Assignment 3

Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)

Le Guin has written eloquently in defense of the environment, passenger trains, abortion rights, and the cultural traditions of Native Americans. She is admired as an author of travel literature, essays on feminist issues, and most of all science fiction. However, her science fiction does not focus on space age gadgets and aliens from outer space but instead raises questions about human nature and human destiny. The novels of her Earthsea Trilogy (1968-1972) and later novels, especially The Left Hand of God, (1969) have made her a favorite of thoughtful readers everywhere.

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (pp. 357-62)

Like so many of her works, this story is often categorized as science fiction, principally because Le Guin is a noted science-fiction writer. But this story does not depend on any of the usual characteristics of science fiction and fantasy. There are no futuristic machines, no supernatural manifestations, not even any remarkable events.

The author, in her headnote to the story, from the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1976), explains that the central idea for this “psychomyth, the scapegoat,” came from an essay by William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” She concludes that headnote as follows: “Of course, I didn’t read James and sit down and say, Now I’ll write a story about that ‘lost soul.” It seldom works that simply. I sat down and started a story, just because I felt like it, with nothing but the word ‘Omela’ in mind. It came from a road sign: Salem (Oregon) backwards.” The subtitle of the story is “Variations on a Theme by William James,” which is not included in our text.

The tone of Le Guin’s story deserves special mention, because it supports the humane wisdom of her theme. Rational, unhurried, calm, and composed, her words flow in long paragraphs like the deep bed of a river. The tone is also animated by her choice of narrator. Simultaneously certain and uncertain, she is both assured and tentative in her description of the happy, peace-loving community (Omelas also means “O-peace” as well as Salem, Oregon, spelled backward).

The pastoral utopia of Omelas is not only inviting but seems quite within the realm of possibility. Numerous small colonies in the United States have sought to establish similar lifestyles–nothing about the social order of Omelas is so heroic or extravagant as to make it fantastic. As the narrator attempts to describe the people of Omelas, she makes a telling point: “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 is interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” In part, this a valid statement. Most serious literature does not “describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” The narrator does go on precisely to celebrate happiness–the state of the people in a society with few laws, free of the military, the clergy, most machines, and, above all, guilt. But there is one small price–the unjust wretchedness of an innocent child. And Le Guin graphically displays that wretchedness, using the most sentimental of all objects–the bewildered and powerless child, aware of his punishment, desperately promising to be good, malnourished in a fearful dark closet, condemned interminably to this physical and emotional torture.

That miserable child, of course, not only represents the scapegoat carrying all the dark emotional debris of Omelas, and thus purifying it, but also symbolizes all the tangible and intangible injustice that flows from the gratification of our own desires. And do we not, as do most of the citizens of Omelas, rationalize: unemployment is necessary to economic health; national boundaries must be policed to protect our wealth; low farm wages are shameful, but cheap food is desirable; too bad about the Holocaust, but that was not our problem; and too bad about apartheid, but that is not our problem; and the various horrible situations today in Africa, but again that is not our problem–its doesn’t affect our national security. Are we not as amazed as the narrator of the story is at those who walk away from Omelas, at those who cannot accept personal gratification on those terms. Those who leave are unwilling to be bound by the terrible laws of this city of near-perfection. Unlike the narrator, Le Guin denies that evil is banal, that pain is boring. How one deals with the perception of evil and pain crucially determines the moral quality of life.