"Shadows to Walk" and the difficulty of deconstructing dualisms

Marcellino’s analysis of feminist science fiction utopia, “Shadows to Walk”, focuses, in particular, on her attempts to undermine the dualism of classification in traditional feminist SF narratives. Rather than utilizing themes of separation (where “women can get away from men and experience female singularity” (203) or countercolonization (which “hinges on a reversal of dominant male power with dominant female power”), “The Left Hand of Darkness” offers a third approach; “by privileging neither female nor male norms, by diagramming in her narrative different but interdependent female and male strengths, and by criticizing and praising (nuanced criticism) both female and male political approaches” (204), Le Guin has, in Marcellino’s eyes, produced a new, non-hierarchical, non-dual paradigm for feminist science fiction. I was also intrigued by the creation of ambisexuality, and the implications that changed physicality has for social organization; however, I remained troubled by the ways in which “The Left Hand of Darkness” might continue to enforce gender binaries and the association of gender with sex.

The title of the novel itself stems from a fragment of Gethen mythology, which states that “light is the left hand of darkness/and darkness the right hand of light./Two are one, life and death, lying/together like lovers in kemmer,/like hands joined together, like the end and the way” (LHoD 233). Within the Gethen mythos, light and dark are identified with gender, with ‘light’ representing masculinity and ‘dark’ representing femininity; in Marcellino’s words, “ just as we need light and dark to see, each gender needs the other to function.”(206) This is a worthy statement, in an era where gender is still hierarchical, and where reimagining of gender often preserves inequality; however, privileging this statement means also accepting a series of assumptions about male and female. The first assumption is that concepts of male and female NEED to exist, as cultural constructs as well as biological entities; that there are concepts that can be usefully pinned down as ‘male’ or ‘female’; that there can be only two genders that work in concert.

As an example of gender interdependence within the text, Marcellino analyzes a scene from the crossing of the Gobrin Ice Sheet; Genly Ai’s Gethen guide (named Estraven) goes into kemmer, and her newly manifested femininity becomes crucial to the survival of both individuals. Because Estraven now identifies as female, she divides up food in a way that favors Genly; her selflessness enables Genly to preserve his physical strength, which he then uses to protect her from the harsh climactic conditions of the ice sheet. Marcellino characterizes this scenario as a “scene of personal gender interdependence”; but his analysis identifies female biological sex as always leading to a set of feminine personality traits; are women always inherently self-sacrificing and physically weaker? (This scenario reminds me of the work of Carol Adams, a feminist and vegetarian who writes extensively on the politics of gender; she constantly debunks the assertion that physically stronger men automatically need or deserve more food than women as a mechanism which is used to justify the exploitation of both women and animals) Is this scenario actually a lesson in gender, or is it a more general point about the necessity of interdependence?

Within “Is Gender Necessary: Redux”, Le Guin points out that “our curse is alienation, the separation of yang from yin. Instead of a search for balance and integration, there is a struggle for dominance.” (16) The preservation of gender binaries and gender roles means that the Gethenians represent an incomplete departure from dualism and gender hierarchy; Le Guin’s novel is certainly feminist, and was very successful in getting its readers to think about alternatives to gender and sex as we currently experience them; however, I’m not sure if it can be posited as an entirely unprecedented form of feminist utopian SF narrative.

"'Consider I have been speculating . . .'"

Among the issues we discussed last week were Darko Suvin’s notion of genre as a matter of “family resemblance,” not to be answered with a strict definition, as well as the peculiar insistence of readers on the internal consistency of “reality” within fiction. Though these hardly seem related, in reviewing The Time Machine’s framework I began to consider the possibility they might be, insofar as both play on a reader’s inarticulable standards for fiction, gleaned from prior experience. Before the ending proves the entire narrative to be a bait-and-switch as egregious as Inception (which faded to black as a cliffhanger, only for the soundtrack to settle things), the story very cleverly deploys a Victorian reader’s loosely defined sense of science fiction as a genre in order to cast doubt on its own status as fiction. “‘Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction’,” the internal narrator allows us to include (before the external one, like Christopher Nolan, insists on a final answer), recognizing that his work of reportage is indistinguishable in tone and purpose from invention. “‘Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest’,” he adds, discovering the problem of realism. (111)

I’d like to do so here in order to enhance not only to enhance its interest, but to develop an understanding of science and science fiction as related practices just before their modern incarnations. I got this sense immediately from the novel, but in a manner better justified by recourse to another course, in the history of biology—since Alexandra has already demonstrated the insight other material might bring to bear on our own. For the homosocial, domestic male discourse with which the novel opens reminded me of nothing so much as the environment in which science was practiced through the 19^th century, among private (without yet becoming truly academic) clubs like the Royal Society, or simply within the home of a wealthy, curious gentleman. The Time Traveler is skilled (or dandyish) enough to furnish his home with furniture of his own design, which is reflective, and even formative, of an environment open to the spirit of intellectual inquiry: “Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision”; fittingly, insofar as those trammels would not be finally applied until the Fordist application of industrialization to the practice of science (1).

In the very same setting, of course, storytelling would have been equally at home, as the more skeptical members of his audience remind us at the novel’s end. Yet I think that, in one of the more self-conscious moments of the novel—and one that so far most clearly articulates the thesis of this course—the equation of science and science fiction is claimed to be a consequence not merely of its practice in the homes of Victorian gentlemen, but its essential reliance on narrative as such. “‘Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Deliver Company, and postal orders and the like? . . . And even of what we knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe?’” (51-52) Here he addresses anthropology, though only by way of a peculiar self-othering inversion. But were we to generalize the point to all systems perceptible only to those with a privileged perspective that nevertheless must derive value from their representation to others (which would describe not only the relation between the scientist, his field of study, and the populace, but also of the critic, “high” literature and the same—if not the critic, “low” literature and the academy), the lesson becomes of greater import to a greater number. And science fiction begins to look like the best training in such impossible acts of speech.