Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness
The Role of the Ekumen in LeGuin's Science Fiction Masterpiece
Nov 5, 2009
Ursula K. LeGuin’s watershed science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), takes for a premise two ideas that are difficult for most readers to imagine. The first and most apparent is the society it describes, the ubiquitously androgynous race on frigid planet Gethen. The second is the Ekumen, the mystical/political government that reaches out to this planet; something not exactly a government at all, but an entirely new way of engendering relations between societies.
“[It] is mostly a failure,” says Genly Ai, an emissary from the Ekumen who has been placed on planet Gethen, “but its failure has done more good for humanity so far than the successes of its predecessors.”
Genly Ai’s Attempt to Define the Ekumen
Genly’s attempts to propose free cultural intercourse between the Ekumen and Gethen provide most of the novel’s action. They often come to nothing, as most Gethenians will hardly believe he is an alien at all; to make matters worse, the ways of the Ekumen itself do not lend themselves easily to words.
“In the common tongue it’s called the Household,” he begins while at lunch with some important officials in the city of Mishnory. He makes a point of differentiating the Ekumen in its different entities (educational, political and economic), but grants that, seen fundamentally as a League of worlds, the Ekumen possesses “some degree of centralized conventional organization”, taking “the motives of communication and cooperation” as its essence.
Most interestingly, this tendency of the Ekumen toward interdependence has an atavistic character, constituting “an attempt to reunify the mystical with the political” and “an experiment in the superorganic”.
The Ekumen’s Relationships With Member States
At that same lunch, Genly goes on to describe the way the Ekumen interacts with its member states, allowing each to follow their own laws but mediating when a conflict arises between planets. It solves crises chiefly by helping enemies to a “legal or ethical adjustment or choice”.
Genly is certainly not over-optimistic when addressing this aspect of the Ekumen’s operations. The Ekumen was established after a period of war, and he seems to fear that history will repeat itself, forcing the Ekumen to evolve into a peacekeeping force. Mere policing seems a prosaic and counterintuitive thing when contrasted to the Ekumen proper, with its Utopian aspirations toward “free trade” between planets.
The Ekumen and “Free Trade”
Genly defines “free trade” as the benevolent exchange of ideas and facts, artworks and belief systems--an interchange that can be accomplished by means of simple radio communication, and will probably have to, bearing in mind the inconveniences of space travel. The process is, in the oldest sense of the word, disinterested; mutual benefit is the goal, but not the emphasis. The mere fact of communication is an end in itself.
Similarity of the Ekumen to the Iroquois League
Ursula K. LeGuin, in creating the Ekumen, may have been inspired by the Iroquois League, the largest and best-known confederation of Native American people. It came to be in the 17th century as a coalition of five Iroquois nations, growing steadily in influence in the following century.
Their decision-making process relied on the principle of unanimity. Representatives from two nations would have to come to an agreement on a course of action before proposing it to another two representatives, and if the second set of representatives did not agree, they would come up with an alternative course of action and propose it back to the first representatives.
The process would continue in this way until all representatives were in agreement. As Genly Ai would put it, decisions were reached on the basis of “council and consent” and never “by consensus or command”.
The Ekumen in Context of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Oeuvre
The Left Hand of Darkness belongs to the Hainish cycle of novels and short stories, works by Ursula K. LeGuin that are situated in the same interplanetary political context. If one follows the chronological order to the cycle proposed by Ian Watson, it seems an interplanetary league existed without the name of Ekumen in the novels The Word for World is Forest (1976), Rocannon’s World (1964), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967), but was frequently threatened.
This interplanetary league evidently recollects itself after a period of war to call itself the Ekumen in The Left Hand of Darkness, and is featured as such in Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995), and in The Telling (2000).
References
Ian Watson’s Proposed Chronology of the Hainish Cycle
 |
