Undoing Dualisms: Ecomedievalism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

While many critics have commented on Ursula K. Le Guin’s medievalism, discussions have mainly focused on her Earthsea series. While her science fictional works are just as rich with references to the Middle Ages and to medieval culture and literature, they have not received the same critical attention. In this light, this paper aims to analyze how The Left Hand of Darkness, one of the novels of the Hainish cycle, engages with the medieval. The novel depicts the arrival of Genly Ai, an envoy of an intergalactic federation of planets, on the planet Gethen. Gethen presents two main alien societies, Karhide and Orgoreyn, that showcase forms of government that echo respectively medieval and modern political and cultural structures. The medieval and modern are therefore made coeval. The protagonist initially perceives Karhide as an obscure and irrational embodiment of the Dark Ages, while he sees Orgoreyn as an enlightened and modern society. With the progression of the plot, however, Genly starts to revise his original impressions. By presenting his change of heart, the novel appears to question linear and progressive notions of history that conceive the modern as superseding the medieval. The paper intends to argue that the blurring of the medieval/modern divide is inscribed within the work’s concomitant questioning of dichotomic thinking in general, and specifically of the nature/culture divide. Karhide is in fact entertains a respectful and horizontal relationship with the more-than-human realm. By showing how Genly Ai learns to understand and accept the “medieval” Others and their modes of being with the world, the work presents the medieval society as an alternative model of engaging with nature that departs from hegemonic concepts of progress and that embraces multiple forms of alterity that cross species boundaries.