19. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy.
Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas" (1973)
Last week: Sui Sin Far, “In the Land of the Free” (1890)
This Week: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973)
Next Week: Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948)
The short stories we’re talking about this week and next are for the philosophy majors, the ethicists, anarchists, and change agents. These two stories, “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) and “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) are make-you-thinkers, and they stick with you like the gadflies that they are. As with Sui Sin Far’s story about immigration last week — these stories cause us to stand back and regard our society and our place in that society in a self-reflective mood.
Le Guin published over 20 novels of speculative and young adult fiction—the classics, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Dispossessed (1974). The first [female author] to win both the Nebula and the Hugo for one work, she would go on to stack up 12 more. (Her writing deeply complicates the idea of a gender binary, so I’ve put [female author] in brackets to honor her work.)
Le Guin’s parents, Alfred Louis and Theodora Kroeber were a cultural anthropologist and psychologist, respectively, and they invited their four children into their field work from their home base at UC Berkeley. The experience of exploring different cultural ways of living and different organizations of society from a young age clearly influenced Le Guin as a writer. Her work tends to be set up as observations in cultural anthropology, and the “speculative” engine of her speculative fiction is to posit: what if we lived like this [insert new societal formation here]? What if everyone married in groups of four? What if anarchists settled the moon and then came back 75 years later? What if the people of this planet have no fixed sex, but instead, can shift based on their relationships or context? What if, what if. I find her work awesome and thought-provoking, and I’ve only read about half of it.
She also published over 100 stories (and several volumes of poetry), and this little gem is perhaps her most well known. Only 4 pages long, Le Guin’s story “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” comes across as a simple, if hesitant, fairy tale about good and evil.
Please take a moment to read it — in the next paragraph, I’ll be laying down spoilers.
The people of Omelas are happy. Joyous, free, and festive. Their town is a marvelous riot of joy enjoyed by all the inhabitants of the city — with one notable exception.
In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting.
This child serves as the locus for all the anger and disgust of the residents of Omelas. Sitting in fear and its own excrement, tortured by solitude and lack of light, the six-year old child is all the darkness of Omelas trapped in one room. They learn the child is there when they are themselves children (“when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding”) and they are forbidden to offer it succor or a kind word. For to do so would instantly end the joy of Omelas. Those are the terms. If someone was to rescue the child from this torment, it would bring the darkness of that cellar into the lives of everyone above ground:
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
Last week, a student shared that the set up of Omelas seemed to him to be super efficient. The greatest good for the most people— “the collective good”—was achieved through the suffering of just one child. It’s the solution to the “trolley problem.” The happiness of millions; the pain of one. If suffering is a given, a requirement in human life — then here was a very efficient way to handle it, through displacement, containment, and minimization.
There is a peach and there is a pit. To have the sweetness of the peach, you must also have the hard bitter truth at its center. That ratio seems to be a given in the story, and change is not possible. Le Guin’s narrator teases the reader into understanding that we seemed to have it backwards in our own understanding — that we are too absorbed in our own suffering and pain to experience joy, and if we could just minimize the dark, and trade it for the light, we too could live in Omelas:
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas?
This leads to a problem of description that the narrator puts on the page for us to consider. Can we even imagine a world without pain? Why is happiness so difficult to write about? How can a writer go about describing such a place without seeming ridiculous, disney-fied, simple? In this story, the narrator piles up the description to ever more dizzying heights of absurdity. Really piling it on, self-consciously, layers and layers of icing on this cake. There are many moments of “I do not know…” and “I wish I could describe it better.” and “I wish I could convince you”and “As you like it…”:
they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn’t matter. As you like it.
Who is she talking to when she says “you”? The reader? The audience? the disbeliever? Wakanda? The great matriarch of speculative fiction is asking our permission to imagine this world… because everyone is um, happy?
But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea.
This reminds me of the Talking Heads song “Heaven”(1979) — Omelas might seem a place “where nothing ever happens.” Too good, and we won’t want it. So please, add an orgy. Don’t hesitate. We must have every kind and flavor of delight in Omelas.
These little glitches in the narration seem placed to remind us that we are in the hands of a storyteller that is winking at us the whole time. With “although that was my first idea,” we are reminded that this is a story. This is a set up.
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
That “one more thing” is the child in the cellar. Whining, crying, begging, ”I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” Absolutely unforgettable.
Once we know that not all is perfect, once we see the shadows, then we can believe that the joy is real. The story closes with the title line. Some people see the child and choose to walk away from the joy, the festivities, the orgies. Some people walk away from Omelas, into the unknown.
In class discussions, this part of the story elicits a lot of analogizing — and we are called to assign this moral to another, actual system of society: capitalism (that’s an easy one), suburbia, resort hotels, cobalt mining, the destruction of the environment; the Catholic Church, and so forth. Some cites are for walking away from; others ask us to hide, ignore, or disavow that which would suffuse the joy of thousands with darkness.
And yes, there are many such interpretations available, and I want to add another, based on a line of philosophy that Le Guin drops into the middle of a fat paragraph without any fanfare:
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.
The parable offers us something of an ethical rubric to apply to this situation. To be happy is to justly decide between three buckets: the necessary choice, the neutral choice, and the destructive choice. On the middle ground, she writes, resides those things that are both unnecessary and undestructive, such as “comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.” I think that these are the extra ingredients to a simple recipe: happiness = necessary > destructive. Happiness is derived from having your necessary needs met, with as little damage to your environment and society as possible. But what if doing so destroys the happiness of unseen others? For some people, staying in Omelas is possible, because they have weighed their necessary against the destruction of a child, and found that balance possible. Others walk away, because they choose the unknown over this terrible equation. They have found a new necessary.
I believe Le Guin is asking us to walk away.
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