The right question?

After the failure of his political mission, Genly Ai makes a pilgrimage to a "Fastness" in order to observe a ceremony of divination. He would not "be pursuing this curiously intangible cult into its secret places at all" did he not desire an answer to a question. This question does not seem to be one of personal import: it is formulated with the detachment of an anthropologist on the search for cultural "fact": "What are the Foretellers, and what do they actually do?"

There's a way of posing a question to a person (or book or culture or object) that situates the questioner himself beyond the access of a question. The way lies in the posing rather than in the question itself. "What are the Foretellers, and what do they actually do?" If this question issues from the "objectivity" of a scientistic anthropology, its answer, while it may very well represent an access of usable knowledge, will not challenge the presuppositions of the questioner: it will not pose a question in return.

What are the Fortellers? This is "the question left unanswered by the Investigators": as if all other questions had been suitably disposed of! And could an answer to the question unsettle or redefine what an "Investigator" is, what an investigator does?

It's important, I think, that Ai is not himself an investigator, though he is reliant on their accumulated knowledge and might replicate the wording of at least one of their questions: and he presents his experience not as "findings" but as a story. Part of the fun of reading a work set in a different time and place -- be it "Left Hand of Darkness" or "Things Fall Apart" -- is finding your bearings in an unfamiliar culture: at its first appearance, an untranslated bit of lingo passes by and leaves a question in the memory: thirty pages later the same term will appear in a context that brings it closer to comprehensibility, and the reader feels a pleasure not unlike that felt by an Investigator, perhaps, at ascribing a "function" to an erstwhile inscrutable practice. Put enough of these insights together and you have a respectiable dossier to send back to the home office.

To what extent, for Ai, is investigation linked to classification? And are our pleasures, as readers, also classificatory?

From what we learn of it, the Ekumen seems an eminently "reasonable" institution: one that, in corroroboration of its name, is fundamentally ecumenical -- difference among the planets, one imagines, is not eradicated: but the derivation of all of their inhabitants from the originary planet of Hain emphasizes that there is something "common" to the humanity of them all. In at least one respect -- their sexuality -- the inhabitants of Winter differ from common humanity: might not the adepts of Handdara also represent a spiritual "deviation"? They prize a "singular 'ignorance'" and suggests the presence, according to Ai, of "an old darkness, passive, anarchic, silent" that lies at the foundation of Karhidian society: and, if Ai is correct in his assessment, is this "darkness" really compatible with the almost technocratic efficiency of the Ekumen, with its network of "information exchange"?

Ai (and the reader) is warned of "the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question": what, then, is the right sort of question? According to the Haddara? According to Genly Ai? According to us, as readers in an unfamiliar land?