sought to praise Gethenian society for its "Nobel Savage" like purity because its society is not dominated by the agressive male stereotype that has seemingly built humanity a dangerous and divisive world. However, there is a certain irony to this claim. While indeed Gethenians live in a simple, noble, and peaceful world, they are vastly outclassed technologically by the Ekumen who have presumably developed along lines derived from our (Terrans') present course. Fortunately for the Gethenians, the Ekuman simply prioritize the exchange of culture and information, something which the former, like all forms of humanity, possess to an inordinate degree.

The Influence of Media on Society in The Time Machine

The First Time Traveller - Edison & the Phonograph

tags: media theory, technology & war, manipulation of media, socialism vs. capitalism vs. communism, McCarthyism

“From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of sweeping changed in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space.” (Kern 1)

In 1877, Edison invented the phonograph, and in doing so, changed the history not only of communications and media, but also the history of consciousness itself. Suddenly for the first time, a voice could be recorded at one point in time and played back in a completely different time. Through the phonograph, and the recording of sound, even the dead could speak, and many during the time period wrote of the uncanny sensation of hearing voices from beyond the grave. An entirely new conception of time came about as the phonograph (and soon after, in 1887, the gramophone) allowed people to preserve a moment in time and space, and bring that moment back later on. In some ways then, Edison was the first Time Traveller – the first inventor able to take people into the future.

 It’s perhaps no surprise then that by 1895, H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller asks his audience (as Cooper notes, both the diegetic audience of his friends, and the extra-diegetic audience of the reader) to reconsider the very nature of time itself, and to reexamine the question of whether human beings are truly locked in a specific time –humans had already achieved the ability to travel to the future via the recorded sound of their voices!

The Time Machine: Colonialism and the Necessity of War

While reading and watching The Time Machine, two themes leapt out at me more than any others. First of all, as alluded to in previous posts, the colonialist themes were surprisingly explicit—as Kai points out in his post, The Time Machine is most definitely a product of its… well, times. In the book, the Time Traveler claims of his first interactions with the Eloi that he “felt like a schoolmaster amidst children” (45), and upon his first exploration he seats himself upon a throne-like chair from which he can survey the entire land (47). Similarly, he repeatedly describes his idea of a paradise as one in which nature has been wholly subjugated. In the 1960 movie adaptation, the parallels between historical British colonialism and The Time Traveler’s attitude toward the Eloi, particularly Weena, are acknowledged quite clearly. In the intimate glow of the campfire, he tells her, “I’m sorry I was angry with your people; I had no right to be. No more than if I had visited the island of Bali in my own time…we’ve had our dark ages before, and this is just another one of them. All it needs is for someone to show you the way out.” History isn’t my strength, but it seems to me that the interaction between Weena and the Time Traveler illustrates the most ignorantly optimistic of colonialist fantasies—the colonized people as ignorant and childish, but receptive, beautiful, and worshipfully adoring. Before the arrival of the Time Traveler, the Eloi do not even possess fire, the ultimate key to human progress according to the legend of Prometheus.

(This telling conversation with Weena begins at about 6:10)

The second theme I’d like to discuss is most clearly illustrated in the film, so I’ll focus on that medium in my discussion. From the beginning, George the Time Traveler’s motivation for building his time machine seems driven not only by intellectual curiosity, but by a desire to escape the entire concept of war. His initial travels land him in WWI, WWII, and a surprise nuclear holocaust in 1966, and he increasingly despairs of mankind as a whole as he tries to race forward to a time when war is but a distant memory.

He finds it, and finds it lacking. I’m not saying that George’s actions against the Morlocks were unjustified, but there’s something bitingly ironic about the fact that his main contribution to the world of the Eloi is exactly what he was trying to escape: aggression and war. For all his desire to find a peaceful paradise, he essentially seeks to recreate his own world, which, despite the fact that he sought to escape it, he still thinks of as the height of progress. Is this a story, then, of a man coming to terms with the justification for violence? Is the film, with its (compared to the book) exaggerated emphasis on the prevalence of war and George’s colonialist attitude, meant as a criticism of the potential hypocrisy of that mindset? Despite the parallels between the detonation of the bomb in 1966 and the fiery death of the Morlocks, the morality of George/The Time Traveler’s near-genocide is not explicitly addressed in either the book or the film, but that sort of thematic juxtaposition cannot be accidental.

** Page numbers come from my edition of The Time Traveler, which probably won’t match up with any of yours. ISBN: 0-449-30043-9