The Left Hand of Darkness may be about gender, and it may be about weather, but it’s also very clearly about the schism between words and real world referents. The vocabulary that LeGuin uses to describe this poststructuralist phenomenon is “veneer.” This comes up first during the description of Argaven’s jingoistic speeches, in which he advocates for war without, we are told repeatedly and in a way that starts to grate by the end of the book, being able to say the word “war.” Ai points out that it’s interesting, then, for Argaven to be so concerned with notions of capital-T “Truth,” given the fact that his oratory consists in large part of deception: “He talked a great deal about Truth also, for he was, he said, ‘cutting down beneath the veneer of civilization’” (102).
This pretty much sets Ai off. He really does not, evidently, appreciate hearing Argaven talk about truth or, we find out, about “veneer”: “It is a durable, ubiquitous, specious metaphor, that one about veneer (or paint, or pliofilm, or whatever) hiding the nobler reality beneath. It can contain a dozen fallacies at once” (102). Genly Ai’s complaint, then, is that the “veneer” argument—the argument about an obfuscating something-or-other that’s always blocking from view the true nature of things—is itself a bit of empty rhetoric, something that nobody if pressed is really sure what to make of. Here, Ai proves himself wrong even as he delivers a deft criticism. There is, clearly, an obfuscating something-or-other, a “veneer,” but it has to do with language; with metaphor, perhaps; with one’s ability to say what one means; not with, as Argaven too-broadly claims, “civilization.”
The book gives two very elaborate and drawn-out examples of how language comes to obscure meaning. The first of these is the concept of “shifgrethor.” LeGuin throws out a lot of made up words to stand in for objects and ideas in the community of TLHoD, but this is the only one that strikes me as sort of ingenious. The only definition of “shifgrethor” we are ever given doesn’t really completely square with how the word gets used in conversation between characters—but this is perhaps because the term is only obliquely defined, is defined as, in a sense, indefinable—“prestige, face, place, the pride-relationship, the untranslatable and all-important principle of social authority” (14). Great. So we have a narrator who’s in the unique position to tell us that there’s an “all-important principle” that governs everything going on in the weird universe of this book, but who’s also totally unable to really accurately say what it is or what it might mean in practice. It turns out usually—though definitely not always; “shifgrethor can be played on the level of ethics,” too (106)—to mean something like the secret rules that govern conversation, something like etiquette. The conversation at Genly’s dinner with Estraven—which is the ostensible context and impetus for Genly’s first defining “shifgrethor”—gets revisited several times in the book, with the common realization between the two characters that neither really had any idea at the time what the other was saying.
The other salient example is the phenomenon of mindspeech, which is, of course, alien to Gethen, but which Genly Ai introduces at least to Estraven. The experience turns out to be wildly uncomfortable for Estraven, whose socially ingrained mode of communication involves what Genly Ai charitably calls “reserve” (255). The idea is that all Gethenians are going to hate mindspeech because it doesn’t allow for falsification, for the sort of rhetorical play that “shifgrethor” necessarily entails. This tells us two things: (1) socially, and specifically with respect to Gethenian cultures, lying is a lot more comfortable than telling the truth, and pure meaning sort of sucks; and (2) objectively, throughout the universe of TLHoD, it’s the transmutation—transubstantiation?—of ideas into words that allows for the fucking up of meaning.
Genly Ai observes all of this about Gethenian culture. He observes that obfuscating rhetoric is absolutely the cultural norm. He also points out one really weird counterexample—of Kundershaden, the prison, he says: “[i]t is what it looks like and is called. It is a jail. It is not a front for something else, not a façade, not a pseudonym. It is real, the real thing, the thing behind the words” (166). Aside from the fact that this seems to be making a sort of stupid and demonstrably false assumption about how language signifies, what I find really interesting here is that the only physical, cultural counterexample that Genly seems to be able to hit upon is a prison. I’m not really sure what to make of this. In his experience, the only thing that is cold and hard and not covered up by the play of language is the locus of state power.