"His name is a cry of pain," Estraven says of Ai, as they cross the Ice together (229). Yet "Ai" also means "love," in both Chinese and Japanese, and Le Guin's description of the Gethenians as "yellow-brown" (35) and the similarity between the religions of Winter and some East Asian traditions suggest that this double meaning is not accidental. Le Guin's protagonist, in these two letters, captures one of the key ideas of The Left Hand of Darkness: opposites must exist together. Love cannot exist without pain. They are, in fact, the same: the same word, the same sound. How one interprets it depends on one's own perspective: Estraven, when he first hears Ai's name, "heard a cry of pain from a human throat" (299), but eventually grows to see him as a figure of love and support instead. As the two figures will learn in Estraven's final moments, the two perspectives must coexist: "he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind" (284).
By mispronouncing Genly Ai's name as "Genry," the Karhiders also unwittingly make a statement about Ai's mission, his very nature. "Genri" (the closest approximation of Ai's name in the Japanese sound system) is a Japanese word meaning "basic principle" or "fundamental truth." But "Genry" is really "Genly"; the "fundamental truth" in his name is a misconstruction, a misunderstanding, grown from the restrictions inherent in the Karhiders' language.
"Truth is a matter of imagination" (1), Ai comments, in the novel's opening , but perhaps it would be better to say that truth in this novel is a matter of perception. On the world of Winter, where it is always Year One, people focus on the present moment, moving and reforming both the past and the future in relation to themselves. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin explores not only the problems of duality and wholeness, but also the problem of the self versus the world, of our inability to experience the world objectively, to know any "fundamental truths," because we are trapped within our own present, our own perspective.
In his role as envoy, Ai attempts to bring Winter into interplanetary cooperation, developing a "fundamental truth" of humanity through communication and exchange. Part of the Ekumen's mission appears to be to lead each planet to achieve the highest standards of humanity, to fill in the gaps in each one's development and knowledge, to create an assimilated form of "humanity" across every planet. However, the Gethenians, by their very being, contradict this mission, being the only branch of humanity thus-far discovered that is not divided into two separate genders. When confronted with these people, Ai must slowly learn that he is trapped in his own perspective, in the norms and fundamental truths that he expects from the world around him. He enforces his own experience of gender on the Gethenians, calling them "he," "men" (at least, until they display negative traits, which he often attributes to their femininity), partly because he knows no other way to think of a person. Just as he wonders, "How could I explain the Age of the Enemy, and its aftereffects, to a people who had no word for war?" (136), he himself is unable to understand the Gethenians in their entirety because his language (and the language with which Le Guin writes the novel) is unable to capture something that is simultaneously male and female: it must always choose one or the other.
If there is one "fundamental truth" of humanity to be learned from Ai, it is that one cannot escape from one's own perspective. One's impressions of the world and its truths must always be subjective, bound by one's own language, experiences and expectations. Ai's story may at first appear to be movement towards greater objectivity, to an understanding outside of himself, as he grows first to talk of himself and Estraven as "the alien" and "the other alien" (213), and eventually to accept Estraven "as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refuse him his own reality" (248). However, when his fellow envoys arrive at the end of the novel, he now considers them strange and inhuman: "great, strange animals, of two different species" (296). After three years on Winter, his perspective has simply shifted. The only fundamental truth, perhaps, is therefore that there is no fundamental truth. We cannot completely escape from our present perspective.
Showing posts with label names. Show all posts
Showing posts with label names. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Titles, Names, and Gender in "The Women Men Don’t See”
Tags: Titles, names, blindness, projection of preconceptions, gender
Seth points out that one of the highlights of “The Women Men Don’t See” is that the reader is inclines to think that the great mystery of the story must have something to do with the Parsons. Of course, some of this inclination comes from Tiptree’s clever manipulation of the title. One of the conventions of the science fiction genre is to refer to the main element of novelty in their story (the “part that’s sci-fi”) in the title itself – “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, for example. The title “The Women Men Don’t See” is an example of Tiptree’s clever manipulation of convention that ultimately reflects the structure of the entire storyand causes us to project our preconceptions about science fiction onto the story in the same way that Don Fenton projects his preconceptions about women onto Ruth and Althea.
After all, we as readers never truly see Ruth Parsons and Althea Parsons – the great irony of this story is that it is told from the point of view of a man, whose narrative is made unreliable by virtue of the title alone, as emphasized by the first line of the story - “I see her first” (115). We soon discover that in this act of “seeing” Don does not “see” very well at all – only a “double female blur” (115) – thus the very first act of seeing in the story is rendered myopic at best.
Don continues this myopia later on, up until the end of the story with the example Arlyn points out – Don’s total obliviousness and blindness to the fact that the world Ruth is leaving is in not her own, which is why she’s leaving it – but also earlier, with his insistence in using the title “Mrs” with Ruth even after he has found out her true marital status (132). The title of “Mrs” is one which he himself projected on her after learning her surname was Parsons – and even learning the truth about Ruth does not allow him to get rid of his former preconceptions of her, which are formed almost the moment he first sees Ruth and Althea for the second time – “It’s the woman and her young companion – daughter?- picking….” He describes the two women. Less than three sentences later, when he mentions Ruth again, she is referred to simply as “the mother” – in such a way, his initial speculation immediately becomes fact in his own mind, without any confirmation by the women themselves (not yet anyway) – this is the beginning of Don’s projections onto Ruth and Althea.
As might be expected in a story by Tiptree, names seem to play a significant role, even beyond the use of titles. Ruth and Althea’s names are marked by the influence that men have on their lives. Parsons is a surname, and surnames indicate either the influence of a man somehow, whether as father or husband, or emphasize the absence of a husband. The fact that Ruth and Althea initially use it as their only name (118) strips them of the individualizing power of their first names, and their whole being briefly becomes a reflection of either the influence of a man or the emphasis of the absence of a husband.
Paradoxically, both interpretations seem to fit Ruth and Althea equally well – especially when we do learn their first names, for both the names Ruth and Althea refer to Biblical and Greek mythological women whose stories and fates are heavily dependent on the influence of the men in their lives:
Ruth’s name is particularly interesting because of the other traits it associates with her (both loyalty and love and a foreignness). Ruth has great success assimilating into a foreign land in the Old Testament – will Ruth Parsons share her success in a foreign world?
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