Taoísmo e A mão esquerda da escuridão: relações dialógicas entre o Tao Te Ching e o romance de Ursula K. Le Guin

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the representation of the main character’s ideological development in Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness in order to comprehend to what extent the Chinese philosophy of Taoism is manifested in the novel, and to be able, then, to contribute to the dialogic studies of literature in its dialog with other fields of knowledge — in this case, with philosophy — and to the novel’s body of criticism. To do so, a dialogical analysis of the main character’s discourses — the novel’s main narrator — is carried out in order to identify reverberations of the Taoist principles of yin-yang and non-action (inaction, wu wei). Lao Tzu’s millennial Taoist founder text Tao Te Ching is the philosophical corpus. The research makes use of Bakhtin and the Circle’s theoretical-methodological approach which lays out concepts such as discourse, utterance, heteroglossia (heterodiscourse), refraction, otherness, and ideology, thus making possible a dialogical analysis through the understanding of Taoist philosophy as an ideological creation, as an ideology in the term’s axiologically neutral sense as utilized by Bakhtin and the Circle — as a system of ideas constituted by refractions and materialized in signs (like words). The analysis exposes a discourse strongly marked by the Taoist principles of yin-yang and non-action (wu wei), which informs the novel in several levels: they are in the speech of the main character Genly, in his behavior, actions and non-actions (inactions), in his stylistic choices, in the way he structures the novel’s narrative and arranges its chapters, and even in the novel’s setting. The philosophical principles manifest especially in the main character’s relationship with the novel’s other main character Estraven, with whom he shares narration. This relationship transforms as the narrative develops and it represents Genly’s integration with the other, with Estraven; it represents the complementarity of opposites and the full acceptance of the different, the joined duality of yin-yang.