Quote:
Originally Posted by latepaul
[...] They mentioned shifgrethor in passing and in a way that assumed it was obvious what it meant once one understood that shifgrethor was derived from the word for "shadow". I remembered that there is that scene in the book where Genly is told this and it's like he suddenly understands.
The other thing that I found interesting about the podcast was that they acknowledged a lot of the same weaknesses but seemed to put them on the character of Genly. i.e. "the book was well written, Genly was a sexist jerk" They also seemed to think that LeGuin felt the average SciFi fan was a "white male engineer" and that Genly was supposed to allow that kind of person a way in. So to go back to what issybird was saying it was LeGuin projecting what she thought a certain kind of man thinks.
They also talked a little about LeGuin's Daoism and how that possibly influenced some of the gender essentialism that seems to be there. I don't really know anything about Daoism but apparently it's very big on binaries - yin/yang, male/female, dark/light?
|
Estraven does say early on, "I’m not anyone’s servant. A man must cast his own shadow....". Later we have the legend of Getheren who in the end says, "Tell them at Shath that I take back my name and my shadow." There is a very similar line during the foretelling chapter.
It's obviously all related to the creation legend in chapter 17: "Each of the children born to them had a piece of darkness that followed him about wherever he went by daylight."
Which is all very neat and tidy, I quite like it, but doesn't actually reveal much about how shifgrethor works as a system of honour. I'd also add that "shadow" gets quite a lot of use through the text, and not all uses have that same significance.
The problem I have with the revelation scene in chapter 18 is that the misunderstanding is clear enough (whether explained as shifgrethor or simply looked at from the reader's outside view), but its relationship to gender is not so clear.
And I definitely agree that Le Guin's treatment of gender as a binary state
while still creating this ambisexual people who so obviously aren't one or the other is a real problem with the story. In Le Guin's essay about this book she speaks of exploring gender by removing it, but she has not done so. Instead she has created a third gender, one that is neither male nor female but something other. And just as we might speak of a man having certain (generalised) feminine attributes, and a woman may have certain (generalised) male attributes, so this third gender can be seen to have these attributes too, but to see it as only a "manwoman" seems to underestimate the situation.
However, if I ignore what has been said (by Le Guin and others) and just go by what I read, then I would have concluded that it is Genly who has made the error. And in this light I think the book mostly works. As issybird has observed about other books, and again just now as I was writing this it seems
, it is sometimes better if the author just shuts up and lets the work speak for itself - and I think this one does that quite well.
On the plus side, having Le Guin's ambisexual people as something "other" makes some of the other possible problems more forgivable. For example the absence of war seems like a big thing to lay on strictly male/female gender differences. I can accept it as a consequence of their particular social arrangements of these alien people (arrangements still under flux). And the fact that these people were, apparently, experiments from the distant past also gives Le Guin the escape clause that the particular arrangements did not have to pass evolutionary constraints in order to have come about.
I never got the sense that Le Guin expected us to see Genly as a "sexist jerk". I think this is very much something imposed by those reading the book with their own agenda. Young and naive, yes, I think Genly is guilty of that. It does seem that Le Guin imposes her own idea of what men think, and generalises about what it means to be a woman in a way that I don't think would hold up to much scrutiny. But I will say that a lot of science fiction of that era is similarly naive, so while I agree these were less than elegant impositions to the story, they are not entirely unexpected in a book of this age.