Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, experiments with form and structure in ways that directly reflect the ideas embodied within the novel’s content. In form, structure and content, The Left Hand of Darkness experiments with the harmonious union of opposites, including perceived gender differences and the relationships between fact and fiction, truth and myth, reality and story.
Figured through the metaphor of Ernst Bloch’s Gothic lines, Woolf’s explorations of the utopian possibilities of language, consciousness, community, society, space and time resonate with the powerful undercurrent of negative dialectics and the possibility of becoming. Bloch, in his essay on the utopian function of architectural structures, provides a compelling and energetic metaphor for the study of the utopian dynamics at play within the literary text. Through the metaphors of stone and line it is possible to explore the ways in which utopian desire inhabits and drives a text structurally and stylistically.
Sally-Shakti Willow 