# 18 = Volume 6, Part 2 = July 1979
Jeanne Murray Walker
Myth, Exchange and History in The Left Hand of Darkness
The theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss provide an access to understanding the workings of the myths in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Among other things, the French anthropologist calls attention to the oppositional structure of myth and to its function in social exchange. He points out that myths are a particularly valuable key to the collective thought of a society because they offer an unusually clear code which classifies and interrelates the data of social experience of the peoples to whom those myths belong. They reinforce and verify the economic, cosmological, and kinship norms of a given society in compressed, almost algebraic fashion. The myths reflect, and reflect upon, the problems and contradictions which arise in practical, everyday life. According to Lévi-Strauss, such thought, inevitably, is highly structured. Myth incorporates in story form pairs of images which represent contradictions lying at the center of the society. The story then develops in such a way as to allow those oppositions common ground. It qualifies or mediates their differences. By mediating between opposites, as they cannot be mediated in real life, myth temporarily overcomes contradiction.1
The relationship Lévi-Strauss outlines between myth and lived experience (or human history) corresponds to that between the chapters in LHD which are distinctly mythic and others which might be called historical. The myths in LHD, it can be assumed, represent the collective thought of Karhidian and Orgotan societies, respectively, about their most vital and puzzling social dilemmas. They are, in fact, models which share many of the symbols, themes, and names found elsewhere in the fiction. That these myths have many narrators (e.g., "Estraven the Traitor") or that their narrators remain unknown (e.g., "The Place Inside the Blizzard") indicates that they have been distilled and shaped by an entire society. Bearing the authority of the social collective (commanding, that is, the broad assent of contemporaries and also of ancestors) these myths assume a normative function in the novel. By means of them the most crucial social problems touched upon in LHD can be identified and the ideal solutions to those problems defined. Furthermore, the underlying structure of the myths — the reconciliation of opposites — typifies the structure of LHD as a whole. Thus the myths both anticipate and act as ideal models for the "historical" events in Le Guin's fiction.
If the process Lévi-Strauss pinpoints in myth is mediation of opposites, the theme he finds at the heart of myth is the social version of that process: exchange. Exchange between human beings in effect constitutes society. Such exchange takes place at the economic level, when people swap goods and services; at the linguistic level, when they give words to one another in conversation; or at the level of kinship, when they marry into one another's families. Each kind of exchange is governed by rules which vary from one society to another. The value of exchange goes far beyond that of the items involved: the exchanges an individual makes, when taken together, form a pattern which defines his social status, his role. Therefore, each individual is the sum and product of the social exchanges in which he participates, and no individual can avoid being defined in this way since no individual can totally escape social exchange.
Of all exchanges, those which define kinship are the most basic. As Lévi-Strauss points out, "the rules of kinship and marriage are not made necessary by the social state. They are the social state itself, reshaping biological relationships and natural sentiments, forcing them into structures implying them as well as others, and compelling them to rise above their original characteristics." Societies depend for their very existence on kinship rules — rules of descent, rules about dwelling, prohibition of incest, and so on. Even more importantly, kinship rules, which almost universally prohibit incest, force the biological family to extend itself, to ally itself with other families. Because of the incest prohibition (a negative rule) and the prescription for legitimate partners (a positive rule) marriage results in complex alliances arising among human beings. Such alliances are essential if families are to endure, for food and shelter and physical defense require larger units than single families. Kinship alliances insure that the interests of individuals will lie in supporting the group and ultimately in sustaining the society.
Unlike the open ended corpus of actual myths that anthropologists examine, the corpus of myths in LHD is closed and complete. Therefore, it is possible to analyze the entire set of Gethenian myths and establish the ways in which they are connected. Kinship exchange, in the Lévi-Straussian sense, comprises their dominant theme. In them, Le Guin articulates the theme of exchange by employing contrary images — heat and cold, dark and light, home and exile, name and namelessness, life and death, murder and sex — so as finally to reconcile their contrariety. The myths present wholeness, or unity, as an ideal; but that wholeness is never merely the integrity of an individual who stands apart from society. Instead, it consists of the tenuous and temporary integration of individuals into social units.
The Orgota creation myth investigates beginnings, locating the origin of man between pairs of unstable oppositions. "In the beginning there was nothing but ice and the sun" (chap. 18). Under duress of the sun, the ice gave way, melting into three great iceshapes. The iceshapes created the world and ultimately sacrificed themselves ("let the sun melt them") to give men consciousness. With consciousness, however, came fear. Edondurath, the tallest and the eldest of the men, awoke first and fearing the others, killed 38 of his 39 brothers. With their bodies he built a hut in which he waited for the 39th, who had escaped him. That last and youngest brother returned when Edondurath lay in Kemmer and they coupled, engendering the nations of men. Edondurath asked his kemmering why each of the men was followed by a piece of darkness, to which his kemmering replied:
Because they were born in the house of flesh, therefore death follows at their heels. They are in the middle of time. In the beginning there was the sun and the ice, and there was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself, and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and darkness. (chap. 17)
This myth explicates that essential mystery, creation, in a way which emphasizes the difference between men as social creatures and men as isolated individuals. Edondurath, the oldest, "the first to wake up," behaves in a totally isolating, egocentric way. Because he fears his brothers when he sees them begin to waken, he kills them, thereby eliminating the necessity of confronting them as individualities. Then, to build himself a dwelling, he stacks them up like objects, which they are because he has refused to accord them the status of conscious beings. Into this dwelling comes a being who is his opposite both because he is youngest and because he is sexually different. The biological urgency of Edondurath's kemmer results in his integration with this other human consciousness. The language of the myth suggests that such biological intercourse brings about social intercourse. "Of these two were the nations of men born" (chap. 17; emphasis added). When men exist in nations — that is, in society — they exist in time, or more precisely "in the middle of time." So the creation myth equates the temporal median with social mediation. Social exchange is the invariable condition of men in time; the lack of exchange — totally egocentric behavior — is equated with nonbeing at the beginning and end of time.
The logic of man's social exchange is further explicated in "The Place Inside the Blizzard." Two brothers in the androgynous world of Gethen vow kemmering for life, a vow which is illegal. In the Hearth of Shath, where they live, brothers may stay together only until they have produced one child. The brothers produce a child. Then the Lord of Shath commands them to break their vow. One brother despairs and commits suicide. The other, Getheren, assigned the great public shame of the suicide, suffers exile. He departs Shath to seek his death on the ice, but before he goes he thrusts his name and his guilt onto the town. Then, wandering deep on the Pering ice, Getheren meets his brother, all white and cold, who asks him to remain and keep their vow. Getheren declines, replying that when his brother chose death, he broke the vow. The brother tries to clutch Getheren, seizing him by the left hand. Getheren flees and several days later he is discovered in a province which neighbors Shath, speechless. He recovers, but his frozen arm must be amputated. Then he leaves for southern lands, calling himself Ennoch. During his long stay there, no crops will grow in Shath. When Ennoch finally becomes an old man, he tells his story to a kinsman from Shath and reclaims the name Getheren. Immediately, thereafter he dies, whereupon Shath returns to prosperity.
The brothers' crime is loving one another so excessively that they exclude the community. Because they swear permanent vows to one another, their love is defined by law as a crime. Lifelong incest is prohibited, but not for the biologically based reason that incest results in weakened offspring (on Getheren brothers are permitted to produce offspring). Rather, lifelong vows of sexual loyalty between brothers are prohibited because they prevent vows with others outside the family. In the Elementary Structures of Kinship Lévi-Strauss makes this point:
Exchange — and consequently the rule of exogamy which expresses it — has in itself a social value. It provides the means of binding men together, and of superimposing upon the natural links of kinship the henceforth artificial links — artificial in the sense that they are removed from chance encounters or the promiscuity of family life — of alliance governed by rule.2
Exchange of permanent marriage vows is the most significant of all social exchanges, since it knits the participants together in mutual obligation and in concern for their offspring. The vows which bind men of different families create a complex network of loyalties and interrelationships which define the Hearth. Without such a network, based on exchange, the Hearth could not function cohesively; it would disintegrate into solitary, isolated — perhaps warring — families. Therefore, the law which requires sexual exchange is fundamental to the existence of the Hearth.
This law of the community competes with the powerful human desire for personal integrity: the need "to keep to oneself." Keeping to oneself is Lévi-Strauss's pun: it means both remaining isolated, alone, and retaining one's kin by not allowing them to marry outside the family.3 The brothers' need to keep to each other in the intimacy of the sexual act is so strong that they vow kemmering to one another for life, thereby defying the law which is fundamental to the continued existence of the Hearth. They force a deadlock between the existence of self and the existence of the social group. When the Lord of the Hearth breaks the deadlock in favor of the social group, one of the brothers performs the ultimate act of keeping to himself: he commits suicide, thereby depriving the social group of all further exchange with him. Thus suicide repudiates the law of exchange which makes social groups in LHD possible.
Once the individual places himself at odds with the community, the balance shifts back and forth between the individual and the community until one or the other is destroyed. The community defines the absolute repudiation of exchange — the suicide of the brother — as the worst possible crime and lays the guilt for this crime on Getheren, the remaining brother. On Getheren the Hearth levies exile, the punishment which fits the crime. Exile robs Getheren of the right to exchange anything with his community, as his brother's suicide had robbed the community of the right to exchange anything with him. In response, Getheren bestows his name on the Hearth.
In this myth, as is the case more explicitly in Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, an individual's name signifies his identity, his moral credits and debits. Therefore, when Getheren curses the Hearth with his name, he, on the one hand, transfers responsibility for the suicide of the brother to the Hearth and on the other denies himself identity as an individual. His journey to the Ice signals his movement away from the community to himself. The center of the ice, the place inside the blizzard, signifies absolute lack of community, a place where "we who kill ourselves dwell" (chap. 2), as the brother says. Such absolute isolation is rejected by Getheren. He takes an alternative name and identity, participating in another society as "Ennoch". Meanwhile, the Hearth, which enforced its own rule of exchange at great cost to one of its members, undergoes famine. This lack of physical sustenance is a metaphor for the lack of social sustenance which occurs when a member of a social group cannot participate in its activities of exchange. The group experiences deprivation and potentially death. But when Getheren hears of the famine in the Hearth he reassumes his name and with it, responsibility for the suicide of his brother. His own death, restoring plenty to the Hearth, follows immediately.
The mutual dependence between a group and its members is so imperative, the myth shows, that death follows when that dependence is denied. Human beings have urgent needs both for privacy and for communal exchanges. As the contradiction between the brother's vows and the law of Hearth demonstrates, these needs are sometimes mutually exclusive. When they are, the rule of exchange must override the need to keep to oneself. If the rule of exchange is broken, someone must pay. The community in the myth tries to make Getheren pay by exiling him, while Getheren tries to make the community pay by cursing it with his name. The community cannot survive in health with its law of exchange thus challenged. Getheren himself can survive only by assuming a role and joining another community — that is, by reaffirming the social law of exchange. In the end, Getheren, rather than the Hearth, assumes responsibility for the suicide which denied the law of exchange. When he bears the guilt he removes its onus from the Hearth. But the myth clearly shows that if he had not done so the whole community might have perished. The vow of the brothers initiates a negative exchange — the suicide, the exile, and the curse. The myth shows that such denials of the law of exchange result in the death of either the individual or the community because both individuals and communities require exchange, not merely for psychological health, but for continued existence.
A third myth in LHD explores the logic of exchange in a broader context, between rather than within communities. Involved here is a dispute over land between the Domain of Stok and the Domain of Estre (chap. 9). One day Arek, the heir of Estre, skating over the ice, falls in, barely pulls himself out, stumbles to a cabin nearby, and is discovered nearly dead from the cold by Therem, the heir of Stok. Therem brings Arek back to life by warming him with his own body. When the two lay their hands together, they match. The two mortal enemies swear kemmering together. After several days some of Therem's countrymen of Stok come to the hut and, seeing Arek, murder him. But after a year, someone arrives at the door of Arek's father, hands him a child, and tells him "This is Therem, the son's son of Estre." Many years later this young man, who has been named heir of Estre, is attacked on the ice by his three brothers, who wish to reign themselves. All but dead from his fight with them he enters a hut. There Therem of Stok binds the wounds of Therem of Estre. Their hands match and they vow peace. When Therem of Estre recovers and, after many years, becomes ruler of Estre, he gives half the disputed lands to Stok and reconciles the two domains. Because of this action he is called Estraven the Traitor.
Here the concept of exchange is demonstrated positively rather than negatively; the ideal of unity is achieved, but at a price. The young heirs, because they belong to warring domains, are not merely strangers but mortal enemies. Yet instead of perpetuating destructive exchange between their domains, they vow kemmering. Because they are the heirs of their respective domains, their doing so mediates, metonymically, the quarrel over the lands. Yet each respective domain refuses to follow the rule of the heirs, preferring instead the rule of the domain, which, in order to protect its own people and customs, denies the value of any others. To this rule of exclusivity the heirs' love is sacrificed: Arek is murdered and that act permanently separates the two heirs. Yet, because Therem of Stok gives the son of that union to Estre, the breach between the domains is healed. The warring communities are reconciled by that gift, the son of the two enemies' love. His very name, Therem of Estre, mediates between the two domains. His ironic title, "Estraven the Traitor," signifies the sacrifice involved in any system of positive exchange between communities, between competing social systems. In order for a man to reconcile competing social systems it is necessary to transcend the definition of both, — that is, he must sacrifice his own social definition and status in either.
A fourth myth, "On Time and Darkness," describes Orgota's god, Meshe, who is said to be the center of time, the universal One. This ideal of the One, which is apparent in the symbol of Meshe, stands behind all the myths in LHD, and also behind the historical sections of the novel. In the historical sections the ideal appears as both the political ideal, the Ekumen, and the personal ideal, human intimacy. These ideals are social, not supernatural. Rafail Nudelman has argued that the figure of Meshe, like other symbols in LHD, implies a "second universe" where "objects and phenomena lay bare their hidden universal significance and supra-historical law of being."4 But Le Guin's myth relates to human beings. "We are the pupils of his Eye. Our doing is his Seeing: our being is his Knowing." (chap. 12) Meshe is supra-historical only in the sense that he is an imagined, mythical character. He is the image of exchange, which brings about the unification of individuals into communities and of communities into states and of states into the Ekumen. This kind of exchange may represent an ideal whose attainment is difficult, perhaps impossible; but it is not supernatural.
LHD finally rejects all static versions of the ideal, all temptations to escape time, even in its myths. The latter do not follow the tautological pattern either of the eternal return or of the eternal wandering. Instead, they define alienation within and between communities and then, without engaging in perfectly ideal solutions, demonstrate healthy systems of social exchange at work. The exchange is presumably endless, for new selves emerge, new choices are made, new oppositions are defined in the continuing process of history. And so new unities must be constantly achieved. These unities are fragile and momentary. Perfect coalition between men in LHD cannot be formalized in documents or solidified in government structures. Yet, as "On Time and Darkness" shows, such perfect coalition exists as a permanent ideal.
The myths of Getheren serve as a means for exploring the ideal of exchange by first embodying contradictories and then reconciling them. But the same myths also reflect normative patterns of exchange which actually appear in the "historical" sections of LHD. Estraven's unwillingness to pursue Karhide's interest in the Shinoath border dispute repeats the action of his ancestor "Estraven the Traitor," who gave half the disputed land to Stok. "Estraven the Traitor" also predicts and illustrates the sacrifice involved in initiating such an exchange. Estraven fails as his ancestor, Therem of Stok, failed; before Karhide and Orgota unite, Estraven actually dies in the cause, as his ancestor, Arek of Estre, died. Before dying, he suffers the indignity of exile, recapitulating the pattern of "The Place Inside the Blizzard." Although the actions recounted in that myth replicate those of the novel's historical section, their meaning is there reversed. Estraven is exiled from Karhide not for "keeping to himself," an act which actually challenges the social system, but rather for exactly the opposite, for political exchange with a stranger. His exile leads to his journey on the ice. There, in a place inside the blizzard he meets Genly Ai: not a brother, but a stranger. In this intimate place they discover how to "mindspeak" one another's names. The exile Estraven, who bears responsibility for initiating not only his own but his country's exchange with the stranger, dies like the exile Getheren, who bears responsibility for refusing to exchange. Ironically, the penalty of initiating exchange and for refusing to exchange is the same. This is because too much exchange with "strangers" — those outside the community — produces the same outcome as too little exchange within the community. In either case, the community feels cheated of the full benefit of its member. Thus the pattern of exchange which the myths set up is repeated — sometimes with ironic outcome, sometimes not — in the historical content of the novel.
Other patterns set up in the mythic sections of LHD are also repeated in the historical ones. Although the history is told by specific perceivers, it is told by two distinct voices: an "alien" and a "traitor". Early in the book Genly Ai instructs the reader that the many voices are "all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best: yet none of them are false, and it is all one story" (chap. 1). This corresponds to the collective voice which the myths in the novel assume. Furthermore, the symbols in the historical sections are conspicuously the same as those in the myths: in both, Le Guin employs the same (aforementioned) contraries.
Most importantly the patterns set up in the myths serve as rules which guide and define the behavior of characters in the historical section. For example, when Estraven learns of his exile from Karhide, he considers returning home to Estre, but he does not. Instead, he quickly concludes "I was born to live in exile and my one way home [is] by way of dying." This easy conclusion seems not to tally with his courageous, stubborn political behavior in Karhide. But shortly after this episode we discover that his self-exile may have more to do with real guilt over incestuous vows than with the trumped-up political charge that he is a traitor. Estraven remarks to his kemmering that their vows were false because "the only true vow of faithfulness I ever swore was not spoken, nor could it be spoken" (chap. 6). Much later, at the conclusion of the novel, we discover that Estraven's earlier "true vow of faithfulness" was made to his brother. The vow, even though it is never verbalized, represents Estraven's reluctance to participate in the most important aspect of social exchange, the importance of which the reader will know from having read "The Place Inside the Blizzard." Accepting the logic of that myth, Estraven judges himself guilty and himself enforces the penalty which the myth prescribes, exile and eventual death. Of course, Estraven's guilt involves an intention, not an act. But the important thing is that the myths provide both the characteristics in the historical sections and the reader with rules for judging human behavior and with the logic behind such rules.
The most important rule is that of exchange, and its paradigmatic figure in the historical sections of the novel is Faxe the Weaver. He shows that it is possible to connect categorically unique human beings in religious ritual. Early in the novel Genly Ai describes this ritual, which thrives on "an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent . . ." (chap. 5). Genly Ai himself becomes drawn into the web, which is masterfully woven and controlled by Faxe. This weaving ritual of brilliant intuitive intensity is paralleled very late in the book by Faxe's cool appearance as a politician in Karhide, expediting the official exchanges between citizens. Faxe the Weaver is the Karhidian equivalent of the Orgoreyn god, Meshe. At the level of politics and at the level of religion he promotes exchange — in some sense he symbolizes exchange. But it is always in history, in real human events not in some distant unchanging place or time.
The novel's imagery of the weaver and weaving shows that any ideal which attempts to fix the movement of time or to make human relationships rigid must be suspect. Productive human exchanges which weave people together into healthy communities are contrasted in the novel with quick, superficial unity: Estraven is replaced in Karhide by Tibe, whose dramatic appeals for unity depend upon his cooked-up threat of war. His superficial resemblance to both Meshe and Faxe the Weaver shows in his face, which is "masked with a net of fine wrinkles" (chap. 8). However, Tibe's face, along with his communications network, the radio, parodies the book's true relationships. A second parody of the novel's ideal becomes evident in the houses of Mishnory, which are "all built to a pattern" (chap. 8). The mesh is distorted into an optical illusion, focusing not on the connecting strands, but on the boxes they form. It emphasizes the emptiness, the vacuity, the unproductiveness of rigid order. Such rigidity is manifest in the Orgotan way of categorizing people and keeping track of them with papers. But perhaps the most powerful representation of unproductive human relationships is the cold trip Genly Ai takes with twenty-six silent Orgotians in the back of a truck which he describes as a "steel box." (Chap. 13) In it he is taken to Pulefen Farm, where he and the other prisoners are kept in dull conformity by anti-kemmer drugs. Such imagery represents social ideals which do not take account of real exchange. Without such exchange the social structure calcifies and becomes rigid. According to Estraven, who brings about personal and political unity, that unity must be brought out of change: "The unexpected is what makes life possible," he tells Genly Al (chap. 8). And he confesses in his notebook that his one gift is the ability to take advantage of flux and change: "I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act" (chap. 14). Illegitimate unity suffocates, the novel shows; legitimate unity arises out of spontaneous human exchange.
Most crucially, then, the myths in LHD assert the impossibility of retreating from history and from human society. They insist that the goal of "keeping to oneself" in a fixed, temporal place is an impossible fantasy, a fantasy that must be sacrificed to the demands of communal exchange in history. This is implied by the pattern of exchange, the mediating of opposites, which underlies all myths. Truth arises out of conflict; the only legitimate unity is fragile and momentary. So Le Guin rejects static, cyclical structures. In her myths, as in the myths which Lévi-Strauss interprets, the oppositions define human problems, particularly problems with exchange; their mediation creates or maintains community. That these myths are fundamental to the meaning of the book is evident in the fact that the patterns they define account for most of the plot in the historical sections of the novel. The novel thus locates significance not in some static, timeless place, but in history; and its myths reflect social ideals which continually — and with difficulty — emerge from that history.
NOTES
1. Mediating opposites means resolving logical contradictions by combining the characteristics of two opposing images in a third image. Such a resolution, as Lévi-Strauss points out, is not in fact logical; it exists only at the level of the story. For more lengthy explanations of the Lévi-Straussian view of myth, see his own Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (US 1967), esp. chap. I I, and The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (US 1969), esp. chap. 1; also Edmund Leach, ea., The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (UK 1968).
2. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, revised and trans. by James Harle Bell and John Richard Sturmer, ed. by Rodney Needham (US 1969), p. 490.
3. Ibid., p. 496.
4. Rafail Nudelman, "An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin's SF," trans. Alan G. Meyers, Science Fiction Studies, 2 (1975), 213. Nudelman, like the comparative religionist Mircea Eliade, assumes that myth is cyclical. For an explication of Eliade's concept of "eternal return," see his Myth and Reality (US 1963). For other readings whose assumptions about the structure of Le Guin's works differ from Nudelman's, see, in the same issue of S-FS cited above, Donald F. Theall's "The Art of Social Science Fiction . . ." (pp. 256-64), and Judah Bierman's "Ambiguity in Utopia . . ." (pp. 249-55).
ABSTRACT
The theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss provide an access to understanding the workings of the myths in Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness. Among other things, the French anthropologist calls attention to the oppositional structure of myth and to its function in social exchange. He points out that myths are a particularly valuable key to the collective thought of a society because they offer an unusually clear code which classifies and interrelates the data of social experience of the peoples to whom those myths belong. They reinforce and verify the economic, cosmological, and kinship norms of a given society in compressed, almost algebraic fashion. The myths reflect, and reflect upon, the problems and contradictions which arise in practical, everyday life. According to Lévi-Strauss, such thought, inevitably, is highly structured. Myth incorporates in story form pairs of images which represent contradictions lying at the center of the society. The story then develops in such a way as to allow those oppositions common ground. It qualifies or mediates their differences. By mediating between opposites, as they cannot be mediated in real life, myth temporarily overcomes contradiction.
The myths present in Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness assert the impossibility of retreating from history and from human society. They insist that the goal of "keeping to oneself" in a fixed, temporal place is an impossible fantasy, a fantasy that must be sacrificed to the demands of communal exchange in history. Truth arises out of conflict; the only legitimate unity is fragile and momentary. So Le Guin rejects static, cyclical structures. In her myths, as in the myths which Lévi-Strauss interprets, the oppositions define human problems, particularly problems with exchange; their mediation creates or maintains community. That these myths are fundamental to the meaning of the book is evident in the fact that the patterns they define account for most of the plot in the historical sections of the novel. The novel thus locates significance not in some static, timeless place, but in history; and its myths reflect social ideals which continually--and with difficulty--emerge from that history.
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